More than a decade after the Sony hack shook Hollywood, Martin Scorsese is still reeling from the fallout of the North Korean state-sponsored digital attack.
The Oscar-winning director recalled how the wide-reaching hack, which was a response to Seth Rogen‘s 2014 film The Interview, “ruined everything” for Scorsese’s planned Cleopatra feature, which would have starred Angelina Jolie.
“Remember we were gonna do Cleopatra at one point, and then they made fun of [Kim Jong Un], and he got mad and he blew up everybody at Columbia,” he told daughter Francesca Scorsese on Tribeca’s Crafty. “Seth Rogen, right? And then he got mad, and [it] ruined Cleopatra.”
Martin added, “We were gonna do it. We were ready on the script. Angelina Jolie—We were going. She was gonna be Cleopatra VII. It was gonna be really wild.”
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As Francesca told her father she’s “so mad about” the fate of the film, Martin quipped, “Well, tell Seth, because they ruined everything. Just because Kim Jong Un doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
In The Interview, co-written and directed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, celebrity tabloid show host Dave Skylark (James Franco) and his producer Aaron Rapaport (Rogen) land a rare interview with Kim Jong Un (Randall Park). When the CIA catches wind, they enlist the pair to assassinated the North Korean dictator.
Despite the unintended consequences of The Interview, Scorsese and Rogen have moved on, as the former even played himself in last year’s debut episode of the latter’s Apple TV series The Studio. Since Rogen’s studio head character Matt Remick ends up responsible for Scorsese’s passion project getting axed, could the storyline be another meta example of life imitating art in the smash show?