In another universe, Noah Centineo is He-Man in “Masters of the Universe.” However, in this one, the actor chose to step away from the project – and just gave insight into why.
During his Monday appearance on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, the “Street Fighter” star opened up about nearly leading the “Masters of the Universe” movie as the sword-wielding comic book hero.
“For a moment there, I was – I guess we can talk about this – was going to do He-Man,” Centineo told host Josh Horowitz. “There was He-Man before ‘Black Adam.’ And that didn’t [work out].”
Horowitz then asked how Centineo ended up leaving the project, given the actor was attached to the movie for some time. Per Centineo, he got pretty close to making the movie, but found himself departing “Masters of the Universe” altogether amid delays.
“We were we were pretty close, dude,” he shared. “I went through the test process. We screen tested loin cloth and stuff. All of it … I signed the contract.”
He continued: “They’re like showing us, you know, previs. They’re showing us kind of the production design, the world building. At the time it was the Nee Brothers that were going to do it … and we got pretty close. And then, for some reason or another, it just pushed and pushed.”
Centineo remembered that the creative team “wanted to keep tweaking it and tweaking it and the contract ran out.”
“And we moved on,” he said. “And then I think Netflix acquired it for a little bit, and then Amazon acquired it and they found [Nicholas Galitzine].”
Despite losing out on the part, Centineo had nothing but praise for Galitzine’s performance, adding, “It’s so difficult to step into a role like that dude. I mean, that’s not an easy movie to make at all. And like, I watched it and Nick is incredible.”
“Like people don’t understand how hard it is to do camp wholeheartedly,” he noted. “It the movie works [or] the movie doesn’t work, often times, especially in that situation, I don’t blame him for that. I loved what he was doing, what he was trying to do.”
Watch Centineo’s comments above.
While Centineo may’ve been a fan of Galitzine’s performance, the live-action adaptation of “Masters of the Universe” received mixed reviews and underperformed at the box office. It brought in only $114 million on an estimated $170 million budget.
