The Blade Runner Meets Drax and Buttercup: Bautista, Wright Added to Sequel
Alcon Entertainment’s Blade Runner 2 has added Robin Wright and Dave Bautista to the cast. They’ll join Harrison Ford, reprising his role as Rick Deckard, the Blade Runner, and Ryan Gosling.
Wright (The Princess Bride, House of Cards) is in final negotiations to join the cast in one of three major female roles. According to The Hollywood Reporter, talks were longer than expected because of Wright’s schedule with Cards. She’s currently shooting Wonder Woman for Warner Bros.
A report in Variety says Wright will have a “key role” in the film, which has yet to get an official title, but no other details on the part. Nor do we have information on whether she’ll play a human or a replicant.
Sources say Alcon worked around Wright’s House of Cards schedule, which seems to imply they wanted her in this part pretty badly. They’d been pursuing her for the project for some time.
Blade Runner 2 is set several decades after the original film, which was based on the story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick. Ford starred as detective Deckard, who was tasked with locating and eliminating four replicants — very sophisticated androids with a six-year life span — who had gone rogue and escaped to Earth. The film ended with the unanswered question as to whether Deckard was himself a replicant or not. Depending on who you ask, he either was (director Ridley Scott) or he wasn’t (Ford). Now, with Deckard still alive after all these years, it seems that question has been answered.
Or has it?
Bautista joins the cast in an undisclosed role that, according to Alcon co-founders and co-CEO’s Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson, will be “an important supporting role”. The wrestler turned actor had one of the breakout performances in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy as the very literal-minded “Drax The Destroyer” and will reprise the role for the sequel, due out in 2017.
He also appeared in the recent James Bond outing, Spectre, and will join Bruce Willis in the upcoming action flick Marauders from Lionsgate.
Principal photography is set to begin in July, reuniting director Denis Villeneuve with his Sicario cinematographer Roger Deakins (Skyfall, The Shawshank Redemption). Ridley Scott will executive produce, with the screenplay by Hampton Fancher — co-writer of the 1982 original Blade Runner with David Peoples— and Michael Green from an idea from Fancher and Scott.
