Sam Cox was born to draw. As a child he drew all day every day, and most of the night too. At university his life became an unstoppable stream of doodling as Sam became a character – Mr Doodle. And Mr Doodle started to push Sam ever further into the background as he began to create a doodle world that he could actually live in.
By the time he left university, Sam was making a living doodling. In 2017 a Facebook video of him doodling a pop-up shop in London racked up over 40 million views in just a week. By 2018 he was putting on solo exhibitions around the world as far away as Seoul, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan and working in Mexico, Europe and North America. Lucrative partnerships with brands such as Fendi, Puma, Samsung and Hello Kitty were establishing him as a name people were starting to watch, and in 2020 a work of his entitled Spring sold for just under $1million at auction in Tokyo.
But in the background, as his fame and wealth grew, Sam’s obsession with doodling was now taking the form of an entire Doodle cosmos. A foundation story in which he was a character whose mission was to cover the world and the universe with doodles. The lines between reality and fantasy began to blur. Still only 25 years old, Sam was now about to embark on his childhood dream: to buy a great big house, paint it brilliant white, cover it with doodles and live in it. Not as a metaphor, a statement or a work of art. But IRL. Sam’s aim was to literally create a Doodle World that he could live in – for real.
But his journey to get there would take Sam down a path that would almost destroy him, when the fantasy world he created became so real that he couldn’t find his way out.
From Academy Award nominated directors Jaimie D’Cruz (Exit Through the Gift Shop) and Ed Perkins (Tell Me Who I Am, The Princess), and executive produced by double Academy Award winner Simon Chinn (Man on Wire, Searching for Sugar Man), and double Emmy Award winner Jonathan Chinn (LA 92, Whitney) The Trouble With Mr Doodle is the story of Sam Cox, an extraordinary boy born into an ordinary family in an unremarkable English town and how a childhood passion for drawing threatened to take over his life, his home and his mind.