Edgar Ramirez Joins Matthew McConaughey in Cast of ‘Black Bear's Gold’

Edgar Ramirez, 37, best known for his roles in Domino (2005), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), Che (2008), Carlos (2010), Wrath of the Titans (2012), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), will be joining Matthew McConaughey in the cast of Black Bear Pictures' upcoming mining drama Gold. He is set to portray the geologist Michael Acosta opposite McConaughey's role of the prospector Walsh.

Stephen Gaghan is directing Gold from a script written by Patrick Massett and Jo Zinman based on a true story about the 1993 Bre-X Mineral Corporation mining scandal in which vast amounts of gold were reportedly discovered in the Indonesian jungle. The real-life Walsh founded Bre-X Minerals Ltd. in 1989 as a subsidiary of Bresea Resources Ltd. The company did not make a significant profit before 1993 when Walsh followed the advice of a geologist named John Felderhof who said the property he bought has a potential for about 200 million troy ounces of gold. The first estimate of the site by his own project manager, a Filipino geologist named Michael de Guzman, was approximately just 2 million troy ounces. In March 1997, de Guzman was found dead after having fallen from a helicopter in Indonesia. His death led to investigations which also incidentally uncovered fraud on a massive scale. Gold ores purportedly from the site were found to have been salted with gold dust to mislead investors. Walsh and his Bre-X were inundated with lawsuits. Walsh died in 1998 of a brain aneurism. His company went bankrupt in 2002. Felderhoff is rich, still alive and doing very well in the Cayman Islands.

Production is set to begin in June with filming in New York, New Mexico and Thailand. Paul Haggis will executive produce the project along with Richard Middleton. McConaughey, Massett and Zinman also are producing, along with Teddy Schwarzman and Michael Nozik through his Hwy61 company.

Ramirez will be seen on the big screen as the boxer Roberto Duran in the biopic Hands of Stone opposite Robert DeNiro which will hit theaters on October 30, and as the titular character's ex-husband in Joy, another biopic about Joy Mangano starring Jennifer Lawrence, which will screen in cinemas on December 25.