According to Deadline, Ben Kingsley has signed on to play the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Operation Finale, the new thriller from MGM and director Chris Weitz (About a Boy, A Better Life) which sees Oscar Isaac as Peter Malkin, a member of Israel’s Mossad tasked with hunting down Nazis following World War II.
Eichmann, an SS officer, was one of the chief architects of the Holocaust and was responsible for arranging and managing the mass deportation of Jews across Europe to the Nazis’ extermination camps. Following the Nazis’ defeat in 1945, Eichmann fled to Austria and then Argentina, where he was eventually captured by Mossad in 1960. Brought to Israel to stand trial, he was ultimately sentenced to death for his crimes and executed in 1962.
Filming on Operation Finale is set to get underway in Argentina in the fall, with Weitz directing from a spec script by British writer Matthew Orton.
