Skip to Content

Listen to the Joystiq Podcast (because your ears can't read)

mystery white boy Tagged Articles at Cinematical

What About Mark Rendall as Jeff Buckley?

Filed under: Music & Musicals », Casting », Fandom »



Since we learned that the Jeff Buckley biopic is still in the works this past June, the news has evoked a myriad of responses. There are those that love the idea, those who loathe even the thought of Robert Pattinson taking the role, those who protest, and even those who want the gig for themselves. Personally, I've liked the idea of Pattinson -- not for his acting, but for his look and musical talents. Any Buckley biopic should have Jeff's music sung by himself, no covers allowed. But they still need the musical talent -- the man who can look wholly natural performing, and who has the talents to play the guitar as Buckley did, freeing any need for careful cuts and stand-in musical hands.

But if the thought of a Twilight actor is too much to bear, there's a Canadian actor who has somehow grown into the spitting image of Jeff Buckley over the last five years. (To be fair, some commenters named this actor back in June, but I quickly forgot about it, imagining the boy actor I first knew, and not the man he had become.) Mark Rendall.

Mystery White Boy: the Long-Awaited Jeff Buckley Film Finally Gets a Title

Filed under: Documentary », Independent », Music & Musicals », Casting », Celebrities and Controversy », Scripts », Newsstand », Cinematical Indie »

Way back in June (yeah, that's light years ago in Internet time), Martha told you all about the efforts to finally make a movie about musician Jeff Buckley, who went for an evening swim in the Wolf River Marina fully clothed in 1997 and drowned. Mary Guibert, Buckley's mother, has long insisted that Buckley's death was accidental and was not related to drugs, alcohol, or mental illness; an autopsy showed no illegal drugs in his system at the time of his death.

Hollywood has been interested in making a film about Buckley for years. Brad Pitt, according to a story in today's New York Times, once said that he was "obsessed" with Buckley's music, and tried more than once to get a film project about the late singer's life going; Pitt was thwarted by Guibert, who has struggled for years to not have her son's life, work and death distilled into a two-hour movie. She previously rejected scripts that portrayed her son as depressed and using drugs, and that delved too far into fantasy -- one rejected script by Emma Forrest (who also wrote the screen play for the Bette Midler film The Rose), along the lines of the film The Rose, had Buckley meeting the ghost of Judy Garland.
 
.