Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is teaming up with Amazon Studios to create and star in a period drama about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the Reconstruction-era South.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Amazon has acquired feature film rights to K Troop, which Gordon-Levitt could both produce and star in. The film’s title refers to a U.S. military division that battled to eliminate the white supremacist group.
The film will chronicle the rise of the KKK in the American South following the end of the Civil War in 1865 and will also follow Major Lewis Merrill, the man who led the U.S. Army’s elite K Troop, which nearly quashed the group in 1871.
THR reports Levitt is slated to play Merrill in the project:
Gordon-Levitt is developing the project with an eye to star as Major Lewis Merrill, the leader of the division. An enigmatic man and brilliant military strategist, Merrill built an sprawling network of informants, including a number of local African-Americans, who risked their lives to piece together the secretive workings of the KKK.
Gordon-Levitt stars in Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden drama Snowden, which will debut this fall.
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