Charlie Hunnam Won’t Be Back For ‘Pacific Rim 2’

Casting has already begun for Pacific Rim 2, which is set to star John Boyega as the son of Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost, with Scott Eastwood reportedly in talks to join the second canceling of the apocalypse. The latter piece of casting news seemed to imply that we may not see Charlie Hunnam return for the sequel, despite Guillermo del Toro’s recent assurance that a lot of actors from Pacific Rim would be back for round two. Turns out there’s only room for one generic white guy in the ongoing war between giant robots and kaiju.

Hunnam spoke with Yahoo! Movies at Comic-Con, where he revealed that he’s not reprising his role as Raleigh Beckett in Pacific Rim 2 due to a scheduling conflict, though he remains “very excited about” the sequel. The actor also said that Raleigh had a fairly large part in a previous draft of the script — presumably when Guillermo del Toro was still attached to direct.

As to the scheduling conflict, Hunnam recently wrapped production on Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, which Warner Bros. is hoping will launch a new franchise — and that’s the sort of thing that would keep an actor pretty busy for the foreseeable future

Former Daredevil showrunner Steven S. DeKnight will helm Pacific Rim 2 from a script by Jurassic World scribe Derek Connolly, with del Toro remaining on board as executive producer. In a recent interview, del Toro declined to get too specific about the sequel’s plot and characters, but he did describe it as a “postwar” movie and promised the return of several actors from the first film.

Hunnam did not comment on which of his co-stars might be coming back, though del Toro’s original plan involved expanded roles for Charlie Day and Burn Gorman. We don’t know if that’s still the case, but more importantly: Is Rinko Kikuchi coming back to fight more kaiju, or what? .

Pacific Rim 2 hits theaters on February 23, 2018.