Will Philip Seymour Hoffman segue from the stage to the arena?
After finishing up his critically acclaimed run as Willy Loman in the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the Oscar winner is being courted for an altogether different, but no less major part—playing Plutarch Heavensbee in Catching Fire, the highly anticipated sequel to Lionsgate's mega-hit Hunger Games.
If true, the Games have never had a better addition.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Hoffman's camp received an offer on Monday, the same day the 44-year-old thesp severed ties with his longtime agency, Paradigm, and a day after he lost out on a Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role Tony for Death of a Salesman.
As fans of The Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins already know, Heavensbee is the new Head Gamemaker taking over for Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley), who was deftly disposed of in the Y.A. franchise's first big screen foray. But as Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) will later discover, all is not what it seems with Plutarch, whose allegiance to President Snow and the Capitol is in question.
A rep for the studio declined to comment on the news.
Hoffman is currently attached to star in only one movie, the Anton Corbijn thriller, A Most Wanted Man, about a Chechen Muslim who finds himself tangled in the war on terror after illegally immigrating to Germany.
The actor next appears in theaters in Paul Thomas Anderson's much-buzzed about drama, The Master, in which he plays the leader of a new faith-based organization that supposedly has parallels to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
If all goes smoothly with negotiations, Hoffman will join Jennifer Lawrence and the rest of the cast when The Hunger Games: Catching Fire starts filming in September with Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) replacing Gary Ross at the helm. The original flick, which unspooled in March, grossed a whopping $650 million worldwide.