When Entertainment Weekly caught up with Sterling K. Brown (Black Panther, American Crime Story) to talk all things The Predator, the actor was, unsurprisingly, bound to secrecy.
But that didn’t stop him from dropping a couple of story/tonal hints regarding Shane Black’s long-in-development reboot. For one, it’s supposedly “very different” than the original cult classic, and will come packing a “really wicked sense of humor.” Given Black’s tendency for razor-sharp dialogue and witty characters, news that The Predator will intersperse some light-hearted fun throughout its R-rated story shouldn’t be all that surprising.
Brown goes on to highlight the palpable chemistry between the film’s leading cast members – namely Logan star Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key and Olivia Munn – and how Black has devised a very specific take on the material.
Per EW:
Shane has his whole take on it and it’s very different than the original Predator. It’s got a really wicked sense of humor to it, which I love about it. And it’s got a real camaraderie amongst the main characters that I think folks will be attracted to. That’s pretty much all I can say.
And though he won’t be reprising the role of Dutch, Sterling K. Brown also name-checked Arnold Schwarzenegger as a personal inspiration when approaching The Predator, which continues to lens in Vancouver.
“I’m a huge fan of Predator. And, of course, everybody loves Jesse the Body [Ventura] and Arnold [Schwarzenegger] and Carl Weathers and Bill Duke. My friends at Stanford used to tease me — being the dark-skinned African-American man that I am — they’d say, ‘Yo, man, you’re going to start getting all [those] Bill Duke roles when you get older.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t look anything like Bill Duke, you guys can kiss my ass.’ So then I booked this movie and I told them and they’re like, ‘Dude, do you even realize that you’re now Bill Duke???’ And I had to go tell them to kiss my ass all over again.”
You’ll never see him coming. The Predator is set to claw its way into theaters on February 9th, 2018. An IMAX release is also planned for Shane Black’s long-anticipated redo, and we can’t wait to see that ugly motherfucker iconic movie monster on the big, big screen once again.