The late Hair and Everwood star, who passed away in June 2023, will be seen playing the philandering media mogul, husband of Babe Paley and former friend of Capote’s in his final TV role. In “La Côte Basque, 1965,” a character named Sidney Dillon, who closely resembled William, is depicted having a one-night stand with the wife of a New York governor and attempting to cover it up. William’s numerous affairs were already common knowledge, but they became the talk of the town only after the publication of the passage. Babe was outraged—not at her husband, but at Capote. While she stopped speaking to the writer, William did take one of his calls, but only to tell him that he was preoccupied with caring for his wife, who was then battling lung cancer.
Chris Chalk as James Baldwin
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The North Carolina native—who’s appeared in Perry Mason as well as 12 Years a Slave, Homeland, and When They See Us—is set to embody James Baldwin, the era-defining author of Giovanni’s Room and If Beale Street Could Talk. The writer ran in the same circles as Capote and attended his 1966 Black and White Ball, but their relationship was complicated. In Bennett Miller’s Philip Seymour Hoffman-led biopic Capote, the latter is shown speaking dismissively about Baldwin’s work at a party. In private, he was even more scathing, writing in a letter to literary critic Newton Arvin: “I loathe Jimmy’s fiction: it is crudely written and of a balls-aching boredom.” Just three years after Capote’s passing, Baldwin died of stomach cancer.
Ella Beatty as Kerry O’Shea
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