Hi, Neighbor! Can You Say “Biopic”?
You Are My Friend, the upcoming biopic about Mister Rogers, isn’t actually a biopic about Mister Rogers.
So director Marielle Heller has revealed to Entertainment Wokely. She’d really prefer you didn’t refer to it as a “biopic”, in fact.
“[This] movie is…. not a biopic,” the filmmaker tells EW of the upcoming TriStar Pictures project, which is SET TO STAR TOM HANKS AS THE BELOVED CHILDREN’S SHOW HOST and pop cultural icon. “I disliked that when it got announced it was characterized as such. It’s really not. It’s a movie that’s largely focused on a reporter and [Mr. Rogers’] relationship to his life, and how [the reporter’s] whole world changes when coming in contact with Fred Rogers.”
In the Land of Make-Believe
Heller’s previous directorial effort was a coming-of-age comedy about the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl, and her next one is a biopic (at least until she tells us it isn’t) about a forger and thief. She’s also directed an episode of a show about an old man who dresses up as a woman, and is going to do a film lauding the effort to impose same-sex marriage on the State of California by overturning the will of its voters.
I can’t think of anyone better suited to direct a non-biopic-biopic having something tangentially to do with gentle, smiling, universally-beloved children’s-show legend Fred Rogers, can you, neighbor?
Oh yeah, I almost forgot until I reread the EW blurb up there: Tom Hanks is in the film as Mister Rogers. Which doesn’t really matter, because this isn’t a movie about Mister Rogers.
You Are My Friend, the upcoming biopic about some jerkoff from Esquire named Tom Junod, opens June 8.
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