What happens when you combine veteran director Steven Spielberg with a best-selling fan-favourite novel? Answer: a highly anticipated, big-screen adaptation of the dystopian science fiction novel Ready Player One. Ben Mendelsohn has been divulging a bit of insider information on his villainous character Nolan Sorrento.
Set in the not too distant future, in fact just 27 years from now, Ready Player One tells of a world in crisis with depleting fossil fuels and the devastating effects of Global Warming. To escape the decline their world is facing, people turn to the OASIS, a virtual reality simulator. Created by James Halliday who, when he died, had announced in his will to the public that he had left an Easter egg inside OASIS, and the first person to find it would inherit his entire fortune and the corporation. The story follows the adventures of Wade Watts, starting about five years after the announcement when he discovers one of the three keys pointing to the treasure.
In a recent interview with The Wrap, Mendelsohn admitted that Spielberg has given some of his actors a bit of a free reign in developing their characters so Mendelsohn has gone slightly off-piste vowing not to stay faithful to the book with his portrayal of Sorrento, a high-ranking official of an evil corporation and the head of the bounty hunters the Sixers.
“Anyone that’s coming at it wanting a faithful re-creation or transposing of the written Sorrento is not gonna get it. I would rarely do that because my feeling about written literature characters is you don’t get to better them. My basic preference is to just try and wipe that slate and to try and do it in context of what is going on around the film. I treat them as very different entities in that way.”
“I sort of see that stuff as playing a song live,”
“And part of the joy of playing a song live is re-interpreting it, or switching it up, or giving it a newness or an alternative. Because I think the books are their own kind of perfection, and I don’t try to fall short of them.”
Ready Player One, which is due for a March 20th, 2018 release also stars, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, Olivia Cooke, Mark Rylance and Tye Sheridan.
