Claire Foy (The Crown, First Man) will portray Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in the upcoming series Doomsday Machine. The upcoming drama series will be based on the best-selling book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. Novelist Ayad Akhtar will serve as the series creator, though a network where it will premiere has yet to be announced.
Doomsday Machine will chronicle the tenuous relationship between Sandberg and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, as well as the various challenges Facebook has overcome throughout the years. Specifically, the series will be anchored in 2016, covering the election and the controversy surrounding the XCHECK regulations and Zuckerberg's manipulation of the platform's News Feed. Doomsday Machine will reportedly include the testimony of several journalists for the source material and content.
Foy herself recently set a relationship with wiip, the studio behind Mare of Easttown who will also oversee Doomsday Machine. Anonymous Content (Spotlight, Mr. Robot) is also on board to help shepherd and produce the series. Kang and Frenkel, the authors whose source material will serve as the program's inspiration, will also executive produce, as will Andrew Marantz, a journalist from The New Yorker.
Foy is well-known for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix's period drama The Crown, for which she won an Emmy. The actress had her most prominent year in film in 2018, where she played the lead in Steven Soderbergh's Unsane, Janet Armstrong in Damien Chazelle's Neil Armstrong picture First Man, and Lisbeth Salander in The Girl in the Spider's Web. She's been out of the spotlight for a bit now since those three films in 2018, though she does have two films for this year in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain starring Benedict Cumberbatch and the mystery/thriller My Son alongside James McAvoy.
Doomsday Machine could be a strong project for Foy, and her next stand-out television role. Based on the premise, it sounds like she will truly benefit from a strong co-star in whoever the creator and producers decide to cast as Zuckerberg. However, she has proven to be a strong performer in her own right against co-stars like Ryan Gosling and Matt Smith, so the hopes are certainly high for this one.