Very busy actor Anthony Mackie is currently in negotiations to star alongside Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake in New Regency and Stone Village Pictures' Runner Runner. The online gambling thriller, directed by Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) and penned by Rounders scribes Brian Koppelman and David Levien, will be distributed by 20th Century Fox.
Runner Runner stars Timberlake "as a Princeton student who is cheated out of his tuition money playing online poker. He flies to Costa Rica hoping to reclaim his losses from the site's billionaire owner (Affleck), and ends up becoming the corrupt CEO's right-hand man."
If confirmed, Mackie will play an FBI detective who has been trying to hunt down Affleck's character for years and who targets Timberlake as the key to the investigation.
The thriller, which co-stars Oliver Cooper (Project X) as "an Ivy League computer nerd who works for Affleck's site," will be produced by Appian Way's Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson Killoran, Double Feature's Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher and Stone Village Pictures' Scott Steindorff.
Mackie just finished production in Michael Bay's dark comedy Pain and Gain, alongside Dwayne Johnson and Mark Wahlberg. He will be seen next in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, out next month and Gangster Squad, in theaters this September.
