Since he appeared in 2013’s Lone Survivor, Ben Foster has kept a relatively low profile on the movie front. However, a hectic tide of commitments has the actor poised to dominate multiplexes over the next year. For Icon he delivers a headline performance as Lance Armstrong in Stephen Frears’ biopic of the legendary sportsman, and he’s since completed work on Coast Guard drama The Finest Hours as well as video game adaptation Warcraft. Now, THR reports that Foster will venture to the dark side as the villain in Dan Brown adaptation Inferno.
The latest in a long line of major players attached, the actor will join Brown mainstay Tom Hanks, who has played professor Robert Langdon twice previously and will reprise his role for the third Langdon-centric feature that’s ready to lens shortly with Ron Howard at the helm.
Set to follow Brown’s source novel closely, Inferno centres on Langdon as he becomes caught in a web of conspiracy surrounding an ancient plague with ties to one of the most decorated poems ever penned – Dante’s Inferno. The Theory of Everything‘s Felicity Jones will fulfil the movie’s romantic interest quota as Dr. Sienna Brooks, with support from Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan and Sidse Babett Knudsen.
For Inferno newbie Foster, he will play “a genius scientist who is obsessed with the Inferno and has also dreamed up a plot to solve the world’s overpopulation by releasing a virus.”
Inferno is currently eyeing an April start date, and will open in theaters on October 14th, 2016.
Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in an Italian hospital, disoriented and with no recollection of the past thirty-six hours, including the origin of the macabre object hidden in his belongings. With a relentless female assassin trailing them through Florence, he and his resourceful doctor, Sienna Brooks, are forced to flee. Embarking on a harrowing journey, they must unravel a series of codes, which are the work of a brilliant scientist whose obsession with the end of the world is matched only by his passion for one of the most influential masterpieces ever written, Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno.