What’s THE wrestling movie that needs to be made? Paul Walter Hauser says it’s a Ric Flair story, and he wants to play “The Enforcer” Arn Anderson.
The topic recently came up during an interview with Collider after Hauser asked Sebastian Stan what the next movie they’d make together was. Stan, Hauser’s I, Tonya co-star and star of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, said they needed to team up for a Ric Flair biopic and he’d “do it in a second if they let me.” Hauser, a noted wrestling fan, was a guest this week on Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette and talked about how he’d lay the film out and who he’d cast.
“I think that if you put me and Sebastian Stan as Ric Flair and Arn Anderson in a Four Horsemen movie, and then you cast Ethan Suplee as Ole Anderson. Then you get someone wacked out of their head,” he noted, “like Ben Foster or Emile Hirsch to play Tully Blanchard. It could be really cool. They’d be great.
“You tell a 24-hour story, and you start with showing Ric in a match—Ric is just leaving the ring, drenched in sweat, exhausted, he’s getting grabbed by women, the kids and all this stuff. And then he gets back to the locker room and he’s like, ‘OK boys, where we going tonight? The party’s in North Carolina!’ He gets into his whole [routine] and then you follow a 24-hour binge of all of these guys—the Road Warriors, [Ricky] Steamboat, the Four Horsemen, everybody’s going out drinking—you follow them like a docu-crew, almost cinéma vérité on all of the micro-conversations where you get to have all of the fun stuff, like Ric Flair trying to get one of the little people laid and sticking Steamboat with a $2400 bill at the bar, you do an accumulation of all of the famous Ric Flair stories in one night,” Hauser explained, “but with that comes, ‘Hey, Road Warrior Animal, can you stuff this in your luggage? Take this back to the Carolinas, my kid needs a birthday present and I’m not going to be there.’ You get the heavy personal stuff with the fun, humourous stuff. And then by the end of the film, the whole third act could just be like Dusty [Rhodes] and Ric doing a 30-minute Broadway.”
When asked who would portray a convincing Dusty Rhodes, Hauser said Dustin Rhodes could probably pull it off with prosthetics, but it’s a tough casting call no matter what. He added that most people would see him as Dusty, but he wants to play Arn and do the ‘Southern thing’ and more serious aspects to Arn’s character and promo work.
Hauser says he wants to see the match actually shot, then they focus on Ric after the bout and show him sitting alone. He lays out the closing moments of the film and says you’d hear the crack of a beer can and Flair gets right back into the routine that we saw in the opening.
“It’s the idea that the ‘Nature Boy’ never stops. He never stops. The guy was equal parts brilliantly creative and sort of mentally ill and just kept going to the degree that he led this iconic lifestyle,” Hauser said. “But one night with the Nature Boy would exhaust an audience of moviegoers. I want the audience to feel that, so I think the movie should happen. They should let me write it and I think Sebastian and I should play Ric and Arn.”
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Hauser’s next film, Cruella, is out May 28 in theatres and via on-demand services. ComingSoon.net shared an early review of the film and said it “delivers on its core premise of giving more depth to the iconic villainess and provides a fun ride throughout.”
Read More: Booker T: Ric Flair Is The Man Because He’s Kept Up With The Times And Lived Life To The Fullest
Check out the full episode of Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette below:
