Tradecraft: Jesse Plemons Joins The Missionary

Deadline reports that Matt Damon lookalike Jesse Plemons (The Master) has been tapped to co-star opposite the previously announced Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) in HBO's Berlin-set Cold War spy series The Missionary. The trade blog offers up the most comprehensive description I've seen yet of the show, which comes from writer Charles Randolph (The Interpreter) and producers Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson and Malcolm Gladwell: "Set in Berlin in the late 1960s, The Missionary centers on Roy (Walker), a young American missionary who gets caught up in Cold War intrigue while helping a young woman escape East Berlin. Plemons ... will play Sherwood Elbridge, a young Coca-Cola executive who helps smuggle defectors out of the Eastern Bloc." Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, who directed Wahlberg in Contraband (a remake of the Icelandic film Reykjavik-Rotterdam, which Kormákur produced), will helm the pilot. There's a lot of good talent involved in this series. I like both Walker and Plemons, and the behind-the-scenes involvement of Gladwell, Wahlberg and Kormákur is certainly intriguing. This is definitely a series I'm looking forward to!