Transformers: The Last Night hits cinemas next month, and to celebrate Empire Magazine is going large on its giant robot coverage, with interviews with the film's director Michael Bay, its writers Ken Nolan and Matt Holloway and some great images from the film, including this shot of Bumblebee riding rodeo.

According to Bay, the new film "gets us back in the groove” after Age Of Extinction, the last movie in the popular live-action Transformers film franchise.

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While franchise veteran Shia Leboeuf won't be back anytime soon, Bay apparently had no trouble securing all the actors his writers asked for this time out. For example, The Last Knight includes an aristocratic British character named Sir Edmund Burton and, as screenwriter Ken Nolan described, “We said, ‘He’s an Anthony Hopkins-type character,' And two days later Michael’s like, ‘So, we’ve got Anthony Hopkins.’" According to Nolan, “it’s good to be Bay,” as apparently, “Everybody says yes.”

Debuting in theaters on June 23, “Transformers: The Last Knight” is a production of Paramount Pictures directed by Michael Bay and starring Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, Stanley Tucci as Joshua Joyce, Isabela Moner as Izabella, Josh Duhamel as William Lennox, Tyrese Gibson as Robert Epps, John Turturro as Seymour Simmons, Laura Haddock as Vivian Wembley and Anthony Hopkins as Sir Edmund Burton.