Hollywood goes to Washington: US presidents in movies

April 26, 20259 Mins Read

It is often said that Donald Trump runs his presidency like a reality TV show.

That may have been true of his first term as Commander in Chief, but less than 100 days into Trump 2.0, reality is beginning to bite…

Season two of Trump’s White House is a far darker affair than the four-year pilot season that ran from 2016 to 2020.

He may not think he’s in a movie, but nearly everything former TV star Donald Trump does is a performance, whether it’s engaging in culture and trade wars or indulging in vanity projects. This is a presidency marked by surreal plot twists, controversial national security moments, and staggering displays of ego.

After all, during his Oval Office clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this year, Trump turned to the cameras and said, “This will be great television!”

Brendan Gleeson played him in the TV mini-series The Comey Rule back in 2020, but we are still waiting for the definitive movie about President Donald Trump to be made.

It will happen because US presidents have been great material for filmmakers since the dawn of cinema. Who can resist a story of political intrigue centred on the most powerful man in the world and played out on a canvas of fast-moving global events?

The definitive Trump movie can wait. In the meantime, we’ve rounded up some notable big screen portrayals of US presidents over the years – from the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

Not one but FOUR US presidents in one movie

Let’s go back to the very start and 1915’s The Battle Cry of Peace, a silent movie which featured no less than four US Presidents – George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant and John Harrison.

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Directed by Wilfrid North and based on the book Defenseless America by the wonderfully named Hudson Maxim, the film depicts a war-torn world, with an enemy by the name of “Emanon” conspiring with American pacifists as his forces prepare an invasion of the US.

Charles Richman starred as John Harrison, William J. Ferguson as Abraham Lincoln, Paul Scardon as Ulysses S. Grant, and Joseph Kilgour as George Washington.

The film was released as World War 1 raged in Europe, with producer Stuart Blackton making no secret of his belief that the US should join the Allies. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was a staunch supporter of the movie and even convinced the US Army to lend an entire regiment of Marines to use as extras.

George W Bush

Josh Brolin stepped into the 43rd president’s oil-slicked cowboy boots in Oliver Stone’s tragicomic 2008 biopic, W. Political maverick Stone played the whole thing as a very off-kilter black comedy that did a good job of capturing the jaw-dropping public mood about Bush Jr.

The always watchable Brolin was joined by an excellent cast – James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Richard Dreyfuss, Thandie Newton, Toby Jones, Jeffrey Wright – who possibly wanted to burnish their liberal cred in this artful skewering of Bush’s two-term presidency. More likely, it was the very good script.

Four years previously, Stone had not quite covered himself in glory with his venture into sword and sandal epics with Alexander. W. was his redemption. Our review from 2008 said: “With the restrained but powerful W, Stone is on the money. Instead of making a dull hatchet job, simple polemic or lame satire, he tells the story of George W Bush as an engaging tragedy that is also a fascinating critique of our times.

“Brolin captures the aura of Bush – the swagger, the voice, the frat boy banality, the accent and the body language – without slipping into parody.”

Richard M Nixon

Coming in at third in the most movies about a US president league is Tricky Dicky with 15 big screen portrayals over the years – and it’s no wonder.

They range from Bob Gunton (that nice prison governor from The Shawshank Redemption) as Nixon in 1997’s Elvis Meets Nixon, Dan Hedaya in 1999’s perhaps unfairly titled Dick, and the great Frank Langella in 2008’s Frost/Nixon.

But towering above the lot is Anthony Hopkins in 1995’s Nixon. Directed by Oliver Stone (who else?), the film begins with a disclaimer that reads: “This film is an attempt to understand the truth… based on numerous public sources and on an incomplete historical record”.

Nixon is told largely in flashback as the president listens back to the notorious White House Tapes. You could call this movie the second in Stone’s presidential trilogy – he had already made JFK and would go on to direct a George W Bush film. Hopkins’ performance was acclaimed, but the movie bombed, becoming one of the biggest box-office flops of the year.

Theodore Roosevelt

The most buccaneering president in US history was a bit of a renaissance man. He was an amateur boxer, a war hero, a cattle rancher, an ardent self-publicist, an amateur zoologist, and generally outward bound – so he was always going to have a cinematic quality. He sure got a lot of big screen time, including Thomas A. Curran’s blink and you’ll miss it appearance in Citizen Kane, and who can forget Teddy, The Rough Rider?

However, the late Robin Williams is probably the most famous on-screen TR. He played the man with a fondness for taxidermy and charging into battle before breakfast in all three Night at the Museum movies, including one of his final roles – 2014’s Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. Williams was in his element and gave Teddy an anarchic flair as he strode about in full dress uniform and a moustache that could have spanned the Panama Canal.

Calvin Coolidge

The 30th president of the United States was known as “Silent Cal” because of his taciturn personality and dry sense of humour. In fact, when the great Dorothy Parker was told he was dead, she quipped, “Really? How can they tell?” So, we are sorry to report that Calvin was never portrayed by anyone during the silent film era. Instead, Ian Wolfe portrayed him in Otto Preminger’s very engaging 1955 true-life story The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, and more recently, Mark Landon Smith appeared as the president of the Roaring Twenties in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

Donald Trump

“FAKE and CLASSLESS… a cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job.” That was Donald Trump’s verdict on The Apprentice, a part-Irish-produced drama released last October, which depicted his rise in 1970s and ’80s New York under the influence of controversial fixer Roy Cohn. Sebastian Stan gave a strong performance as a younger Trump, but this was a portrayal of the man before he entered the Oval Office.

As for depictions of Trump during his presidency, mainstream filmmakers have largely shied away from direct dramatisation, but animated and satirical films have leaned in.

Among the more curious examples is The Queen’s Corgi, a 2019 animated comedy about one of Queen Elizabeth II’s dogs who gets lost during a visit by a fictionalised “President Trump” and must find his way back home. Voiced by British impressionist Jon Culshaw, the character is played broadly for laughs and received a frosty reception from critics.

And then there’s Trump vs the Illuminati (2020), an animated sci-fi comedy in which a cloned version of Trump battles an evil alien race – and ultimately Satan himself. It’s less a political statement than a surreal internet-age oddity, but it shows the extent to which Trump’s larger-than-life persona has become fodder for even the most outlandish corners of pop culture.

Abraham Lincoln

Honest Abe is the US president who has been portrayed on film far more than any other. 46 times in total to be precise, from the one-reel 1910 silent film Abraham Lincoln’s Clemency to fun genre mashups like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. There has also been Henry Fonda in John Ford’s excellent Young Mr Lincoln in 1939 and Will Forte as Honest Abe in the LEGO movies.

But for perhaps the finest and certainly most nuanced portrayal of the 16th Prez, we must turn to an Irish actor.

Who else could play the most cautious, watchful and most consequential leader in US history than Daniel Day-Lewis? A painstaking perfectionist, he brought gravitas and the weight of history onto the great man’s stooped shoulders in Steven Spielberg’s epic Lincoln in 2012.

Spielberg really got his teeth into what was a very talky and very chewy movie, and while it may be two-and-a-half hours long, it focuses on the final four months of Lincoln’s life and his battles to abolish slavery by having the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution passed by the House of Representatives.

In our review back in 2012, we said, “Day-Lewis’ Lincoln is a self-educated, conscientious, fair, hard-working and surprisingly accessible family man who, despite great personal loss following the death of two young sons, strove to ensure that all Americans, regardless of race, were equal, and to end the Civil War.”

Daniel also looked good in that hat.

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