Hal Holbrook, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce McGill & Joseph Cross All Circling
Holy shit. Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Field were announced in tiny little drips of information, but the faucet on Steven Spielberg‘s dream project “Lincoln” is on full blast with a massive cast angling for parts.
THR reports that (take a deep breath) Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tommy Lee Jones, John Hawkes, Hal Holbrook, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce McGill and Joseph Cross are in negotiations for the upcoming film. Based on the best-selling book, “Team of Rivals,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and featuring a script by Tony Kushner (”Angels In America”), the film will focus “on the political collision of Lincoln and the powerful men of his cabinet on the road to abolition and the end of the Civil War.”
Jones will play Republican Thaddeus Stevens who supported the abolishment of slavery and wrote legislation that helped fund the Civil War. Gordon-Levitt will be Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd, the only one to survive past his teenage years. Or put it another way: Daniel Day-Lewis is gonna be JGL’s Dad. Amazing. No word yet on the roles for the rest, but they will be slotted into supporting roles.
Lensing is set to begin this fall in Virginia with an Oscar-season 2012 release in the works. So, with Quentin Tarantino gearing up “Django Unchained” and Spielberg finally getting “Lincoln” rolling it looks like we’re gonna have two high-profile slavery films taking very, very, very different approaches. But if you want Oscar-glory Spielberg sooner, your wait won’t be long. He’s got “War Horse” coming on December 28th.