Nigel Farage and his fellow Brexit campaigners could become the focus of a big Hollywood film, it has been reported.
The diary of Leave.EU’s financial backer Aaron Banks is said to be attracting interest from American movie studios. The book’s humourous story of how Brexit came about has become an unlikely bestseller.
The Daily Telegraph reported that executives from Warner Brothers are keen to meet Farage and Banks on their next visit to the US.
Farage’s star ascended in America when he became the first British politician to meet with Trump following his election. The former Ukip leader had been a keynote speaker at one of Trump’s campaign rallies.
Banks too attended the November meeting with Trump, and is believed to have discussed the Brexit campaign at length with the president elect. His book, Bad Boys of Brexit, is a diary-style tale of how the EU referendum was fought.
Andy Wigmore, a spokesman for Banks, told the paper: “We have had some very serious Hollywood people in touch with us who are going to buy the rights to the book. They want to buy the option on it.”
Profits from any future film rights have been pledged to charity.
“It is not like it is something we would personally benefit from. The Bad Boys of Brexit – the film. It is a comedy,” Wigmore added.
Amazon describes the book as an “honest, uncensored and highly entertaining diary of the campaign that changed the course of history”.
The description adds:
From a David Brent-style office on an industrial estate in the south-west, Banks masterminded an extraordinary social media campaign against the tyrannies of Brussels that became a mass movement for Brexit. He tore up the political rule book, sinking £8 million of his personal fortune into a madcap campaign targeting ordinary voters up and down the country.
His anti-establishment crusade upset everyone from Victoria Beckham to NASA and left MPs open-mouthed. When his rabble-rousing antics landed him in hot water, he simply redoubled his efforts to wind up the targets. Lurching from comedy to crisis (often several times a day), he found himself in the glare of the media spotlight, fending off daily bollockings from Nigel Farage and po-faced MPs.
The Telegraph also reported that photographs of Farage and Donald Trump together at the president-elect’s residence in New York have achieved £200,000 in licensing sales.
That money has also been earmarked for good causes.