Irish actor Brendan Gleeson transformed himself into the 45th President of the United States for a forthcoming series about the conflict between Donald Trump and former FBI director James Comey.
Showtime announced the two-part miniseries The Comey Rule will air after the 2020 election in November, with Jeff Daniels in the title role.
The first images from the series shows a remarkable likeness from a profile angle between the president and The Gangs of New York and In Bruges actor.
The Dublin-born 65-year-old joins a relatively short list of actors to portray Trump, with Alec Baldwin’s impression for Saturday Night Live being the most well known.
The series, timed to follow the results of the election between Trump and presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden, is based on Comey’s New York Times bestselling memoir, A Higher Loyalty, plus an additional year of interviews with key players from the events leading up to the 2016 presidential election and its immediate aftermath.
“The Comey Rule is not a biopic of one man, but is instead the story of two powerful figures, Comey and Trump, whose strikingly different personalities, ethics and loyalties put them on a collision course,” Showtime said in its announcement.
The first four-hour part of the series will focus on the Russia investigation, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the night of the 2016 election.
The second four-hour part will give a day-by-day account of the relationship between Comey and Trump in the first months of the presidency.
The cast will also include Holly Hunter as former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, Michael Kelly as former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Scoot McNairy as former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Jonathan Banks as former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, Oona Chaplin as former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, Amy Seimetz as former FBI lawyer Trisha Anderson, and Steven Pasquale as former FBI agent Peter Strzok
Peter Coyote will play Robert Mueller while Kingsley Ben-Adir will play President Obama.
Published in April 2018, A Higher Loyalty was an instant best-seller, moving more than 600,000 copies in its first week.
The book covers Comey’s 2013-17 tenure as FBI director, his role in the 2016 election — both in the investigation of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and in Russian interference with the election — and his relationship with Trump, who fired Comey in May 2017.
Brendan Gleeson as Donald Trump in Showtime miniseries.