No Time to Die's Billy Magnussen lands role in Disney's Lilo & Stitch remake
No Time to Die star Billy Magnussen has been cast in the upcoming remake of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch.
The actor, who played CIA agent Logan Ash in the most recent James Bond film, has joined the cast for the live-action adaptation of the 2002 animation, according to Deadline, which is being directed by Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On).
The other members of the cast include newcomer Maia Kealoha, who will play the young Hawaiian girl, whilst Zach Galifianakis was cast in a currently undisclosed role; Magnussen’s role is also unknown.
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The original film depicted the titular duo who bond after the latter, an extra-terrestrial creature named Experiment 626, crash lands on Earth without a clue where he is. After meeting Lilo, he is renamed Stitch and gradually acclimated to Hawaiian culture.
Chris Sanders, who co-directed the original film alongside Dean DeBlois, revealed last year he was “frustrated” by the praise afforded to fellow Disney film Frozen for its prominent themes of sisterhood, which he said were featured in Lilo & Stitch over a decade earlier.
“To be clear, I think Frozen [is] great,” he said. “But it was a little bit frustrating for me because people were like, 'Finally, a non-romantic relationship with these two girls,' and I thought, 'We did that! That has absolutely been done before'.”
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Lilo & Stitch isn’t the only Disney animation that is getting a live-action adaptation, with The Little Mermaid set to be released next month and Moana being announced in recent weeks.
“As you know, Hawai’i means so much to my family and me and the traditions of our ‘Ohana or ‘aiga', as we say in Samoa, were shaped by these incredible islands,” said lead star Dwayne Johnson about Moana. “The pacific islands and their cultures inspired a very special story.”
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