Weapons and The Three-Body Problem star Benedict Wong is ready to brave the post-apocalypse for Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars. Scott’s next epic is currently shooting in Italy with Jacob Elodi (Saltburn, Priscilla, The Narrow Road to the Deep North), Margaret Qualley (The Substance, Maid, Kinds of Kindness), Josh Brolin (Running Man, Weapons, Outer Range), and Guy Pearce (The Brutalist, Neighbours, Inside) leading the cast.
The Dog Stars hails from 20th Century Studios and is based on the 2012 novel by Peter Heller (Burn, The River, The Painter, The Last Ranger). Initially, Scott was reteaming with Gladiator II star Paul Mescal for The Dog Stars, but scheduling conflicts with his part in Sam Mendes’s Beatles anthology kept him from participating. Mescal plays Paul McCartney in Mendes’s upcoming Beatles film series, making him essential to the project. Mark L. Smith, who wrote The Revenant and the Netflix mini-series American Primeval, is partnering with Christopher Wilkinson (Ali, Nixon, Birth of the Dragon) to pen the screenplay.
Here’s the official synopsis for Heller’s novel:
“Hig’s wife is gone, his friends are dead, and he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a mercurial, gun-toting misanthrope named Bangley. But when a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life exists outside their tightly controlled perimeter. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return and follows its static-broken trail, only to find something that is both better and worse than anything he could ever hope for.”
Most know Benedict Wong as Wong, Master of the Mystic Arts, leader and former librarian of Karmar-Taj. Still, Benedict Wong is a spectacular presence in many film and television projects like Annihilation, The Three-Body Problem, Deadly Class (gone too soon), The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and more. Wong’s next theatrical outing is for Zach Cregger’s anticipated horror mystery film Weapons. In Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian, all but one child from the same class mysteriously vanishes on the same night at exactly the same time, and a community is left questioning who or what is behind their disappearance.
On a scale of one to ten, what is your hype level for The Dog Stars? Let us know in the comments section below.
