Gyllenhaal to star as Hall of Fame quaterback Joe Namath
Variety article which talks about this casting mentions that Gyllenhaal is athletic, which he may well be but we haven't seen him show that yet on screen.
While other quarterbacks racked up bigger lifetime stats, Namath became the first football player to achieve rock-star status. The pic will tell the story of how the golden-armed kid from Beaver Falls, Pa., became Broadway Joe, the New York Jets quarterback who became a '60s cultural figure.Such cultural status brought him many advertising deals, including this delight I stumbled across over at Youtube...
Sadly, I have to say Gyllenhaal really bores me as an actor and the idea that he is going to play a cultural sporting icon, just screams of mis-casting to me.
I'll admit I know very little about Namath, but someone like Joaquin Phoenix would have interested me so much more and would instantly have been an actor I could believe as an icon. Hell he played one of the biggest musical icons of all time in WALK THE LINE.
