Watch Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux Accidentally Topple the Presidency in ‘White House Plumbers’ Trailer
The first footage from Watergate series White House Plumbers includes Woody Harrelson saying, “We’ll be laughed at as third-rate burglars forever. People need to understand why we did what we did.”
Based on the teaser trailer first released of the anticipated HBO limited series from Veep showrunner David Mandel, White House Plumbers will do just that when it tells the story of E. Howard Hunt (Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Theroux), the pair who planned the Watergate burglary that eventually brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency.
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The five-episode series will debut on May 1.
Per the logline, it will tell the true story of how Nixon’s political saboteurs and Watergate masterminds accidentally toppled the presidency they were zealously trying to protect, and their families along with it. Chronicling actions on the ground, this satirical drama begins in 1971 when the White House hires Hunt and Liddy, former CIA and FBI, respectively, to investigate the Pentagon Papers leak. After failing upward, the unlikely pair lands on the Committee to Re-Elect the President, plotting several unbelievable covert ops — including bugging the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex. Proving that history can sometimes be stranger than fiction, White House Plumbers sheds light on the lesser-known series of events that led to one of America’s greatest political crimes.
The show is based partly on public records from the era and on the book Integrity by Egil “Bud” Krogh and Matthew Krogh.
The teaser trailer had shown Hunt and Liddy being recruited as covert operatives to plant surveillance inside the Watergate. “You are White House employees on the payroll. For God’s sake, don’t get caught,” they are told by Bud Krogh (Rich Sommer).
Hunt’s response — a lingering chuckle — sets the tone for the rest of the trailer, which describes their task as including “sabotage, espionage, infiltration, bare-knuckle tactics. Same shit they do to us every election.”
And he vows, “I know things that could tear this country apart.”
The full trailer, which was later released (below), showed much more of what White House Plumbers has in store, including noting that, “No names have been changed to protect the innocent, because nearly everyone was found guilty.”
The White House Plumbers, as they were known, were a covert team of former FBI and CIA operatives that were established after the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and were tasked with stopping leaks of classified information or anything that would paint President Nixon in an unfavorable light.
The sprawling cast in the series also includes Lena Headey (Dorothy Hunt), Judy Greer (Fran Liddy), Domhnall Gleeson (John Dean), Toby Huss (James McCord), Ike Barinholtz (Jeb Magruder), Kathleen Turner (Dita Beard), Kim Coates (Frank Sturgis), Yul Vazquez (Bernard “Macho” Barker), Alexis Valdés (Felipe De Diego), Nelson Ascencio (Virgilio “Villo” Gonzalez), Tony Plana (Eugenio “Muscolito” Martinez), Zoe Levin (Lisa Hunt), Liam James (Saint John Hunt), Kiernan Shipka (Kevan Hunt), Tre Ryder (David Hunt), David Krumholtz (William O. Bittman), F. Murray Abraham (Judge Sirica) and John Carroll Lynch (John Mitchell).
White House Plumbers is directed and executive produced by Mandel; created, written and executive produced by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck; and executive produced by Frank Rich, David Bernad, Gregg Fienberg, Theroux, Harrelson, Len Amato and Ruben Fleischer. The series is an HBO co-production with wiip, with executive producers Paul Lee, Mark Roybal and Nne Ebong.
This story originally posted Dec. 9, 2022, with the teaser trailer and has been updated with the full trailer.
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