Though he’s usually to be found on the small screen playing rich kid Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl, Penn Badgley has been nabbing the odd film role here and there, including romancing Emma Stone in Easy A. But now it appears he’s taking a shot at iconic musician Jeff Buckley, agreeing to play the man in Greetings From Tim Buckley.
The role of the younger Buckley has been the subject of intense speculation across a variety of movies that planned to portray him. While none have yet come to pass, Greetings is already in pre-production with co-writer/director Dan Algrant planning to shoot this August.
Following the true story of the time leading up to Jeff Buckley’s performance at his late father’s tribute ceremony, the plot will follow his romance with a young woman and his slow understanding of the man who abandoned him as a child. As he finds his own voice, Jeff performed a cathartic rendition of 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain', a song written by Tim Buckley about his wife and infant son. While he never intended the concert to push his musical career to the next level, Buckley’s appearance nevertheless saw him accepted more than ever before.
"To play a man who was singularly gifted as an artist, greatly misunderstood & mythologized as a human being... It's something very special and sacred. I'm going to give all I can to this project,” Badgley says in a statement picked up by Deadline. There’s no word on how this might affect Jake Scott’s plans to craft a biopicbased on Jeff’s life...