Steve Carell will presumably have to step out of his comic persona to play John Eleuthère du Pont in the upcoming “Foxcatcher.” To be directed by Bennett Miller  (“Capote.” “Moneyball”), the movie is about the events surrounding the millionaire du Pont’s fatal shooting of the Olympic gold medal-winning freestyle wrestler Dave Schultz. The writers are Dan Futterman and E. Max Frye.

Bennett is assembling an impressive cast for the project, reports Deadline. Mark Ruffalo will play Schultz, Sienna Miller his wife Nancy, and Channing Tatum his brother Mark. The Schultz brothers are the only brothers in U.S history to win Olympic and World titles.

Heir to the DuPont chemicals company, John du Pont (born in Philadelphiain 1938) was an ornothologist, conchologist, philatelist, and author. He is credited with discovering two species of birds and wrote several ornithological books. In 1957, he founded the Delaware Museum of Natural History, which opened to the public at Winterthur in 1972.

He also did much to sponsor amateur sports in America. In 1988, he turned the 440-acre Liseter Hall Farm in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, into a training center for amateur wrestlers, making it home to his “Team Foxcatcher,” named for his father William du Pont Jr.’s famous throughbred racing stables. He befriended Dave Schultz and the wrestler and his wife lived on the estate for several years; they had a son and daughter.

On January 26, 1996, du Pont shot Schultz, 36, three times in the driveway of the latter’s home. The killing was witnessed by Nancy Schultz and du Pont’s head of security. No motive was established, but at the trial one of the defence’s psychiatric witnesses said du Pont was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed Schultz was part of an international conspiracy to kill him.

Du Pont pleaded “not guilty by reason of insanity.” This defence was thrown out. The jury found him guilty of third-degree murder but mentally ill. He was sentenced to 13 to 30 years in a minimum security prison. He died in custody on December 9, 2010.

He bequeathed 80 per cent of his estate to the Bulgarian wrestler Valentin Yordanov. Members of the du Pont family challenged the will, their petition alleging that at the time he made it du Pont claimed to be Jesus Christ, the Dalai Lama, and a Russian Czar. If Robin Williams and not Carell were attached to “Foxcatcher,” we could envision some “Aladdin”-like riffing, but given the tragedy of Schultz’s death, expect Miller to weight his film with seriousness and Carell to play it relatively straight.