NEW YORK (Variety) - Here's the reason you don't see Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings with movie deals.
Jon Stewart, anchor of Comedy Central's The Daily Show, has just signed to play the villain in Death to Smoochy, the Danny DeVito-directed Warner Bros. comedy in which DeVito co-stars with Edward Norton, Robin Williams and Catherine Keener. That will leave the yuk web scrambling to fill the anchor chair occasionally once filming begins.
Stewart replaced Craig Kilborn and signed a three-year deal nearly two years ago as the host of Comedy Central's popular nightly comic newscast. He has flourished in the role, but came in already having turned in solid performances in a number of films, most notably the Adam Sandler starrer Big Daddy and Playing by Heart. Stewart's reps, Jimmy Miller and James Dixon, smartly structured his Comedy Central deal so that Stewart could continue the momentum with the occasional movie, and this is the first time Stewart is using the contract perk, which will take him out of service for the next couple of months.
In Smoochy, Stewart plays a ruthless network executive who dumps a popular Barney-like kidshow host named Rainbow Randolph (Williams) and hires a blue rhino (Norton) to replace him, driving Randolph to plot the murder of his rival. The pic is shooting in Toronto and New York, and they're formulating plans to sub the show with The Daily Show correspondents, though Stewart will do his best to make the show on down days in Toronto and when the pic comes to Gotham, where The Daily Show tapes.
By all accounts, he likes his Daily Show gig and isn't contemplating a full-time transfer to screen acting like Greg Kinnear made when the Talk Soup host got a career break with a supporting role in Sabrina, and then got an Oscar nomination in As Good As It Gets.
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*In this article "Smoochy" was incorrectly spelled "Smoochie", so I corrected the spelling.
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