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Lewis Hamilton

Hamilton-produced F1 film casts KEY role

Damson Idris has been cast alongside Brad Pitt in the upcoming Apple Studios production

Chris Deeley

Saturday 8 April 2023 16:30

Rising star Damson Idris has been cast alongside Brad Pitt in an upcoming film based around Formula 1, which Lewis Hamilton is a producer on.

The Apple Studios production is helmed by Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer, with Pitt playing an older driver coming out of retirement to mentor a young racer – presumably Idris.

The film's producers have been casting the key role for the best part of six months, and Deadline report that they even had some of the hopefuls get behind the wheel to show that they can handle themselves on the track.

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Kosinski famously had actors in real fighter jets when filming the wildly popular Top Gun: Maverick, and apparently intends to do similar with F1 cars in this new venture.

Hamilton's role

With a busy schedule as one of the leading drivers in the world, it would be understandable if Hamilton's role in the production was fairly hands-off, but the 38-year-old has spoken about his involvement in the casting of the role Idris has won.

"We're going through a process right now of selecting the character that will be alongside Brad, which is exciting," Hamilton said earlier in the year.

"Basically that's the process of watching (the auditions). We have recordings of them doing certain scenes and we got through it. I've have sat in the office with Jerry and Joe and Brad, and we've been watching them and kind of given our inputs and what we think.

"Right now, we’ve still got the script. We’ve gone through quite a few different iterations of it. We're still waiting for a new rewrite, and that's the whole process. But I was doing that throughout Christmas. I'm excited to get the next end of the script. I was talking to Brad last night about the characters that we have coming."