Robert Rodriguez Casts Charlie Sheen For MACHETE KILLS

• Tweet
• Pin It

Sheen joins fellow outcast Mel Gibson on sequel.

There isn’t anybody in the movie business today that can more fittingly be referred to as a “maverick filmmaker” than Robert Rodriguez.  There are other directors who are mavericks, to be sure, but Rodriguez not only fits the description, but the motif as well.  And frankly, Rodriguez was selling his body to science to advance his craft while a lot of the next wave of independent filmmakers was still heaving camcorders up onto their shoulders.  Rodriguez is at a point now where he can step in and out of the mainstream at will, when necessary, and then jump back out to the fringe to crank out a Planet Terror or a Machete without anybody questioning his street cred.

Charlie Sheen is a maverick, too, though you get the feeling nowadays that the cloud of toxic hype that erupted from Sheen’s chapped lips a couple years back has left him a vacated shell of the vitriolic, fastball-heaving rock star he once was.  Sheen’s got a series adaptation of Anger Management that nobody was asking for coming out later this year, and will spend the interim quietly praying for daylight to crack through the topsoil now piled high above his head, so that he might scrape and claw and crawl back to the mainstream.

Rodriguez is hard at work assembling the particulars of Machete Kills, the sequel to his 2010 gorefest.  After adding Mel Gibson to the ranks a couple months back, Rodriguez has now cast Charlie Sheen to cameo as the President of the United States, according to Deadline.  No word yet as to whether or not Rodriguez will seek out former San Diego Chargers quarterback Ryan Leaf to participate as a stunt coordinator.

I know Machete Kills is a goof, and I know also that Gibson and Sheen are both, underneath everything else, ridiculously talented actors.  No, seriously.  But isn’t there a point where this type of casting takes the audience out of the reality of the flick just a hair too much?

We’ll find out next year, when Machete Kills slashes its way into theaters.