There was consternation and cries of “it must be an April Fool’s joke!” when Ashton Kutcher was announced as the actor to play the late Apple overlord Steve jobs in Joshua Michael Stern’s Jobs. We’re guessing there’ll be much less outcry greeting the news that Josh Gad is in talks to play another key figure in the early days of the company, co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Woz, as he’s long since become known, first became friends with Jobs when they worked together at Hewlett Packard in 1970. Jobs wanted to forge ahead with his idea to sell a computer as a fully assembled kit, which Wozniak wasn’t sure would work. But after Jobs convinced him, he threw in his lot and the pair began to work on their prototypes for what eventually became the Apple I. On April 1, 1976, the pair founded Apple Computers together and began a 12-year business partnership, which was temporarily imperilled when Woz was injured in a small plane crash.
Though he’s since said that he and Jobs were not close friends, they maintained a bond right up until the Apple boss’s death last year.
Stern’s film will follow Jobs from his younger, awkward hippie days to the founding of Apple. He’s aiming to kick off shooting next month.
Gad was most recently seen on the big screen in Love And Other Drugs, but has been spending more time in the theatre, appearing in – and scoring a Tony nomination for – Trey Parker and Matt Stone's The Book Of Mormon. He’ll be heard as part of the voice cast on Ice Age: Continental Drift and is in addiction comedy drama Thanks For Sharing. He’s also been developing TV comedy 1600 Penn, a family comedy set in the White House.