On April 1st every year there are usually a flurry of bullshit and wildly imaginative stories of impossible Hollywood castings, not so much to fool readers into believing them to be true but just to make people laugh at the absurdity of it all. A casting story that Sean Penn, coming off an Academy Award winning leading man role in Milk and that the two Hollywood stars Jim Carrey and Benicio del Toro were in talks to play Larry, Curly & Moe (in that order) in a big screen comedy adaptation of The Three Stooges for the Farrelly Brothers wouldn't look out of place on that day. In fact, it would be one of the funnier stories I dare bet.
But guess what? It's not April 1st and this news is solid.
Variety say so. Penn (Larry) seems to be a lock, Carrey (Curly) and Del Toro (Moe) are in final talks. Carrey... who is in such a desperate need of a hit movie right now if he wants to continue in the comedy genre after a couple of mis-fires, is planning to gain 40 pounds to play the role of Curly! As I said last month when
Film Drunk first caught wind of Sean Penn being involved in this movie, I mentioned
that I couldn't believe they weren't going the biopic route revolving around the actors who played the characters
and that they were clearly missing a trick by simply adapting the characters they played to the screen, for a broad comedy. But that's definitely what's happening here. Which is why it's so dumbfounding that the project has attracted these kind of names instead of
Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Will Ferrell. Production looks like it will finally begin for the Farelly's this fall for a
release next year. They tried to make the movie at Columbia, then Warner Bros. but now look to have been successful at MGM. And boy have they pulled off the coup of a lifetime here. Have Penn, Carrey and Del Toro gone insane, is it career suicide... or is their an artful way to do broad comedy, when you haven't been brought up as a comedian (maybe Carrey has but the others have barely cracked a joke in a movie for years). Penn hasn't done an out and out comedy since the 80's!