Mark Felt stars Tony Goldwyn and Josh Lucas on the 'mind-blowing' timing of Watergate movie

In their latest roles, Tony Goldwyn and Josh Lucas are going deep into the Watergate scandal as FBI agents Ed Miller and Charlie Bates, real men involved in the investigation.

Goldwyn tells EW it was immensely beneficial as an actor to play a real person. “When you’re playing a real character that actually existed, it really is a tremendous resource because you can do some research and get a lot of really helpful information,” he says.

He adds that he was attracted to the project because of the great script. “I’ve been a political junkie for a long time and it’s history repeating itself, so that’s just mind-blowing,” the Scandal star tells EW. “We didn’t know that at the time, we just thought it was a great script and wanted to be a part of it.”

Josh Lucas perhaps had slightly different reasons for joining the cast. “I am a massive fan of Liam Neeson,” he admits. Neeson stars as the titular Mark Felt, the man who, as “Deep Throat,” fed information to the Washington Post that ultimately brought down Richard Nixon and his administration.

Lucas was also interested in the history and getting the story from the opposite perspective of All the President’s Men. “It is a story that’s been told before, but it’s been told in a completely different way from a completely different side,” he says. “But you never had a real sense of who this person ‘Deep Throat’ was. … And then it really becomes interesting for us to play these men who are kind of a Mad Men kind of era but inside J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the culture of that, which is so strange and interesting of itself.”

Watch the video above for more from Goldwyn and Lucas on their experiences making the film.

Mark Felt: The Man who Brought Down the White House hits theaters on Friday.