Don Cheadle is in talks to produce and star in an adaptation of Shane White’s biography Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire, which will reunite him with screenwriter Steven Baigelman, who co-wrote Cheadle’s directorial debut Miles Ahead.
The official Amazon description for Prince of Darkness reads: “In the middle decades of the nineteenth century Jeremiah G. Hamilton was a well-known figure on Wall Street. Cornelius Vanderbilt, America’s first tycoon, came to respect, grudgingly, his one-time opponent. The day after Vanderbilt’s death on January 4, 1877, an almost full-page obituary on the front of the National Republican acknowledged that, in the context of his Wall Street share transactions, ‘There was only one man who ever fought the Commodore to the end, and that was Jeremiah Hamilton.’ What Vanderbilt’s obituary failed to mention, perhaps as contemporaries already knew it well, was that Hamilton was African American. Hamilton, although his origins were lowly, possibly slave, was reportedly the richest colored man in the United States, possessing a fortune of $2 million, or in excess of two hundred and $50 million in today’s currency.”
Cheadle was last seen on the big screen in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, while he has also starred in the Showtime series House of Lies for the past five seasons, although that came to an in end June 2016.
Originally published April 12, 2017. Updated April 15, 2018.
