Welsh actor Matthew Rhys is in talks with Netflix about dramatizing The Power Broker, he told Conan O’Brien this week.
Rhys is now trying to acquire publishing rights for Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, which turned 50 years old last year, and was the subject of a recent play starring Ralph Fiennes, Straight Line Crazy, at The Shed in Hudson Yards.
“There is a select group of us who have approached a very well-known streaming platform,” Rhys said this week on O’Brien’s podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. “It’s been pitched. They do want to do it.” Rhys told O’Brien that Caro “doesn’t have an issue with handing over the rights to The Power Broker. The agencies and publishing houses do.”
“I certainly think it’s a story in a book that needs to get made, because the sheer scale and scope of it,” Rhys added. “But also Moses as a human being, as an individual, if you read that book, is staggering. It lays Shakespeare to the sword, because you cannot quite believe the ascent of that man.”
Straight Line Crazy written by David Hare first premiered at London’s Bridge Theater in 2022, and only later came to New York, where it had tremendous commercial success. Tickets for the 150-minute play at The Shed sold out almost immediately. Resellers subsequently upcharged them for over $2,000.
The play starring Fiennes was also met with overwhelmingly positive reviews across the pond, although not as many Londoners had ever heard of Robert Moses. Will The Power Broker be met with equal fanfare by a mass audience?
Certainly, Rhys has demonstrable experience playing brutal characters. He recently played a similar role to Moses as Nile Jarvis, a fictional New York real estate scion suspected of killing his wife in the Netflix series The Beast In Me (2025). Nile Jarvis (Rhys) is a composite character that draws from multiple real estate moguls—Donald Trump, convicted killer Robert Durst, perhaps Stefan Soloviev too—trying to build Jarvis Yards, an obvious allusion to Stephen Ross’s Hudson Yards.
On air this week, O’Brien implored Rhys to “work things out” and get the publishing rights for The Power Broker.
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