Jared Leto to play Andy Warhol

Jared Leto has been cast to play late art icon Andy Warhol in a biopic.

The Dallas Buyers Club star will produce Warhol alongside Captain Phillips' Michael De Luca. The Wolf of Wall Street's Terence Winter will write the screenplay for the film, which will be based on Victor Bockris 1989 book, Warhol: The Biography.

It is unclear who will direct the movie, but Leto and De Luca purchased the rights to the book some years ago and the project has been in development for a while.

The news comes a month after the Oscar winner joined the likes of Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright, Ana de Armas, and Mackenzie Davis in the Blade Runner sequel. His character details are being kept under wraps, but Harrison Ford is also part of the cast and will be reprising his robot hunter character Rick Deckard from the 1982 original, based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and directed by Ridley Scott.

Plot details also remain scarce, but reports suggest Blade Runner 2 will be set several decades after the conclusion of the original movie.

Gosling has previously been pressed about the film, and joked with curious reporters that the movie is a star-studded musical, packed with dancing girls and Broadway-style tunes.

Gosling quipped, "I am singing and dancing in it and you probably won't want to see me do that again! Most of the dance numbers are on practical locations but there's one where we had a whole freeway overpass for a day and people were dancing on cars and it was pretty amazing."

On a more serious note, Gosling said he had been sworn to secrecy about the Blade Runner sequel.

"There's literally a sniper on that roof if I say anything about Blade Runner," he said.

Blade Runner 2 is slated for an October, 2017 release.