Jeff Buckley’s mom turned down Brad Pitt biopic

The late musician’s mother Jeff Buckleywho drowned in the Wolf River in May 1997, had good reason to refuse Brad Pitt Asked to play the singer-songwriter in a biopic years ago.

“We’re going to dye your hair, put brown contact lenses on those baby blues, and you’re going to open your mouth and Jeff’s voice is going to come out?” a skeptic Mary Guibert said Variety of the star in an interview published on Saturday January 25.

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Despite the fact that Pitt invited Guibert to his ex-wife’s wedding Jennifer AnistonGuibert would not move. The pair continued to talk about the possibility of a film about Buckley’s life and help from the director Amy Bergfinally landed on the best way to pay tribute to the late musician: a documentary.

“Once I started listening to his voicemails and his DAP player and his demos and reading his diaries, I couldn’t imagine it being anything other than a documentary,” Berg explained to the outlet. “And I just didn’t know how you could kind of replicate Jeff in that scripted sense.”

The result is the documentary It’s never over, Jeff Buckleywhich premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Friday, January 24.

Guibert’s son and musician Tim Buckleywho left when his son was six months old and later died of a drug overdose at age 28, the younger Buckley signed a three-album deal with Columbia Records in 1992 for nearly $1 million. He released his only album, Grace, in 1994, but struggled to deal with the overwhelming praise from fans and musicians he looked up to, such as his idol Bob Dylan.

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His death three years later was, as Variety put it, “shrouded in mystery.” roller stone released an investigation into what went wrong that night, but did not include Buckley’s autopsy results, which Berg believes “contributed to the legacy that Jeff likely overdosed.” Instead, the singer drowned due to the strong force of the massive river.

“One of the great things about Jeff Buckley is that you discover him when you’re supposed to discover him,” Berg also said of the singer, who is perhaps still best known for her cover of Leonard Cohen “Alleluia.”

“He’s definitely had a big impact on TikTok, where I was surprised to see that he has more followers on the Jeff Buckley hashtag than even Bob Dylan,” she continued. “It’s definitely having another moment in pop culture history.”