(from left to right: Winona Ryder, Zoe Kazan, Morgan Spector, John Turturro)
Winona Ryder (Stranger Things), Zoe Kazan (The Big Sick, The Deuce, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), Morgan Spector (Pearson, The Mist, Homeland), Anthony Boyle (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Tolkien), Azhy Robertson, Caleb Malis and John Turturro (The Night Of) have been cast to star in HBO's upcoming 6-episode miniseries, The Plot Against America, per Deadline.
The miniseries is based upon the novel by Philip Roth and hails from David Simon, Ed Burns, Annapurna Pictures and Joe Roth. David Simon and Ed Burns will pen the adaptation of which production is about to begin on.
The Plot Against America imagines an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Charles Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist, who becomes president and turns the nation toward fascism.
Ryder will play Evelyn Finkel. The older sister to Bess, Evelyn is unmarried, her plans arrested by 10 years of caring for her infirm mother, and is hungry to find her own place in life. The sudden attentions of a key Lindbergh supporter — the politically ascendant Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf — are exhilarating and transformational for her.
Kazan will play Elizabeth "Bess" Levin, an insightful mother and homemaker, fears for the future as she tries to protect her family from the escalating political climate and plan a possible escape for the forces that seem to be threatening her world.
Spector will play Herman Levin, the proud and opinionated father, works as an insurance agent and tries to maintain normalcy in the life of his family and friends even as his country seems to be slipping into fascism, anti-Semitism and xenophobic isolationism.
Boyle will play Alvin Levin, the angry and intelligent orphaned nephew to Herman, allows political differences with his family, personal grudges and resentments, and his own abhorrence of hypocrisy and cant to drive him from street crime to the battlefields of Europe and back.
Robertson will play Philip Levin, the youngest of the Levin family, copes with his own innocent curiosity and growing anxiety in a world that seems to be collapsing around him, both at home and in the streets.
Malis will play Sandy Levin, the Levin's artistic teenage son, rebels against his family and his father in particular as his adolescence become entangled with his growing admiration for Lindbergh — a stance encouraged by his beloved Aunt Evelyn's guidance.
Turturro will play Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, a conservative rabbi and a transplant from Charleston, S.C. where he gained his first synagogue pulpit and became a widower with the death of his affluent wife, seizes the reins of history to become a key figure in the emergent Lindbergh administration — despite growing opposition within the Jewish community as a whole.
