Can a washed-up Formula One driver come out of retirement to mentor a young rookie into a champion? That's the basic premise for F1, a forthcoming film starring Brad Pitt and directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy, Top Gun: Maverick). Warner Bros. dropped the first teaser for the film yesterday, right before the 2024 British Grand Prix.
Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a fictional Formula One driver who crashed horribly in the 1990s and retired from the sport. Then his longtime friend Ruben (Javier Bardem), owner of the fictional team APXGP, approaches him about coming out of retirement to mentor his team's rookie prodigy, Joshua "Noah" Pearce (Damson Idris). "They're a last place team, they're 21-22 on the grid, they've never scored a point," Pitt told Sky Sports last year. "But they have a young phenom (Idris) and they bring me in as kind of a Hail Mary and hijinks ensue."
In addition to Pitt, Bardem, and Idris, the cast includes Kerry Condon as Kate; Tobias Menzies as Banning; Kim Bodnia as Kaspar; Shea Wigham as Chip Hart; Joseph Balderrama as Rica Fazio; Sarah Niles as Noah's mother, Bernadette; Samson Kayo as Cashman; Callie Cooke as Jodie; and Layne Harper as Press.
Playing themselves in the film: seven-time Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz Jr., Sergio Perez, Benoit Treluyer, and the rest of the F1 drivers and team members. Hamilton is a co-producer on the film and was also involved during the script-writing process to keep the film as realistic as possible by drawing on his own experiences. "We want everyone to love it and to really feel that we can encapsulate what the essence of this sport is about," Hamilton said last year.