Mark Rylance Jacks In For Steven Spielberg's READY PLAYER ONE

Movie Mark Rylance Ready Player One Steven Spielberg about 8 years agoby Ben Pearson

It was only yesterday I was talking about how it looks like Steven Spielberg has found a new collaborator in Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance, who broke out in Bridge of Spies, plays the title character in The BFG, and just joined Spielberg's The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. Now that creative partnership has been cemented even further.

THR reports that Rylance has also joined Spielberg's next project, Ready Player One. Rylance will play James Halliday, the enigmatic founder of the OASIS, a virtual game world where players are searching for the easter egg Halliday leaves behind when he dies. In Willy Wonka fashion, whoever finds the egg receives Halliday's multi-billion dollar fortune and assumes control of the OASIS itself.

Early rumors indicated that Spielberg was trying to lure the former Wonka himself, actor Gene Wilder, out of retirement to play this role, and I have to admit this is a case where rumors got me excited about something that ended up not happening, and now I'm a little bummed about it. That goes to show that we shouldn't put too much stock in a lot of early reports like that because there's still plenty of time for things to chance. I'm sure Rylance will make a fine cinematic Halliday, but seeing Wilder in that role would have been amazing.

I read Ready Player One a couple of months ago, but totally forgot that Halliday's full name is James Donovan Halliday. James Donovan was Tom Hanks' character's name in Bridge of Spies, which was Rylance's breakout movie. Weird.

There was some question as to whether or not Rylance would be able to star in both this and Christopher Nolan's war film Dunkirk, but Warner Bros. figured out a way for the scheduling to work. At this pace, it will only take another year or two before Rylance becomes the actor with whom Spielberg has worked the most.

Ready Player One stars Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, and Simon Pegg, and the film arrives in theaters on March 30, 2018.

At once wildly original and stuffed with irresistible nostalgia, READY PLAYER ONE is a spectacularly genre-busting, ambitious, and charming debut—part quest novel, part love story, and part virtual space opera set in a universe where spell-slinging mages battle giant Japanese robots, entire planets are inspired by Blade Runner, and flying DeLoreans achieve light speed.

It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.