Categories: Movie News

42’s Chadwick Boseman will play James Brown in biopic

Who did they get to play the “hardest working man in show business”? 42’s Chadwick Boseman has nabbed the role of James Brown in the upcoming biopic on the singer.

Does it feel good? He knew it would. So good. So good. Cause he got the part.

THE HELP’s Tate Taylor is set to direct, and today even said that it wouldn’t be until next week when we would find out who would be playing Brown. Guess they couldn’t wait. The director mentioned that he was more likely to cast a relative unknown rather than someone more well-known.

Not many details were given at all about the film when Deadline released the news but an interview with Taylor earlier today did have some info:

“The film will begin when Brown was about 5 years old and will extend to about 1993, Taylor said, declining to give details about what parts of Brown’s life will be depicted: “You have to buy a ticket and come see it.” Brown performed a concert at the Mississippi Coliseum in February 1969, although it was not immediately clear whether that concert will be depicted in the movie. Taylor said the coliseum’s interior will stand in for Boston Gardens, where Brown played a concert and calmed an audience after the Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968; and downtown Jackson will stand in for downtown Cincinnati, home of King Records.”

The biopic will start filming this Fall in Mississippi. Brian Grazer and Mick Jagger will produce. Jagger got those moves from Brown. The Maroon 5 song doesn’t tell you that.