Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Malkovich are teaming up for a film that may hit a bit too close to home.
The 43-year-old ‘The Tudors’ star and the 67-year-old iconic ‘Being’ actor John Malkovich recently wrapped shooting on their new disaster-related feature, The Survivalist, which centres around the fall of a society a year-and-a-half after a virus outbreak.
Rhys Meyers plays a former FBI agent who finds himself on the run from a psychopath and his gang of hunters played by Malkovich while trying to save a young girl who is immune from the virus.
The movie, which wrapped filming in the Tri-state area recently, is being produced by Yale Productions, with horror movie fanatic Jon Keeyes as director and an original script by Matthew Rogers.
Jordan Yale Levine and Jordan Beckerman of Yale Productions who most recently released Chick Fight with Bella Thorne, Malin Akerman and Alec Baldwin released a statement about the project.
‘We’re thrilled and honoured to be working with screen legends John Malkovich and Jonathan Rhys Meyers on The Survivalist, an exhilarating, timely and action-packed feature film with stellar performances,’ said Levine.
The news of the upcoming film comes just a month after Irish-born actor Rhys Meyers was charged with a DUI in Malibu on November 8, after getting into a minor crash.
The Match Point star was the only one in the car and failed a field sobriety test, causing him to be arrested and briefly jailed before release.
Not his first run-in with the law, he was detained at LAX in 2018 following a verbal dispute with his wife Mara Lane over an e-cigarette, though both she and officers maintained that no crime was committed.
A history of alcohol abuse, most recently he relapsed in 2017 following his wife’s miscarriage though she called him, ‘the strongest person I know,’ while adding, ‘He has been able to turn any ugliness and hurt in his life into art.’
Also pushing past hard times, Malkovich was swindled out of his nearly $50M life savings in the 2008 Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, that affected a handful of Hollywood heavyweights including Kevin Bacon, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Larry King.
Eventually getting $670K back in return investments after the scammer’s firm was liquidated the New Pope actor told Vanity Fair in 2013, ‘In all honesty, it was a good life lesson,’ as he said it made him work harder while adjusting his perspective.
‘I had to do more work that paid for a number of years and work all the time. I think it kind of reconnected me to how most people live all the time. And, unlike a lot of people that were involved in the Madoff thing, I could just go back to work, and it was fine,’ he cooly said.
The pair’s latest venture The Survivalist has not been given a release date but is in post-production.
