Chris to star in Noel Coward biopic

The fact that Chris has the Noel film after he finishes Glee sits right with me now, admittedly after my initial teeth gnashing that the movie would not be filmed this summer/fall.

Filming in between the last season of Glee would have produced headaches and a lot of deadline pressures for Chris, on whose shoulders the Noel movie squarely rests. (I suspect he will be in virtually every scene)

In hindsight, I love the comfort/ease of knowing that Chris will jump into a big project as soon as Glee is over.

Plus there is absolutely no more reason that Kurt can't be used in Season 6 from the get go. IF he is underutilized it makes it easier for me to let go of Glee (don't judge, I like other characters like Rachel, Artie, Santana...) and if he actually miracles of miracles is used as a focus point of a SL it's win win for those last 13 Glee episodes.

But back to Noel, I'm wondering if the production schedule will have Chris in England/continent for at least 2-3 months...

Buenos, I have to agree with you. I want this movie released yesterday, but I would much rather have Chris be able to do it at leisure without having to worry about rushing things so he can get back to film Glee so that he can give this performance the kind of focus that it deserves. It's going to be such a challenge carrying this film and there's no need to rush things.

In a way, it's going to be a taste of what his career after Glee is going to entail. We're not going to get the weekly spoilers to focus on. We're going to have to show more patience because the news will come out in smaller doses, and much further apart than we're used to. It's going to be even worse if he does Broadway because unless you live in the NY area (or plan to travel there), you won't see anything beyond what some fans post on YouTube (and of course, the Tony Awards telecast because I'm sure he'll be nominated).

Admittedly, we're rather spoiled. We like getting all these hints and spoilers and BTS photos for Glee. It's like we're addicts and Chris is our drug of choice. But I want Chris to have these opportunities, even if they mean he's going to be off my tv for awhile. We'll just have to learn a bit if patience.

The movie will cover Noel's life from 15 to 25. (1914-1924) Here is a website that talks about his early life:

http://www.bard.org/education/studyguides/Blithe/blitheplaywright.html#.U9aEhrG8Nls

Excerpt:

Coward’s first professional engagement, and that which launched his long career, was on 27 January 1911 in a children’s play, The Goldfish. After this appearance, he was sought after for children’s roles by other professional theatres. He was featured in several productions with Sir Charles Hawtrey, a light comedian, whom Coward idolized and to whom he virtually apprenticed himself until he was twenty. It was from Hawtrey that Coward learned comic acting techniques and playwriting.

At the tender age of twelve, Coward met one of the actresses who would help contribute to his overwhelming success, Gertrude Lawrence; she was then fifteen and a child performer as well. The acting team of Coward and Lawrence would become synonymous with polished, sophisticated comedy during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s.

Coward began his writing career when he was sixteen by writing songs and selling them for distribution. He turned his hand to playwriting when he was seventeen and found that he was very good at writing dialogue. By 1919, his play I’ll Leave It to You was produced in the West End with Coward in the leading role. One of the idiosyncrasies of Coward’s writing is that often he wrote “whacking good parts” for himself or for people he knew. Some of his best plays are essentially vehicles for his own talents or those of Gertrude Lawrence and later of the Lunts. I’ll Leave It to You met with moderate success, and Coward received great praise from critics for his play-writing abilities.

Coward went to New York for the first time in 1921 and arrived virtually penniless; however, although he may have begun the 1920s in penury, his position as the most popular playwright in the English theatre became secure during this decade. In 1924, The Vortex, Coward’s most important serious play, was produced in London.

fantastica wrote:
you can tell Lea knows how to smoke.  Smile

i hope chris will nail the smoking part, especially the subconscious mannerisms. i hate smoking but it's such a great role so i hope chris will act like a natural chain smoker, hopefully w/o actually inhaling a ton of poison.

herbal cigarettes are just as carcinogenic, but w/o the nicotin it won't be addictive.

Noel Coward said in an interview IIRC that  smoking was such a signature for him , and that some directors wanted to wean him from that in roles he played for them.  So yes, I agree  that it makes sense that Chris as Noel be smoking as something natural and second nature.

Actors do all kinds of things for roles, didn't Jarred Leto, Matthew McCaunehy, Matt Bomer, Christian Bale, Matthew Fassbender, etc, lose an alarming amount of weight for movie roles?  I think in that context Chris smoking herbal cigarettes for a few weeks won't have as much impact (hopefully) on him physically.

i think you would have to smoke for years to see any clear sign of damage. a few weeks or even months of smoking won't do any permanent harm. i heard the smog/bad air pollution in China is hundred times worse than smoking and they have to face it 24/7, even babies. poor thing!

Confession time... I used to smoke and on once in a very rare occasion (like maybe 2x a year) I'll go out with my friends to a hookah bar. I've learned how not to breathe the smoke deep into my lungs so I think that Chris will be able to manage just fine.

I think that they will be very careful with how they use the smoking in the film, not just to protect Chris's health and voice (which for me is paramount). Modern sensitivity towards smoking has changed and the industry has been under a lot of pressure to curb on-screen depictions of smoking. I think that "Noel" will still be portrayed as a smoker, but it won't be the centerpiece of the character.

NBC is going through the same issue with one of the shows premiering this fall (Constantine). The lead character (taken from a fantastic comic book) is known for being a very, very heavy smoker and the show is being very careful about how they portray it (with little of him actually smoking on screen).

Do remember it is a British film though. We don't tend to cut the smoking quite as religiously as the you do on film.

Georgette888 wrote:Do remember it is a British film though. We don't tend to cut the smoking quite as religiously as the you do on film.

I think for "period" films American movies don't cut back on the smoking.

line 126 Tumblr i dont have any other info but i thin this amazing and i had to pass it on

Kurt addict wrote:
line 126 Tumblr i dont have any other info but i thin this amazing and i had to pass it on

    

Full tumblr post of above image (which I love!   ):



source page

It's really beautiful I could not get the whole pic on my iPad so th nukes for putting it all on.

great work! very talented artist.

Easiest thing for the director will be to make Chris look as 15-16 year old Noël, as he looks in this amazing drawing.

Considering that when Glee first started, half the actors playing high school sophomores were in their mid-late twenties, this is not going to be too much of a challenge.

Ranwing wrote:Considering that when Glee first started, half the actors playing high school sophomores were in their mid-late twenties, this is not going to be too much of a challenge.

TBH, Chris was the only one of the original  actors in S1 who looked plausible as a teenager , he was 18 but looked 14.  Mark Salling could have passed for his father.    

The uncanny thing  (sort of freaky) is that he can look like a 24 year old which is what he is but he can still look like a teenager with the right look/hairdo quite seamlessly.  In the photos of his BD party he looked all of twelve.    

The Noel movie with going from 15-25 is so within his ballpark.

The odds that the Noel Coward film will get an R rating in the US just got a lot less steep. A film focusing on an older gay couple that contains no nudity, no sex scenes and no violence got hit with an R rating because apparently young people need to be shielded from the portrayal of two men in love.

link

The Motion Picture Association is rightly being called out on giving this film the same rating as Sin City: A Dame to Die For (which contains extreme violence and where every female character is a murderer, stripper or prostitute). Apparently that's no worse than showing two fully clothed men sleeping in the same bed.

The idea that the USA is a liberal, modern and civilized country is a carefully kept illusion that shows more and more cracks over time.

(I'm sorry for this bold statement, Americans on this board: I'm sure most individuals in the USA are of good will and heart, like most people in the world are, actually.)

Glorfindel wrote:The idea that the USA is a liberal, modern and civilized country is a carefully kept illusion that shows more and more cracks over time.

(I'm sorry for this bold statement, Americans on this board: I'm sure most individuals in the USA are of good will and heart, like most people in the world are, actually.)

I have no problem with the view  that American society is less than perfect and that both liberal and conservative views coexist uneasily  side by side, things vary from region and even within states.    New York City is far different from Fresno, California, for example.   After all it is also a country of close to 320 million people of different ethnic, social and economic backgrounds.

Of course we don't have the advantage of 1000 years of bloodshed/strife  and wars like most European countries/societies to fully learn our lessons.  No offense to the Europeans among us.

It's not necessarily a majority of  liberals, I will grant you that, though whether the United States is  modern or civilized, well let's just say people can make up their own minds about such broad,  sweeping generalizations.

Buenos wrote:I have no problem with the view  that American society is less than perfect and that both liberal and conservative views coexist uneasily  side by side, things vary from region and even within states.    New York City is far different from Fresno, California, for example.   After all it is also a country of close to 320 million people of different ethnic, social and economic backgrounds.

Granted, the USA is a very biiiiiiiiiiig country. And there are many differences between the states, even between cities within states. But when you look at the issue at hand here (movie rating), 'Hollywood' (meaning the entertainment/movie making industry, including those who decide ratings for American and foreign movies) is for a large part responsible for how America is represented as a nation to the outside world.

Or at least Hollywood pretends to represent it. And yet, even after all the positive change America made, like in the 1950's and 60's, Hollywood still does quite a crappy job when it comes to honest and equal representation of its people, whether it comes to race, gender, sexuality and social status. Rating a movie as 'R' only because it shows a homosexual couple (without any sexual content) is not liberal, not modern and, quite frankly, not civilized.
(same as refusing to stand behind and present your most popular and awarded character and actor of your show as the rightful male lead simply because he's gay in real life, btw)

So I stand by my earlier statement.

And when you look at the bigger picture of this, the treatment of minorities/anything-that-may-have-conservative-naysayers-clutch-their-pearls in Hollywood is only the tip of the iceberg, and points to a bigger problem in the society it works in and aims at.
Hollywood wants to please the masses, or at least the people that they think will bring in the most money (either in quantity of numbers, or quality of social status). And don't forget that money often means power, in America too. However wrong Hollywood's perception of their costumers and what they actually want to see might be, fact remains that Hollywood wouldn't be so neglectful, ignorant and even suppressive of e.g. gays (or any LGBTQIA), women and POC in their products if the society they are making their products for (or rate movies for) would not accept their blatant discrimination.

Having said that:
I also said that imo most people (everywhere) are of good will and heart, because I see a lot of people (like on tumblr and here) who do see what's wrong and backwards with all of this. But it's the stilted structure of their society and country (countries: I never tried to single out America as the only culprit here), shaped by many years of political, social and cultural dealings, that hinder positive progress that could be made a lot quicker if it had been simply left up to its (often younger generations of) citizens.

Of course we don't have the advantage of 1000 years of bloodshed/strife  and wars like most European countries/societies to fully learn our lessons.  No offense to the Europeans among us.

That's a non-valid argument, as the founders of America's political and cultural fundaments of society  came from that same Europe (it's not like the Native Americans or the slaves they made and/or shipped to America had much say in that).
Any 'advantage' of those 1000 years of bloodshed and strife was brought right along with them to the 'New World' (and that bloodshed and strife didn't exactly stop after they crossed the Atlantic Ocean). Those immigrants even intended to do it better than the countries and governments they fled from.

It's not necessarily a majority of  liberals, I will grant you that, though whether the United States is  modern or civilized, well let's just say people can make up their own minds about such broad,  sweeping generalizations.

And this goes back to what I said earlier: when you want broad, sweeping generalizations, watch a movie from Hollywood.

To take this further and slightly off topic: watch how America's politicians use these same broad, sweeping generalizations.
Not that leaders of other countries are much better, tbh. But I think the difference is that America pretends to be the leader of the civil world, or at least it's trying to tell a lot of other countries they consider less civilized how to behave, going as far as to sometimes use their military force in the name of that civilization, equality and freedom. When maybe they should focus on the problems when it comes to equality and freedom of the people in their own country first?
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and tbh: lately that's what really pissing me off when it comes to America.

To simplify this and bring it back to something familiar for this forum   (and to lighten the mood)  : if the Blaine/Darren/Klaine stans wouldn't continuously come into all the tumblr tags and any Glee forum/discussion board, telling others how exceptional and supertalented their precious is, and how wonderful a representation Klaine is for the LGBTQIA community, while in the mean time also telling us that our fave(s) suck and our (fanon) ships are horrible, we wouldn't nearly be as irritated by them and their precious as we are now.  


Anyway, I was just giving my opinion. And if I offended someone: that was not my intention.

I'm fine with opinions, Glorfindel, as I have plenty of my own.    

The irony is that most HW movies now get most of their box office grosses overseas, so that the foreign take is as big if not bigger.  European markets as much as anyone gobble up HW movies, just a fact.

The one thing about the movie about the mature gay couple is that something stupid but consistent  with the American ratings is that ANY movie, that incorporates the word "FUCK" more than once (or is it 2/3 times ?) will get an R rating.  Without exception.  So I wouldn't be so swift to assume that just portraying a gay couple would give that movie an R rating by itself.  

I do  agree the rating system is messed up.

AS to American military power, it's a two way street.  When the US doesn't get involved, many scream the US has certain responsibilities and obligations as the leader of the free world.  Not black and white but it's a grey issue where I stand.

Sadly, it is the vocal minority that convinces those in power that they actually represent the numbers they pretend to, and Hollywood bows to them. To me, it isn't what gender is in bed together that matters, but if they are in love or not. There is so much gratuitous sex in Hollywood, anything to get a woman naked, that I am getting kind of bored with the gymnastics. Movies are truly a world market, and they need to start showing more of a pandorama, than the puritanical ethics of those who prefer that time stand still, so they can live in the blissful comfort of being the right color, gender and religion.

To me, having people have sex without any emotional involvement is far more offensive, than two people genuinely in love. To me, that is all about titillation, rather than storytelling.

I really like that guy's sense of humor.  


So.........we will get something soon?

^ question is "HOW SOON". soon could be next year. i want it tomorrow.