Michelle Yeoh will play a replicant on Amazon's Blade Runner TV show
By Dan Selcke
Michelle Yeoh has been an icon for decades, but lately she's been an extremely busy icon. Between winning an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, appearing in the Star Trek universe (she's headlining her own spinoff movie called Section 31), headlining The Witcher: Blood Origin, and starring in the Disney show American Born Chinese, it's like she's trying to fit in a career's worth of work into a few years. Considering how compelling she is onscreen, it's hard to complain.
Now, Variety reports that Yeoh will play a lead role in Blade Runner 2099, a new show set in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner universe. She'll play Olwen, a replicant near the end of her life. A replicant is a bioengineered person that is almost indistinguishable from a real human being, expect that they have super strength and intelligence. They're robot people, basically, and they're often treated as property by this far-future society. In the first Blade Runner movie from 1984, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunts down a rogue group of replicants. In the sequel movie Blade Runner 2049, made in 2017, we find out that replicants can produce biologically, which was previously thought impossible.
What new developments await us in 2099? It's hard to say; plot developments are being kept under wraps, although whatever they are I'm betting Yeoh will make the most of them.
The mood of the Blade Runner franchise is brainy and dreary; Blade Runner is one of the classic sci-fi dystopias. Meanwhile, Yeoh is a veteran of the Star Trek universe, one of the classic sci-fi utopias. She's done it all at this point, and I expect Blade Runner 2099 to be yet another feather in her cap, whenever it comes out on Amazon Prime Video. It looks like early days, so we shouldn't expect to see actual episodes for at least a year yet.
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