Actress Xochilt Gomez (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, The Baby-Sitters Club) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Birds of Prey, Smashed) have been tapped to star in Ursa Major, a sci-fi thriller to be directed by Jonathan and Josh Baker (Kin).
Gomez will play Natalie and Winstead will play her mother Charlie on an Earth-like planet where both fight for survival, hiding from a group of relentless hunters with the added threat of an imminent and deadly storm approaching. Now a teenager, Natalie wants answers to many of her questions. She is eager to know how they got there and what they will do to survive on that planet.
Gomez became the first Mexican-American teen to play a superhero in the Marvel cinematic universe, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Gomez played a teenager from the Utopian Parallel who has the ability to travel between dimensions in the multiverse by punching open star-shaped doorways.
Gomez was born in Los Angeles, California. Her parents are of Mexican descent—her father is from Morelos, Mexico, and her mother is from Los Angeles. Gomez began acting when she was 5, when her mother enrolled her in a musical theater class.
In 2019, Gomez landed a lead role as Dawn Schafer on Netflix’s reboot of The Baby-Sitters Club. “Latina girls tell me that they finally see someone who looks like them on TV and that it means so much,” she shared in a 2020 interview.
Ursa Major is an original script written by Emmy-nominated creator of HBO Max series Station Eleven, Patrick Somerville. Colleen O’Brien and Katie French are also part of the writing team. Somerville and David Eisenberg will produce through Tractor Beam. Lost City’s James Hoppe and Jack Byrnes will exec produce in association with XYZ Films. Other producers include John Finemore, Mason Novick, Allen Fischer and Brian Steinberg.