The Crown's Claire Foy is moving from Windsor Castle to Facebook headquarters to play Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in a new series Doomsday Machine.
The upcoming TV series Doomsday Machine has cast The Crown’s Claire Foy as Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Multiple award-winning actress Foy, who played Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of Netflix’s Royal Family drama The Crown (and returned for a cameo in season 4), also tackled the role of computer hacker Lisbeth Salander in 2018’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Foy is also shortly slated to appear in an upcoming film adaptation of Miriam Toews’ critically acclaimed novel Women Talking.
In a new report from Variety, Foy’s new role as the Facebook COO Sandberg is an adaptation of the bestselling book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination penned by Pulitzer prize-nominated journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. Being adapted for television by Ayad Akhtar, the series is being produced by Mr. Robot’s Anonymous Content and Mare of Easttown’s Wiip. This particular series will focus on the relationship between Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and Sandberg in the period since the 2016 election and the rise of online disinformation. The show will also seek to lift the lid on how the social media giant was aware of the mental health risks its Instagram platform posed to its youngest users.
This, of course, is not the first time the history of Zuckerberg’s social media empire has inspired an onscreen adaptation, and 2010’s The Social Network saw Facebook’s earliest days brought to life with Zuckerberg himself being played by Jesse Eisenberg. Screenwriter Alan Sorkin has also expressed his interest in writing a sequel to the film, charting the many events that the social media giant has been involved in since then. It would seem, however, that Doomsday Machine will get there first, and will explore a most turbulent time in the company’s recent history. With Zuckerberg previously voicing his dissatisfaction with The Social Network, it will be interesting to see how he reacts to news of this latest project.
Source: Variety
