Michael B. Jordan is the human equivalent of the flame emoji in Black Panther, so it’s only natural that his next project involves fire.
HBO released the latest teaser for Fahrenheit 451, a TV movie based on Ray Bradbury’s dystopian future-set book of the same name. It stars Jordan as Guy Montag, an increasingly skeptical “fireman” who burns books (Fahrenheit 451 is “the temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns”), and Michael Shannon as his antagonistic boss, Captain Beatty. (Michael Shannon as a bad guy? I don’t believe it.) The rest of the cast is rounded out by Star Trek Beyond‘s Sofia Boutella, famous “vlogger” Lilly Singh, 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s Keir Dullea, Martin Donovan, and other people not named Michael.
“It was daunting to take on Bradbury because he’s such a genius and a legend,” writer and director Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop) said about the project. “Me and so many people love his work. When you do an adaptation, you’re going to change things. I knew I would upset somebody. I tried to stay true to the themes, even if I changed certain characters and plot lines. To take them and modernize them. It wasn’t easy.” But he also had some presidential inspiration.
“I think it’s pretty obvious, right?” Bahrani said when asked why Bradbury’s dystopian story is especially relevant in Trump’s America… “Politically things are going in a very strange direction in terms of what is real and what is not real. I think we’ve been going in that direction for a long time, it’s just now kind of being revealed to us more clearly. So I think from a high level, that’s a problem.” (Via)
Fahrenheit 451 debuts in May.
