John Wick regular Ian McShane has been quite frank about spin-off Ballerina and its reshoots. “They’ve got to make it better,” he says.
The great Ian McShane is currently on the promo tour for his latest film, the drama-thriller American Star, in which he plays an ageing hitman – we’ve seen it, and we really rather liked it.
On BBC One magazine programme The One Show, meanwhile, McShane has talked with remarkable frankness about the forthcoming Ballerina – a spin-off from the John Wick action series in which he’s regularly appeared. In the wake of recent reports that the film is to be delayed until June 2025 – a full year – to allow for new action sequences to be shot, McShane offered his own perspective on the production.
According to him, the film isn’t undergoing reshoots, but entirely new scenes (or ‘new-shoots’, as he calls them). He also confirmed that Chad Stahelski, director of the mainline John Wick films, had been brought in to oversee them.
“Then we go on to Budapest, and it’s not reshoots – it’s new shoots,” McShane said. “The new shooting for Ballerina […] They’ve got to protect the franchise. We did it about a year ago, the movie Ballerina. And they’ve looked at it and Chad’s come in – the guy who’s directed all the John Wick movies – and they want to make it better because they want to protect… I mean, Keanu’s in it as well. It takes place between John Wick 3 and John Wick 4.“
It’s the kind of insight into an ongoing production that we don’t often hear about straight from such a high-profile actor (we can almost hear a faint squeak of anxiety from Lionsgate publicists).
Nor did McShane mince his words about another spin-off – TV series The Continental: From The World Of John Wick, which stars Mel Gibson and Colin Woodell – the latter playing a younger version of McShane’s character from the films, Winston Scott.
“They never asked anybody about it,” McShane said of the series, which streamed from September 2023 on Amazon Prime in the UK. “They just went ahead and did it. They didn’t ask Keanu and me about it. We both went, ‘I dunno. Nobody asked us about it.'”
McShane stars in Ballerina alongside Ana De Armas, who plays the title heroine, while Keanu Reeves, Angelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne and Norman Reedus will also appear. The film’s directed by Len Wiseman, who previously made, among other things, the Underworld movies and the remake of Total Recall. By the sounds of things, Chad Stahelski may be taking over the reigns in the coming months.
Ballerina is now due for release in June 2025.
