Daniel Craig will join David Oyelowo on the small stage next fall as one of theatre’s great villains.



Craig, whose fourth James Bond film Spectre opens worldwide next month, will star in an off-Broadway production of Othello as the scheming, handkerchief-planting Iago. Oyelowo, known for playing Martin Luther King Jr in Selma, will play the title character in the New York Theater Workshop’s first Shakespeare production since 1990.



The New York Theatre Workshop, a small but prominent nonprofit, will stage the play in a 199-seat theatre during its limited run in fall 2016. Additional casting and further details will be announced at a later date.



Director Sam Gold, who won the Tony award for best director this year for his work on the musical Fun Home, assembled the cast and offered it to the Workshop, where he made his directorial debut in 2007.



“This production is an opportunity for New York Theatre Workshop to do what it aspires to do – to foster the growth and accomplishment of the artists we believe in,” the company’s artistic director James C Nicola said in a statement. “When Sam Gold, a longstanding member of our NYTW Usual Suspects community, came to us with the beginning sketches of this production, with these two sublime actors, it seemed the perfect next step for us to take together. I’m eager to see what these original, creative artists come up with in response to Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy.”



Gold said that he had long wanted to direct a Shakespeare play, and picked Othello because of its focused and clear plot.



“‘Othello, for me, is the Shakespeare that when I watch, I feel the most involved – I care the most about the people, and have the simplest connection on a gut level, so I wanted to start there. But I’ll do more of them,” the director told the New York Times.



Although Craig and Oyelowo are now well-known for their film work, both performers are trained stage actors. Craig’s interest in Othello was noted by the New York Post in September. Oyelowo’s previous roles include Henry VI for the Royal Shakespeare Company – he was the first black actor to play an English king in a major Shakespeare production.



Craig and Oyelowo also have the role of one of fiction’s greatest spies in common: Oyelowo will play James Bond and other characters in the audiobook version of Trigger Mortis, written by Anthony Horowitz and commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate.

