Keira Knightley’s face is going to be all over the popular fiction table at Barnes and Noble. The actress — who has already appeared in adaptations of Pride & Prejudice and Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and will soon star in adaptations of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children — is said to bethe front-runner to play the female lead in a film based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, a novel about a marriage disintegrating in the South of France. Matt Damon (fifteen years Knightley’s senior, for those keeping track of age differences we’re supposed to ignore at home) is the desired male lead.
As there’s only a script and no director attached, it’s unlikely both Knightley and Damon will make it into the final project — if the final project gets made at all. (The pair may end up on the next version of this list though!) But between this film and the Fitzgerald biopic The Beautiful and the Damned, which Knightley is attached to star in as Zelda Fitzgerald opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, the actress should get a chance to play a high-strung, mentally unstable woman in an unhealthy relationship with an alcoholic who either is, or is loosely based upon, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Exclusive: Matt Damon and Keira Knightley Offered Leads in Tender is the Night Remake [Pajiba]