Director Shawn Levy Sees Your ‘Uncharted’ Fan-Casting, But Says No Thanks

Uncharted will attempt to break new ground in late 2017, early 2018 as the first not-bad film adaptation of a video game, but the road there is long and the production has only just embarked. They’ve got director Shawn Levy (esteemed cineaste behind such films as Date Night, The Internship, and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb), but now Levy has to find himself a leading man for the role of box-jawed hero Nathan Drake. As is so frequently the case with fan-cherished entertainment in recent years, the hordes of devotees decided to take matters into their own hands and ply the director with plenty of suggestions for casting.

An item today from Collider sees Levy responding to the many options floated by fans with a resounding “I’m good.” He’s aware of the grassroots campaigns for various actors with big online followings, but ultimately, they won’t affect his final decision:

I’ve been pitched everyone. God bless you, Twitter, but I made a joke that, “You’re saving me the money of hiring a casting director, Twitter,” because from Nikolaj [Coster-Waldau] to Oscar Isaac, [Nathan] Fillion, everyone that you would, [Chris] Pratt, Chris Evans, Chris Pine, I mean the suggestions are… It’s every actor who is ruggedly handsome, which is to say every movie star, and who looks anything like the square-jawed, chiseled-featured Drake. I’m not actually going to base my casting on Twitter suggestions. Maybe I’ve even said the name in this room; who knows? Eventually, if people keep suggesting ideas and actors, one of them will prove to be true. We’re very hard at work on the script right now.

In that same interview, Levy clarified that he had no intention of searching for an Indiana Jones type to play the more rough-hewn role of Nathan Drake. He explained:

Indiana Jones, people compare Uncharted to it because both are treasure-hunting movies, but Indy was academic, there was nobility and a kind of well-intentioned … he actually was heroic whereas Drake, the last thing he would ever call himself or be called is heroic. And if he has heroic qualities within him, they’re in spite of his rogue nature. So maybe from a million miles away it’ll have those Indy elements, but it’s very much a much grittier, more naturalistic, real-world, contemporary.

Levy expects to shoot next spring or summer, depending on the pace at which pre-production moves along, so it’ll be at least a year until we can see what a big-screen Uncharted might look like. But he can’t forestall the anointing of a new Drake for much longer.