LOS ANGELES, March 27 — The Black Panther and Creed star Michael B. Jordan is in line to play Methusaleh in a film of the same name, a movie about the Bible’s oldest man, said to have lived for 969 years.
Having led Rocky franchise successor Creed as a talented and determined boxing prodigy, and co-starred in Black Panther as the film’s antagonist, Michael B. Jordan is about to become the oldest man on earth, according to a new report from Deadline.
Methuselah would star Jordan as “a man who has managed to stay alive for over 400 years... without showing the physical signs of age,” Deadline writes.
“In that time, he has accumulated vast intellectual knowledge, from multiple languages to the sciences, as well as survival skills.”
Jordan’s production company, Outlier Society, has a deal with Warner Bros, and he is boarding a project that has been in development since 2009 at least.
At that time, Methuselah was to be helmed by writer-director James Watkins (Eden Lake, McMafia), later succeeded by Tony Gilroy of The Bourne Legacy, though producer David Heyman, of Gravity and the Harry Potter franchise, had remained attached throughout.
Methuselah pops up only a few times throughout the Bible, firstly as a link in the family line from Adam, the first man, down to ark-builder and flood-survivor Noah, and later as one of the ancestors of Saul, the first king of Israel.
At a time when Biblical lifespans stretched into many hundreds of years, Methuselah outlived them all.
As well as being mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, he also appears in Islam’s Stories of the Prophets.
His story usually ends at the time of the great flood, when he was survived by grandson and ark-builder Noah, recently the subject of a 2014 epic in which Russell Crowe was cast as its lead. — AFP-Relaxnews
