I’m still stand-in... look who’s making Elton glam again
THOSE oversized, over-the-top spectacles... that gold lame bomber jacket... the gold-winged platform boots. It can only be Elton John. But wait, and take a closer look. Behind the glasses and the teased tufts of hair is not the flamboyant rock’n’roll icon but Taron Egerton, 28, who portrays him in Rocketman.
The film is shooting now with Bodyguard and Game Of Thrones star Richard Madden playing John Reid, the singer’s former lover and manager; Jamie Bell as Bernie Taupin, who wrote a catalogue of hits with John; and Bryce Dallas Howard and Steven Mackintosh as his parents.
‘This film is going to make people’s jaws hit the ground,’ predicted producer Matthew Vaughn.
‘Elton just said, “Tell it all. Go as Rrated as you need to”. And we do just that, with his blessing. The flaws and the genius are all there.’
Director Dexter Fletcher, in a break from shooting in London yesterday, told me: ‘It’s about Elton navigating personal and family relationships. He looks for love in all the wrong places, he abuses himself with drugs and booze – yet he’s a genius who has survived for over half a century in showbusiness.’
Although the movie, written by Lee Hall, is based on fact, some of John’s story has been fictionalised. For instance, the exclusive image here is from a fantasy sequence which sees John being launched like a rocket (as the soundtrack blasts out Rocket Man) from the stage of a concert he gave at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in 1975. He then lands aboard a private jet, and cavorts with friends.
Welsh-born Egerton does his own singing. ‘Taron nailed the singing and speaking, hands down,’ Fletcher said.
Rocketman is due in cinemas late next spring.
Ralph Fiennes will be going into the trenches in the new Kingsman film: a prequel that will explore the
origins of the intelligence organisation.
The first two films — The Secret Service and The Golden Circle — had Colin Firth and Mark Strong supporting Taron Egerton as Eggsy, the young man recruited into the Kingsman clan.
But the third picture — currently known as Kingsman: Untitled — will be set during World War I and will focus on the man who would be Kingsman: a character to be played by Fiennes.
plot details on the film, which shoots early next year, are sketchy; though I understand it will include some fictional storylines involving the real life Duke of lancaster’s Regiment which, for more than a century, has included Kingsman as a unique rank, the equivalent of private.
producer and director Matthew Vaughn and his team have started booking studio space for the picture, which will be released on November 8, 2019 — the date originally claimed by Bond 25, before behind-thescenes upheaval forced the 007 picture to shift to a February 2020 release.
Fiennes is expected to be in that film, too.
The actor is riding high at the moment, what with top notices for his antony (opposite Sophie Okonedo’s marvellous Queen of the Nile) in antony and Cleopatra, which I saw at the National Theatre on Tuesday.
and last week I revealed that he will star with Nicole Kidman in The Dig, which films next summer.
Up-and-coming actor harris Dickinson will join Fiennes in the third Kingsman movie.
Dickinson is currently appearing in the Getty family drama Trust, directed by Danny Boyle on BBC TV. he plays teenage kidnap victim John paul Getty III.