Rodrigo Lands a Villainous Role on HBO’s “Westworld”

Rodrigo Santoro is heading west(world)

The 38-year-old Brazilian actor has landed a villainous role on HBO’s Westworld.

Rodrigo Santoro

Santoro joins the Anthony Hopkins– and Evan Rachel Wood-starrer, which is inspired by Michael Crichton‘s 1973 film of the same name.

The drama is billed as a dark odyssey about the dawn of artificial consciousness and the future of sin. Hopkins stars as Dr. Robert Ford, the brilliant, taciturn and complicated creative director, chief programmer and chairman of the board of Westworld, who has an uncompromising creative vision for the park — and unorthodox methods of achieving it.

Wood portrays Dolores Abernathy, the quintessential farm girl of the frontier West — who is about to discover that her entire idyllic existence is an elaborately constructed lie.

Santoro will portray the terrifying and brutal with a dark sense of humor Harlan Bell, Westworld’s perennial “most wanted” bandit. He subscribes to the theory that the West is a wild place, and the only way to survive is to embrace the role of predator.

Joining Santoro, Hopkins and Wood are Jeffrey Wright, Shannon Woodward, Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Angela Sarafyan and Simon Quarterman.

Person of Interest‘s Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote the pilot, will direct and executive produce alongside J.J. AbramsLisa Joy co-wrote the pilot and will exec produce.