Up to this point, Steven Spielberg’s long standing Lincoln project had been stuck in development hell until the announcement that Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) would play the 16th U.S. President while Sally Field would play Mary Todd Lincoln. Now, Dreamworks has released the a press release outlining what is shaping up to be an all-star roster for the project.
As if Day-Lewis as Lincoln in a Spielberg film weren't enough Oscar bait already, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hal Holbrook, James Spader (Boston Legal), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) and Joseph Cross (Running with Scissors) are all in negotiations to play a part in the file written by Tony Kushner (Angels in America).
Jones and Gordon-Levitt are the only ones given character bios in the release: Jones will play Thaddeus Stevens, “a Republican leader and powerful congressman from Pennsylvania … a staunch supporter of abolishing slavery … was critical to writing the legislation that funded the American Civil War.”
Gordon-Levitt (also in next year’s The Dark Knight Rises) will play the part of Robert Todd Lincoln, eldest son of Abraham and Mary and “the only one to live past his teenage years”… God, that’s depressing.
Filming is scheduled for this fall, to be released sometime late 2012
and will take place during the “political collision of Lincoln and the powerful
men of his cabinet on the road to abolition and the end of the Civil War.”