Handmaid's Tale Star Cast in The Excorcist Movie Reboot

The Exorcist reboot has added The Handmaid's Tale star Ann Dowd. Dowd, who is best known for her role as Aunt Lydia in the Hulu dystopian series, will star alongside Hamilton's Leslie Odom Jr. and Ellen Burstyn, according to Variety. Burstyn in said to be reprising her role from the original film. The Exorcist reboot is being produced by Blumhouse and Morgan Creek for Universal and Peacock and is set to be released theatrically next October.

In addition to her work on The Handmaid's Tale for which she was nominated for Emmy awards in 2018 and 2021, Dowd starred in the 2021 film Mass, and also appeared as Edna Garrett in ABC's Live in Front of a Studio Audience Diff'rent Strokes and The Facts of Life performances.

Earlier this year, Halloween Kills co-writer Scott Teems, who helped develop the story for The Exorcist reboot, spoke with ComicBook.com about the approach to the film, detailing how he and the rest of the team behind the project aimed to capture the terror of the original movie.

"It's a different beast than Halloween because of the way it's revered in a different way," Teems detailed to ComicBook.com. "They both are massively successful and massively popular films, but there's something about The Exorcist that, for whatever reason, people look at it a little more like it's more of a 'film' as opposed to a 'movie,' or however you might want to say it. I feel more pressure in The Exorcist, but I also just, end of the day, we all vowed not to tell this story unless we could tell it in a way that we felt honored."

He continued, "So we were breaking the story and trying to figure it all out well before there was any deal. Before we even tried to make a deal or to figure out the rights and all that, we wanted to be sure we could figure out a story. So that was our early COVID project, is every Friday morning during the beginning of COVID in early 2020 we would meet over Zoom, me and David and Danny [McBride], Jason Blum, and we would pitch ideas and we would bounce ideas around and I'd go off and write and David would go off and write and we'd come back together and pitch ideas and spent a couple of months doing that. And then we got this story we were excited about and presented it. So, it wasn't until we were really sure … We didn't want to just do it to do it. We knew it had to be something we all believed in. And we did, we found it."

The Exorcist is set to be released on October 13, 2023.