Creed Star Tessa Thompson Circling Key Role In Alex Garland’s Annihilation

Michael B. Jordan may have toplined Ryan Coogler’s Creed as the boisterous new kid on the block, but it was Tessa Thompson’s budding musician Bianca that anchored the director’s Rocky spinoff – and it’s a performance that has catapulted the up-and-comer onto Hollywood’s radar. Case in point: The Wrap reports that Thompson has entered talks to join Natalie Portman and Gina Rodriguez in Alex Garland’s Annihilation.

Best known for his cerebral directorial debut in Ex Machina, the writer-director is tackling Jeff VanderMeer’s eponymous novel as his next project, and over the past few months Garland has assembled a fine cast of leading ladies to bring the gothic horror tale to life. Centering around a crack team of four scientists – a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor – common logic dictates that Thompson will step into the shoes of one of the remaining foursome, though neither The Wrap nor Paramount confirmed anything official.

Orbiting around a dubious patch of land in North America known as Area X, Annihilation has the aforementioned quartet packing their bags in preparation for a trip to the mysterious land mass. But perhaps what’s more unsettling is that they’re the 12th expedition to do so, and previous trips to Area X have quickly turned into one-way expeditions.

Here’s the official logline from VanderMeer’s novel:

A team of four (a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a surveyor) set out into a place known as Area X. The area is abandoned and cut off from the rest of civilization. They are the 12th expedition. The other expeditions have been fraught with disappearances, suicides, aggressive cancers, and mental trauma.

Production on Alex Garland’s Annihilation is primed to get underway in spring of this year, meaning that Paramount will be keen to lock down Tessa Thompson and a fourth actress sooner rather than later.