The Offer is one of two projects about the making of The Godfather, one of the famously nightmarish film shoots of the 1970s, and it’s the first to come out, with a teaser dropping yesterday, revealing an April premiere date on Paramount+. Right now, The Offer might best be known for replacing embattled Armie Hammer with Miles Teller, but the teaser is aiming straight for prestige TV, positioning The Offer as one of 2022’s first big contenders. Miles Teller stars as producer Al Ruddy, and is joined by Dan Fogler—aka, the best part of Fantastic Beasts—as Francis Ford Coppola; Juno Temple as Betty McCartt, Ruddy’s assistant who later became a talent agent, representing at one time George Clooney; and the guy positioned to steal the whole, Matthew Goode as legendary producer and Paramount chief Robert Evans.
Robert Evans is A Character, and he Lived A Life, and you can tell even in just seconds that Goode is HIP DEEP in that sh-t and LOVING IT. Matthew Goode is a guy who rarely gets roles that make the most of his talent. Sure, he’s good-looking enough and charming enough to pull off romantic roles like Leap Year and Downton Abbey, and he’s stiff-upper-lip English enough for The Crown, but Goode excels at WEIRD and he rarely gets to be WEIRD. Stoker remains his best role to date because it is a deeply WEIRD role—his work in A Discovery of Witches is largely recycling what he did in Stoker—but here is Robert Evans, a phenomenally weird guy whose life covered everything from a failed acting career, to running Paramount in the Seventies, to an entanglement in the 1983 murder of producer Roy Radin, to a cocaine trafficking conviction for which Evans’s defense was: Nah, I didn’t sell coke, I just did a lot of it.
There was a lot going on behind the scenes of The Godfather. This teaser hints at some of it—Frank Sinatra trying to shut the film down; Joe Colombo, head of the Colombo crime family and founder of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, protesting Mario Puzo’s book and the film; money problems; personnel issues; the pressure to deliver a hit for Paramount—but what really stands out is Matthew Goode as Robert Evans. Ostensibly, The Offer is about Al Ruddy’s efforts to get The Godfather into production and to stay on track, but I bet Matthew Goode ends up running away with the whole show.
