The Adam Project, a time travel movie that reunites Ryan Reynolds with Free Guy director Shawn Levy, has added two new cast members. Jennifer Garner is set to play Reynolds’ mother (before you do a double-take on that remember that this is a time travel movie, with the main character going back in time), while Zoe Saldana is set to play Reynolds’ character’s wife.
THR is reporting that Jennifer Garner and Zoe Saldana have joined Ryan Reynolds in The Adam Project cast. In the movie, Reynolds plays “a man who must travel back in time to get help from his 13-year-old self. Together, they encounter their late father, who is now the same age as Reynolds.” Garner is playing Reynolds’s 13-year-old self’s mother while Saldana will play the character’s wife, a fighter pilot, in the present day.
Shawn Levy, who directed Reynolds in the upcoming Free Guy, is helming the film with a script rewritten by Jonathan Tropper. Previous versions of the script were penned by Mark Levin, Jennifer Flackett, and T.S. Nowlin. Netflix picked up the rights to the film, so you can expect to see it streaming sometime in the future. This premise – guy goes back in time and meets his father – is not exactly what you’d call “original.” Hell, it’s the main plot of Back to the Future, and was even a subplot in Avengers: Endgame, with Tony Stark having a moment with his dearly departed dad. But a lack of originality doesn’t mean that Levy and Reynolds can’t create something memorable here. Since the story involves Reynolds going back in time I’m not sure how big a part Saldana will have, but I’m guessing she wouldn’t sign on for a quick blink-and-you’ll-miss-her role.
This project has been around for a while. T.S. Nowlin’s original script, which was called Our Name is Adam, made the 2012 Black List. And at one point, Tom Cruise was attached to star. I’m guessing that when Cruise was attached, the film was more straight sci-fi, and now the rewrites since then have made the film more of a comedy to better suit Reynolds. Can Reynolds do drama? Sure, but he tends to lean heavily into smart-assery these days, so I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that The Adam Project will have a humorous bent.
In addition to the casting news, THR reports that The Adam Project “will be the first project under The Group Effort Initiative, a self-financed diversity and inclusion program from Reynolds’ Maximum Effort and Blake Lively’s B for Effort banner that aims to give people of color, across all ages, a chance to work and learn on the actor’s productions.”
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