The Loudest Voice Trailer Looks Like a Fox News Horror Story
A new look at the rise of the Fox Network and its disgraced, former CEO Roger Ailes is coming to Showtime—and it’s truly terrifying. That’s largely due to Russell Crowe, who managed to eerily perfect the network executive’s persona, as the first trailer for The Loudest Voice shows.
The seven-part series, which Crowe stars in and premieres June 30, touches on everything from the rise of Ailes and Fox to the messy end of the media mogul’s career in television, following the allegationss of sexual misconduct against him by Gretchen Carlson and at least 20 other women who came forward in 2016 as the #MeToo movement gained momentum. Ailes’s relationship with Carlson is heavily depicted in the latest trailer, where she is played by Naomi Watts. “Is Rupert [Murdoch] really as brilliant as they say,” Watts’s Carlson asks Crowe’s Ailes, to which he replies, “He hired me, didn’t he?”
That kind of bravado is rampant in the trailer, in which Ailes summarizes the Fox Network’s strategy, saying things like, “People don’t want to be informed. They want to feel informed” and “Television is the most powerful force in the world. We’re going to give them a vision of the world—the way it really is—and the way they want it to be. If we could do that, then they will never change the channel.”
The network’s former press chief Brian Lewis, played by Seth MacFarlane, is even more direct in the trailer, especially when he says, “Anyone outside Fox is the enemy and we do not talk about what we do.”
Outside of that trio, the cast includes Simon McBurney, who plays Rupert Murdoch, as well as Sienna Miller, Annabelle Wallis, Aleksa Palladino, and Josh Charles as Casey Close, Carlson’s husband. The show’s credits also include directors Kari Skogland from The Handmaid’s Tale and Jeremy Podeswa from Game of Thrones.
Strangely or not, this isn’t the only project about Roger Ailes that’s in the works. Last August it was revealed that Watts’s real life best friend Nicole Kidman would be playing Carlson in another look at the former Fox News CEO, which stars Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly and is being produced by VICE‘s Adam McKay and directed by Austin Powers‘s Jay Roach. The film, which does not yet have a title, started shooting last year and is reportedly due out this year.
