Kim Novak isn’t totally confident in the new biopic about her.
The Vertigo star, 92, recently shared her thoughts on Scandalous, the forthcoming film that will dramatize her controversial romance with singer Sammy Davis Jr. in the late 1950s, expressing she was worried the film’s title isn’t accurate.
“I don’t think the relationship was scandalous,” the actress told The Guardian. “He’s somebody I really cared about. We had so much in common, including that need to be accepted for who we are and what we do, rather than how we look.”
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Novak is anxious that the film, which will star Sydney Sweeney as her, will reduce her relationship with Davis to simple lust. “I’m concerned they’re going to make it all sexual reasons,” she said of the movie’s possible depiction of the onetime couple.
The 1957 romance between Davis and Novak caused significant controversy due to racist opposition to mixed-race relationships at the time — only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriages in a Gallup poll conducted the following year, and Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that federally legalized interracial marriage, did not occur until 1967.
Davis told his friend and biographer Burt Boya that he had a hidden agenda while pursuing Novak, reportedly saying he wanted “to get the whitest, the most famous chick in the world and just show ’em” after persistent racism, according to Hitchcock’s Blondes biographer Laurence Leamer.
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However, Davis did genuinely fall for Novak, and the media fallout from their relationship only made Novak’s feelings stronger. “Something inside of me rebelled when I was told not to see him,” Leamer quotes Novak as saying. “I didn’t think it was anybody’s business.”
Whether the complexity of the relationship makes it onto the screen in Scandalous remains to be seen. The film will be helmed by Sweeney’s Euphoria costar Colman Domingo, making his directorial debut. David Jonsson, best known for his work on HBO’s Industry and in the sci-fi sequel Alien: Romulus, is set to play Davis.
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Sweeney paid tribute to the actress at the Met Gala in May, donning a black Miu Miu dress akin to one Novak wore in 1967’s The Legend of Lylah Clare. Domingo served as the co-chair of the gala this year.
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Novak is set to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Venice International Film Festival on Monday. A documentary about her life, Kim Novak’s Vertigo, will premiere on the same day.
