I was closer to Mum than Dad, but there were long periods when we didn’t speak. They divorced when I was 13, both remarried, which I was happy about, although my relationship with both of them was always tricky. ![]() The best way to escape it was to shut myself in my bedroom with my record collection and my comics, and drift off into an imaginary world, fantasising that I was Little Richard or Ray Charles or Jerry Lee Lewis. I got the feeling they were staying together because of me, which just made things more miserable. My dad was in the RAF so he was away from home a lot, and when he got back, he tried to impose new rules about everything: how I ate, how I dressed. Hot seat: Taron Egerton, Elton John and David Furnish on the set of Rocketman. The rows were usually about me, how I was being brought up. When they were together, all I can remember are icy silences or screaming rows. ![]() My dad was strict and remote and had a terrible temper my mum was argumentative and prone to dark moods. They gave every impression of hating each other. I suppose my mum and dad must have been in love once, but there wasn’t much sign they ever had been by the time I came along. But it fitted life in Pinner Hill Road perfectly. I Want Love is a song Bernie wrote, I think, about himself: a middle-aged man with a few divorces, wondering if he’s ever going to fall in love again. So I wasn’t prepared for the power of what I was seeing. I figured it would be uncomfortable for everyone to have the person the film was about lurking around. But otherwise I’d kept well away from Rocketman, letting my husband David be my eyes and ears on set every day. I gave some suggestions, saw a few daily rushes, said yay or nay to some important decisions and met two or three times with Taron Egerton, who plays me. Up until that point, I’d kept a discrete distance from the actual process of making a movie about my life. I knew it was in the film, but I didn’t know how they were going to use it. I was watching my family – my mum and dad, my nan – in my nan’s old council house in Pinner Hill Road in the late 1950s, singing I Want Love, a song Bernie Taupin and I had written in 2001. Not crying as in the occasional tear quietly trickling down my cheek: really sobbing, in that loud, unguarded, emotionally destroyed way that makes people turn around and look at you with alarmed expressions. He gracefully accepted and spent his time on set being a perfectly polite professional.I was in the cinema for about 15 minutes before I started crying. When Vaughn repeated his offer for the sequel, John did not repeat his mistake. ![]() (According to ScreenRant, the blow of his refusal was so severe that star Colin Firth actually wrote to John and begged the singer to reconsider.) After the movie came out, John loved Kingsman: The Secret Service so much that he regretted his decision. Cinema Blend tells us Vaughn wanted John to make an appearance in the first Kingsman, but the musician turned him down. Apparently, this wasn't meant to be a stealth nod to Egerton's future role as the Rocket Man, but a completely coincidental thing that was championed by director Matthew Vaughn. ![]() After all, they knew Egerton had already collaborated with Sir Elton John, who had a sizable cameo role as himself in 2017's Kingsman: The Golden Circle. When Taron Egerton was announced as the lead in Rocketman, fans of the Kingsman movie franchise might have lifted a knowing eyebrow. As Ultimate Classic Rock reports, Timberlake went on to revisit the role in 2013, when he opened his Saturday Night Live hosting gig with a sketch where John is playing at the funeral of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. In 2001, Timberlake starred in a music video for John's song "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore," playing a '70s version of Elton John, and apparently Elton really liked the job he did. The NSYNC heartthrob turned solo superstar and actor may seem like a choice out of left field, but the inspiration didn't come entirely out of the blue. At that point, the film didn't have a director or a solid lead attached, but John already had an eye on the man he felt would be best equipped to play him: Justin Timberlake. According to Rolling Stone, Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall was already writing the script and Sir Elton John himself was confident on the tone and timbre the eventual movie would take. In 2012, Rocketman was little more than a glimmer in the eye of everyone involved, but the backstage was already plenty busy.
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