VCUarts Sculpture alum Savannah Knoop (MFA ’16) is the artist who helped author Laura Albert trick the public into believing the myth of JT LeRoy, a pseudonym that Albert wrote three of her books under. In the early ’00s, Knoop would pose as LeRoy in public, fooling many famous fans such as Madonna and Courtney Love. Now, a new film directed by Justin Kelly is set to retell their story, with Laura Dern as Albert and Kristen Stewart portraying Knoop.
Though there have been other movies made about the hoax, Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy—which is based on Knoop’s memoir Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy—is the first to be told from Knoop’s perspective.
After Stewart got ahold of the script, she reached out to Kelly, whose previous films I Am Michael and King Cobra explore queer issues. (Kelly joked that the LeRoy movie is the third in an “accidental trilogy.”) Stewart immediately won Kelly over with “her energy and her thoughts on the story, and the fact that, at the time, she was kind of going through a very similar trajectory as JT, dealing with issues of sexuality and being in the public eye kind of thing,” he said.
In preparing for the role—a complicated exercise in playing a character who is playing another as the primary character transforms—Stewart met with the real-life Knoop and did extensive research.
Read the full article in Vanity Fair.
Image: Kristen Stewart, Justin Kelly, and Savannah Knoop on the set of Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy. By Allen Fraser. Credit via Vanity Fair.
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