Lincoln in the Bardo Movie: Cast, Story and Everything We Know About Tom Hanks' Abraham Lincoln Film

Willem Dafoe, Jonathan Bailey and Peter Dinklage have joined the voice cast of Lincoln in the Bardo, the hybrid stop-motion and live-action adaptation of George Saunders’ novel that has Tom Hanks playing Abraham Lincoln. Deadline’s casting report gives the project its most concrete shape yet: specific roles for all three actors, a director with real credentials in exactly this kind of filmmaking, and a screenplay written by the author of the source material himself.

What is Lincoln in the Bardo about?

Saunders’ 2017 novel, which won that year’s Man Booker Prize, is built around a real historical moment: Abraham Lincoln’s grief after the death of his 11-year-old son Willie in February 1862, during the early years of the Civil War. The novel imagines Lincoln visiting his son’s crypt at night, while Willie’s spirit lingers in a graveyard populated by other dead souls caught in a transitional state between one life and whatever comes next. Saunders borrows the term “bardo” from Tibetan Buddhist tradition, where it broadly describes that in-between state — though the novel’s version is very much his own invention, not a religious text.

The book tells its story through fragments: invented testimony from the ghosts, spliced together with real and fabricated historical accounts, centered on a single night when contemporary reports say Lincoln returned alone to the crypt where Willie had just been placed. It’s an unusual structure for a novel, and an even less obvious one to adapt straight into a conventional screenplay.

Who’s in it

Tom Hanks plays Abraham Lincoln in the film’s live-action portion. He’s also producing through his Playtone banner alongside Gary Goetzman.

The new additions all join the voice cast for the stop-motion ghosts populating the graveyard:

• Willem Dafoe voices Reverend Everly Thomas, a minister who died believing he was bound for heaven and discovered otherwise.
• Jonathan Bailey voices Roger Bevins, a young man who died by suicide after a failed relationship and immediately regretted it.
• Peter Dinklage voices Hans Vollman, fixated on being reunited with his much younger wife.

Deadline hasn’t reported a complete cast beyond these names, and Red Reactions isn’t going to pad the list with unconfirmed actors pulled from casting databases.

Live action and stop motion, not one or the other

The film splits its two forms along a clear line: Hanks’ Lincoln exists in live action, while the ghosts occupying the bardo are rendered in stop-motion. That structural split maps onto the book’s own divide between the mortal world Lincoln is grieving in and the spectral one Willie has entered.

Duke Johnson is directing, which explains the format choice. Johnson co-directed Anomalisa with Charlie Kaufman in 2015, a stop-motion feature that earned an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. That’s a real credential for handling a story built around interior grief and stylized character work, rather than a novelty pairing of formats for its own sake.

Who’s making it

George Saunders adapted his own novel for the screenplay, which is notable given how unconventional the book’s structure is — this isn’t a studio handing the material to an outside writer to smooth into a traditional plot. Starburns Industries produces, with Johnson, Paul Young and Devon Young Rabinowitz among the producers there; Hanks and Goetzman produce through Playtone. Saunders also holds an executive producer credit.

What we still don’t know

No release date has been set. There’s no confirmed distributor yet, either — reporting indicates the film is currently being represented for sales by CAA Media Finance and WME Independent, which points to a project still being shopped rather than one locked into a release plan. The rest of the voice cast beyond Dafoe, Bailey and Dinklage hasn’t been announced, and no footage, stills or artwork from the production has been made public. This page will get updated as those pieces come in.