Britney Spears biopic hires Liz Meriwether as screenwriter, but who should play the pop star?

Britney Spears has been one of the most famous women in the world since she broke out in the 1990s, sashaying her way into the cultural conversation with a series of earworms that any half-drunk enthusiast still belts out at karaoke with wild abandon and glee.

But she has been better known for the behind-the-scenes dramas of her tumultuous life, which has, in truth, not been that behind-the-scenes.

Spears’ life has, to varying levels, been shockingly public, including the memorable breakdowns, the dramatic relationships and flings, and the fight over the conservatorship she was placed under by her scoundrel father.

She has belonged to everyone but herself, whether it’s those who sought to control her, denigrate her or defend her. There is Britney Spears and then there is someone’s perception of Britney Spears.

There will soon be another narrative of Spears, a biopic based off the 2023 memoirs, The Woman in Me, she released after she was finally freed from the legal prison of that conservatorship.

The film, which has yet to be officially titled, will be directed by Jon M. Chu and has just attached a screenwriter in New Girl creator Elizabeth Meriwether.

Meriwether has experience in the biography space as the creator of the series The Dropout, which told the story of disgraced tech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes and her fraudulent company Theranos, as well as the acclaimed comedy-drama Dying for Sex, which was loosely based on podcaster Molly Kochan’s experience of terminal breast cancer.

Besides helming Crazy Rich Asians, Chu’s connection to music is strong throughout his work. He directed the two Wicked films as well as the screen adaptation of In the Heights, and had started his Hollywood career with dance films Step 2 and Step Up 3D. He also shepherded two Justin Bieber concert films.

When The Woman in Me was published in 2023, it topped The New York Times bestseller list within a week, and over the next two years, sold more than four million copies.

Given the proliferation of biopics about music artists in recent years, in large part due to the commercial success of Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018, studios have been eagerly casting around to see whose life could make a good movie.

The Spears biopic will have several challenges because her life story is so well-known, and a lot of the personal drama detailed in The Woman in Me, if the wrong tone is struck, could come off melodramatic and soapy in a midday movie way.

Think about it. There’s the alcoholic and emotionally abusive father, child fame, a bad boyfriend in Justin Timberlake, who Spears alleged had pressured her into having an abortion at a time when two of them were still trying to keep up appearances of their purity (Timberlake has not responded to what Spears wrote in her book), the head-shaving incident, the marriage to Kevin Federline, time with her children being used as a threat to make her comply with her father’s demands, financial exploitation and the culmination of the courtroom battle over the conservatorship.

It’s a lot to happen to one person before they’ve even hit middle-age.

It will take deft hands to capture all that in one film and not make it seem over-the-top. There has already been a Spears TV movie biopic, Britney Ever After, and no one is looking to repeat that.

Casting will also be a closely scrutinised piece. Spears is such a well-known public figure that whoever ends up playing her can’t have a celebrity profile that brings its own lustre.

So, for example, you can’t have someone like Sabrina Carpenter or anyone already too famous. When people look at the fictional Spears on screen, they need to see Britney, not Sabrina-as-Britney or Florence Pugh-as-Britney.

Which means it will likely be someone who’s either a total unknown or someone who’s still an up-and-comer with maybe a handful of projects on their CV but is not a tabloid fixture.

Here’s one suggestion: Canadian singer and actor Maisy Stella.

Stella is 22 years old and while she’s been in the public eye since she was a child (which means she has lived experience she can draw from) as part of a band, Lennon & Maisy, with her sister, she’s not yet a household name.

She was on the musical TV drama Nashville, and for the past couple of years, has been forging a film career. She was the star of the film My Old Ass, a coming-of-age comedy drama which also featured Aubrey Plaza, and included a scene in which Stella played a hallucinatory version of Bieber.

There’s also Emilia Jones, 24, a British actor and singer, who has been working as a kid in screen projects in the UK including High-Rise, One Day (the 2014 film version), Doctor Who and Utopia.

She was also in the main ensemble of HBO series Task, the film Cat Person and was in the Oscar best picture CODA, in which she proved she can sing.

Stella and Jones are both on the cusp of something bigger (both have films out this year – The End of Oak Street for Stella and Tony, the Anthony Bourdain biopic, for Jones), so now feels like the right time to snatch them up before they’re too famous to play Spears.

Finally, Madelyn Cline is someone who is on the fence of maybe-too-famous but could still get away with it.

Cline is better known among young audiences who really love Netflix YA show Outer Banks, she’s one of the main cast on the series that will drop its fifth and final season later this year.

Cline, 28, actually looks like Spears, and has shown Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, that she can also be playful as well as dramatic, and it feels like that’s something necessary to play a popstar.

As for whether she can sing, she did croon a few acoustic bars of 4 Non Blondes in the film The Map That Leads to You. It wasn’t a revelation, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t be trained.

Plus, Spears’ song catalogue is relatively forgiving for non-professional singers. It’s one of the reasons why she’s a perennial karaoke favourite.