Michael Johnston, who led this year’s surprise horror hit Obsession, is in early talks to take a role in the fourth Mummy film alongside Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah.
Image: Michael Johnston (WikiCommons/Gage Skidmore)
Michael Johnston, who led this year’s surprise horror hit Obsession, is in early talks to take a role in the fourth Mummy film alongside Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and John Hannah. Variety and Deadline both reported the discussions in late July 2026. Nothing is signed, and no one has said who he would play.
From US$750,000 To More Than US$400 Million
The reason his name carries weight right now is arithmetic. Obsession, a horror film about a young man who wishes his best friend into loving him, was made for somewhere between US$750,000 and US$1 million by first-time feature director Curry Barker. It sold to Focus Features out of Toronto for a reported US$14 to 15 million, the biggest price a genre film has ever fetched at that festival, and has since taken more than US$400 million worldwide (Variety, July 2026). It is now Focus Features’ highest-grossing release.
He Came Out In 2023, Then Went Quiet
Johnston is 30 and grew up in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, where he started auditioning for voice-over work at 12 from a recording studio he rigged up in his bedroom. He finished high school early, moved to Chicago to live with his father and train at The Second City, then left for Los Angeles six months later.
Gay readers know him best as Corey Bryant, who turned up in the fifth season of Teen Wolf in 2015 and spent two seasons in a relationship with Mason. He also led the 2016 indie Slash, playing a teenager who writes slash fiction, which is about as on the nose as casting got that decade.
He came out publicly in early 2023 in the simplest way available. He posted about his boyfriend, the filmmaker and writer Anthony Sellitti. Sellitti later helped make the video for “Gravity”, the track Johnston released in 2024, which is built around a queer romance.
Johnston told Anthem magazine in May that the response to Corey blindsided him. Thousands of messages arrived “saying how much my character in Teen Wolf helped them,” he said.
“I had no idea what that representation would mean to so many people.” He is careful not to let it flatten the work, though. “A character’s sexuality isn’t the first thing I’m looking at,” he said. “It’s more important that I connect with the story.”
What he will not do is discuss who he is seeing. “I haven’t talked a lot about my personal life,” he told the magazine. “I’m still trying to figure out how I want to navigate all of this. I think it’s nice when there’s some mystery around actors’ lives.” Since Obsession premiered at Toronto, his Instagram has been almost entirely work.
What Is Actually Locked In
Radio Silence, the directing pair Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, are behind the camera, working from a script by David Coggeshall. Universal has pulled the release forward from May 2028 to 15 October 2027. Fraser, Weisz and Hannah return as Rick O’Connell, Evelyn and Jonathan Carnahan, together for the first time since 2001’s The Mummy Returns. Be honest, did the 1999 original do something to you too? Plenty of us have quietly filed it under formative.
Johnston told Anthem what he actually wants from a career. “I want to be like Charlize Theron in Monster. I want to be in prosthetics, and you won’t even know it’s me. That is my dream career.”
He may get it. The Mummy films have been burying actors under latex and pixels since 1999.
Source: https://www.dnamagazine.com.au/michael-johnston-mummy-4-talks/
