Oscar-winning actor Jeremy Irons will portray U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in an upcoming Netflix film of Robert Harris’ 2018 historical thriller, Munich, according to Variety.
The novel tells the story of two university friends, Englishman Hugh Legat and German Paul von Hartmann, who take different paths in the 1930s. Legat is a private secretary to Prime Minister Chamberlain, and von Hartmann is a German diplomat who secretly wants to oust Adolf Hitler. Both end up at the Munich Conference in 1938, where they hope to head off Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of the Nazis. Kirkus’ review called the book “engaging, informative, and quietly suspenseful,” singling out Harris’ “humane and sympathetic” portrayal of the notorious Chamberlain.
Harris’ upcoming novel, V2, is set near the end of World War II, and will be published by Knopf on Nov. 17. He’s best known for his 1992 bestseller, Fatherland, set in an alternate version of the 1960s in which Germany won the war; it was made into a 1994 HBO film starring Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson. The Munich film is set for release sometime next year.
Irons won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Claus von Bülow in the 1990 movie version of Alan M. Dershowitz’s 1986 nonfiction bestseller, Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bülow Case. More recently, he played the villainous Adrian Veidt in last year’s Emmy-winning HBO miniseries adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen.
George MacKay will co-star as Legat in the Munich film; he was the lead in last year’s Oscar-winning World War I drama, 1917, and also appeared as Hamlet in the 2019 film adaptation of Lisa Klein’s 2006 YA novel, Ophelia.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
