The biopic of Dennis Wilson, The Drummer, gets a little closer to the screen, with Variety reporting that Chloe Moretz and Rupert Grint have signed up to star alongside the already cast Aaron Eckhart and Vera Farmiga.
Eckhart will play The Beach Boys drummer Wilson, with the film focusing on the last six years of his life. Dennis is generally seen as the dark horse of the Beach Boys, but the last few years of his life saw him stepping into the limelight and releasing a solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, in 1977 (Eckhart will apparently record his own versions of songs from that record, and classically trained pianist Farmiga is set to make her own music as well, as Fleetwood Mac singer Christine McVie, who was romantically involved with Dennis).
However he was also battling with drug and alcohol problems and eventually drowned whilst swimming drunk. Chloe Moretz will play Brian Wilson’s daughter, Jennifer, while Rupert Grint is playing Stan Shapiro, a mail room intern at William Morris who befriends Dennis Wilson.
Randall Miller (Bottle Shock) is directing with production scheduled to begin June 15th.
As the cast of The Drummer starts to fill up, it’ll be interesting to see which actors take on which musicians of the late 70s. The movie is a biopic of the last six years of the life of Beach boys drummer Dennis Wilson’s life, up to his death in 1983.
Drummers often get overlooked in the history of music, but Dennis Wilson, drummer for the Beach Boys and brother of bandmates Carl and Brian, is getting his own biopic, simply titled The Drummer.