Alexander McQueen West End Play Headed to the Big Screen, With Zach Helm Writing
Ted Field's Radar Pictures is developing a feature film about the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, adapting James Phillips' West End play McQueen: or Lee and Beauty for the screen (Deadline).
Zach Helm, whose screenwriting credits include Stranger Than Fiction and Deep Water, is writing the screenplay. Phillips, the playwright, will collaborate with Helm on the film's development (Deadline). Maria Frisk and Michael Napoliello will produce alongside Field.
No casting has been announced.
Phillips' play opened in London's West End in 2015, five years after McQueen's death. The world premiere took place on 12 May 2015 at the St. James Theatre, a 312-seat venue with a top ticket price of £65 (about $101 at the time), in a limited engagement (London Theatre; Variety). Olivier Award-winning actor Stephen Wight starred as McQueen in the stage production, with Dianna Agron — known to television audiences from Glee — debuting the role of Dahlia, a character who appears opposite the designer (Deadline).
In the play, the title character goes by Lee — his birth name — for most of the story (Variety). The subtitle, or Lee and Beauty, signals that approach: the man behind the fashion-house name, rather than the iconography alone.
Alexander McQueen was a four-time British Designer of the Year who served as chief designer at Givenchy before launching his own label. He died by suicide in 2010 at the age of 40.
Radar Pictures' producing credits span a wide commercial range, from The Last Samurai and Runaway Bride to the Jumanji franchise (Radar Pictures). The company's track record gives some indication of scale: these are films built for global theatrical release, not boutique platforms.
For a designer whose work was always theatrical — the runway shows were staged productions in their own right — a stage-to-screen path has a certain logic. The play already did the work of finding a dramatic shape for a life that resisted easy summary. The film now faces a different task: translating an intimate 312-seat theatre piece into something that fills a cinema.
How that translation happens, and who steps into McQueen's shoes, remain open questions.
