Russell Crowe speaks softly and carries a big stick in The Loudest Voice
By Karl Quinn
June 28, 2019 — 11.45pm
The first thing you notice about The Loudest Voice (Stan, Mondays from July 1) is how quietly Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe) speaks. The founder and head of Fox News from 1996 until his resignation 20 years later amid allegations of sexual harassment seems to personify the style of diplomacy espoused by Theodore Roosevelt a century earlier: speak softly and carry a big stick.
That stick, of course, was very big indeed – the size of the top-rated cable news channel in the US, a voice for the conservative cause that arguably helped elect Donald Trump.
Ailes in fact worked in a more official capacity to get three other Republican presidents elected: Nixon, Reagan and the elder Bush. Having just hired him to head his fledgling cable news operation, Rupert Murdoch (Simon McBurney) introduces Ailes as "the pre-eminent Republican strategist of his generation", thus exposing the fallacy of the channel's slogan, Fair and Balanced, from the very outset.
He's a big man, this Roger Ailes, and Crowe has spoken of the hours spent in the make-up chair each day having layers of latex affixed to his face so as to disappear into the role. It worked, too; Crowe is almost unrecognisable, but utterly compelling, persuasive and repulsive. But not immediately.
Ailes might almost seem avuncular at first, what with his roly poly gait and that soft voice, but with increasing frequency we see glimpses of the big stick, and his willingness to use it.
At his farewell from CNBC, a female staffer seems to speak for the entire team when she yells "we love you Roger!"
"Now you tell me," Ailes shoots back. "You shoulda played your cards earlier, you mighta got a raise."
Annabelle Wallis as Laurie Luhn and Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes. Their relationship goes from adulterous to abusive. Credit:JoJo Whilden
At first, this exchange, just a few minutes into the first episode, seems to mark nothing more than how much attitudes to casual sexism in the workplace have changed since 1996. But it soon becomes clear that it's in fact an early hint of the behaviours that would ultimately prove Ailes's undoing.
He's a groper, a harasser, a man who uses his power to extract sex from his female underlings, sometimes with violence and threats of dismissal. His third wife, Beth Tilson (Sienna Miller, almost as unrecognisable in the role as Crowe is in his), had been both a vice-president of programming at CNBC and his lover. That didn't stop him sleeping with others on the payroll.
But The Loudest Voice isn't unduly fixated on Ailes's sexual misconduct, critical as it is to his demise. It's at least as interested in the way he blended a political mission with a savvy understanding of popular taste, and thereby changed the nature of news as we now know it.
Sienna Miller as Beth Tilson, Ailes' thrid wife (and a former subordinate at CNBC). Credit:Stan
When he first arrives at Fox a year before the channel's planned on-air debut, he shoots down the notion that the intended audience is everybody. All the station's competitors are fighting for the same patch of turf – "liberal, left-leaning", he insists – and that leaves the conservative audience ripe for the picking.
"We need to program directly to the viewer who is predisposed to buying what we're trying to sell," he tells a room full of News Corp executives. "In politics it's called turning out the base. If we can do that then they will never change the channel."
Here, as elsewhere, Murdoch comes across as a man willing to be led. It's a curious depiction, vastly at odds with Brian Cox's steaming patriarch in the fictional but Murdoch-inspired Succession, but maybe it's not so far off the mark.
"People don't want to be informed, they just want to feel informed," Ailes says at another point, and while that's nobody's notion of fair and balanced, or arguably even of news, there's no doubt he's onto something.
Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes and Simon McBurney as Rupert Murdoch. Credit:Stan
It's powerful stuff, balancing outrage at the behaviour of Ailes and the organisation he created with grudging respect for the cunning and intellect that guided it.
But make no mistake, it is a takedown. It may start quietly, but across the three episodes that have been made available for preview the murmur of disapproval gradually becomes louder. Don't be surprised if by the end of the seven-part series it's turned into an entirely justified howl of outrage at the havoc that's been wreaked under the guise of "balance".
Follow the author on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin
James Murdoch
Karl Quinn
Karl is a senior entertainment writer at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.