Mos Def To Star In Hitchhiker's Guide To Galaxy

Mos Def (The Italian Job, Monster's Ball) will star as "Ford Prefect" in Spyglass Entertainment's The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. The film will be directed by Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, and will start filming in April. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is based on the acclaimed novel by Douglas Adams, which tells the story of a British man who's confounded when he's saved from the destruction of Earth by his best friend, who turns out to be an alien.

Mos Def recently completed work on the HBO film Something The Lord Made, in which he stars alongside Alan Rickman (Die Hard, Quigley Down Under). The film chronicles the real life relationship between heart surgery pioneers Vivien Thomas and Alfred Blalock, and will air on HBO later this year. Def can also be seen in The Woodsmen, opposite Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick and Benjamin Bratt, which just premiered at Sundance. Mos Def is also set to release a new album on Geffen Records in 2004.

Additional film credits include Spike Lee's Bamboozled, and the 2002 romantic comedy Brown Sugar, for which he received an NAACP Image Award nomination.

Def also serves as the host, music supervisor and co-executive producer for the HBO series Def Poetry and served as a writer, producer and actor on the MTV sketch comedy series Lyricist Lounge. Mos completed his Broadway debut in 2002 in the Tony nominated, Pulitzer Prize winning, Topdog/Underdog. In 2003, he re-teamed with Topdog playwright Suzan Lori Parks and director George Wolfe for the off-Broadway play, F---ing A, for which he received an Obie Award.