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Ready Player One casts Rogue One star as villain - SciFiNow

Ready Player One casts Rogue One star as villain

We’re loving this casting choice for Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One

One of the future film adaptations that we’re constantly eyeing up is Ready Player One. Adapted for the big screen by Steven Spielberg from Ernest Cline’s acclaimed novel (with a treatment from Zak Penn and Eric Eason), the plot (a youngster who spends his time living in a virtual world being forced to escape from his comfort zone thanks to a plot that not only threatens his own life, but has wider ramifications) is quintessentially Spielberg. He can’t go wrong.

With Olivia Cooke already cast in one of the lead roles as Samantha Evelyn ‘Art3mis’ Cook, Collider are now reporting that one of the latest pieces of casting could be Ben Mendelsohn, who has apparently been offered the role of Nolan Sorrento, one of the main adversaries for protagonist Wade in the book. As a high-ranking official of internet service provider Innovative Online Industries, he leads the attempts to monetise OASIS (the in-book game that the characters spend most of their time in), which inevitably involves being ever so slightly nefarious.

Ben Mendelsohn Ready Player One
Ben Mendelsohn could be taking on villain duties in Ready Player One

Having long been a fan of Mendelsohn after seeing him turn from chilled to psychotic in the likes of David Michod’s Animal Kingdom and Netflix’s Bloodline (as well as more low-key roles in films like The Place Beyond The Pines), it looks like the next few years will be big for him, having also been cast in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. He’s consistently been the most memorably part of pretty much everything we’ve seen him in, and it’s hard to think of a better villainous choice. Now, he’s going to be able to prove it on the big stage that a Spielberg movie represents.

Ready Player One will be released in cinemas on 15 December 2017. For more news about the biggest movies, pick up the latest issue of SciFiNow.