Michael Sheen to be third wheel on Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt’s sexy space adventure

By William Hughes | July 17, 2015 | 10:27pm

Aux Features Film

There aren’t many circumstances in which Masters Of Sex star Michael Sheen could be described as “the least charming person in the room,” but the minds behind upcoming sci-fi romance story Passengers appear to have devised one. The charismatic Welsh actor has been cast in the film opposite Jurassic World and Mockingjay stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, who play space travelers awoken from cryo sleep early by some sort of spaceship malfunction, presumably caused by all the excess star power the craft is being forced to keep on board.

Besides representing the vital “never opened a record-shattering, zeitgeist-capturing, franchise-launching blockbuster” portion of the movie-going audience, Sheen will lend his talents to playing a robot who’s also traveling with the pair. Not much more is known about the role, but we’re going to guess it involves a lot of bumbling around fussily and interrupting potential sexy space shenanigans, before being psychically ejected from the film by the collective wills of millions of audience members, desperate for him to get the hell out of the way so that they can watch Star-Lord and Katniss finally get it on.