Looks like President Lincoln’s distinctive stovepipe top hat is about to become a stovepipe Tom hat.

According to Variety, Nice Guy Actor Tom Hanks is set to play the mourning President Lincoln in the film adaptation of Nice Guy Author George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, which explores the President’s grief over his son, who died in 1862, a year into the Civil War. The Oscar nominated Duke Johnson is on board to direct and produce.

The novel is highly stylized and set in a metaphysical intermediary space between death and rebirth, so it could be considered tough to adapt. But apparently, the film will “blend stop-motion animation and live-action to explore ‘themes of love, empathy and human capacity in the face of unimaginable grief.’” So we’ll see how that goes.

More importantly, will Hanks play Lincoln closer to his Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the self-doubting and reluctant hero? Or with the supernaturally-beset emotion of corrections officer Paul Edgecomb from The Green Mile? Or will he just play it closer to himself, since Hanks is himself a distant cousin of Abe Lincoln? We’re all going to find out together.

And relatedly: Bardot in the Lincoln.