Tron 2.0 has a leading man! Yeah I know, I was hoping it’d be Boxleitner or Bridges too but let’s face it, they’re kind of old. They’ll be in the movie but HR says it’s a guy named Garrett Hedlund who will star.
Apparently competition for the role was fierce. Disney is reported to have considered and met with a wide variety of actors including Ryan Gosling and the new Captain Kirk Chris Pine. I’m not sure if my geekhead could have handled the possibility of Captain Kirk in a Tron movie. Luckily, we will now never have to find out whether or not my head would explode.
It’s Hedlund who has the role and though you may not recognize his name you’ve probably seen him in a wide variety of high-profile projects. He was in Troy back in 2004 and he’s one of the dudes in Friday Night Lights. Unfortunately he was also in truly awful projects like Eragon and Georgia Rule, but let’s not hold that against him.
Hedlund’s role in Tron 2.0 sounds like a mirror image of the one played by Jeff Bridges in the original film. In fact HR describes his part as, “a man who finds himself pulled into the world of a computer and retracing the steps of a character from the original movie named Kevin Flynn.” Whether he’s following in Flynn’s footsteps intentionally or as the result of a malicious computer intelligence remains to be seen.
In the film along with Hedlund, Boxleitner, and Bridges is Olivia Wilde, whose casting was announced a couple of weeks ago. Since the announcement she’s been out and talking up the film, and most recently she talked to Sci Fi. Unfortunately as she puts it, she’s “in a total cone of silence” (her geek cred just went up ten points), so she can’t really tell us much of anything.
She does reveal that she’s already been talking to Bruce Boxleitner about the project though, letting him regale her with stories of making the original. That’s encouraging. She also reveals that this won’t be just another all CGI-green screen thing. Apparently they’re going to build “a huge amount of the set.”
