Russell Tovey Is the Spitting Image of Late Fashion Designer Alexander McQueen in First Photos from Biopic Set

NEED TO KNOW

• Russell Tovey takes on the role of late fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen in photos from the London set of Wild Bird

• The short film also stars Olivia Colman as fashion editor Isabella Blow and is directed by British filmmaker Andrew Haigh

• Per Variety, Wild Bird sees Blow and McQueen “on an imagined road trip seeking emotional redemption”

Russell Tovey is taking on the role of Lee Alexander McQueen.

On Wednesday, June 10, in London, the actor was spotted on the set of a new biopic based on the man behind the Alexander McQueen fashion house. Tovey plays the late fashion designer and looked to be his spitting image in a white T-shirt, blue and white checkered shirt and baggy jeans.

Olivia Colman, who plays fashion editor Isabella Blow, also appeared on set in a glamorous fur-lined black coat and black birdcage veil. Credited with discovering McQueen, Blow was the designer’s muse and one of his closest friends. She died by suicide in 2007.

Per Variety, the project is a short film titled Wild Bird, directed by British filmmaker Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers, Weekend, 45 Years).

Written by Tovey, Wild Bird sees Blow and McQueen “on an imagined road trip seeking emotional redemption — a new and interpretive approach to one of fashion’s most storied relationships,” according to the outlet.

“I’ve had a lifelong fascination with Alexander McQueen, his artistry and persona on and off the runway and the way he carried himself has been endlessly inspiring,” Tovey told Variety. “As an actor he’s a man I’ve always wanted to portray and as a writer he’s a character I’ve longed to get under the skin of. The friendship between Isabella and Lee is beautifully tragic and endlessly compelling. It’s an honor to write about one of my heroes and I couldn’t be prouder of the team that we have assembled to bring this story to life.”

McQueen became known as a provocative disruptor in the industry thanks to his outlandish and sometimes grotesque fashion show themes.

The 2018 documentary McQueen highlighted the internal struggles that affected McQueen personally and professionally leading up to his death by suicide in 2010. Later in life, McQueen revealed to his family that he had been sexually abused by his older sister Janet’s then-husband Terence Hulyer, who also physically abused Janet.

The designer’s nephew Gary McQueen previously told PEOPLE that after Blow’s death in 2007, McQueen was “very much out of it a lot of the time.”

According to the documentary, McQueen was HIV-positive when he died, which Gary thinks was “always in the back of Lee’s mind.”

At his final fashion show in 2009, his former assistant Sebastian Pons says in the documentary that McQueen contemplated killing himself at the end of the show. “Everything in his life just led to these feelings of torment,” says Pons. “He said, ‘Yeah, I’m fed up, I’m done with this, I just want this to end.’ He thought the whole fashion world was against him.”

What reportedly eventually sent McQueen into a deeper depression was the death of his mother, Joyce, on Feb. 2, 2010. The two were very close and she sat front row at many of his fashion shows. “She was incredibly proud of him,” says groomer Mira Chai-Hyde in the documentary.

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McQueen died one day before Joyce’s funeral. On the day before taking his own life, he passed along the design plans of her gravestone to Gary. “Funny enough, he was in really good spirits and he seemed like he was actually getting better,” Gary recalled. “I thought that maybe he was going to be OK. But who knows. You just wonder.”

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