James Phillips’ West End play McQueen: or Lee and Beauty is being adapted into a film, with Radar Pictures developing the project and Phillips collaborating on the screenplay with Zach Helm. The play, which opened in the West End in 2015, five years after Alexander McQueen’s death, imagines a single, fictional night in the designer’s life.
The official synopsis reads: “Lee McQueen, alone and troubled in his beautiful townhouse, is trying to come up with his new collection. He must pitch to his investors the next morning, but he’s got nothing: inspiration has deserted him. Dahlia, a mysterious young woman, breaks into his house. She wants to steal a dress but also to escape from her own troubled life. As McQueen is about to call the police something in her raw honesty, her boldness, intrigues him. He changes his mind, puts down the phone.”
First reported by Deadline, Olivier Award-winning actor Stephen Wight starred as McQueen in the original West End production, opposite Glee’s Dianna Agron as Dahlia. Maria Frisk and Michael Napoliello are producing the film alongside executive producer Ted Field.
“I’m thrilled to be working with Radar Pictures and Zach to bring Lee and Beauty to the big screen,” Phillips said. “It’s a dream to have a chance to walk again into the visionary world of Alexander McQueen, an artist I have loved for so long. When I first conceived this way of telling Lee’s story, it always seemed to me something that would lend itself wonderfully to cinema, so to have the chance to work with such a brilliant team of people is a great privilege.”
Radar’s Maria Frisk added: “Alexander McQueen’s intense brilliance cast an inspirational light and a perilous darkness. James and Zach invited us to take that journey in his steps — into the extraordinary, imaginative mind of genius — and to create the definitive cinematic portrait of the man behind the legend.”
Phillips’ play isn’t the only stage work to explore McQueen’s life. Darrah Cloud’s House of McQueen ran Off-Broadway in 2025.
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