Claire Foy will play Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in an HBO limited-series adaptation of Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Deadline reports.
Foy, the British actor known for her roles in the series Wolf Hall and The Crown, will also serve as an executive producer of the adaptation, which is titled Doomsday Machine.
Frenkel and Kang’s book, published last year by Harper, tells the story of Facebook from 2016 to 2020, when the social media platform was under fire for how it handled disinformation during the 2016 presidential election and the Jan. 6, 2020, Capitol insurrection. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “thorough, high-caliber investigative reporting every social media user should read.”
Doomsday Machine will be written by Ayad Akhtar, the playwright (Disgraced), novelist (Homeland Elegies), and PEN America president.
Akhtar will also be an executive producer of the series, along with Josh Stern, Paul Lee, Doug Wald, David Levine, Elyse Cheney, Adam Berkowitz, and Adam Eaglin.
Frenkel shared news of the project on Twitter, writing, “BIG news! HBO is turning our book, An Ugly Truth, into a TV show! Can’t wait to see what @ayadakhtar and his team do with this.”
BIG news! HBO is turning our book, An Ugly Truth, into a TV show! Can’t wait to see what @ayadakhtar and his team do with this. https://t.co/ZIHb63xSk1
— Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) February 8, 2022
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.