Peyton Elizabeth Lee first made her name as the title character of Disney Channel’s Andi Mack, and she most recently voiced Prue McKeel, the lead role in Laika’s stop-motion adventure Wildwood. Now she is headed somewhere entirely new: the 1990s punk scene.
Lee will star in Gasoline, a feature directed by James Merendino from his own script, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She stars alongside Tanner Buchanan, who plays Eric Casey, a young singer working to stay sober who persuades his teenage brothers to pile into the family van and spend a summer playing punk shows across the country. The film is based on real events involving the band Eight Buck Experiment.
The music in Gasoline will be the real thing. Lee, Buchanan and fellow cast members Elliott Fullam, Finn Douglas and Oscar O’Meara are all musicians, and the actors will play together as an actual band. “I’ve been looking for a character like Gasoline‘s Eric Casey for the better part of a decade,” Buchanan said. “I grew up playing and listening to punk and metal, so the script connected with me from page one.”
Merendino has said he wanted that authenticity, casting actors who could function as a real punk band, and he describes the story underneath the noise as one about a makeshift family of outsiders looking out for each other. It is familiar territory for the filmmaker: his SLC Punk! opened the Sundance Film Festival in 1999, was released by Sony Pictures Classics and grew into a cult classic, later followed by the sequel Punk’s Dead. Gasoline is produced by Isen Robbins, Aimee Schoof and Megan Freels Johnston of Intrinsic Value Films, together with Eight Buck Experiment founder Evan O’Meara.
Lee’s character has not been announced yet, and the production has not confirmed filming dates or a release plan.