Beanie Feldstein’s Monica Lewinsky is in way over her head in new Impeachment: American Crime Story trailer
The miniseries from Ryan Murphy is set for release on September 7
TV News Beanie Feldstein
Beanie Feldstein’s Monica Lewinksy takes center stage in the newest trailer for Impeachment: American Crime Story. In first trailer, for the forthcoming Ryan Murphy series, she was pretty M.I.A. but viewers have finally been introduced to the young Monica.
Feldstein makes an extremely convincing Lewinsky and early on in the clip, we see her sitting across a table from Linda Tripp (Sarah Paulson). “You must be dating some big D.C. player”,” Linda tells her before adding, “Tell me about him. Someone from work? Someone important?” Monica says nothing but she does give her a coy little smile.
We’ve known for while that the actual Monica Lewinsky serves as a producer for the project and that she has been closely involved with most aspects of the script. Feldstein and screenwriter Sarah Burgess took it a step further and explained that Lewinksy oversaw “every word” on every single page. It’s clear that though this is a story we all think we’ve heard many times before, they will shake up the narrative. “It feels like in 1998, our culture created a second Monica Lewinsky that doesn’t bear any relationship to the real person,” Burgess told Entertainment Weekly.
Bill Clinton (Clive Owen) barely appears in the trailer this time around (we mostly just get a few out-of-focus shots of him from the back and the sides) and we should probably get used to seeing a lot less of his character. Another way Impeachment: American Crime Story seeks to flip the narrative is by completely avoiding any sex scenes between Lewinsky and Clinton’s characters and leaving out any graphic sexual details. Been there, done that (and there are hours and hours and hours of ‘90s era shaming news coverage to prove it).
In addition to Feldstein, Paulson, and Tripp, the cast also includes: Edie Falco as Hillary Clinton, Ashford as Paula Jones, Billy Eichner as Matt Drudge and Cobie Smulders as Ann Coulter. After experiencing a slew of delays, Impeachment: American Crime Story will finally premiere on September 7.
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i don’t understand why you go to all of the effort to make clive owen up like that if the end result is what they showed. he doesn’t look like clive owen and he doesn’t look like bill clinton.
He kind of looks like you took a Clive Owen mask and stuck it over Bill Clinton, rather than the other way ‘round.Still, it’s a stiff competition for some of the worst attempts at recreating presidents. A particular favorite of mine is Richard Nixon in the Doctor Who episode “Day of the Moon”, where it really looks like they thought the president in ‘69 was Johnson, and then someone realized the day of shooting that they’d made a mistake and they tried to hastily correct it.
From what I’ve seen so far he doesn’t have Clinton’s charm and magnetism, either, and is being portrayed as another entitled humorless scumbag in power. If they captured that I wouldn’t care how “off” he looked. Travolta isn’t a double for Clinton in Primary Colors but really nailed the portrayal and that should be the gold standard. If they don’t get that right they might as well scrap the whole thing.
I still don’t understand why Clive Owen was cast when I know Ryan Murphy has John Travolta’s number! I mean, you have access to the star of “Primary Colors,” and you don’t fucking use him!? What the fuck!!!!?
Travolta is too old at this point.
Isn’t Edie Falco at this point as well? Hillary was turning 40 during this and Falco is coming up on 60.
Correction – I was a decade off, but still a 58 year old Falco playing a turning 50 Hillary is a bit weird.
I don’t think it’s weird. And in any case, it’s far from the biggest suspension of disbelief the audience is being tasked with, casting-wise. That would be Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp, I don’t care what makeup they use on her. Though funny enough, it is age appropriate casting. Paulson is 46, whereas Tripp was 48 when the scandal broke.
Politicians age a lot faster than actors.
Weirdly, that makeup reminds me of Nick Stahl in Sin City.
0:03 that’s from the movie Blink image blink 1993 madeleine stowe ‘Getty Images 181790584 Actress Madeleine Stowe attends the “Blink” West Hollywood …’ in the image Madeleine Stowe is drunk and had just been beaten up the photographer didn’t take the photograph out of any concern for her he just thought she was a mess she was very thin and she’d be dead soon
Clive Owen’s little, “Hey,” combined with the prosthetic nose he’s
wearing, is giving me real Country Bears Jamboree vibes, and I am so
excited for that.
After years of visiting Disney, we finally did the Country Bears. OMFG. The lyrics!
After watching Truth and Lies: Monic and Bill, I find that a documentary is every bit as satisfying, narratively, as any ‘Creative Nonfiction’ movie take might be. And I’m not convinced that the ‘doc’ is that great; but it does manage some nice drama.
Heh-heh. Head.
While I agree Lewinsky got a raw deal at the time, I don’t think “we created a ‘true crime’ story where we let one of the involved parties have a huge amount of creative input” exactly endears me to watching this. It’s just a new round of mythmaking to fashion on top of the old.
That’s a good point, but when it’s a scripted show, they’re definitely going to need a narrative. And pretty much every story/program I’ve seen about this mess, it rarely paints Lewinsky in a positive light. So I don’t mind her getting some redemption this time. I’m not watching this to get a “true” story, not when the true story is already pretty well known.
Yeah despite what’s implied here, Lewinsky has been actively ‘shaking off the narrative’ and telling the story of this scandal from her perspective for 20+ years now (which is her right, and she has been a necessary corrective to how it was portrayed at the time.) So I’d prefer a more distant approach to this, one without the input of any of the major players. I don’t see what essentially giving script control to one of the main characters wil add.
Considering how lop-sided the narrative has been for over 20 years—Clinton’s version is a small part and the rest is the media taking it and running with it without hardly any input from Lewinsky other than to call her a whore—I don’t really give a shit. It’s still bound to be closer to the truth than any other version we’ve gotten.
“Billy Eichner as Matt Drudge”Holy shit that’s perfect.
Eh, it doesn’t quite have that late 90s vibe to me; like no one’s wearing JNCO jeans or drinking Orbitz or singing “MMMBop”. I think I’ll pass.
I love Beanie Feldstein and Im sure she is going to be great in this. I ALSO would love to see her return to What We Do In the Shadows. fingers crossed *Hissss!!*
Interesting that the “From the Executive Producer of” card refers to season 2 as just “Versace” when it was actually called “The Assassination of Gianni Versace.” I wonder if FX’s lawyers advised against putting the word “assassination” into an ad about a living former president.
The Assassination of Gianni Versace by the Coward Andrew Cunanan
As a millennial of a certain age I couldn’t be sicker of the Lewinsky scandal. Adults wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it as I was growing up, and I had to listen to years of hacky jokes from late night comedians and sanctimonious speeches from hypocritical Republicans. Clinton was a scummy, manipulative sex pest, Lewinsky was painfully naive, and the Republicans were opportunistic vultures too stupid to realize when they were overplaying their hand. It was all a pathetic, tawdry affair that, again, everyone had to talk about ad nauseam for fucking years. What more needs to be said?
There have been a lot of reassessments by good writers and documentarians about how much we villianized women who were sexually abused or taken advantage of. “Lorena” is excellent in this regard. I wish they would just do a version of that focusing on Monica, who by all accounts was a young woman pressured into sex by the most powerful man in the world and then utterly destroyed in the media for it. This probably isn’t that, though – it’s a drama, and I’ve seen enough actors playing the two of them for a lifetime.
‘Monica, who by all accounts was a young woman pressured into sex by the most powerful man in the world’This absolutely isn’t true–Bill rebuffed a lot of her advances. Even by her account she was the one who made the moves.
Absolutely. The book this is based on goes into a lot of detail about how she actively pursued Clinton.That’s in no way to discount the power imbalance between them and his shitty behaviour, but Monica was in no way a passive actor in the situation.
Greetings from a Gen-Xer who still thinks of Watergate as the boring adult show that took off all the good TV when I was a kid. I didn’t know there was another generation out there like me.
Sure, but All the President’s Men has got to be a better movie.
As a GenX-er of a certain age, I pretty much agree. Icky then, icky now.I really enjoyed the OJ Simpson series. I was intrigued by the Versace one, but didn’t even make it through the first ep. This? No interest at all.
(And I’ll freely admit that I bought into the whole “villiany” of Ms Lewinsky at the time; I chalk it up to being a dumb*ss in their twenties and hope that in the intervening years one has gotten smarter.)
As long as they go after Jay Leno hard, I’m in.
“In addition to Feldstein, Paulson, and Tripp, the cast also includes: Edie Falco as Hillary Clinton, Ashford as Paula Jones”Ashford? And is Tripp supposed to be Linda Tripp, as in she’s starring in this?
… from beyond the grave …
Love Clive Owen in general, but I agree with the prevailing sentiment that he was just wrong for the role of Bill Clinton. The make-up makes him look like a Dick Tracy character.I think a better choice would have been Garrett Dillahunt. He can certainly do the accent, he is around the same age as Clinton was at the time, and he has that effortless type of charm that the former President was known for.Hopefully, the focus of the show is on Lewinsky and the other figures in the whole sordid affair. The media narrative was all about the men, but maybe we can hear more from the women. If the show is close in quality to even The Assassination of Gianni Versace, I will check it out.
Still, I doubt I will ever be able to accept Clive as Bill.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Clive Owen looks more like Ian Smith than he does Clinton. He’s even got that thing going where half his face looks lifeless after reconstructive surgery.
That is not my Clive Owen. My Clive Owen, the one who should have fucking been James Bond instead of the whiny guy there now, does not look like that.
Everyone always tries to predict the fall of the MCU. I am calling this one as the fall of the Murphyverse. Plus, can I be over Sarah Paulson? I kind of want to be over Sarah Paulson.
Beanie? Beanie!
Both previous seasons were fantastic, can’t wait for this one!
I swear to god, men will jump through so many hoops to find a reason to shit on something involving/focused on women so they can justify their hatred even when it’s clearly just straight up misogyny.