A studio reboot can be cast for box office or for texture. Universal’s new Miami Vice already has its box office in Michael B. Jordan as Ricardo Tubbs and Austin Butler as Sonny Crockett; André Holland is a texture hire. The actor behind Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick has joined Joseph Kosinski’s reboot, and his arrival confirms that the bench around the two leads is being filled with performers who bring their own critical credibility.

As Deadline first reported, Holland is the latest addition to what the trade calls an all-star cast, and his character is being kept under wraps. He joins John Leguizamo, Walton Goggins, Alden Ehrenreich, Edi Gathegi, Danny Ramirez, Whitney Peak, Camila Morrone and Andrew Schulz. Screenwriter Dan Gilroy, the writer-director of Nightcrawler, built his script from the pilot and first season of the original television series, which Michael Mann executive-produced, and the story follows two detectives working undercover.

Holland’s filmography explains the fit. Beyond Moonlight, he played civil rights leader Andrew Young in Ava DuVernay’s Selma, reteamed with Soderbergh on the basketball-business drama High Flying Bird and starred opposite Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga in Rebecca Hall’s Passing. On The Knick he carried the role of Dr. Algernon Edwards, a gifted Black surgeon fighting for standing in a turn-of-the-century New York hospital. The new film, which explores the glamour and corruption of Miami in the mid-eighties, gives him another period world to inhabit, this time inside a studio franchise play.

For Kosinski, the project follows Top Gun: Maverick and F1, two films that turned practical spectacle into large-format events, and he is again shooting for IMAX. It is also the property’s second trip to the big screen after Mann’s own Miami Vice feature with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, which moved the partnership into the present day. Miami Vice ’85 heads back to the decade that made the show a pop-culture signature, and Universal is staffing it accordingly.

Cameras are due to roll in November, with production in New York and Miami. Universal has dated the film for May 19, 2028, after moving it from an earlier August 2027 slot. Eric Warren Singer wrote an earlier draft of the script before Gilroy took over.

With the shoot only weeks away, the ensemble now stands at eleven named actors — a deep bench for a story whose television original sold itself on two detectives, a Ferrari and a pastel jacket.

Tags: casting, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Mann, Marc Anthony, Rebecca Hall, Barry Jenkins, Austin Butler, John Leguizamo, Alden Ehrenreich, Joseph Kosinski