After being a fan of music legend Miles Davis for years, Don Cheadle is finally about to play him on screen – and make his directorial debut at the same time with Miles Ahead. Now, via Entertainment Weekly, we have the first look at Cheadle in character.
The film kicks off shooting this week in Cincinnati, ending a journey through development that has lasted for nearly a decade. With Ewan McGregor, Michael Stuhlbarg, Keith Stanfield and Emayatzy Corinealdi all aboard to co-star, the drama will sidestep usual biopic conventions by focusing on one specific period of Davis’ life, a tumultuous five-year span that saw him pull back from music and navigate a fraught relationship with first wife Frances Taylor Davis.
“This was something that had been a periphery for me,” Cheadle tells EW. “I never thought about portraying him, really. I had done several other quote-unquote biopics and was always struck by the limitations they presented, because they were trying to be historically accurate. Let’s be honest, any biopic is a series of omissions and conflations of events and amalgamations of characters. And you’re trying to have a movie experience under three hours, so in the process you condense people’s lives from cradle to grave, so things tend to feel episodic and event-oriented as opposed to a story about people and relationships and a character. So I didn’t want to do another biopic. When I heard the idea, from various people who had played with him, producers, writers, that this could potentially be something, I thought, ‘if the script is great, I would be open to it since he’s always been a fascinating figure to me.’ For more from Cheadle, head to EW’s site.
Meanwhile, Cheadle has been leading the campaign to help finance the movie itself, even as it starts rolling cameras, and there are just a couple of days left on the clock if you want to jump aboard.