Lee Pace joins Edgar Wright’s The Running Man remake alongside Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, and Katy O’Brian as “the heavy” of the film.
Preparations for Edgar Wright’s remake of Stephen King’s The Running Man are moving at full speed as the list of cast members continues to grow with show-stopping additions. Today, The Hollywood Reporter says Lee Pace (The Fall, Halt and Catch Fire, Pushing Daisies) is joining Glen Powell (Anyone But You, Twisters), Josh Brolin (Dune, The Goonies), Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), and Daniel Ezra (All American, A Discovery of Witches) for Paramount’s adaptation of the classic short story by Stephen King.
Last Night in Soho and Baby Driver director Edgar Wright directs The Running Man from a script he co-wrote with Michael Bacall. Production for the dystopian Contest of Champions kicks off early next year in London.
Powell stars as a “desperate man, needing money for his sick daughter, who joins the most popular show, The Running Man, in which teams of killers hunt down contestants. The longer that a contestant survives, the more money that person makes. But as the game show’s producers and killers will find out, this desperate man will break all the rules and expose the show’s dark secrets.” Josh Brolin plays “the antagonist behind the violent reality show.” In contrast, O’Brian plays a contestant in the wicked game. Ezra’s role remains a mystery. However, THR says Lee Pace is “essentially the heavy of The Running Man, playing the brutal chief hunter for the network airing the game shows and tasked by the producer with tracking down Powell’s character.”
Previously, Wright said that the remake of The Running Man would be closer to the original Stephen King novel than the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. “I like the film but I like the book more, and they didn’t really adapt the book,” Wright said. “Even as a teenager when I saw the Schwarzenegger film I was like, ‘Oh, this isn’t like the book at all!’ And I think, ‘Nobody’s [done] that book.’ So when that came up, I was thinking, and Simon Kinberg says, ‘Do you have any interest in The Running Man?’ I said, ‘You know what? I’ve often thought that that book is something crying out to be adapted.’ Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy!”
Edgar Wright’s The Running Man enters the theatrical arena on November 21, 2025.
