Steve Carell and Gore Verbinski to team up in paranoid thriller

When it comes to picking projects, actor Steve Carell and director Gore Verbinski have both shown themselves to be among the more unpredictable characters in Hollywood. In recent years, they’ve each bounced between genres with either intrepid or haphazard variety, depending on how you look at it, with wide-ranging results.

In that sense, it was perhaps only a matter of time before they ended up working together. (In another sense, it’s a similarly entropic collaboration.) Carell is set to star in an untitled paranoid thriller directed by former “Pirates of the Caribbean” director Verbinski, the Fox-based New Regency announced Tuesday. The script is by Steve Conrad, who wrote “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”; plot details have yet to be revealed.

Scheduled to begin production in March, the thriller will be the first project in a multiyear deal between Verbinski’s Blind Wink and New Regency. It will be followed by two more films he’ll direct back-to-back: the horror movie “A Cure For Wellness” and the action-comedy “Passengers.”

Both Carell and Verbinski are at career crossroads, though in different ways. Carell is best known for his everyman brand of comedy (“The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” “Dinner for Schmucks”) and his voicing Gru in the “Despicable Me” movies. Most recently, though, he’s taken a more serious, chilling turn -- in Bennett Miller’s upcoming Oscar-tipped drama “Foxcatcher,” he plays John du Pont, the troubled chemical-fortune heir and convicted murderer.

Verbinski, meanwhile, most recently directed a pair of Johnny Depp-starring Westerns, with wildly different results. His 2011 animated movie, “Rango,” won the Academy Award for best animated feature, but his 2013 action flick, “The Lone Ranger,” was an expensive bomb.

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