EXCLUSIVE: Rowan Blanchard, one of the stars of Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale spin-off/sequel series The Testaments, has signed on to star in The Drill, a dark comedy from director Millicent Hailes (Perfect) that begins shooting in Texas next week.
Written by Keatyn Lee, The Drill centers around what happens when an active shooter lockdown traps a high school drill team inside their gym.
Producers on the project include Vince Jolivette (Spring Breakers, The Disaster Artist), Tyler Payne (Perfect, Speed the Plow), Jiarui Guo (The Brutalist, Family Movie), and Douglass Riggs (Perfect, Speed the Plow).
In The Testaments, led by One Battle After Another‘s Chase Infiniti, which premiered in April and has already been renewed for a second season, Blanchard plays Shunammite “Shunam” Hayes, a young woman raised within the elite sphere of the near-future theocratic dictatorship known as Gilead.
Seasoned for a young actor — with 15 years of screen experience under her belt while still in her early 20s — Blanchard was previously seen starring opposite Jennifer Connelly and Daveed Diggs in TNT’s Snowpiercer. Additional credits include Hulu’s Crush, Peacock’s Poker Face, Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time, and a recurring role on ABC’s The Goldbergs. She is repped by Paradigm, Untitled Entertainment, and Goodman, Genow, Schenkman.
Hailes is a queer English director coming off of her directorial debut Perfect, an indie drama starring Julia Fox and Ashley Moore, which premiered at this year’s SXSW Film Festival. Otherwise best known for her work on music videos for the likes of Lil Yachty and Adam Lambert, she is repped by Luber Roklin Entertainment.
