You might be aware that we’re big fans of Bill Hader here at Empire Towers, so we’re always happen to hear about new acting/writing gigs the Saturday Night Live star is lining up. He’s apparently got a couple of projects bobbing to the top of his development cauldron – action comedy Henchmen and dark laugh-fest Vaughn Meader.
Chatting with the noble squires over at The Playlist, Hader spilled a few details on both. Turns out that Henchmen is a project that **Real Steel **director Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps company has been working on, based off of a script by Owen Egerton and Chris Mass.
”They came to us with this script that Hot Rod director Akiva (Schaffer) and I are now reworking,” Hader says, admitting that they’re now looking for other cast members to feature alongside him. “The film is about two guys who don’t realize it, but they’re two henchman for like the bad guy in a Bourne movie and then they slowly figure who that they’re working for the wrong guys, but like doing it in the actual style of one of those films.”
Apparently, the pair figured that the Paul Greengrass-style shaky cam action moves could blend with comedy thanks to audiences embracing mockumentary comedies such as The Office. “We realized we could keep that same style. That would be a different feel for that and something we’re working on.”
The only question we have about the script is how it might chafe against Hench, which Danny McBride has been writing and planning to headline for Warners, and which finds a former American football player signing up to support a successful villain. Still, little has been heard of that one since it was announced, so it may have gotten bogged down in development murk.
Hader, meanwhile, also has another intriguing project on the go, this time for Ben Stiller’s Red Hour Films. Vaughn Mader will be based on the eponymous American comedian and impressionist who made a killing taking off John F Kennedy before the assassination of the president shut that part of his career down.
“He had this comedy album called The First Family and it was the biggest selling comedy record, still to this day I think it’s one of the biggest selling comedy records,” Hader says. “He does this insane, amazing JFK impression and then JFK gets assassinated and his whole career goes away. So Rob Siegel is working on that now.” That would be Rob Siegel, who scripted and directed Big Fan and worked on **The Wrestler **with Darren Aronofsky. And it won’t shy away from dark turns, either. “I would like to do… dark. It would be pretty sweet. It’s a real interesting piece and in a weird way it feeds into now, just like people becoming super famous overnight, reality stars and stuff. This guy became crazy famous, the president was talking about this guy and then it all went away. It’s really interesting.”