Maya Hawke is trading Hawkins for a fantasy multiverse, joining the live-action Magic: The Gathering movie that Legendary Entertainment and Hasbro Entertainment are building from the hit card game, Deadline reports.
Her character has not been revealed, but the part is a key one in a cast expected to have an ensemble feel. Most roles in the film will be filled through auditions. Hawke was the exception: the producers made landing her a priority and put the first offer in front of her.
Matt Johnson, the filmmaker behind BlackBerry, is directing and shares the script with Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald. The movie is meant to launch a wider Magic: The Gathering universe across film and television for the two companies.
Magic: The Gathering arrived in 1993 and grew into one of the best-selling games in the world. Players duel with decks of collectible cards as Planeswalkers, spell-casters who jump between fantasy worlds, so the filmmakers have more than three decades of characters, creatures and settings to pull from. Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes the game, is producing with Legendary and Hasbro. No release date has been set.
Most viewers know Hawke as Robin Buckley on Stranger Things, and she voiced Anxiety in Pixar’s Inside Out 2. Her next trip to the big screen is much closer: she plays Wiress in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, opening November 20, and Trevor Decker News readers can revisit the film’s trailer coverage here.