Anthony Hopkins & Evan Rachel Wood to star in HBO’s Westworld

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

It was almost one year ago when we learned that HBO would be producing a pilot based on Michael Crichton's "Westworld", hailing from writers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and executive produced by J.J. Abrams and Jerry Weintraub. Now THR is reporting that SILENCE OF THE LAMBS star Anthony Hopkins and "True Blood's" Evan Rachel Wood have been tapped to star in "Westworld", which has formally been picked up to pilot.

Inspired by Michael Crichton's 1973 film of the same name, the drama is billed as…

…a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin.

The new HBO project marks the second series inspired by WESTWORLD, which starred Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin and James Brolin and introduced new digital visual techniques. The first, the short-lived 1980 drama "Beyond Westworld", was a continuation of both WESTWORLD and its movie sequel FUTUREWORLD.

Hopkins is set to play Dr. Robert Ford, the brilliant, taciturn and complicated creative director, chief programmer and chairman of the board of Westworld, who has an uncompromising creative vision for the park — and unorthodox methods of achieving it. Wood will portray Dolores Abernathy, the quintessential farm girl of the frontier West — who is about to discover that her entire idyllic existence is an elaborately constructed lie.

There's plenty of impressive talent involved in "Westworld", from Hopkins and Wood to J.J. Abrams and Jonathan Nolan, so I'd say that this one is already shaping up to be something worth keeping an eye on. We'll clue you guys in on more info on this one once we hear it.