Eddie Redmayne is to star in ‘The Last Days of Night’.
The 34-year-old actor has signed a deal to appear in director Mortum Tyldum’s new movie which focuses on the "War of Currents" between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse in the US in the 1880s and 1890s.
Both men were racing to establish one American electricity system with the Edison Electric Light Company’s direct current (DC) based delivery in direct competition with the Westinghouse Electric Company’s alternating current (AC) system.
The two rivals fought on the front pages of newspapers and in the Supreme Court, which included a struggle over who would power the country’s first electric chair execution.
Redmayne will play lawyer Paul Cravath who represented Edison in his career making case.
The movie is based on a script written by Graham Moore and is the second project the scriptwriter and Tyldum have teamed up for following their 2014 World War II code breaking film ‘Imitation Game’ – which earned Moore the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
The Black Bear Pictures drama is due to start filming in the UK in January.
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.’
He was recently at San Diego Comic-Con promoting his next film, the Harry Potter spin-off ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,’ which is in cinemas on November 18.
Eddie Redmayne cast in The Last Days of Night
