With Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest action thriller, “The Revenant,” nominated for 12 Oscars, former Mayer Brown partner Michael Punke has just upped the ante for every big-firm lawyer working on that still-unpublished novel in his or her spare time.
Punke, now deputy U.S. trade representative and U.S. ambassador and permanent representative to the World Trade Organization in Switzerland, wrote the 2002 novel on which the film is based. Punke found time to research and write “The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge,” set in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains in the nineteenth century, while he was working as an international trade lawyer at Mayer Brown’s Washington, D.C., office from 1998 to 2003. DiCaprio has earned raves for his role as a mountain man determined to survive after a brutal grizzly bear attack in the drama directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.
