Matching the acclaim of his directorial debut Submarine was never going to be an easy feat, but thankfully it doesn’t look like Richard Ayoade’s particularly fazed by the hype. The director/writer/performer/smugbastard is throwing himself into his next project – adapting Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double for the screen. And what’s more, he plans on improving the original tale. Poor chap, if only he had just a little more confidence…

We wrote a while back that the adaptation had a Jesse Eisenberg attached to it, and we can now tell you that he’ll be starring against Jane Eyre‘s Mia Wasikowska. Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double is a dark, surreal tragedy following a bank clerk who slowly comes to believe that a doppleganger is trying to usurp him. When asked about the project a while ago, Ayoade stated in typical dead-pan style:

“it’s funny, I think. Very funny. Dostoevsky never finished it to his satisfaction… So yes, we’re going to dust that off… We’ll do what Fyodor couldn’t.”

Lad.

We probably don’t need to mention how excited we are to see more of Ayoade’s directorial undercarriage. Shooting begins this spring, so we’ll probably get the finished product by the end of the year. Until then, it’s just going to have to be Garth Marenghi on repeat…