In news that will excite punk fans new and old, it’s been announced Trainspotting director, Danny Boyle is going to be adapting Steve Jones‘ autobiography Lonely Boy into a six-part TV drama entitled Pistol that charts the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols.
The series is set to air on FX (TV channel) and is due to star Emma Appleton, Louis Partridge and Maisie Williams, amongst others. The show is being filmed in London with production due to start on 7 March.
The drama will focus on Steve’s rags-to-riches origin story, bringing Boyle’s darkly confronting directorial style to a tale of a band that shocked a nation! Pistol promises to bring the Sex Pistols to the small screen capturing all the ‘filth and the fury’ of their short but explosive reign as the most feared band in the world.
With a strong cast including Australian actor Toby Wallace as Steve Jones, 1917‘s Anson Boon as infamous Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten and Enola Holme‘s Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious Pistol has the cast to bring one of the most intense and exciting periods in music history spitting back to life.
“Imagine breaking into the world of The Crown and Downton Abbey with your mates and screaming your songs and your fury at all they represent,” says Danny Boyle in a statement. “This is the moment that British society and culture changed forever. It is the detonation point for British street culture, where ordinary young people had the stage and vented their fury and their fashion — and everyone had to watch and listen, and everyone feared them or followed them.”
Lydon has yet to comment on the news, however, in 2019 he disowned a prospective Sex Pistols biopic in a scathing Tweet.
Director Penelope Spheeris was also at one time, in talks with Lydon about a biopic, but said in 2015 that it was unlikely to happen. “I just don’t know if he’s got the mindset to do it,” she told Pitchfork. “I love him, and I think he changed the world, especially the world of music, but he was suffering from the same thing I was – you get to a certain age and you go, ‘What is my identity?’ What’s Johnny Rotten’s identity? The birth of punk, the Sex Pistols. You want to get it right, and I think John is afraid to get it right.”
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