DiCaprio to play cult leader ‘Jim Jones’

Leonardo DiCaprio is in final talks to star in and produce Jim Jones for MGM. The Oscar-winner actor will play the character of Jones, the infamous religious cult leader who orchestrated mass murder-suicide in 1978, reports Variety.

Jim Jones tracks the true story of Jim Jones, the founder of the Peoples Temple, a religious cult that promoted Christian Socialism. Jones later claimed he was God and led his followers to compound, which would later be known as “Jonestown,” in Guyana in 1974.

The Jonestown Massacre has already been made into a number of films, TV series and documentaries, most notably the Emmy-winning 1980 miniseries ‘Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones’, and the 2007 History Channel doc ‘Jonestown: Paradise Lost’.

The tragedy was also heavily referenced in an episode of ‘American Horror Story: Cult’.

Jim Jones will also be produced by DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson via their Appian Way company, while Rosenberg will executive producer.

DiCaprio has played a number of real-life figures in his career, including Jordan Belfort in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, Frank Abagnale Jr in ‘Catch Me If You Can’, Howard Hughes in ‘The Aviator’ and J Edgar Hoover in ‘J Edgar’.

DiCaprio will next be on our screens this Christmas in the star-studded Netflix movie ‘Don’t Look Up’, in which he plays an astronomer attempting to warn mankind about an approaching meteor set to destroy Earth.

The sci-fi comedy also stars Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Timothee Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, Chris Evans, Matthew Perry, Mark Rylance, Rob Morgan, Ron Perlman, Himesh Patel, and, perhaps most excitingly, Meryl Streep as the President of the United States.