Another star has officially joined Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy in The Wettest County In The World! Jessica Chastain, star of Law and Order: Trial by Jury has confirmed she’s going to sign for John Hillcoat’s book adaptation movie.

Based on the novel The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant, and on his grandfather and two great-uncles, the true gangsters story tells of the Bondurants boys, bootlegging siblings taking the law into their own hands in Prohibition-era Virginia while making a run for the American Dream.

Chastain will play Hardy’s love interest, a big city woman now living in a small town who at one time was mixed up with gangsters.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Maybe most of you thought that the production was cancelled, but apparently not! According to The Film Stage, actor Tom Hardy will join our man Shia in The Wettest County in the World, an adaptation of Matt Bondurant book directed by John Hillcoat. The movie is set to be filmed started in spring. Here’s the synopsis of the book itself:

This family saga follows the Bondurants, bootlegging brothers runnin’ stills, runnin’ loads, and runnin’ from the law in Depression-era Virginia. The book is mainly narrated through the experience of the youngest Bondurant, Jack (in truth, a grandfather of the author), and his family’s moonshine enterprise supplies the action in a plot that evokes the culture of distilling and distributing white lightning. To optimistic Jack, bootlegging is both a bond to his older brothers, Forrest and Howard, and a means to make cash to impress a girl. Forrest, by contrast, is taciturn and suspicious: the world is violent, and he meets it on that ground. Tender of the stills and imbiber from same, burly Howard is always ready to take on the Bondurants’ enemies, corrupt law officers. Wending through this conflict in flash-forward mode is novelist Sherwood Anderson, who plumbs the Bondurant story a few years after the brothers’ climactic confrontation with the county sheriff. Descriptively gritty and emotionally resonant, novelist Bondurant dramatically projects the poverty and danger at the heart of the old-time bootlegging life.

This is such a not-good news. So do you remember that our guy Shia was attached to John Hillcoat’s upcoming project The Promised Land aka The Wettest Country In the World alongside Ryan Gosling and Amy Adams? The project is now “off” as the director himself announced.

My own new project – with a much-loved script by Nick Cave and a dream all-star cast – has fallen apart. The finance company that we began The Road with has also fallen apart, having to radically downsize to one remaining staff member. The great divide has begun, with only very low-budget films being made or huge 3-D franchise films – the birth of brand films such as Barbie, Monopoly: The Movie – who knows what’s next, Coca-Cola: The Movie?

Source: The Playlist

My dream to watch Shia plays with Ryan Gosling has fallen apart either. x( But don’t worry, this year in April we’ll finally see our man again in theaters in Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps!

So here it is the first look of Shia’s upcoming project The Promised Land aka The Wettest Country in the World. Soon as I found more info about this movie I’m going to post it here so check back soon!

• 001 x “The Wettest Country in the World”: Promotional Poster