Julia Garner isn’t giving up hope of slipping into a cone bra just yet. The Fantastic Four: First Steps star stopped in to the SmartLess podcast for this week’s episode and told hosts Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes that despite the delayed Madonna biopic getting put on ice in 2023 she’s still confident it will happen at some point.
Hayes asked for an update on the Universal Pictures project and Garner said, “Yeah, that’s supposed to still happen,” without divulging any additional details of timeline for the biopic that was first announced in 2020 and then put on indefinite hold as Madonna went on the road for her Celebration world tour. Garner was rumored to have landed the coveted lead role and she told the trio that the casting made perfect sense given her superfandom.
“Oh my God! I was such a fan of Madonna’s,” she said. “I grew up listening to Madonna. It just came about. I knew that they were doing a project, making a movie about it and then I went out to audition.” In a career that has taken her from the gritty, Emmy-winning role of Ruth Langmore in Bateman’s Netflix series Ozark, to top-lining in this year’s horror film Wolf Man and her first super hero franchise in the just-released Fantastic Four box office smash, Garner said the decision to try out for the Madonna biopic was “another thing that I kind of just wanted to see if I could do.”
Admitting that she has no formal dance training — unlike Madonna, who attended the University of Michigan on a dance scholarship and trained with famed choreographer/dancer Martha Graham — Garner, 31, said she had to learn how to dance and then show off her moves in front of Madonna herself. “And convince her that I can dance, basically, and sing with her,” she said.
When Bateman asked what that high-pressure situation was like, Garner described approaching it with a WWMD (what would Madonna do?) attitude. “Which is like, convince you that she deserves to be in this room.. and I owned it,” she said. “I was kind of like, ‘you can take it or leave it. But if you leave it, if I leave, then that’s on you. If you take it, great.’”
The bottom line, Garner said, is that the stalled project is “still brewing,” noting that anything great “takes a long time.” After the movie was paused, Madonna appeared to tease that it was back on last July when she posted a since-deleted photo of herself sitting at a typewriter working on a screenplay entitled Who’s That Girl, an apparent reference to her 1987 film and song of the same name.
That news came two months after Deadline reported that Madonna had teamed up with Deadpool & Wolverine producer Shawn Levy to develop a limited Netflix series based on her life and career; at press time The Hollywood Reporter said the series is in the “early stages” of development at the streamer.
Further muddying the waters, in November, Madonna floated the idea of doing a TV series about her life, saying that a number of “producers and agents” had told her that a movie wouldn’t allow her the space to tell her whole story. “Downsize-down scale-think smaller-they say—I realized that everything in my life is going to be challenged,” she wrote in the deleted post, asking her fans if they would prefer to see her story adapted into “a series or a feature film.”
Listen to Garner talk Madonna biopic below.