MGM+'s 'Magnificent Seven' Adds 4 Series Regulars
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Joshua Close, Ken Yamamura, Michael Rubenfeld, and Joel Nankervis joined MGM+'s 'The Magnificent Seven' as series regulars, with production currently underway in Calgary.
- Close will play Skelton, a former Confederate raider turned bounty killer hired by the antagonist Clemons to lead the assault on the Quaker village.
- Yamamura will play Kenjiro "Kenji," a samurai displaced by Japan's Meiji Restoration who fled after avenging his father's murder and now carries only his sword and his shame.
- Rubenfeld will play Eli "Wick" Kagan, a da Vinci-esque inventor whose mechanical genius masks deep loneliness, while Nankervis will play Jebidah "Jeb" Campbell, a swaggering Quaker teenager who idolizes gunslingers despite his community's pacifist teachings.
- The four new additions join previously announced series regulars Matt Dillon (Chris Adams), Will Patton (Cyrus T. Clemons), Michael Ealy (Vin Tanner), Danny Pino (Santiago "Santi" Vega), Joanne Froggatt (Harriet Talbot), and Amy Forsyth (Katie "Deadeye" Dalton).
- The series is set in the 1880s American frontier and centers on a central question: whether violence is acceptable to defend people whose faith is based on non-violence, a theme each character's backstory explores.
- Tim Kring (Heroes, Touch) writes and executive produces, alongside executive producers Donald De Line, Lawrence Mirisch, Bruce Kaufman, and Matt Dillon, with MGM+ Studios and MGM Television Studios producing.
Why it matters: MGM+ is investing in a prestige Western whose central conceit — mercenaries defending a pacifist Quaker village against a land baron's hired killers — sets up a built-in moral tension that lifts the show beyond standard gunslinger fare. The casting of a displaced Japanese samurai (Yamamura) and a Quaker teen torn between faith and firearms (Nankervis) gives the ensemble deliberate cross-cultural and ideological range, suggesting the show is positioning character interiority as its distinguishing edge in a crowded Western revival.
