Let’s get this out of the way right now and say that it doesn’t really matter if you’re an established American television actress like Elisabeth Moss in Top Of The Lake or a British feature film player like Benedict Cumberbatch but we definitely need to acknowledge the fact that very few actors can do Australian accents in a way that feels emotionally spontaneous or inherent to the character they are playing and can at any moment diverge into the stringy sing-song intonations of a South African street magician or a Kiwi backpacker on pain medication and seriously Hollywood what is up with that?
Now that’s out of the way, villainous rake Beady Cumberbatch stars as controversial Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in the trailer for the upcoming Wikileaks thriller The Fifth Estate, directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, The Twilight Saga – Breaking Dawn) and written by former West Wing scribe Josh Singer.
Other key players include Daniel Brühl (Good Bye, Lenin!, The Edukators) as Assange’s former WikiLeaks colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci as paranoid US Government agents #1 and #2. Watch the trailer below…
The official synopsis: “THE FIFTH ESTATE reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and
corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st
century’s most fiercely debated organization. The story begins as
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his
colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become
underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring,
they create a platform that allows whistleblowers to anonymously leak
covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets
and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the
world’s most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange
and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence
documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining
question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free
society—and what are the costs of exposing them?”
The Fifth Estate is slated for release Ocotber 11th.
