Olivia Cooke Scores Lead Role in Spielberg's READY PLAYER ONE

Looks like Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the video game-centric novel Ready Player One has found its female lead. After testing against Elle Fanning and Lola Kirke, actress Olivia Cooke — star of Me and Earl and The Dying Girl and Bates Motel — is in negotiations to join the cast. THR has the news, and they say that Spielberg was hoping to secure both the male and female lead at the same time, but he's still on the hunt for someone to play Wade Watts.

The story centers on Watts' hunt for an Easter Egg hidden in a virtual reality gaming world called Oasis and who encounters a female player named Art3mis. In Oasis, everyone operates as avatars, so at this point it's unclear whether Cooke will play Canadian blogger Sam (the one who controls Art3mis), if she'll only be playing Art3mis herself, or if she'll end up playing both roles. We're still not sure how Spielberg intends to handle the depiction of the virtual reality world.

It sounds like an awesome project, though, one that's rooted deeply in nostalgia for a lot of the 1980s pop culture that Spielberg himself helped to create, so it should be interesting to see how he handles that element of the story. Cooke was great in Me and Earl earlier this year, and it's not hard to see how she's on the shortlist for big movies like this. She was also in contention for a Star Wars film.