The premise may sound familiar: an ageing, little-known athlete from the wrong side of the tracks gets a belated shot at the big time and triumphs, finding fame and redemption, but the price is a broken, battered body.
It’s not Rocky Balboa, it’s Michael Flatley in a “no holds barred” biopic series about his rise, fall and Pphoenix-like resurrection in the world of Irish dancing.
The six-part drama series announced this week heralds a possible return to the screen for Flatley a year after the release of his spy thriller Blackbird, which critics derided as a vanity project.
Titled Dancelord, it promises to show the “epic sweep” of a life that has reached “a plane beyond mere rock stardom”.
Flatley, 64, is to be listed as an executive producer on the series that will chart his path from digging drainage ditches in Chicago to the breakthrough interval act at the 1994 Eurovision song contest that launched him, aged 35, as the star of Riverdance.
The ensuing 20 years performing on stages around the world in the Lord of the Dance and other shows he created evoke the ordeals of Sylvester Stallone’s fictional boxer Rocky, said Micho Rutare, who wrote the pilot episode script.
“It’s an inevitable comparison – the underdog pushing yourself beyond what you’re supposed to push yourself, risking your wellbeing physically for the sake of your craft, your art. It’s the courage to put your body on the line and to be willing to endure the pain of that.”
Flatley, who entered the Guinness Book of World Records by tapping his feet 28 times per second, suffered a recurring broken bone in his foot and major damage to his vertebral column, knees, tendons, muscles and ribs.
The drama will feel more like a sports narrative than a showbusiness tale of self-destruction, said Rutare, who is based in Los Angeles.
“You see the flawless performance onstage but you don’t see all the physical therapy, the bleeding feet, the aches and pains that never go away, the loneliness of the road.”
The production is to be a collaboration between the UK-based StoryFirst Entertainment and American Meme, which is run by Rutare, who helped develop the Sharknado films, and Ben Rosenblatt, a producer who worked on The Alienist and Snowpiercer.
The next steps will be to cast an actor to play Flatley and find financial backers and a distributor, said Rosenblatt. “We’re really excited about the chance to tell Michael’s story and understand what makes him tick.”
The drama will delve into Flatley’s contract dispute with the Riverdance producers, which led to his departure in 1995.
“His star burns too brightly, and the fall is fast,” promotional material for the series has said. However, Flatley made a spectacular comeback with the 1996 Lord of the Dance show, which has performed in 70 countries.
However, the series will not settle scores, said Rutare. “It’s not the kind of story that has villains per se. We worked hard – Michael more than anybody – in seeing the other parties’ point of view.
“Even if in a certain draft I might have shaded someone toward a villain status, he’ll say: ‘Now hang on a second, they had their reasons for doing what they were doing.’”
Ruth Barton, a film studies professor at Trinity College Dublin, said Riverdance and Lord of the Dance gave Irish culture a positive, creative sheen during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom. “A new type of sexy Irish masculinity was on offer and Flatley was part of it.”
Irish people today tend to be ambivalent about him, said Barton. “He’s so in your face about his success and yet at the same time they’re proud of what he has accomplished.”
In January, Flatley disclosed that he was being treated for an aggressive form of cancer. The promotional material for Dancelord said he was once again pushing his body’s “mortal limits” and wanted his story to “live on with audiences forever”.
