Few actors have reached the same masculinity-defining icon status as Steve McQueen. Thus, as seems to be the case when anyone leaves a legacy nowadays, it was inevitable that eventually a biopic would be in order. And now it’s official: Lake Forest Entertainment and The Exchange have reached agreements to finance a McQueen biopic, McQueen (bet you didn’t see that title coming). Though it’s hard to think of a contemporary McQueen equivalent, a few big actors, such as Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum and Jeremy Renner, are already interested.
According to Mid-Day, the biopic will partly be based on Marshall Terrill’s 2010 biography Steve McQueen: The Life And Legend of a Hollywood Icon, and partly based on McQueen’s own writings about his life from shortly before his death at the young age of 50. The Immigrant‘s James Grey is allegedly a directorial frontrunner.
Though many of the aspects of McQueen’s tumultuous life are known — his many marriages, his drug use, the fact that Charles Manson had planned to murder him — the film centers partly around an unknown aspect of the actor’s life. Graham Kaye, who’s producing alongside Brian O’Shea and Jeff Bowler, said of the film:
There is a diary that was kept by his nurse in Mexico who gave it to the author of the book that was done on him by Marshall Terrill. Something happened in McQueen’s life that has been kept secret for a long time. We think we have a very interesting way into this story.
