Matthew Macfayden will follow up his Emmy for Succession by playing Charles Guiteau, the assassin of US President James Garfield.
Guiteau was an unhinged preacher who briefly entered a religious sex cult before developing a fixation on obtaining a diplomatic posting to Vienna or Paris.
He pelted the president and the cabinet with correspondence and appealed to officials in person to secure a consulship but was repeatedly rebuffed.
Ultimately, he flew into such a vengeful frenzy that he confronted Garfield at a train station and shot him twice, leading to his death from infected injuries weeks later.
The bizarre story will now be dramatized on the Netflix show Death By Lightning starring Macfayden opposite Michael Shannon as the president, Deadline reports.
Matthew Macfayden (left) will follow up his Emmy for Succession by playing Charles Guiteau (right), the assassin of US President James Garfield.
Macfayden is weeks off his latest Emmy victory, having won a second award for best supporting actor in a drama for his fan favorite role on Succession
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are most famous as the showrunners of Game Of Thrones, are serving as executive producers of the new series.
Mike Makowsky, who wrote the 2020 HBO film Bad Education, is adapting the show from Candice Millard’s book Destiny Of The Republic.
Over the course of his adult life in the late 19th century, Guiteau drifted from career to career, bouncing from law to preaching to politics and temporarily joining the Oneida Community, a religious sect notorious for its free love practices.
After he gave an obscure campaign speech for Garfield’s presidential election in 1880, Guiteau became convinced he was crucial to Garfield’s eventual triumph.
He set himself with mounting fanaticism on the task of being appointed a consul, either to the Austro-Hungarian Empire or France’s Third Republic.
His efforts included crashing a White House function and introducing himself to the First Lady as ‘one of the men that made Mr. Garfield President.’
Garfield was seeing his wife off at a train station in July 1881 when Guiteau marched up to him from behind and fired a revolver into him twice.
Because of the unsanitary conditions then prevailing in American medicine, Garfield suffered through weeks of unhygienic treatment before his infections killed him.
The bizarre story will now be dramatized on the Netflix show Death By Lightning starring Macfayden opposite Michael Shannon (left) as Garfield (right), Deadline reports.
Macfayden featured on Succession as Tom Wambsgans (pictured), who marries his way into Logan Roy’s media dynasty and blossoms into a ruthless and effective manipulator
Garfield, a Civil War veteran who reluctantly became the presidential nominee as part of a Republican Party compromise, had been in office for just six months.
Guiteau was sentenced to hang, and as he stood on the gallows he recited a poem he had written hours earlier called I Am Going To The Lordy.
Macfayden is weeks off his latest Emmy victory, having won a second award for best supporting actor in a drama for his fan favorite role on Succession.
He featured on the acclaimed series as Tom Wambsgans, who marries his way into Logan Roy’s media dynasty and, despite initially appearing gawky and naïve, blossoms into one of the most ruthless and effective manipulators in the family.
