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Michael Bay's Six Underground Casts Mélanie Laurent
Inglourious Basterds star Mélanie Laurent has been added to the cast of Six Underground, Netflix’s big-budget action movie directed by Michael Bay. Ryan Reynolds will headline the film, which is thought to be Netflix’s biggest production to date with a budget of around $150 million. Last year, Netflix spent $90 million on the Will Smith action movie Bright, which the streamer claimed was watched by 11 million people in its first three days on the service.
Plot details on Six Underground are being kept under wraps, but the script was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the team responsible for penning both Deadpool films as well as the 2017 sci-fi movie Life. The Disaster Artist star Dave Franco also recently jumped aboard the cast of Six Underground, which started filming on July 30. The cast also includes Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Sicario: Day of the Soldado), and Ben Hardy (X-Men: Apocalypse). And now, a few more stars have joined the production.
Variety reports that Six Underground has now added Mélanie Laurent and Payman Maadi to the cast. Character details for both are, like everything else about the production, being kept under lock and key for the time being. Maadi previously worked with Bay on 13 Hours, the director’s 2016 action film about the attack on the United States compound in Benghazi that wound up becoming a controversial political matter.
Mélanie Laurent, of course, first came to the attention of American audiences for her portrayal of Shoshanna, the orphaned Jewish girl who hatches an elaborate revenge scheme against the Nazis, in Quentin Tarantino’s fast-and-loose historical epic Inglourious Basterds. Laurent also had a starring role in 2013’s magician heist film Now You See Me. She appeared opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in Denis Villeneuve’s mystery Enemy. Next up, she'll star with Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley in the historical drama Operation Finale. Laurent has also become a film director, and recently directed Ben Foster and Elle Fanning in an adaptation of True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto’s noir-ish novel Galveston.
If nothing else, the cast for Six Underground continues to become a lot more packed with intriguing actors. Though plot details on the film are still unknown, it’s a fair guess that the movie will resemble 13 Hours, his attempt at a Kathryn Bigelow-style action-packed drama. For the time-being, Bay has left behind the realm of Hollywood popcorn spectacle of the type he took to new extremes in the Transformers series. But, of course, that doesn’t mean Bay has retired from making movies about robots. In fact, Bay’s next project after Six Underground is expected to be Robopocalypse, an adaptation of the 2011 novel about an out-of-control AI that begins merging the organic with robot technology.
