Deadline.com reports Jackie Earle Haley is the latest to join a massive ensemble for Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln where he’ll play Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States during the Civil War and a nemesis of Lincoln’s slavery reform agenda. A look-up at Wikipedia tells us Davis is most famous for his March 1861, Cornerstone Speech in Savannah, Georgia in which he declared that slavery was the natural condition of blacks and the foundation of the Confederacy. He declared, “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
Haley joins a cast that already includes Daniel Day-Lewis as the titular character as well as Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hal Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce McGill, Joseph Cross, Gloria Reuben, David Warshofsky, David Strathairn, Walt Goggins and Lee Pace. So yeah, the pieces are in play, but how will they be moved around the board?
The film is based on the book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Spielberg recently spoke with the Orlando Sentinel‘s Roger Moore saying that while the film is based on Goodwin’s book, they are “only focusing in on the last four months of Abraham Lincoln’s life.”
Shooting in Richmond, Virginia, Spielberg is sure to say it’s “not a battlefield movie… There are battles in it, and being in Virginia, we have access to those historic battlefields. It is really a movie about the great work Abraham Lincoln did in the last months of his life.”
Lincoln does not yet have a release date, but you can look for it after next year’s Presidential election as Spielberg tells Moore, “I didn’t want it to become political fodder.”
Fair enough.
