Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan to star as reporters who exposed Weinstein

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan are set to take on the roles of the reporters who exposed Harvey Weinstein.

In She Said, the pair will play Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, the New York Times journalists whose landmark expose helped to bring down the movie mogul accused and ultimately convicted of sexual assault.

Related: ‘It’s wild!’ Carey Mulligan and Emerald Fennell on making Oscars history

The film is an adaptation of the pair’s bestselling book She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, which details their Pulitzer prize-winning work that exposed Weinstein as a predator. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

The Guardian’s Helen Lewis praised the book as “a hymn to old-fashioned investigative reporting” comparing parts of it to All the President’s Men. The spirit of the adaptation is being likened both to the Watergate drama and the Oscar-winning Spotlight about a team of journalists investigating allegations of sexual abuse within the Catholic church.

The Universal Pictures project will be directed by Maria Schrader, who recently won an Emmy for her work on the hit Netflix drama Unorthodox. The script will come from British playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz whose big screen work includes Ida and Disobedience.

The news comes after Mulligan received rave reviews and awards attention for her role in the revenge thriller Promising Young Woman. She is currently filming fact-based sci-fi drama Spaceman alongside Adam Sandler.

Kazan, best known for her performance in The Big Sick, was most recently seen in HBO’s miniseries The Plot Against America. She is also set to star in social media-based drama series Clickbait with Adrian Grenier.

Mulligan and Kazan have previously co-starred on stage in a Broadway production of The Seagull.