As a dedicated player of the Uncharted games, I was one of the people saying Tom Holland was the wrong choice to play treasure hunter Nathan Drake. He’s too young (or, he looks too young), and while there are storylines in the wildly popular games that follow Nate when he’s a teenager, that seemed like a strange place to start the story. However, Holland has taken to his Instagram account to share the first look at his version of Nate from the upcoming Uncharted movie, and OK, that looks right.
Tom Holland reportedly has wrapped filming on Uncharted, with the film taking over locations in Berlin and Spain to achieve the globe-trotting appeal that makes the games so alluring. The weird bit of casting Twister is that original Nathan Drake star Mark Wahlberg has taken on a different role in the project. He will play Nate’s mentor and partner-in-crime, Sully.
For a while, Mark Wahlberg was pursuing an adaptation of Uncharted that would have put him in the lead role as the puzzle-solving treasure seeker. And that might have been a good fit (even with director David O. Russell at the helm). Fans, of course, lobbied really hard for Drake dead-ringer Nathan Fillion to land the part. The actor even participated in a fan film, and it looked so damn cool.
Let’s hop back to Tom Holland’s Uncharted movie. This will be a prequel to the stories that we see in the popular Sony Playstation games, featuring a younger Nate on a mission. As mentioned, Mark Wahlberg is moving up the ranks to play Sully, while Antonio Banderas has been tapped to play the movie’s villain. As part of this reveal, Naughty Dog also shared a photo of Holland alongside Nolan North, the actor who plays Nathan Drake in the games.
If you are unfamiliar with the Uncharted games, they play like a modernized Indiana Jones adventure, with Nathan Drake often finding maps or icons that send him off on wild adventures to unearth historical artifacts and untapped treasures. Similar to Nathan Fillion, Drake is a sarcastic fly in the ointment, and looking the part can only be the first step for Tom Holland. Can he pull off the devil-may-care attitude that makes Nate beloved? Physically, he seems up to the challenge, but now we will wait for footage to see what tone director Ruben Fleischer nails in the Uncharted movie.
Uncharted also has been one of those movies that suffered fits and starts before finally rolling into production, though these had nothing to do with COVID-19 (though yes, this movie did pause its production thanks to the pandemic). Scripts made the rounds and actors flirted with the parts before Sony fashioned it into a vehicle for Tom Holland. Currently, Uncharted is looking at a July 16, 2021 released date, though you might want to write that in pencil, and then keep checking our release date calendar to see how projects have shifted.
