Did we ever deserve Fred Rogers? All evidence points to the contrary—yet there he was all those years, creating, producing, writing, and starring in the legendary children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers, who died in 2003, was a lauded figure in his lifetime, praised for his creative programming as much as he was for his saintly personality. (In times of calamity, how often do you see people quote his famous “look for the helpers” line?) Now, it appears, we are about to receive some much-needed Rogers content, with two new films on the horizon that will celebrate the TV icon’s legacy.
On Tuesday, Focus Features released the trailer for the upcoming documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Directed by Oscar winner Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom), the doc uses archival footage and never-before-seen clips of Rogers to contextualize his legacy and trace how his show addressed then-contentious social issues like civil rights and divorce.
Isn’t it a wondrous, pure thing? Doesn’t that trailer just fill you with hope and pat you on the back, assuring that everything is going to be O.K. eventually? Won’t You Be My Neighbor? debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, drumming up warm reviews and whisking viewers into Rogers’s gentle inner life.
And beyond the documentary set, we’re also getting a film about Rogers titled You Are My Friend, starring Tom Hanks as the beloved entertainer. The film, which was officially announced in January, will be directed by Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) and is based on a 1998 Esquire profile, in which Rogers was interviewed by reporter Tom Junod, who underwent a personal transformation after landing in Rogers’s orbit.
On Monday, Heller clarified in a statement to Entertainment Weekly that the film is “not a biopic.”
“I disliked that when it got announced it was characterized as such,” she said. “It’s really not. It’s a movie that’s largely focused on a reporter and [Mr. Rogers’s] relationship to his life, and how [the reporter’s] whole world changes when coming in contact with Fred Rogers.”
She added that this film tells “a story for our times, a story about kindness and family connection and trying to tap into our better self. God knows we need that right now!”
While researching the movie, Heller also noted, “the writers found that more people than they could possibly count credited Mr. Rogers with changing their lives.” You Are My Friend will zero in on Junod’s life. “[He was] in a critical point in his life—becoming a new father, having issues with his own father—and meeting Mr. Rogers to write a piece about him, thinking it’s going to be a bit of a puff piece, but it ends up changing his entire life.”
You Are My Friend will begin shooting this fall. Won’t You Be My Neighbor? will hit theaters this summer. Several seasons of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood are already on Amazon Prime, so you can dash back to your childhood whenever you want in the meantime.
