The dynamic duo of Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale are back again. After not sharing enough scenes in American Hustle, they’ll team up for a new film based on the book Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War by Eric Dezenhall and Gus Russo.
American Hustle’s Eric Warren Singer will write Best of Enemies but has not landed a director at the time of writing. Deadline reports that Cooper might step into the director’s role after his work on Maestro.
Deadline reports that the book Best of Enemies “tells the story of CIA agent Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko, a pair of Cold War spies who developed an unlikely friendship at a time when they should have been anything but. Platt and Vasilenko were new entrants to the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene in 1978, with the former working out of the CIA’s counterintelligence office and the latter out of the Soviet Embassy.
“The pair were involved with solving some of the most famous spy stories of the 20th century, including the rooting out of Soviet mole Robert Hanssen. While Vasilenko spent some time in a Soviet prison after it came to the government’s attention that he’d been working as a double agent for the U.S., he was ultimately freed with help from the CIA during the Spy Swap of 2010.”
Cooper will play Platt, and Bale will star as Vasilenko in the film, which is targeting a 2024 shoot.
