Christoph Waltz to play Mikhail Gorbachev in that Michael Douglas Ronald Reagan movie

By John Semley | October 15, 2012 | 3:31pm

Aux Features Film

In August, we told you that Michael Douglas would be getting more mileage out of his shellacked Liberace hairdo with a turn as actor-cum-40th-president-cum-GOP-tin-god Ronald Reagan, starring in a film about the 1986 U.S.-Soviet Union meetings that marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Now Deadline is reporting that Christoph Waltz has been signed to the Mike Newell-directed historical drama as the Evil Empire’s then-emperor, Mikhail Gorbachev—this despite the fact that Christoph Waltz looks absolutely nothing like Mikhail Gorbachev.

Presumably Toby Jones, Danny DeVito (as we suggested earlier), Don Rickles, and the guy who plays Kevin on The Office were all tied up. Or maybe they couldn’t lure Bob Hoskins out of retirement. Anyway, there it is: The lightly built, hair-having Christoph Waltz is playing Mikhail Gorbachev—or maybe, potentially, controlling a life-sized Mikhail Gorbachev animatronic puppet. Also the movie is called Reykjavik, after the Icelandic capital where Reagan and Gorbachev’s summit was held. But given the cumbersome spelling and general difficulty/disinterest in properly pronouncing “Reykjavik,” you can just keep referring to it as “that Michael Douglas Ronald Reagan movie.”