Jeff Daniels might be in that Steve Jobs biopic that nobody seems to want to be in
Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs biopic—the one that was going to star Christian Bale, and then Leonardo DiCaprio, and then maybe Matt Damon, and now Michael Fassbender—has had a lot of issues getting off the ground. For one, it has had almost as much trouble finding a director as it has had finding a star—with David Fincher being replaced by Danny Boyle—and also the movie was dropped entirely by Sony back in November when it realized that maybe a biopic about a guy who already has a biopic isn’t really worth all of this trouble. Oh, and Natalie Portman—who actually chose to suffer through scenes like this—turned it down. Even with Fassbender and Boyle allegedly locked in, common sense should indicate that maybe Sony was right and this movie won’t be worth all of this.
However, a project with Aaron Sorkin’s name on it would never let a little thing like common sense hold it back from telling its Very Important story, so Universal—which has since picked up the movie—is going to stick with it. Now, according to The Wrap, Jeff Daniels is being “eyed” to play former Apple CEO John Sculley in the movie. Daniels hasn’t been given an actual offer yet, but he’s apparently the favorite for the role—and he already has some experience with Sorkin’s walk-and-talks from his Emmy-winning work on The Newsroom.
Assuming Sorkin’s script treats Jobs as the deity-like figure that he was, Sculley will probably fill a villain-ish role in the movie. After all, he’s the straight-laced non-believer from the soda industry who was brought in by Apple to stop Jobs from being too brilliant. See, Apple in the ‘80s was afraid of Jobs’ genius ideas, so it tried to hold him back from making the company too successful. Wait a minute, this might be from Ayn Rand’s Steve Jobs biopic, not Aaron Sorkin’s….