Austin Butler is due to star in the upcoming sci-fi movie ‘The Barrier’.
The 33-year-old actor has signed on to lead ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ director Edward Berger’s film, which is reportedly due to focus on time travel.
Sources told Deadline the upcoming flick - which is based on a short story by writer MacMillan Hedges - will is being sold as “‘Interstellar’ meets ‘Top Gun’” as the blockbuster gets pitched to different Hollywood studios.
While a release date has not been revealed, it was confirmed Butler would serve as an executive producer on ‘The Barrier’ as well as starring in the film.
The ‘Dune: Part Two’ actor is currently shooting for Darren Aronofsky’s crime-thriller ‘Caught Stealing’, in which he plays Hank Thompson - a burned-out former baseball player - as he’s unwittingly thrown into a wild fight for survival in the downtown criminal underworld of ’90s New York City.
The Sony Pictures production - which also stars Zoe Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber and Bad Bunny - is based on author Charlie Huston’s 2004 novel of the same name, and is slated to hit cinemas at some point next year.
Director Aronofsky previously teased: “I am excited to be teaming up with my old friends at Sony Pictures to bring Charlie’s adrenaline-soaked roller coaster ride to life. I can’t wait to start working with Austin and my family of New York City filmmakers.”
‘Caught Stealing’ is being adapted for the big screen by Huston, while Aronofsky produces through his Protozoa Pictures banner.
Sanford Panitch, President of Sony Pictures' Motion Picture Group, said: “Darren is one of the most brilliant audiovisual storytellers in the world, and adapting these wonderful books by Charlie Huston for Austin to star was too exciting an opportunity to not be a part of.”
Butler could recently be seen in ‘The Bikeriders’, where he starred opposite Tony Hardy, Jodie Comer and Norman Reedus in a story about a Chicago motorcycle club.
The actor had worked on the crime-thriller in tandem with Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune: Part Two’ - in which he played Paul Atreides’ arch-nemesis Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen - and previously admitted he struggled juggling the two projects.
He told The Hollywood Reporter: “That was the tricky part to figure out. I knew that I was going to do both films before I started ‘Dune’, but I had to figure out how to front-load the prep on ‘Bikeriders’ and start training on a motorcycle.
“So I was getting used to those old motorcycles as I was doing the knife training and stuff for ‘Dune’, and then I put ‘Bikeriders’ on hold for a bit as I got closer to 'Dune’.”
