British actor David Oyelowo has been working his way towards becoming one of the best and most compelling screen presences of the last few years. Following on from his stunning, “should have been Oscar nominated” turn in Martin Luther King biopic Selma, he has lined up an altogether different film.
THR reports that Oyelowo has joined the cast of an upcoming high-stakes prison thriller entitled Three Seconds, which already has Luke Evans tapped to star. It’s based on a popular Swedish book of the same name by crime-writing team Anders Roslund and Borge Hellström and focuses on an undercover prison assignment gone horribly awry. The script is being written by Matt Cook and Rowan Joffee.
Three Seconds tells the story of a man (Evans) forced to go undercover in prison as part of an FBI operation. When he’s abandoned, however, he’s forced to escape on his own. Oyelowo will play an anti-social N.Y.P.D. detective who quickly begins unraveling the FBI’s operation after the murder of a fellow officer.
It sounds very similar to the plot of the brilliant French prison riot movie Cell 211 from a few years back but with more of a focus on the police side of things. It’s obviously transporting the events and themes of the movie from Sweden to the U.S., and as a result it will lose all of the exploration of contemporary Swedish law enforcement operations. Hopefully they can adapt that well enough so that it explores similar themes for the New York setting.
This is the second film Oyelowo has committed to from Cannes, the other being A United Kingdom, a historical drama in which he’ll play Prince Seretse Khama of Botswana who caused controversy in the 1940s by marrying a white woman. Alongside Selma, he gave another great performance recently in American crime drama A Most Violent Year so it’s great to see him going after another crime tale.
Source: THR