After years in development, Spielberg is finally getting ready to shoot his biopic of Abraham Lincoln, and as a result the cast is getting ever larger. Daniel Day-Lewis (an Honest Abe), Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hal Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson are all signed up and now Deadline reports that Walton Goggins has joined them.
Goggins stars in the TV show Justified and has also been seen in the likes of Predators and TV’s The Shield, and will appear in this summer’s Cowboys & Aliens. In Lincoln he will be Ohio Congressman Wells A. Hutchins, a Democrat who crossed party lines to vote in favour of abolishing slavery. It probably won’t be a huge role, but it shows Spielberg is looking for quality actors all the way through the cast list.
Steven Spielberg is directing Lincoln from a screenplay by Tony Kushner, who received an Oscar nomination for writing Steven Spielberg’s Munich in 2005. The project is based on the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Shooting will begin on Lincoln sometime this autumn, for release at the very end of 2012.