Robert De Niro is in talks to play Tommy Lasorda, the Hall of Fame manager who led the Los Angeles Dodgers to two World Series titles, in a biopic being developed at Skydance Sports under the working title “Tommy & Me.”
Reid Carolin, who directed “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and the Channing Tatum drama “Dog,” is attached to direct. George Gallo, Cambron Clark and Carolin wrote the script, though plot details and the scope of Lasorda’s life the film will cover remain undisclosed. Skydance Sports is producing alongside Mandalay Pictures’ Peter Guber, Intuition Productions’ Keri Selig and Diane Galardi, and Carolin’s Free Association banner.
Lasorda managed the Dodgers for two decades, from 1976 to 1996, winning four National League pennants and World Series championships in 1981 and 1988. He spent 71 years connected to the organization in one capacity or another, the longest tenure anyone has held with the team, and remained a fixture at Dodger Stadium well into his final years, taking on an advisory role that kept him scouting, coaching and appearing at team events almost until his death in 2021 at age 93. Born in Pennsylvania to Italian immigrant parents, he signed with the Philadelphia Phillies as an amateur free agent in 1945 before eventually building his career with the Dodgers organization.
De Niro’s casting would pair two prominent Italian-American figures, one from baseball and one from film, in a role that plays to the actor’s long history of embodying larger-than-life real-life characters. He is coming off “The Whisper Man,” a Netflix thriller that drew roughly 55 million views in its first two weeks on the platform, and will next appear in “Focker-in-Law,” the fourth installment in the “Meet the Parents” franchise, arriving in theaters November 25.
Any production centered on the Dodgers would likely require cooperation from Major League Baseball and the team itself to secure rights to use official logos and likenesses, a step other baseball films such as “Moneyball” have had to navigate. Given the subject’s stature in Los Angeles sports history, the project is expected to draw interest from actors looking to fill out the supporting cast around De Niro once a director’s full vision for the film takes shape.
