Brendan Gleeson has been praised for his “uncanny” portrayal of Donald Trump in the new trailer for The Comey Rule.
The Irish actor stars in the two-part series, which debuts on Showtime in the US on 27 and 28 September.
The Comey Rule depicts the 2016 US election, and the events that led to the firing of former FBI director James Comey (Jeff Daniels) in May 2017. The mini-series is adapted from Comey’s tell-all 2018 book A Higher Loyalty.
Described as “the story of two powerful men, whose strikingly different ethics and loyalties put them on a collision course”, the show will look at how Trump’s election and potential Russian interference changed the course of politics forever.
The first episode follows the early days of the Russia investigation, the FBI looking into Hillary Clinton’s emails and the night of the US election, while the second looks more closely at Trump and Comey’s tempestuous relationship.
The trailer prompted a positive response online, with viewers praising Gleeson’s unexpected transformation into Trump.
“In a million years I’d have never thought to cast Brendan Gleeson as Trump. But the impersonation is uncanny,” one viewer tweeted.
“This trailer is as bananas as REALITY, and that’s a hard thing to pull off these days,” another viewer said.
Another social media user compared Gleeson’s portrayal of Trump to his character in the Harry Potter film franchise, writing: “Brendan Gleeson manages to combine Trump and Steve Bannon into a Mad-Eye Moody standalone film.”
“Brendan Gleeson is amazing, I’m heartbroken that his clearly very good Trump performance was wasted on some dull Comey s*** and not the centerpiece of a totally unhinged Oliver Stone film,” another wrote.
Gleeson and Daniels are joined by a stellar cast including Succession’s Holly Hunter as former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, House of Cards’ Michael Kelly as former FBI director Andrew McCabe and British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir as former president Barack Obama.
