Passengers is rapidly moving forward today as Variety reports that Michael Sheen is set to join Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in the sci-fi drama.
Scripted by Jon Spaihts, Passengers takes place on a spacecraft that’s traveling to a distant planet on which a passenger wakes up from a cryogenic sleep 90 years before planned and decides to wake up a female passenger. Sheen will appear as the voice of a robot with whom both passengers interact.
Sony bought the rights to Spaihts’ acclaimed screenplay in December after a number of other distributors tried developing it, including Dimension Films and Focus Features. Neal Moritz and Ori Marmur will produce the film through Moritz’s Original Film along with Michael Maher of Start Media and Stephen Hamel of Company Films.
Sheen is no strange to science fiction, having previously starred in Disney’s TRON Legacy. He currently stars opposite Lizzy Caplan on the acclaimed Showtime series “Masters of Sex” while some of his other notable big screen roles have included Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris in addition to recurring roles in both The Twilight Saga and the Underworld franchise.
