According to Deadline, Janelle Monáe has joined the cast of Julie Taymor’s Gloria Steinem biopic The Glorias: A Life On The Road. Monáe will be playing Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the civil rights activist who co-founded feminist magazine Ms. with Steinem in the ‘70s. The movie, which is based on Steinem’s memoir, will follow major events in the activist’s life, with both Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander starring as Steinem at different points. As Deadline puts it, the movie “will follow Steinem’s journey to become a crusader for equal rights and her groundbreaking work as a journalist and campaigner.”
This project is coming a few years after HBO announced that it was developing a Gloria Steinem miniseries starring Marisa Tomei and executive produced by George Clooney. That one was going to specifically focus on the creation of Ms. and “the world-altering early days of the Women’s Movement,” but—as far as we can tell—there hasn’t been much movement on it since then.