We’ve reached the point in Patricia Arquette’s career where the True Romance star is playing someone’s mother? Sheesh, I’m old. But Variety has attached 43-year-old Arquette’s name to the role of Jeff Buckley’s mom, Mary Guibert, in a planned biopic for the late musician (played by Reeve Carney of Broadway’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark).
The trade makes an interesting True Romance connection, though. That film was directed by Tony Scott back in 1993, while Tony’s son, Jake, is on the hook to direct the Buckley biopic. Apparently the Scott family counts themselves as Arquette fans, and rightfully so. Though the part that she’ll play in Jake’s film is little more than a cameo, appearing in a few flashback scenes and present-day shots, where she acts as the driving force to get her son, Jeff, to perform at a tribute concert for his father, Tim Buckley. As Variety says, that’s largely recognized as Jeff Buckley’s first public appearance, and his career launched from there.
Arquette appears to be going after more feature-film work after spending years on NBC for Medium. She will appear alongside Charlie Sheen and Bill Murray in Roman Coppola’s A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, and she has been tinkering on Richard Linklater’s untitled project for the better part of a decade.
But it’s easy to see why the Buckley story would interest her. The singer-songwriter tragically drowned at age 30 in 1997. This after his father, also a musician, died of a drug overdose at age 28. Interestingly, Variety says that a rival Buckley film is in the pipeline with Margin Call star Penn Badgley attached. That’s nowhere near as high-profile as dueling Snow White pictures, but a race is a race, and we’ll see how many Buckley biopics are sustainable at the box office.
