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Hollywood star Schwarzenegger to appear in Russian adventure film

The movie was shot by Russian and Chinese filmmakers and will also feature Jackie Chan

Arnold Schwarzenegger EPA/JEROME FAVRE

Arnold Schwarzenegger

© EPA/JEROME FAVRE

YEKATERINBURG, December 9. /TASS/. Hollywood megastar and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has appeared in the role of the Constable of London's Tower in a sequel of the Russian movie Viy (internationally known as Forbidden Empire, or in the UK as The Forbidden Kingdom) titled Journey to China: the Mystery of Iron Mask, Russian producer Aleksey Petrukhin told a news conference at the TASS office in the Urals city on Friday.

The sequel, second in a series, was shot by Russian and Chinese filmmakers and will also feature Jackie Chan, the producer added.

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"We could not offer a large sum of money to Schwarzenegger but succeeded in fascinating him with the plot of Journey to China: the Mystery of Iron Mask, asking him to appear as the Constable of the Tower. Furthermore, he hinted that he was not against this role in the third movie in the series - Journey to India," Petrukhin said.

Creating the character for Schwarzenegger, the scriptwriters intertwined facts and fiction.

"We found out that the Constable of the Tower staged some sort of mixed martial arts among the prisoners. The winner had a chance to get free," he said, adding the dates for movie release were being negotiated with Chinese partners and it would probably come out by the autumn of 2017.

The Viy movie directed by Oleg Stepchenko was released in 2014, being produced by Russia, the UK, Germany, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. The dark fantasy film is based on the horror novella Viy by Russian 19th-century writer Nikolai Gogol and on the works of William le Vasseur de Beauplan, a French cartographer. According to the plot, the British cartographer Jonathan Green (Jason Flemyng) undertakes a scientific journey across Europe to the East. During his travel he finds himself in a cursed place of some kind. In the second movie, he goes to China and in the third - to India.

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