Some collaborations are worth the wait. For the first time in their formidable careers, Oscar-winning pals Julia Roberts and Sean Penn starred opposite each other as married couple Martha Mitchell and John N. Mitchell in Starz’s new Watergate drama, Gaslit, based on Slate's podcast Slow Burn: Watergate. The pair walked the red carpet arm in arm at Monday night’s premiere at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, telling V.F. that working together made the experience of bringing the ’70s scandal to a modern audience that much more meaningful. “It’s the together part,” Roberts exclusively told V.F. on the Gaslit red carpet. “That’s the real key for me.”
“There is literally no Martha without John—the good, the bad, the sad of that statement,” she continued. “And so to have my sandbox partner be this guy, it was a dream come true.”
Penn echoed the sentiment, telling V.F. that he and Roberts had been waiting years to collaborate. “We’d known each other for a very long time, and some projects had come close,” Penn told V.F. “Then we got to do something that was this rich the first time out.”
Gaslit takes a fresh look at the Watergate scandal, centering key players whose voices have historically been sidelined—people like Martha Mitchell and Frank Wills, the Black security guard who helped catch the Watergate intruders. “People know about the Watergate scandal, but they don’t know who did it,” said Patrick Walker, who portrays Wills on the series. “They don’t know it was a Black man. A lot of people don’t know the inside story.”
Like Walker, many of Gaslit’s actors were shocked to learn more of the facts as they shot the series. “[Gaslit has] the same tension and paranoia of All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor—but being closer to what the history was, it’s actually sillier and dumber,” said comedian Patton Oswalt, who plays Richard Nixon crony Chuck Colson. “The actual stuff was so inept and clumsy. It was that embarrassing. This felt like a bunch of dudes scribbling on a napkin in a Wendy’s going, ‘So this is how we subvert democracy, I guess.’”
Roberts, too, said her understanding of Watergate was turned on its head after getting involved in the series. “I think I learned everything,” Roberts said. “I was the school of Alan Pakula’s Watergate, All the President’s Men. That was really the sum of my parts, so this was a brave new world for me.”
Diving in meant going beyond the usual cast of characters associated with Watergate and highlighting new perspectives like that of Judy Hoback, the accountant who served as a crucial investigative source during the Watergate scandal. She’s played in Gaslit by Tony nominee Marin Ireland. “You never learn her name in All the President’s Men,” says Ireland of Hoback, who was only known as “the bookkeeper” in the seminal ’70s film. “Judy, she’s an American hero.”
Betty Gilpin, who stars on the series as Mo Kane Dean—the savvy wife of Watergate whistleblower John Dean, portrayed by Dan Stevens—spoke to V.F. about the importance of telling well-worn stories from a different point of view. “I think that in American cinema and television, in particular, we like to pretend we’re telling the full story of a national error or mistake or evil, but only tell it through the eyes of the heroes that fixed it all, and thereby kind of excuse ourselves from accountability,” said Gilpin. “I think that this is a really honest look at what happened and the voices that were silenced in real time. Martha Mitchell was telling the truth from the jump, and Frank Wills, who was the security guard who discovered the Watergate break-in, he changed the course of history, and I never knew his name before the series.”
Like Gilpin, Penn hopes that Gaslit paints a more honest portrait of what happened during Watergate—and that with the show delving into the characters of Martha and John Mitchell, viewers learn something from the mistakes of the past. “I am older than the young lady to my left,” Penn said, referring to Roberts, “and it was an obsession, the Watergate hearings—I watched. This side of it is much more accessible to me. I start to understand the politics of it much more from these personal stories.”
“I think, for both of us, the fact that this story is still so timely—to echo things and to be able to be a part of that,” Penn said, looking to Roberts, “we’re grateful.”
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