Because he doesn't already have enough acting jobs lined up, Benedict Cumberbatch is sorting out the details for one more. He has his eye on The Man In The Rockefeller Suit for Fox Searchlight.
It's the true story of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a man for whom "truth" did not come naturally. After moving from Germany to the States in his late teens, he pulled off a variety of scams using aliases, living as an actor, director, art collector, an English aristocrat and even a ship's captain.
In 1995, having assumed the identity Clark Rockefeller, and trading off the name to secure various business opportunities, he crucially lived off the income of Sandra Boss, a successful businesswoman he persuaded to marry him. They had a daughter together, but when Boss began to discover "Clark" wasn't quite who he claimed to be, Gerhartsreiter tried to kidnap the child. He was arrested for that, and was then convicted of the 1985 murder of a man in California.
David Bar Katz wrote the script, which adapts Mark Seal's eponymous book, subtitled The Astonishing Rise And Spectacular Fall Of A Serial Impostor. Searchlight wants to make this one as quickly as possible, and the hunt for a director is now on.
Cumberbatch – if that is indeed his real name – will pop up as Doctor Strange in Thor: Ragnarok (out 27 October) and plays Thomas Edison in The Current War, which will arrive here on 5 January next year.
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