The Mortal Kombat reboot cast continues to grow as Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, and Lewis Tan join the ranks. McNamee and Lawson have been cast two play two iconic characters in the Mortal Kombat franchise and Tan will arrive on the scene in a still-unannounced role, fresh off his work on Netflix's Wu Assassins.
According to Deadline, McNamee will play Sonya Blade while Lawson is taking on the role of Kano. In the Mortal Kombat game, Sonya is a female soldier and member of a special unit known as Outer World Investigation Agency. Meanwhile, Kano is a menacing member of the Black Dragon clan with his cybernetic eye and bulging muscles. Both characters have been included in the vast array of Mortal Kombat characters since the game's early days.
As a resident Australian, McNamee got her start on the popular soap Home & Away. Today, she is best known to a wider audience for her roles in 2017's Battle of the Sexes, starring Emma Roberts and Steve Carell, as well as 2018's shark disaster movie The Meg starring Jason Statham. Fellow Aussie Lawson has been scooping up onscreen roles since the late '90s, with more recent and recognizable turns in supporting roles on series like Showtime's House of Lies and NBC's Superstore. To date, neither McNamee nor Lawson have taken on roles in a project of this size or one that is so firmly rooted within the action genre.
While McNamee and Lawson get most of the shine here because we know who they're actually playing, it would be an error of the highest order to not talk about Tan. The actor broke out with his role on AMC's Into the Badlands before moving on to roles in Deadpool 2 and Wu Assassins. Tan is a trained martial artist, too, which will no doubt be beneficial to his role in this reboot.
Plot details about the Mortal Kombat reboot are still being kept under wraps, so it's unclear if it will bear any resemblance to the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie starring Christopher Lambert. McNamee, Lawson, and Tan join an already strong cast which includes Power Rangers actor Ludi Lin, The Raid's Joe Taslim, and Supergirl's Mehcad Brooks. The movie is expected to arrive in theaters on March 5, 2021.
