Bad Robot’s starry ensemble cast for God Particle only continues to balloon. No sooner had we brought you the news that Irishman Chris O’Dowd had joined the roster of talent in place of John Krasinski and now it’s emerging that John Ortiz and Aksel Hennie have inked deals to board the intriguing sci-fi thriller.
Indeed, Ortiz and Hennie’s additions all but cap off the casting spree, with the final casting docket also boasting Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Bruhl, Elizabeth Debicki, and Zhang Ziyi. It’s understood production is now pegged to begin on June 10 in Los Angeles.
Nigerian filmmaker Julius Onah is the one behind the camera, bringing God Particle to life via Oren Uziel and Doug Jung’s original screenplay. Though the evocative title would lead you to believe that Onah’s sophomore feature film revolves around the Higgs Boson – a subatomic particle held up as a landmark discovery in physics back in 2013 – and therefore a collapsed particle accelerator, those fleeting plot tidbits that have found their way online indicate that the International Space Station crew will happen upon a “terrifying discovery that challenges everything they know about the fabric of reality, as they desperately fight for survival.”
What really throws the spanner in the works is that, while floating in the inky blackness of space on their lonesome, an unidentified space vessel appears out of the ether. Friend or foe? Human or alien? The answers to those questions, old sport, are being kept stowed away in Bad Robot’s bunker.
Paramount and Bad Robot has penciled God Particle in for a release on February 24, 2017.