Chloe Bailey just landed a major starring role in a feature film.
The songstress and actress has been tapped to portray “The Wolfette of Wall Street” Lauren Simmons in an upcoming feature film. Currently titled Midas Touch, the film will focus on Simmons’ journey as the youngest-ever equity trader to work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, only the second Black woman in history to fill that role.
According to Deadline, Simmons herself will serve as an executive producer over her life’s story, with director Numa Perrier bringing the story to life.
Simmons, who graduated from Kennesaw State University in 2016, and was on the NYSE floor by the following year, becoming the only woman in her position at all at the time.
As Simmons told ESSENCE in a 2020 interview, where she first detailed plans of bringing her life story to the big screen, she left Wall Street due to the fact that while she was breaking ground with her age, her gender, and her race on the trading floor, she noticed that she still wasn’t able to serve her community the way she had hoped.
“I loved working on the trading floor. I genuinely mean that. Even making my small amount of money, I loved going into work every single day,” she said. “But I did see that our clients were institutional clients, and they were all white men. And it was starting to frustrate me that there weren’t more women, and people of color, that were in those spaces.”
Bailey, perhaps best known on-screen as Jazz Forster in Freeform’s hit Black-ish spinoff Grown-ish, has acted in several feature-length films over the course of this year. She just starred in the 2022 college revenge film Jane, and is set to star in the upcoming Praise This and The Georgetown Project alongside Sam Worthington and Russell Crowe.
The starlet has been near omnipresent in the last year, as her hit singles “Treat Me,” Surprise” and “Have Mercy” have experienced a groundswell of fan support. While her debut album still has no set release date, the songstress’s recent callback to Adina Howard’s 1995 hit “Freak Like Me” has placed anticipation at its height.
Bailey’s big foray into film comes simultaneous to her younger sister Halle Bailey’s much-buzzed-about starring turn as Ariel in Disney’s upcoming live-action reimagining of The Little Mermaid.