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Fresh off his Golden Globe win for Luther, Idris Elba is busy working on his next TV project: the miniseries Ascension, which “revolves around the history of astronomy and mankind’s impulse for the stars,” as Deadline reports. Elba will play two characters: “the Egyptian polymath Imhotep in 3000 B.C., as well as a brilliant astronomer in the near future.” So he’ll be time traveling in a sense, cutting between eras to demonstrate something ambitious about the human will. Heady stuff. It’ll be written by acclaimed comic book scribe Warren Ellis (Red, Transmetropolitan) and co-produced by Elba Vivek J. Tiwary (The Fifth Beatle).

Ellis has quite the the flair for the sci-fi fantastic, which combined with Elba’s more-than-solid acting chops should make Ascension a must-watch right off the bat. The producers might want to do some creative reworking on Elba’s name, though — Imhotep is the same name as the villain of The Mummy , and there may be some residual brand confusion between the two (even though the Imhotep Elba will be playing was actually a real guy, and not a psychotic mummy priest). Or maybe not, since The Mummy Returns came out over a decade ago and was kind of a silly movie to begin with. Ascension is currently being shopped around British networks, but you can see Elba in this summer’s Prometheus.

Via: BlackBook