Sterling K. Brown is a busy man in a very enviable position, spending the hiatus between seasons of the hit TV show he's on, This Is Us, bouncing back and forth between Atlanta and Vancouver to film his roles in the Marvel movie BLACK PANTHER and director Shane Black's THE PREDATOR, an "inventive sequel" to 1987's PREDATOR.
Of course, these high profile projects are shrouded in secrecy, so Brown can say very little about them. When Entertainment Weekly caught up with him and asked him about THE PREDATOR, all Brown could offer is that
Shane has his whole take on it and it’s very different than the original Predator. It’s got a really wicked sense of humor to it, which I love about it. And it’s got a real camaraderie amongst the main characters that I think folks will be attracted to. That’s pretty much all I can say."
That doesn't give us a whole lot of information, but Brown made up for the secrecy by telling an amusing story about being "the new Bill Duke":
I’m a huge fan of Predator, and, of course, everybody loves Jesse the Body and Arnold and Carl Weathers and Bill Duke. My friends at Stanford used to tease me — being the dark-skinned African-American man that I am — they’d say, ‘Yo, man, you’re going to start getting all [those] Bill Duke roles when you get older.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t look anything like Bill Duke, you guys can kiss my ass.’ So then I booked this movie and I told them and they’re like, ‘Dude, do you even realize that you’re now Bill Duke???’ And I had to go tell them to kiss my ass all over again."
Brown co-stars in THE PREDATOR with Boyd Holbrook, Jacob Tremblay, Yvonne Strahovski, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Trevante Rhodes, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey, and Edward James Olmos. Arnold Schwarzenegger was offered the chance to reprise his PREDATOR role in the sequel but turned it down.
Written by Shane Black and his THE MONSTER SQUAD collaborator Fred Dekker, THE PREDATOR is scheduled for release on February 9, 2018.