Spike Lee's true-life drama Black Klansman has added Adam Driver and Laura Harrier to its cast. The film is being produced by QC Entertainment, Blumhouse Productions and Monkeypaw Productions, the team behind this year's smash-hit horror/thriller Get Out.
Black Klansman tells the story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), an African-American police detective who in the '70s infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, CO and improbably rose inside the organization's ranks, briefly becoming the bodyguard of KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and later being asked to serve as head of the Colorado Springs chapter. Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Spike Lee, and Kevin Willmont wrote the script based on Stallworth's own book about his incredible experience.
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Focus Features has announced that Driver and Harrier will join Washington in the cast of Black Klansman. Driver will play an undercover Colorado Springs police officer who is described as being "anti-social" but brave and dedicated. Details of Harrier's character have not been revealed yet.
Driver will next be seen reprising his role as the mysterious Kylo Ren, who may soon flip from villain to hero, in the sure-blockbuster Star Wars: The Last Jedi. In August, he played the slow-talking one-armed racetrack robber Clyde Logan in Steven Soderbergh's rural heist comedy Logan Lucky. Driver won acclaim in 2016 for his supporting role in Martin Scorsese's period film Silence, and for his lead role in Jim Jarmusch's drama Paterson. Driver has been Emmy-nominated three times for playing Adam Sackler in the HBO comedy series Girls. In 2018, Driver will star alongside Jonathan Pryce in Terry Gilliam's oft-delayed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He's also set to play quadruple-amputee war veteran Travis Mills in Tough As They Come from director Sylvester Stallone.
Harrier has risen through the acting ranks after starting out in the daytime soap opera One Life to Live. In 2017, she scored her break-out role as Liz in the summer blockbuster Spider-Man: Homecoming. Next year, she'll appear alongside Michael Shannon and Michael B. Jordan in HBO's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's dystopian science-fiction classic Fahrenheit 451.
Sean McKittrick, Raymond Mansfield, Shaun Redick, Jason Blum, Jordan Peele, and Spike Lee are producing Black Klansman, with QC Entertainment's Edward H. Hamm Jr. serving as executive producer. The film represents Lee's first fictional feature film since his typically controversial 2015 movie Chi-Raq. Lee's future also includes a television adaptation of his debut feature film She's Gotta Have It, which is set to run on Netflix.
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Source: Focus Features