Russell Crowe Confirms Role in ‘The Mummy’ Reboot, Says It Will ‘Scare the S— Out of You’
It’s hard to know what to expect from Universal’s ambitious new monster movie franchise, which will reboot many of the studio’s iconic boogeymen in one shared universe of films. And we probably won’t have a decent idea about what the studio is up to until next summer, when The Mummy hits theaters. But thanks to Russell Crowe, we have some indication of what Alex Kurtzman is planning for his reboot, which also stars Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella.
Earlier this week it was reported that Crowe was in talks to play Dr. Henry Jekyll in The Mummy, and the actor himself confirmed that casting to Collider:
Yeah, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna play Dr. Henry Jekyll, Fellow of the Royal Society. It’s very interesting, what they’re gonna do with that stuff. I’ve had a couple of chats about it with the director (Alex Kurtzman). I’ve known Tom Cruise since 1992, or something like that. When he was married to an Australian, I was really good friends with him. But when he got divorced, I was part of the settlement package, and I went to Nicole [Kidman].
Universal has some fairly big plans for the new monster movie universe, and it seems a bit odd and presumptuous for the studio to start building a franchise before they’ve even released the first film — will audiences want to see more of this universe? Crowe is pretty confident about Kurtzman’s plans, and says that he’s impressed with the world they’ve built so far:
How they’ve pulled all of this stuff forward into a contemporary world and how they’re building it out from there, and how all of the different character interweave into each other’s stories, it’s fantastic.
As to what we might expect from The Mummy, there have been conflicting reports about just how horror-driven these films will be, but Crowe says Kurtzman’s film is “designed to seriously scare the s— out of you.”
We’ll see if he’s right when The Mummy hits theaters on June 8, 2017.