Ten years after David Cronenberg’s 2007 gangster film Eastern Promises was released in theaters, the sequel is finally being produced. According to Consequence of Sound, a casting notice for Body Cross (a.k.a. Eastern Promises 2) was released in London, and the movie will begin filming in March. Though Cronenberg’s involvement in the feature is unclear, the screenwriter Steven Knight, who is behind the current Tom Hardy vehicle Taboo, is fully onboard. In an interview with IndieWire back in 2014, Knight said that he had already written Body Cross, and “I can say the script for the second one is much better that the first. Honestly, it’s one of the things I’ve written that I most like and it’s driving me mad … so I’ve got to get it made.†Here’s the description of the sequel as posted on the casting notice:
The sequel picks up where the 2007 film left off — with the incompetent underboss Kirill thinking that he and his henchman driver Nikolai really have inherited the throne from his crime-lord father, without knowing that Nikolai is actually a clandestine agent working undercover in Russia’s federal security service.
Since the description includes Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), it can be assumed that both actors are onboard. Mortensen’s performance in the 2007 movie earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Whether Mortensen will reprise the famous nude fight scene this time around is anyone’s guess.