The cast for Michael Bay’s new true-life military thriller 13 Hours continues to fill out. Freddie Stroma, a veteran of the Harry Potter films and Pitch Perfect, has landed a role.
Written by Chuck Hogan, the script adapts Mitchell Zuckoff’s book 13 Hours: The Inside Account Of What Really Happened In Benghazi. The focus will be on six members of a security team who fought to defend the US State Department special mission compound in Libya when terrorists attacked the place. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and one of the compound’s workers died in the initial assault and two contractors were killed during another attack on a nearby CIA facility.
John Krasinski is starring alongside James Badge Dale, Max Martini, Pablo Schreiber and David Denman. Stroma, last seen in The Inbetweeners 2, will play an arrogant Yale graduate who also happens to be an undercover CIA agent working in the city.
Bay is scheduled to begin filming next month in Malta and Morocco, and he’ll have some competition. Deadline reports that Alcon Entertainment has picked up the rights to Scott Charnick, Charley Parlapanides and Vlas Parlapanides’ spec script Zero Footprint, which tracks not only the attack but the 18-month operation that led up to it. “This about why it happened and the siege of the embassy is the last part of the third act. This is about everything that led up to that attack,” Alcon co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Kosove tells the site. “We talked about this from a timing standpoint. We are not trying to throw anyone under the bus politically. There are secrets and there are secrets that need to be kept for national security. We are looking carefully at the timing of the release.”
And then there is Relativity and producer Dana Brunetti, who have the life rights to two former Navy SEALS/CIA operatives, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, who died trying to save others in the ensuing battle. The company hired Matthew Sand – who most recently scripted Deepwater Horizon – to write the screenplay. Bay, however, will be first out of the gate.