Liam Neeson brings ‘ grace’ to Watergate drama role
See new photos of Mark Felt biopic, eerily similar to Trump- era politics
More than 40 years after the Watergate scandal, there are still revelations to be had.
Mark Felt — The Man Who Brought Down the White House ( in theaters Sept. 29) casts Liam Neeson as the FBI associate director who, as the anonymous informant “Deep Throat,” leaked information to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and toppled Richard Nixon’s presidency in the 1970s.
Yet as much as the film is about Watergate — and with the recent White House clash with ousted FBI director James Comey, it has “almost a supernatural relevance,” says writer/ director Peter Landesman ( Concussion) — what’s equally important is Felt’s marriage to wife Audrey ( Diane Lane) and his hunt for missing daughter Joan ( Maika Monroe).
“It reveals Felt to be a stoic hero at an unparalleled level. He was dealing with all of these traumas and crises all at the same time,” says Landesman, who started on the project soon after Felt revealed he was Deep Throat in a Vanity Fair article in 2005. Felt spans the year between the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972 — when Patrick Gray ( Marton Csokas) was named FBI director and Felt became his second- in- command — and Felt executing his plan to bring down the Nixon ad- ministration. The supporting cast includes Michael C. Hall as White House counsel John Dean and Tony Goldwyn as Felt’s right- hand man, Ed Miller.
“In order to save the FBI from the corruptions of the Nixon administration and save the country, he had to betray the FBI’s deepest code, which was classified material and ongoing investigations have to be protected,” Landesman says. “He realized that Nixon was going to get away with it. The FBI’s reputation as a last line of defense was completely imperiled, so he betrayed the FBI to save the FBI.”
There were personal stakes for Felt as well. He was married to “a very troubled, complex, driven woman,” Landesman says, and when his daughter vanished, there was a fear that Joan “might have withdrawn into the political counterculture he was hunting. That was as primary to his motivation as Nixon.”
In the last three years of Felt’s life ( he died in 2008 at age 95), Landesman had multiple interviews with Mark and Joan, and he found himself impressed by Felt’s integrity, nobility and “unapologetic acceptance of what he’d done and also the rules he broke to get it done.”
Landesman wrote the film for Tom Hanks to star, and when Neeson was cast instead ( with Hanks staying on as a producer), “I realized that Liam has the stillness and the implicit dignity and grace that Felt did,” the director says.
In recent weeks, the filmmaker has found it fascinating following headlines about President Trump and Comey, another man “trying to navigate the moral and ethical desert of Washington to try to do the right thing,” he says. “We’re seeing a lot of the elements of Watergate being replayed in front of us: Trump is Nixon, Comey is Felt. It’s a bizarre, almost snowglobe window into what we’re looking at now and maybe in the coming months.”