Dan Stevens has been a busy boy since his Downton Abbey character Matthew Crawley died in a tragic car crash leaving us to mourn without him last year.   He filmed The Fifth Estate this past year along with a star-studded cast, including PBS Masterpiece’s own Laura Linney.  What would the U.S. viewers do without Laura Linney introducing Downton Abbey to us on Sunday nights???

The Fifth Estate is a DreamWorks Pictures film directed by Bill Condon and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Bruhl, Anthony Mackie, David Thewlis, Alicia Vikander, Peter Capaldi, Carice van Houten, Dan Stevens, Stanley Tucci and Laura Linney.

Stevens (picture above with Peter Capaldi) will play Ian Katz who is a South-African born British journalist who was the deputy editor of The Guardian. In May 2013 it was announced that Katz was to become the new editor of the BBC Two current affairs program Newsnight.

(Dr. Who fans should be thrilled to get a sneak peek at Peter Capaldi since he was recently announced as the newest Doctor on the show.)

DreamWorks just released the official movie poster for the film which is opening on October 18, 2013.

The story begins as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring, they create a platform that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously leak covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the world’s most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society-and what are the costs of exposing them?   Written by DreamWorks Pictures

Check out the trailer – sadly, Dan Stevens doesn’t appear in it.