Daniel Radcliffe to play ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic in Funny Or Die, Tango biopic for Roku

The Roku Channel has commissioned a feature film about the career of ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic, with British actor Daniel Radcliffe set to play the award-winning musician and pop culture icon.

Daniel Radcliffe and Al Yankovic

Produced by Funny Or Die and Tango, WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story will begin filming in LA next month and will debut exclusively on The Roku Channel. A premiere date has not yet been announced.

Yankovic wrote the biopic alongside Eric Appel, who serves as director and executive producer. Yankovic is a producer along with Mike Farah, Joe Farrell and Whitney Hodack for Funny Or Die and Tim Headington, Lia Buman and Max Silva for Tango. Other executive producers are Funny Or Die’s Henry Muñoz III and Tango’s Neil Shah.

Five-time Grammy winner Yankovic, known for parodying pop culture, is the best-selling comedy recording artist of all time, with more than 12 million albums sold.

Roku said the project will “explore every facet of Yankovic’s life, from his meteoric rise to fame with early hits like Eat It and Like a Surgeon to his torrid celebrity love affairs and famously depraved lifestyle.”

The greenlight comes as The Roku Channel continues to expand its slate of originals. In September, the AVoD platform, which acquired global rights to the library of now-defunct shortform streaming platform Quibi last year, confirmed it would revive the cancelled musical dramedy Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist with a Christmas-themed movie. The following month it acquired the exclusive US rights to the Canadian comedy Children Ruin Everything.