Post Malone Is Playing a Mutant Sting Ray in TMNT: Mutant Mayhem

There's a certain hierarchy or ladder that musicians have to climb to achieve the ultra-rare movie star/musician status, and Post Malone is on his way to the top rung.

It goes like this: First (and this is the hardest part), you have to become a chart-topping musical megastar. Post Malone has already checked that box with eight diamond singles, surpassing Bruno Mars' record last April, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). In fact, he's triple- checked, filled in the box completely and even circled it several times with a red Sharpie. So that's covered.

Then you have to go on TV a lot, which is easy to do when you've broken RIAA records and received Grammy nominations and such. You go on late-night shows, reality shows or even comedy shows. Hell, you don't have to do most of the work on that one. They come to you. Posty's done that with shows such as Late Night with Seth Meyers, where he went on a day-drinking trip with the satirical comedian, and more recently, Post Malone helped play pranks on the public on Impractical Jokers.

Then and only then can you achieve the first step on the path to movie stardom, and Post Malone is a month away from completing that task. He's been cast as one of the many villains in Paramount Pictures' animated comedy adventure Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, premiering on Aug. 4.

The new TMNT movie, written and produced by Seth Rogen, is finally taking pop culture's most famous reptile assassins down the comedy route it desperately needed since Michael Bay took over the franchise. The less said about that, the better.

Everything from the stop-motion-ish animation style to the cavalcade of characters approach to storytelling brings the Turtles back to their afternoon cartoon roots. The film is basically turning the characters into another LEGO Movie minus the LEGOS. Instead of just having the Turtles fight their arch nemesis Master Shredder, Rogen and company are throwing pretty much every villain at them. Posty has been cast to play the human-manta ray hybrid Ray Fillet. We even get a little taste of how he might approach the character in this extended trailer.  Ray Fillet is one of those characters who didn't get a lot of time in the original cartoon and zero time in the movies. In fact, he's more known for being a mutant in some of the TMNT comic book spinoff series in the 1990s who flirts between friend and enemy from story to story. And he's one of the toy line's most sought-after action figures.

According to IGN, Ray is a former marine biologist who got exposed to that pesky mutagen while investigating a toxic waste dump. His DNA fused with a manta ray who happened to be in the vicinity, and you know the rest. It's a tale as old as time, if time started in 1990.

Having a character who's not as well known as the brutish Bebop and Rocksteady or Baxter Stockman means Post will have a lot of room to play around with the character and build up a personality for the new movie. In other words, we're about to get a prime dose of mutated Posty that you'll be able to inject directly into your veins come early August. If anybody can play a sing-songy, fighting manta ray, it's Post Malone.

The role may already be paying off for Post Malone. According to IMDB, Posty has two more upcoming roles in two separate film productions. He's been cast in an upcoming Christmas comedy called Dear Santa that also stars Jack Black and Keegan-Michael Key (and Jack Black better be playing Santa) and as a narrator in a short film called Cody Hughes' Pangea, which has something to do with continental drift. He may or may not also be a talking manta ray in the latter.