Meryl Streep Confirmed To Play Joni Mitchell In Upcoming Biopic

Joni Mitchell on stage at the Newport Folk Festival(Credit: YouTube)

Legendary record executive Clive Davis has confirmed that the Oscar-winning actress, Meryl Streep, will depict Joni Mitchell in an upcoming biopic.

Davis shared the news during his annual pre-Grammy Awards party on Saturday (31 January), Rolling Stone reports. At the event, held at the Beverly Hilton, Davis introduced superstars in attendance, including Mitchell. He announced that Streep would portray her in Almost Famous filmmaker Cameron Crowe’s long-awaited biopic.

Cameron Crowe, a filmmaker and formerly a music journalist, developed a long friendship with Mitchell after interviewing her for Rolling Stone in 1979. His biopic about the singer has reportedly been in development for approximately five years, as he discussed in a 2025 interview on The Late Show.

In the chat, Crowe said he’d been working on the project “for about four years” and had regular meetings with Mitchell “where I can ask her anything and she speaks with her heart about all kinds of stuff. It’s a movie that will be not from a distance… This is from her perspective, her life, looking out,” he explained.

Crowe added that Mitchell has kept all her costumes and instruments from her decades of performing, and as a result, the forthcoming film is “a really personal, wonderful look at her life and music.”

As Rolling Stone notes, speculation about Streep’s potential casting in the film first surfaced in 2024. Streep will reportedly play an older version of Mitchell, while Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Queen’s Gambit) has been speculated to play the singer “in her prime” in the 1960s and 1970s, when she recorded iconic albums like Blue and Clouds. The latter’s casting remains unconfirmed.

Streep is set to portray Mitchell in the present day, according to the Express Tribune, and to offer an in-depth perspective on her early rise in folk music to her enduring influence.

In 2024, Joni Mitchell made her debut performance at the Grammy Awards. During the ceremony, she won her tenth Grammy for Best Folk Album for Joni Mitchell At Newport, a recording of her performance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, her first time on stage in nine years.

Since that performance, Mitchell played multiple shows with singer Brandi Carlile, and in June 2023, she played her first headline show since 2000, headlining the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington. She was joined by numerous friends, including Annie Lennox, Allison Russell, Marcus Mumford, Brandi Carlile, Sarah McLachlan and more.