Tom Hardy heads up a phenomenal cast in this gripping tale of crime and passion in “The Drop” from a screenplay of world-renowned crime novelist Dennis Lehane. At first glance nothing looks particularly unusual as the movie starts. But as the clientele of the bar put their hands on their hearts, Bob (Hardy) discreetly stashes an envelope of cash behind the bar. Indeed, there's more to Cousin Marv's bar than meets the eye. Cousin Marv (played by the late James Gandolfini) has been drawn into working with a group of nefarious Chechen gangsters, meaning his employee Bob has to go along with the scheme. Meanwhile, the bartender has found an abandoned pit bull puppy in a trash can, leading him to cross paths with the beautiful but troubled Nadia (Noomi Rapace) and her violent ex-boyfriend Eric (Matthias Schoenaerts). It's the set-up for an explosive, emotional drama with plenty of twists and turns.

Bob’s simple life becomes much more complicated when he discovers a battered pit bull puppy in a trash can. Turning to his neighbor Nadia (Noomi Rapace) for help, he nurses the puppy back to health, as their mutual concern for the dog sparks an unexpected attraction between them. But when Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts), the dog’s original owner and Nadia’s abusive ex-boyfriend, tries to reclaim both of them, and a robbery at the bar puts Bob in the crosshairs of the Chechen crime boss who owns it, Bob is forced to face the shocking truth about the people he thinks he knows best—including himself.

The story is, as Lehane points out, still quite simple. “A guy finds a dog. The dog allows him to reclaim a part of his life. But at the exact same moment, outside forces press in on him. The Chechen mobsters who own the bar where he works for his Cousin Marv are suspicious about a robbery. The guy who originally owned the dog wants it back and he’s not taking no for an answer.”

The film opens on the day Bob re-engages with the world he’s closed himself off from. It all starts with Rocco, the puppy. “Bob made a decision ten years ago to shut himself away from humanity, from feeling,” says Lehane. “Suddenly something begins to open up in him. He meets this woman. He starts to re-join the human race. The largest dramatic question of the film is, can Bob really be rescued?”

“Like most of the people in the film, he is chasing something that’s already in the rearview mirror,” the writer continues. “They’re trying to get back to a self that doesn’t exist anymore. That idea fascinated me as I was writing the script. I think the audience will feel an emotional connection with the characters that leads them to some sort of emotional truth about their own lives, about the moments when they seem to be stuck in gear. The people who successfully navigate those waters are the ones who will ultimately reach a happy ending.”

"This has been an intense shoot," says director Michael Roskam. "It is such a tense story, but there is also a huge amount of heart. That combination is really what made me fall in love with it." The cast and crew know that they are making something special. "It's a very beautiful story about daring to take a risk with your emotions," muses Rapace. "To let someone in, even though you have a smashed heart. Someone who has been beaten up really badly still finds a way to believe and to hope again. Through a dog!"

“The Drop” opens November 12 in cinemas nationwide from 20^th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

Tom Hardy heads up a phenomenal cast along with actress Noomi Rapace, the late James Gandolfini and Matthias Shoenaerts in “The Drop,” a gripping tale of crime and passion where Bob (Hardy) works as a bartender at his cousin Marv’s (Gandolfini) bar and crosses paths with Nadia (Rapace) that unearths the depth of human frailties leading to an explosive, emotional turns never before bared.

Acclaimed director Michaël Roskam assembled an international cast for his American film debut, he says was not specifically looking for European actors to headline this film. “But when I found them, it made sense. New York is a city full of nomads. It’s a gateway to the rest of the world. There are so many nationalities represented here. Probably 40 percent of the people I met during location scouting spoke with an accent that wasn’t purely Brooklyn.”

Noomi Rapace, who plays Nadia, is in the process of building a major acting career in the U.S. after achieving enormous success in her native Sweden. “Noomi’s at a really exciting point in her career,” says Larocca. “We were incredibly lucky, because she approached us, saying, ‘I have to play Nadia.’ That kind of passion is what you want as a filmmaker.”

The script sparked Rapace’s initial eagerness and when she learned that Roskam and Hardy were attached, she pursued it even more ferociously. “After reading the script, I kept asking my manager what was happening with it,” the actress recalls. When I met with Michaël, I talked to him for about 10 hours.”

“I told him that I thought Nadia is a very beautiful, wounded soul and we started from that,” she continues. “She’s gone through a lot. It’s like she’s backed into a corner, living a quite protected life and sticking to the same routine. She and Bob are both quite lonely, but deep down they dream of meeting someone who understands.”

Nadia is a survivor, a tough but achingly vulnerable woman trying to stand her own. “Noomi invests a lot of herself in the character,” says Roskam. “We spent a great deal of time creating a whole life for Nadia that Noomi then lived every day. The character comes with a lot of baggage and Bob may not be the kind of man who can deal with that. You need to see a credible relationship between them and that took a lot of time and investment from the actors to create.”

Rapace had been watching Hardy’s career explode over the last few years and earmarked him as an actor to watch. “I’d been wanting to work with Tom for a while,” she says. “He’s a one-of-a-kind actor who always brought something to the table that I hadn’t thought about. That forced me to dig into things, to think and to be open. Each scene could go in any direction because he has a completely different take on it.”

For Hardy, it was a joy to come to work with Rapace. “Noomi is capable of doing anything she puts her mind to,” says the actor. “She’s unstoppable—full of courage, truth and heart. She’s incredibly supportive. If you want to put a team together, Noomi is the way to go. She keeps the flag flying when everyone else is tired and out of ideas.”

“The Drop” opens November 12 in cinemas nationwide from 20^th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

Money hardly ever stays in place in the much-anticipated crime thriller “The Drop” where an unusual love story is set in the midst of an organized crime’s unbreakable grip on small pubs and taverns used as money-laundering “drops.”

Director Michaël Roskam assembled an international cast for his American film debut in “The Drop,” including British actor Tom Hardy, who electrified audiences as the masked criminal mastermind Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises,” Swedish-Spanish actress Noomi Rapace, who captured international acclaim as the brilliant, damaged Lisbeth Salander in the original “The Girl with the Golden Tattoo” series; the late “The Sopranos” star and New Jersey native James Gandolfini in his last film role; as well as and Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts, who played the lead role in Roskam’s award-winning “Bullhead.”

Hardy is Bob Saginowksi in “The Drop,” a bartender at his cousin Marv’s bar where Brooklyn crime bosses use the place as a temporary bank for their ill-gotten gains. The film opens on the day Bob re-engages with the world he’s closed himself off from. It all starts with Rocco, the puppy. “Bob made a decision ten years ago to shut himself away from humanity, from feeling,” says the movie’s screenwriter Dennis Lehane, from whose short story “Animal Rescue” the film is based upon. “Suddenly something begins to open up in him. He meets this woman. He starts to re-join the human race. The largest dramatic question of the film is, can Bob really be rescued?”

Bob’s simple life becomes much more complicated when he discovers a battered pit bull puppy in a trash can. Turning to his neighbor Nadia (Noomi Rapace) for help, he nurses the puppy back to health, as their mutual concern for the dog sparks an unexpected attraction between them. But when Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts), the dog’s original owner and Nadia’s abusive ex-boyfriend, tries to reclaim both of them, and a robbery at the bar puts Bob in the crosshairs of the Chechen crime boss who owns it, Bob is forced to face the shocking truth about the people he thinks he knows best—including himself.

“Like most of the people in the film, he is chasing something that’s already in the rearview mirror,” the writer continues. “They’re trying to get back to a self that doesn’t exist anymore. That idea fascinated me as I was writing the script. I think the audience will feel an emotional connection with the characters that leads them to some sort of emotional truth about their own lives, about the moments when they seem to be stuck in gear. The people who successfully navigate those waters are the ones who will ultimately reach a happy ending.”

“The Drop” will finally open in theatres on November 12 from 20^th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

"The Drop" is the latest crime drama from Michaël R. Roskam, the Academy Award® nominated director of "Bullhead." Based on a short story from Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River," "Gone Baby Gone"), "The Drop" follows lonely bartender Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy) through a covert scheme of funneling cash to local gangsters – “money drops” – in the underworld of Brooklyn bars. Under the heavy hand of his employer and cousin Marv (portrayed by the late James Gandolfini), Bob finds himself at the center of a robbery gone awry and entwined in an investigation that digs deep into the neighborhood’s past where friends, families, and foes all work together to make a living – no matter the cost.

To direct "The Drop," the producers Peter Chernin, p.g.a. ("Rise of the Planet of the Apes," "Daen of The Planet of the Apes") and Jenno Topping, p.g.a.with executive producers Mike Larocca, M. Blair Breard and Dennis Lehane selected Michaël R. Roskam, a Belgian with one feature film to his credit: "Bullhead," a dark thriller about a brooding and dangerous loner that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2011.

“It was such a strong debut for a director,” says Larocca. “The way he handled the cast made it really clear that this is a guy who knows how to work with actors. Our script has rich and deeply complex characters, so we needed someone we knew could work with actors to draw out truly extraordinary performances.”

The success of Roskam’s first feature was rapidly opening doors for the director in Hollywood, and he gave careful consideration to the choices he was offered. A fan of "Bullhead," Lehane was excited to see Roskam tackle his first American film. “Michaël and I talked a lot about the themes, especially the Catholic themes and the spiritual themes in the film,” he says. “We agreed that it’s an urban fairytale, gritty certainly, but with something more underneath.”

Roskam likewise, is deeply appreciative of Lehane’s approach to working with a director. “He didn’t present the script and say ‘this is what it is and just don’t mess around with it.’ He said, ‘it’s all yours.’ He even allowed me to plot out some scenes, which he then adapted to his style. It’s a very good thing for a director to have a writer like Dennis on his side.”

The drop bar keeps dirty money out of the hands of law enforcement. “It could be bets placed with bookies or massage parlor receipts, anything that brings in money that cannot go on the books,” explains Roskam. “The cash could be evidence and needs to be kept out of the hands of the police. If you always hide it in the same place, it’s just a matter of time before the police find that. They keep it moving, so if the police figure out where they stash the cash, they will always be late.”

Roskam loves that tone. “It’s a pretty dark, gritty story, but it has sunshine in it. The larger themes are very close and inspiring to me. This movie is about a desperate search for innocence in a very complex and rich world.”

The film may deal with dark themes, but it is ultimately an optimistic view of the world, in Topping’s opinion. “At the beginning, there’s a sense of a huge burden from the past and a moment where it seems the past may repeat itself,” she says. “In the end, though, love triumphs.”

The movie implies that redemption is possible and that everyone is inherently good, according to Larocca. “But it also shows that everyone is a little bit more complicated than they seem. That’s something I’ve always loved about it. The strength of Dennis’ screenplay is that he doesn’t shy away from that. It’s a timeless story about people whose dreams maybe didn’t pan out the way they thought they would, and that is pretty universal and timeless.”

"The Drop" opens November 12 in theaters from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

The discovery of an abandoned and abused puppy leads a lonely bartender out of his constricted world in "The Drop," a riveting journey through a rarely seen side of working-class Brooklyn. The first film written by best-selling author Dennis Lehane, "The Drop" sets an unusual love story against the volatile backdrop of organized crime’s unbreakable grip on the small pubs and taverns used as money-laundering “drops.”

Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy) slings drinks in his Cousin Marv’s (James Gandolfini in his final performance) bar and looks the other way whenever Brooklyn crime bosses use the place as a temporary bank for their ill-gotten gains. He keeps to himself, attending Mass daily at the old neighborhood parish church, but never taking Communion.

Bob’s simple life becomes much more complicated when he discovers a battered pit bull puppy in a trash can. Turning to his neighbor Nadia (Noomi Rapace) for help, he nurses the puppy back to health, as their mutual concern for the dog sparks an unexpected attraction between them. But when Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts), the dog’s original owner and Nadia’s abusive ex-boyfriend, tries to reclaim both of them, and a robbery at the bar puts Bob in the crosshairs of the Chechen crime boss who owns it, Bob is forced to face the shocking truth about the people he thinks he knows best—including himself.

To direct the movie, the producers selected Michaël R. Roskam, a Belgian with one feature film to his credit: "Bullhead," a dark thriller about a brooding and dangerous loner that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 2011.

“It was such a strong debut for a director,” says executive producer Larocca. “The way he handled the cast made it really clear that this is a guy who knows how to work with actors. Our script has rich and deeply complex characters, so we needed someone we knew could work with actors to draw out truly extraordinary performances.”

The success of Roskam’s first feature was rapidly opening doors for the director in Hollywood, and he gave careful consideration to the choices he was offered. “This is the first time I have directed a film from a script I didn’t write,” Roskam says. “One of the things that drove my decision was that I wished I had written it. I knew it was the story for me. It was extremely well-written and plot-driven, but with the kind of complex character development that appeals to me.”

"The Drop" will open in cinemas soon from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros. Trailer link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7AlH76IGCc&list=PLcZs6n5iZPx-LUexAQmpiQoSvEzeuBBwv