Kurt Russell to spill black blood of the Earth in Mark Wahlberg’s BP oil spill movie
Nearly 30 years after his last encounter with the black blood of the Earth, Kurt Russell is set to appear in a movie about an oil spill. Russell, currently stealing scenes and kicking ass—sans eyepatch or 1970 Chevy Nova this time—as Mr. Nobody in Furious 7, is in talks to join Mark Wahlberg and Jane The Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez in Lionsgate’s true-life disaster epic Deepwater Horizon. The role Russell will play in the film is still unknown.
The script is based on a 2011 New York Times article called “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours,” written by David Barstow, David Rohde, and Stephanie Saul. The piece detailed the 2010 explosion of Deepwater Horizion, an ultra-deepwater, dynamically positioned, semi-submersible offshore oil drilling rig owned by Transocean and leased to BP from 2001 until September 2013. The explosion on the BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico resulted the deaths of 17 men working on the platform and the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. Once it began to leak, the oil gushed out for three months before it was finally capped.
Pete Berg, whose last seafaring action-adventure movie Battleship failed to connect with audiences—or fans of the board game for that matter—is attached to direct. World War Z scribe Matthew Michael Carnahan is penning the script.
Deepwater Horizon is set to be released September 30th, 2016.