The Current War features Michael Shannon as George Westinghouse, waging a competitive battle for electrical supremacy with Benedict Cumberbatch's Thomas Edison. "I'd just seen him in Long Day's Journey Into Night on Broadway and met him briefly backstage, although he doesn't remember," says director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. "I'd been a fan of his for many, many years. There's something unmistakable about what he does, but he hasn't done anything quite like this and it was exciting to see him go places I hadn't seen before."

"I told him that I didn't really enjoy making movies very much and was trying to stop doing it so often," the actor recalls, "and he told me that he really wanted me to play George Westinghouse anyway." Gomez-Rejon had something up his sleeve: an antique book about Westinghouse. He slid it across the table. "It wasn't even a biography," says Shannon, "more a kind of eulogy about what a great man he was. I think he knew when he gave me it that it was good bait. Then he left and I realized, 'Well, I've got to get this back to him somehow, because this is obviously a very valuable book.'"