Transformative performances remain nothing new, but some will earn more attention than others, and it feels like a minor crime that Russell Crowe‘s work in The Loudest Voice has gone so unnoticed. As Roger Ailes, Crowe might be hidden beneath mountains of makeup effects, but he still shines in a rare villainous role, capturing the paranoid and highly abusive nature of the man who once thoroughly dominated cable news until his behavior simply became too much to handle. Unlike Bombshell that same year, the miniseries takes a deep dive into Ailes as a person during his two decades at the network, showing the propagandist and the abuser as two sides of the same coin, and revealing his corrosive influence upon both the workplace and society itself.
Much like its spiritual successor The Apprentice did recently, the story allows viewers to pity Ailes but never truly empathize with him, displaying the damage he has left behind in the wake of his downfall and never letting us forget that we’re witnessing the creation of a monster. From the likes of Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in The Apprentice to Colin Farrell as Oswald Cobblepot in The Penguin, there has recently been lots of talk about stunningly transformative performances in movies and television. Therefore, it’s a terrible shame how overlooked Russell Crowe was while playing Roger Ailes.
Thanks to some incredible makeup efforts, Crowe looks 20 years older than his age and is almost unrecognizable throughout the series. However, his appearance is just the start of what makes his portrayal of Ailes so shocking and unique. Across his career, Russell Crowe has portrayed a wide variety of characters, but none remains quite as unlikable as Roger Ailes, who is at best infuriatingly smug and at worst truly evil to watch. Even when his health declines, Crowe shows how Ailes dominates everything within his vicinity, making him feel like an unstoppable presence.
Much like a wounded predator or cornered animal, Roger is paradoxically more terrifying when he is gradually losing control, and Crowe captures the fierce tension of what it feels like to have a human bomb in the room. All of this comes to a head in the finale when his meltdown goes into overdrive with a terrifying villainous breakdown that shows why he was so feared in the first place. Although Crowe fittingly dominates the series, special mention should also be given to the supporting performances.
In a rare dramatic turn for his career, Seth MacFarlane is nearly as openly hateable as Ailes when playing fixer Brian Lewis, but his confrontation with Crowe at the end of the story perfectly shows just how deep into delusion Roger has fallen. Regardless of her late debut, Naomi Watts also strikes a careful balance when portraying Gretchen Carlson, creating sympathy for her many personal struggles but also displaying her skills as a journalist who knows how to counter Ailes in the court of public opinion. Finally, he may get overshadowed, but Emory Cohen does a great job at showing how those like Joe Lindsley can be radicalized by Roger so quickly, making his corruption arc feel chillingly realistic.
When it was released, The Loudest Voice went largely unnoticed by many viewers, especially since the bigger film Bombshell came out that same year. Although it was generally received well, the movie has gained criticism for its historical inaccuracies, as some major characters were either exaggerated or even fabricated. By contrast, the status of The Loudest Voice as a miniseries allows it to explore the story of Roger Ailes in a deeper manner, far beyond what any film could honestly achieve.
With a greater timespan, many lesser-known victims are able to earn their spotlight in the main story, as well as various enablers like his wife Beth (Sienna Miller), who validates his paranoia through her own. Before Gretchen Carlson finally enters the scene, major focus is largely given to Laurie Luhn (Annabelle Wallis), the first victim of Ailes who has largely been ignored because she was not a prominent news host. Moreover, the series shows victims of his psychological abuse in addition to sexual misconduct, specifically in the case of Joe Lindsley during his time living with Ailes in upstate New York.
While Bombshell focuses largely on the sexual harassment scandal that helped bring Ailes down, The Loudest Voice only gets there in the last two episodes. Most of the miniseries focuses on his growing political paranoia, which can be shocking to witness once viewers learn how deep it goes. Rather than a subplot to his harassment, the show treats them both as inextricable, and Roger is at his most abusive when he is unable to control the political winds around him. His purchase of the local newspaper in Garrison also shows how his toxic impulses affect not only his female employees but society at large, directly contributing to many current political divisions in the United States.
Similarly, while the series does not explore his entire life in the manner of the book, The Loudest Voice gives us hints at the psychology of Ailes, which explains his highly volatile personality without excusing it. For example, Ailes remarks how his abusive father instilled in him a permanent distrust of others, and his attempts to control women seem like an attempt to compensate for the clear lack of control over his own body due to his status as a hemophiliac.
Long before his time at Fox, Roger was a media consultant for Richard Nixon and met Luhn while campaigning for George H.W. Bush in the 1988 election. As such, it’s deliciously ironic that Ailes is forced to resign in the same manner as Nixon once was, through a hidden series of incriminating audio tapes. The Thunderbolts, A Different Man, and The Apprentice star has been quite busy.
One of the cleverest but subtle things The Loudest Voice does is begin with the death of Roger Ailes from a head injury in 2017, shortly after his fall from political power. More than just asking how he got here, the miniseries wants that presence to linger across the first two episodes, where Ailes’ impulses remain somewhat in check and he still possesses some admirable qualities.
After all, he mastered cable television and showed leadership to his staff after 9/11, which was enough to earn the loyalty of many who worked alongside him. Had the flash forward not been present, his deep paranoia after 9/11 might have been viewed as an understandable, if slightly extreme, reaction to the hysteria many felt during the aftermath. There are small hints at his sexual misconduct, and he is clearly verbally abusive towards his staff, but only after the election of Barack Obama in the third episode does his ugliest side truly become visible.
Watching it today, there are plenty of parallels that can be drawn between The Loudest Voice and The Apprentice in more ways than just the main performances. This is not surprising, as The Apprentice screenwriter Gabriel Sherman wrote the book upon which The Loudest Voice is based, originally published as a series of essays in New York Magazine. Sherman also co-wrote three of the seven episodes, and his investigations of Fox are portrayed in the series as a source of paranoia for Ailes towards the end of his career.
Such unique insight allows him to explore the darkness behind the man through his own personal experiences with it, whereas The Apprentice adapts events reported by many others over the past four decades. Like Roy Cohen (Jeremy Strong) in The Apprentice, the miniseries pities Ailes as his health declines and his paranoia deepens, but not once is he meant to be the object of sympathy by viewers. To the contrary, he becomes even more monstrous and unstable as his grip on power erodes, to the point that even Rupert Murdoch (Scott McBurney) comes to see him as a liability.
Rather than the gradual creation of a figure like Trump, The Loudest Voice portrays both the rise and the fall, and watching Ailes’ delusions finally come crashing down is undoubtedly the most satisfying part of the series. Like with Cohen, however, Ailes leaves behind a vicious legacy that the rest of us are still being forced to reckon with today, serving as a highly bittersweet end for two men who died in disgrace but left a permanent imprint upon the world.
