James McAvoy will star opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in the WikiLeaks movie

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

James McAvoy will take over the role Joel Kinnaman was rumored to play in Bill Condon’s WikiLeaks movie. McAvoy will reunite with his STARTER FOR 10 costar Benedict Cumberbatch who is playing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Variety reports that McAvoy will play Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who wrote the book “Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange At The World’s Most Dangerous Website”. Variety broke down their relationship pretty well:

Assange launched whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in 2006 and began antagonizing world governments by leaking embarrassing diplomatic cables and other state secrets, prompting the U.S. to seek to prosecute the polarizing figure.

Domscheit-Berg began working with WikiLeaks after meeting Assange at the Chaos Computer Club’s annual conference in 2007, eventually becoming a spokesperson for the organization. Assange recruited Domscheit-Berg because he had been burned by some hacker friends when he was younger and the German tech guru seemed like someone he could trust.

The charismatic Assange seduced Domscheit-Berg with his ideology, promising the two could cause real change in the world via WikiLeaks. Assange is expected to be portrayed as a noble crusader who eventually becomes drunk with power as he grows increasingly paranoid and obsessed with winning the “war of information.”

Though he rose to become Assange’s right-hand man at WikiLeaks, Domscheit-Berg left due to his belief that Assange failed to display journalistic integrity. His split from WikiLeaks was widely credited by news outlets as being one of the incidents that led Assange to release more than a quarter-million U.S. diplomatic cables. In his book, Domscheit-Berg criticizes Assange’s leadership style and handling of the Afghan War Diaries. In September 2010, Domscheit-Berg founded OpenLeaks with the intention of being more transparent than WikiLeaks, though the project has failed to have the same impact.

Production is slated to start in 2013 and will be worked around McAvoy’s commitment to X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. So, we may not see this project completed and in theaters for quite a while.

McAvoy is a good actor and Cumberbatch is everywhere these days. Here is to hoping the pair share the same chemistry they had on their prior film.