Gugu Mbatha-Raw has signed on to star alongside the previously announced Kevin Hart in upcoming Netflix action-thriller Lift.
Vincent D’Onofrio, Billy Magnussen, and Yun Jee Kim round out the cast of the film, which will be directed by F. Gary Gray (Straight Outta Compton, The Fate Of The Furious) from a script written by Dan Kunka.
Netflix landed the rights to the film last year, which will see Hart play a master thief who is wooed by his ex-girlfriend and the FBI to pull off an impossible heist with his international crew on a 777 flying from London to Zurich.
Per Deadline, Mbatha-Raw beat out a number of actresses for the role, which had become one of the more coveted parts for young female stars in recent weeks.
Hart will produce Lift via his HartBeat Productions alongside Brian Smiley, while Simon Kinberg and Audrey Chon will do the same for Genre Pictures, as will Matt Reeves and Adam Kassan for 6th & Idaho. The latter recently produced The Batman, while Genre Pictures’ series Invasion just finished its first season on Apple TV+.
This project is under Hart and HartBeat Productions’ creative partnership with Netflix, which was signed in January 2021. The company and streamer are also currently in production on comedy film Me Time, which will star Mark Wahlberg and Regina Hall.
This will be Mbatha-Raw’s first film role since 2020, as her recent projects have been on the TV side of things. She has a key supporting role in the Disney+ Marvel series Loki, starred in four-part thriller series The Girl Before for BBC and HBO in December, and will soon be seen playing the lead in Veronica West‘s Apple TV+ psychological thriller series Surface.
Surface will arrive this summer. There’s currently no word on when Lift will enter production.
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