Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope had never met each other when they were hired to play artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. There was no chemistry read. Mirroring the subjects of the play, they were put in a room and asked to create something together. The result, with playwright Anthony McCarten and director Kwame Kwei-Armah, is The Collaboration, a dramatization of the mid-’80s artistic collab between the two pop painters.

“It is about two men with seemingly no common ground finding common ground,” says Bettany. “Their art really clashes—their idea of what art is for really clashes, and what art should be really clashes.”

After premiering on the West End in February 2022, The Collaboration is now running on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club, a co-production with original producer Young Vic Theatre—and filming for a screen adaptation has already been completed.

Film and television star Bettany (Emmy nominated for his turn as Vision in Marvel’s WandaVision) and stage vet Pope (a two-time Tony nominee in the same season for Choir Boy and Ain’t Too Proud) have brought the artists to life in all three iterations of the script. Bettany is Warhol, whose star has begun to dim by 1980; Pope is Basquiat, a young street artist on the rise in the New York City art scene. The Collaboration
gives audiences a look at their sometimes sparring, yet ultimately loving relationship. The 1985 poster for the Shafrazi Gallery show depicted the artists…