No, we are not calling out a group of actors as radical insurgents looking to cause trouble in the States. The Plot Against America is instead the Philip Roth novel adaptation in the works from The Wire's David Simon for HBO. And it has now announced a chunk of its main cast, with Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Zoe Kazan, Morgan Spector, Caleb Malis, Azhy Robertson and Anthony Boyle joining the ranks.
Roth's 2004 novel is set in an alternate America and centers on a Jewish family in New Jersey who watch the political rise of Charles Lindbergh, an aviator hero and xenophobic populist who becomes president, defeating Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, and turns the country toward fascism.
Ryder is on to be Evelyn Finkel, an unmarried woman whose plans were arrested by 10 years of caring for her infirm mother. She's exhilarated by the sudden attention of a key Lindbergh supporter, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (Turturro). He, in turn, becomes a key figure in Lindbergh's administration despite growing opposition from the larger Jewish community.
Kazan is set as Elizabeth "Bess" Levin, Evelyn's younger sister. An insightful mother and homemaker, Bess fears for the future and tries to protect her family from the escalating political climate and plan a possible escape, while Spector is her husband Herman, an insurance agent who tries to maintain some normalcy even as the country seems to be slipping into fascism, anti-Semitism and xenophobic isolationism. Malis is Sandy, Bess and Herman's artistic teenage son who rebels against his family — and his father in particular — as his adolescence becomes entangled with his growing admiration for Lindbergh, which Evelyn encourages. Robertson take on the role of Philip, the youngest Levin child who copes with his own innocent curiosity and growing anxiety that the world is collapsing around, and Boyle plays Alvin, Herman's orphaned nephew who allows political division in his family, personal grudges and an abhorrence of hypocrisy to drive him from street crime to the battlefields of Europe and back.
Simon has been writing the series with Ed Burns, and the cameras are now rolling, so we can likely expect this one either later this year or early next.
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