In April, Karl Urban will officially conclude his time in The Boys with the release of Season 5. Before that, however, he and Priyanka Chopra Jonas are getting their own gritty, swashbuckling adventure on the streaming platform with the movie The Bluff. Esquire exclusively shared the first images from the epic new film today, teasing a more brutal, R-rated spin on a pirate tale that sounds more like the setup for a mafia film. At the center is Chopra Jonas‘s Ercell Bodden, a former pirate trying to leave her old life behind until her former crew tracks her down and attacks her for abandoning their ranks and stealing away with a stash of their gold, too. It’s set to premiere on February 25.
Set in the late 1800s, The Bluff takes place after the heyday of thieving buccaneers on the high seas as outlaws struggle viciously to maintain their hold and way of life. Ercell was once among the most brutal, earning the nickname “Bloody Mary,” which makes a ton of sense when looking at images of her ferociously leaping at Urban’s Captain Connor or aiming her weapon while covered in blood. Chopra Jonas studied real historical female pirates to get a sense of the reality behind her character and ensure the film represented the scary and violent truth behind piracy rather than the often glamorized fiction featured in films like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Though she’s tried to turn over a new leaf, she’s more than willing to slip back into those old, brutal ways to fight for her family, home, and freedom.
Opposite Chopra Jonas, Urban‘s Connor acts as a stark reminder of Ercell’s old life and looks the part of an immoral swashbuckler in the images shared. He’s the narcissistic current leader of Bloody Mary’s old crew and a former member of the East India Trading Company who has a more personal connection to her as her scorned former lover. Following Ercell’s escape, he’s determined to destroy her, preferably by hauling her in for trial to hopefully restore his place in society. Their competing desires set Connor and Ercell on a collision course that leads to a fair few clashes that let Chopra Jonas channel “my own experience as a mum” to fight desperately for her family and let Urban brush off his sword-fighting skills years after his time as Eomer in The Lord of the Rings. Speaking to Esquire, Urban compared his character to Captain Ahab, driven to capture his white whale by personal vengeance and yearning for acceptance.
“To have somebody who he took under his wing and nurtured and trusted stab him in the back, there’s a certain element of narcissism about not being able to let that go. But to me, it was also a story about a man who’s trying to find his place in the world. If he can hand her over, she is his ticket. He’s also a Captain Ahab type. He’s driven by obsession.”
Who Else Is Behind ‘The Bluff’?
In addition to Chopra Jonas and Urban, the images also spotlight The Book of Boba Fett star Temuera Morrison, who plays Quartermaster Lee, Captain Connor’s consigliere, who’s more interested in the gold than capturing Bloody Mary. The rest of the cast, meanwhile, features Ismael Cruz Córdova, Safia Oakley-Green, Zach Morris, David Field, and Vedanten Naidoo, among others. Frank E. Flowers, who previously co-wrote the Bob Marley biopic One Love, directed The Bluff and co-wrote the script with Joe Ballarini while Avengers helmers Anthony and Joe Russo served as producers in a reunion with their Citadel star Chopra Jonas.
As a native of the Cayman Islands, Flowers told Esquire he wanted to do the Caribbean justice with his swashbuckler and make it an integral part of the story. “As a Caribbean person, I don’t always feel like our story was told and represented in a lot of pirate films,” he said. “So I was like, ‘What if we did a pirate film from the Caribbean perspective and lean into what was real?’” The result is something that promises to be brutal and action-packed, but also more faithful to how piracy actually functioned in the late 1800s.
The Bluff premieres on Prime Video on February 25. Check out the images in the gallery above.
via Collider