George Clooney Is Too Old For Jack Ryan
There’s been talk recently about how Paramount is prepping anotherJack Ryanmovie and thatGeorge Clooneywasinterestedin the role. (Or that Paramount was interested in Clooney, depending upon who you talked to.) Well, producerLorenzo Di BonaventuratoldMTVthat Clooney isn’t the man to lead the new film, because the script is “not written for a man his age.” Or, as Di Bonaventura says, “sorry, George.” But the movie moves forward, so who will be Ryan now?
The script Di Bonaventura refers to is the Hossein Amini script that werecently mentionedwas just about done. The producer says it is “for a young Jack Ryan…it is written for a man in his early 30s,” which means the role is basically wide open. It’s probably not unsafe to assume that Di Bonaventura might have the 29-year old Channing Tatum, star of the producer’s currentGI Joe, in mind. Which fills me with some dread, because the aspects of Jack Ryan that make him interesting have nothing to do with being either a brooding or bulky action guy. (I still haven’t seenStop-Loss, in which Tatum may project an image very different from what we see in a movie likeGI Joe.)
Di Bonaventura seems to get that Ryan is his own man, as another statement reveals. “It’s a great character. Very different [from] Bond or Bourne. It’s the analytical side of him and the everyman side of him that makes him… special.” What also makes him special is that, so far, he’s survived the reboot process. Ben Affleck’s turn inSum of All Fearswasn’t bad, and both Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford were able to stamp the character with their own vision and not have the effort fail. And while I’m not a fan of Di Bonaventura’s big action movies, he was also a part of the very character-orientedStardust, so maybe this will work out.
