Reality Winner had just pulled into the driveway of her Augusta, Ga. home on a late afternoon in June 2017 when two men approached her car.
They worked for the FBI. They wondered if Winner, a contractor for the National Security Agency and former Air Force veteran, had time to answer a few questions. A few hours and about a dozen agents later, Winner, then 25, was handcuffed outside her home, faced with charges of leaking a damning classified report about Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump.
Winner's interrogation by the agents, Justin C. Garrick and R. Wallace Taylor, would inspire the verbatim for Tina Satter's 2019 play Is This a Room, an unnerving stage drama that debuted both off and on Broadway that accounts for — in addition to the exhaustive dialogue — every pause, stammer, and cough in the tense 65-minute transcript that would lead to Winner's incarceration under the Espionage Act.
Sydney Sweeney in 'Reality'
| Credit: HBO
Sydney Sweeney, the Emmy-nominated star known for her role as Cassie on Euphoria and Olivia in The White Lotus, steps into the interrogation room as Winner in Reality, Satter's upcoming feature film directorial debut based on her acclaimed play.
Though she wasn't familiar with Winner's story until she read the script, "I was completely blown away because I've never read something that flowed that way, directly taken from a transcript," Sweeney tells EW recently, following the first day of production on ...
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