FKA Twigs Just Landed The Role She Was Born To Play: Josephine Baker
The casting is confirmed, the director is locked in and production starts this fall. Here's everything you need to know.
NEW YORK — The role of Josephine Baker has found its person. FKA Twigs is officially confirmed to star in an upcoming biopic about the legendary entertainer, civil rights activist and French Resistance spy, with filming set to begin this fall. Studiocanal is backing the film and launched worldwide sales at the Cannes Film Market this week. The deals for both Twigs and director Maimouna Doucouré are officially closed.
Let that soak in for a second.
The yet-to-be-titled film will be written and directed by Doucouré, the French-Senegalese filmmaker behind “Cuties,” the Sundance Award-winning debut that earned her both critical acclaim and, thanks to a disastrously misleading Netflix promotional campaign, a controversy that had absolutely nothing to do with what the film was actually about. The point is: Doucouré is a serious filmmaker with a sharp eye for the interior lives of women. This project has been on her radar for years. That intention shows up in everything she has said about it.
“Josephine Baker has lived with me for years,” Doucouré said in a statement. “Working on this film, I realize how modern, fearless and complex she was. Beyond the legend, I want to explore her contradictions, her wounds and her immense courage, as well as her relentless fight for dignity.”
That right there is the version of this story worth telling. Not a highlight reel. Not a Wikipedia summary with a costume budget. The full, complicated, brilliant, painful, extraordinary woman.
And FKA Twigs is ready for exactly that.
“I am honored to collaborate with the immensely talented Maïmouna Doucouré on this incredible project,” Twigs said in a statement. “Josephine Baker’s extraordinary legacy is such an inspiration to me and to so many people around the world. She lives on in our hearts as a visionary, groundbreaking woman whose story is as powerful as it is relevant today. I cannot wait to embody Josephine Baker, bringing her fight, her love, her losses, her talent and her heroism to the big screen.”
The fit here is not accidental. It is almost cosmically logical.
Twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett in Cheltenham, England in 1988, is a Grammy-winning musician, dancer, actor and all-around creative who has spent her entire career existing in a category of one. Her third studio album “Eusexua,” released in January 2025, won the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album and pushed her to No. 3 on the UK Albums Chart, the highest chart entry of her career. On the acting side, she most recently appeared in A24’s “Mother Mary,” following a role in “The Crow” in 2024 and her breakout screen performance in “Honey Boy” in 2019.
But what makes her the right person for Baker is not just the resume. It is what she carries. Twigs is a performer who understands the body as a storytelling instrument, who has built an entire artistic identity around movement, transformation and resilience. She has spoken publicly about surviving an abusive relationship, testified before the U.S. Senate on the dangers of AI-generated deepfakes, and consistently used her platform to push for causes bigger than herself. She does not just perform. She means it.
Sound familiar?
Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a family living in poverty on the margins of a deeply segregated America. She watched the East St. Louis race riots burn at age 11. She dropped out of school at 13. By 19, she had made her way to Paris, opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and become one of the most celebrated performers in Europe overnight. She was the highest-paid entertainer on the continent. She was a film star. She was untouchable.
And she was not done.
During World War II, Baker joined the French Resistance, smuggling intelligence against the Nazis at enormous personal risk and entertaining Allied troops across North Africa. France awarded her the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor with the rosette of the Resistance. She became a French citizen in 1937 and never truly left. In the 1950s and 1960s, she returned her focus to the United States and became a prominent voice in the Civil Rights Movement, refusing to perform for segregated audiences and speaking alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington in 1963. She adopted 12 children from different countries and backgrounds, calling them her Rainbow Tribe and raising them as a living statement about human unity.
She died in Paris on April 12, 1975, during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of her Paris debut. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to be honored at France’s Pantheon.
To call her life remarkable is almost an insult to its scope. It was several lives, stacked. And it took a certain kind of woman to live all of them fully.
The film has been developed with the support of Baker’s sons Jean-Claude Bouillon Baker and Brian Bouillon Baker, and the Rainbow Tribe. That family involvement matters. This is not a studio reaching for intellectual property. It is a collaborative telling, built with the people who knew her.
Doucouré will produce under her Bien Ou Bien Prods. banner, alongside Studiocanal and CPB Films. Studiocanal CEO Anna Marsh called the project “both ambitious and profoundly authentic,” and for once that kind of statement actually feels warranted.
Production begins this fall. Studiocanal will handle theatrical releases in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Benelux, Poland, Australia and New Zealand.
This one has been a long time coming. Get ready.
— REAVES // @wildreaves