Chris Hemsworth Is Going To Play Hulk Hogan In A New Netflix Film, Brother
What a sentence.
Hulk Hogan, AKA Terry Gene Bollea, has spent almost three decades bodying wrestlers and media empires, maintaining a moustache so thick and luscious that it’d make a toilet brush blush, and telling kids to take their vitamins and say their prayers while secretly indulging in a (now under control) cocaine addiction.
The man’s lived a life, is what I’m saying. Which is why it’s unsurprising that his story is being adapted into a forthcoming biopic from Netflix. What is a bit more surprising, mind you, is the actor set to inhabit the role of Hogan is Australia’s own Chris Hemsworth.
Look, Hemsworth certainly has the body to play Hogan — whether he can nail the distinctive speech patterns or the swagger is another question entirely.
I read the thing about Chris Hemsworth playing Hulk Hogan in a Todd Phillips movie and my brain instantly tapped out. Not even gonna try to process that one.
— Scott Wampler™ (@ScottWamplerBMD) February 20, 2019
Equally odd is the choice of director, Todd Phillips. Phillips is known to lovers of extreme cinema as the director of Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, a documentary about the excrement-smearing and penis-mutilating shock rocker GG Allin, and to everybody else as the man behind the wildly successful Hangover trilogy.
Given his credentials as a director of comedy then, it’d probably be safe to assume that the forthcoming biopic will take a distinctly light and breezy look at the Wrestlemania legend’s life.
Indeed, insiders close to the project have already ruled out the possibility that the film will cover Hogan’s highly publicised sex tape, Gawker legal battle, or struggle with addiction — instead, it’ll apparently cover his rise, looking at the early days of Wrestlemania and the sport’s move into the mainstream.
Disappointingly, I guess that means the biopic will miss out on one of the most important chapters in the wrestler’s life — that time he was tricked into commiserating Tony Abbott on Twitter after the ex-PM got knifed by Turnbull.
A release date for the film has yet to be set, but given this project is still in very early stages, we’ve probably got a few years to wait yet.