’Southpaw’ Duo Jake Gyllenhaal & Antoine Fuqua To Re-Team On Tense Thriller ‘The Guilty’
Jake Gyllenhaal will star and Antoine Fuqua will direct The Guilty, a thriller that is based on the Gustav Moller-directed Danish drama Den Skyldige that premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
It takes place over the course of a single morning in a 911 dispatch call center. Call operator Joe Bayler (Gyllenhaal) tries to save a caller in grave danger—but he soon discovers that nothing is as it seems, and facing the truth is the only way out.
Bold Films is financing the drama with Amet Entertainment. Scripted by True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto, the film will be produced by Gyllenhaal and his Nine Stories partner Riva Marker, along with Fuqua through his Fuqua Films, Scott Greenberg, Michel Litvak, Gary Michael Walters, David Litvak and Svetlana Metkina for Bold Films and Amet’s David Haring. Annie Marter, Gustav Moller and Lina Flint will be exec producers with Christian Mercuri and Jon Oakes.
Endeavor Content will handle worldwide sales.
The Guilty will shoot in November in a single location in Los Angeles, following rigorous sanitation and safety protocols. The production has secured COVID-19 insurance.
Fuqua will make the film before jumping with Will Smith into the William College-scripted runaway slave drama Emancipation, which sold to Apple TV + in a huge deal at Virtual Cannes. Gyllenhaal is coming off a turn as Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home, and he is an exec producer on Good Joe Bell, the Mark Wahlberg-starrer that just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.
Gyllenhaal and Fuqua first teamed on the 2015 boxing drama, Southpaw, a film memorable here at Deadline in that when we ran the first photograph of Gyllenhaal showing how ripped and in ring shape he got, it nearly crashed the site.
Said Gyllenhaal: “I couldn’t be more excited to work with Antoine again. Our time together on Southpaw was one of the great artistic experiences of my career, and I cannot wait to be back on set with him again. The Guilty is a special story, and one that we all feel very close to.”
Gyllenhaal is repped by WME and Goodman Genow’s Carlos Goodman; Pizzolatto is WME and Anonymous Content, and Fuqua is LBI Entertainment and Ziffren Brittenham’s Matt Johnson and Brian Lazarus.