Gaslit Trailer: Nixon Administration Be Damned, Julia Roberts Won’t Shut Her Mouth

Julia Roberts has reunited with the team behind Homecoming, and as the trailer for the limited series Gaslit that Starz dropped on Wednesday makes abundantly clear, her latest role couldn’t be more different. The 56-year-old Academy Award winner stars as Martha Mitchell, a socialite with a strong Arkansan accent who, depending who you ask, is “completely insane” or “hysterical,” and a “truth-teller” or a “loudmouth bitch wife.” The Nixon administration is begging and pleading her husband, Attorney General John Mitchell, to keep her in line, but Martha simply won’t keep her mouth shut. “I told you, no more interviews!,” John exclaims as the camera flashes the cover of a magazine with the headline “Exclusive! Martha Mitchell Bares All: Marriage, Sex and Nixon’s Feud With Henry Kissinger!”

It’s no wonder why the administration is so rattled: The Watergate scandal is chief among the many topics Martha freely discusses with the public and press. She’s causing such a ruckus that they end up breaking into her home and sedating her—a turn of events that’s even more shocking when you learn that it happened in real life. “A lot of women suffer from paranoid episodes,” a psychiatrist tells her, writing her a Valium prescription “for her nerves.” The pills are only 10 milligrams, but from the look of it, Martha is popping them like candy. And yet, much to her husband’s chagrin, they don’t seem to have any sedative effect. (Buried beneath all those prosthetics, by the way, is fellow Academy Award winner Sean Penn.)

Dan Stevens, Betty Gilpin, Patton Oswalt, and Nat Faxon round out the eight-episode series’s cast. Ahead of its April 24 premiere, watch the trailer below.