Emma Watson has just signed on for another movie project that will help leave Harry Potter even farther in the rear-view mirror. In the film, Watson will essentially realize our greatest fears about privacy invasion in the Internet age, and she'll do so alongside Tom Hanks.
The English actress will star in The Circle, an upcoming adaptation of Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel of the same title. Written and directed by The Spectacular Now filmmaker James Ponsoldt, the tech thriller features Watson as a recent college graduate who scores a job at a powerful Internet monopoly, called the Circle, which boasts a gorgeous campus and incredible amenities for its employees. After ascending the ranks fairly quickly, she discovers herself to be in the center of a corporation linking “users’ personal e-mails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.” A press release for the project explains that the film will explore “the perils of life in a digital age where personal data is collected, sifted, and monetized and used for surveillance, rendering privacy obsolete.”
Hanks, who is producing the film, will also co-star, but his role has not yet been announced.
Although The Circle’s central company sounds similar to Google and Facebook, Eggers explained that he set his story in the not-so-distant future, at a corporation that “has subsumed all the big tech companies around today.” The author also clarified that he did not visit either company’s campus, or speak to any of their employees, while researching for his book.
In a statement released today, Ponsoldt suggested that Watson’s intelligence—she graduated from an Ivy League school, thank you very much—was integral to her getting the part: “Emma Watson is one of my favorite actors, and her incredible talent, sensitivity, and deep intelligence will bring an electric energy to The Circle.”
Watson will start filming this September, after wrapping her part as Belle in the live-action Beauty and the Beast adaptation. You know what they say: nothing helps shake off the Disney princess like a little dystopian technology thriller.
