Benedict Cumberbatch to Produce, Star in A24 TV Show About Vatican Heist
The upcoming series marks Cumberbatch's return to television.
After a significant bidding war, A24 has acquired the rights to adapt Nick Brucker’s upcoming Vatican heist novel, White Smoke, into a television series—and a big star is attached.
Deadline reports the series will be produced by A24, actor Benedict Cumberbatch, and his production company SunnyMarch. The two-time Oscar nominee for The Power of the Dog and The Imitation Game is also on board to star.
Set to publish next year, White Smoke is a heist novel “set among a group of duplicitous con men and thieves determined to steal the Vatican’s most remarkable treasures during a papal conclave.”
The book, the first in a series, had more than a dozen suitors looking to option the rights for film and TV, per Deadline. But the sellers decided to go with A24 and SunnyMarch’s offer to adapt the novel for television.
Nick Brucker is the pen name of science fiction and horror author Nicholas Binge. His latest novel, Dissolution, is being adapted at Sony Pictures, with Eric Heisserer (Arrival, Bird Box) tackling the screenplay.
White Smoke marks the return to TV for Cumberbatch after the limited series Eric for Netflix in 2024. SunnyMarch also co-produced the BAFTA-winning limited series Patrick Melrose in 2018, which starred Cumberbatch, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Hugo Weaving.
On the silver screen, Cumberbatch most recently starred in The Thing with Feathers, an adaptation of Max Porter’s novella Grief is the Thing With Feathers. He also starred alongside Olivia Colman last year in the black comedy The Roses and appeared in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme.
This year, Cumberbatch is set to appear alongside Rosamund Pike and Anthony Hopkins in Guy Ritchie’s thriller Wife and Dog, expected to hit cinemas on October 23rd.
So far, information on potential directors for White Smoke or when and where the series will premiere has not been revealed.
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