“The Sopranos” star Edie Falco is stepping up to play yet another embattled spouse — this time a very real, high-profile one.
The 57-year-old actress has been cast as former first lady Hillary Clinton in the FX drama “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” according to Collider. The next installment of the anthology series — produced by Ryan Murphy (“Hollywood,” “Pose”) — will chronicle the sex scandal between former President Bill Clinton and onetime White House intern Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent political fallout.
Falco won Golden Globe awards in 2000 and 2003 and Emmys in 2003, 2001 and 1999 for her portrayal of put-upon mob wife Carmella Soprano in HBO’s 1999 to 2007 drama, which co-starred the late James Gandolfini as her philandering husband, mafia boss Tony Soprano.
Others previously cast in the production include Clive Owen as Bill Clinton; Beanie Feldstein as Lewinsky; Sarah Paulson as former White House staffer Linda Tripp; Annaleigh Ashford as sexual-harassment accuser Paula Jones; Billy Eichner as Matt Drudge, and Betty Gilpin as right-wing pundit Ann Coulter.
“Hillary is actually not a significant character in ‘Impeachment’ because it’s really told from the point of view of these women who were really far from the center of power,” FX CEO John Landgraf told the Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “It’s really a revisionist history as told through the point of view of these women, whose stories did not seem in any way central to the political stakes of what was going on but who became really central to that.
“Hillary is a character in it, but she’s not one of the main characters in it,” he added.
Murphy’s production is based on disgraced ex-New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin’s 2000 book “A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President.”
Filming on the series — which had been slated for a 2020 debut but no longer has a firm premiere date — was temporarily halted in December due to a positive COVID-19 test on set.
Sarah Burgess is adapting the book for television, and producers will include Lewinsky, Henrietta Conrad and Jemima Khan. Joining Murphy and Burgess as executive producers are Paulson, Feldstein, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Brad Falchuk, Larry Karaszewski, Scott Alexander and Alexis Martin Woodall.
