Taylor Kitsch will play a closeted investment banker turned AIDS activist in the film adaptation of The Normal Heart. 

Friday Night Lights star Taylor Kitsch is getting his gay on to star in Ryan Murphy's upcoming HBO film The Normal Heart. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he's objectified the entire time! He's playing a closeted investment banker . . . White collar on the down-low: sounds like my dream man.

The Normal Heart, which is an adaptation of Larry Kramer's play about AIDS in the 1980s, will also star Jim Parsons, who was in the 2011 Broadway revival, as well as Matt Bomer, Mark Ruffalo and Julia Roberts. Roberts worked with Ryan Murphy on his last film, Eat, Pray, Love. 

Interesting fact: Barbra Streisand originally wanted to bring Kramer's play to the big screen in the 1980s, but the notoriously scrupulous Streisand could not reach agreements with Kramer over rewrites and money, so The Normal Heart never made it past development. "I think it’s unfair to keep blaming me for the movie not getting made," Streisand wrote on her website in June 2012. "I worked on it for 25 years, without pay. Larry had the rights for the last 15 years and he couldn’t get it made either. Those are the facts, and none of this is news to Larry." 

Ryan Murphy's The Normal Heart will air on HBO in 2014.