The Dylan O’Brien-led American Assassin adaptation has brought in Sanaa Lathan for an important role that will hopefully carry across the franchise.
O’Brien joined the film in May following an accident on the set of the third Maze Runner film, The Death Cure. The actor has since been recovering and only recently getting back in the saddle.
He’s scheduled to appear in Teen Wolf season 6, and many believe he’ll be filming the second half of the final season of the series before he hits the Death Cure set come February.
In the meantime, CBS Films and Lionsgate are still working on American Assassin, in which O’Brien will star as Mitch Rapp. According to Deadline, Sanaa Lathan will also be involved in the thriller, which the studios hope to turn into a profitable franchise.
Lathan will be playing CIA Deputy director Irene Kennedy, and of the project Deadline also says, “The novel starts off a hoped-for film franchise with Rapp as a CIA recruit who is schooled by Cold War veteran Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). They are tapped by Kennedy (Lathan) to investigate a wave of seemingly random attacks on military and civilian targets. All this leads to a joint mission with a deadly Turkish agent to stop a mysterious operative (Taylor Kitsch) aiming to start a World War in the Middle East.”
Michael Cuesta will be directing based off a script by Stephen Schiff. Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Nick Wechsler are producing the film, which is based off the series of books by Vince Flynn.
Deadline also describes Lathan’s character as the equivalent of M to Mitch Rapp’s James Bond. The Kennedy character is vitally important to the series, and it’s nice to see that although the character was originally white in the books, Lathan was cast based on the merit of her acting chops.
Lathan is known for Alien vs. Predator (2004), Blade (1998), and Now You See Me 2 (2016).