The primary time Jared Leto met Karl Lagerfeld, the actor told the designer: “You already know, someday I actually have to play you in a movie.”

Lagerfeld responded approvingly, saying: “Only you, darling, only you.”

“I feel like it is a full-circle moment and Karl can be pleased with what we’re doing,” Leto related, revealing to WWD exclusively that he’s partnering with the Karl Lagerfeld fashion house to create a feature film concerning the late German fashion superstar.

Leto is to not only play the lead role, but additionally produce the movie alongside his partner, Emma Ludbrook, through their production company Paradox.

“Karl was an artist. Period,” Leto said. “He was a dressmaker, he was a photographer, he was an artist. There was no defining him. He was a creative powerhouse.”

It continues to be not clear when cameras will start rolling, and the precise storyline stays under wraps, though it would delve into the “key relationships in Karl Lagerfeld’s life, told through an unpredictable lens, very like the person himself. Producers are currently in conversation with filmmakers,” in response to a press release from the Karl Lagerfeld company.

Asked if the film can be a love story, Leto offered: “There are a mess of relationships to explore. Karl had a profession that spanned 50-plus years so each personally and professionally he was near numerous people. I can say we’re going to home in on key relationships that convey different parts of his life.”

Leto is to collaborate with three of Lagerfeld’s most trusted confidants, who will partner with him as executive producers of the forthcoming film. They’re Pier Paolo Righi, chief executive officer of the Karl Lagerfeld house since 2011; Caroline Lebar, senior vp, image and communications at Karl Lagerfeld, who was on the indefatigable designer’s elbow for 35 years advising on press matters, and Sébastien Jondeau, who logged twenty years because the designer’s personal assistant and bodyguard.

Righi said the corporate has been approached by several Hollywood producers over time, all wanting to partner on a movie about Lagerfeld’s life and profession.

“It has been only since we met Jared and Emma that we felt truly confident concerning the story being told within the artistic way Karl would have loved to see,” Righi said in the discharge. “Throughout our conversations we’ve got created an equally trustful and galvanizing creative relationship that can allow us to work together very fluidly on this beautiful project.”

To make certain, Leto has been a keen observer, and participant, in the style scene for a few years. He crossed paths continuously with Lagerfeld in St. Tropez, where the designer spent several weeks every summer, and as a guest at some Chanel fashion shows, including the autumn 2015 couture display.

In recent times Leto has been closely related to Italian fashion house Gucci, even attending the Met Ball last May as creative director Alessandro Michele’s plus-one — dressed like his twin.

“I’ve worked with Gucci and Alessandro for about seven years now, and proceed to. It’s an incredible partnership and a fantastic friendship with Alessandro and all the Gucci team,” he related in an exclusive interview conducted by email. “Alessandro actually worked with Karl for about five years at Fendi and all the time has had the kindest things to say about him.

“My role is to portray him on screen as truthfully as possible,” Leto continued of Lagerfeld. “With celebrity, most individuals don’t get to see under the surface. They see one or two facets of an individual as presented through a public lens. Karl was a human being. All of us have beauty inside us and all of us have faults. Now we have masks after which we’ve got moments once we reveal the mask. I’m all the time all in favour of seeing what’s behind the mask.”

Leto hinted that he’s already plunging into researching what is bound to be an epic role for the seasoned actor, whose breakthrough was probably the 1997 biopic “Prefontaine.” He won an Oscar for his role in 2013’s “Dallas Buyers Club” and recently appeared in “House of Gucci,” by which he played Paolo Gucci. He can be a member of the rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars.

“It’s an exciting a part of the method. You begin firstly and take a look at to learn the whole lot you possibly can,” Leto said. “I’m grateful to be doing this with an impressive group of people that were incredibly near Karl for a few years of his life.”

To make certain, Righi, Lebar and Jondeau were among the many closest witnesses to Lagerfeld’s profession designing for Chanel, Fendi and his namesake fashion house while also juggling a slew of unusual side projects.

Jondeau, now a mode consultant at Karl Lagerfeld, wrote a book last yr by which he chronicled the designer’s four-year battle with cancer, which finally claimed him in February 2019. The book also exalts Lagerfeld’s work ethic, generosity, intelligence and kindness.

Greater than a designer, Lagerfeld was a fashion mastermind, one of the crucial prolific, admired and multitalented fashion figures of the fashionable age, credited with setting the fashionable template for reviving and animating heritage brands.

A polyglot with a photographic memory and vast knowledge of history, philosophy, art and popular culture, Lagerfeld ran his own publishing imprint and bookstore.

“I hate leisure,” the designer told WWD in 2008, “except reading. I’m really an individual made to work, if sketching is taken into account work.”

News of the film project arrives lower than per week after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Recent York announced that its spring 2023 Costume Institute exhibition can be dedicated to Lagerfeld, focused on his “stylistic vocabulary because it was expressed in through lines.”