Rachel Maddow‘s next project will take her to Russia — in a sense.
The journalist’s Surprise Inside production company will team up with Adam McKay‘s Hyperobject Industries to work on the Rakontur documentary project “From Russia With Lev.” All three production entities are clients of WME.
The feature boasts exclusive interviews with Lev Parnas, the Ukranian-born operative whose association with former President Donald Trump and one of his attorneys, Rudolph Giuliani, took him on a strange journey that ended in a stealth campaign to produce dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden and a role in Trump’s first impeachment.
Maddow and McKay will serve as executive producers on the political farce, which is directed by Billy Corben and produced by Alfred Spellman, The duo have more than 30 hours of interview footage with Parnas and exclusive access to his personal archive that includes hundreds of gigabytes of photos, videos, documents, audio and secret recordings.
“Lev is a survivor of the most absolutely unbelievable story,” Maddow said, in a statement. “Here is a man intimately involved in one of the most lurid, stupid, dangerous and traitorous political scandals ever in American history — and he somehow managed to be kind of adorable while doing it.”
Maddow’s interview with a remorseful Parnas on the eve of Trump’s impeachment trial in January 2020 drew one of the largest audiences in the 15-year history of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
“Rachel’s historic interview with Lev instantly put him on our radar as a quintessential fellow Florida Man whose madcap misadventures led to the impeachment of an American president,” said Spellman, in a statement. “This partnership with Surprise Inside and our old friends at Hyperobject Industries is a dream team for us.”
Rakontur last partnered with Hyperobject Industries on the Jerry Falwell Jr. story, “God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down A Dynasty,” which became Hulu’s most viewed feature documentary ever.
