Joseph Gordon-Levitt for Lincoln role

Los Angeles - Joseph Gordon-Levitt is set to star in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln.

The Inception actor is in negotiations to play the role of 16th US President Abraham Lincoln's son Robert Todd in the movie, which features Daniel Day Lewis as the titular character.

Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader, John Hawkes and Bruce McGill are among the other stars expected to play roles in the film.

Sally Field is already signed up to play Lincoln's wife Mary in the movie, which is based on the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

The project tells the tale of the president's dream of abolishing slavery and ending the civil war in the US, which ran from 1861 to 1865.

Gordon-Levitt - whose last appearance in cinema was in Christopher Nolan's Inception - has a number of film roles coming up over the next few years, and will soon shoot his role in forthcoming Batman instalment The Dark Knight Rises starring Christian Bale and Anne Hathaway.