Matt Damon is set to star opposite Ben Affleck in Killing Gawker, a drama focused on Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the Gawker website.
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are, of course, longtime friends and collaborators. They’ve shared the screen many times and also co-own Artists Equity, a production company that was founded upon the values of fairly ensuring payment with cast and crew both above and under the line.
The company’s first film was Air, the 2023 film that dramatised the true story of Nike becoming a major player in the world of sports shoes thanks to the signing of basketball legend Michael Jordan. Air sold to Amazon for a hefty sum and in the past 12 months, Artists Equity’s slate has continued to fill out with the likes of The Instigators, a Doug Liman film, and The Accountant 2, which will see Affleck return in a sequel to the 2016 action thriller.
It looks like Affleck may also be lining up for a different kind of battle in the future too, as PWInsider is claiming that the actor will be playing the legendary former wrestler and Suburban Commando star Hulk Hogan. As far as we can tell, that doesn’t mean that Affleck will be donning yellow tights and telling kids to ‘eat their vitamins’ to get big and strong whilst secretly, allegedly, consuming monstrous amounts of steroids and defeating a host of cartoonish foes.
Instead, the film will focus on one of Hogan’s battles outside of the ring – the retired wrestler’s triumph over gossip website Gawker in a privacy case over a sex tape of him that the website released online. Matt Damon is also set to co-star star as billionaire investor Peter Thiel. The duo are also working together on the upcoming RIP for Netflix as well.
This story isn’t just an open/shut case of right versus wrong or good versus evil, as Hogan’s matches in the ring were often portrayed as. The book that Killing Gawker is set to be adapted from makes the case that Hogan was merely a proxy for Thiel, who used the wrestler’s situation to attack and destroy Gawker. Ryan Holiday penned the 2018 book, titled Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.
It’s a pretty fascinating story and one that should make for an entertaining film. The Big Short scribe Charles Randolph has penned the script and whilst there’s no word yet as to whether Affleck will direct, it has to be a distinct possibility.
Chris Hemsworth was also supposed to be playing Hulk Hogan a couple of years back and actually went through the training regime to do so, adding stacks of muscle (even by the Thor star’s standards). That was supposed to be a Netflix production but is now off the table as far as we know. Instead, this film will be the one that depicts Hogan onscreen and by the sounds of it, will probably be a more nuanced portrait of such a polarising figure.
We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it.
