‘Blade Runner 2099’ Lands Michelle Yeoh

Amazon’s Blade Runner series is still kicking, and with the casting of Michelle Yeoh in the lead role, that’s not an understatement.

Prime Video has cast Academy Award-winning actress Michelle Yeoh as the lead in Blade Runner 2099, the upcoming TV series sequel to both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. While plot details remain scarce, Variety reports that “Yeoh will play a character named Olwen, described as a replicant near the end of her life.”

Blade Runner 2099 was announced in 2021 by Ridley Scott, the director of the classic sci-fi noir from 1982. Set in Los Angeles in 2019, Blade Runner stars Harrison Ford as Deckard, a former “blade runner” who specializes in hunting bioengineered humanoids known as replicants—extremely convincing human clones programmed with a short lifespan. Though replicants have become illegal on Earth, they’re still used for labor on off-world colonies. When several replicants escape their colonies and appear in Los Angeles, Deckard is dragged out of retirement to find and kill them, but the mission becomes an existential reckoning when Deckard falls for a replicant named Rachael (Sean Young). Ford reprised his role opposite Ryan Gosling in the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Silka Luisa is the showrunner and executive producer of Blade Runner 2099, which is presumably set another 50 years on from the previous film. Luisa was also the showrunner and creator of the Apple TV+ limited series Shining Girls, starring Elisabeth Moss, and she previously worked on the Halo series for Paramount+.

(featured image: Lionel Hahn, Getty Images)

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Britt Hayes

Britt Hayes (she/her) is an editor, writer, and recovering film critic with over a decade of experience. She has written for The A.V. Club, Birth.Movies.Death, and The Austin Chronicle, and is the former associate editor for ScreenCrush. Britt's work has also been published in Fangoria, TV Guide, and SXSWorld Magazine. She loves film, horror, exhaustively analyzing a theme, and casually dissociating. Her brain is a cursed tomb of pop culture knowledge.