Sony Pictures and director J.C. Chandor have cast Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) in the upcoming Marvel film Kraven The Hunter. She will take on the role of Calypso. It was previously rumored that Taylour Paige was going to get the role, but that obviously isn’t how the casting played out.
DeBose played Anita in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and she was awesome in it! She was one of my favorite parts of the movie and gave an incredible performance which ended up landing her a SAG award and it also landed her an Oscar nomination, which she’ll probably win as well.
For those of you not familiar with Calypso, she is a Voodoo priestess who has the abilities of mind control and resurrection. She also has a key role in Kraven getting his enhanced abilities and eventually becomes Kraven’s love interest. She was originally “a manipulator, taunting and making Kraven try to fulfill his own promises of hunting and killing Spider-Man, his arch-nemesis. She enjoyed when Kraven got angry and violent toward Spider-Man for her own reasons and prompted him to be in a rage as often as she could.”
Calypso was created by Denny O’Neil and Alan Weiss, and the character made her debut in 1980’s The Amazing Spider-Man #209. She’s a great character and it totally makes sense that she would be in the film with the history that she has with Kraven in the comics.
The movie also stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Fred Hechinger (White Lotus) as Kraven and Chameleon and it was recently reported that Russell Crowe might be taking on the role of their father, Nikolai Kravinoff.
The script for the film is being written by Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Iron Man). The initial draft of the script was written by Richard Wenk. Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach are producing the film.
Source: Deadline