Given how solid IT Crowd co-star Richard Ayoade’s first film turned out – Submarine, in case you were crazy enough not to see it – it’s no surprise that he’s attracting top name talent for his follow-up. And so it has proved to be, with Vulture reporting that Jesse Eisenberg will star in The Double.

The casting hasn’t been officially announced just yet, so we’re going to let this one straddle the worlds of rumour and fact for now. But if it definitely pans out, it’s great news.

That said, Ayoade hasn’t picked something easy for his second stab at filmmaking: he’s adapting Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s eponymous novella. Nor familiar with it? Not a shock, but the basic story finds a Russian government clerk whose life begins to fall apart when an identical man, right down to the details of his life and including his name, starts working in his office.

Since this is an indie production, we doubt Ayoade will be splashing out on the technology David Fincher used to create the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, but a double dose of Eisenberg being paranoid and twitchy sounds like it could work.