Brie Larson To Star In Apple TV Series About An Undercover CIA Agent

Oscar-winning actress Brie Larson is about to go undercover. The Captain Marvel star will produce and star as a CIA agent in a new untitled drama series that Apple just secured in a bidding war. This is another huge "get" for Apple, which is about to reveal more details about its upcoming streaming service next month.

The Hollywood Reporter says Apple has picked up this untitled project straight to series after a "multiple-outlet bidding war" erupted over the property, which is an adaptation of an upcoming memoir written by CIA agent Amaryllis Fox. After reading this description of the book, her life admittedly does sound like it would make a wildly entertaining TV show:

Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world.

At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to "the Farm," where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity. At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover – the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.

This reminds me a lot of Zero Dark Thirty, although THR's description of "a provocative and contemporary look at a young woman's journey in the CIA, told through the prism of her closest relationships" makes it sound a bit more like Homeland or even Alias (but without all of that supernatural Rambaldi nonsense). Megan Martin (Animal Kingdom) is negotiating to write and executive produce the series.

Larson has had big roles on TV shows in the past: she starred on Raising Dad and The United States of Tara, and later had a guest run on a season of Community, but that was well before her big Oscar win and her subsequent rise to stardom. Apple has been scooping up major talent left and right and is supposed to be announcing more details about its streaming service later this month, so stay tuned for that.