“Gaslit” kicks off Sunday night on Starz, showcasing lesser known stories from those around the Watergate scandal, including outspoken whistleblower Martha Mitchell, the wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney general-turned-campaign manager John Mitchell.
The drama, starring Julia Roberts as Martha and Sean Penn as John, comes from executive producer Robbie Pickering (“Mr. Robot”), who told TheWrap he had been wanting to do a story set in the Nixon era for quite some time.
“I always wanted to do a show about the culture around Nixon, and nobody was really interested for many, many years,” Pickering said. “[For] about 10 or 12 years, I tried to pitch a show like that. Then, just when I’m going to give up, the podcast ‘Slow Burn’ comes along and really centers [on] Martha Mitchell, who I knew about.
“She’s really tangential and sidelined in a lot of the histories of the period and it kind of gave me the springboard I needed in Hollywood to get this project going,” he continued. “And centering it on Martha was just such a great idea for Leon [Neyfakh] to do in the podcast, and for our show, and centering it on the relationship between John and Martha was the way to do it.”
To paint the dramatic portrait of Martha — who at the time was well-known for being outspoken and was one of the first whistleblowers around Watergate calling out what she said were “dirty tricks” in political campaigns — Pickering said he thought about people he met while growing up in Texas.
“Martha’s based on...
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