Rogue One’s Diego Luna set to play new Tona Montana in Scarface remake

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After really breaking through with Star Wars standalone film Rogue One, Diego Luna looks to have landed another huge role - the lead in Universal’s upcoming Scarface remake.

Variety reports that he’s attached to star - essentially as the Tony Montana of the film, though it will be a modern-day reimagining of Brian De Palma’s 1983 film, focusing on a Mexican immigrant instead of a Cuban one and taking place in LA rather than Miami.

Though Al Pacino, of course, gave a terrific performance as the iconic drug lord, many will be pleased to see the lead this time going to a Latino actor, an issue that was very important to Luna in Rogue One.

The bad news for the project is that director Antoine Fuqua has had to drop out in order to fast track a sequel to Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer, with the remake now looking for a new director (a quick discussion on this in the office has thrown up ultra-violence master Nicolas Winding Refn and crime genre expert Stefano Sollima as initial wish list options).

While Universal may face some backlash for remaking Scarface, the 1983 film was itself a remake. Scarface: The Shame of the Nation was released in 1932, directed by Howard Hawks and adapted from a 1929 novel of the same name based loosely on the rise and fall of Al Capone.

Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos' Terence Winter wrote the most recent draft of the script; the 1983 screenplay was written by Oliver Stone, who saw it as his personal revenge on cocaine.