‘Fake!': Kate Winslet To Star In Cryptocurrency Scheme Movie From ‘The Report’ Director Scott Z. Burns
Kate Winsletis heading back into the tech world for her newest movie.
After playing Apple executive Joanna Hoffman in 2015’sSteve Jobs, Winslet will be portraying a woman who was scammed by a cryptocurrency scheme inFake!, a new movie that’s being written and directed byThe Report’sScott Z. Burns.
Deadline brought the news about thisFakemovie, which will serve as a reunion between Winslet and Burns – he wroteContagion, Steven Soderbergh’s eerily prescient 2011 pandemic thriller that counted Winslet among its excellent ensemble cast members. The new film is based on a forthcoming book by Jen McAdam and Douglas Thompson which details McAdam’s involvement in the OneCoin Ponzi scheme.
OK, so what’s this story actually about? The answer is surprisingly elaborate (you cancheck out this NPR storyabout it), but it boils down to this: Jen McAdam was one of many victims of OneCoin, a company which purported to be selling a cryptocurrency but which actually ended up bilking its “customers” out of billions of dollars. McAdam and her friends and family lost almost $300,000, and when McAdam began investigating the disappearance of OneCoin’s charismatic leader on a podcast calledThe Missing Cryptoqueen, she quickly received death threats and threats of sexual assault from OneCoin members who didn’t (or couldn’t) believe that the organization was a massive scam. Dr. Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian woman who served as the public face of OneCoin, disappeared in 2017 as the heat started closing in, and her whereabouts are still unknown.
Winslet will play McAdam in the movie, and I’m excited to see what she can do with a role like this. She’s back in the news for her work in this year’s period dramaAmmonite, but it feels like it’s been a while since we’ve gotten a true knock-out Kate Winslet performance, and I’m more than ready to experience another one. This will be the third feature directorial effort from Burns, who directed 2006’s little-seenPu-239and made waves with the solid real-life political thrillerThe Reportlast year.
The real McAdam is set to executive produce this film adaptation of her book, while Winslet and Burns will produce alongsideJennifer Todd, who previously producedMemento, theAustin Powerstrilogy,Across the Universe, Tim Burton’sAlice in Wonderland,The To Do List,Celeste & Jesse Forever, multiple editions of the Oscars ceremony, and recently, the Ben Affleck-as-a-sad-basketball-coach movieThe Way Back.
