Guy Ritchie is heading back to his roots with Toff Guys – a British crime caper that he’s squeezing into production before he’s even finished post-production work on his live action Aladdin.
Matthew McConaughey, Kate Beckinsale and Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) are already on board to star, and they’re now joined by Hugh Grant.
Toff Guys is described as a darkly comic “blend of Sexy Beast and Downton Abbey”, with a story about a British drug lord attempting to cash out on his highly profitable weed empire by selling it off to a dynasty of Oklahoma billionaires.
Whilst it would be great to see Grant as a bumbling London drug lord, Deadline reports that he’s actually playing Fletcher, “a British gossip journalist with a reputation of going into people’s lives, and undoing them”. Given Grant’s recent real life history with the worst side of the British press, it sounds like the opportunity was too good for him to pass on.
Ritchie is writing the script alongside Marn Davis and Ivan Atkinson (one an extra in Sherlock Holmes, the other Ritchie’s former assistant), and the speed that he’s rolling the film out so soon after wrapping Aladdin makes it sound like Toff Guys is going to be a fast and fun return to his Lock Stock days.
The film is aiming to go into production before the end of the year, so we should start hearing a lot more soon.