Over the last two decades, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen somehow went from being that cute baby on Full House, to becoming the anorexic moguls of a very lucrative multi-faceted empire. And they also appear to have done it without having an iota of actual talent between the two of them.
But you can’t blame them for that deficiency though, as it seems that the Olsen gene-pool saved it all for younger sister Elizabeth. Fresh from wowing critics in Martha Marcy May Marlene, she’s been offered a lead role opposite Josh Brolin in Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s ultra violent and hard hitting Oldboy.
Olsen would be up for the role of sushi-chef Mi-do, although the character has apparently now been renamed to Marie for this English language version. Both Rooney Mara and Mia Wasikowska previously passed on this role.
In the original film, Mi-do was the love-interest of protagonist Oh Dae-su (Brolin’s as-of-yet unnamed character), a man who has 5 days to unravel the mystery of why he was kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years.
No word yet on whether or not Lee will be drawing his inspiration from the film or from the original manga on which it’s all based. The manga contains tons of material that was never used for Chan-wook’s film, which means that Lee can use that to really turn this into his own vision, instead of just rehashing the same ground. He’s already taken the first albeit tiny step to differentiating the two films by changing the title from Oldboy to Old Boy. Either that or he’s just a grammar nazi.
Cha-wook’s film is considered to be an outright classic and contains what is arguably the greatest fight scene (in my opinion) ever put to film, so Lee – who is a weird choice of director for this type of film to begin with – will certainly have his work cut out for him. Let’s just hope that he at least has the stones to include the infamous “squid” scene from the original film though. If he does, irrespective of the overall quality of the film, it will result in an entirely new generation of cinemagoers never looking at calamari the same way again.
Last Updated: February 29, 2012
James Francis
February 29, 2012 at 17:56
I could see this work. Who knows – maybe she has the chops for it.