Brad Pitt Assassin Movie 'Bullet Train' Casts Aaron Taylor-Johnson As "Tangerine"

Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Avengers: Age of Ultron) is about to step on a train...the only problem is that the train is full of assassins.

The former Kick-Ass star is the latest cast member to hop on board Sony's Bullet Train, an assassin film which has Oscar winner Brad Pitt headlining and former stuntman and Deadpool 2 director David Leitch behind the camera.

What's that, you ask? What is Taylor-Johnson's character's name going to be? I'm so glad you asked. According to a new report, he will playing a guy named Tangerine. So he's got that going for him, which is nice.

The Hollywood Reporter brings us the Bullet Train Aaron Taylor-Johnson casting news, with their sources telling them that Taylor-Johnson will be playing an assassin named Tangerine. What a world.

For the record, I'm into this movie's off-the-wall names. Brad Pitt is playing an American hitman named Ladybug, while Joey King, star of the Netflix romantic comedy franchise The Kissing Booth, will be playing "an unassuming teenaged assassin named Prince." It seems slightly odd that Pitt's Ladybug (again, a super fun assassin name) would be specifically called out as being American, while there's no mention of the nationalities of the other two characters. Does that mean King and Taylor-Johnson are playing non-Americans, or should we just assume that they're playing Yanks?

The movie is based on Kotaro Isaka's Japanese book Maria Beetle, which centers on multiple assassins with conflicting motivations boarding the same bullet train in Tokyo. English translations of the book are difficult to come by, but from what I've been able to glean from a cursory search, it seems like in the book, the character of Tangerine is actually twin brothers, one of whom is incredibly serious and has a penchant for classic literature, while the other is apparently brash and obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine. It's unclear whether those two characters are being condensed into one for this movie, or if Taylor-Johnson will be pulling double duty.

This will be Pitt's first film since winning his Academy Award for playing stuntman Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and it be the second time Pitt has worked with filmmaker David Leitch. In 2018, Pitt showed up for a couple of frames of Deadpool 2 as The Vanisher, an invisible hero who joins Deadpool's X-Force team and is immediately electrocuted and killed before the team's first mission even gets going. Zak Olkewicz, who wrote the upcoming movie adaptation of R.L. Stine's Fear Street, is writing the screenplay.