He’s been rumoured as part of the cast for a little while now, but Warner Bros. has just confirmed that Bill Nighy is officially aboard the still-untitled Clash of the Titans sequel, playing the fallen god Hephaestus.
Nighy’s just one of the ever-swelling ensemble that includes returning faces Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Danny Huston, along with newcomers Rosamund Pike, Toby Kebbell and Edgar Ramirez.
The story rockets us forward to 10 years after the events in the first movie as Perseus (Worthington) is trying to put his heroic escapades behind him and live life as a fisherman and single dad to son Hellus (Hellus? Really? Is that any solid start in life for a child?)
But because it would be really dull to just watch Worthington catch fish for two hours (unless that floats your boat), the universe naturally conspires to drag him back to fight the good fight. In this case, it’s a struggle for supremacy between the gods and the Titans as the weakened gods face a new challenge from the leader of the imprisoned Titans, Kronos, father to Neeson’s Zeus, Fiennes’ Hades and Huston’s Poseidon.
Hades and Zeus’ son Ares (Ramirez) decide to switch sides (who saw that coming, eh?) and hatch a deal with Kronos to imprison Zeus. With the world in danger from this new threat, Perseus needs help from Andromeda (Pike), Hephaestus (Nighy) and Poseidon’s boy Argenor (Kebbell) to journey into the underworld and rescue Zeus…
Battle: LA director Jonathan Liebsman kicked off shooting on stages outside London and will be headed off around the globe to such glamorous locations as Surrey, South Wales and Tenerife. He’s working from a script by writers Dan Mazeau and David Leslie Johnson, which more recently got a polish from Steven Knight.