If you found Russell Crowe particularly convincing as the late, disgraced Fox News boss Roger Ailes in The Loudest Voice, that might be because he found an unlikely inside source: Jared Kushner.
As Crowe told his longtime friend Nicole Kidman in a conversation for Variety, he ran into Kushner in 2018, at Hugh Jackman’s 50th birthday party in New York. Conveniently enough, Crowe recalled, “Nobody else was talking to him.”
“Ivanka [Trump] came in,” Crowe said. “So that gave me the opportunity to have a very long conversation with Ivanka’s husband.” Kidman’s response? An understandable “Wow.”
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The Loudest Voice, a seven-episode limited series chronicling Ailes’ time establishing Fox News and based on Gabe Sherman’s book of the same title, debuted on Showtime last year. But as with the Fox News-inspired Jay Roach film Bombshell, which premiered months later, the production failed to fully capture the breadth or scope of the depravity and corruption at hand.
Still, it sounds like Kushner was a helpful resource for Crowe. “He had a very direct relationship with Roger over their presidential campaign,” Crowe said. “Phone calls every Sunday. So it gave me that contemporary insight that the book could not give me.”
