It’s hard to know what Donald Trump will hate more—that the upcoming two-night drama about the 2016 election so witheringly presents him as vulgar, corrupt, and deeply indebted to the manipulations of Vladimir Putin, or that he has to share the spotlight with James Comey.

The Comey Rule, based on the former FBI director’s memoir A Higher Loyalty, follows the bureau’s leadership during that tumultuous campaign as they parse Democratic contender Hillary Clinton’s email controversies while simultaneously grappling with evidence that Russia was trying to help Republican Trump win the election. Jeff Daniels portrays Comey as someone beholden to the rules of his position and institution nearly to a fault, while Brendan Gleeson’s Trump is a thoughtless exploiter of honor systems who has no problem setting that same rulebook on fire and hurling it at anyone who displeases him.

Writer-director Billy Ray, best known for the true-life films Richard Jewell, Captain Phillips, and Shattered Glass, is braced for rage from Trump and his supporters now that the project’s secrecy has lifted. He’s even expecting some blowback from the left over lingering resentment over Comey’s actions. “I recognize that there is something for everyone to hate in this movie, and I know we’re going to be prejudged by a lot of people who think they know who Comey is, who think they know who Trump is, and who think they know exactly what happened in 2016,” Ray said. “And I understand how polarized the public is out there. And that’s fair.”

Vanity Fair can reveal the exclusive first trailer for the series below—the first time the Trump election has been explored in a way that’s not satire. “We are the first depiction ever of Donald Trump as a dramatic character,” Ray said, mentioning the spoofs of the president on Saturday Night Live. “This is not Alec Baldwin…whom I love, by the way.”

Ray praised Gleeson for his “courage” in stepping into the role. “Here’s a guy who’s won plenty of awards. He’s had a great career. He’s sitting in Ireland, bothering nobody,” Ray said. “This guy needs controversy like he needs a hole in the head. I mean, there’s just no reason to invite the kind of grief that he’s about to catch. And in fact, he actually turned the part down the first time we offered it to him for exactly that reason.”

After Gleeson initially turned it down, Ray said other lead actors rejected it too. Then, finally, Gleeson was approached again and said yes. “What we got were people who passed without reading,” Ray said. “They just didn’t want to be anywhere near it for reasons that I understand. Because if you are a private person, like Brendan, boy, this is inviting a lot of rancor from someone who’s not shy about letting you know if he’s unhappy with something you’ve done, right?”

The Comey Rule will air on Showtime over two nights starting September 27, which itself was a source of controversy. Comey’s announcement about reopening the Clinton email probe 11 days before the last election, and his subsequent pronouncement clearing her two days before voters went to the polls, was blamed by many, including Clinton herself, for her narrow loss in key swing states. Executives at Showtime’s parent company, ViacomCBS, initially wanted to hold off on airing the miniseries until after the 2020 election, according to Ray, who publicly objected to such a delay, leading ViacomCBS to relent.

“Of course, I wanted this series to air before the 2020 elections,” Ray said. “I think our democracy is on the line right now. And I wanted this series to be part of that conversation.”

What Was He Thinking?

For everyone who wondered that about Comey in the buildup to the 2016 election, this miniseries tries to present an answer. “That’s exactly the approach I took with it,” Daniels said. “We will show you what he was thinking, moment to moment. One of the options, to do nothing, is a decision, but it’s not an option for him. As a dramatic character, basic story structure, you want to put your hero between a rock and a hard place, write the hero into a corner, and then he has to overcome the obstacles to come out of it, one way or another. And Comey, what he went through was a rock and hard place.”

Like Gleeson, Daniels also wasn’t sure about playing the character at first. “I didn’t see that. I go, ‘Why me?’” the actor said. Ultimately, he felt it was an important story to tell. Ray was hewing so close to the record of what actually happened, and Daniels felt sharing the narrative in a film would help inform people who might not have immersed themselves in Comey’s book.

“I think this country is going to be much more informed four years later than it was back in 2016,” Daniels said. “Certainly, there are those who are more [politically] right than ever, and more left than ever, but I think there are a lot of people in the middle who don’t really pay attention.…The next thing you know, the election has happened, and maybe they voted, maybe they didn’t. They thought about it for five minutes and then went in. I think it’s different this time. I hope everyone will vote on November 3, because I think everyone has a responsibility for what this country is now, and what it could become.”

That was also Comey’s motivation for agreeing to let his memoir be adapted. After frustration over what he could and could not say as FBI director in 2016, he wanted his side of the story to be told as widely as possible. “The hero of that part of the story is Shane Salerno, who’s one of our executive producers,” Ray said. “Comey did not want to have this thing adapted. He didn’t want this to be made into a feature or into television. And it was really Shane who said to him, ‘Look, if your book is a giant success, it will reach this many people. If we make a miniseries of this and it’s a success, it will reach 10 times that number of people. If your goal is to tell a story about leadership and principles, you need to get it in front of as many eyeballs as you can.’”

The Comey Rule is also intensely critical of its key subject besides Trump. Characters in the FBI and Department of Justice, such as U.S. deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein (Scoot McNairy) and his predecessor Sally Yates (Holly Hunter), regard Comey as alternately arrogant or oblivious to the political implications of his actions. Michael Kelly plays Andrew McCabe, Comey’s deputy director, who repeatedly warns him that he’s not as in control of the situation as he believes.

One of Comey’s harshest critics in the series is his own wife, Patrice, portrayed by Jennifer Ehle, who tearfully warns him that his pronouncements about Clinton and his silence about Russian interference could help the kind of wrongdoers he pledged to hold accountable.

“This is what apolitical looks like,” Daniels said. “In those moments where he had to decide between really bad and catastrophic, he had to lean on ‘What’s the right thing to do?’ in his opinion. No matter which way he went, he was going to upset at least half the country. While being aware of that, he had to ignore it, because he had to follow the one path: ‘Where’s the rule of law?’”

Even though Comey tried to make the right decisions, that doesn’t mean he was always successful. “There’s a line in the series where some of the FBI leadership says to Comey, ‘I think you’re underestimating how poisonous the political atmosphere is right now.’ And Comey says, ‘I’m not a politician,’” the filmmaker said. “The truth is that director Comey, who is a brilliant man, really did underestimate it. I think he truly believed that his decency was going to carry the day. And he was very wrong.”

Born in a Crossfire Hurricane

That opening lyric from the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” does not just summarize the Trump campaign’s chaotic path to victory, it was also the FBI’s code name for the investigation into Russian interference in the election.

Despite the real Trump’s insistence on calling it “the Russia hoax,” it’s well-documented fact, verified by America’s intelligence community. The Comey Rule explores what the FBI knew before the election, and finds the investigators unable to address such an unprecedented act of foreign aggression.

After Trump’s election, Comey, the rest of the leadership at the FBI, and the heads of the Department of Justice also find their circuits blown by the president’s determination to shatter norms and push the boundaries of executive power. Gleeson’s performance is surprisingly understated—at least given the theatrics and bluster of the real man he’s depicting.

“There was a lot of conversation with the hair team and the makeup team and the costume team: How do we accurately depict Donald Trump without making him a cartoon? Because so many people feel that he is one,” Ray said. “And everywhere that we could, we dialed it down. We made the contrast between the bags under his eyes and the orange skin softer than it actually is. We made the hair a little less cartoonish than it actually is. We made the suits fit a little bit better. We went out of our way to play fair because we felt we owed that to the public.”

“We are not here to ridicule anybody,” he added. “We talked a lot about where Donald Trump had a point of view that was defensible and valid, and we leaned in hard.…I think that Donald Trump believed, and continues to believe, that personal loyalty is the coin of the realm in any kind of business transaction. And I think he believes that you could run a government that way.”

Comey was used to being at odds with people, and The Comey Rule depicts a somewhat contentious but nonetheless respectful working relationship between the lifelong Republican and Democratic president Barack Obama (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir), who nominated him to lead the FBI in 2013. But Comey was unprepared for dealing with someone like Trump.

Daniels said he and Gleeson seldom rehearsed, which helped his upright and uncomfortable Comey remain in a constant state of destabilization in the presence of the chaotic new president. “I used Brendan a lot,” he said. “I always listen, and acting is reacting and half your performances is the other actor. I preach that. But when you have someone like Brendan Gleeson throwing this version of Trump at you, all you have to do is catch it. Just have to catch it and let it affect you.”

It’s hardly a spoiler to note that Comey’s leadership at the FBI came to an abrupt end early in Trump’s term, shortly after Yates herself was ousted as acting attorney general. Comey contends he was fired for continuing to probe the connections between Trump’s administration and campaign and documented Russian interference; Yates was removed for insisting that Trump’s immigration order was unconstitutional and shouldn’t be enforced.

“What this series wound up being about for me is how heartbreaking it can be to be a public servant,” Ray said. “That seems to be what every scene is about, because these government employees, the Sally Yateses of the world, they care deeply about the values of this country and the purpose of American government as a force of good, not just in American lives, but in the world. And they ran into a buzz saw in 2016, and that buzz saw is still spinning.”

Ray is ready for a mean nickname delivered via the president’s Twitter account. He even jokes that he’s braced for an IRS audit or for his phone to be tapped. What he’s not sure about is whether the public will be too burned out on politics, but he’s counting on the stellar cast to make viewers tune in, if only out of curiosity.

“I don’t think there’s any way for people not to watch,” he said. “I think there’s going to come a moment at the end of September when we are going to be the center of the conversation for a while, and I think we have the goods to back it up. I think if you can get people to turn their television on, we’ll be just fine.”

He’s also braced for the fact-checkers, noting how much of the dialogue is pulled from the actual record—including some of the things Trump said behind closed doors. “I can’t tell you how many times on our set, people would come up to me after Brendan would do a scene, and they’d say, ‘Oh, my God, what a great line. Good for you,’ and I’d say, ‘I didn’t write it. Donald Trump did.’”

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