Back to Black: A love letter to Amy Winehouse

Deeply soulful and astonishingly powerful, 2024 biopic Back to Black looks at one of the 21st Century’s biggest talents and attempts to understand how personal demons tore Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) apart. With a script based on first-person material, we see the rise of Amy Winehouse from her suburban upbringing to global superstardom, before her death at just 27, leaving the world with an indelible legacy.

The makings of a superstar

Told throughout from Amy’s own point of view, her story starts in a proudly Jewish north London family amid the separation of dad Mitch (Eddie Marsan) and mum Janis (Juliet Cowan). Amy shares an unbreakable bond with her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), who is everything Amy wants to be – glamorous, gorgeous, and with a wild past filled with romance and jazz. A teenage Amy starts writing songs, packing them with stark emotional detail as well as her unique brand of humour. She soon gains a following, and despite the success of her debut album, Frank, remains down-to-earth, spending much of her time playing pool at The Good Mixer.

It’s there she meets Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell), who woos her to a soundtrack of The Shangri-Las on the pub jukebox. Their connection is instant, and despite the fact Blake already has a girlfriend, the pair share a whirlwind romance. Amy is wary of Blake’s use of hard drugs, but when the pair break up, a troubled Amy starts using herself. Her manager Nick (Sam Buchanan) insists she go to rehab, but Mitch agrees with Amy that it’s unnecessary. Instead, a devastated Amy goes to New York and starts writing her second album, Back to Black, which details her and Blake’s split. Already heartbroken,
Amy then discovers her beloved grandmother in London has died from lung cancer.

Sam Taylor-Johnson (Nowhere Boy), whio directs Back to Black, explains “It's not a cradle-to-grave lifelong story,” explains Taylor-Johnson. “Our movie is framed by Back To Black the album, and is in my mind a love story and from that love story the album was born.”

Casting and playing Amy

Finding an actor to play Amy was one of the biggest challenges of Back to Black, but as soon as Sam Taylor-Johnson met Marisa Abela (BBC’s Industry), it was clear that the hunt was over. Casting agent Nina Gold had whittled down hundreds of applicants to eight women for a day of auditions.

“Seven had come dressed as Amy and Marisa came in dressed as Marisa, but Marisa was the only person who, when she looked into the camera, was Amy,” remembers Taylor-Johnson. “She found something in her soul that really reflected who Amy was. That moment is like gold dust for directors. Me, Nina and Matt [screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh] went – ‘there she is’.”

But Abela was initially reticent about going for the role, and thought about it for two weeks after getting the call from her agent. “I knew it demanded so much respect and care and love, but also hard work,” remembers Abela. “I thought I'm not going to short-change anyone, including myself and Amy, by not giving everything to the audition process.”

Abela did as much research as possible before the audition, fully ensconcing herself in the world of Amy Winehouse. “And that’s partly why she got it, because she came into the room with all of that humility, but also with that work ethic,” says Taylor-Johnson.

Singing like Winehouse

The team wanted someone who could convincingly play Amy from the ages of 17 through to 27. “We didn’t necessarily want a lookalike, we didn’t want somebody who was going to be doing an impression of Amy, we wanted somebody who could inhabit the role,” says Owen. “Sam was very clear that singing was a secondary thing for her, but as it happened, we struck gold because Marisa could sing brilliantly and sings all the music through the movie and is absolutely phenomenal.”

Abela’s final audition was a singing audition. “I sing, but I've never tried singing in the style of anyone, let alone Amy, who has such a specific and authentic style,” says Abela, who like Amy, is from north London. “I don't think any of us were 100% sure at the very beginning how much we were going to be using my voice … but it was so important to me to do everything I could to pour myself into this role.”

Abela threw herself into the challenge, taking singing lessons for two and a half hours a day, every day, for four months. She also worked closely with record producer Giles Martin in order to replicate Amy’s singing style. “Amy Winehouse changed quite dramatically in a small number of years and Marisa had to do the same thing,” says Martin. “And at every point when we worked together, I just thought ‘you've nailed this’.”

“In my mind, I was never going to be using the voice of the actress, because Amy's voice is incredibly distinctive and incredibly familiar and so hard to emulate,” says Taylor-Johnson. “But Marisa trained until she got to a place where her voice could tell us the story in an emotional way that connected. Therefore, you know that it's not Amy, but she delivers in a way that is so soulful that you believe her”.

"A bad boy in a good sense"

When it came to casting Blake, the team were keen to find an actor who shared the positive qualities that Amy saw in him. “Blake’s persona as represented by the media was quite a junkie image, a bad boy in a bad sense. Amy saw him as a bad boy in a good sense, more like James Dean, and charming,” says Owen, who met Blake during the film research process and saw the same appeal that Amy did.

“I really liked him greatly and I was not expecting to. To have cast someone who was going to play him as a nasty character would have made Amy seem ridiculous – she felt lucky that Blake was with her”.

Nina Gold was emphatic about casting Eddie Marsan as Amy’s father Mitch, knowing he would bring warmth and intelligence to the role. “Every time the camera is on him you feel for him and feel what he is going through. He loves his daughter but he’s out of his depth, there’s no guidebook for how to deal with all this. Eddie just connects as soon as you see him on screen,” says Owen.

Lesley Manville was also the obvious person to play Amy’s paternal grandmother, Cynthia. “We were really lucky, we got all of our first choices for the roles,” says Owen. “When Nina brought her up Sam fell in love with the idea.”

It was important for Taylor-Johnson and Greenhalgh to highlight the less-told story of Amy’s close relationship with Cynthia, and how deeply her death affected Amy. “I think that was when it started to go wrong and life unravelled. It was important for us to make that relationship as deep and as meaningful as possible.”