The comedic premise of a female serving in the military will receive an extra dose of awkward hilarity, The Tracking Board reports, as Rebel Wilson has been added to New Line’s remake of Private Benjamin. First developed in 2010 as a vehicle for Anna Faris, the film aims to update the 1980 comedy in which Goldie Hawn’s pampered young widow is duped into enlisting, only to learn that being trained to die gratefully in foreign wars through a ruthless barrage of training exercises is maybe not as fun as it sounds.
Faris doesn’t seem to be attached to the project anymore, but Wilson also isn’t replacing her. Instead, The Wrap says she’s been brought aboard to play an all-new character—that of a “redneck” who signs up at the same time as a rich city girl, with both of them getting “more than they bargained for,” according to their respective redneck and rich-girl definitions of “bargain.”
For what it’s worth, when the project was announced four years ago—amid several ongoing wars that, fortunately, America is long since bored with thinking about—producers promised it didn’t want to “poke fun at the men and women in the service or take political potshots, but rather focus on the empowerment elements and build on the fish-out-of-water comedy.” Adding Rebel Wilson to adopt a redneck accent and fall down certainly seems like a step in that direction.