Having been announced back in May 2015, director James Gray’s (The Lost City of Z) “sci-fi epic” Ad Astra is gearing up to go into production this September, and Deadline is reporting that Tommy Lee Jones is in final talks to join Brad Pitt in the project.
According to the site, Pitt is set to play a slightly autistic space engineer who travels through the solar system in search of his father (Jones), a scientist who twenty years earlier set out on a one-way mission to Neptune in search of extraterrestrial life. It is described as having “a bit of Heart Of Darkness vibe, set in deep space.”
Pitt previously collaborated with director James Gray on The Lost City of Z, serving as a producer through his Plan B company. He had initially been expected to star in that film, and was earlier attached to Gray’s adaptation of The Gray Man, a project that failed to materialise.