Jeff Buckley’s mother has revealed Brad Pitt once approached her about starring in a biopic about her son.
The musician died in 1997 before his second album was complete. He was recording Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, which would be released posthumously in 1998, when a swimming accident took his life. He was 30-years-old.
Pitt, 61, asked Buckley’s mother, Mary Guibert, for permission to create the biopic in 2000 after inviting her to his wedding to Jennifer Aniston, a request she initially granted before later changing her mind.
Speaking to Variety, Guibert joked: “If there’s 20 people calling you, and Brad Pitt is one of them, who are you gonna pick to go see?”
However, the musician’s mother admitted she became reluctant to go through with the project, later asking the actor: “‘We’re going to dye your hair, put brown contact lenses on those baby blues, and you’re going to open your mouth and Jeff’s voice is going to come out?”
Guibert said she and Pitt remained in touch even after she made the decision not to go ahead with the film.
The Fight Club star subsequently acted as executive producer on Amy Berg’s forthcoming Buckley documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival last week.
Of her decision to make a documentary rather than a narrative feature about Buckley, Berg said: “Once I started listening to his voicemail messages and his DAP player and demos and reading his journals, I just couldn’t imagine it being anything but a documentary.
“I just didn’t know how you could kind of replicate Jeff in that scripted sense,” she added.
In recent years, Buckley has gained fans from younger generations on TikTok. His song “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is particularly popular and has been used in thousands of videos on the platform.
“One of the great things about Jeff Buckley is you discover him when you’re meant to discover him,” Berg said. “He’s definitely having another moment in pop culture history.”
Back in 2016, Guibert told The Independent what she thinks the world could have expected from her son if he had not passed away so prematurely.
“If Jeff had lived, he would now be on a level with Bono,” she said. “He would have toured the world and had a lifelong career, and at the end of it, he would have been that guy sitting in a wheelchair with the microphone specially lowered six inches, so that we could all hear him sing ”Hallelujah“ one more time.”
Read the interview in full here.
