Nelsan Ellis has been set to play Bobby Byrd, James Brown’s longtime friend and musical collaborator in the Tate Taylor-directed Get On Up for Imagine Entertainment and Universal Pictures, Deadline said.
Imagine’s Brian Grazer is producing with Jagged Films’ Mick Jagger. It’s a big role in the film behind Brown, who’s being played by Chadwick Boseman. Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer also star.
Ellis is best known for playing Lafayette on the HBO vampire series True Blood. He was last seen on screen playing Martin Luther King Jr. in Lee Daniels’ The Butler and his screen credits include The Express, The Soloist, Secretariat, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
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.
