Colm Meaney and Aidan Gillen set to star in film about gambling company Paddy Power

Irish actors Colm Meaney and Aidan Gillen are set to star in a new film about the rise of betting company Paddy Power.

Brian Gleeson and Alex Murphy will also appear in the upcoming movie.

The film, which was announced by Irish media production company Playhouse Studios, is based on Punters: How Paddy Power Bet Billions and Changed Gambling Forever, a book by journalist Aaron Rogan.

Peggy Cafferty, chief executive of Playhouse, said the story of the betting company “stood out immediately as a story with real scale, authentic dark humour, grit and tenacity”.

Paddy Power was formed from the merger of three Irish bookmakers in 1988 and has grown into a global gambling firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market value of €13 billion.

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Cafferty said “you could not make up this incredible story” about the growth of a company that “refused to play by the rules” and “stepped outside the norms of marketing with brilliant twists and always with wit”.

Details of the production first appeared in film industry publication Variety.

According to its synopsis, the movie, titled Paddy Power, recounts the “crazy true story of how one man bet big on brash advertising and brought online gambling – and addiction – to every corner of the globe”.

It describes the project as “an inherently Irish origin story” that shows “how a few chancers changed the world as we know it, destroying hundreds of thousands of people’s lives forever”.

Paddy Power was cofounded and managed for years by Stewart Kenny before he became an outspoken critic of the gambling industry, criticising poor regulation and lack of protections for vulnerable gamblers.

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Rogan, deputy editor of the Business Post, said the making of the movie from his book was “as exciting a thing that can happen to a journalist or reporter that people think your work is worth dramatising”.

He said it was “really flattering”.

Rogan said there were “serious aspects” in the story but it was also a “very bantery, laddish company” that “purposefully caused controversy, but did it with a bit of humour”.

“It was a company that always fascinated me because it was such a big part of sort of cultural and sporting life in Ireland, but also this huge, huge commercial success as well,” he said.

“I could see from being a customer of theirs that it was a very sophisticated company and I thought that was worth looking into.

“This was around the time that I think the issue of problem gambling was coming up more and more so my starting to report on them came at that part of their history.”