Kellan Lutz to Play William Shatner in 'Experimenter'

Quick, if you were casting somebody to play a young William Shatner who would it be? The answer is probably not going to be Kellan Lutz, the guy who played the really bulky vampire in those Twilight movies. He's been keeping busy, busier than some of his Twilight co-stars actually, with last winter's dud The Legend of Hercules and this summer's The Expendables 3, and now he's joining the cast of  Experimenter in the role of Shatner. Why is Shatner a character in this movie, anyway? Read on.

We learned about Experimenter some time back when Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder came aboard to lead the film, a biopic on noted social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram became famous, or infamous, for his 1961 Yale University obedience experiments that instructed subjects to deliver what they believed to be painful electric shocks to complete strangers. Basically it tested a person's willingness to be ordered around by a presumed authority figure, and if you want to see an example of this in action check out the amazing movie, Compliance.

So Lutz will play Shatner, who portrayed Milgram in the 1976 TV movie The Tenth Level so there will be some movie-in-a-movie stuff going on. Also joining him will be Anton Yelchin (Star Trek) as Rensaleer, a subject who resists authority, and Taryn Manning (Orange Is the New Black) as a test subject who becomes stressed by the experiment and pushes back. Anthony Edwards (ER) and Edoardo Ballerini (Romeo Must Die) also have roles.

Michael Almereyda (Hamlet) is directing Experimenter now in New York.