Gold trailer: Matthew McConaughey is a balding wolf of Wall Street in new film

He plays a struggling businessman who discovers an enormous goldmine in Borneo

After more than a decade away from film, Syriana writer/director Stephen Gaghan returns with a new film based on the Bre-X Mineral Corporation mining scandal and starring Matthew McConaughey as an avaricious gold prospector.

You may have seen set photos from this one, as McConaughey sports a heavily balding hairline and gut for the role.

Scanning the Wikipedia page for the Bre-X fraud, the cinematic aspect to the story leaps right of the page from sentence one:

‘The fraud began to unravel rapidly on March 19, 1997 when Filipino Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman committed suicide by jumping from a helicopter in Busang, Indonesia. His body was found four days later in the jungle, mostly eaten by animals.’

Somewhere on a venn diagram with The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short and Blood Diamond, Gold centres on struggling, pawn shop-frequenting businessman Kenny Wells (McConaughey), who strikes gold in a big way in Indonesia and soon finds himself being courted in Wall Street’s biggest boardrooms.

Gaghan previously wrote the script Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, so hopefully he’s rustled up some more magic here.

Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World), Edgar Ramirez (The Girl on the Train) and Corey Stoll (House of Cards) co-star in Gold, which currently has a release date no more specific than ‘Christmas’.