Nic Cage to Play Villain in Rogen’s ‘Hornet?’

Seth Rogen, Nicolas Cage and Cameron Diaz

Seth Rogen may have found a new villain, and we’re not talking about Turtle during this week’s episode of Entourage: part-time Oscar-winner and full-time action star Nicolas Cage is in negotiations to play The Green Hornet’s gangster villain.

Losing Stephen Chow hasn’t slowed down production, scheduled to shoot in September, at all. Variety also confirms last week’s story of Cameron Diaz in talks to play Rogen’s love interest.

Rogen offered these tidbits to AintItCoolNews:

On rumors of the film’s demise:

No, we’re building sets! There’s more people working on the film every day! They traditionally don’t spend millions and millions of dollars on movies that are dead. (Laughs)

On re-casting Kato:

We are reading many, many people from all over the globe, and it is a wild adventure. We’re just looking everywhere, honestly. We’re looking at people who are really famous overseas, and we’re looking at people who are completely unknown. We’re looking at people who are American. We’re looking at people who are martial arts experts. We’re also looking at people who don’t do any martial arts, and who do Broadway and are actors. We know what we want. And there’s some wiggle room. We’re the type of writers who can easily adapt the roles to whoever is playing it. We’ve done that on every movie we’ve ever written. But we know how we want the relationships to work, and so someone needs to fill that general role.

On multiple versions of the script:

Honestly, there have been different versions of it. There are versions where we’ve had more comedically-inclined people in mind for the role - and in that version, it was a tit-for-tat type of relationship. There have also been versions where we’ve been forced to confront “This guy doesn’t speak any fucking English!” That obviously changes their relationship a little bit. That means it would be a lot more on me to be the person who drives the scenes verbally. These are all just things that have been discussed during the endless hours of talking about this movie. Obviously, there are different versions. And they’re all written.

And yes, as previously mentioned, this week’s episode of Entourage featured Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) obsessing over why Katherine Heigl would sleep with Seth in Knocked Up (welcome to two-years ago). Part wink at Ferrara’s on-and-offscreen relationship with Jamie Lynn Sigler; Part jab at Rogen’s 2008 comments about Entourage not being funny.

All we have to say is Entourage’s Vinnie Chase may have been Aquaman, but Turtle is no Green Hornet.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 11:33 pm and is filed under Casting, Entourage, Evan Goldberg, Rumor, Seth Rogen, The Green Hornet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.