It looks like the CBS reboot of ’80s action series MacGyver has found its leading man as The Hollywood Reporter brings word that 25-year-old Lucas Till, best known as Havok in the X-Men franchise, will take over the title role from Richard Dean Anderson. Joshua Boone (Fan Girl) has also joined the new MacGyver series as a regular, while George Eads (“CSI”) is set to co-star in the pilot as Lincoln, a conspiracy theorist who works for the government.
Although he’s still aboard the series as an executive producer, James Wan is no longer planning on directing the pilot episode due to a scheduling conflict. Instead David Von Ancken will take the helm.
“My initial concept was I wanted to do a young college MacGyver who went to Boston, one of the great universities, who’s really brilliant, right?” said Wan previously. “He’s so smart he could never feel like he fit into a world that is an establishment. So he’s always a bit of an outsider. He’s very crafty, he’s very smart, all kinds of science and mathematics and engineering. I wanted to put my MacGyver story around something like a ‘North by Northwest’: He gets blamed for something that he had designed, something really big that’s something everyone wanted, and now someone has weaponized it and everyone’s coming after him. He’s running for his life and he’s trying to clear his name, not quite unlike the structure of ‘Enemy of the State.’ So imagine ‘Enemy of the State’ if Will Smith had the brains of MacGyver.”
Playwright Paul Downs Colaizzo has penned the script for the new MacGyver, which sees the show’s original executive producer Henry Winkler set to return as EP with Michael Clear.
Till will next be seen reprising his role of Havok in this summer’s blockbuster X-Men: Apocalypse, and has a lead role in Paramount’s Monster Trucks.
