Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz will replace Hilary Swank in the film adaption of Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt’s book about her legal battle with a Holocaust denier.
Weisz will play the lead role in “Denial,” a courtroom drama based on “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier,” the Hollywood Reporter reported last week.
Swank left the movie after a change in her personal schedule, Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University, told the Times of Israel.
Tom Wilkinson, a two-time Oscar nominee, will portray David Irving, a British revisionist historian who sued Lipstadt for libel after she called him a Holocaust denier in her 1993 book “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth & Memory.”
Lipstadt won the case in 2000 and published “History on Trial” in 2005.
Full production will begin in December on location in Poland, London and Atlanta. — jta