Queen's Gambit actor to star in Sex Pistols TV series as first-look images revealed

Queen’s Gambit actor to star in Sex Pistols TV series as first-look images revealed

Mar 03, 2021

The Queen’s Gambit star Thomas Brodie-Sangster will play Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren in a new TV series about the controversial rock band.

Filming has begun on the six-part series – titled Pistol – which is being directed by Trainspotting filmmaker Danny Boyle.

Based on the memoir Lonely Boy: Tales From A Sex Pistol by the band’s guitarist and founding member Steve Jones, it will tell the story of the famously anti-establishment punk rockers.

Other newly revealed cast members include St Trinian’s Talulah Riley, playing fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood, and model Iris Law as punk influencer Soo Catwoman.

Christian Lees, who played Jerry Lee Lewis in the Sun Records series, will play original Pistols bassist Glen Matlock.

First-look images from the set show two different band line-ups, at different points in their punk journey.

In the first image Lees plays original bassist Matlock, Anson Boon portrays singer John Lydon and Toby Wallace is guitarist Steve Jones.

The second features the addition of Jacob Slater as drummer Paul Cook and Louis Partridge as bassist Sid Vicious, who replaced Matlock after he quit in 1977.

Actors already attached to the show include Game Of Thrones actress Maisie Williams as punk model Jordan, Sydney Chandler as fellow rocker Chrissie Hynde and Emma Appleton, who portrays Vicious’s girlfriend Nancy Spungen.

The limited series has been created by Australian screenwriter Craig Pearce, the writer behind hit movies Moulin Rouge, Strictly Ballroom and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.

Boyle, whose previous films include 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire, has called the period the show is set in – the 1970s – “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”.

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The band’s 1977 single God Save the Queen was famously banned by the BBC, and on reaching the number two position in the singles charts, it made history by being listed as a blank, to avoid offence to the monarchy.

The drama will start off in west London’s council estates, before moving to Westwood and McLaren’s notorious Kings Road SEX shop, and on to the international controversy that came with the release of Never Mind The B******s and cemented the band – which formed in 1975 – as one of the most notorious British outfits of all time.

Pistol is due to air on US network FX on Hulu in 2022, with a UK distributor yet to be confirmed.

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