Multi-award winning stage and screen actor Richard Armitage, who is best known for his role as Thorin in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, is joining suspenseful new Netflix series The Stranger.

“I could barely contain my excitement reading Harlan Coben’s The Stranger,” he says. “It’s a nail-biting thriller with a huge beating heart and a dash of social commentary for extra bite.”

Armitage stars as Adam Price, a man with a good life, two wonderful sons, and a watertight marriage. When a stranger sits next to him one night in a bar and tells him a devastating secret about his wife, Corinne, Adam finds himself tangled in something far darker than even her deception.

He soon realises that if he doesn’t make exactly the right moves, the conspiracy he’s stumbled into will not only ruin lives—it will end them. Coben (Fool Me Once, Tell No One, No Second Chance and the Myron Bolitar series) has described the book as “one of my most challenging novels — and definitely the most twisted.”

The series brings together the team behind Safe (starring Michael C. Hall), which debuted on Netflix earlier this year, and is the third collaboration for the RED Production Company, Harlan Coben and Netflix following the earlier success of The Five.

Netflix has ordered eight 60-minute episodes of The Stranger and the series goes into production in March 2019.

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