Matthew Macfadyen Signs to Star in Ben Hopkins' 'Epic'

LONDON -- Matthew Macfadyen, the star of BBC's Ripper Street,  Myanna Buring and Noah Taylor have signed to star in Ben Hopkins' Epic, a U.K.-Germany-Russia-Georgia co-production.

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Co-written by Hopkins along with BAFTA winner Pawel Pawlikowski, the movie is billed as "gentle black comedy."

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It details the story of a washed-up Oscar winning British film director, named Emil Forester (Macfadyen), who gets invited to make a national epic in an obscure Caucasus Republic called Karastan.

Scheduled to shoot in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi at the Georgian Film Studios early next week, the film is a co-production between U.K.-based Film and Music Entertainment (F&ME) led by Mike Downey and Sam Taylor, Daniel Zuta’s Frankfurt-based Brandstorm Entertainment, Metra Films’ Artem Vassiliev in Moscow and Tbilisi’s 20 Steps owned by Vladimer Katcharava.

Key equity backing comes from Russian investor Alexander Malchevsky.

The project was developed with backing from the British Film Institute (BFI) and is supported by HessenInvestFilm Fund (Frankfurt), the French-German Cultural Channel ARTE, CinePlus (Berlin/Frankfurt), German film distributor Piffl, and Georgian National Film Centre.

Stephen Daldry is executive producing.

Said Hopkins: "It’s comedy about globalisation and nation-building, sex and art, money-laundering and love. In the case of Epic, reality is absurd, credibility is ridiculous, and authenticity is hilarious. And all set in a fictitious country, that could be one of any number of post Soviet satellite states."