Cary Elwes Teases Return To Major Movie Franchise
Could Cary Elwes return to this popular franchise?
Cary Elwes has his hands full with film projects this holiday season. He’s co-starring with Brooke Shields in the Netflix holiday movie A Castle for Christmas, his first rom-com since The Princess Bride in 1987, and he’s currently working on the highly-anticipated Mission: Impossible 7 as well as the Guy Ritchie film Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre. He’s also teasing a return to one of the greatest movie franchises in Hollywood history: Saw.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cary Elwes was asked if people will ever see him playing Dr. Lawrence Gordon in the Saw franchise ever again. The English actor has played the heroic oncologist in three Saw films between 2004 and 2010, with his last appearance being Saw 3D. While he’s open with talking to filmmakers about bringing the character back, he said he feels there’s no need to explore the doctor’s life any further. “I never say never — but I pretty much feel like I have explored that character as far as I can go,” he said. “I am open if the filmmakers wanted to discuss it, but I feel we have run the full gamut of Dr. Gordon’s life.”
The Saw films were born out of a 2003 short film of the same name, the first eight of which revolved around a serial killer named John Kramer, aka the Jigsaw Killer. As the nickname suggests, the Jigsaw Killer traps his victims in situations he calls “traps” or “games” that test their will to live through physical or psychological torture, operating under the belief that if they survive, they will be “rehabilitated.” In the first film, Cary Elwes’ Dr. Gordon becomes trapped in the game and is told through a tape recorder that he has to kill the other captor in the room or risk having his wife and daughter killed after he had an affair with one of his medical students. In Saw 3D (or Saw: The Final Chapter), Gordon escapes his trap and becomes an accomplice to the Jigsaw Killer.
It seems that in between those three Saw films, Cary Elwes went from a desperate doctor fighting to escape the clutches of the Jigsaw Killer to an apprentice following his orders to the letter and trapping the bad guy involved in every single Jigsaw murder in the same bathroom that he was trapped in at the beginning of the film franchise and leaving him to die. It was a twist that surprised and shocked many fans of the series, even those who theorized that Dr. Lawrence Gordon would be in cahoots with the Jigsaw Killer prior to the release of Saw 3D. But hey, he had to keep himself alive somehow.
Cary Elwes may leave the possibility of reprising Dr. Lawrence Gordon up in the air, but one thing’s for sure, he’s giving a hard pass to the reboot of The Princess Bride. He doesn’t want the iconic fantasy film, in which he played the dashing Westley, to be remade for the same reason he’s conscientious about reprising his role of Dr. Gordon for Saw: It has had a good run. Perhaps it is best to leave the good things in the past.
