Nathan Lane Documentary in Works From Filmmaker Matthew Miele

EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Matthew Miele is currently directing a new feature documentary on the life, career, and theatrical legacy of three-time Emmy and three-time Tony Award-winning actor Nathan Lane. The film will trace Lane’s remarkable body of work across stage and screen while following him through a major artistic moment: his long-awaited (and Tony-nominated) portrayal of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, a current Broadway role he has contemplated for more than thirty years.

The documentary will feature conversations and appearances from a wide-ranging group of collaborators, friends, and contemporaries, including Matthew Broderick, Tony Kushner, Jean Smart, Laurie Metcalf, George C. Wolfe, Ann Roth, Mel Brooks and Mike Birbiglia, among others.

“There are very few performers left who carry within them not only extraordinary talent, but the living memory of the theater itself,” said Miele. “What fascinates me is not simply documenting a remarkable career, but capturing a man who has spent decades absorbing the language, history, rhythms, heartbreak, humor, and mythology of Broadway and American theater. Nathan doesn’t just perform within that tradition, he understands it deeply and embodies a necessary bridge between generations of playwrights, actors, directors, and audiences.”

Rather than approaching Lane’s story as a traditional cradle-to-present biography, the film uses his life and work as a way into the continuing importance of theater itself. At the center of the documentary is Lane’s relationship to Willy Loman, one of the most towering and demanding roles in American drama, which becomes both a personal artistic reckoning and another chapter in Lane’s career forged through the words and worlds of playwrights like Neil Simon, Arthur Miller, Terrence McNally, and Tony Kushner.

Through Lane’s story, the director notes, the film aims to capture not only the evolution of an actor, but also the living continuum of Broadway itself — the inheritance of stories, craft, memory, and artistic ambition passed from one generation to the next.

Miele’s most recent documentaries include Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words, and Alan Pakula: Going for Truth all currently streaming on HBO Max. 

Additional participants and production details on the Lane project will be announced in the coming months.

Lane has appeared in 25 Broadway productions since 1982 including Present Laughter, Guys and Dolls, Forum, Love! Valour! Compassion! The Man Who Came to Dinner, The Producers, Waiting for Godot, The Front Page, The Nance, Angels in America, Death of A Salesman, as well as The Iceman Cometh at BAM. He has received three Tony Awards, seven Drama Desk Awards, including the Hal Prince Lifetime Achievement Award, seven Outer Critics Circle Awards, the Drama League Distinguished Performance Award, the Olivier Award in London, and two Obies for his work Off Broadway.

His numerous film and TV credits include The Birdcage, The Lion King, Nicholas Nickleby, Beau Is Afraid, The Good Wife, Modern Family, The People vs. OJ, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, Mid-Century Modern and The Gilded Age. He has received eight Emmy nominations, winning for Only Murders in the Building, two Daytime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe nominations, the SAG Award, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and in 2008 was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.