Following a round of casting announcements earlier, Deadline brings word that Billy Crudup has entered talks for a mystery role in director Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. The outlet also reports that Bill Crudup has signed on to star in director Pablo Larrain’s Jackie. The biopic of Jackie Onassis Kennedy is set to feature Academy Award winner Natalie Portman in the title role.
Should he officially sign on, Billy Crudup will join an Alien: Covenant cast set to include Michael Fassbender (reprising hisPrometheus role) Katherine Waterston (Inherent Vice), Danny McBride (Eastbound and Down), Demián Bichir (The Hateful Eight), Jussie Smolett (Empire), Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color), Carmen Ejogo (Selma) and Callie Hernandez (Machete Kills).
Set as the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with Prometheus, Alien: Covenant connects directly to Scott’s 1979 seminal work of science fiction. It begins with the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy. There, the crew discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world — whose sole inhabitant is the “synthetic” David, survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.
Jack Paglen (Transcendence) and Michael Green (Green Lantern) are providing the Alien: Covenant screenplay. The project is entering production in Australia with 20th Century Fox set to distribute the film in theaters on October 6, 2017.
Billy Crudup, whose genre credits include films like Zack Snyder‘s Watchmen and Tim Burton’s Big Fish, starred last year in both Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight and Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s The Stanford Prison Experiment.
