Stop Everything: Pierce Brosnan Will Play Dr. Fate in DC's Black Adam

The Brosnaissance continues apace. No sooner had we found out that your friend and ours Pierce Brosnan was set to play a creepy fertility expert in Ilana Glazer's upcoming A24 horror False Positive, than it's being reported that Brosnan's bagged one of the top gigs in the DC Cinematic Universe.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Brosnan will be playing Dr. Fate in the upcoming Black Adam, starring opposite Dwayne Johnson in the title role.

This is quite a big deal. Black Adam will set up the Justice Society, which isn't the Justice League from Justice League, but acts as a sort of forerunner to it. Dr. Fate is both one guy and a succession of different people: the title runs in a sort of lineage through different sorcerers, but the Dr. Fate Brosnan will play is the original one.

He's a guy named Kent Nelson who discovers and opens the tomb of an ancient wizard called Nabu, and Nabu kindly instructs him in the ways of both magic and crime-fighting and gives him the Helmet of Fate. Nelson/Fate then becomes a founding member of the Justice Society of America, which sounds more like an offshoot of an upstate New York Rotary Club than a team of superheroes, but there we go.

The Black Adam story sits a little apart from Justice League and all that carry on, instead linking into the much less long and fraught story which Shazam! set up. Shazam and Black Adam are rivals in the comics, so expect to see them join up at some point in the near future. Filming's set to start in Atlanta next month.

This story originally appeared on Esquire.co.uk. Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.