Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn could be in line to take the lead role opposite Felicity Jones in Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, reports Deadline.
Mendelsohn, best known for standout supporting turns in Animal Kingdom, Killing Them Softly and The Dark Knight Rises, is tipped for an unspecified role. Little is known about Gareth Edwards’ film other than its title and studio Disney’s assertion that the project will explore “characters and events beyond the core Star Wars saga”.
Mendelsohn, 45, is a rising star in Hollywood with a recent appearance in biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings and talk of an Emmy award for his turn as the black sheep oldest son of a close-knit Florida Keys family in Netflix’s Bloodline series. If suggestions that Rogue One is about X-Wing pilots turn out to be true, he has the perfect rugged looks to play an airborne Star Wars grunt.
The Golden Compass’s Chris Weitz replaced After Earth’s Gary Whitta as Rogue One’s screenwriter earlier this year. Jones, the Oscar-nominated British star of Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, has signed on to play an unspecified lead role.
The new film has a release date of 16 December 2016, almost exactly a year after the first new major Star Wars movie in a decade, JJ Abrams’ The Force Awakens, hits cinemas. Disney aims to deliver a trilogy of new films, with a series of spin-off movies filling the scheduling gaps to ensure a new Star Wars adventure hits cinemas annually between now and 2019.
