The Rush Hour director Brett Ratner is going to make a biopic on Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and the film will have the Suicide Squad star Jared Leto play the role of Hefner. The film is being managed by Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment and it took shape after producer Jerry Weintraub’s demise that saw the rights to Hefner’s life story being available.
Hefner recently died at 91 and his death has sparked fierce debates about the legacy left behind the Playboy founder. There are people who consider him to be a man ahead of his times while others believe that he was a misogynist who treated women like objects.
Hefner’s journey began in 1950s when he founded the Playboy magazine as an influential monthly publication featuring high class literature merged with images of naked models. Hefner later went on to become a reality star on an E! seriesThe Girls Next Door which featured models from various parts of America visit California to fulfil their dream of living with Hefner in the iconic Playboy Mansion.
Brett Ratner has been attempting to launch the Hefner biopic project since 2007 and at that time there were rumors about Robert Downey Jr. being associated with the project and now Jared Leto has been chosen by him to play Hefner (reported by The Hollywood Reporter). Ratner explained the reason behind selecting Leto to portray the charismatic and controversial media/lifestyle billionaire:
“Jared is an old friend. When he heard I got the rights to Hef’s story, he told me, ‘I want to play him. I want to understand him.’ And I really believe Jared can do it. He’s one of the great actors of today.”
Jared is considered to be a hardcore actor (he says that the reputation is over exaggerated) who totally merges into the character that he plays. He often undergoes physical transformation (it is said that he had blinded himself for his role in Blade Runner 2049) and even adopts extreme mental changes.
He played terrible pranks and behaved nastily with his co-actors as if he was indeed a chaotic evil person during the filming of Suicide Squad where he played the iconic villain Joker. While most of the scenes shot by him didn’t make it to the movie’s final cut, his on set antics now form a part of the film’s folklore and that’s pretty annoying for Leto.
Leto’s selection to portray Hugh Hefner is bound to make a lot of people talk about this Ratner work. We wonder what all methods Leto will employ to embody a person who was renowned for his impeccable taste in most things, enjoyed intimacy with hordes of women and lived a major part of his life as a reckless bathrobe-draped hedonist.
Ratner was a very good friend of Hefner and that’s likely to result in the portrayal being a great deal positive with only a passing reference to the various controversies associated with Hefner’s handling of women (Ratner might altogether overlook such things). Therefore, it is unlikely that Leto will go overboard with this one.
Besides the Hefner biopic, this Oscar winner also has Suicide Squad 2 coming up where he is going to once again play the Clown Prince of Gotham and another proposed Joker and Harley Quinn film. We will also see him as a GI alongside Yakuza in the crime drama The Outsider in 2018.
