Russell Crowe is headed to small screen for Roger Ailes miniseries

Hollywood star Russell Crowe has been roped in to play Fox News founder and chairman Roger Ailes in a new miniseries for Showtime, the network has announced.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the series, which will run for eight episodes, is based the reporting by journalist and Ailes biographer Gabriel Sherman, who wrote, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News -- and Divided a Country.

Sherman, who interviewed more than 600 people for his book, co-wrote the pilot alongside Tom McCarthy.

The project is being executive produced by Emmy winner Jason Blum and is a co-production between Showtime and Blum's Blumhouse Television.

"In many ways, the collision between the media and politics has come to define the world we live in today. We've seen this phenomenon depicted on screen as far back as the story of Charles Foster Kane, and it finds contemporary embodiment in the rise and fall of Roger Ailes. With Russell Crowe in the lead role, this limited series promises to be a defining story for this era," Showtime CEO David Nevins said in a statement, comparing the series to Orson Welles' exploration of William Randolph Hearst in 1941's Citizen Kane.