Liam Neeson will play the legendary FBI whistleblower Mark Felt, otherwise known as “Deep Throat” in a new spy thriller about the Watergate scandal that brought down US president Richard Nixon, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Director Peter Landesman’s film will portray Felt, who was second in command at the bureau at the time of the scandal in 1972-74, as a conflicted man struggling to do the right thing. The real-life Felt, who died in 2008 at the age of 95, harboured “ambivalent emotions of pride and self-reproach” about his actions for more than 30 years, according to the Vanity Fair reporter who unveiled his identity in 2005.
The Watergate story was previously told on the big screen in the classic 1976 journalistic procedural All the President’s Men, based on the memoir by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the scandal. It is not clear if Bernstein and Woodward – played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in the earlier film – will appear in Landesman’s thriller, though it appears likely.
Felt’s meetings with Woodward in an underground garage and other secluded locations led to a series of news stories that eventually sparked the resignation of Nixon in 1974. The FBI deputy was motivated to leak details about corruption in the White House due to “tense relations” between the bureau and Nixon’s administration at the time. Felt had been passed over for leadership of the FBI in 1972 when J Edgar Hoover died, and feared the agency would fall under the political sway of the Nixon White House.
Landesman previously wrote and directed another presidential thriller, the 2013 film Parkland about the assassination of John F Kennedy. His Will Smith-led drama Concussion, about efforts to suppress controversial research into brain damage suffered by American football players, is due to premiere at the AFI film festival in Los Angeles next week.
Neeson continues to mix dramatic fare with the action thriller roles for which he has become known since finding success in the Taken movies. The Ballymena-born actor has finished filming his role as a 17th-century Jesuit monk in Martin Scorsese’s highly anticipated Japanese-set period drama Silence, and has also wrapped the title role in fantasy A Monster Calls for director Juan Antonio Bayona, with Felicity Jones and Sigourney Weaver.
