Baruchel stays close to the pack
By KEVIN WILLIAMSON - Sun Media
With super friends like Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow and Ben Stiller, who needs the Justice League?
Still, it's hard to mistake the disappointment -- or enthusiasm -- in Jay Baruchel's voice when he discusses the mega-budgeted comic-book extravaganza that almost was.
"I really, really hope it happens. It was the coolest thing in the world for a nerd like me," says the 26-year-old Montrealer, best recognized from last year's Knocked Up, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby and the Apatow-produced TV series Undeclared. "It was going to be awesome."
And frankly we're probably going to have to take his word on that. Baruchel -- who won't reveal what role he'd signed for, although rumours had him pegged as one of the villains -- was in Australia last December rehearsing when Warner Bros. unceremoniously banished the production to a purgatorial phantom zone. Among probable reasons why? The toxic buzz the League movie -- despite being helmed by The Road Warrior's legendary George Miller -- was generating online. With neither big-screen Batman Christian Bale nor Superman Brandon Routh on-board, fanboys balked at the decision to recast young unknowns as those spandex-clad icons. "Everyone on the Internet was hating our movie," Baruchel says. "But you know us cast members were psyched that everybody was gunning for us because it would have only meant people would have been blown away that much more. We knew the bulk of the detractors would have been silenced."
Not that Baruchel isn't staying busy while he awaits final word on League's fate.
(Tropic Thunder talk clipped)