Russell Crowe embraced his funny side in recent films like The Nice Guys and The Mummy, but he’s going very dark for his first major TV role. In an upcoming limited series on Showtime, the actor is set to play former Fox News honcho Roger Ailes.
The series, titled The Loudest Voice in the Room, will be based on Gabriel Sherman’s eponymous book. (Sherman is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.) The series will run for eight episodes, with Spotlight director Tom McCarthy and Get Outproducer Jason Blum set to executive produce; Sherman and McCarthy co-wrote the pilot. So far, additional details are scarce, including a premiere date—although, per Entertainment Weekly,2019 is looking likely. It’s also unclear which other characters might make their way into the film, but it seems possible that we could soon see casting announcements for Hollywood doppelgängers of former Fox personalities like Bill O’Reilly and Gretchen Carlson.
Ailes was known as the architect behind Fox News, which he ran for two decades starting in 1996, when Rupert Murdoch named him C.E.O. In 2005, Ailes was named chairman of the Fox Television Stations group. In 2016, he was forced to leave the company in disgrace following multiple accusations of sexual harassment—which started with a lawsuit from Carlson, who said Ailes had sexually harassed her. Ailes became an adviser to the Donald Trump campaign after his departure from Fox, and died months later.
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