Shia LeBeouf // Current

Bardem won't do Wall Street 2

Bardem Snubs 'Wall Street' Sequel:
Actor forgoes chance to play master of the universe in new Gordon Gekko film, to be sappy

He was the stony-faced psychotic killer in No Country for Old Men, wielding a cattle gun as he took out his victims one by one. So it was only natural that the producers of Oliver Stone's sequel to the seminal 1980s movie Wall Street asked Spanish actor Javier Bardem to play a hedge fund manager.

Yet Bardem's publicist tells Forbes that the Oscar-nominated actor has now turned down the role due to scheduling conflicts. Though he "loves Oliver Stone," he's had "five or six other offers."

Oddly, rather than stick with a movie that will detail the dramatic collapse of Wall Street banks and whose script has been ripped straight from the dark business headlines of the last two years, he will be appearing alongside Julia Roberts in the film version of the sappy best-selling book, Eat, Pray, Love. The movie, due for U.S. release in 2011, is based on a memoir about an American woman who travels to Italy to seek meaning to her life, good food and hunky Mediterranean men.

Sappy, it seems, is better these days than sleazy. Jeremy Zimmerman, a casting director who has worked with Wall Street 2 producer Edward R. Pressman, points out that the characters of the original Wall Street came across as heroes. "The 80s were a time of expansion and everyone thought that expansion was a good thing," he says. Perceptions of bankers and fund managers, particularly in the wake of Bernard Madoff, are very different now.

Still, expect the financial community to be rather disappointed that Bardem won't be in the long-awaited sequel to the movie made famous by main character Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" speech. "His whole emotionless expression would have fit that role perfectly," said one trader at a London hedge fund. "Successful traders need a bit of a steely demeanor where nothing shakes you, and he epitomizes that."

Michael Douglas at least will reprise his role as Gordon Gekko, a corporate raider whom Forbes last year ranked at No. 4 on our list of the World's 15 Richest Fictional Characters, with a net worth of $650 million. He's just finished a prison sentence in the sequel, according to Deadlinehollywooddaily.com, while actor Shia LaBeouf will play a young trader engaged to Gekko's estranged daughter.

The plot sees LaBeouf's character suspect that a stock-shorting hedge fund manager--which distributor Twentieth Century Fox had originally hoped would be played by Bardem--is somehow responsible for the surprise suicide of his mentor. The trader then goes to ex-con Gekko for help seeking revenge on the villainous hedge fund chief.

Executives at Twentieth Century Fox were quoted by Deadlinehollywooddaily.com as saying that Bardem was "who we want" to play their hedge fund manager. But a spokesman for the movie powerhouse now says it hadn't even formally offered the Spanish actor the role in the first place, and that his agents had come to Fox about the role.

Either way Fox is still not ready to announce who it's got lined up to play the bad guy. It won't help that critics, as well as the hedge fund community, are notoriously hard to please.Bardem Snubs 'Wall Street' Sequel: Actor forgoes chance to play master of the... more