John Lee Hancock‘s legal drama about the landmark legal trial against U.S. chemical company Monsanto just added more star power. LaKeith Stanfield, Julia McDermott, David Duchovny, Melonie Diaz, Bilal Hasna and Greg Kinnear have signed on to join previously announced stars, Jonathan Bailey and Laura Dern.
The yet-to-be-titled film follows the true story of young, untried attorney Brent Wisner (Bailey), who in 2019 took on a seemingly insurmountable case against the giant U.S. chemical company Monsanto on behalf of Dewayne “Lee” Johnson (Stanfield), who used the company’s best-known product Roundup, a wildly financially successful weed and grass pesticide killer, as part of his job as a high school groundskeeper. Dern plays Dr. Melinda Rogers, the Monsanto Company’s chief toxicologist, who testifies with certainty that Roundup is safe during the trial.
The Johnson vs. Monsanto case was the first Roundup cancer lawsuit to proceed to trial and ended with a verdict determining that Roundup causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The jury awarded Johnson $289 million for failing to warn consumers that exposure to Roundup weed killer causes cancer. The verdict set a precedent that paved the way for thousands of subsequent lawsuits and jury verdicts against Monsanto’s parent company, Bayer.
