Prometheus 2 is still shrouded in mystery, but as of today there’s one more thing we know for sure: Michael Fassbender will be back, as confirmed by director Ridley Scott. Fassbender played mischievous android character David in the first film. Read Scott’s Prometheus 2 Michael Fassbender confirmation after the jump.

Deadline caught up with Scott at TIFF. Asked whether Fassbender would return for Prometheus 2, Scott responded, “Oh, yes. He and I are friends, because we also did The Counselor. And, I love The Counselor. No one else seemed to.”

To refresh your memory, 2012’s Prometheus ended with Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and David (Fassbender) taking off in an Engineer spacecraft to visit the Engineers’ home planet in search of answers. So it’s not exactly shocking news, but it’s nice to hear nonetheless. In fact, we might get even more of Fassbender this time around — we heard last year that the film could feature multiple versions of David.

Fassbender is currently shooting Assassin’s Creed, due out December 21, 2016. Recently, he picked up The Snowman to shoot sometime after that. But Scott’s comments suggest Prometheus 2 will likely be Fassbender’s next film.

Scott additionally discussed where Prometheus 2 could go next. While he doesn’t really get into plot specifics, he digs into the larger themes of the film.

You can either say, leave the first film alone and jump ahead, but you can’t because it ends on too specific a plot sentence as she says, I want to go where they came from, I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I thought the subtext of that film was a bit florid and grandiose, but it asks a good question: who created us? I don’t think we are here by accident. I find it otherwise hard to believe you and I are sitting here at this table, because the molecular miracles that would have had to occur were in the trillions, since the first sign of human life that crawled out of the mud with four fingers, would bloody well be impossible, unless there was some guidance system. Also, you have the sun approximately the same distance from earth as it is from maybe millions of planets and planetoids that are almost identical distance and therefore enjoy the value of sunlight on their soil. Are you telling me there are no other planets with human life? I simply don’t believe it. That raises the question to me, same as was depicted in 2001 when that object comes hurtling through space, and lands in Ethiopia. And an ape that had been grubbing around in the water hole with all of them bickering at each other, goes up and touches it. He has a bigger thought injected into his brain than Newton got sitting under a tree and seeing an apple fall. Stanley then picks something metaphorically poetic in its violence, as the ape picks up a hip bone and brains the anteater so they can eat him. That is one gigantic, magnificent leap of a thousand years of evolution; that is where the world begins. It is pretty grand thinking, and that’s what I want to explore. You’ve got to go back and find those engineers and see what they are thinking. If engineers are the forerunners of us, and therefore were creators of life forms in places that were possible for biology to function, who created that? Where’s the big boy? You think this was all an accident? I don’t know. Even Stephen Hawking now says, I am not sure. He no longer believes in the big bang.

Well, Prometheus 2 certainly doesn’t lack for ambition. Then again, neither did the first one, and all of its lofty goals didn’t stop it from receiving severely mixed reviews. Here’s hoping Scott can deliver a more satisfying exploration of those grand ideas this time around. Prometheus 2 shoots early next year for release in 2017.