Armie Ham­mer and Mads Mikkelsen will play spy games in a new thriller

Though the past few years have been some­what rocky, Amma Asante remains one of the more excit­ing emerg­ing tal­ents to break out of the UK in the past decade or so. She com­plet­ed her debut fea­ture A Way of Life in 2004, and came into her own dur­ing the 2010s with Belle and A Unit­ed King­dom before direct­ing the wide­ly reviled Holo­caust romance (what a phrase) Where Hands Touch in 2018.

Since that frosty recep­tion, she’s been build­ing her good­will back up with direc­to­r­i­al gigs on a pair of well-regard­ed TV series (The Handmaid’s Tale and Mrs. Amer­i­ca), and now she’s ready to return to the sil­ver screen with a project decid­ed­ly more geared to her suc­cess. A press release dis­trib­uted yes­ter­day announced that Asante’s next film will be the espi­onage pic­ture The Bil­lion Dol­lar Spy, and that she’s already got a pair of strap­ping, very tall lead­ing men.

Mads Mikkelsen and Armie Ham­mer will star in the Cold War-set thriller, in which they play oppo­site sides of the US-Sovi­et con­flict as they find some com­mon ground for the good of the world. Ham­mer plays CIA spook Brad Reid, the oper­a­tive who made con­tact with Russ­ki engi­neer and defec­tor Adolf Tolka­chev, to be por­trayed by Mikkelsen. Though they had every rea­son to dis­trust one anoth­er, they struck up a close friend­ship that land­ed both men and their wives in the crosshairs of the KGB.

The press release empha­sizes the his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy of the script, which draws on a book penned by the Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist David E. Hoff­man, the work that earned him his Pulitzer Prize. By the sound of it, we’re in for some­thing in the vein of John le Car­ré, in which gran­u­lar inside knowl­edge of the intel­li­gence-gath­er­ing community’s doings will com­bine with paper­back excite­ment as the clock runs out for the unlike­ly heroes.

Tolka­chev may have been a com­pli­cat­ed man with torn alle­giances, but he’s revered as a great asset to the Unit­ed States to this day, his por­trait still hang­ing in CIA head­quar­ters as a trib­ute to the man who helped end the Cold War. It took Amer­i­cans a lit­tle while to warm up to the idea of lik­ing peo­ple named Adolf again, but we got there. The film won’t com­mence pho­tog­ra­phy in East­ern Europe until next year, so expect to see this one on the pre­mière slate for 2022.