Ben Whishaw, who will soon be seen in Cloud Atlas and Skyfall this autumn, is circling another major major, as he’s in talks for a big role in Robopocalypse for DreamWorks and director Steven Spielberg, according to Variety.
An official offer has yet to go out to the actor, although DreamWorks has had him at the top of their list to play a computer hacker named Lurker. Chris Hemsworth is up for the male lead, while Anne Hathaway has been approached to take on the female lead.
Cabin in the Woods director Drew Goddard is writing the adapted screenplay based on Daniel H. Wilson’s novel. The story is set in the aftermath of a robot uprising, exploring the fate of the human race now that the machines have taken over.
Here’s the novel’s synopsis from Amazon, ‘Not far into our future, the dazzling technology that runs our world turns against us. Controlled by a childlikeyet massively powerfulartificial intelligence known as Archos, the global network of machines on which our world has grown dependent suddenly becomes an implacable, deadly foe. At Zero Hourthe moment the robots attackthe human race is almost annihilated, but as its scattered remnants regroup, humanity for the first time unites in a determined effort to fight back. This is the oral history of that conflict, told by an international cast of survivors who experienced this long and bloody confrontation with the machines. Brilliantly conceived and amazingly detailed, Robopocalypse is an action-packed epic with chilling implications about the real technology that surrounds us.’