After 8 seasons of playing a cantankerous, mercurial, sarcastic yet brilliant medical doctor, Hugh Laurie is now in talks to play the big baddie in Juan Padilha’s reboot of the 1987 sci-fi film ‘Robocop.’
Laurie is best known to American audiences from his years of playing Dr. Gregory House in the Fox television series ‘House.’ With the series having aired its final episode, Laurie is now free to pursue other projects and according to Variety, he’s in negotiations to play the CEO of Omni Corp, the corporation that creates Robocop. If you recall, in the original film, the CEO (who was played by Ronny Cox) had built Robocop for his own personal gain.
If the deal goes through, this will be the biggest movie role to date for Laurie who has done quite a bit of voice work for films like ‘Arthur Christmas,’ ‘Monsters vs. Aliens,’ and ‘Stuart Little.’ While playing the bad guy may not seem like a stretch, it does give him a great opportunity to do so on a much grander scale.
Little is known about Laurie’s character and we can’t even be certain how close Padilla’s reboot will be to the original. Nick Schenk worked on the latest rewrite of the current script which Padilla describes will be more philosophical in nature and centering on the time between Alex getting shot and when he becomes a fully working Robocop.
If Laurie accepts the deal, he will be joining what can only be described as a very interesting cast with Joel Kinnaman in the lead as Alex Murphy, the cop who was brutally gunned down and remade into the half cyborg law enforcer, Gary Oldman as Norton, the scientist who helps rebuild Murphy, Samuel L. Jackson in the role of a powerful media mogul and Abbie Cornish as Murphy’s conflicted wife who struggles with the fact that she’s really not a widow.
So far Padilla does have me interested in this reboot and I can’t wait to hear more about it. Filming should start soon in Toronto with the movie slated to be released on August 9, 2013.
