🎬 Josh Gad Cast as Roger Ebert in 'Russ & Roger'

Josh Gad is playing Roger Ebert. The actor has signed on to portray the late, Pulitzer-winning film critic in Russ & Roger, a biographical film about one of the strangest true stories in Hollywood history: how America's most famous movie critic ended up co-writing a camp exploitation picture.

For Gad — best known as the voice of Olaf in Frozen and for broad comedy — a real, recognizable public figure in a drama is a deliberate change of register. It's the kind of role an actor takes to be seen differently.

The story behind the movie

Russ & Roger dramatizes the real early-1970s collaboration between Roger Ebert and exploitation director Russ Meyer. Before Ebert became the thumbs-up-or-down household name alongside Gene Siskel, he co-wrote Meyer's 1970 cult film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. A serious critic writing a deliberately over-the-top B-movie is exactly the sort of contradiction that makes for a good biopic — and it's all true.

Why this matters

Biopics live or die on casting, and casting a comedy actor as a beloved real critic is a bet. Get Ebert's voice and warmth right and it's a career pivot; get it wrong and it's the miscast that defines a film. The role also puts a real, verifiable public figure at the center — the kind of project our profiles desk tracks, alongside the studio track records that shape which of these films actually get made and marketed.

There's no confirmed release window yet. What's confirmed is the casting: Gad as Ebert, in a story about how a critic who later spent decades judging other people's movies once helped write one of the campiest of all time. Whether the finished film lands as prestige drama or a curiosity depends entirely on whether Gad can disappear into a face and voice audiences already know — the same make-or-break test behind every real-person biopic, and one that separates the awards contenders from the films that quietly flop.