First look at Henry Cavill's Highlander confirms wet hair, access to swords

It feels like we’ve been hearing about Henry Cavill and Chad Stahelski’s Highlander remake for time immemorial at this point—which, now that we think about it, is pretty apt for a film franchise about various immortals running around chopping each others’ heads off, while the regular human public blithely ignores all the random Tesla coil shows said decapitations produce. Now, though, we finally have a glimpse at what Cavill will look like in the film, and—oh, yep, that’s a guy with wet-looking hair holding a sword. Yeah, that tracks.

 

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Cavill posted the photos to his Instagram as a first-look at the film, which reportedly began shooting recently, after months of delays caused by an injury Cavill suffered during pre-production rehearsals. Possibly owing to that recent start date, the photos take the perhaps unorthodox step of not showing Cavill’s character Connor MacLeod as, well, a Highlander, i.e., a Scottish warrior from several hundred years ago, and instead showing him as just a sort of guy running around in the modern day in a trench coat. Admittedly, the original film—which starred Christopher Lambert, and became a cult hit after its release in 1986—had a lot of that sort of thing, too, as MacLeod faced off against his ancient enemy The Kurgan in modern day New York. But c’mon, Highlander, you can’t give us a little bit of highland action, as a treat?

Highlander has a lot riding on it: Cavill, for his part, probably needs a win after the whole shakeout over his role as Superman a few years back, as well as his high-profile departure from his Netflix series The Witcher. Stahelski, in turn, is filming his first movie not set in his incredibly successful John Wick film franchise; Highlander will be a litmus test for whether his highly visceral brand of action can work without Keanu Reeves there to anchor the punches.

There’s no word yet on when Highlander will land in theaters; Russell Crowe, Dave Bautista, and Karen Gillen are all slated to co-star.