Movies - Wrath of Man - Meet the main cast

By Mulder, 29 april 2021

Wrath of Manis an upcoming action thriller film written and directed by Guy Ritchie, based on the 2004 French film, Cash Truck by Nicolas Boukhrief. It is Ritchie's fourth directorial collaboration with lead actor Jason Statham, following Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Snatch (2000), and Revolver (2005).

Together, their early films redefined the action movie genre. Now, for the first time in more than 15 years, superstar Jason Statham and visionary director Guy Ritchie team up for the explosive revenge thriller Wrath of man. After a deadly ambush on one of its armored cars, Los Angeles-based Fortico Securities hires a mysterious new employee, Patrick Hill (Statham), who becomes known simply as “H.” As he learns the ropes from partner Bullet (Holt McCallany), H initially appears to be a quiet, keepyour- head down type simply there to do a job and earn a living. But when he and Bullet become the targets of an attempted robbery, H’s formidable skills are revealed. Not only is he an expert marksman who’s equally adept at hand-to-hand combat, but H is also fearless, ruthless and lethal.

H (Jason Statham)
No one plays a tough guy like Jason Statham. The English actor has built a career bringing hardcharging, vengeful men to the screen in such films as The Transporter, Crank, The Expendables and The Mechanic, among many others. He also happens to have a remarkable facility for comedy—this is an actor who has a way with a deadpan one-liner and even sent up his actionmovie persona in the 2015 movie Spy. Yet Wrath of Man challenged Statham to portray an exceptionally menacing character, a father hollowed-out by grief who nevertheless retains his ability to assuredly navigate a criminal underworld. “He’s cold, intelligent, focused and driven,” says Ritchie of the character, who spirals into obsession as he searches for those responsible for his son’s murder. Still, the pain that drives him is entirely relatable. “I see him as a complicated guy who above everything is a father,” says Statham, who has one young son, Jack, with his wife, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley. “Even though I became a father quite late in the game, I feel everything rotates around that in my life. So, to have it removed is an unimaginable sort of horror to deal with. You wonder how you would come back from losing a son or a daughter, as it seems unimaginable. These are conversations I had with Guy regarding my character.” The rapport that Ritchie and Statham had established in their earliest days of working together served them well, as they shared the same perspectives on both the character of H and the film itself. Despite having not worked together for well over a decade, they easily fell back into a productive creative rhythm. “We have both come a long way since we started working together over 20 years ago,” Statham says. “What you really want to do in a situation like this is see if anything has changed, but the truth is that it hasn’t. I fell in love with this profession thanks to a lottery ticket that Guy handed me called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.” “He doesn’t look like he’s aged a day which is the other strange thing,” Ritchie adds of the actor. “I don’t know what he’s up to. He’s still in great physical nick.”

Bullet (Holt McCallany)

To build out a powerhouse ensemble of actors around Statham, Ritchie turned to some of the most gifted talents working today Chief among them was Holt McCallany, most recently seen in David Fincher’s acclaimed FBI profiling drama Mindhunter. McCallany plays Bullet, a former soldier and a Fortico Securities employee who takes an immediate liking to H. Determined to show the newbie the ropes, Bullet introduces H to the rest of the crew and partners with him to help him learn the ins and outs of the armored truck company’s daily schedules. “He’s generally an extroverted and gregarious guy, but he’s dissatisfied with his life and his prospects since leaving the military,” McCallany says of the character. McCallany took an immediate liking to Bullet, noting that he saw the character as “charming and fun-loving” with “a great sense of humor.” But the actor also homed in on a connection to an action movie icon that had a profound personal pull. “When I was a boy, my favorite actor was Steve McQueen,” McCallany says. “My mom was an actress who had [worked] with his first wife, a lady named Neile Adams. They would occasionally come by, and I would get to meet Steve. I just thought that Steve was the coolest actor in the world, and his film Bullitt is the one that critics often described as capturing his star quality more than any of his other films. So, in the back of my mind, I’m reading this, and I’m thinking of it as an homage to Steve McQueen.” At first, neither H nor Bullet realizes that the other is operating with a secret agenda—though Bullet begins to harbor suspicions about his new partner after they encounter a group of would be robbers who plan to steal cash from the armored car they’re driving. “Bullet has a lot of admiration and respect for H because H is clearly a very talented and a very capable kind of a guy,” McCallany says. “When he foils an attempted robbery, Bullet gets a glimpse of not only his ability as a fighter but also his resourcefulness and the way that he responds under pressure. He is very impressive. But at the same time, this causes Bullet to begin to become a little bit suspicious of him: Why is it that such a talented guy who is so together has found himself in this relatively low-paying security job? Bullet begins to ask himself whether there is a little more than meets the eye to H?”

Jackson (Jeffrey Donovan)

Every antihero needs a worthy foil. In Wrath of Man , that character is Jeffrey Donovan’s Jackson. But Jackson is not a conventional movie bad guy—he’s a veteran, a husband and a father of two who is desperate to earn a living to care for his family yet left with little recourse to do so. Notably, thanks to the script’s innovative, perspective-shifting structure, Jackson’s identity and his motives until the film’s nail-biting third-act. “A bad break in Afghanistan caused him to be discharged dishonorably, which means he’s pretty much a felon, and he can’t make a living,” explains Donovan, known to audiences for his role in the 2020 film Let Him Go and for his work on television series including Fargo and Burn Notice. “He has to make ends meet in any way he can. He’s a highly skilled soldier, but there’s not a lot of jobs for soldiers without weapons. So, he comes up with an idea to start knocking over cash trucks. He thinks it’s a victimless crime.” To help him in his scheme, he recruits many of the soldiers he led during their tours of duty in the Middle East. “These guys all served together in the same unit,” Donovan says. “Jackson was their sergeant. They’ll do anything for him, and he’ll do anything for them. They don’t want to kill anybody. They don’t want to hurt anybody. They’re just trying to provide for their families. “These are insured cash trucks—[the guys on Jackson’s crew all look at it like] we’re just taking money from the banks. They’ll get reimbursed. “Every criminal thinks they’re not a criminal, and Jackson’s no different,” Donovan continues. “I think that he has a lot more honor than most people, the way he treats his crew and treats the victims in the heist. But with any good plan, it just goes horribly wrong, and the stakes just keep getting higher. He’s got to up his game—and that’s when shit happens.”

Boy Sweat Dave (Josh Hartnett)

One of the colorful complement of Fortico employees, Boy Sweat Dave arguably has the distinction of the film’s most unforgettable moniker. “What I’ve noticed about all of Guy’s films is that people tend to use each other’s names a lot on screen, and so the names have to be memorable,” offers actor Josh Hartnett. “I like that. I think it’s funny. That’s one of the signatures of a Guy Ritchie film.” Although Hartnett had not previously worked with Ritchie, he has much more than a passing familiarity with the action genre, having starred in such films as Black Hawk Down and Sin City over the course of his two-plus decade career. He easily found his footing in his Wrath of Man role. “He’s a wannabe antagonist toward H, but he’s someone who maybe is a little too comedic to be taken seriously,” says the actor of his screen alter-ego. “To scare other people off, he barks a lot more than he bites, and H obviously doesn’t respond to that. That’s why Boy Sweat gets sort of remanded to the background.” To inhabit the character more fully, Hartnett invented a rich backstory for Boy Sweat Dave before filming began. “My idea of Dave is that he wanted to be in the military but wasn’t able to for a multitude of reasons, mostly his temperament,” Hartnett says. “Then he moved out to Los Angeles to be an actor, and he found himself not being very good at that either. He thought he could employ both of those mentalities in a job like this where he gets to pretend like he’s tough but really, he’s a kid who grew up without a father who just wants to prove himself to everyone around.”

Dana (Niamh Algar)

Dana is the only woman working in the hyper-masculine confines of Fortico, but it’s an environment in which she’s learned to become comfortable, according to Irish actress Niamh Algar (Raised by Wolves). “I think Dana has always been a woman in a man’s world,” says Algar. “For me, I built this backstory that she grew up with a lot of brothers—hence she is able to take on all these lads within the team. She’s strong-willed and she’s quick and she can give back just as well as she takes. She’s part of this family of misfit guards. She’s got this tough exterior, but inside, she’s quite fragile and damaged.” When H arrives, she finds herself drawn to the new driver—but their relationship takes an unpredictable turn. “When H first comes onto the crew, it’s almost like he’s a new little toy to play with,” Algar says. “She sees this English lad and is quite taken by him. I think she is quite intrigued to find out a bit more about him because he is quite mysterious and guarded. She develops this relationship with him that becomes slightly romantic and from there finds out a lot more about him that she wished she hadn’t.”

Jan (Scott Eastwood)

There’s only one way to describe Scott Eastwood’s Jan: “Dangerous,” the actor says. “Very dangerous. He’s a hot head, very unpredictable.” Unquestionably the least trustworthy member of Jackson’s team, Jan is unabashed about his hunger for wealth and status, a trait that Eastwood chose to emphasize through the look that was developed for the character. “I wanted Jan to be flashy, to be very into his appearance and into his stuff, into things,” says the actor, known for his roles in such films as Pacific Rim: Uprising, The Fate of the Furious and Fury. “Guy wanted to roughen me up a little bit, so we decided to do a prosthetic scar and a contact lens that is specifically painted to create sort of a milky eye. I wear that for the entire film.” Eastwood was especially excited to perform the impressive array of stunts the film required: “It’s an action movie. We’re running around carrying guns, shooting people, fighting bad guys, fighting good guys. I’m a pretty active guy so stunts are fun for me. I think that’s probably where I excel.” Like all the characters who make up the rich tapestry of players in Wrath of Man , Jan’s hardly a run-of-the-mill gangster—even if he is involved in much of the film’s gun play. “The interesting thing about Guy Ritchie’s films is he loves to explore these criminal underworlds, but all the characters have their own flaws, their own issues,” Eastwood says. “They’re all going through something. You relate to the characters. Even if some of them might have done terrible things that you can’t relate to, you can relate to parts of them. It makes the films interesting because things aren’t black and white.”

Terry (Eddie Marsan)

The manager of the armored car depot, Terry is the hub around which all the drivers orbit. He assigns routes and monitors transactions—and in the wake of the robbery that opens the film, “He has a heightened sense of security and fear about losing another one of his drivers,” says actor Eddie Marsan, a veteran of several of Ritchie’s films dating to 2009’s Sherlock Holmes. “H comes in to the depot and at first seems very efficient and very calm, but Terry is very aware of the fact that there is something not quite right. He thinks that H is too dangerous in the sense that he wouldn’t follow procedure if there’s a robbery, that he would try to fend off the robbers. Terry worries about that because it is against procedure and he could lose another driver.” As it happens, Terry’s instincts prove entirely correct—though he certainly doesn’t need to fear for H’s safety. H can handle any situation he finds himself in. By contrast, Terry doesn’t exhibit that same sort of machismo, but that was fine with Marsan. “In a film that’s very alpha male, full of all these guys running around in bulletproof vests and armor, the guy in the office who is worried is quite an interesting character for me to play,” he says.

Synopsis :
A mysterious and wild-eyed new cash truck security guard (Jason Statham) surprises his coworkers during a heist in which he unexpectedly unleashes precision skills. The crew is left wondering who he is and where he came from. Soon, the marksman’s ultimate motive becomes clear as he takes dramatic and irrevocable steps to settle a score.

Wrath of Man
Directed by Guy Ritchie
Produced by Ivan Atkinson, Bill Block, Andrew Golov
Written by Guy Ritchie and Ivan Atkinson & Marn Davies
Based on Le Convoyeur (Cash Truck) Written by Nicolas Boukhrief and Éric Besnard and Directed by Nicolas Boukhrief
Starring Jason Statham, Scott Eastwood, Holt McCallany, Jeffrey Donovan, Laz Alonso, Post Malone, Josh Hartnett
Music by Chris Benstead
Cinematography : Alan Stewart
Production companies : Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Miramax
Distributed by United Artists Releasing (United States), Lionsgate (United Kingdom), Metropolitan FilmExport (France)
Release date : May 7, 2021 (USA), June 15, 2021 (France)

(Source : productions notes)