When it was announced back in February that Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch and Ben Foster would be starring in Peter Berg's Lone Survivor it felt like an incomplete story. After all, the film, based on the book by Marcus Luttrell, follows a group of four Navy SEALs, and if you can count you know that Wahlberg, Kitsch and Foster only make three. Five months have passed with the identity of the fourth soldier being kept unknown, but according to The Playlist that mystery has now been solved.
Emile Hirsch, most recently seen in Oliver Stone's Savages, has landed the role of the fourth Navy SEAL in Lone Survivor. The film will tell the story of how the soldiers were pinned down by 250 armed Al Qaeda agents while on a mission to kill a terrorist leader in Afghanistan in 2005. The book is actually based on Luttrell's true story and he will be played by Wahlberg in the movie (though the new report doesn't say which members of the squad will be portrayed by Kitsch, Foster and Hirsch. The project serves as a return to the Middle Eastern desert for Berg, who directed The Kingdom back in 2007.
Hirsch hasn't had the greatest run of late, as the last film he made before Savages (which I hated) was the dreadful Russian sci-fi thriller The Darkest Hour, but it's hard to not still have faith in his career. Despite his few missteps, the young actor has put on some great performances in movies like Milk and Into The Wild and shows a lot of promise. Perhaps Lone Survivor can be the jolt his future needs.
