After Game of Thrones, the romantic comedy Me Before You and a key role in Solo: A Star Wars Story, Emilia Clarke has essentially landed in true crime reenactment territory in the upcoming crime drama, Above Suspicion–co-starring a grizzled Johnny Knoxville. Watch the movie’s new trailer above.
Here’s the synopsis from Lionsgate:
Based on the true story of one of the most notorious crimes in FBI history, this gritty crime-thriller stars Emilia Clarke (“Game of Thrones”) as Susan Smith, a young woman desperate to escape a seedy life of crime and drugs in a Kentucky coal mining town.
When a newly minted FBI agent named Mark Putnam (Jack Huston, “Fargo”) recruits Susan as his informant for a high-profile case, she believes her bad luck may finally be changing. But as Susan and Putnam’s relationship deepens, so does the danger, setting them both on a collision course with deadly consequences.
It’d be a bad idea to google the case if you don’t want spoilers, for one of the reasons this true crime tale was worth a cinematic treatment featuring a sexy lead like Clarke is how twisty it was–something the trailer cleverly nods to in making Clarke’s character seem like a country femme fatale, shouting lines like “This ain’t no way to treat your star witness,” in a wild rage.
Told properly, this is a true tale in which the victims and the villains are not exactly who you might assume they are.
Above Suspicion, based on a 1993 true crime novel with the same title, also stars Knoxville, Jack Huston, Sophie Lowe, and Thora Birch.
To a southerner’s ears, Clarke’s backwoods accent sounds like yet another Hollywood generic twang (there really isn’t one single southern American accent, but Tinseltown thinks there is), but her look is pretty perfect for the story, and it calls for dramatic chops the British actress proved she had time and again as Khaleesi in Game of Thrones.
Above Suspicion will be available in select theaters and via On Demand on May 7th–it comes out on Blu-ray and DVD May 18, 2021.