Headline-maker, Super Bowl champion and the potential future Mr Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, has dipped his toe into the world of filmmaking — and his first film will make its world premiere next month.
The 34-year-old NFL star is an executive producer on My Dead Friend Zoe, a film debuting at cultural festival South By Southwest next month, which stars Morgan Freeman and The Walking Dead’s Sonequa Chaunté Martin-Green.
Per Variety, My Dead Friend Zoe is a 'war comedy-drama film' that follows a female Afghanistan veteran, played by Parks and Recreation’s Natalie Morales, who comes head-to-head with her Vietnam veteran grandfather, played by Westworld’s Ed Harris’ at the family’s ancestral lake house.
Kelce, and the same team behind My Dead Friend Zoe, are also hoping to make a second film, the Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary, King Pleasure.
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This isn’t Kelce’s first foray into show business, despite his high-profile romance. He hosted Saturday Night Live in March 2023, an experience the football player said opened up a ‘new happiness’ for him.
‘I’ve been fortunate to do a few things outside of the sports world that I’ve been enjoying doing, like getting on camera,’ Kelce told reporters last month. ‘The SNL stuff kind of opened up a new happiness and a new career path for me, but it’s funny for me to even say that at this point in my career because I think it’s so much further down the road than it is right now.’
It may well be that Kelce has taken a leaf out of his girlfriend Taylor Swift's book. In December 2022, it was announced that the 'Red' singer would be making her directorial debut for a Searchlight Pictures feature film after the star wrote an original script. The exact topic of the film has yet to be announced. She previously sat on the director’s chair for her 14-minute short film All Too Well: The Short Film, which was inspired by the 10-minute version of her hit song, ‘All Too Well’. The short film was a semi-autobiographical narrative of a crumbling relationship and had special screenings at Tribeca Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.
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Naomi May is a freelance writer and editor with an emphasis on popular culture, lifestyle and politics. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard as its Fashion and Beauty Writer, working across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Acting News Editor at ELLE UK and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others.
