David Gyasi will make up the starring cast of 7 for a new BBC2 drama series titled White Heat, which is said to be an updated version of an older BBC drama serial, Our Friends In The North.
The cast was first announced earlier this summer, by BBC Two, but we missed it then; better late than never!
The seemingly intriguing, ambitious project will chart the lives of seven friends from 1965 through to the present day. Over the course of the series, the complex, volatile, life affirming and life changing relationships between the seven friends is explored the start, when they first met as a diverse group of young students to live as roommates in London's Tufnell Park: the rebel with a cause Jack (Sam Claflin), intelligent feminist Charlotte (Claire Foy), fragile beauty Lilly (MyAnna Buring), medical student Jay (Reece Ritchie), electronics enthusiast Alan (Lee Ingleby), big-hearted Orla (Jessica Gunning), law student Victor (David Gyasi).
The series follows them over four decades, their lives shaped by the political events of each era – from the death of Winston Churchill, the ascendancy of Magaret Thatcher, the end of the Cold War, etc, through the present-day.
A little big of info on 31-year old David Gyasi: a star of both stage and screen, he starred in the National Theatre production of War Horse, and also roles in the upcoming Tuskegee Airmen actioner Red Tails, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, and will play a character named Autua, opposite Tom Hanks and Jim Sturgess, he highly-anticipated Wachowski/Tykwer adaptation of David Mitchell's 2004 Booker Prize winning novel of the same name (the character Autua is the last of the Moriori tribesmen – the indigenous people of the Chatham Islands, a New Zealand territory who lived by a code of non-violence and passive resistance, which led to their near-extinction at the hands of Taranaki Māori invaders in the 1830s. Don't want to give away any of the plot; you'll just have to read the book, or wait to see the movie when it's released in 2012).
Filming on BBC2's White Heat begun in London over the summer, with an early 2012 debut expected.
So it looks like we'll likely be talking a lot about Mr Gyasi next year. Consider this your intro 🙂
Watch his acting showreel below:
