Bradley Cooper is, it would seem, more than a really, really ridiculously good-looking face: he has been tapped to script an adaptation of Dan Simmons' Hyperion .
The actor was speaking on Charlie Rose when he announced the unexpected career move.
He said: "[We] went to [producer] Graham King, who own the rights to Hyperion , and we wrote a treatment on spec. I said, 'I know this is a very audacious endeavour, but can you just read this spec we wrote? I think we have a way in to tell the story.' So now we're negotiating to write the script for it."
That's not bad going for someone with no previous writing form, though Cooper's ambitions don't stop there: "This is an example of trying to get things started... Ideally I'd like to direct it, but there's no way."
His fame following successes like The Hangover , The A-Team and Limitless (on which he served as exec-producer) must have added to his clout, but it'll be interesting to see how he fares when he actually puts pen to paper (with the help of his friend Conal Byrne).
Hyperion ain't exactly the easiest starting block for a writer with no experience.
The epic sci-fi series of novels is inspired by the framework narratives of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron , as it unites the stories of a bunch of pilgrims journeying to the Time Tombs of Hyperion.
The screenplay will need to nimbly weave a dense mythology into flashy space opera action.
As this is in the very early stages right now, don't go expecting further details for quite some time.
