Operation Mincemeat, it might sound like the title of a grisly new horror but I swear it’s not. The film by Shakespeare in Love director John Madden is based on a real-life act of deception by the British to confuse Hitler and disguise the Allies’ planned attack on Sicily. The plot, cooked up by two British intelligence officers, was to use the body of a dead man and dress him up as a secret agent.
Colin Firth and Succession‘s Matthew Macfadyen star as the two British agents who came up with the scheme. They’re joined by Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton, Jason Isaacs, with Johnny Flynn as James Bond creator Ian Fleming and Simon Russell Beale as Winston Churchill.
It’ll be interesting to see if Netflix plays up the inclusion of Fleming to try and attract 007 fans. I certainly would. Don’t really get that from this trailer, though.
Operation Mincemeat will open in select theaters and streaming on May 11th.
It’s 1943. The Allies are determined to break Hitler’s grip on occupied Europe and plan to launch an all-out assault on Sicily; but they face an impossible challenge – how to protect the invasion force from potential annihilation. It falls to two remarkable intelligence officers, Ewen Montagu (Colin Firth) and Charles Cholmondeley (Matthew Macfadyen) to dream the most inspired and improbable disinformation strategy of the war – centered on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man. OPERATION MINCEMEAT is the extraordinary and true story of an idea that hoped to turn the tide for the Allies – taking impossibly high risks, defying logic, and testing the nerves of its creators to breaking point.
