Seth Rogen will try to kill Kim Jong Un in next movie
North Korea is getting the Hollywood treatment yet again. But this time, instead of puppets, actors Seth Rogen and James Franco are taking on the Hermit Kingdom in a film entitled The Interview. "James and Seth play reporters who get an interview with the dictator of North Korea and the CIA asks them to kill ...
North Korea is getting the Hollywood treatment yet again. But this time, instead of puppets, actors Seth Rogen and James Franco are taking on the Hermit Kingdom in a film entitled The Interview.
North Korea is getting the Hollywood treatment yet again. But this time, instead of puppets, actors Seth Rogen and James Franco are taking on the Hermit Kingdom in a film entitled The Interview.
"James and Seth play reporters who get an interview with the dictator of North Korea and the CIA asks them to kill him," producer Evan Goldberg told E!Online during this week’s premiere of This Is the End. "They’re going to play a–holes."
And Hollywood isn’t going to create any old fictional North Korean leader.
"It’s Kim Jong-un. Literally King [sic] Jong-un in the movie. We figured it’s North Korea, you might as well make it Kim Jong-un," Rogen told E!
But that’s about as close to reality as the movie gets (this is Hollywood, after all). In March, the Hollywood Reporter noted that Columbia Pictures expects to spend around $30 million to make the film. But Rogen and Franco won’t be getting anywhere close to Pyongyang. "We’re going to the foreign land of Vancouver, Canada," Goldberg admitted.
And the premise is pretty shaky as well. As far as we can tell, no reporter has ever interviewed Kim Jong Un, let alone one from a Western news organization. The Associated Press did open a bureau in Pyongyang in January 2012, but operating a bureau in a place that ranks 178th out of 179 countries on Reporters Without Borders’s Press Freedom Index (Eritrea has the dubious distinction of placing last) comes with many challenges, including using office space that is hosted by the Korean Central News Agency, as my colleague Isaac Stone Fish pointed out in an article last year. Many journalists who have written about life in North Korea have had to rely on accounts from defectors.
The closest any American journalists have gotten to Kim Jong Un in recent months was during Vice’s highly publicized basketball diplomacy campaign in North Korea with Dennis Rodman in February. Vice’s Ryan Duffy has said he found Kim Jong Un "socially awkward," and that the North Korean leader avoided eye contact while shaking hands. (Rodman, for what it’s worth, described Kim as a "cool guy" who wears "regular clothes" and is "not one of these Saddam Hussein-type characters that wants to take over the world.")
Suffice it to say the actor who ends up playing Kim Jong Un for The Interview will have a lot of creative license for his portrayal.
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