Much Ado? Mike Leeder says ‘Hey Nonnie, Nonnie, Yes’…

Forsooth etc.

Our old friend Mike Leeder appears to be switching from punches to period drama. As a British-born, but long-time Hong Kong resident Mike served as my Eastern Editor counterpart on Impact Magazine for many years and has since become a regular and important contributor to the casting of key Eastern movies and East/West collaborations including Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Jet Li’s “Fearless, Man of Tai Chi, the Ip Man franchise and The Raid movies.

But his next venture won’t be in quite the same ‘high-octane’ vein. Thrills, yes. Frills… not quite.

Red Packet Media (the media company that Leeder founded with Semiquaver ‘Semi’ Iafeta and Philippe Joly) will see Mike acting as producer and casting director on Much Ado About Nothing. The production is a feature debut and a passion project for British writer-director Lakeem Rose who will be making a contemporary-set (but traditionally dialogue’d) version of the classic tale of love, humour and betrayal in the time of war. Love and complications ensure when soldiers return from a modern-day conflict only to find that their host and his family’s celebration is not going quite the way they anticipated.

“I think a lot of people shy away from Shakespeare as they’ve got this vision of men in tights and confusing dialogue that perhaps doesn’t work for modern audiences.  But the likes of Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet (set in an alt-California) and the Ian McKellen take on Richard III (set in a fascist 1930s Britain) blazed a trail…” Mike tells Chaotic Neutral. “I really think that director Lakeem Rose vision for how he wants to bring Much Ado About Nothing to a modern audience is something very cool. There’s a lot of relevance to the modern world once you peel back the original dialogue and that’s something that attracted producer Plato Fountidakis and myself to the project. Look at Hamlet, it’s a classic tale of revenge, Henry V is a tale of brotherhood amongst soldiers, and Much Ado About Nothing is a story of love, friendship, self-expression and so much more… It’s gonna be fun!”

“What interests me is the collision of traditions,” Mike adds. “The language remains Shakespeare’s, but the world around it belongs to contemporary genre cinema….”

The project will be promoting its development at the Toronto Film Festival market and hopes to release late in 2027.