“He’ll suffocate! He’ll experience explosive decompression! He’ll be roasted by a stray rocket booster! He’s playing the planet Mars and it blows up at the end!” Yes, we can almost hear the litany of 'How Will Sean Bean Die?' jokes being drawn up as we write this, but here’s the news anyway – he’s joined the cast of Ridley Scott’s** The Martian{
Matt Damon is starring in the film as NASA astronaut Mark Watney, left stranded on Mars after his crewmates on the Ares 3 mission are forced to evacuate by a dust storm.
To stave off death on the Red Planet, Watney tries to rustle up water and grow crops. Meanwhile, his fellow astronauts are kept in the dark about his survival during their voyage back to Earth on the Hermes spacecraft. NASA struggles to find some way to rescue Watney, while the Hermes astronauts add their efforts once they finally discover he’s alive. Jeff Daniels will play the NASA boss who must decide how much to tell Watney’s colleagues about his dire straits, while Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara and Michael Peña are all now listed as aboard the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
As for Bean, he’s staying firmly on the ground as a NASA flight director, who presumably works for Daniels’ character and faces little chance of kicking any buckets unless a stray space shuttle lands on him, or something. Drew Goddard adapted Andy Weir’s book for the film, which kicks off filming next month.
Bean has been busy starring in US cable drama Legends and will be seen in both** Jupiter Ascending** (due February 6 next year) and Pixels, which lands on August 21. He likes to joke about his onscreen fatalities as much as anyone, and talked to us about them here. Plus he was celebrated in our recent poster mashup set.