Sela Ward, who previously worked with Roland Emmerich in his 2004 global warming disaster thriller, "The Day After Tomorrow," will reunite with the director as she joins the cast of "Independence Day 2."
Deadline reported that the "CSI:NY" star who most recently seen in big-screen as a Diane Sawyer-like TV journalist in director David Fincher's "Gone Girl" at 20th Century Fox, is set to play as the film's sitting POTUS, President Lanford.
Ward will be joining the cast members of the original "Independence Day" film including the original film's President Thomas J. Whitmore who will also be returning with Bill Pullman reprising his role opposite fellow alums Jeff Goldblum, Vivica A. Fox, Judd Hirsch and Brent Spiner. They will appear alongside franchise newcomers Liam Hemsworth, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Joey King, Travis Tope, Jessie Usher (who plays the son of Will Smith's fighter pilot ace character in ID4) and Maika Monroe (It Follows) whose replacement of actress Mae Whitman as Pullman's First Daughter character caused a small tremor of controversy last week.
Other than that, Will Smith, who played the character of Captain Steve Hiller, will no longer reprise his character in the sequel.
"Will Smith can not come back because he's too expensive, but he'd also be too much of a marquee name. It would be too much. We have like maybe half of the people that you know would know from the first film (in the script) and the other half people who are new," Emmerich told NY Daily News.
The action thriller with a script written by James Woods and Nicholas Wright is set to begin filming in New Mexico later this month and is targeted to hit theaters June 24, 2016 (almost exactly 20 years after the original), according to Entertainment Weekly.
The original film "Independence Day" opened on July 3, 1996 and earned an impressive $817.4 million worldwide. Emmerich is also set to produce the sequel alongside Dean Devlin and Harald Kloser.
This time around, the nations of Earth collaborates using recovered alien technology to develop a defense program to protect the planet against invading aliens.
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