“The Help” stars to reteam for “Get On Up” James Brown biopic

PanARMENIAN.Net - Tate Taylor has set Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer to star with Chadwick Boseman in Get On Up, the James Brown biopic that Imagine’s Brian Grazer is producing with Jagged Films’ Mick Jagger, Deadline said.

Davis will play Susie Brown, who was only 16 when she gave birth to the future R&B legend, and abandoned him to live with relatives.

Spencer will play the child’s Aunt Honey, a formative figure in his upbringing.

This is a re-team with Taylor from The Help, for which Davis was nominated for Best Actress Oscar and Spencer winning for Best Supporting Actress.

Universal will start production November in Mississippi. The script is by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth and Steven Baigelman, and Victoria Pearman and Erica Huggins are also producing.

James Joseph Brown, Jr. (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American recording artist and musician. One of the founding fathers of funk music and a major figure of 20th-century popular music and dance, he is often referred to as "The Godfather of Soul". In a career that spanned six decades, Brown profoundly influenced the development of many different musical genres.

Brown holds the record as the artist to have charted the most singles on the Billboard Hot 100 without ever hitting number-one on that chart. In spite of this, however, Brown recorded seventeen number-one singles on the R&B charts. Brown was honored by many institutions including inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. Brown is ranked seventh on the music magazine Rolling Stone's list of its 100 greatest artists of all time.