Actor Russell Crowe has reportedly signed on to play the late Roger Ailes — the former Chairman and CEO of Fox News — in a Showtime mini-series entitled The Loudest Voice in the Room.
The 54-year-old Crowe will play Ailes in the eight-episode series, based on events chronicled in Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman’s book on the cable news network.
“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 on Monday. “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.”
The conservative media icon passed away on May 18, 2017, after suffering a subdural hematoma.
News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch recruited Ailes to help launch Fox News and the veteran political operative served as CEO of the cable news giant from October 1996 until stepping down from his post in July 2016 following allegations of sexual harassment.
“To understand the events that led to the rise of Donald Trump, one must understand Ailes,” Showtime’s description of the forthcoming series reads. “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.”
“McCarthy’s deft handling of similarly complex, high-stakes storytelling in Spotlight earned him an Oscar for co-writing 2017’s Academy Award winner for best picture, plus an Oscar nomination for directing. For the primary source material, The Loudest Voice in the Room, Sherman interviewed more than 600 people,” the description continues.