Hot off of an appearance at Comic-Con for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Eddie Redmayne has been cast in the industrial age historical drama The Last Days of Night.
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The story follows the battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to bring electric light to the country. He’ll play Paul Cravath, the brilliant young lawyer fresh out of Columbia Law School who defended Westinghouse when Edison sued him for infringing his patent.
Morten Tyldum is set to direct from a script by Graham Moore. Released in 2014, it nabbed Moore an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and it’s understood studio Black Bear Pictures is hoping to strike gold once more.
The Last Days Of Night starts production in the United Kingdom late January in anticipation of a fall 2017 release.
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This year, Redmayne was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as transgender artist Lili Elbe in ‘The Danish Girl, ‘ a year after he took home the same prize for his portrayal of motor neurone disease sufferer and genius physicist Stephen Hawkins in ‘The Theory of Everything’. Edison proves to be a formidable, wily, and risky opponent. Before that, though, Redmayne will educate audiences on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them come November. Woven into the tale are Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford White and other technological titans of the late 19th century. Benedict Cumberbatch is attached to The Weinstein Company’s rival project The Current War, with Cumberbatch to play Edison and possibly Jake Gyllenhaal as Westinghouse in the race to electrify America.
