In Highlander, there can only be one. Still, adding actors to the cast of Henry Cavill’s upcoming reboot sounds like a good idea. According to Collider, Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe is officially joining the cast. The forthcoming reboot of Highlander features Cavill in the lead role, with John Wick mastermind Chad Stahelski directing, and cameras beginning to roll this Autumn.
Previously, Stahelski told Collider that his Highlander project is more than a reboot. It’s a chapter in the franchise meant to broaden the saga to untapped and unknown parts.
Stahelski has also teased the timeline for the movie. “We’re bringing it forward from the early 1500s in the highlands to the beyond present-day New York and Hong Kong, and seeing how it goes,” he said. “There’s big opportunity for action. There’s a chance to play a character that not a lot of people get to play. And it’s a bit of a love story, but not how you think. On John Wick, I learned a lot on how to bend the storytelling a little… another kind of myth.”
Released in 1986 and directed by Russell Mulcahy, Highlander centers on an immortal Scottish swordsman who must confront the last of his immortal opponents. This murderously brutal barbarian lusts for the fabled “Prize.” It starred Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, Rozanne Hart as Brenda Wyatt, Clancy Brown as Kurgan, and Sean Connery as Ramirez. The film was a significant hit with science-fiction and fantasy fans and paved the way for four sequels and three television series.
Russell Crowe recently completed work on the James Vanderbilt-directed historical thriller Nuremberg, based on the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai. Crowe stars as Hermann Göring alongside Rami Malek as Douglas Kelley, Michael Shannon, Leo Woodall, Colin Hanks, Richard E. Grant, John Slattery, Wrenn Schmidt, and more.
Here’s a description for El-Hai’s novel, courtesy of Amazon:
In 1945, after his capture at the end of the Second World War, Hermann Göring arrived at an American-run detention center in war-torn Luxembourg, accompanied by sixteen suitcases and a red hatbox. The suitcases contained all manner of paraphernalia: medals, gems, two cigar cutters, silk underwear, a hot water bottle, and the equivalent of 1 million in cash. Hidden in a coffee can, a set of brass vials housed glass capsules containing a clear liquid and a white precipitate: potassium cyanide. Joining Göring in the detention center were the elite of the captured Nazi regime Grand Admiral Dönitz; armed forces commander Wilhelm Keitel and his deputy Alfred Jodl; the mentally unstable Robert Ley; the suicidal Hans Frank; the pornographic propagandist Julius Streicher fifty-two senior Nazis in all, of whom the dominant figure was Göring.
To ensure that the villainous captives were fit for trial at Nuremberg, the US army sent an ambitious army psychiatrist, Captain Douglas M. Kelley, to supervise their mental well-being during their detention. Kelley realized he was being offered the professional opportunity of a lifetime: to discover a distinguishing trait among these arch-criminals that would mark them as psychologically different from the rest of humanity. So began a remarkable relationship between Kelley and his captors, told here for the first time with unique access to Kelley’s long-hidden papers and medical records.
Kelley’s was a hazardous quest, dangerous because against all his expectations he began to appreciate and understand some of the Nazi captives, none more so than the former Reichsmarshall, Hermann Göring. Evil had its charms.
Who will Russell Crowe play in Chad Stahelski’s Highlander? Will he play unhinged killer Kurgan, or does the role of Ramirez make more sense? Could he play another Immortal? Perhaps an enemy or an ally of Connor MacLeod’s? With Stahelski promising to take the story into uncharted territory, your guess is as good as ours.
