It has been announced that Ian McShane (Deadwood) will be starring alongside David Harbour in Neil Marshall's Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen. McShane is set to play Hellboy's adoptive father, Professor Broom. The R-rated reboot was recently announced with Harbour attached to portray the titular character in a "dark and gruesome" take on the popular series. The project is expecting to start filming next month in the U.K. and Bulgaria.

The announcement of Ian McShane's involvement in Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen came via The Hollywood Reporter. It was also announced that the new story will see Hellboy square off against a medieval sorceress who is looking to destroy all of mankind. The script for the reboot was written by Andrew Cosby, Christopher Golden, and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and is expected to hit theaters sometime in 2018.

McShane is a veteran Hollywood actor who has been in HBO's Deadwood, American Gods, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and John Wick to name a few. McShane won the Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actor in a Drama Series in 2005 for his role as Al Swearengen in HBO's Deadwood and was nominated for another Golden Globe in 2011 for his performance in Pillars of the Earth. McShane announced in April of 2017 that a script for a two-hour Deadwood movie had been completed and submitted by show creator David Milch to HBO and that the movie is closer than it has ever been to happening.

Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen director Neil Marshall has said that the R-rating has allowed him to "take off the cuffs" while adapting the popular comic book series. Marshall is looking forward to making the movie that he wants with the rating, but also making sure that the rating isn't going to dictate how the story moves. Guillermo del Toro's original Hellboy movies were all a PG-13 affair so it should be pretty interesting to see what a new R-rating will do for the character and the story this time around. While no specific plot points have been announced, Marshall did say that the team had been working overtime to get "that Mignola" magic to the screen and it appears that he was correct since everything seems to be going ahead full steam ahead at the moment for the reboot.

An official release date has yet to be set for Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen, but it is expected to come out in 2018 from Lionsgate. Both David Harbour and Ian McShane are two pretty big actors to get the new reboot off of the ground and fans that have been waiting for any kind of Hellboy news should be happy that everything is moving rather quickly. While some fans are disheartened that Ron Perlman and Guillermo del Toro will not be returning to finish the original trilogy, an R-rated reboot is still exciting. Mike Mignola's source material is certainly bloody and twisted, so it'll be interesting to see how Neil Marshall takes his vision of Hellboy and how closely it follows the original comic book series.