The 42-year-old actor is to star alongside Julia Roberts and Elizabeth Olsen in the film that is being written and directed by Sam Esmail.

Plot and character details on the flick are yet to be revealed but the movie has been described as a paranoid thriller that is influenced by 'The Silence of the Lambs' and focuses on the hunt for a cyber-terrorist.

Esmail and Chad Hamilton are producing the picture for Esmail Corp while Kevin McCormick and Chrystal Li are overseeing the movie for Warner Bros.

The studio acquired the film earlier this year after a competitive bidding war with part of the appeal for the filmmakers a commitment to a cinema run – a growing factor in the sale of films to distributors.

Eddie's most recent role saw him play assassin The Jackal in the Sky Atlantic TV series 'The Day of the Jackal' and admitted that he was fearful that he would "butcher" a character made famous on the big screen by Edward Fox in the 1973 film adaptation.

He said: "I grew up with the original Edward Fox film and I loved it.

"When the scripts arrived, I thought: ‘I don’t want to touch this, I don’t want to butcher something I love,’ but it has been updated and has a very contemporary feel while retaining that old school, analogue spy quality."

Eddie has enjoyed success on both stage and screen but revealed that he is "more critical of (his) own work than most critics".

Asked if he reads his own reviews, the Oscar-winning star told The Independent: "Oh, yeah, absolutely.

"TV and film, though, often it’s so long since you did the thing that there’s a level of detachment from it. But the interesting thing about them is that I’d say most actors are harsher critics of themselves than any critic can be.

"It’s rare that I’m sitting reading a bad review of one of my performances, going, 'No! They got it wrong!’ I typically sit there going, ‘Oh, yeah, I saw that too.'"

Asked if his approach is good for his health, the London-born star replied: "Oh, none of it's healthy!

"The whole industry is deeply unhealthy. It’s a horrendous job to do for health reasons."

Despite his self-criticism, Redmayne still believes that the stresses related to acting are worth putting up with.

The 'Fantastic Beasts' star said: "I’m certainly more critical of my own work than most critics, I would say. So the reason I do this job is to aspire to those glimmers of something that momentarily feels real.

"It sounds f****** pretentious, but there are those moments, and sometimes they last for under a second, where you’re completely free, and you’re playing against someone, and everything is alive, and momentarily you go somewhere else."

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