Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still

“He is not”: the bogus post-apocalyptic Shakespeare movie that lied about casting Michael Caine

Tue 12 May 2026 15:45, UK

As a British actor who started his career in the 1950s, Michael Caine was no stranger to William Shakespeare, but he definitely didn’t agree to star in a post-apocalyptic movie adaptation.

Despite that, the mysterious benefactors behind the production tried to drum up investment for the production by insisting that he had. Not only that, but there was apparently an entire principal cast in place, not that anybody involved bothered to check with them first, either.

Caine’s background as a working-class lad done good meant that he didn’t follow the path of his upper-crust contemporaries by treading the boards in a number of Shakespeare plays before migrating to the silver screen, with a voice role in Gnomeo & Juliet about as close as he got on the big screen.

However, in 2010, it was announced that a new spin on Henry V was in the works, selling itself as transplanting the source material to “an age of apocalypse, in a land without a leader,” and various other broad descriptors that made it perfectly clear that this version would unfold in a razed futuristic wasteland.

So far, so weird, but things got even stranger from there. Hanwood Holdings, the company that was trying to put the budget together, insisted that “the film will become an instant modern classic,” predicting that when the dust was settled, Henry V would earn at least £100million at the box office.

There’s confidence, and then there’s talking out of your arse, with the group also shilling walk-on roles as extras for £6,000 a pop, with investors also having the opportunity to recoup a 25% return within a year, and then 25 years of royalty payments when the picture made that nine-figure windfall they seemed so confident in.

To add some gravitas and prestige, it was touted that “Sir Michael Caine and Ray Winstone are our leading stars,” which didn’t seem unreasonable, since those two will show up in almost anything. That said, when Caine’s agent was contacted to confirm his involvement, the response was as simple as it was illuminating: “He is not.”

What about Winstone, then? “He’s not involved; they are using his name without our consent.” Alright, fair enough, but Henry V also announced Gerard Depardieu, Derek Jacobi, and Vinnie Jones as co-stars, and at least one of them actually had to have signed on for the film, surely? Nope. “He’s definitely got nothing to do with this; we’ve not even had a conversation about it,” Jones’ agent revealed.

Shockingly enough, the post-apocalyptic Shakespeare movie that lied about every single member of its cast, and tried to siphon money from would-be backers while knowing it was lying through its teeth never happened, almost as if fraudulent practices are guaranteed to fail once anyone does even the slightest bit of digging.