Sting totally rejects the idea of a biopic, maybe because of all the tantric sex
While we’ve been enjoying a current renaissance of rock-star biopics, thanks to the successes of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, there’s one artist whose personal rags-to-riches story you won’t see playing out on the big screen any time soon: Sting. And while there may be a number of reasons for that, let’s just go ahead and assume it’s because vast stretches of the film would simply be rehashing the endless months, if not years, he’s hypothetically spent in a semi-fugue state of ecstatic, tantric sex.
Taking a break from what we can only imagine was his usual 17-day January orgasm (several weeks shorter than his usual ones, hence his fond nickname for it, “Dryuary”), Sting gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter in which he opened up about a variety of subjects, including his history as an actor, his new musical The Last Ship, and how he got along with his bandmates in The Police (famously, if you’re curious about his take). But the key question comes in the middle of the piece, where the interviewer asks the man born Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner if he’d ever consent to turning his life into a biopic à la the recent aforementioned hits:
Absolutely not. I just don’t think I want to. I’m telling my story in an artistic way. [The Last Ship] is a metaphor. This is a story about me. I’m in this play in many ways—probably more than I intended to. But the character I’m playing is built on composites of people like my father, uncles, people I was brought up with. That’s the way I want to do it, rather than somebody going, “What’s the arc of Sting’s life?” I haven’t finished it yet.
His general point here seems to be that he’s more interested in the history of the town where he’s from and the people who surrounded him as a child, rather than his personal journey translated into film. But that seems like a way of avoiding the much more logical explanation, which is that the musician has spent so much of his adult life in the sensuous ardor of intimate pleasures with his spouse, the movie would be more like porn than anything else. Sure, he may have tried to shrug off his comments about day-long horizontal mambo routines as a bit of a “larf” (how English people say “made-up bullshit,” also their term for taxicabs), but let’s not forget he still refers to sex as “a sacrament.” Does that sound like someone whose life is anything but marathon fuck sessions? It does not.
Anyway, the whole interview is high-quality Sting, and also manages to discuss the excellent nature of his solo album The Dream Of The Blue Turtles without somehow also mentioning it is easily one of the top ten most hilarious pop album names of all time. So sadly, we may have to wait until he death (he does seem to think that will finally be an okay time to consider “the arc of Sting’s life” for a biopic) before we can see Sting: Slappin’ The Bass And The Boudoir at a multiplex near you.