Former NFL’er and “Old Spice” guy Isaiah Mustafa wants to be more than just a pretty face that smells good and The Man Your Man Could Smell Like. Dude wants to act. He’s appeared on shows like “Hot in Cleveland,” “Chuck,” and “NCIS,” popped up in “Madea’s Big Happy Family,” and has a small role in WB’s upcoming summer comedy, “Horrible Bosses.”
He’s a professed fan of comic books, “Star Trek” and as he puts it, “just happens to be a geek in an athletic body.” Asked if he had the choice to play any comic book character in a 2011 interview he said, “that’s my dream, in my life to be Luke Cage.”
Luke Cage is of course, Power Man, an African American Marvel super hero who was sent to prison for a crime he did not commit and gained super human strength and impervious skin in a freak experimental accident that would have been in exchange for an early parole. Frequently teamed up with the character Iron Fist in the comics, the two fought crime “for hire,” in the 1970s at the height of the blaxploitation era.
Either way, Mustafa is not kidding when he says it’s his dream to play the character and a teaser video has made its way on to YouTube which seems to be the actor’s self-financed campaign to play the character. Marvel Films and chief Kevin Feige are definitely developing a Luke Cage/”Power Man” film, with Idris Elba fueling speculation that he could potentially take the role, but unlike fellow second-tier Marvel characters like “Iron Fist,” “Dr. Strange,” and “Black Panther,” no writer has actually been hired to write the script.
That essentially means, while Marvel are eyeing actors, or at least thinking about the project, the field is wide open which is good news for Mustafa. It’s a pretty quick teaser and while the effects are fine, and Mustafa does look the part, the clip doesn’t exactly show that it takes special acting chops to pull off this role. Here’s two clips. The aforementioned Mustafa-as-Cage teaser and another humorous clip that appears to have been hosted on Marvel’s YouTube channel which is another good look.
