Sci Fi has cast Canadian actress Laura "Smallville" Vandervoort to co-star in the Vancouver-lensed "Riverworld". Vandervoort played 'Supergirl' in the CW TV series.Vandervoort will play the fiance of war correspondent 'Matt Ellman', who is killed, but awakens in a mysterious world populated by everyone who has lived on Earth.
"Riverworld" will air next year as a four-hour movie on Sci Fi.
"Riverworld" adapts the sci-fi books by author Philip José Farmer, withStuart "Charmed" Gillard directing for producer Robert Halmi.
Located millennia in the future, the 'Riverworld' is an Earth-like planet whose surface has been 'terraformed' to consist of one long river-valley, with an average depth of 1.5 miles, shallow near the shore then plunging to enormous depths towards the channel. The banks expand into wide plains then climb into jagged hills before a sheerly impenetrable mountain ridge, taller than the Himalayas. While the valley averages 9 miles in width, the river is 20 million miles long.
The story begins when the whole of humanity, from the first homo sapiens to people of the 21st century are simultaneously 'resurrected' along the banks of the river. Everyone awakens in a body equivalent to that of their twenty-five year old selves, except in perfect health and free of any previous genetic or acquired defects....
