Next year, Danish actor Pilou Asbæk will plot course for the mystical realm of Westeros for HBO’s Game of Thrones season 6 – as Euron Greyjoy, no less – revelling in all manner of political intrigue, familial disputes and unabashed fantasy. On the other end of the spectrum, though, will be DreamWorks Pictures’ long-gestating Ghost in the Shell movie, which today added Asbæk as the no-nonsense Batou.
That’s according to Variety, who reports that the actor will now star opposite Avengers alum Scarlett Johansson. She’s set to topline the live-action feature as Motoko Kusanagi, a highly-skilled cyborg ninja who cleans up the neon-drenched streets of Niihama on behalf of elite task force Section 9. Indeed, news of Asbæk joining the nascent production will mark a Lucy reunion on DreamWorks’ manga adaptation, and we’re excited to see how the pair’s chemistry will carry over into this most peculiar setting.
Banging the drum as the leader of the extremist group is The Laughing Man, a powerful entity who lives in the shadows of Niihama as a corporate terrorist hacker. Fixated with J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the villain boasts the ability to remotely hack into cybernetic brains, which ought to make him a formidable foe for Johansson’s heroine to confront.
Taking point for Ghost in the Shell is Rupert Sanders, working from a script produced by Straight Outta Compton scribe Jonathan Herman. In terms of producing, Avi Arad and Steven Paul will assume those duties on behalf of Paramount, while Michael Costigan, Jeffrey Silver, Tetsu Fujimura, Mitsuhisa Ishikawa are executive producing.
Ghost in the Shell is currently on course for a release on March 31, 2017.