Deadline has learned that Jackie Earle Haley (“Human Target,” A Nightmare on Elm Street, Watchmen) will play Alexander Stephens in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Stephens was vice president of the Confederate States during the Civil War.
Haley joins a large cast that includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hal Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce McGill, Joseph Cross, David Costabile, Byron Jennings, Dakin Matthews, Boris McGiver, Gloria Reuben, Jeremy Strong, David Warshofsky, David Strathairn, Walton Goggins and Lee Pace. He is currently filming Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows in London.
In related news, the Orlando Sentinel got a chance to talk to Spielberg about the film, which he’ll shoot in the Richmond, Virginia area. The movie will be based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best-selling book “Team of Rivals.”
The director says that while 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.”
He added that they are only focusing on the last four months of Lincoln’s life.
Spielberg also said that Lincoln “will be purposely coming out AFTER next years election. I didn’t want it to become political fodder.”
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