Paul Mescal Replaces Blake Jenner in Richard Linklater's 20-year Film Adaptation of the Musical MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG
Just a day after it was announced that actor Paul Mescal (Normal People) has joined the cast of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2, we’ve learned that Mescal has now joined Richard Linklater’s 20-year film, Merrily We Roll Along. Mescal replaced Blake Jenner in the film project, who had already shot scenes for the film, though he exited the project shortly after domestic violence allegations resurfaced against the actor from his ex-wife, Supergirl star Melissa Benoist.
The film is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s acclaimed stage musical, and the multi-decade project is in the same vein as his previous work, Boyhood, which spanned 12 years.
Mescal joins previously cast actors Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein, and he plays the role of “Franklin Shepard, a talented Broadway composer who abandons his theater career in New York and all his friends in order to produce movies in Los Angeles. Like the play, the musical begins at the height of his Hollywood fame and moves backward in time, showing snapshots of the most important moments in Frank’s life that shaped the man he went on to become. Feldstein will play Frank’s best friend, theater critic Mary Flynn, while her real-life pal Platt will play Charley, Frank’s regular lyricist.”
Sondheim’s musical was itself based on the 1934 play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Back in 2019, sources indicated that the film would be shot in reverse chronological order, as the play and musical end when the characters are in their mid-20s and just embarking on their entertainment careers.
“I first saw, and fell in love with Merrily in the ’80s, and I can’t think of a better place to spend the next 20 years than in the world of a Sondheim musical,” Linklater said in a statement to the New York Times. “I don’t enter this multiyear experience lightly, but it seems the best, perhaps the only way, to do this story justice on film,” added the director, who is also producing the film alongside Jason Blum and Jonathan Marc Sherman.
via: AbovetheLine