Thanks to her fresh, funny and Golden Globe-awarded breakthrough performance in US TV drama Jane The Virgin, Gina Rodriguez has become less of a rising star and more of a shooting one. While she’s had several film roles and worked behind the scenes on a variety of shorts, she’s now in talks for what could be her most visible job yet, co-starring with Mark Wahlberg in **Deepwater Horizon.
Peter Berg recently took over directing the based-on reality drama, which charts the events on the BP oil rig in the 48 hours leading up to the 2010 disaster and the day itself. The behind-the-scenes tale will highlight stories of real-life heroism around the incident, which were not made public at the time but appeared in the script’s source material, the New York Times article titled 'Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hour'. The paper’s piece chronicled how 11 people were killed and 16 injured when the rig blew, and gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Wahlberg is aboard to play Mike Williams, the supervisor on the rig, while Rodriguez is in talks for the role of Andrea Fleytas, who had been operating the structure’s navigation equipment. As the disaster unfolded, she realised that no-one had issued a distress call, but after using the radio, she was reprimanded by her superiors.
With a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan, the film is scheduled to start shooting soon, with a September 30, 2016 US release date already on the books.