Jason Clarke takes on the hard-to-believe-but true crime thriller ‘The Silk Road’

Lionsgate(NEW YORK) — The new crime thriller The Silk Road is now available for streaming on Video On Demand platforms. Based on true events, the film stars Chappaquiddick actor Jason Clarke as a veteran detective trying to catch up with the times — when an entrepreneurial college student creates the titular dark web site and gets rich becoming, essentially, Amazon for pretty much anything illegal. 

Clarke, who is an Aussie, but convincingly plays a Baltimore FBI and DEA agent, tells ABC Audio he loved the fact that the movie, like director Tiller Russell’s bonkers Netflix documentary Operation Odessa, seems too crazy to be real.

“I mean, he’s got this way of finding these stories that are unbelievable but true and using a narrative which follows that, but still makes it an enjoyable watch as well,” Clarke says.

The Silk Road isn’t a documentary, however. “You know, it takes a lot of poetic license,” admits the actor. “You know, the front page of the script was, you know, what was it? ‘This is a true story.’ You know, ‘Thanks for believing my lies,'” Clarke laughs.

He says of Russell, “There’s something about the way he weaves a story which…is, you know, this would be a lot of fun to make as well as, you know, showing people something really crazy [that] does happen.”

By Stephen Iervolino
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.