Jessica Gunning, the breakout star of Netflix's Baby Reindeer, has been cast to play The Mamas & The Papas singer "Mama" Cass Elliot in an upcoming biopic.
Based on the My Mama Cass, the bestselling memoir about Elliot, penned by her daughter Owen Elliot-Kugell, the screenplay will be adapted by author Emma Forrest (Thin Skin). The film will be produced by Peter Jaysen and Alan Gasmer at Veritas Entertainment, who were behind 2024's Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown.
Deadline reports that My Mama Cass will be "a definitive film on Cass Elliot, centered on her life, legacy, and the mother-daughter bond that shaped them both, rather than a traditional biopic on the Mamas & the Papas member."
It will "explore how, in a musical landscape that was not short on iconoclasts, Elliot was a trailblazer. But her true power was that she took things the world didn’t want to give her…a gifted, outspoken singer who refused to be defined by her weight or the men around her, forging a singular career and choosing motherhood on her own terms at a time when the culture wasn’t ready for any of it."
The film will also go beyond the folk singer's life and death, highlighting "Owen’s journey to unravel the truth surrounding her mother’s untimely death — finally laying to rest a long-standing urban legend of how she tragically died at the age of 32."
Alongside members John Phillips, Michelle Phillips and Denny Doherty, Elliot led The Mamas & the Papas to become one of America's most popular folk bands in the late 1960s with songs like "California Dreamin'" and “Monday, Monday.”
Cass Elliot died suddenly in 1974 at the age of 74 from a heart attack. However, somehow over the years, rumours persisted that she had actually choked to death, a lie that has become part of rock lore.
In 2024, Owen Elliot-Kugell expressed her frustration over how her mother's death had been portrayed and ridiculed over decades.
"There was a ham sandwich, but she didn't eat it and she didn't choke on it," Elliot-Kugell explained to the BBC. "So enough with the jokes... It's beyond frustrating, almost immeasurable. It bothered me because it was such a horrible story, and I knew that it wasn't true. And it just felt so cruel to have a rumour like that perpetuated. It tortured me."