Although it’s been going under Untiled WikiLeaks Project for quite some time, producers have finally gone with a tentative title for their upcoming Julian Assange drama. According to sources, they’ll be using The Man Who Sold the World as they head into a January production — no relation to the David Bowie song.
Led by Benedict Cumberbatch in the main role, we’ve also got word from Variety that Downton Abbey star Dan Stevens has joined the cast that follows the WikiLeaks founder. Stevens will play a hacker who is close friends with Daniel Domscheit-Berg, portrayed by Inglourious Basterds star Daniel Bruhl. Swedish starlet Alicia Vikander (Anna Karenina, A Royal Affair) also recently joined the cast.
The Man Who Sold the World is being helmed for DreamWorks by Bill Condon, director of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Parts 1 & 2 and veteran television writer Josh Singer (The West Wing, Fringe) adapts the screenplay from the two books, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, as well as David Leigh and Luke Harding’s WIkiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.
The film will focus on Assange and the setting up of WilkiLeaks, as the non-profit organization came to be in 2006 and has gone onto leak a significant number of anonymous, corporate and government documents from around the world to the public. In February of 2010 WikiLeaks had its well-known “Cablegate,” a U.S. diplomatic cables leak that would become the organization’s undoing. Assange, currently seeking asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy on London, will give a public Christmas speech tonight from the embassy at 19:00 GMT.