It isn’t that Elton John is full of himself, right. I mean, he handpicked Justin timberlake to portray him in a video once but hey, have you ever known a real person get somebody to portray them that is uglier than them? I haven’t. Even Woody Allen used Kenneth Branagh.
And how good looking is actor tom Hardy, who will be portraying Elton in the upcoming “Rocketman” bio, which takes post-rehab Elton in 1990 all the way to the present. Doing lotsa good works and helping fight AIDS and stuff. Not that cute in “The Dark Knight Rises” but otherwise a good looking fella. But he is not a singer apparently. From the Wall Street Journal: “I will have to sing otherwise I’ll have probably failed, right? But that’s terrifying me. I can’t hold a tune to save my life. God knows how I’m going to do that. But then I couldn’t cage fight before I’d gotten in with Warrior. And I still can’t. I’m not supposed to be a cage fighter. I’m only playing one.”
Yeah well I guess that’s why Tom makes the big bucks and any way much more difficult will be portraying a recovering addict. The obvious stuff for the rehabbed is the shakes and the shudders but internally, Elton would be going through other stuff. Reinventing himself internally. Finding somebody who was there and now isn’t.
Or so they tell me.
Perhaps I’m an exception but I found nothing like that. No revelation, no happier emotional life, nobody pleased or displeased. Just a huge bland nothingness. So why stop? Because drinking made me so sick it just about killed me. It wasn’t about happy or sad, I could be extremely happy when drunk, much higher than sobriety has brought me. It is about would you rather have diabetes or not. Having diabetes doesn’t make you a worse person, but not having diabetes makes you physically better. It might not be emotional happiness but it is physical not horribleness. And that is so huge.
Sometimes I wonder if, as a self-professed loner, the fact that my alcoholism mostly affected me made me less caring about how it changed me, but I don’t feel my character has improved being sober. But the lack of physical pain is huge.
The question is if and how do you show that in a movie. Or, in what seems to be something like a vanity project, do you do it at all? Plus, will Elton deal with sobriety robbing him of so much of his creative gifts on Rocketman? And when, in what part of his life exactly, did John resemble Hardy?
