Blade Runner 2049 actress Sylvia Hoeks has signed up to play Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel in an upcoming biopic from Michael R. Roskam.

The project is said to be inspired by Kristel’s life after she relocated to L.A. and her life spiralled out of control with a number of relationships and developing a cocaine addiction. The centres on Kristel’s iconic career in the ’70s and ’80s when the huge success of the “Emmanuelle” films stood in stark contrast to her troubled personal life, a press statement said:

Sylvia Kristel was one of the women that opened up a sexual way of looking at sex for women,” said Hoeks. But she added: “She was also “very free-spirited, maybe even too early in that regard for her generation.”

Hoek’s stated on the troubled actress “her intelligence and creativity as an artist made her difficult to grasp. You couldn’t have a full sense of who she was.”

The drama, which has yet to receive a title, is set up at Bart van Langendonck’s Brussels-based Savage Film, producer of Roskam’s Oscar-nominated debut Bullhead. The Misfortunes Dimitri Verhulst is the pen the screenplay.

Michael R. Roskam directed Tom Hardy’s The Drop, he also directed duel language film, Racer and the Jailbird which starred Matthias Schoenaerts.

Sylvia Hoeks, who started of her career as a model before heading into the movies, is currently shooting The Girl in the Spider’s Web, directed by Don’t Breathe’s Fede Alvarez alongside The Crown’s Claire Foy. She will also star in Luc Besson’s Renegades and as been cast in Matthew Hope’s All the Devil’s Men.