A few days ago, when Johnny Depp joined the cast of Richard Says Goodbye, we noted that he often prefers to play characters who are either swaggering pirates or possibly insane geniuses, and his latest film role suggests that he has no intention of dispelling that notion. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Depp has signed on to star in King Of The Jungle, a movie about McAfee Antivirus creator John McAfee. As people who follow the tech world are probably aware, McAfee went a bit—as THR puts it—”Colonel Kurtz-like” when he decided to take all of his antivirus money, abandon civilization, and live in a jungle paradise full of “guns, sex, and madness.”
The movie itself will be based on “John McAfee’s Last Stand,” a Wired story about a reporter who went to Belize to interview McAfee but eventually found himself sucked into McAfee’s world of “escalating paranoia, slippery reality, and murder.” The real McAfee eventually returned to the United States and tried to run for president as part of the Libertarian party, so the wackiness obviously didn’t stay in Belize, but that’s probably all that the movie will focus on.