Julian Assange Warned Benedict Cumberbatch Against Role in A Letter
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has been making limited appearances as he enjoys the political asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London. However, there is a recently released a letter to Benedict Cumberbatch dated January that certainly reveals how Assange feels about the film, The Fifth Estate, Us Weekly reported.
"Dear Benedict," the email correspondence, which was published on WikiLeaks on Wednesday, Oct. 9, begins. "Thank you for trying to contact me. It is the first approach by anyone from the Dreamworks production to me or WikiLeaks."
He praised Benedict Cumberbatch who portrays him in the film The Fifth Estate. The movie is based on a book by Assange's ex-partner Daniel Domscheit. It will narrate how Assange made the decision to release previously protected U.S. military and diplomatic documents to the general public back in 2010.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, Cumberbatch only said that they communicated via "email through a friend, basically."
"He was pretty keen for me not to do the film, and the rest is sort of between us, really," he said at the time. The content of Assange's email discloses the reason.
"I believe you are a good person, but I do not believe that this film is a good film," the Australian warned. "I do not believe it is going to be positive for me or the people I care about. ....It is based on a deceitful book by someone who has a vendetta against me and my organization."
"Feature films are the most powerful and insidious shapers of public perception, because they fly under the radar of conscious exclusion," he continued. "This film is going to bury good people doing good work, at exactly the time that the state is coming down on their heads. It is going to smother the truthful version of events, at a time when the truth is most in demand."
"You will be used, as a hired gun, to assume the appearance of the truth in order to assassinate it," Assange added. "To present me as someone morally compromised and to place me in a falsified history. To create a work, not of fiction, but of debased truth. Not because you want to, of course you don't, but because, in the end, you are a jobbing actor who gets paid to follow the script, no matter how debauched."