Like most Blade Runner fans, Lennie James had his reservations about a sequel. But Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve put the actor at ease when the two hopped on the phone, James told GameSpot in an interview leading up to the movie`s release.`He was already a director that I was very keen to work with, and after our conversation I was very keen to work with him,` James said.The actor, who also plays Morgan on The Walking Dead and voices Lord Shaxx in Destiny, portrays a character by the name of Mister Cotton in Blade Runner 2049. He runs what is essentially a sweatshop for gadgetry in a part of California we haven`t seen before in the Blade Runner universe. You can watch a clip from one of his scenes, released last month, below.James explained that one moment in particular made him certain he wanted to join the project--and that changed the shape of the movie as a whole.`I`ll tell you what it was: Denis asked me what I thought of the character, and somewhere he heard kind of a moment`s pause. And I wasn`t being blasé or anything like that; I just took a moment to think about it. And he asked me what that reticence was,` he said. `I said it wasn`t necessarily reticence; it was just that the character`s written in a particular way. He was written more in a warlordy type way, and I just thought it might be interesting to make him a weaker man. And Denis just jumped on that, and we started, you know, riffing on that back and forth, on what he could be.`James said that change affected everything about his scenes, from the way the character looks to `the shape of all those scenes.` The new take on the character also affected the script, which James and Blade Runner 2049 star Ryan Gosling wound up using only as a jumping-off point for much of those scenes, improvising their lines instead.`The fact that Denis was up for that, and the fact that it wasn`t just me going in there, standing in the right place and saying the lines, but actually contributing to the ...
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