Freida Pinto is joining the likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, and Angelina Jolie: she’s set to play a spy. The “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” actress will star in and exec produce “Spy Princess,” a limited series from “Girl with the Pearl Earring” screenwriter Olivia Hetreed and Red Room Films. Deadline confirmed the news.
Based on Shrabani Basu’s “Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan,” the project will tell the story of “the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France in 1943 – a role with a life expectancy of just six weeks.”
Hetreed is penning the script, and Basu is signed on to serve as a consultant.
Pinto described Khan as “a fierce and amazing woman, the most unlikely heroine of World War 2.” She explained, “Sending women to the front line is controversial even now. Then it was unthinkable. Sending a Sufi mystic, who won’t use a gun, daughter of a long-haired Indian Guru who preaches love and peace – ridiculous! But Noor thrives, not in spite of her differences, but because of them. Her struggle to reconcile her values with the desire to find her own path and with her complex sense of duty, is something I am so excited to explore and to recreate.”
Pinto continued, “Olivia has crafted Noor’s story into something very powerful, thrilling, and extremely relevant. Noor is unlike all the other female superheroes, warriors, and badass women I see in film and TV, who train so hard and are so great with all the physical stuff, almost leaving us mere mortals to believe that courage means being good at everything. Noor has a quiet strength that she’s not entirely aware of. Alone in Paris, she lives and loves more intensely in a few months than most of us do in a lifetime, helping establish the ‘Secret Armies’ of the Resistance who will rise up on D-Day, astonishing the men who said she should never have been sent to the front line.”
Hetreed, whose other credits include “Wuthering Heights” and “Finding Altamira,” added, “At a time when conflicts about race, identity, and patriotism have a new and frightening energy, Noor’s character and her nail-biting story of hair’s-breadth escapes and life and death choices, offer us the picture of a heroine who defies every prejudice and stereotype.”
Pinto has another small screen project in the works, “The Henna Artist.” She’s signed on to star in and exec produce the drama about a woman who escapes an abusive marriage and becomes a successful henna artist.
Pinto was last seen in “Hillbilly Elegy.” “Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle” and “The Path” are among her other recent credits.
