Madonna at The 2025 Met Gala Celebrating "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style" held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 5, 2025, in New York. Gilbert Flores/Variety
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Madonna just made some big confessions about the origin of her upcoming album, Confessions II, which she says emerged from the frustration of having her biopic repeatedly kicked down the line.
In her Interview cover story published Monday (June 22), the pop superstar finally spoke openly about why her long-awaited screen project has experienced so many delays, from her perspective. “I was supposed to make a movie about my life,” she began. “I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting. We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget because I needed — I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget.”
“I found a way to make it for less money in Serbia, but I don’t think they were into the idea … one of their first reactions was, ‘We don’t believe you’d stay in Serbia more than four days,'” Madge continued. “And I said, ‘Did you read the script?” My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for a holiday. But anyway, I was in limbo when that fell apart, and then Netflix reached out to make a series.”
Madonna went on to say that she started working on adapting the project into a multipart series, but was stymied again when Universal allegedly blocked her from using the script she’d initially written unless she “bought it from them for an extortionist’s price, even though I wrote it.”
Billboard has reached out to Universal for comment.
With her biopic journey back to square one, the icon spent “eight or nine months” trying to find the perfect writers and showrunner for the series before realizing that she couldn’t continue in production limbo without having another creative outlet. “I was like, ‘Good thing I have another job because I need to work, I need to create,'” Madonna recalled. “‘Unless Netflix is going to call me tomorrow with a writer I like, I’m going to start going down this road.'”
That’s when she reached out to producer Stuart Price to start work on what would become Confessions II, the upcoming follow-up to her beloved 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor. “I thought the world is in a very dark place and people need to dance,” she said, explaining that many of the songs on the sequel were informed by the deaths of her stepmother and brother.
“Of course, in the middle of the process, more than like 75 percent of the way through, we found the writer [for the Netflix series],” she added. “I was like, ‘I can’t turn back now. I have to move this up a bit.’ So that’s what I did.”
Madonna’s biopic was first announced by Universal Pictures in 2020. After Julia Garner was cast in the starring role and the Queen of Pop had worked on two versions of the script, news broke in 2023 that the project had been scrapped by the studio. In May 2025, the seven-time Grammy winner partnered with Shawn Levy to create an autobiographical series about her life, a few months after which the Weapons actress appeared to hint that she was still involved.
“I can’t say too much about it, but yes,” Garner said in a video for W Magazine in September. “It’s a work in progress.”
In the meantime, the actress recently appeared in Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter’s “Bring Your Love” music video, which dropped earlier in June ahead of the July 3 release of Confessions II.
See Madonna on the cover of Interview and photos from the shoot below.
