Brie Larson is going from having a secret identity in this weekend’s Captain Marvel, to going undercover in the CIA. The Oscar winner has agreed to star in and produce an untitled series for Apple as part of their upcoming streaming service. Yeah, I know, yet another subscription network to pay for.
Unsurprisingly, a fierce bidding war broke out to acquire the series, which is based on the memoir of real-life CIA agent Amaryllis Fox. Animal Kingdom‘s Megan Martin is in talks to come aboard as writer and exec-producer.
Here’s the synopsis for her upcoming book:
Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master’s program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world.
At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to “the Farm,” where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity. At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover – the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.
Okay, damn, that DOES sound like a story built for the Hollywood treatment. That description is more interesting than THR‘s which focuses on the lead’s “provocative” relationships, which makes it sound like a series for The CW. Doubtful Larson would’ve signed on to such a thing.
Apple has a big rollout of their service coming up in the next few weeks, and they are expected to announce a lot of new projects with some big names attached. Now that they’ve got Larson ready to go on this you can bet it will be an integral part of their presentation to potential subscribers.
