Dakota Fanning is making the jump to TV. The actress will star as the female lead in TNT’s The Alienist, joining Daniel Brühl and Luke Evans to fill out the high-caliber cast. Based on the book of the same name, The Alienist is a psychological thriller about what happens when a string of boy prostitutes are horrifically murdered during New York City’s Gilded Age. Fanning will play an aspiring detective and ambitious secretary to Theodore Roosevelt, then the police commissioner. Brühl and Evans, meanwhile, are the criminal psychologist (i.e. the alienist in question) and reporter, respectively, who get called on by good ol’ Teddy to conduct a secret investigation. Any chance that “speak softly and carry a big stick” was just some common sense advice for hunting one of New York City’s first serial killers? History is just a big, sloppy game of telephone, after all.
