According to The Hollywood Reporter, actor and director Andy Serkis is working with Newen Connect to create Madame!, a biopic about French artist Marie Tussaud. The artist and creator of the world-famous Madame Tussauds wax museums will be the focus of a new docuseries that will also detail her life at the French court. Through his company, Imaginarium Productions, Serkis not only developed the series but will also serve as showrunner and director. Later, after escaping the French Reign of Terror, Tussaud established her wax museum in London, where she developed her skills during the French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment.
The show will follow her rise to prominence in Paris in the eighteenth century and is being promoted as a previously unknown narrative. They want to have her play a “business mogul who “built her company from the ground up” and “gave up connections with practically everyone close to her (including her own children), swapping love for her legacy” Serkis stated in a statement about the production, “This is no straight-up historical drama, it is a wonderfully wild, no holds barred, anarchic, punk escapade created from the bizarrely warped imagination of a fantastically post-truth executioner’s daughter!”
Marie is clear on one point: if you’re going to recount your life narrative, make it interesting, even if it means making some stuff up, and leave out the dull parts at all costs.” To most people, Andy Serkis will always be Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movie or Caesar from the Planet of the Apes series, but his most recent role was as Alfred in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Disney’s Mowgli, Sony’s Venom, and the forthcoming Animal Farm are just a few of the films he has directed. His recent film was Venom: Let There Be Carnage, starring Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson, which he also directed.
His production business, Imaginarium, is responsible for such works as Fungus the Bogeyman and the upcoming The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself on Netflix, as well as Taika Waititi’s next film, The Ritual. Imaginarium’s cooperation with Newen Connect “anchors the vision of Newen Connect to help producers in the creation and study of finance for ambitious co-production projects,” according to Newen Connect CEO Rodolphe Buet. In his own words, “the series would present a visionary heroine who broke up traditions in the 18th century and whose path as a strong independent woman striving to construct an empire resonates particularly now.” There has been no more information released on the project.