UFC fighter Conor McGregor has revealed that he was supposed to star in a “full season” of Vikings, but that it ultimately fell apart.
McGregor – who stars in Amazon Prime Video‘s Road House remake alongside Jake Gyllenhaal – recently spoke with Ireland’s JOE, sharing that Road House wasn’t originally planned to be his acting debut.
Instead, the former UFC featherweight and lightweight champion was scheduled to make his debut in the hit series, Vikings but that he kept pushing it back and production eventually moved on without him.
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McGregor said to JOE about making his acting debut alongside Gyllenhaal: “I’ll have a whack at anything no bother. You know, I was supposed to be in Vikings, the Vikings had me teed up.”
He explained further: “I had a few things teed up but I just kept pushing it along down the line, but I just stayed in the fight business. I always said ‘I’m in the fight business, not the movie business.’”
“Ultimately I ended up letting people down over that because I was teed up to do a full season, and it just never happened,” McGregor concluded.
Vikings first premiered on the History channel before making a splash and being picked up at Prime Video. A Vikings sequel, Vikings: Valhalla, was picked up by Netflix.
Conor McGregor stars in Road House – a remake of the 1989 Patrick Swayze film of the same name – as Knox, a hired brute to clashes with Gyllenhaal’s Elwood Dalton throughout the film. With his movie, McGregor claims to have broken the record for the highest-paid debuting actor of all time.
McGregor doubled down on his claim, telling Good Morning Britain: “That’s the fact, the highest paid first time actor of all time so it’s a nice feather in the cap. I’ve never done a movie before so I am akin to a white belt, a beginner. There’s not an action star in Hollywood that could take me on and that’s a fact, so let’s see how it goes.”
Though he’s seemingly making good money in Hollywood, McGregor has shot down the idea of picking up another acting role as he’s focused on making his UFC return after a long layoff due to injury in July 2021.