Star-packed Roger Ailes drama gets an awards… | Little White Lies

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Star-packed Roger Ailes dra­ma gets an awards sea­son release

06 Mar 2019

Words by Charles Bramesco

Older man with grey hair wearing a plaid shirt, looking stern and contemplative.
Older man with grey hair wearing a plaid shirt, looking stern and contemplative.
John Lith­gow will play the late, dis­graced head of Fox News.

Roger Ailes, the ser­i­al sex­u­al preda­tor and founder of right-wing tele­vi­sion net­work Fox News, died in May 2017. A select few mourned his pass­ing, many more breathed a sigh of relief, and now the final stage of the nation­al grief process has arrived: a scathing, star-stud­ded biopic.

Today, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter relays the news that a still-unti­tled film about Ailes and his reign of coer­cion at Fox will pre­mière in Decem­ber of this year, just in time for awards sea­son con­sid­er­a­tion. In light of the many Oscar nods for Dick Cheney por­trait Vice, this shrewd choice may very well pay off, too.

Direc­tor Jay Roach also took a cue from Vice in cor­ralling a cast made up of big names to mount a drama­ti­za­tion of mod­ern his­to­ry. John Lith­gow will por­tray the noto­ri­ous Ailes, while Mal­colm McDow­ell has signed on to play mogul Rupert Mur­doch, Ailes’ long­time busi­ness partner.

On the distaff side, Char­l­ize Theron will take on San­ta Claus race-denier and Fox per­son­al­i­ty Meg­yn Kel­ly, with her col­league Gretchen Carl­son played by Nicole Kid­man. Mar­got Rob­bie has also been con­firmed as an unnamed asso­ciate pro­duc­er, undoubt­ed­ly a part of the effort to expose Ailes’ mis­con­duct spear­head­ed by Kel­ly and Carlson.

The sup­port­ing bench goes even deep­er, how­ev­er, with Alice Eve, Alli­son Jan­ney, Mark Duplass, and Kate McK­in­non all in unspec­i­fied roles.

Late­ly, films with even the faintest whiff of fem­i­nist mes­sag­ing have tried to hitch their wag­on to the public’s sup­port of the #MeToo move­ment, but this one posi­tions itself smack dab in the mid­dle of the ongo­ing controversy.

With his TV movie Game Change, Roach suc­cess­ful­ly trans­lat­ed the hec­tic messi­ness of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics into thought­ful enter­tain­ment; this time around, the mate­r­i­al will be far more sen­si­tive and the stakes much higher.

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