Lashana Lynch has been cast in the sci-fi film Optimize.
The 36-year-old actress will star in the feature film from director Lindsey Anderson Beer.
The plot centers on an “average woman” who “utilizes an AI assistant to optimize all facets of her life, but soon finds that the AI’s pursuit of perfection comes at too high a cost.”
Paramount is making the movie with Beer’s Lab Brew banner as part of the director’s first-look deal with the studio.
Before entering the film industry, Beer studied artificial intelligence and robots at Stanford University — an experience that proved useful in developing Optimize, first as a short story and now as a feature.
Lynch can currently be seen as Rita Marley in the biopic Bob Marley: One Love and explained that she would have turned down the chance to play the wife of the late reggae legend if the Jamaican accents in the movie had been “watered down.”
The No Time To Die star told Collider: “There’s no other way to tell this story outside of being as authentic as possible to every inch of who Bob is right now, what he was, what he represents. Jamaica, especially Jamaica in the ‘70s, it’s just a special time, and a really important time in my culture’s history.
“So to have accents that were watered down, I mean, that’s one thing that I wouldn’t have signed up for at all. I’m of Jamaican heritage and it would have been against everything that I believed in if we just had a quote-unquote understandable Jamaican accent.
“I just think that’s wrong in every way. And I think it’s important for audiences to lean in with understanding narratives, understanding cultures and accents. It’s important, and it really doesn’t underestimate what audiences do. We shouldn’t be spoon-feeding them in any way, and the accents being as true as they can be was one way of doing it.”
