Michelle Yeoh and Pete Davidson to play Transformers in Rise Of The Beasts

Pete Davidson will play Autobot Mirage and Michelle Yeoh will play Maximal Airazor in the next Transformers movie

By Sam Barsanti  |  October 12, 2022 | 2:09am
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Michelle Yeoh and Pete Davidson to play Transformers in Rise Of The Beasts
Pete Davidson (Kevin Winter/Getty Images), Michelle Yeoh (Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images) Image: The A.V. Club

In a fiendishly clever scheme to play with people’s emotions, Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts director Steven Caple Jr. shared a couple of big casting announcements on his Instagram today that seem carefully designed to trick you into conceding that you might be kind of interested in seeing Rise Of The Beasts. The first new addition to the cast is Pete Davidson, who people tend to have… a strong opinion about… and the other is Michelle Yeoh, who is great and universally beloved.

So, if you like her in Everything Everywhere All At Once, surely you must like her in Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, regardless of how many Pete Davidsons are in it! Ergo, you should like Rise Of The Beasts! And if that’s the case, we have some other recommendations for you to check out (but not now, we don’t have time for that).

Caple’s Instagram post explains that Davidson is playing Mirage, an original G1 Autobot who turned into an old ‘70s-style Formula 1 car in the cartoon (but he’ll be a Porsche in Rise Of The Beasts, even though there were a ton of Autobots who turned into 911s and none of them were Mirage). Yeoh will be Airazor, who isn’t an Autobot at all. She’s one of the eponymous beasts, and in the ‘90s Beast Wars cartoon, she was a robot who turned into a bird. She’s also one of the only female Cybertronian characters in the original Transformers continuity, assuming you count Beast Wars as part of the original continuity, which you should (we don’t have time to get into this!).

Rise Of The Beasts stars Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback as the main humans, with Peter Cullen once again playing Optimus Prime (Caple said he’s the film’s “robot lead”), and it (at least partially) takes place in ‘90s Brooklyn. In addition to Autobots, it will feature Maximals (good guy robots that turn into animals) and Terrorcons (which are like Decepticons, but with more terror). After a lengthy delay last year, it will open in 2023.

 
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