Ready Player One star Tye Sheridan is in talks to play the young lead opposite Ben Affleck in George Clooney‘s coming-of-age film The Tender Bar, Collider has exclusively learned.
Set up at Amazon Studios, the film is based on J.R. Moehringer‘s bestselling memoir, which recollected the time he spent searching for unlikely father figures among the patrons at his uncle’s bar in Long Island. Sheridan is making a deal to play Moehringer, while Affleck is set to play his Uncle Charlie.
It’s unclear whether Clooney plans to act in the film himself, but he has starred in every film he has directed with the exception of Suburbicon, where he entrusted the lead to his Ocean’s 11 pal Matt Damon.
Oscar-winning scribe William Monahan (The Departed) will adapt Moehringer‘s memoir, and Clooney will produce the film with his Smokehouse partner Grant Heslov as well as former Amazon exec Ted Hope. Amazon acquired the project out of turnaround from Sony, which had been developing the film with Hidden Figures director Ted Melfi.
Clooney‘s latest film, The Midnight Sky, is a post-apocalyptic thriller in which he plays a lonely scientist in the Arctic who tries to stop a team of astronauts led by Felicity Jones from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.
Sheridan is coming off of the innovative Quibi series Wireless from executive producer Steven Soderbergh (a longtime Clooney pal), and he’ll soon be seen alongside Oscar Isaac in Paul Schrader‘s revenge thriller The Card Counter. Sheridan also stars opposite Colin Farrell in the upcoming sci-fi thriller Voyagers from Divergent director Neil Burger, and he was recently cast in Rupert Sanders‘ star-studded war movie The Things They Carried alongside Tom Hardy and Pete Davidson.
Sheridan made his professional acting debut in 2011’s The Tree of Life before going on to star alongside Matthew McConaughey in Jeff Nichols‘ drama Mud and Nicolas Cage in David Gordon Green‘s indie crime movie Joe. He was cast as Scott Summers, aka Cyclops, in X-Men: Apocalypse before landing the lead of Wade Watts in Steven Spielberg‘s adaptation of Ready Player One.
Sheridan recently branched out into producing with the indie movie The Night Clerk, which paired him with Ana de Armas, and personally, I was a big fan of his performance in The Stanford Prison Experiment. He’s represented by WME, Mosaic and attorney Mitch Smelkinson.
via Collider