It suddenly got a lot easier to place your bets on which of the seven cowboys in Antoine Fuqua’s remake of The Magnificent Seven will get shot first. According to The Hollywood Reporter, David Kallaway has signed on to the Denzel Washington-starring remake of the 1960 John Sturges classic. (Which is itself a remake of the Akira Kurosawa film Seven Samurai, but we’re Americans, and taking credit for other folks’ ideas is kind of our thing.) That reaches the magic number of actors for the title crew—along with female lead Haley Bennett and villain Peter Saarsgaard—and creates a much simpler prediction for who will die first among the hardy gang.
See, Kallaway is probably a terrific actor, but his IMDB page currently lists a large number of roles where he played characters with names like “Militia Man,” “Taliban Soldier,” “Man #5,” “Cop 2,” and so on. Now, compare that with the other actors currently scheduled to ride alongside him: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, and Vincent D’Onofrio. It seems unlikely the studio is going to say, “Yeah, let’s off that Pratt kid early.” True, lesser-known names Luke Grimes and Wagner Moura are still in contention for the first to bite it, but with those actors’ meaty roles in films like Elysium, Fifty Shades Of Grey, American Sniper, and more, Kallaway still looks far and away like the low man on the cowboy pole. But don’t feel too bad for him—he’s starring in The Magnificent Seven with Denzel Washington, which is far preferable to starring in The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington.