Benedict Cumberbatch Signs on to play The War Magician

Benedict Cumberbatch will soon be trickin’ Nazis as The War Magician

By Adam Poltrack December 9, 2015

benedict cumberbatch how the grinch stole christmas — JStone / Shutterstock

From The Imitation Game to the illusion game.

Benedict Cumberbatch has already helped defeat Nazi Germany once, but according to THR, the actor is ready for round two of WWII.

Cumberbatch has signed on to star in The War Magician, which is based on David Fisher’s 1983 book of the same name. The war drama follows the true story of Jasper Maskelyne, a man of magic who used misdirection and illusion to help vanquish the Nazis during the second World War. The British conjurer assembled a special team dubbed,“The Magic Gang” which used various modes of trickery to confound the Germans and conceal high-priority targets.

The Allied armies tried some wacky things during the war, but this wasn’t just some half-baked, quickly abandoned project. Maskelyne pulled plenty of rabbits out of his hat, and was so successful in this endeavor that he actually made Adolf Hitler’s personal blacklist.

Interestingly enough, Cumberbatch is already playing comic book sorcerer Dr. Stephen Strange for Marvel, so we’ll be pretty used to seeing the actor abracadabra by the time this film actually hits theaters.

The War Magician has yet to set a release date and details are still scarce, but you can check out the official synopsis of Fisher’s book below.

“Jasper Maskelyne was a world famous magician and illusionist in the 1930s. When war broke out, he volunteered his services to the British Army and was sent to Egypt where the desert war had just begun. He used his skills to save the vital port of Alexandria from German bombers and to ‘hide’ the Suez Canal from them. He invented all sorts of camouflage methods to make trucks look like tanks and vice versa. On Malta he developed ‘the world’s first portable holes’: fake bomb craters used to fool the Germans into thinking they had hit their targets. His war culminated in the brilliant deception plan that won the Battle of El Alamein: the creation of an entire dummy army in the middle of the desert.”

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