‘The Catcher Was a Spy’ Trailer: Paul Rudd Goes From Baseball To Espionage

In 1934, Morris “Moe” Berg was chosen to join the American All-Star baseball team on a trip to Japan, among the likes of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. While Berg did appear on some leaderboards, his career, overall, was unremarkable. Why then was he chosen to join the team? Berg’s actions while abroad provide the clues to a greater clandestine mission presumably under the aegis of the U.S. government. While the All-Star team was in Tokyo, Berg, who spoke seven languages, including Japanese, slipped away and discretely took video footage of the Tokyo skyline, harbor, and military facilities from the city’s tallest buildings. This footage, would later, go on to be used in the planning of the U.S. bombings of Tokyo in 1942.

While Berg wasn’t necessarily a stand-out on the baseball field, he seems to have left a mark in the world of espionage. A mark that Paul Rudd gets the pleasure of exploring in Ben Lewin‘s “The Catcher Was a Spy“— a film that was pulled from the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (because it apparently wasn’t finished on time), but went on to find a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year (here’s our review).

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Mark Strong, who is no stranger to this type of film, having already appeared in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” and “The Imitation Game,” co-stars along with  Jeff Daniels, Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Paul Giamatti and Hiroyuki Sanada.

Below is the official synopsis:

“The Catcher Was a Spy” tells the true story of Morris “Moe” Berg (Paul Rudd), the Major League Baseball player, Ivy League graduate, attorney and top-secret spy who helped the U.S. defeat Nazi Germany in the race to build the atomic bomb. 

With fifteen seasons of Major League Baseball under his belt, Moe Berg walks away from his catcher’s career and the love of his life to dedicate his supreme intellect, linguistic skills and athletic prowess to U.S. intelligence’s wartime efforts. After excelling at the rigorous training mandatory for intelligence officers in America’s pre-CIA agency, Moe convinces O.S.S. Chief Bill Donovan (Jeff Daniels) that his unique capabilities will serve the nation singularly well in espionage matters abroad. Soon Donovan tasks Moe with a deadly overseas mission: to head to war-torn Europe and infiltrate the inner sanctum of the Nazi atomic program’s gifted lead physicist, Werner Heisenberg (Mark Strong). Backed by U.S. military specialist Robert Furman (Guy Pearce) and renowned Dutch-American physicist Samuel Goudsmit (Paul Giamatti), Moe traverses the embattled villages of Italy and the upper echelons of Swiss academia on the hunt for the elusive Heisenberg. But once Moe ascertains exactly how close Heisenberg is to building an atomic bomb for the Nazi enemy, he is to make a life-or-death decision that will impact the very future of humanity.

“The Catcher Was A Spy” Hits theaters June 22, via IFC Films.