Billy Porter has signed up to portray author and civil rights activist James Baldwin in a movie biopic.

In addition to his starring role, the Pose actor is working with Dan McCabe to co-write the script based on the 1994 book James Baldwin: A Biography by David Leeming, Baldwin’s longtime friend and assistant.

Porter has been an admirer of Baldwin’s for many years and it has long been his dream to play him in a movie.

“As a Black queer man on this planet with relative consciousness, I find myself, like James Baldwin said, ‘in a rage all the time.’ I am because James was. I stand on James Baldwin’s shoulders, and I intend to expand his legacy for generations to come,” Porter said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Porter’s production company Incognegro Productions will also co-produce the biopic along with Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group Motion Pictures.

“Billy Porter and Dan McCabe’s talent and commitment to amplifying James Baldwin’s legacy and contributions are invaluable and unmatched for this unique and epic story,” Allen added.

Baldwin was a gay African-American writer and civil rights campaigner best known for works including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Another Country, The Fire Next Time and If Beale Street Could Talk. The latter book was turned into a movie by Barry Jenkins in 2018, while his unfinished manuscript Remember This House inspired the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro.

Baldwin died in 1987 at the age of 63.

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