'Freak Show' Rising: Alex Lawther Is Billy Bloom

Billy Bloom has been cast, and it's inspired: Alex Lawther — the young Alan Turing whose few minutes in The Imitation Game did much of that film's emotional damage — will lead the adaptation of James St. James' Freak Show, with Trudie Styler making her directing debut.

St. James' 2007 novel is a young-adult book with club-kid DNA: Billy, a gloriously flamboyant teenager, crash-lands in a conservative Florida high school and responds to hostility by running for homecoming queen. The author lived a version of the material twice over — as a New York club legend and as the memoirist of Disco Bloodbath — and the book hums with his conviction that fabulousness is a survival skill.

Styler, producing through Maven Pictures, has described the film as 'armor made of sequins'; the supporting cast filling in around Lawther includes Bette Midler and Laverne Cox.

Update: the film premiered at Berlin and reached theaters in 2017 — details on the adaptation page. Lawther, as predicted, became one of his generation's most interesting actors; Billy Bloom would approve of the trajectory.