Dan Stevens has had great success as the dishy Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey, and now Variety reports that he’s landed a film role in Dreamworks’ planned Wikileaks movie, playing a hacker friend of Daniel Bruhl’s Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who goes to work at the controversial website.
Benedict Cumberbatch will play WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the film, which follows the rise and fall of the website. Bruhl (who recently replaced James McAvoy) is also onboard to play Daniel Domscheit-Berg, whose departure from the site in 2011 – due to major philosophical and journalistic differences – is credited as one of the main reasons that thousands of secret international cables were leaked, which led to massive international controversy.
Bill Condon is directing from a screenplay by Josh Singer, which is adapted from Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s book Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange At The World’s Most Dangerous Website and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War On Secrecy by David Leigh and Luke Harding. Filming will begin next year.
The film is bound to prove controversial, as many see Domscheit-Berg as a turncoat who turned on his former friends and has been spreading disinformation to further his own agenda. Others believe he’s a hero who’s exposed the personality cult around Assange and the ethically dodgy way he handled the secrets leaked to him. Quite how the film will handle this isn’t known, although there are some who already believe it will be a hatchet job against Assange (whether he deserves it or not).