War Machine/James Rhodes actor Don Cheadle is looking to star in the adaptation of Shane White’s biography of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Prince of Darkness.
Don Cheadle has been making his mark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Tony Stark’s best friend and right hand man, but now he’s looking to take on quite a different role with Prince of Darkness.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cheadle has picked up both the TV and movie rights for White’s biography of the Wall Street billionaire.
Steven Baigelman will pen the script. He previously worked with Cheadle on Miles Ahead, a biopic about Miles Davis.
The synopsis for Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire reads:
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century Jeremiah G. Hamilton was a well-known figure on Wall Street. Cornelius Vanderbilt, America’s first tycoon, came to respect, grudgingly, his one-time opponent. The day after Vanderbilt’s death on January 4, 1877, an almost full-page obituary on the front of the National Republican acknowledged that, in the context of his Wall Street share transactions, “There was only one man who ever fought the Commodore to the end, and that was Jeremiah Hamilton.”
What Vanderbilt’s obituary failed to mention, perhaps as contemporaries already knew it well, was that Hamilton was African American. Hamilton, although his origins were lowly, possibly slave, was reportedly the richest colored man in the United States, possessing a fortune of $2 million, or in excess of two hundred and $50 million in today’s currency.
In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger than life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily white business world, he married a white woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally set his white contemporaries teeth on edge when he wasn’t just plain outsmarting them. An important contribution to American history, Hamilton’s life offers a way into considering, from the unusual perspective of a black man, subjects that are usually seen as being quintessentially white, totally segregated from the African American past.