Shooting is now underway on James Wan’s blockbuster sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which is hoping to replicate the success of an original that surprised a lot people by rocketing to over $1.1 billion at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing DC Comics adaptation ever made in the process.
That’s an awful lot of pressure for any movie, especially one that’s lost the element of surprise. For a long time, Aquaman was viewed as little more than a punchline in the pantheon of superheroes, until he was reinvented for the DCEU in the chiseled surfer bro form of Jason Momoa. So far, any new additions to the cast are being kept under wraps with the exception of Game of Thrones alum Pilou Asbaek, but one returning star with a much bigger part to play is Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Black Manta.
The last we saw of him, the star’s David Kane was cozying up with Randall Park’s Dr. Stephen Shin in the mid-credits scene to formulate a revenge plot, and in a new interview Abdul-Mateen II revealed that he’s set to bring much more to the table the second time around.
“In Aquaman, we just got a small introduction to Black Manta and to some of his motivations. In this one, I get to exercise and breathe a little bit more. I’m showing some different colors with this one. It gives the actors a lot of good storytelling moments.”
It would be an understatement to say that the actor is a much bigger star now than he was in December 2018, with the 35 year-old one of the industry’s most in-demand talents, so he was inevitably going to find his screentime in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom getting a substantial increase given that he’s got the Candyman reboot, The Matrix 4, Mad Max: Furiousa, high concept actioner Emergency Contact and dystopian thriller By All on the docket, all of which will cement his rapid rise up the A-list.