Merseybeat’s back for a new life of Brian
BEATLEMANIA is back on the streets of Liverpool as a new film chronicles the complex life and times of the Fab Four’s manager, Brian Epstein. The movie is called Midas Man, after the man with the golden touch who, in addition to The Beatles, also helped launch the careers of Gerry And The Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas — and a club cloakroom attendant called Priscilla White . . . better known to us as Cilla Black.
It’s as if everything old is new again, with Kenneth Branagh casting a Bee Gees biopic, and a stage musical about the Osmond brothers in pre-production.
Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, one of the stars of Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit, spent months exploring Epstein’s background in order to play the lead in the film. ‘He was a middle-class boy from some privilege,’ Fortune-Lloyd told me (Epstein’s father, Harry, made a fortune out of department stores in Merseyside).
‘It’s so interesting when you get these figures who shape culture but are outside the mainstream,’ he added. ‘He was a gay man, a Jewish man and cultured. He loved classical music and wanted to be an actor. And here he is, setting up the world’s best known, most-loved rock ’n’ roll band of all time.’
Epstein had a flair for design and was effortlessly stylish — always immaculate in hand-made suits (a little like the Burberry tuxedo Fortune-Lloyd is wearing in my exclusive first picture of him in the role). Clothes were his armour; they got him through the door. His words did the rest.
Once he’d discovered The Beatles in the Cavern nightclub in 1961 — John, Paul, George, and then drummer Pete Best — he set about changing them . . . out of the leather jackets they’d adopted during their period in Hamburg, and into their sharp suits and ties.
Midas Man director Jonas Akerlund has cast actress and writer Rosie Day to portray Cilla Black.
Day’s book, Instructions On A Teenage Armageddon, was published just last week. And now she’s relishing the chance to ‘step into Cilla’s fabulous shoes’. She told me: ‘There’s only one Cilla, but it is a real honour to portray such an iconic trailblazer.’
The script, by Jonathan Wakeham and Brigit Grant, focuses on Epstein. But, of course, the six years he spent with The Beatles are a key part of British rock history, and the actors assembled to play them will do their key scenes next month.
In an unusual move, producers have told the cast filming will shut down for two weeks for set and costume redesigning, resuming on November 8. This week, though, Fortune-Lloyd has been filming in Port Sunlight on the Wirral with Emily Watson, Eddie Marsan, Omari Douglas and Lukas Gage.