Portraying President Abraham Lincoln has led actors to great acclaim.
In 2013, Daniel Day-Lewis won his third acting Oscar for playing the 16th U.S. president in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Now, another Oscar winner will have his shot at playing the iconic president.
Two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks, 69, will portray President Lincoln in the upcoming film adaptation of George Saunders’ best-selling novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
Unlike other films that focus on Lincoln as the Civil War-era president, Hanks’ upcoming film will focus on Lincoln as a father.
In Lincoln in the Bardo, Hanks will play the president as he grieves the death of his son, Willie, who passed away at just 11 years old due to typhoid fever. The story unfolds largely over the course of a single evening during “bardo,” the Buddhist-inspired liminal space between life and rebirth.
Lincoln is the latest in Hanks’ extensive filmography of real-life figures. The acclaimed actor has played Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks, heroic pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger in Sully, astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13, and children’s TV icon Mr. Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. The role is Hanks’s first time playing a president.
According to Deadline, the film will blend live-action and stop-motion visuals to portray “themes of love, empathy and human capacity in the face of unimaginable grief,” and will feature a cast of characters “both living and dead, historical and invented.”
The events of the story take place in 1862, just months before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and three years before the Civil War came to a close.
