Shubhabrata Dutta
Toby Jones will shoot his next movie in Leeds, UK. Principal photography for ‘Mars Express,’ a biographical drama, will take place in Leeds starting this September. Mackenzie Crook will direct, based on a screenplay by Joe Bone.
The movie tells the true story of Colin and Judith Pillinger and their mission to find life on Mars in the late 1990s, known as the Beagle 2 mission. With no prior experience of building a spacecraft, the English farmers pulled together a team of misfits who took on NASA and almost won. Colin and his wife, Judith, also a scientist, toured conferences using a concept based on a model their daughter constructed in 1997 on her kitchen table in Cambridge. On 2 June 2003, Beagle 2 launched from Kazakhstan on ESA’s Mars Express. While the Mars landing was scheduled for Christmas Day 2003, after numerous failed attempts to establish contact, it was declared lost in February 2004. Then, in January 2015, a mere 7 months after Colin’s death, who died in May 2014, it was announced that the spacecraft had landed intact, with the first images being received by ESA from NASA even fewer months after Colin’s passing.
You know Toby Jones as Dobby from the ‘Harry Potter’ movies, you know him as Arnim Zola from the MCU’s ‘Captain America’ movies and ‘Agent Carter,’ you know him as Claudius Templesmith from the ‘Hunger Games’ movies, and you also know him as Percy Alleline from ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.’ Jones has been a fan favorite for years, if not decades, known for playing a wide range of roles, be it a dark one like Zola or a kind-hearted one like Dobby. His recent roles include Inspector Hewitt in Lance in BBC’s ‘Detectorists,’ Bharat Nalluri’s adventure movie ‘Flavia,’ Peter Faber in Season 2 of Apple TV+’s ‘Hijack,’ Iago in Tom Morris’s ‘Othello,’ and Alan Rusbridger in ITV’s crime drama series ‘The Hack.’
Mackenzie Crook, whom you may recognize as Ragetti from the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies and Orell from ‘Game of Thrones,’ will be making his feature directorial debut with ‘Mars Express.’ He previously worked with Jones as an actor in ‘Detectorists,’ playing Andy Stone.
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