Leonardo to play his namesake

Leonardo DiCaprio will play his namesake Leonardo da Vinci in an upcoming biopic about the Italian Renaissance icon. It seems no coincidence that the Oscar winner has desire to portray the one of the brightest minds of human history. DiCaprio’s mother has chosen the artist as her son’s namesake when she was examining a da Vinci piece at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy and she felt him in utero kicking for the first time. Paramount won the rights to the film, which will be based on the Walter Isaacson book Leonardo da Vinci, after participating in a bidding war against Universal, and spent a seven-figure sum to secure the project. DiCaprio will also produce the film alongside studio producers. Walter Isaacson, a New York Times Best Selling author, has written biographies on other notable thinkers including Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin. Isaacson’s biography on da Vinci, which uses the artist’s own notebooks to, “weave a narrative that connects his art to his science and voracious curiosity and imagination,” will come out on October 17, 2017. Earlier, Isaacson also wrote Steve Jobs, the book that became the Danny Boyle film of the same name and earned Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet Academy Awards nominations. Currently, DiCaprio has two projects in the pre-production stages; Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and The Black Hand, which is based on the Stephan Talty book of the same name. A release date for the Leonardo da Vinci biopic has yet to be revealed.