Ever since The Hurt Locker, Anthony Mackie seems to have been poised on the edge of becoming a big name without quite making it. Now he has a new project he’ll hope will further his climb up the star tree, as Variety reports he’s joined the cast of Runner, Runner.
The thriller already has Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake onboard, and is set in the world of illegal online gambling. Timberlake will play a Princeton student who is cheated out of his tuition money playing online poker. Hoping to reclaim his money, he flies to Costa Rica to get his cash back from the site’s owner (Ben Affleck), but ends up becoming the corrupt CEO’s right hand man. Mackie will be an FBI agent who has spent years trying to take the site owner down as comes to see Timberlake’s character as the key to the investigation.
The script is from Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who have a bit of a speciality in writing about the gambling world, as they wrote the screenplay for Rounders, and created the short-lived TV series Tilt.