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Casting Call: Empire Rising

Irish/German actor Michael Fassbender treads a very delicate line between the kind of lovable puppy adoration associated with Ryan Gosling, and the kind of sadomasochistic obsession that surrounds Robert Pattinson. We'd like to nominate him for the role of IRA man and construction worker Michael Briody.


Photo by Sebastian Kim, Interview, January 2012

We might be type casting, but we think Cillian Murphy would make a great Johnny Farrell.

As the morally suspect mayor Jimmy Walker, we pick Leonardo DiCaprio. He's already accumulated significant experience playing red-faced, screaming tyrants (J. Edgar, Django Unchained) and has Gangs of New York under his belt for the setting.

Among the other historical figures who feature in the novel and will likely get some film screen time is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then-governor of New York with designs on the White House. After House of Cards, we know Kevin Spacey can do the ambitious-politico thing, and we'd like to give him the chance to play someone a little more lovabel than Frank Underwood.

She's already playing another famous Grace in Grace of Monaco, and we'd love to see Nicole Kidman in a '30s bob as the film's heroine, Grace Masterson

Judge Joseph Force Crater, who also had ties to Tammany, disappeared in 1930 and became known as "The Missingest Man in New York," with far-reaching political implications. John Travolta has similar wide-set eyes to Crater's, and we believe he could play a little... off.