Ryan Gosling Will Play Court Gentry, a Fictional CIA Agent Turned Assassin, in ‘The Gray Man’

Mark Greaney’s Court Gentry books are some of the most successful 21st-century thriller novels, and the first book in the series, “The Gray Man,” is now filming as a big-budget movie for Netflix.

Ryan Gosling takes the lead role of former CIA agent Gentry, known to all as the Gray Man. Gosling is joined in the movie by Chris Evans as Lloyd Hansen, Gentry’s former CIA colleague and the man tasked with hunting him down.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have a long working relationship with Evans, helming five Marvel movies in which the actor starred as Captain America. The brother-directing team is fresh off “Cherry,” their Apple TV+ thriller about an Iraq war veteran who takes to robbing banks to pay for the drug habit he’s acquired to manage his post-traumatic stress.

Gosling, who’s managed to steer clear of superhero movies in his career so far, is working with the Russos for the first time.

The Russo brothers celebrated the first day of filming with this Twitter post.

The film is rumored to be the biggest-budget project yet for Netflix. They haven’t cut corners with the acting payouts, as the movie has added Regé-Jean Page (fresh off “Bridgerton”) and Ana de Armas (“Knives Out”). Billy Bob Thornton and Alfre Woodard round out the cast.

The Russos have confirmed that they’ve conceived this movie as the first installment in a series of Court Gentry movies, and Greaney already has published 10 books featuring Gentry as lead character.

Tom Clancy fans know Greaney’s work, since Greaney collaborated with Clancy on the last three Jack Ryan books published during the author’s lifetime and continued the Ryan universe with four more novels written after Clancy’s death in 2013. Greaney stopped writing Clancy sequels in 2017 to concentrate on Court Gentry.

“The Gray Man” represents just the latest title in a flood of spy and military thrillers finding life on streaming services. After Amazon scored a huge hit with “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” the streaming service is giving us a new series based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, a movie starring Michael B. Jordan based on Clancy’s novel “Without Remorse” and a Chris Pratt-led series based on Jack Carr’s “The Terminal List.” Netflix is gearing up for a sequel to its hit Chris Hemsworth spec ops thriller, “Extraction.”

Look for “The Gray Man” to stream on Netflix in 2022.

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