When one casts Daniel Day-Lewis in your lead role, one can only expect the rest of the talent involved to swirl down from there. Not for director Steven Spielberg. After grabbing one of the best actors of generation, he went ahead and got Sally Field. Now he has a new pile of high-caliber names to add to the cast of Lincoln.

THR reports that Tommy Lee Jones (No Country For Old Men, The Fugitive) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Inception, Brick, The Dark Knight Rises) are in talks to join the large cast. It doesn’t stop there though. We’ve got a dozen more actors boarding the project.

Hal Holbrook, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, Bruce McGill, Joseph Cross, David Costabile, Byron Jennings, Dakin Matthews, Boris McGiver, Gloria Reuben, Jeremy Strong, and David Warshofsky are all joining the cast. Tony Kushner (Munich) has written on the script that “will focus on the political collision of Lincoln and the powerful men of his cabinet on the road to abolition and the end of the Civil War.”

While we don’t know exactly what all these supporting roles will be, we do know that Jones will play Thaddeus Stevens, “a Republican leader and congressman from Pennsylvania in the U.S. House of Representatives. Gordon-Levitt takes the role of President Lincoln’s eldest son Robert Todd Lincoln.

This an extremely high quality batch of actors, if I already didn’t have to tell you. Outside of the two big names just added, John Hawkes pops out the most. He recently got a supporting actor nomination for Winter’s Bone and will be seen in my current favorite film of the year, Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Lincoln shoots this fall in Virginia for a late 2012.

What do you think of this big batch of names for Lincoln?