Olivia Cooke is clearly a young woman with a very bright future. The 21-year-old British actress has only been acting for a few years, but has already stacked up a bunch of impressive credits: horrors “The Quiet Ones” and “Ouija,” a regular role on the acclaimed “Psycho” TV prequel “Bates Motel,” and most recently, one-third of the title role in Sundance hit “Me & Earl & The Dying Girl,” which she’s very impressive in.
And now she’s working with the biggest popular filmmaker of our time, as The Hollywood Reporter reveal that Cooke has beaten out the likes of Elle Fanning and Lola Kirke to play a lead role in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming adaptation of Ernie Cline’s novel “Ready Player One.” Set in a pop-culture mish-mash of a virtual world, Cooke would play Sam, known in the game as Art3mis, a Canadian blogger racing the male lead to the treasure, and falling in love along the way.
This does mean, however, that Cooke won’t be doing the other big role she’s been up for recently, that of a new female lead in Rian Johnson’s “Star Wars: Episode VIII,” putting either “Orphan Black”’s Tatiana Maslany or “Jane The Virgin”’s Gina Rodriguez in a good position to win out there. We like Cooke and this is a smart hire from Spielberg — let’s just hope that he can find a way of making the source material anything other than a terrible, rotten example of 2015 pop culture’s obsession with nostalgia at the expense of creating anything new. The movie will open on December 15th, 2017.