The maple syrup mob heist from 2012, one of the world’s most notorious crimes, is being made into a mini-series starring a Hollywood icon.

As executive producer and guest star of the dark comedy series, The Sticky, Jamie Lee Curtis took to Instagram to alert the world to the Oscar winner’s latest on-screen role, her third in a pivot to TV after a five-decade movie career.

“My new show where you learn if [blood emoji] is stickier than maple syrup,” wrote the seasoned actress, affectionately known as The Scream Queen after decades making horror movies.

Inspired by a real-life heist that made global headlines, which saw more than $CAD18 million ($20 million) worth of maple syrup stolen from Quebec’s national reserves, the six-part series “combines moments of culture-clash hilarity, edge-of-the-seat excitement and heartbreaking drama”.

Curtis, who started her career as a 20-year-old playing Laurie Strode in Halloween in 1978, will make a cameo in later episodes of The Sticky, but it signals a further step into the world of guest starring roles in TV shows.

She went on to play Strode another five times and star in iconic action comedy films including A Fish Called Wanda, Trading Places and True Lies.

But After Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2022, she found a new groove.

It began that year with TV comedy series, Reno 911, then as Carmy’s (Jeremy Allen White) alcoholic mother Donna Berzatto in The Bear, for which she won an Emmy.

She’s currently filming alongside Australia’s hardest-working star, Nicole Kidman, in Scarpetta, an adaptation of a Patricia Cornwall novel about a forensic pathologist who solves crimes, and is involved in seven made-for-television series or movies.

“I’m the luckiest girl in the world,” she said in September after the Emmys.

“I’ve been an actor since I was 19. I’m 65. I sold yoghurt that makes you sh-t for seven years, and I just never thought in my life that I would get to do work at this level, depth and complexity and intelligence.

“It’s just been the thrill of my creative life these last couple years that I get these opportunities.”

Her latest opportunity is filming The Sticky in Montreal.

‘Maple Wars’

The real story, documented in Netflix’s Dirty Money series in 2018, began in 2011 where, over several months, 60 per cent of the stockpile of syrup at the Global Maple Syrup Reserve warehouse in Montreal, Quebec, had been syphoned off.

Described as liquid gold, almost 16,000 blue-coloured unmarked barrels were stacked to the ceiling and were only checked once a year.

At the time, the price of maple syrup was 13 times the price of crude oil.

“The liquid inside was not goopy, brown, or redolent with the wintry scent of vanilla, caramel, and childhood; it was thin, clear, and odourless. It was water,” wrote Brendan Borrell in a 2013 cover story for Bloomberg Businessweek after an accountant blew the whistle during the annual stocktake.

“To steal that amount of maple syrup means you have to know the market,” Simon Trépanier, acting director of the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, told Borrell.

“We are talking about big players.”

Brendan Borrell says the syrup trail led to free-market renegades inside and outside the province. It wasn’t just about syrup, or money. It was a miniature Canadian Cold War. Photo: Prime Video

The theft was also an “existential threat to the federation”, says Borrell, which had viewed its growing strategic reserves as the final step in stabilising prices, locking in buyers and ensuring loyalty from its producers.

“For the past decade it had struggled to overcome opposition to its reign in a series of legal battles the local media had christened ‘The Maple Wars’.

“Some observers suggested that their attempts to control the syrup supply had, in fact, catalysed an underground economy.”

It was an inside job, with thieves on-selling the siphoned syrup in small numbers to unsuspecting legitimate distributors.

The ringleader and his offsiders were jailed and fined.

Bloomberg says Canada’s francophone province is the Saudi Arabia of the syrup world, producing some three-quarters of the world’s output. Photo: Prime Video

But let’s leave the true crime storytelling to fictitious character Ruth Clarke (played by three-time Emmy Award winner Margo Martindale), a tough, middle-aged maple syrup farmer who turns to crime when authorities threaten to take away everything she loves.

She teams up with a Bostonian mobster (Chris Diamantopoulos), and a French-Canadian security guard (Guillaume Cyr) to carry out the multimillion-dollar heist.

The three maple syrup thieves evade police, create mayhem in their quest for the liquid, and potentially dabble in murder.

All six episodes of The Sticky premiere on Prime Video on December 6