Paz Vega has signed on to star in Kill the Messenger for director Michael Cuesta and Focus Features. We first reported on the project back in January, when Jeremy Renner signed on to star.

The project is based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner), who helped expose the CIA's involvement in helping Nicaraguan rebels smuggle cocaine into California in the 1980s. The spy agency tried to discredit the journalist until his death, which was deemed a suicide even though there were two bullets in his head. Paz Vega is playing the girlfriend of a prominent drug dealer, who hopes that the journalist can get her boyfriend out of jail.

Michael Cuesta (L.I.E.) is directing from a screenplay by Peter Landesman, which is adapted from both Gary Webb's book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion and Nick Schou's Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb. Production is scheduled to begin this August in Atlanta.

Paz Vega will next be seen in director Pedro Almodóvar's I'm So Excited! and in Grace of Monaco. She recently wrapped production on Paul W.S. Anderson's Pompeii.