EXCLUSIVE : Jamie Lloyd , director of the Broadway -bound Sunset Boulevard musical led by an incandescent Nicole Scherzinger center stage as Norma Desmond, is making a move into the world of movies and reveals to Deadline that his London-based Jamie Lloyd Company “will set up a separate film division and work with new partners from the film world.” Lloyd met with us as he prepared to fly to New York this weekend to oversee rehearsals for Sunset Boulevard which begin on Monday. He was also concerned about a fire that ripped through the roof of the west wing of the landmark Somerset House, a might 18th century palace that stretches from the Embankment to the Aldwych, where the Jamie Lloyd Company keeps a small suite of production offices.
The fire was contained although it’s not yet known how much smoke and water damage the JLC offices sustained. The step into filmmaking seems a natural progression for the 43-year-old who has become adept at taking classic works and shaking them up on stages in London’s West End , Broadway, Australia and Argentina. We broke the news in late July of Lloyd’s limited run Shakespeare season starring Sigourney Weaver as Prospero in The Tempest and Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell playing Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing , beginning this winter at the Andrew Lloyd Webber -owned Theatre Royal Drury Lane, an historic venue in Covent Garden.
The plays run eight weeks each, starting with The Tempest from December 7 through Februa.