He cracked the Enigma code as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game and now Benedict Cumberbatch is revisiting the Second World War to play a magician whose illusions helped the allied forces fight against the Nazis.
The actor, recently seen in Black Mass, will star in The War Magician, a dramatised retelling of real-life British illusionist Jasper Maskelyne’s wartime efforts to dupe the Third Reich on the battlefield.
While the director of The War Magician is yet to be announced, it’s been confirmed that Gary Whitta – who co-wrote the forthcoming Star Wars standalone movie Rogue One with Chris Weitz – will be adapting the script based on David Fisher’s book of the same name.
Cumberbatch received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his role in The Imitation Game last year – which is around the same time that he was approached about playing Maskelyne.
The project itself, however, has been in development since 2003, and its fanciful storyline has long attracted the attention of actors such as Tom Cruise, who was once linked to the role.
In the book, Maskelyne assembles a rag-tag of accomplices dubbed “The Magic Gang”, who were able to use sleight-of-hand stunts to create fake tanks and soldiers to give the illusion of troop movement to Nazi spy planes overhead. It’s claimed that this "dirty dozen" even managed to hide strategic targets such as the Alexandria harbour near the Suez Canal, where there were 150,000 men with 1,000 guns and tanks.
Storyscape Entertainment principals Bob Cooper and Richard Saperstein are producing the film, with StudioCanal financing it.
