HBO’s ‘Westworld’ Remake Will Feature A Renowned Actor As Its Lead

The Westworld remake has been in the works for years now, starting as a movie before jumping to HBO as a series. And being an HBO series, it can lure some fairly major talent to TV, like for example Hannibal Lecter and Marilyn Manson’s ex.

OK, to be more specific, Anthony Hopkins and Evan Rachel Wood. We know, we know, it’s not Brian Cox and Dita Von Teese, but hey, they’re still good actors. According to Deadline, this is Hopkins’ first TV job, but the language being used concerns us a little. For example, HBO is calling it a “dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin,” which is a really complicated way of telling us there are now sex robots on Westworld, we’re assuming. That extends to the acting descriptions Deadline copied and pasted out of the press release.

Hopkins will play Dr. Robert Ford, the brilliant, taciturn and complicated creative director, chief programmer and chairman of the board of Westworld who has an uncompromising creative vision for the park — and unorthodox methods of achieving it.

So… he’s playing a mad scientist? Then there’s Evan Rachel Wood:

Wood plays the provincial, beautiful and kind Dolores Abernathy, the quintessential farm girl of the frontier West — who is about to discover that her entire idyllic existence is an elaborately constructed lie.

We know she’s a robot. Or at least a human who doesn’t know everyone else is a robot. Still, come on, that’s kind of the whole selling point of Westworld.

The criminally underused James Marsden will also apparently be getting a role, and HBO has made a pilot commitment, so at the very least we’ll get to see what J.J. Abrams had planned for this when it was going to be a big-budget movie. It’s not clear when we might see this pilot, but expect it for 2015.

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