Niko Foster Adds Directing to His Flourishing Hollywood Career
Niko Foster is Hollywood’s latest Renaissance man, heading rapidly toward action/adventure leading man status. In addition to acting, he’s known for producing or executive-producing films and writing them. Foster’s roles have gotten more complex and essential to the films, and he’s been in movies with more and more recognizable name actors.
“I had five films at Cannes this year. I was the number one, number two, or number three lead in all five. Oh, wow,” Niko says. “But it’s always about being an entertainer.”
In the film Desert Dawn, now in post-production, one of Foster’s co-stars is Kellan Lutz, who is best known for playing Emmett Cullen (brother of the famous vampire) in The Twilight Saga movie series. Desert Dawn began filming in late September in Nevada after receiving a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement to allow the work during the union strikes.
In the first quarter of 2024, Niko will begin directing his first film called The Wall. The movie begins casting this month. And November is a busy month for Foster, who is also starting The Exorcist Tapes. All this from a man who started out as a Chippendales entertainer, then owned 54 nightclubs across the US and sold those to follow his dreams.
“I want to entertain everybody,” Foster says. “I said, ‘I’m going to get into the film business. I’m going to build a studio, a film studio.’ So then I became an actor, a writer, and a producer. Now we’re producing films. And we’ve done about 30 films now. And I finally built up my acting prowess enough to be a good enough actor to start getting leading roles.”
And he has a very specific goal, too. An actor who’s six-foot-two and 205 pounds. Sound familiar? It should if you have watched any of the popular action-adventure movies Hollywood produces so often and are a fan of the leading men.
“So I’m kind of a Jason Momoa or John Cena size. I’m not a professional wrestler, by any means. But, you know, I’m kind of in that size range,” Niko says. “And people say, ‘You know, he’s one of these bigger guys in Hollywood now.’ In my movie The Wrecker, where I’m the lead, we showed a lot of skin, a lot of shirtless workout scenes, to attract the female audience to like the character as well.”
There’s a hole in Hollywood casting these days that Foster points out. And Niko is willing to step up and fill this gap.
“There’s a big depletion of real leading men in Hollywood, because Bruce Willis is gone. Sylvester Stallone is pretty much gone, Schwarzenegger’s pretty much gone. Dolph Lundgren is pretty much gone. Van Damme, too. All these major ‘’80s and 90s iconic leading men are now no longer there. So it’s pretty much Tom Cruise, and then everybody else.”
Foster’s action-adventure movie The Wrecker, in which he stars in with Harvey Keitel and Tyrese Gibson, will hit theaters early in 2024.
“The Wrecker has been getting some pretty good reviews so far,” Niko says. “It’s still in post-production, but the international distributor, out of their 50 films at the Cannes Film Festival, put us on the cover of their magazine because they believe in this film tremendously.”
Niko Foster’s journey is just beginning in Hollywood, the town where dreams do come true.
