Reports are surfacing that Hugh Jackman is set to take on American history with a film from Precious director Lee Daniels about the truth behind the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The project is called Orders to Kill and it is poised to tell an alternate version of the shooting.
According to the LA Times, Hugh Jackman will play controversial activist attorney William Pepper who has argued that James Earl Ray did not shoot MLK after all. Orders to Kill will largely focus on his efforts to debunk theories that Ray was the man who pulled the trigger and instead pass blame to the U.S. government.
The source material will be based on a 1995 book entitled Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King which was written by Pepper. Adapting will be Hanna Weg.
Orders to Kill is currently being shopped around Hollywood by Millennium Films which will finance the picture.
There is no word on a timeline for this project just yet, but it will presumably come sometime following production on James Mangold’s The Wolverine which just started production in Australia as Jackman is set to reprise his role as the title character.