HBO has announced that Ariana DeBose will appear as a recurring character in the upcoming fourth season of the sci-fi series Westworld. DeBose’s previous roles include portraying Anita in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (2021) and Alyssa Greene in Prom (2020); she will join a cast that includes Evan Rachel Wood, Tessa Thompson, and Luke Hemsworth, among others, for Westworld season 4.

First premiering in 2016, Westworld is the latest installment in a media franchise that began with a 1973 film of the same name. The original Westworld movie portrayed a Wild West-themed amusement park filled with androids that begin to malfunction and kill the park’s human visitors. The modern HBO series follows a similar premise with a dystopian twist, transforming the setting into a futuristic Wild West-themed park run by a company named Delos Inc. in the 2050s. According to the official Westworld synopsis, “a group of android ‘hosts’ deviates from their programmers’ carefully planned scripts in a disturbing pattern of aberrant behavior.” The show deals with heavy topics like the very nature of humanity as the android hosts, created by Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), develop sentience and struggle with the revelation that they aren’t actually human, though they believed themselves to be.

What We Know About “Westworld” Season Four

Westworld’s fourth season has been highly anticipated by fans of the series, as the show’s third season was concluded way back in May 2020 as android host Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) sacrificed herself to defeat Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), the creator of the AI Rehoboam. Little is currently known about what role Ariana DeBose will play in Westworld season 4, though it is known that Evan Rachel Wood will be reprising her previous role, along with Thandiwe Newton, Ed Harris, Jeffery Wright, Tessa Thompson, and Luke Hemsworth, and others, according to Deadline.

Westworld season 4 will be produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, along with Alison Schapker, Denise Thé, J.J. Abrams, Athena Wickham, Richard J. Lewis, and Ben Stephenson. The eight-episode will release on June 26, 2022, on HBO and will also be available on HBO Max.