James McAvoy has signed on for The Conspirator; Robert Redford's true-life historical drama about the events following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Robin Wright Penn will be co-starring.
The script is by James Solomon, who also wrote Redford's Lions For Lambs.
McAvoy will play Frederick Aiken, the lawyer defending Penn's Mary Surratt in the wake of the assassination. Surratt was the only woman charged among the conspirators, and was the first woman to be executed by the United States Federal Government, in 1865. Her trial was somewhat irregular as she was a civilian convicted by miltary tribunal. There's a school of thought that her major "crime" was to be the mother of the conspirator John Surratt, and that her arrest was designed to flush him out of hiding.
Variety reports that this is the first film to come under the banner of entrepreneur Joe Ricketts' American Film Co: formed to tell "historically accurate American stories". Lincoln experts Thomas Turner and Fred Borch, and Pulitzer Prizewinning essayist and short story writer James McPherson are on board as historical advisors. Borch resigned from the Guantanemo military commissions over corruption charges, so we hope his historical acumen is more reliable.
Whether this will affect Steven Spielberg's long-mooted Lincoln biopic is unclear, but it seems very much rooted in the events after Lincoln's death, so the projects could presumably co-exist quite happily. Filming begins next year.