Peter Dinklage And Nicola Peltz Join Christian Bale In The Deep Blue Good-By

Game Of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage and Transformers: Age Of Extinction star Nicola Peltz have entered talks to appear in Fox’s franchise-starter The Deep Blue Good-By. Based on John D. MacDonald’s series of novels about a free-wheelin’ bachelor with a taste for trouble, the studio are aiming to kickstart a series of movies with Christian Bale at the center.

James Mangold (The Wolverine, Walk The Line) will direct The Deep Blue Good-By, the first in a proposed line of adaptations. It will revolve around the self-proclaimed “savage consultant” Travis McGee (Bale), who has been transformed from novel to screen from a house boat-livin’, easy-going beach bum into… an Afghan war vet.

The latest versions of the screenplay, penned by Wolvie scribe Scott Frank – who in turn reworked a series of earlier drafts by Dennis Lehane – will now find the experienced military man “on the trail of stolen sapphires which leads to a sadistic torturer.”

Turning to the new additions, Dinklage is poised to play a mathematician who made a fortune thanks to an app and later merges into McGee’s sidekick. Peltz will play a smart youngster who behaves like an experienced moll with more knowledge of the sapphires than she lets on. She winds up hiring McGee to find them, and “ends up on the wrong side of the torturer.” Are there ever good sides to a torturer?

The pair will also join Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl), who is set to co-star. In the announcement last month outlining her involvement, we learned that the film would be based on the first in MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, The Deep Blue Good-By. However, upon reading this clutch of new story details, that loyalty to the source seems to have vanished.