New reports suggest that Avatar villain Stephen Lang could be set for a major role in Spielberg’s forthcoming Terra Nova series...
Stephen Lang's profoundly aggressive performance was arguably one of the high points in Avatar. Taking a fairly stock military character, Lang invested his villain with seething menace, and provided a brittle counterpoint to James Cameron's lush, green visuals.
Now, it appears that Lang could be set to play a similar role in the forthcoming television series Terra Nova. A project I'll shamefacedly admit to not knowing much about until now, Terra Nova will be a big budget sci-fi drama due to air next autumn on Fox.
In the year 2149, humankind hovers on the brink of extinction, and in desperation, scientists open up a portal into the past, where they've set up a new colony of survivors in prehistoric times.
Irish actor Jason O'Mara, who has appeared as Albert Wesker in 2007‘s Resident Evil: Extinction as well as the US adaptation of Life On Mars, is set to star as a former cop and security guard hired to protect the human colony, and he'll be joined, it's rumoured, by Stephen Lang as a "charismatic and ruthless leader of the Terra Nova settlement."
Steven Spielberg and Jon Cassar are among the executive producers on the series, and Alex Graves (Fringe, The West Wing) has signed on to direct the pilot, which is set to air "in a special TV event" in the US next May. The rest of the 13-episode series will then follow later in the autumn.
Early reports from those who've read the script have been positive, and with a reported $4 million at their disposal for each episode, Terra Nova's ‘humans in the shadow of dinosaurs' premise should look pretty good, too.
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