While he’s currently hard at work directing Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, David Yates is also putting the finishing touches to The Legend of Tarzan, the latest live-action take on this iconic character. However, the movie is going to come up with a more original tale.
Rather than retelling Tarzan’s origin story, Legend finds John Clayton III, Lord Greystoke, a decade removed from his home in the Congo and fully entrenched as a British gentleman in 1880s Victorian London, with his beloved wife Jane (Margot Robbie) now by his side.
While the movie is going to explore his early days in flashbacks, Tarzan is eventually forced to return to the Congo when Jane and some of his other friends are put in serious danger.
“It’s almost the opposite of the classic tale, where it’s about taming the beast,” explains Skarsgård. “This is about a man who’s holding back and slowly as you peel off the layers, he reverts back to a more animalistic state and lets that side of his personality out.”
Jane is also going to be a major part of The Legend of Tarzan, though Yates promises that this take on the character is, “in no way a passive partner to Tarzan. She’s a really strong, assertive, beautifully knowledgeable, very sexy modern woman who can more than look after herself. In a way, it’s a story of two human beings and how they save each other.”
The Legend of Tarzan also stars Djimon Hounsou as Chief Mbonga, Samuel L. Jackson as George Washington Williams, and Christoph Waltz as the villainous Captain Leon Rom.
