Will Ferrell To Take On The Role Of Ronald Reagan In New Film
Will Ferrell has a new role to tackle — the role of President Ronald Reagan. The movie is titled Reagan and is set at the end of the president’s second term. In the film, Will Ferrell will play the president as he declines into dementia.
Gary Sanchez Productions, owned by Will Ferrell, will be producing the film. Mark Rosolio, a newcomer to the big screen, wrote the script.
Entertainment Weekly reports,
“Mike Rosolio’s screenplay tracks Reagan at the beginning of his second term. When the President begins to fall into dementia, an ambitious intern is tasked with convincing the commander-in-chief that he is an actor playing the president in a movie.”
While the movie that Will Ferrell will star in is based on the life of a real person, the account is mostly fictional.
Playing the part of a president is nothing new for Will Ferrell. While Ferrell has shown a lot of diversity in the roles he has played in the past, one of the fan favorites is when he played Bush in multiple skits on Saturday Night Live. He brought humor and character to the Bush sketches on SNL and many of his fans remember this well. Will Ferrell did great impressions of George W. Bush.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyqSYDnRwxM
Will Ferrell has done other political comedy movies and productions in the past as well. Variety reminds us about past roles that Ferrell has played, saying,
“He would eventually took the impression to Broadway in the play “You’re Welcome America.” He also starred in the political comedy The Campaign opposite Zach Galifianakis.”
Will Ferrell is a busy man lately. This new Reagan movie is not the only thing that he’s been working on. Ferrell has also agreed to be in a new movie about Uber where he will take on one of the two lead roles in the movie by Universal. He’ll be playing an Uber driver who has an escaped convict in his cab. The movie, which he’s also producing, is still untitled at this time.
Will Ferrell will also be getting together with Mark Wahlberg to do a second Daddy’s Home movie. After the movie made more than $240 million gross, it was decided that there should be a sequel. Will Ferrell will be joined by Sean Anders, who will direct, and John Morris, who will write the script, for the sequel to Daddy’s Home.
Variety says that Daddy’s Home was “the highest offshore gross of any picture Ferrell has made.”
While many of his fans will watch Will Ferrell in pretty much anything that he stars in, there are some people that are not convinced that Will Ferrell as Ronald Reagan is a good idea. People on Twitter have expressed their reservations about Will Ferrell acting in this role in the movie.
Huh, Will Farrell is going to play Ronald Reagan. I like Farrell (sort of), but that sounds like a terrible choice. Even if it's a Comedy.
— Joe Archer (Spiny Winchester) (@Joker_ARC) April 27, 2016
Even the Washington Post has wondered how Nancy Reagan would feel about this, doubting that she would have approved.
https://www.facebook.com/poststyle/posts/10153669332353412
In fact, people on Facebook think that this is just in poor taste. Some have expressed the opinion that Will Ferrell is disrespectful to former President Reagan (Reagan was not officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s until he was 94 and did not suffer from dementia while he was still serving as president), while others are offended that a comedy movie is being made about suffering with dementia.
What do you think? Do you think that Will Ferrell and Hollywood are going too far with this movie?
[Photo source: Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images]
