Evidently interested in more than the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea sends a message that he's ready to play Popeye

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      No stranger to film sets, Michael Balzary has over the decades played everything from a home-invading nihilist in The Big Lebowski to himself in Bruce Weber’s essential Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost. Now, the man known professionally as Flea has evidently been feverishly rehearsing for the biggest role of his life in between tour dates with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

      Taking to his Twitter account on the weekend, the bassist suggested that more than excited about the idea of playing one of the most famous characters in the history of cartoons.

      “If a good director decides to make a popeye movie, I’m your man,” Flee tweeted.

      It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. Hollywood legend Robert Altman mounted a lavishly realized live-action Popeye in 1980, with Robin Williams playing the role of the spinach-obsessed, fisticuffs-fixated sailor.

      Widely shat upon at the time, the movie has since been revisited as a surreally artsy and chaotically weird movie that’s been mistakenly overlooked. And there’s little denying that surreally artsy and chaotically weird are both terms that fit Flea’s career with the Red Hots.

      Recall, if you will, the band’s early years where it would take to the stage wearing nothing but neon paint and tube socks. Don’t forget the giant light bulb headwear during the brief Dave Navarro period. And consider that the bassist is one of the few 59-year-olds on the planet who can pull off hair that looks like the rainbow sherbert tub at Baskin-Robbins.

      If there’s a good director out there—Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Sofia Coppola, or Jane Campion anyone?—a Popeye reboot not only has its leading man, but a set just waiting to be re-used. The boardwalk and 19 wooden buildings constrcuted for Altman’s film version of the town of Sweethaven are still intact in Malta, where they make up the popular tourist attraction and open-air resort known as Popeye Village.

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