Jack O’Connell on ‘SAS Rogue Heroes’ and playing Shaun Ryder in his scrapped biopic: “We’d started recording tunes like ‘Step On’ in the studio”

nme.com:

Shaun Ryder biopic Twisting My Melon – in which he was due to star as the Happy Mondays frontman – has been halted due to creative disputes.Speaking to NME, the SAS Rogue Heroes actor revealed that he had laid down vocals for the Mondays’ Madchester anthems in preparation. “We even started recording some of the tunes like ‘Step On’ in the studio, so the train had left the station.

It’s unfortunate that it didn’t come together in the end, but never say never!”As Ryder recently told NME, problems on the ITV adaption of Twisting My Melon, which is based on his raucous 2011 autobiography, arose because of a creative disagreement between screenwriter/director Matt Greenhalgh – who also penned the scripts for the Ian Curtis biopic Control, John Lennon’s origin story Nowhere Boy and Amy Winehouse film Back to Black – and the film’s American funders.

O’Connell echoed concerns that the US focus was “disheartening.”“It really frustrated me about the film industry here that we don’t want to champion such an obviously important story because they wanted to know how it would land in America,” he said. “I just thought we could just focus on making it great here and whatever happens after that is secondary.”O’Connell was talking to NME ahead of the second season of the BBC’s SAS Rogue Heroes, where he stars as poetry-loving livewire killing machine Paddy Mayne, who is based on a real-life war hero.

Created and written by Peaky Blinders impresario Steven Knight, the thrillingly high-octane series follows the exploits of the misfits in the Special Air Service during the Second World War, with this season seeing the action shift from the conflict in North Africa to mainland Europe, and Mayne assuming control of the SAS following David.