Home Celebrity Mitt Romney, 65, Wants 84 Year Old Retired Gene Hackman to Play...

Mitt Romney maybe should get a clue. He tells Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan next week on his taped segment with them who sees playing him in the movies: though Romney is 65, he imagines Gene Hackman, 84 and a half, retired, curmudgeonly, half Jewish, voice of hardware store ads, to play him on film. Okay? And Ann Romney? Mitt sees Michelle Pfeiffer. I see dead people. The Romneys taped their interview today for a show called “Live!” and it airs on Tuesday. There’s nothing worse on “Live!” than a canned interview, except for a canned ham. It’s interesting who people see themselves as on film and in fiction. I always thought my late friend Ron Silver was playing me, and he was several years older–but not 20.

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Roger Friedman began his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years with Fox News, where he created the Fox411 column. His movie reviews are carried by Rotten Tomatoes, and he is a member of both the movie and TV branches of the Critics Choice Awards. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications over the years including New York Magazine, where he wrote the Intelligencer column in the mid 90s and covered the OJ Simpson trial, and Fox News (when it wasn't so crazy) where he covered Michael Jackson. He is also the writer and co-producer of "Only the Strong Survive," a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals, directed by DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.
3 replies to this post
  1. Gene Hackman isn’t “half Jewish”, or any “percentage” Jewish (although of course he did play a “half Jewish” man in The Royal Tenenbaums). His great-grandfather was Pennsylvania Dutch (German), which is where the surname comes from.

    I guess his father’s middle name, “Ezra”, might sound Jewish today, though it wasn’t out of place among non-Jews 100 years ago (and relatively rare among Jews then).

    Speaking of Ezras, how cool is the cast of this new movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower? Logan Lerman, Paul Rudd, Ezra Miller… a lot of Jewish actors in one film (well, this Ezra is a halfsie). I do love getting off topic…

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