Andy Garcia has been cast as Ricardo Montalban in Sacha Gervasi’s My Dinner with Herve. Gervasi serves as the writer and director on this project that stars Peter Dinklage as Herve Villechaize, the one time most famous dwarf in the world, chronicling the last few months of the actor’s life up until his suicide in 1993 at the age of 50. A few weeks ago, we were able to see the first image of Peter Dinklage as Herve Villechaize along with Fifty Shades of Grey star Jamie Dornan as Danny Tate living it up.
Deadline reports that Andy Garcia has been cast as Ricardo Montalban, the star of Fantasy Island and co-star to Herve Villechaize, which seems like a perfect casting choice. It was also announced that David Strathairn would be starring alongside Dinklage in the movie last week. My Dinner With Herve was written by Gervasi and Sean Macaulay and centers on an unlikely friendship between struggling journalist Danny Tate and Villechaize forged over the course of one crazy night in Los Angeles in the early 1990s.
The movie is based off an interview that Sacha Gervasi conducted with Herve Villechaize, which would turn out to be Villechaize’s last interview and seen as a form of suicide note to Gervasi in retrospect. Villechaize was probably best known as Nick Nack in The Man with the Golden Gun and as Tattoo from Fantasy Island and he detailed the struggles of his life. Gervasi has said that Villechaize “wasn’t just a pop culture icon; he was one of the most charming, cultured, and dangerous people I’ve ever met. His story is the story of a unique misfit trying to find his place in the world.” It wasn’t until years after Villechaize’s death that Gervasi realized that the interview was a form of a suicide note. The passion project has been in the works for over a decade.
Herve Villechaize started acting in the mid 1960s, but his big break didn’t happen until 1974 when he was cast opposite Roger Moore in The Man with the Golden Gun. Before that Villechaize made ends meet as a rat catcher and living out of his car in Los Angeles. The actor even went on to perform as the “feet” for Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street when Oscar needed to be mobile. Fantasy Island came around in 1977 and brought Villechaize a whole new type of fame and success, but he was let go from the show for hitting on women and demanding an equal salary to his co-star Ricardo Montalban.
It was announced in March of 2012 that Sacha Gervasi and Peter Dinklage had been working on a script for several years about Villechaize. My Dinner With Herve will cover the last days of Villechaize’s life and try to shed some light on the complicated individual that he was while telling an entertaining story and a tribute to the actor. My Dinner With Herve is scheduled to be released in 2018 via HBO.