Jared Leto, the living vampire, has announced that he will play Karl Lagerfeld, the dearly deceased one. The Morbius actor told Women’s Wear Daily that he will be starring in and producing a biopic of the former Chanel creative director and fashion-world personality who died in 2019. No director is attached to the film yet, but it does have the blessing of the Karl Lagerfeld fashion house. “There are a multitude of relationships to explore,†Leto said. “Karl had a career that spanned 50-plus years, so both personally and professionally, he was close to a number of people. I can say we are going to home in on key relationships that convey different parts of his life.†This is more or less the definition of any biopic, but we appreciate Leto’s grasp of the subject.
Lagerfeld had a storied career in fashion, but he had a reputation for making comments about women and their bodies that were needlessly disparaging and fatphobic even by fashion-world standards. “Karl was a human being,†Leto says. “We all have beauty within us, and we all have faults. We have masks, and then we have moments when we reveal the mask. I’m always interested in seeing what’s behind the mask.†Considering the way Leto likes to inhabit a character on set, we just know he’ll be a joy to work with on this.