He’s played a bad guy or two in his time, and he’s recently been burning up the small screen as nuanced threat Wilson Fisk in the Marvel/Netflix Daredevil series. So you can see why Dax Shepard might have picked Vincent D'Onofrio to play the villain in the new CHiPs movie{
Word broke last September that Shepard had locked in a deal with Warner Bros. to write, direct and co-star in the film adapted from Rick Rosner’s cult TV series that saw Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox as dedicated, khaki-clad cops Frank “Ponch” Poncherrello and Jon Baker, who kept the mean streets of California’s highways safe from crime between 1977 and 1983.
With Shepard taking over the Baker role and Michael Pena filling Ponch’s groin-troubling shorts, not much else has been revealed about the film’s angle, which is written by Shepard based on an earlier script from Paul Kaplan and Mark Torgove. Will it be a** Jump Street**-style meta spoof? Or will it go the action route? What we do know, at least, is that it features an exotic car stealing gang, with D’Onofrio as the ringleader, a ruthless former cop. Which makes sense on a meta level already, given the years he spent on Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
D’Onofrio will next be on our screens as gruff, potentially troublesome security chief Vic Hoskins in **Jurassic World **(out June 12), and he’s also locked in a role in Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven, though he’ll be one of the heroic gunslingers for that film.