Steven Spielberg’s casting spree for Ready Player One continues unabated today, with news emerging that Japanese singer-cum-actor Win Morisaki has inked a deal to join the long-in-development adaptation.
On board to play Daito, Morisaki joins an ensemble cast that already boasts Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Simon Pegg, Ben Mendelsohn, The BFG‘s Mark Rylance and, as we learned just recently, Deadpool‘s T.J. Miller.
Adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, Ready Player One is rooted in an ultra-futuristic virtual universe known as OASIS, where Wade Watts (Sheridan) toplines the sci-fi adventure as “a gunter (a portmanteau of egg hunter) who is the first person to discover the first of three keys left behind by the late OASIS creator James Halliday.”
Those elusive easter eggs spawn an old-fashioned treasure hunt, with Sheridan, Cooke and Co. diving headfirst into the alternate reality dreamed up by the brilliant James Donovan Halliday (Mendelsohn). Simon Pegg, meanwhile, is on board to play Ogden “Og” Morrow, the Wozniak to Donovan’s Jobs, who stands as the co-creator of the OASIS and is therefore instrumental in the search for those wayward keys.
As for Morisaki, Variety notes that Japanese up-and-comer clinched the role after an extensive auditioning process, and landing a role in a Spielberg tentpole will surely go down as a major turning point for the actor’s career.
Once slated to arrive in December of 2017 before Warner Bros. opted to avoid a potential clash with Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: Episode VIII, Ready Player One will finally whisk moviegoers off to OASIS on March 30, 2018.