Danny Boyle To Direct FX Miniseries About Sex Pistols Guitarist Steve Jones

Chris Morphet/Redferns

Danny Boyle To Direct FX Miniseries About Sex Pistols Guitarist Steve Jones

Chris Morphet/Redferns

The two most famous Sex Pistols are the ones with the funny stage names: Johnny Rotten, the singer who’s been in the news lately for MAGA-related reasons, and Sid Vicious, the bassist who didn’t know how to play bass and who’s mostly notorious because he probably murdered his girlfriend. The whole sensational narrative around the Pistols tends to ignore Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock, the other three guys who were in the band. But now guitarist Steve Jones is getting his own sensational narrative, and it’ll be told in TV-miniseries form!

Danny Boyle, director of movies like Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, is working on Pistol, a new six-episode limited series for FX. Pistol will tell the Sex Pistols story, one that’s been told quite a few times, but it’ll focus on Jones, the yobbish guitarist who went on to become a rock radio host in Los Angeles. Pistol is an adaptation of Jones’ 2016 memoir Lonely Boy: Tales From A Sex Pistol. Boyle will direct all six episodes, and he’ll also serve as executive producer. Deadline reports that the Australian screenwriter and frequent Baz Luhrmann collaborator Craig Pearce created the show, and 24 Hour Party People screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce is co-writing it. According to Pitchfork, production is set to begin in March.

Toby Wallace, the Australian star of the Netflix series The Society and the indie film Babyteeth, is playing Steve Jones. Maisie Williams, Arya Stark from Game Of Thrones, will play Jordan, the punk model who went to a lot of Pistols shows. Here’s the rest of the cast, per Deadline:

Other cast includes Anson Boon (Crawl) as John Lydon, Louis Partridge (Enola Homes) as Sid Vicious, Jacob Slater as Paul Cook, Fabien Frankel (The Serpent) as Glen Matlock, Dylan Llewellyn (Derry Girls) as Wally Nightingale, Sydney Chandler (Don’t Worry Darling) as Chrissie Hynde, and Emma Appleton (The Witcher) as Nancy Spungen.

In a press release, Boyle says:

Imagine breaking into the world of The Crown and Downton Abbey with your mates and screaming your songs and your fury at all they represent. This is the moment that British society and culture changed forever. It is 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… and everyone feared them or followed them. The Sex Pistols. At its center was a young charming illiterate kleptomaniac — a hero for the times — Steve Jones, who became in his own words, the 94th greatest guitarist of all time. This is how he got there.

That sounds great! Sign me up! (Boyle is also an executive producer on Creation Stories, the forthcoming movie about UK indie label Creation Records. A teaser for that came out back in September.)

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