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Dan Stevens Will Star Opposite Julia Roberts in Watergate-Themed Series 'Gaslit'

Photo credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle
Photo credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle


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There's been no shortage of Watergate-themed movies over the years, from 1976's All The President's Men to 2017's The Post. But the upcoming Starz drama Gaslit promises to tell a different kind of Watergate story, focusing on the forgotten players and lesser-known aspects of this era-defining political scandal.

Here's what we know so far about Gaslit.

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The cast is packed with A-listers.

The Gaslit ensemble is spearheaded by Julia Roberts and Sean Penn, who will play husband and wife. Roberts is Martha Mitchell, "a celebrity Arkansan socialite and wife to Nixon’s loyal Attorney General, John Mitchell," who's described by the Starz synopsis as "a big personality with an even bigger mouth. Despite her party affiliation, she’s the first person to publicly sound the alarm on Nixon’s involvement in Watergate, causing both the Presidency and her personal life to unravel.”

Meanwhile, Penn plays Attorney General John Mitchell, a "temperamental, foulmouthed and ruthless" man whose Achilles heel is his love for his outspoken wife, and who's ultimately forced to choose between his loyalty to her, and to the President. The cast also includes Dan Stevens as John Dean, Betty Gilpin as Mo Dean, and Shea Whigham as G. Gordon Liddy.

The show will premiere in April, and the full trailer is out now.

Gaslit will debut on Starz’s streaming platform at midnight on April 24. It'll also air live on Starz earlier that evening, at 8 p.m. ET.

Watch the full trailer here:

Dan Stevens replaced Armie Hammer in a key role.

Originally, Hammer was on board to play John Dean, a young White House counsel who finds himself torn between his ambition and his morality, when he's pressured to lie to protect Nixon. Per Deadline, Hammer left the project in January owing to a scheduling conflict, weeks before a series of sexual misconduct and assault allegations emerged against him. Hammer has denied those allegations.

Photo credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle
Photo credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle

The series is based on a podcast.

The first season of Slate's Slow Burn podcast, now in its fifth season, focused on the lesser-known stories of Watergate. Gaslit is adapted from that season of Slow Burn, and is described as "a modern take on Watergate that focuses on the untold stories and forgotten characters of the scandal—from Nixon’s bumbling, opportunistic subordinates, to the deranged zealots aiding and abetting their crimes, to the tragic whistleblowers who would eventually bring the whole rotten enterprise crashing down.”

The show, which is planned as an ongoing anthology series, is created by Mr. Robot showrunner Sam Esmail, who previously worked with Roberts on another podcast adaptation, Amazon's Homecoming. Robbie Pickering, who worked with Esmail on Mr Robot, will serve as showrunner.

Gaslit focuses on the women whose stories are often forgotten in standard retellings of Watergate.

"The women in this scandal have been kind of ignored, for the Woodwards and Bernsteins and Nixons and Deans," Pickering told journalists at a TCA Press tour panel in February. "Not many people know Martha's story, and that's kind of a tragedy, and I hope after this they will."

Esmail added that for him, redressing this imbalance was one of the goals of the series. "I don't think it’s a mistake that the women who played an instrumental role in this scandal were ignored and silence," he said. That’s one of the reasons why I found the story compelling when I listened to the Slow Burn podcast, that this was clearly by design. For me, that's the perspective shift that this story takes on."

Despite its period setting, the show has plenty to say about modern politics.

During the panel, Pickering noted that he sees the show "not as a reassessment of that period, but an assessment of where we are now, and how the things happening now echo through the decades." Specifically, Gaslit explores "complicity in government, and people subsuming their values for an authoritarian figure, and how that comes from human frailties. The need to be valued in the case of John Mitchell, blind ambition in the case of John Dean, zealotry in the case of G. Gordon Liddy. Really, the show is an exploration of how that propensity to be subsumed is in all of us."

Gilpin noted that the show depicts a version of politics that is "the negative image of our culture now. Now, someone's public persona involves this branding of their 'authentic self', and they're presenting themselves as 'This is who I really am'. Whereas back then, your public self was very formal and austere, this stiff Norman Rockwell version of yourself, and the White House was still seen as this distant Camelot." Gaslit depicts a time when this status quo was beginning to feel stale, and Americans were beginning to distrust it, she added.

"So for Martha to be sort of the opposite of a stale Norman Rockwell facade, and just being so much her authentic self, and telling you the truths you don't want to hear, back then, that was really rare. Now, we're sort of inundated with people being their true, loud, brash selves. But back then, Martha doing that was refreshing, even to people who didn't agree with her politics."

Filming on Gaslit had to pause after Sean Penn took a stand in favor of vaccination.

In a move that may signal a sea change in Hollywood's approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sean Penn took a public stand against crew members who refuse to get vaccinated. Penn refused to continue working on set until every single crew member on the series was vaccinated. Per The Wrap, the production continued to film scenes that don't include Penn for now, and as of February 2022 filming is complete.

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