St. Jimmy’s comin’ down across the alleyway and apparently headed straight for your TV screen. In a new interview with NME, Billie Joe Armstrong says that Green Day’s long-gestating American Idiot movie has been green-lit at HBO, with Armstrong set to star as his debaucherous alter ego St. Jimmy. “That’s the plan right now, yeah,†he says. “We’ve got a green light from HBO, and the script is currently going through a couple of rewrites here and there, so I’m not sure when exactly we’re going to start shooting, but it’s definitely all systems go at the moment.†Armstrong also briefly played St. Jimmy in the show’s Broadway run, which first adapted the politically divisive 2004 album of the same name. A film version has long been in the works; it was originally announced in 2011 under Tom Hanks’s production company, though that never came to fruition. Rather than pulling the pin out of that heart grenade and letting it explode in the Hollywood graveyard, it now appears that the network that brought us Vinyl has saved another rock opera.
Vulture has reached out to HBO for comment; we’ll update this story if we hear back.