Ariana DeBose will use her dancing skills to kick it up with Ke Huy Quan for the new action film from David Leitch and Kelly McCormick’s 87North.
Recently, Ke Huy Quan’s upcoming action film With Love announced that it has set a release date for February 7, 2025. The movie comes from Universal and 87North Productions. While the plot details have yet to be revealed, it has been announced that With Love is written by Luke Passmore and was based on an original script by Josh Stoddard & Matthew Murray. Former stunt performer and coordinator Jonathan Eusebio steps up as the director after having done second-unit directing on films like Violent Night, Deadpool 2, Black Panther, John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Deadline has now revealed that co-starring with Huy Quan in the film will be West Side Story‘s Ariana DeBose. DeBose recently starred in the sci-fi thriller I.S.S. and showed off a sliver of her action prowess in the recent spy-action-comedy Argylle from Matthew Vaughn. According to Deadline, “After attaching Huy Quan to the starring role, producers and studio execs wanted to make sure his co-star was the perfect, meeting with a number of female actors for the highly-coveted part. Once DeBose got wind of the meetings, she became super aggressive in chasing the role ultimately landing after chem test with Huy Quan, that blew execs away.”
87North’s David Leitch and Kelly McCormick recently shared their excitement for producing the project with their stunt peer, Eusebio, helming the film. The duo were blown away by Huy Quan’s martial arts skills, “What was a lot of discovery for us, he has some action chops because he’d worked with Corey Yuen’s team for a while in the past. He’s done quite a bit of fight action, obviously even before Everything Everywhere All at Once. It was really about like, there was an assessment phase with the guys, and they were all just like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing.’ The aptitude’s already here, so let’s take it to the next level. I think it was just sort of like tweaking him to the next level and really finding the character in the action. That’s what they were unpacking.” McCormick then shares, “He also has a really amazing glasses move that I can’t really tell you about [Kelly and David laugh] where his spectacles like fly and then land. He does it naturally in like IRL, and we’re gonna take advantage of that superpower.”
