Anthony Hopkins to play Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s fiction is famously difficult to develop for the screen, but perhaps his life will translate a little easier.

That’s the hope, anyway, for Andy Garcia, who plans to direct and co-star in Hemingway & Fuentes, a historical drama set to star Anthony Hopkins as the embattled writer. The movie will focus on Hemingway’s relationship with Gregorio Fuentes, the first mate of his fishing boat. According to THR, it also will be confined to the writer’s later years, which were marked by intense depression and ended with a double-barreled shotgun fired into his forehead.

Garcia will pen the script with Hilary Hemingway, a niece of the author’s. He previously directed The Lost City to little fanfare in 2006. Garcia also plans to play Fuentes; Annette Bening may play Hemingway’s wife, Mary Welsh.

At 71, Hopkins is already a decade older than Hemingway was when he took his life, but that will be a deterrent to precisely no one. The movie is planned to be a low-key indie production and is still in early development.

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