DiCaprio Goes for Gold Once More with 'The Revenant'

Leonardo DiCaprio has found his next mountain to climb — literally. The actor is attached to star in The Revenant, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's adaptation of Michael Punke's 2002 novel about Hugh Glass, the fur trapper mauled by a grizzly in 1823 and left for dead by the men paid to bury him.

Punke's book, subtitled 'A Novel of Revenge,' is a lean, ferociously researched piece of frontier history; its author, in one of publishing's stranger footnotes, currently serves as a U.S. trade ambassador and is barred from promoting it. The novel's Glass crawls some 200 miles to Fort Kiowa fueled by little more than spite — exactly the kind of physical ordeal DiCaprio has been circling in his post-Wolf of Wall Street hunt for the Oscar that keeps eluding him.

Iñárritu plans to shoot in remote locations with natural light, with Emmanuel Lubezki — fresh off Gravity — behind the camera. Tom Hardy is in talks to play John Fitzgerald, the man who abandons Glass.

Update: the bet paid off. The shoot became Hollywood legend for its brutality, the film took three Oscars, and DiCaprio finally collected Best Actor for the 2015 film. The novel remains the leaner, meaner telling.