With The Dark Knight Rises and Lawless out of the way, it’s not going to be long before I need another Tom Hardy fix. Seriously, the guy is too great to not be in front of eyeballs routinely, and we’re all looking forward to his choices here on out.

Along with the long long-gestating Mad Max rebootquel we might get to look forward to Tom Hardy being a badass on a side of a mountain, as he’s negotiating to join Everest with Doug Liman as soon as the director’s done palling around with Tom Cruise on All You Need Is Kill. The director of the first Bourne film and Jumper is taking on a script from Up In The Air scribe Sheldon Turner, who is adapting a book called Paths Of Glory. It has nothing to do with the magnificent Kubrick film, and instead with George Mallory and his several attempts to scale Everest in the early 1920s.

The story is a tragic one, as the Mallory became a hero in post-WWI ravaged Great Britain, but on his third attempt to reach the peak he failed to return. Though his remains have been found, it’s never  been determined if he actually made it to the summit or not, though some very romantic evidence suggests he may very well have done so. You see, he carried with him a picture of his wife that he intended on leaving at the peak- a photo that was not found on his remains.

Hardy joins Casey Affleck in the tragically inspirational historical drama about a Brit that can’t quite make it and that takes place somewhere really goddamn cold genre (rumors are flying of a new Oscar category in 2014), as Affleck will be heading towards the south pole in the (surely to be retitled) Race To The South Pole. Like that film, there’s a rivalry involved, as Mallory often competed with George Finch of Australia (who, by the way, was a total pussy that merely adopted the cold… Mallory was born in it… molded by it…).

Source | Deadline (via Dark Horizons)