MMA Fighter Gina Carano is a KNOCKOUT for Steven Soderbergh!!!
Sasha Grey to MMA fighter Gina Carano. It is impossible to guess who will lead a Stephen Soderbergh picture these days. Maybe I shall get called up soon to play a small time movie reporter who stumbles across some news he shouldn't (that maybe Michael Bay is to direct Batman 3) and I am chased down by an angry movie studio exec (played by George Clooney) to cease and desist the information. Of course instead I turn to my mentor Michael Caine, (in pseudo post-modernist casting) who tells me that "the bloody truth must get out son" before he is shot down by Shia LaBeouf and can no longer play Alfred. God where is this going? Anyway, Variety have confirmed today that after the public humiliation of his Brad Pitt movie Moneyballbeing yanked away from him by a tepid studio, Soderbergh's responds with a La Femme Nikita and female James Bond esque, sexy hot chick who can fight, spy thriller titled Knockout, which should begin production in late January from a script by Lem Dobbs, who wrote The Limey and Kafka. Carano will play a girl "from the wrong side of the tracks" who has a second chance to put her life long skills to a better use. The movie takes MMA fighter Carano out of the ring and onto the big screen for her leading lady debut... her only experience thus far being a small part in the Z-grade fighter movie Blood & Bone. Some might remember her as playing Crush on American Gladiators. The trades say although the character she plays is expected to acknowledge her MMA background, we won't ever see her in the ring - which kind of mirrors the use of porn star Sasha Grey as an escort in The Girlfriend Experience, where the nudity and actual sex scenes were barely non-existent. Producer Ryan Kavanaugh describes it as mainstream action film with universal appeal for a reasonable budget... Yeah I can buy Carano as a lead for an action vehicle. She certainly has a presence and a million dollar smile and her physical attributes will lend her a credibility that very few leading actresses' would be able to afford. 2010 is expected to be a busy filming year for Soderbergh with potentially two further movies being shot (Cleo and Liberace), so I like his get up and go attitude to make this one early next year. And we all know he was once offered $15 million to make a Bond movie but turned it down because of the lack of creative control to take it into his own direction. Well he's got full control on this one, let's see where he runs it too...