KJ Apa Opens as Jimmy Stewart Today — and Stewart's Daughter Says He Channels Him Rather Than Impersonating Him

The hardest job in a biopic is the voice everyone already knows. Jimmy, which begins its wide theatrical run today after opening the Heartland Film Festival on October 8, gives that job to KJ Apa — the New Zealand-born actor from Riverdale, appearing with his natural dark hair instead of the dyed red audiences know — and then does something smarter than casting: it kept the original's daughter on set.

The endorsement that matters

Kelly Stewart Harcourt, Jimmy Stewart's daughter, was alongside the production throughout filming. Speaking to IndyStar on the Heartland red carpet, she described the fear she carried into the project: "I had often thought that it would be impossible to make a movie about Dad because you couldn't get an actor to play him because it would be so hard for an actor not to just do a Jimmy Stewart impersonation for an hour or two hours."

Her verdict on what Apa did instead: "He has the same cadence, but he's not doing a Jimmy Stewart impersonation. He's kind of channeling Dad. I mean, I just think he did a terrific job."

How the voice was built

Apa declined to demonstrate the voice for the reporter — doing it, he said, would require performing it on the spot — but he described the construction. "There were lots of moments that I picked apart with my dialect coach Eliza Simpson – (a) phenomenal dialect coach that I worked really closely with – in order to kind of get you into character faster or things that are very specific that help you embody the character a little bit."

The raw material, at least, was unlimited: "Luckily, there's so many movies and footage of him. I was grateful for that." And the set itself supplied the rest. "We had Kelly, Jimmy's daughter, alongside us the whole time, which was very helpful, being able to have more personal conversations about him that the public doesn't know, that you can't really read in a book or in one of his movies or something like that. So that was helpful and just interesting because I really became a huge fan of him while I was prepping for him."

What the film covers

As IndyStar lays out the film's span: Stewart's 1941 Academy Award victory, his service as a World War II bomber pilot shortly after, and the trauma he later channelled into George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life in 1946. The film played its first screenings in Indianapolis on Thursday ahead of today's wide release. Whether a channelled Stewart plays beyond the festival audience that first applauded it is now a question for the weekend's audiences — the opening-day numbers land with Sunday's box office report.