The very first Baywatch movie (not counting the straight-to-video movies Baywatch: Hawaiian Wedding and Baywatch: Forbidden Paradise, obviously) is currently being filmed in Florida, and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has shared the first photo of his leading lady on Instagram.
Alexandra Daddario is playing Summer Quinn, the character originally played by Nicole Eggert in the long-running beach lifeguard TV series. Daddario, seen here in regulation lycra swimwear, co-starred with Johnson in last year’s disaster movie San Andreas, and in his Instagram post The Rock explained he was “so impressed by her chops and presence every day, that I had to have her ‘rep the squad’ in our film”.
If you’re perhaps wondering why there should be a Baywatch movie, it’s worth considering that the TV show, which originally ran from 1989 to 1999, was at one point the most popular television series in the world, with its winning mix of attractive tanned people in skimpy clothing, coupled with copious slow-motion running.
Seth Gordon is directing this distinctly comedic take on the franchise (Johnson recently described it as “Avengers meets Anchorman”), with Johnson, Daddario, Zac Efron, Kelly Rohrbach, Ilfenesh Hadera, Jon Bass, Priyanka Chopra, Hannibal Buress – and, as revealed last week, a cameo appearance from original series stalwart David Hasselhoff. It’ll be diving slow-motion into cinemas in May 2017.