Entertainment Weekly has spoken with Emmy-winning American Crime Story actor Sterling K. Brown about his role in Shane Black‘s sequel The Predator, which is currently filming in Vancouver.
“Shane has his whole take on it and it’s very different than the original ‘Predator,’” Brown said. “It’s got a really wicked sense of humor to it, which I love about it. And it’s got a real camaraderie amongst the main characters that I think folks will be attracted to. That’s pretty much all I can say.”
“I’m a huge fan of Predator,” Brown added, “and, of course, everybody loves Jesse the Body [Ventura] and Arnold [Schwarzenegger] and Carl Weathers and Bill Duke. My friends at Stanford used to tease me — being the dark-skinned African-American man that I am — they’d say, ‘Yo, man, you’re going to start getting all [those] Bill Duke roles when you get older.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t look anything like Bill Duke, you guys can kiss my ass.’ So then I booked this movie and I told them and they’re like, ‘Dude, do you even realize that you’re now Bill Duke???’ And I had to go tell them to kiss my ass all over again.”
The cast includes Boyd Holbrook (Narcos, Logan), Olivia Munn (X-Men: Apocalypse), Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight), Keegan-Michael Key (Keanu, Key & Peele), Thomas Jane (The Punisher), Jacob Tremblay (Room), Yvonne Strahovski (Dexter), Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones), Sterling K. Brown (The People vs. O.J. Simpson, This is Us) and Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner).
Details on the film are still under wraps, but the persistent rumor is that the film takes place partly in suburbia with the Predator slowly revealing himself to be a threat to the film’s heroes.
Black, who wrote the script with his Monster Squad co-writer Fred Dekker, has confirmed that the film remains in the continuity of the first two movies and isn’t a full reboot of the series. He said there is a reference in the script as to why the film has a singular title, and that the film will carry an R rating.
The original Predator was directed by John McTiernan and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as the leader of a United States special forces team that comes under attack from an alien entity that prizes the thrill of the hunt above all else. It was followed by a direct sequel, Predator 2, in 1990 before crossing over with Fox’s Alien franchise for two additional sequels, Alien vs. Predator and AvP: Requiem. In 2010, Nimrod Antal helmed a reboot with a new feature, Predators.
The Predator will be released in theaters on February 9, 2018.
(Photo Credit: Getty Images)