Angelyne Producers Respond to the Real Angelyne's Issues With the Show

Daniel Trainor
·2 min read
5

The queen of self-promotion has major issues with her latest portrayal.

Emmy Rossum plays Angelyne, the notorious and campy Los Angeles legend who rose to fame with a series of billboards plastered around the city in the '80s, in the limited series Angelyne, which premiered on Peacock May 19.

Now Angelyne, whose iconic pink Corvette has become a staple on L.A. streets for decades, is firing back at the way she's portrayed on the series.

"I had a little glimpse of it, and I refuse to watch it," Angelyne told Inside Edition on May 19. "It doesn't do me justice. Would you be flattered if someone played you and misrepresented you?"

The series is based on a 2017 article in The Hollywood Reporter titled "The Mystery of L.A. Billboard Diva Angelyne's Real Identity Is Finally Solved," which broke down many of the mysterious walls that Angelyne had built surrounding her persona over the years.

First Look: Peacock's Angelyne

In the series, a high school yearbook photo of Angelyne is shown which indicates she was born to Holocaust survivors in Poland in 1950. Angelyne told Inside Edition that the photo is not her. When they tried inquiring more about the photo "she threatened to end the interview."

In an exclusive statement to E! News, the show's producers UCP and Peacock insisted that Angelyne is meant to be a celebration of its subject.

"This series has embraced the legend and legacy of Angelyne from its inception," the statement reads. "There have been no bigger advocates for celebrating her than Emmy Rossum and the producing team, who approached the storytelling with love, admiration and respect. We were happy to have Angelyne on board during the creative process and are very proud of this show."

Angelyne's disapproval of the series is a bit curious, seeing as she and Rossum met for four hours prior to filming.

"I just told her from the heart how moving I find her life, her power, how original she is," Rossum told E! News' Daily Pop about their meeting, "what a kind of renegade I think she is and what I hope to achieve with this story, which is to embue it will all of the kind of magic and whimsy and fairytale storytelling that she has made her performance art of."

Angelyne, Emmy Rossum
Isabella Vosmikova/Peacock; ITV/Shutterstock

Whether the real Angelyne approves of the series or not, Rossum's transformation into the blonde bombshell is undeniably impressive—and it wasn't just aesthetics.

"I worked with a vocal coach, a dialect coach, a movement coach," she told E!. "Many, many coaches helped me kind of figure out who my version of Angelyne was."

You can watch all five episodes of Angelyne now on Peacock—just don't tell the original.

(E! and Peacock are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)

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