Turns out Joan Rivers won’t be coming back to life in biopic-form anytime soon.
Last month it was announced that Kathryn Hahn, 48, would be portraying the late comic and talk show host in the Showtime miniseries “The Comeback Girl.”
Now those plans have been scrapped as the network does not have Joan’s life rights, Variety reported.
The rights are currently held by the brash funnywoman’s daughter, Melissa. While the project could have gone the unauthorized route, Joan’s jokes and trademark catchphrases could not have been used without rankling Melissa or the estate.
“Trailblazer. Adored. Cruel. Diva. Joan Rivers had a life like no other,” the original logline for “The Comeback Girl” had teased. “At age 54, she was a superstar comedienne … and then it all fell apart. THE COMEBACK GIRL is the awe-inspiring untold story of how Joan Rivers persevered through near suicide and professional abyss to rebuild herself and her career to become a global icon.”
The limited series was to be produced by Warner Bros. and Greg Berlanti.
Joan died in 2014 at the age of 81, one week after she stopped breathing during routine throat surgery.
Comedienne Sarah Silverman previously had something to say about Hahn’s casting. The 50-year-old called out Hollywood earlier this month for casting non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters, referring to the technique as “Jewface.”
After Hahn, whose roots run deep in Catholicism, was first announced, Silverman had this to say on her podcast: “There’s this long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews, and not just playing people who happen to be Jewish but people whose Jewishness is their whole being.
“One could argue, for instance, that a Gentile [a non-Jew] playing Joan Rivers correctly would be doing what is actually called ‘Jewface.’”
Silverman added that the casting is “defined as when a non-Jew portrays a Jew with the Jewishness front and center, often with makeup or changing of features, big fake nose, all the New York-y or Yiddish-y inflection. And in a time when the importance of representation is seen as so essential and so front and center, why does ours constantly get breached even today in the thick of it?”
Rivers’ representative declined to comment to The Post, which also reached out to reps for Berlanti and Hahn, who didn’t immediately respond.