Who Should Play Roger Ailes In The Upcoming Miniseries About Him? A Few Suggestions!


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The fall of Roger Ailes is coming to television. The New York Times recently broke the story that the reign and subsequent ouster of the once-mighty Fox News boss will soon become the subject of a television miniseries produced by some of the people behind Spotlight and The Purge, and based on the reporting of Gabriel Sherman, who wrote both the book-length biography of Ailes and the series of articles that brought him down amid a wave of sexual harassment allegations.

While the news about the series raised, well, a lot of questions (What network will get it? Will Ailes and his attorneys take steps to squash or at least sterilize it? How many real-life Fox News staffers will be depicted in the series, and in what kind of situations?), the most important preliminary one is who will land the role of Ailes, the secretive, domineering, and allegedly predatory figure at the heart of it.

Luckily, we have a few suggestions. Some of them are even good!

John Goodman

John Goodman feels like the obvious person to start with. His size and deep voice create a commanding on-screen presence, which would work well for the hyper-secretive and power-hungry Ailes. It’s strange. Goodman appears to be such a nice, pleasant man whenever you see him out of character, but he can carry himself with such authority and/or menace when he wants. Think, like, Walter in The Big Lebowski, or his character from The West Wing.

It’s a good fit, sure, but I think we can do better.

Kelsey Grammer

Kelsey Grammer also has the voice and screen presence to pull off playing an intimidating and ruthless boss like Ailes, and we know this because he just recently played an intimidating and ruthless boss on a prestige cable show that was titled, accurately enough, Boss. In a perfect world, Peri Gilpin would play Gretchen Carlsen and David Hyde Pierce would play, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Bill O’Reilly and we’d just get the whole Frasier gang back together for the weirdest miniseries ever, but some things are too perfect to even dream about.

Paul Giamatti

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This is perhaps a little unfair to Giamatti since he’s only 49 years old, making him over a quarter century younger than Ailes. But it just… it feels like a Paul Giamatti role, doesn’t it? I don’t think I’m too out of line when I say that, either, because even Giamatti seems to know where he slots in when it comes to casting. From a recent THR roundtable:

Are there doors you feel remain closed to you? Parts you just can’t land, despite interest on your end?

BOBBY CANNAVALE: White guys. [Laughter.] Cowboys. I’m always getting the ethnic roles of some kind, like a mob guy or an Italian-American pizza guy or some shit like that. I never get, like, doctors.

PAUL GIAMATTI: I’d love to play an Italian. I am Italian, and I never get to play Italians. I’ve had people tell me I’m not Italian enough. It’s hilarious.

RAMI MALEK: We get all the Italian guys. [Points to Cannavale.]

PAUL GIAMATTI: I’d love to be in a Western, but I know if I’m in a Western I’m going to have to play this guy [wiping the table], “What’ya havin’?” I’m going to be that guy. Or I’d be the corrupt mayor, the guy who’s building a railroad through somebody’s farm. [Laughter.]

No one plays despicable like Giamatti.

John Travolta

Okay, so I have no idea if this would actually be “good,” in the way we commonly use the term to describe acting performances, but I do know that ever since I saw Travolta as Robert Shapiro in The People v. O.J. Simpson, I have wanted to see him play every real-life person in every based-on-a-real-life person role that gets tossed about as a possibility, just to see what kind of ludicrous thing he does with it. Roger Ailes? Sure. George W. Bush? Of course. Axl Rose in an as-yet-undiscussed anthology series about the ups and downs of famous rock groups of the ’70s and ’80s that I just thought up this very second and now need more than the oxygen I breathe? Yes.

Yes yes yes.

Vin Diesel

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We’ll have to take a few small liberties with the story to make this work. Very small. Barely even noticeable, really. Like, for example:

  • Ailes drives a NOS-powered muscle car
  • Fox News is now a small collection of Corona-drinking fugitive street racers who have been recruited by the United States government to fight crime
  • Instead of sexual harassment and abuse of power, the plot is about a diamond heist in Monaco
  • Gabriel Sherman will be played by Jason Statham
  • Roger Ailes’ name will be changed to Dominic Toretto.

Otherwise exactly the same.

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