Michelle Yeoh, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in 2022’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, has been cast in the lead role of Amazon Studios’ Blade Runner 2099, reports Variety. The highly-anticipated series is slated to kick off production in Prague later this spring.
Blade Runner 2099 is the latest expansion of the Blade Runner series, which began in 1982 with Ridley Scott‘s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and was followed by Denis Villeneuve‘s 2017 feature Blade Runner 2049. Scott is on board as an executive producer for the series, while Villeneuve, who recently won acclaim for Dune: Part Two is not involved.
Plot details for the series have not been revealed, and additional cast members have also yet to be confirmed. Harrison Ford, who starred in both feature films, and Ryan Gosling, who featured in Blade Runner 2049, may not return for the series as it takes place fifty years after the events of the previous movie.
Blade Runner 2099 was originally slated to film in Belfast last year, but production was delayed due to the writer and actor strikes. Deadline reported earlier this year that production would begin in Prague from April, but according to local sources, filming is expected to kick off in June.
Jonathan van Tulleken, coming off his acclaimed work on FX’s excellent miniseries Shōgun (streaming on Disney+ locally) will direct the first two episodes of Blade Runner 2099. Silka Luisa (Halo, Shining Girls) is serving as showrunner and exec producing alongside Scott. The series is being produced by Alcon Entertainment and Scott Free Productions for Amazon Studios.
In Prague, primary production of Blade Runner 2099 will take place at Barrandov Studio, which will reportedly undergo a major transformation for the series. Film United is handling the local production.
“This will be one of the most demanding projects ever produced [in the Czech Republic],” Pavlína Žipková from the Czech Film Commission told Reflex earlier this year.
“The vast majority of filming will take place at Barrandov Studio. The Czech Film Commission, a department of the State Cinematography Fund, negotiated with producers Alcon Entertainment for the Czech Republic to be a country for the production of [Blade Runner 2099] in Los Angeles last August.”
Yeoh rose to international fame through her work in the Hong Kong film industry on collaborations with Jackie Chan such as the Supercop films before making the jump to Hollywood in the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. In addition to her Oscar-winning role, she has also recently appeared in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Kenneth Branagh‘s A Haunting in Venice.
Yeoh was recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, by US President Joe Biden. In addition to Blade Runner 2099, she will star in upcoming franchises like the Avatar sequels for James Cameron and Star Trek: Section 31 for Alex Kurtzman.
Additional details about the filming of Blade Runner 2099 in Prague should be revealed ahead of the June start to production.
Lead photo: Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
