Joe Rogan has a vision for the ultimate British crime flick, and it involves a former UFC fighter, a big pile of unrecovered cash, and Hollywood’s favorite bald action hero. On his podcast, the JRE host pitched a wild movie based on the extraordinary true story of Lee Murray, the English mixed martial artist who masterminded the biggest armed cash heist in UK history before being imprisoned for decades.

“There’s this dude, his name is Lee Murray,” he started telling actor and producer Scott Eastwood on his podcast. “Lee Murray, he was a UFC fighter. He was famous in London, in England, for being like a street fighter and like a crazy guy who was fighting in MMA at a really high level, like one in the UFC, and then was a part of the biggest armed robbery in the history of the UK.

“This guy was a full-on psycho. He was a gangster. He was such a gangster that he got stabbed in the heart in a street fight, and they made a video of him hitting mitts six weeks later. Six weeks later, he’s back in the gym. I got to see him fight in real life. He actually knocked out a friend of mine.”

Murray, also known in the cage as ‘Lightning,’ was an absolute savage who memorably went the distance with a young Anderson Silva at Cage Rage 8 and even knocked out UFC veteran Tito Ortiz in a legendary London street fight back in 2002.

However, his fighting career ended abruptly after he was stabbed outside a birthday party in 2005. The 48-year-old became a full-time criminal less than a year later, leading a group wearing realistic prosthetic disguises and fake police uniforms to kidnap a depot manager and steal $92.5 million to $98 million from a Securitas depot in 2006.

On February 21, 2006, the robbers hit a Securitas cash depot in Tonbridge, England, and stole £53 million. At the time, the conversion rate was roughly $1.75 for every £1, making it worth around $92.75 million. Using the average exchange rate for all of 2006 ($1.84 for £1), the stolen money would have been worth around $97.5 million.

They actually left behind another £154 million, worth roughly $270 million at the time, simply because their getaway lorry was completely full. So it is no surprise that due to the sheer scale and execution of the robbery, Joe Rogan is asking for a big-screen adaptation from a specific director.

“When this guy got arrested, and when everyone heard the story, everybody was saying, ‘That guy’s got to be a Guy Ritchie movie,'” he said. “If you’re going to really capture who this guy was, like, he was a real nut. They stole an enormous amount of money, and they did it like in a very high-tech, like the movie Heat. They had full masks on, body armor, the whole deal.

“Jason Statham could probably nail it. He doesn’t have the hair for it, because Lee Murray had a full head of hair, but it doesn’t matter.”

While Hollywood has yet to greenlight Joe Rogan’s dream casting, Lee Murray’s transformation from a top-level athlete to international fugitive has certainly piqued the interest of filmmakers.

In fact, his wild story was the focus of two-time Emmy Award winner Pat Kondelis‘ four-part 2023 Showtime docuseries ‘Catching Lightning,’ which followed the former UFC fighter’s rapid downfall.

What’s next for Lee Murray and could his story really become a movie like Joe Rogan suggested?

Lee Murray escaped to Morocco after the crime to avoid British authorities, but his luck ran out when he was arrested for possession of hard drugs and assaulting police officers during a raid at his villa. During the investigation, he was then identified as the mastermind of the heist and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In fact, ‘Lightning’ is still imprisoned in Morocco, and his wife, Nicola Murray, is campaigning for his return to the UK so that he can see his children and grandkids.

Murray finally admitted to his involvement in the now-famous heist in taped jailhouse recordings released by his family; however, he downplayed the idea that he was the sole mastermind, claiming the crew operated completely as a team, with everyone playing an equal part.

“My role was no more than anybody else’s,” Lee said. “We worked as a team and tried to do as much as easy as possible.”

More than $43 million in stolen cash has yet to be found. Authorities believe that much of the missing loot was buried in the ground soon after the crime.

And because British bank notes were still made of paper in 2006 rather than modern plastic, officials estimate that a large amount of the hidden millions have likely rotted away in the dirt over the last two decades.

As for the chances of his story turning into a big Hollywood flick, the MMA-to-cinema pipeline can be a tricky gamble, as fans saw with the Dwayne Johnson starrer ‘The Smashing Machine,’ a biopic about heavyweight pioneer Mark Kerr.

Despite garnering high praise from critics, the movie failed at the box office, earning only $21.1 million worldwide on a $50 million budget. Still, given Lee Murray’s story reads like a cross between a sports drama and a high-stakes mafia thriller, a Guy Ritchie adaptation of the Securitas robbery could easily break the MMA film curse.