Lin-Manuel Miranda has set Andrew Garfield to star in tick, tick…BOOM! Miranda makes his feature directorial debut for Netflix on the adaptation of the autobiographical Off Broadway show written by Jonathan Larson, who shortly after went on to write the Pulitzer-winning musical Rent. Larson died tragically the night before Rent‘s first Off Broadway preview performance, before the show became a sensation.
Imagine Entertainment principals Brian Grazer and Ron Howard are producing with Imagine’s Julie Oh, and Miranda. Steven Levenson, the Dear Evan Hanson playwright who wrote Fosse/Verdon, is adapting the script from Larson’s original stage show. Julie Larson, Levenson and Celia Costas are the exec producers.
Garfield is essentially playing Larson in a musical about the young playwright’s towering ambition. Garfield will play Jon, an aspiring theater composer who waits tables in New York City while writing Superbia, which he hopes will be the great American musical that will finally give him his big career break. The young man is feeling pressure from his girlfriend Susan, who is tired of continuing to put her life on hold for Jon’s career aspiration. Meanwhile, Jon’s best friend and roommate Michael has given up on his creative dream and has taken a high paying advertising job on Madison Avenue and is preparing to move out. As Jon approaches his 30th birthday, he is overcome with anxiety, wondering if his own impossible dream is worth the cost.
The autobiographical show was certainly prescient, as Larson posthumously won three Tony Awards for Rent, a show that enjoyed a dozen year run to become the 11th longest running show in Broadway history. When Miranda won his Pulitzer for Hamilton, he and Larson became two of only nine creators of stage musicals who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
CAA and Kate Bryden at Gordon and French in London rep Garfield, who was Oscar nominated for Hacksaw Ridge and won the Tony for Broadway’s 2018 revival of Angels in America. Garfield recently wrapped production on the Gia Coppola-directed romance film Mainstream, and he is currently shooting the role of scandalous televangelist Jim Bakker opposite Jessica Chastain’s Tammy Bakker (remember the tarantula eyelashes?) in the Michael Showalter-directed The Eyes of Tammy Faye for Fox Searchlight. Miranda is repped by WME and Liebman Entertainment.
