After perhaps one or two Oceans too many, Steven Soderbergh is now crossing the Pacific to begin shooting his new infection thriller “Contagion” in Hong Kong.
THR reports that Soderbergh has added Josie Ho to the cast of his thriller about a casino worker who spreads a virus among the passengers on an aeroplane leaving Hong Kong bound for the United States.
Ho, who has previously appeared in a wealth of films in her native Hong Kong, will play the sister of the casino worker who spreads the virus, among an otherwise thoroughly western cast, including Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Marion Cotillard.
Ho told THR that she would draw on her memories and experiences of the SARS http://onhealthy.net/product-category/cancer/ outbreak in China in 2003 for her role and was really excited about and looking forward to working with the rest of the cast.
After shooting in Hong Kong, Contagion is also due to film in Minneapolis, Dubai, Japan, Switzerland, The United Kingdom, Brazil, Russia, and Malaysia before its release in October 2011. This must surely mean an intended scope for the film far beyond (for example) the solitary town in jeopardy plot of “Outbreak”, cranking things up instead to the scale of a global crisis.
There is no word yet on the Asian actor to be cast as “Patient Zero”, the casino worker who starts the spread of the infection. We will keep you posted.
