‘The Thomas Crown Affair’: Michael B. Jordan Remake Adds Kenneth Branagh, Lily Gladstone & Danai Gurira!!

Michael B. Jordan‘s high-profile remake of The Thomas Crown Affair has just added some award-worthy talent. Deadline first reported earlier this morning that Belfast Oscar winner Kenneth Branagh would be coming aboard in an undisclosed, but potentially villainous, role for the romantic heist film. Following that, Killers of the Flower Moon Oscar nominee Lily Gladstone was added to the cast as well, followed by another report from The Hollywood Reporter this afternoon that Danai Gurira would be reuniting with her Black Panther co-star Jordan as his character’s confidante. The trio will join the previously announced leads, Jordan and Taylor Russell, in the project, which will be the latest directorial effort from Jordan after making his debut on Creed III.

Per the reports, the additions of Branagh, Gladstone, and Gurira come ahead of filming beginning on Monday in London. They weren’t the only newcomers to The Thomas Crown Affair either, with another Oscar winner in Oppenheimer producer Charles Roven joining to help produce through his Atlas Entertainment banner. Any details of the story are being kept under lock and key at this time, but the remake figures to follow a similar structure to the 1968 and 1999 versions. Both iterations revolve around the wealthy and bored businessman Thomas Crown, who executes a high-profile heist just for the thrill of it, only for the brilliant investigator to engage him in a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game that quickly becomes romantic. In the 1969 movie, Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway played the leads, while John McTiernan‘s 1999 version starred Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo.

On the creative end, Jordan directs from a script penned by Drew Pearce, whose previous writing credits include Iron Man 3, The Fall Guy, and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. A previous draft of the screenplay was also written by Wes Tooke and Justin Britt-Gibson, and it reportedly hewed closer to the Norman Jewison-directed classic. The original film’s writer, Alan Trustman, even serves as an executive producer on Jordan‘s take, with Marc Toberoff of Toberoff Productions and Patrick McCormick also on board as producers.

What Have Branagh, Gladstone, and Gurira Been Up To?

Though Branagh‘s lone Oscar win came as a director and writer on Belfast, he brings an excellent acting resume to Jordan‘s latest, most recently including Oppenheimer, The King of Kings, his third Hercule Poirot film, A Haunting in Venice, and Blue Eye Samurai, which is currently preparing for another season at Netflix. The Thomas Crown Affair is just his latest major casting, though, after his recent addition to the much-anticipated The Devil Wears Prada 2 alongside returning stars Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci. He’s also bound for Ryan Reynolds‘s action-adventure movie Mayday, which wrapped filming last June.

Gladstone made history by becoming the first Native American to be nominated for Best Actress in Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon, and she hasn’t slowed down yet. In the time since, she’s earned acclaim for Hulu‘s crime drama Under the Bridge and has taken on a variety of big-screen roles between the indie drama Jazzy and the remake of The Wedding Banquet with Bowen Yang, Kelly Marie Tran, and Han Gi-Chan. Among her upcoming projects is the Marc Maron comedy In Memoriam and the action-thriller Lone Wolf with Brian Cranston, though that film has faced a bit of turbulence since wrapping production.

Gurira hasn’t been on the big screen since Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in 2022, but the small screen has kept her plenty busy. She got the chance to reprise her role as the fan-favorite survivor Michonne in last year’s The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live opposite her longtime co-star Andrew Lincoln. She’ll soon get the chance to become Okoye once more in the MCU with the upcoming Eyes of Wakanda in August, too. Thomas Crown won’t be her only theatrical effort, though, as she’s set to join John Cena in his stacked Matchbox movie.