'Snake Eyes' Movie Casts 'The Expanse' Actor As Title Character's Father

Hey, remember Snake Eyes? No, not the Nicolas Cage movie. The G.I. Joe character who never takes his mask off and rarely speaks? I'd totally forgotten about this, but Paramount is giving that character his own spin-off film, with Crazy Rich Asians and Last Christmas star Henry Golding playing the lead role. Well, today the Snake Eyes movie cast recruited one more actor: Steven Allerick (The Expanse) has been hired to play Snake Eyes' father. Get hyped, people – we're about to see Big Daddy Snake Eyes in the flesh!

Deadline brings word about the new addition to the cast. Personally, I've never heard of Steven Allerick, but the dude has been kicking around for years with bit parts in things like Star Trek: Enterprise, Fear the Walking Dead, Jane the Virgin, S.W.A.T., and Extant. This role seems like the biggest opportunity yet for him to make an impression on a large scale, but there's no word about how big of a part this will be. It seems likely that we'll see this character in flashbacks because A) Allerick doesn't seem that much older than Golding (strangely, I couldn't find his age anywhere online), so it might be weird to see them standing side by side as father and son, and B) in the previous G.I. Joe movies, Snake Eyes was abandoned as a 10-year-old, so it stands to reason that this film may fill in some of those gaps between his birth and that abandonment. Deadline also says that Snake Eyes' father was murdered, and Snake Eyes spends some of this movie hunting the man who killed him.

Not much is known about Snake Eyes' past, but in the previous G.I. Joe films (which I'm assuming are still being considered canon for this spin-off's purposes), he's depicted as a street-savvy scavenger who gains favor with the Arashikage ninja clan and meets his sworn arch-enemy, a fellow ninja named Storm Shadow. Here's their first meeting from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, just to jog your memory:

Through a series of complicated reveals and intricately choreographed fights across two movies, the two face off several times but eventually come to an understanding and join together to defeat a common enemy. I still think it would be a mistake to cast someone as charismatic as Henry Golding to play a guy who hardly ever speaks, but what do I know?

The new film will be directed by Robert Schwentke (RED, Flightplan) and is set to co-star Samara Weaving as Scarlett, Ursula Corbero as The Baroness, Iko Uwais as the Hard Master, and Andrew Koji as Storm Shadow. Snake Eyes hits theaters on October 16, 2020.