Jim Belushi has joined the cast of Green Bank, Josh Ruben’s new sci-fi thriller set in the real-life West Virginia town that gives the film its name. The project is built around Green Bank, a federally protected Quiet Zone where radio transmissions are restricted so they do not interfere with a massive telescope.
Belushi’s addition gives the film another familiar face to go with Tatiana Maslany, Kumail Nanjiani, Brittany O’Grady and Taylor John Smith. Brittany O’Grady is set to play a sleep scientist who travels to the town and begins to realize that the residents’ supposedly healthy way of life is hiding something far darker and stranger than it first appears.
For Belushi, the role adds to a recent stretch that has kept him moving between film and television work. He recently appeared in Song Sung Blue as manager Tom D’Amato, has a part in Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, and had a supporting role in Home Sweet Hell. In 2016, he gave an intimidating turn in the thriller The Whole Truth.
Ruben has already framed Green Bank as a “wickedly funny” and “smart” horror-thriller, and has compared its tone to M3GAN. That comparison points to the film’s mix of genre play and menace, which fits a story set in a town where silence is not just a mood but a rule.
The backdrop matters because Green Bank, West Virginia, is one of the few places in the country where the government has restricted radio activity to protect scientific observation. Earlier reporting had described a different version of the project with Tatiana Maslany and Jasmin Savoy Brown, but the current cast now includes Belushi, and the film’s premise still rests on the same unsettling idea: a place built around quiet, and the possibility that the quiet is hiding something.
That is what gives Green Bank its pull today. The cast is filling out, Ruben has signaled the film’s tonal range, and Belushi’s arrival suggests the movie is leaning into both the humor and the unease that have already been promised. The bigger question is not whether the town is strange. It is what, exactly, its residents are trying to keep hidden from the outsider who arrives to study them.
