Alec Baldwin Cast In NBC's 'A Few Good Men' Live, Can Obviously Handle The Truth
Alec Baldwin recently earned a rare Best Supporting Actor Emmy nomination for his presidential performances on Saturday Night Live this past season (and he'll keep that going next season), but the actor is staying under the NBC umbrella for another major production. He'll star in the network's upcoming live adaptation of Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. Hey, truth? Go ahead and consider yourself handled. Read the latest Alec Baldwin A Few Good Men news below.
Baldwin will play Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in the upcoming live production, which is the role that was famously played by Jack Nicholson in Rob Reiner's 1992 film version. A Few Good Men follows rookie military lawyer Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, who's tasked with defending three Marines on trial for murdering one of their own. Kaffee and his legal team face off against the intimidating Col. Jessup, who runs the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Tom Cruise played Kaffee in the film version, and Demi Moore and Kevin Pollak played the members of his legal squad. Baldwin, who seems like the right age and the type of actor who may have been up for Cruise's role in the movie, is the first person cast in this new production, so we're still waiting to hear who will go face to face with him in the climactic courtroom scene in the live TV version.
"Alec is one of our greatest actors," Sorkin said in a statement. "Having him play this role – live onstage for a television audience – is a dream come true. This will be a brand new take on Nathan Jessup and I expect that Alec is going to bust through TV screens and right into living rooms." I don't think we have the technology yet for that last part to be physically possible, but I'm definitely intrigued about a new take on Jessup. It has to be difficult to work in the shadow of Nicholson's iconic, towering performance in the '92 movie; I'm picturing Baldwin staring at himself in a mirror and practicing putting emphasis on every syllable except the one Nicholson did during his most famous line reading. "You can't handle the TRUTH!" "You CAN'T handle the truth!"
A Few Good Men Live was originally supposed to air sometime this year, but was bumped to the second quarter of 2018 a couple of months ago when casting proved to be more difficult than producers anticipated. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the original play and the subsequent film adaptation, will also write and produce this live version, and his busy schedule was also cited as a reason for the recent delay.