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This fall, Daniel Craig returns to the big screen as one of film’s great spies. Next fall, he will return to the small stage as one of theater’s great villains.

Mr. Craig, whose fourth outing as James Bond, “Spectre,” opens in the United States next month, will be paired with another British movie star, David Oyelowo (“Selma”), in an Off Broadway production of “Othello” that is sure to be one of the hottest tickets of the next theatrical season. Mr. Oyelowo will play the title role, and Mr. Craig his infamous tormentor, Iago.

The play will be staged by New York Theater Workshop, a prestigious but small nonprofit that plans to present the work in a 199-seat theater for a limited run in the fall of 2016 (the theater has not yet announced the production’s dates or duration).

The starry cast was assembled and offered to New York Theater Workshop by one of New York’s most in-demand directors, Sam Gold, who this year won the Tony Award as best director for his work on the musical “Fun Home,” and who is also known for his fruitful and frequent collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker. Mr. Gold’s career has been built largely on the direction of new work; “Othello” will be the first time he has professionally directed a play by Shakespeare.

Mr. Craig, although best known for his film work, is also a stage actor; he has appeared twice on Broadway, in a 2009 production of “A Steady Rain” and a 2013 revival of “Betrayal,” and earlier this year he told DuJour magazine that he wanted to do more New York theater but that “I don’t want to do Broadway anymore” because the audiences are too old. His interest in this “Othello” was previously reported by The New York Post.

In a telephone interview from Amsterdam, where he is directing a production of “The Glass Menagerie,” (in Dutch, which he does not speak), Mr. Gold said that Mr. Craig had sought him out after seeing a play that he directed and that the two have been talking and seeking a project on which to collaborate for some time. Mr. Gold said he reached out to Mr. Oyelowo through a friend; the actors read the play together and the project took off.

“I’ve been wanting to do Shakespeare for a long time — it’s what started me as a director — and I’ve almost done Shakespeare a number of times in the past few years, but it hasn’t worked out,” Mr. Gold said. “Finally, the right thing came together.”

He said he had chosen “Othello” because it interested the actors and him.

“Honestly, I wanted to start with a really simple, straight-shot Shakespeare, and ‘Othello’ is a single-plot show, very focused and clear,” he said. “‘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.”

Mr. Gold said that, given the cast, he could have brought the project anywhere; he chose New York Theater Workshop, he said, because of its emphasis on supporting directors, and because that’s where he had directed his first professional play. He said he was excited to do the play in a small theater, because of the intimacy it would afford; he declined to describe the production in any detail, saying it was too early.

James C. Nicola, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, said his organization had not presented a Shakespeare play since an adaptation of “As You Like It” in 1990.

“From the founding of our theater, we have had this double focus, not just on playwrights, but on directors, and for three years we have had an ongoing conversation about what we and Sam could do together that would be a challenge to him to grow and build muscle and capacity as a director,” he said.

“Because he tends to get new contemporary plays, we were looking back into the canon — we talked about a classic musical, but it hadn’t gone anywhere, and then he called and said he wanted to talk,” he added. “He said he’d put this together, and does it sound like it might fit in, so I said yes.”

Mr. Nicola said he did not think a Broadway transfer of the production was likely, given the limited availability of the actors. He said New York Theater Workshop would conduct fund-raising to support the production, which he said would be relatively large for his theater — perhaps 12 to 14 actors. The production will likely help the theater attract membership support as well, because tickets will be available to next season’s members; in London, the Barbican theater similarly benefited by selling memberships to people who wanted to get tickets to see Benedict Cumberbatch in “Hamlet.”