AceShowbiz -

Guillermo del Toro talks "Pacific Rim 2" and, in the process, reveals which actors will be back for the second film. The director spills to Collider that Charlie Day's Dr. Newton Geiszler and Burn Gorman's Dr. Hermann Gottlieb will return to help bring more science to the sequel.

"It's quite a different movie from the first one in that, but I think that two of our main characters like in the first one are Burn and Charlie," he explains. "They are really, really - I mean, honestly, they are probably the guys I have the most fun writing along with Hannibal Chau so just from a purely selfish drive, I like writing them."

"I love writing for Charlie and Burn. I mean, [Burn's] in 'Crimson Peak' for that reason, because I love working with him. You're gonna get a lot of that, but the Kaijus are very different and you're gonna see a very different type of the robots I think. It's gonna be quite a different adventure."

del Toro also teases the timeline he plots for the follow-up story, "It's a few years after the first one. It's not an immediate follow-up. It is the world having been freed of Kaiju, what happens to the world after - what happens to the Jaeger technology once the Kaiju are not a threat. It's quite a jump."

The sequel is planned for April 7, 2017. Del Toro writes the script with Zak Penn ("Elektra", "X-Men: The Last Stand", "The Incredible Hulk"), setting up the next installment for a third film. He previously said, "Some of your favorite characters come back, some others don't because we have decided that we're going to shoot ambitiously and say, 'Let's hope we have three movies,' so some characters come in at the end of the second, hoping that it will ramp up on the third one."