EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE

EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE I Director Jonathan Butterell on his stage musical’s makeover.

Why the stage adap will be something to drag about.

It is a first and it’s a rather big first,” chuckles theatre director Jonathan Butterell of making his movie debut with Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. “It’s rather enormous, so it’s been a lot like jumping in the deep end and paddling away, swimming as hard as I can.” Luckily, as the creator of the stage musical upon which the film is based, he hasn’t been entirely cast adrift. “I’ve been producing this story for the last six years! That helps.” A Sheffield native who has previously worked with Sam Mendes and John Crowley, Butterell originally adapted the story of young drag performer Jamie in 2017 after watching the BBC3 documentary about the real-life schoolboy who dreamed of stardom. “As soon as I saw Jamie walking on that wall in his heels outside his house,” he recalls, “and his mum looking out the kitchen window at him, I thought, ‘This is a story to tell.’” The resultant stage show was a hit in Sheffield before it moved to London’s West End, and a movie was the logical next quickstep.

Finding their big-screen Jamie, though, proved a challenge. Butterell met with over 3,500 young people, while his casting director put out a call on Twitter. That’s how they found newcomer Max Harwood, who sent in a video audition but had zero screen experience. “I wanted to meet him as he had a little bit of magic about him,” Butterell reveals. “He’s got a whole film on his shoulders, and he has to move and dance, and find some kind of deep emotional centre, because Jamie goes to a very vulnerable place, but he’s fantastic.”

Butterell surrounded the newbie with a seasoned supporting cast, including Sharon Horgan as Jamie’s brittle schoolteacher, and Richard E. Grant as Hugo, the elder cabaret dame who takes Jamie under his sequinned wing. “Richard brings this kind of largesse and exuberance,” Butterell says. “He did say to me, ‘Why are you casting me?’ I said, ‘Because you’ve got sad eyes.’ For all of Richard’s exuberance, he has this thing that goes off inside him that’s intriguing and heartbreaking. That’s how I saw Hugo. He is a man who has lost his way.”

Of course, this is also a musical, and the film offered an opportunity to expand on the show’s set-pieces in a way that only cinema can. “There were times we had 4,000 people in the street dancing,” Butterell reveals. And despite the working-class setting, don’t expect this to be Loachian in its approach. “Although it’s a community that isn’t financially wealthy, it has a massive heart,” Butterell says. “I didn’t want it to feel like a deprived community, quite the opposite. I wanted it to feel like an abundantly proud community.”

ETA | 26 FEBRUARY / EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE OPENS IN CINEMAS NEXT YEAR.