S. Epatha Merkerson has joined her fellow “Law & Order” alum Jesse L. Martin in “Sexual Healing,” Julien Temple’s biopic of Marvin Gaye, which begins shooting later this month. The British director Temple is best known as the foremost movie chronicler of punk rock, though his resume also includes “Absolute Beginners,” “Earth Girls Are Easy,” and films about the doomed French cinema wunderkind Jean Vigo and the English Romantic poets.
Martin will play the great soul singer, stepping into the shoes of Lenny Kravitz, who dropped out of the film. Merkerson has been cast as Gaye’s mother, Alberta. The only witness to Gaye’s fatal shooting by his father in 1984, Alberta died three years later.
Irish actor Brendan Gleeson has been cast as the club owner and promoter Freddy Cousaert, a soul aficionado who was instrumental in steering Gaye to record much of his hugely successful (and groundbreakingly erotic) “Midnight Love” album in Belgium. A 2008 incarnation of the project was to have been produced by James Gandolfini, who would have starred as Cousaert.
The fears of Gaye’s second wife, Janis, and his adopted son Marvin Gaye III that Temple’s film, written by Lauren Goodman, will wallow in the singer’s depressive last years and his demise are probably ill-founded.
The movie reportedly focuses on his rejuvenating relationship with Cousaert, who rescued Gaye from his squalid, drug-dependent existence in London and brought him to live at his pension in Ostend in January 1981. Under Cousaert’s supervision, Gaye quit drugs and got himself back into shape by running on the beach and training as a boxer.
“Marvin was a special man, very distinguished, very impressive, but it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Monique Licht is quoted as saying in an illuminating American Way article written by Gregory Katz.
As an independent producer, Licht worked with Gaye on a half-hour film for Belgian television, “Marvin Gaye: Transit Ostend” (1981). “At times, he was like an elegant zombie walking along the beach in Ostend,” she recalled. “He was there, but at the same time he was not there. His mind was working all the time, thinking a lot of things, and he was far from his family. Everything was broken in his life and in his mind. He was suffering.
“He rebuilt himself in Ostend,” she continued. “He was quiet and peaceful. At that time, he was free of drugs. He could walk in the streets. He was calm. He was happy alone in front of the sea. In my opinion, he should have stayed in Ostend. I don’t understand why he went back to the States. That is the cruel reality. If he had stayed, he might still be alive today.”