The cameras are rolling and the sparks are flying on the set of period legal drama The Current War, and the first image of one of the main players, Benedict Cumberbatch's Thomas Edison, has arrived.
Written by Michael Mitnik, the film will follow the real-life public clash between Edison and George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) as to who was going to decide the future of the electricity industry in the 1880s. Edison favoured direct current, while Westinghouse and several other companies preferred to push alternating current. Caught between them was inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).
Also in the cast for Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's latest? Katherine Waterston, playing Marguerite Westinghouse and Tom Holland as Samuel Insull, Edison's right hand man. The progress on The Current War means that this project is set to beat competing chronicle of the events The Last Days Of Night out into cinemas. That one has Eddie Redmayne aboard (as lawyer Paul Cravath) and a script by The Imitation Game's Graham Moore (ironic Cumber-link there), but is still a ways from starting.
“Edison and Westinghouse’s rivalry is the ultimate tale of competition driving ingenuity,” says Weinstein Company co-chairman Harvey Weinstein. "Theirs was a battle of intellect, a race of creativity and technological innovation that we see echoed in the self-made inventors dominating spaces like Silicon Valley." There's no release date set for the film yet.