Despite spending the last few months trying to find someone better, Steven Spielberg has settled on Tye Sheridan to play the lead in his adaptation of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. This comes from The Hollywood Reporter, which notes that Sheridan was the production’s top choice for the part earlier this month, but Spielberg and Warner Bros. continued searching and even resorted to an open casting call on the Ready Player One website.
Now that it’s official, Sheridan will be playing Wade Watts, a kid who is so good at ‘80s references that he becomes the hero of a virtual world called Oasis. He’ll be joining Olivia Cooke and Ben Mendelsohn, who are playing the female lead and the villain (respectively). Sheridan’s next film role will be as Cyclops in X-Men: Apocalypse, which means he’ll soon have both a superhero movie and a Spielberg movie under his belt. That’s not bad for a kid who isn’t even old enough to drink.