Jonathan Rhys Meyers is to star in Damascus Cover, a spy thriller that begins filming in Casablanca this week.
Deadline.com reports that he will play an undercover agent sent to Syria in 1989 to help a chemical weapons scientist and his family leave the country.
Rhys Meyers said: "I'm enormously excited about this role. This was a hugely significant time in the conflict in the Middle East, post-Cold War and with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, when spies were redeployed to the Middle East, where the theatre of covert operations would now take precedence."
The film is based on the Howard Kaplan book of the same name and also stars John Hurt, Olivia Thirlby, Igal Maor, Jurgen Prochnow and Navid Negahban.
