'Fake!': Kate Winslet To Star In Cryptocurrency Scheme Movie From 'The Report' Director Scott Z. Burns

Kate Winslet is heading back into the tech world for her newest movie.

After playing Apple executive Joanna Hoffman in 2015's Steve Jobs, Winslet will be portraying a woman who was scammed by a cryptocurrency scheme in Fake!, a new movie that's being written and directed by The Report's Scott Z. Burns.

Deadline brought the news about this Fake movie, which will serve as a reunion between Winslet and Burns – he wrote Contagion, Steven Soderbergh's eerily prescient 2011 pandemic thriller that counted Winslet among its excellent ensemble cast members. The new film is based on a forthcoming book by Jen McAdam and Douglas Thompson which details McAdam's involvement in the OneCoin Ponzi scheme.

OK, so what's this story actually about? The answer is surprisingly elaborate (you can check out this NPR story about it), but it boils down to this: Jen McAdam was one of many victims of OneCoin, a company which purported to be selling a cryptocurrency but which actually ended up bilking its "customers" out of billions of dollars. McAdam and her friends and family lost almost $300,000, and when McAdam began investigating the disappearance of OneCoin's charismatic leader on a podcast called The Missing Cryptoqueen, she quickly received death threats and threats of sexual assault from OneCoin members who didn't (or couldn't) believe that the organization was a massive scam. Dr. Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian woman who served as the public face of OneCoin, disappeared in 2017 as the heat started closing in, and her whereabouts are still unknown.

Winslet will play McAdam in the movie, and I'm excited to see what she can do with a role like this. She's back in the news for her work in this year's period drama Ammonite, but it feels like it's been a while since we've gotten a true knock-out Kate Winslet performance, and I'm more than ready to experience another one. This will be the third feature directorial effort from Burns, who directed 2006's little-seen Pu-239 and made waves with the solid real-life political thriller The Report last year.

The real McAdam is set to executive produce this film adaptation of her book, while Winslet and Burns will produce alongside Jennifer Todd, who previously produced Memento, the Austin Powers trilogy, Across the Universe, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, The To Do List, Celeste & Jesse Forever, multiple editions of the Oscars ceremony, and recently, the Ben Affleck-as-a-sad-basketball-coach movie The Way Back.