According to Deadline, 25-year-old English actor Alex Roe has landed the male lead opposite the previously-announced Matilda Lutz in the third installment of Paramount’s horror franchise, Rings.
Roe will play Holt, the boyfriend of Lutz’s character who becomes distant from her after watching a videotape. This doesn’t quite jibe with previous reports that Rings will be a prequel that takes place before the creation of the unmarked tape that terrorized the characters of The Ring and The Ring Two. Is this a different tape, or were rumors of the film’s prequel plot greatly exaggerated?
This will not be Roe’s first horror rodeo, having made his film debut as a possessed child in 2000’s The Calling, and he will be seen next year in Sony’s hot YA property The 5th Wave opposite Chloë Grace Moretz.
Released in 2002, Gore Verbinksi’s The Ring was an English-language remake of Hideo Nakata’s 1998 supernatural thriller, Ringu, which told the story of a videotape of ghostly imagery that causes anyone who watches it to die seven days later. Ringu was followed by three Japanese sequels, while the Verbinski version received its own 2005 sequel directed by Nakata, titled The Ring Two.
F. Javier Gutierrez (Before the Fall) is directing Rings, with Academy Award-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman rewriting the current sequel draft by David Loucka. It is set for a release this November 13, 2015.
