Who does Barkhad Abdi play in Blade Runner 2049?

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

As many film fans have been noting over the last year, we are now living within the timeline of director Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi classic BLADE RUNNER. Although the film's story is set in November of 2019, several of its replicant (android) characters had already been "incepted" (a better way of saying "switched on") by this point in 2017 – if we lived within the BLADE RUNNER universe, replicants Roy Batty, Pris, and Zhora Salome would have been in existence since last year, and Leon Kowalski just joined them on April 10, 2017.

Just as we're about to catch up with BLADE RUNNER, director Denis Villeneuve's BLADE RUNNER 2049 is coming along to push things another thirty-plus years into the future.

Produced by Scott and scripted by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green from a story by Scott and Fancher, BLADE RUNNER 2049 has the following synopsis: 

Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.

Gosling and Ford are joined in the cast by Jared Leto, Robin Wright, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, Dave Bautista, David Dastmalchian, Lennie James, Hiam Abbass, Edward James Olmos, and Barkhad Abdi, who recently gave The Hollywood Reporter's Heat Vision some information on the character he plays in the film.

When Abdi's casting was announced back in June of 2016, no details on his character were shared. The CAPTAIN PHILLIPS star has now revealed that his character is 

a scientist, and he's totally deformed."

Abdi also confirmed that he shares scenes with Gosling in the film. When asked if he felt the weight of trying to live up to the original BLADE RUNNER while working on 2049, the actor replied that getting the opportunity to work on the project was "not pressure, it's a blessing."

Abdi says that he approaches every role like it could be his last, he puts his all into everything he does and hopes to surpass CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, for which he earned an Oscar nomination. That definitely makes him an actor worth watching, and it should be interesting to see him as this deformed scientist in BLADE RUNNER 2049.

The film is set to reach theatres on October 6, 2017.