Russell Crowe has been cast to portray Roger Ailes in a new miniseries that will appear on the premium cable channel Showtime.
The show will depict the birth and rise of Fox News Channel, as well as the rise and fall of Ailes, its founder, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Crowe is a three-time nominee for Best Actor at the Academy Awards and won for 2000's "Gladiator."
The eight-part miniseries, titled “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” is based on the Gabriel Sherman bestseller of the same name and marks Crowe’s first regular role on the small screen.
Sherman, who also co-wrote the screenplay’s pilot with Tom McCarthy, reportedly interviewed more than 600 people for his book.
“In many ways, the collision between the media and politics has come to define the world we live in today," Showtime CEO David Nevins said Monday, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Nevins compared the project to Orson Welles' 1941 film “Citizen Kane” based on newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
"We've seen this phenomenon depicted on screen as far back as the story of Charles Foster Kane, and it finds contemporary embodiment in the rise and fall of Roger Ailes. With Russell Crowe in the lead role, this limited series promises to be a defining story for this era," he said, according to THR.
Ailes reshaped TV news and brought Fox News Channel from being a fledgling CNN upstart to taking a commanding ratings lead in cable news.
"In today’s politically charged media landscape, no figure looms larger, even after his passing, than Roger Ailes, molding Fox News into a force that irrevocably changed the conversation about the highest levels of government," Showtime said in a statement. "To understand the events that led to the rise of Donald Trump, one must understand Ailes. The upcoming limited series takes on that challenge, focusing primarily on the past decade in which Ailes arguably became the Republican party's de facto leader, while flashing back to defining events in Ailes’ life, including an initial meeting with Richard Nixon on the set of The Mike Douglas Show that gave birth to Ailes’ political career and the sexual harassment accusations and settlements that brought his Fox News reign to an end."
The story will be “told through multiple points of view,” and expects “to shed light on the psychology that drives the political process from the top down," Showtime’s statement concluded.
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