If you’re not familiar with David Jonsson, the British thespian who grew up in East London and came up through the English stage in the West End has been an immense talent on the rise ever since many critics and hopeless romantics discovered him in the deeply underrated romantic comedy Rye Lane(2023), directed by Raine Allen-Miller. Afterward Jonsson’s star rose fast in both prestige television where he is one of the leads on HBO ensemble series Industry, and genre cinema, including Alien: Romulus, which Jonsson starred in opposite Cailee Spaeny. Indeed, Jonsson was more or less the heart of that film where he played a synthetic android who was also something of an adopted brother of shifting loyalties to Spaeny’s space miner.
Yet the film that every genre fan should absolutely check out if they haven’t already is The Long Walk, a superb adaptation of the first novel Stephen King ever wrote, and also probably his angriest and most nihilistic. Directed by Francis Lawrence, written by J.T. Mollner, and starring Cooper Hoffman alongside Jonsson, the film was a forerunner to The Hunger Games and Battle Royale where it imagined a dystopian future in which young men are encouraged to volunteer (or sign up for a lottery) for a quasi-game show where they all must walk until their legs give out and are executed on live television. But the winner, we are promised, will get to live in luxury and have one wish granted. (In the original novel, it is all a not-so-subtle metaphor for the Vietnam War, which was still raging when King began the book in college).
Jonsson once again plays the emotional anchor of that film, here as Pete McVries, a fellow walker who befriends a group of young men on this journey into almost certain death, and the kid who might just save the life of Hoffman’s Ray Garraty. All three films—Rye Lane, Alien: Romulus, and especially The Long Walk—are worth checking out.
What Jonsson’s casting as the Black Panther means for the future of Wakanda, or for that matter Letitia Wright’s Shuri, who took up the Black Panther mask in Wakanda Forever, remains to be seen. To be clear, it was confirmed that Wright will be returning for Black Panther 3 as well. We’d assume she will still be the Black Panther when the film begins, although one cannot help but speculate this seems to be setting up Josnson taking the mantle.
Whatever happens, given the pedigree of Coogler’s continued involvement and the pure impressiveness of Jonsson’s casting, it would seem Marvel has another December to reign in, even after the mask of Doom has fallen.
Black Panther 3 opens on Dec. 15, 2028.
