Angelina Jolie as Cleopatra under Martin Scorsese’s direction?
Hollywood came surprisingly close to making it happen — until, as the filmmaker jokingly puts it, Seth Rogen ruined everything.
During a conversation with his daughter Francesca at Tribeca on Thursday, October 29, the director, 83, reflected on his unrealised ambition to make a grand Roman epic.
He admitted he had “missed it,” joking that Ridley Scott has now “done [them] all.”
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But one project still seems to sting: a Cleopatra film with Jolie attached to play the legendary Egyptian queen.
Scorsese revealed that the project fell apart in the aftermath of the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, which followed the studio’s plans to release Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s comedy The Interview.
The film mocked North Korea’s leadership, prompting a major cyberattack attributed to a North Korean state-sponsored group.
“[Kim Jong Un] got mad and he blew up everybody at Columbia,” Scorsese said. “[It] ruined Cleopatra. Angelina Jolie, we were going. She was Cleopatra VII. It was going to be really wild.”
He then delivered his playful verdict on the whole mess: Seth was the one who “ruined everything.”
“Just because Kim Jong Un didn’t have a sense of humour, you know?” he quipped.
The joke also has a funny connection to The Studio, Rogen’s Apple TV series.
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Scorsese appeared as himself in the show, where Rogen’s character also manages to derail the director’s hopes of making a film.
