Armie Hammer and Alexander Skarsgard Reportedly Frontrunners for ‘Invisible Man’ Role

Johnny Depp was originally announced as starring as the Invisible Man in a new reboot and, in some ways, he will continue to play the character, as no one will see him in the upcoming Invisible Man from writer/director Leigh Whannell. Instead, The Hashtag Show claims that actors Armie Hammer and Alexander Skarsgard are the current frontrunners for the role.

Few details are known about the project and how it will update the novella from H.G. Wells and the 1933 film, with recent reports also claiming that Elisabeth Moss was in talks to star. The story follows a scientist who successfully discovers a way to render himself invisible, yet when he fails to find a way to make himself visible once again, he begins to go mad.

Depp was announced to star as the character in 2017, ahead of the release of The Mummy. That film was expected to launch the Dark Universe, a series of interconnected reboots focusing on the iconic Universal Monsters. Given that film’s disappointing critical and financial reception, the Dark Universe has been put on hold indefinitely, with this new film having no connection to any other films.

Producer Jason Blum previously revealed that this Invisible Man will fall more in line with previous efforts from his studio than the blockbuster audiences saw in 2017’s The Mummy.

“It was like the Blumhouse version of the Invisible Man, it’s a lower-budget movie. It’s not dependent on special effects, CGI, stunts,” Blum shared with Collider. “It’s super character-driven, it’s really compelling, it’s thrilling, it’s edgy, it feels new. Those were all things that felt like they fit with what our company does. And it happened to be an Invisible Man story, so it checked both boxes. And we responded to it because I think Leigh is just an A+ director.”

The announcement of The Invisible Man immediately inspired theories that Blumhouse could be reviving various other abandoned Dark Universe projects and, while Blum isn’t ruling this out, he admitted he wants to focus on one project at a time.

“I don’t believe in saying ‘We’re going to do movies about this’ and then trying to find a movie about it,” the producer admitted. “So I didn’t believe in going and saying, ‘I want to do all these movies’, and then try to find directors to do them. We have a director who… we’ve also done six or seven movies with, pitched us this spectacular idea about Invisible Man. We told him to write it, he wrote it, then we took it to the studio and said, ‘We’d love to do this and this is what we would do with it,’ and they said yes.”

Stay tuned for details on Invisible Man.

Who would you rather see star in the film? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!

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