Lexi Underwood, the actress who played Pearl Warren in Hulu’s “Little Fires Everywhere,” has been tapped to play Malia Brown in Showtime’s upcoming anthology series, “The First Lady.”
The anthology series stars Viola Davis as the former first lady Michelle Obama. Michelle Pfeiffer will play Betty Ford and Gillian Anderson will star as Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The series will peel back the curtain on the personal and political lives of these enigmatic women, with season one focusing on Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Michelle Obama.
“Throughout our history, presidents’ spouses have wielded remarkable influence, not only on the nation’s leaders but on the country itself.” said Winograde. “FIRST LADIES fits perfectly within the SHOWTIME wheelhouse of drama and politics, revealing how much personal relationships impact both domestic and global events. Having Viola Davis play Michelle Obama is a dream come true, and we couldn’t be luckier to have her extraordinary talent to help launch this series.”
During a visit to the UK’s talk show, “The Graham Norton Show,” Davis expressed her reservations about playing Obama.
The Graham Norton Show for an episode that will air on Dec. 25, where she opened up about playing the former first lady.
“People love Michelle Obama,” Davis told Norton. “They feel like they know her, they own her — and they do not want anything that is negative to touch her.”
“Listen, everything you think, feel, see with Michelle Obama is all that she is. We know that. But I always say, ‘You can talk to my husband, you can talk to my daughter, you can talk to my mom about me’ if someone were going to play me in a biopic — ‘but you would still only know 40 or 50 percent of me.’
She continued, “You’re not going to know some deep, dark secret that I don’t even share with the people who are closest to me. And it’s all that info that you gather as an actor to create another human being,” she said, jokingly adding, “So, now I got Michelle Obama — What do I do with that?”
