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DiggZach Braff will play Fletch
By Colin Mahan - TV.comScrubs actor's pen will be mightier than his scalpel when he steps into Chevy Chase's shoes.
Watch out, mattress-tag removers--the mattress policeman is back.
Future Fletch Zach Braff.
Zach Braff, the star of NBC sitcom Scrubs, is set to take on the role of Irwin "Fletch" Fletcher, the wisecracking investigative reporter twice played by SNL funnyman Chevy Chase. The new movie will be written and directed by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence.
Lawrence will make the prequel Fletch Won for the Weinstein Company. Fletch Won, based on the novel of the same name by Fletch creator Gregory McDonald, follows Fletch through his early days as a sarcastic journalist and shows how he became an investigative reporter.
In 2005, Braff made the big-screen jump with his self-directed Garden State. Lawrence is also the creator of Nobody's Watching, the orphaned sitcom that recently became an Internet sensation.
The original Fletch, directed by Bad News Bears helmer Michael Ritchie, was released in the summer of 1985 and grossed $85 million in unadjusted dollars. In one memorable scene, a bewigged Chase is accosted by a gun-toting baddie, at which point he informs the villain, "Mattress police, you're under arrest--these tags have been removed." A sequel, Fletch Lives, was released in 1989.
Fans of the first movies breathed a collective sigh of relief when Braff became the front-runner over steroidal jokester Ryan Reynolds. Also in the running was Arrested Development star Jason Bateman.
Lawrence says he thinks audiences will welcome a Fletch origins movie with slightly more edge.
"I'd compare this one more to Beverly Hills Cop, where there was a sense of real jeopardy," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "Like Batman Begins, I [also] think people will enjoy seeing how Irwin Fletcher became Fletch."
