Priyanka Chopra has teamed up with actor Karl Urban for a pirate adventure drama that debuts on Prime Video on February 25. Titled The Bluff, the film has the two actors playing former lovers-turned-foes.
As per the first-look details revealed in Esquire magazine, the plot recalls Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies, but with a slight twist. It is set in the late 1800s, for one, and Karl Urban's is not so much of a bad guy as David Carradine's character as he is an anti-hero.
For her character, an ex-pirate named Ercell Borden, Chopra researched on legendary real-life female pirates such as Grace O’Malley, the “pirate queen” of Ireland from who lived during the 1500s, and Zheng Yi Sao from the 1800s who lead a fleet of raiding ships in the South China sea. “I did not know anything about females who were pirates. I didn’t know that was a concept that actually happened or that women had captained their own ships at a time where piracy—real piracy—was not the Disney version of it. It was scary, it was bloody, it was brutal,” said Chopra in the Esquire interview.
On his character Captain Connor, Urban said he is someone who doesn’t take rejection well. “This character is a former member of the East India Trading Company, a man who literally helped build an empire, and then the empire had no further service for him, so it ostensibly turned him into an outlaw. That intrigued me: the story of a man who built something and then there was no place for him to live in that world that he built.”
The Bluff will see Urban returning to the swashbuckling element of the Lord of the Rings films, in which he played the leader of the Riders of Rohan. “I thoroughly enjoyed the swashbuckling element of it. I’d come off The Boys and Mortal Kombat, and both of those were physical in a different kind of way. But this was the first time I’d picked up a blade since Lord of the Rings, and to reconnect with that skill set was a lot of fun. I mean, every kid wants to play pirates, and this project delivered in spades.”
Directed by Frank E. Flowers, The Bluff is produced by the Russo brothers along with Angela Russo-Otstot, Michael Disco, Priyanka Chopra, Cisely Saldana, and Mariel Saldana.