Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2022-06-21T14:42:27.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Miles Teller cheated death to become a star – now he is reliving his horrific car crash on screen again
items: Judi Dench and the stars of Tim Burton’s new movie share their childhood secrets
items: Bryan Cranston's life goes on after Breaking Bad
items: Ian McKellen on playing an ageing Sherlock in Mr Holmes
items: Mark Strong: Benedict Cumberbatch can't walk down the street. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy
items: Brenda Blethyn: “I’ll always be working class”
items: Richard Ayoade on acting: "My range is so ridiculously narrow I don’t know if it counts"
items: Dustin Hoffman on directing national treasure Maggie Smith in Quartet

Miles Teller cheated death to become a star – now he is reliving his horrific car crash on screen again
type: item
date: 2016-12-02T08:59:00.000Z
creator: Danny Leigh
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Interview
description: First Rabbit Hole, then Whiplash, now Bleed for This...
encoded: Miles Teller blacked out shortly after the car crash that, on another day, would have killed him. It was the summer of 2007 and the 20-year-old New York drama student was heading back to his family home in Florida. The car was doing 80mph when the friend driving lost control of the wheel. They crossed three lanes of traffic and flipped eight times. “All I knew was that I had been thrown through the window, I was covered in blood and I couldn’t feel my legs,” Teller says. “Then I woke up in the hospital. It’s how the brain copes. The people it was most traumatising for was my parents, getting the phone call. And my friend. I do remember him saying, ‘Please don’t die.’” Now 29, Teller is one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising young movie stars. He’s a little like Elvis in the face, and his sleek leather jacket looks dizzyingly expensive. He makes good company. There have been times in his career when remarks about his plans for acting greatness have seen him on the brink of a bad reputation. Today, he’s nothing but courtesy and wisecracks. The only evidence of the crash now is a couple of light scars striped across his chin, and if you look closely, more on his throat. Discussing the accident doesn’t faze him. He has, after all, had to relive it on screen – and more than once. In the most successful role of his career so far, as a gifted young jazz drummer in the Oscar-winning Whiplash, his character is made late for a show by a viscerally rendered road accident. Putting Teller’s drummer under the guidance of a bullying music teacher, the director of Whiplash, Damien Chazelle, said he wanted the film to feel like a boxing movie. Miles Teller and JK Simmons in Whiplash Now Teller is starring in the real thing – Bleed for This, a biopic of Vinny Pazienza, the Rhode Island brawler who won world titles in the 80s and 90s. But Bleed for This isn’t really about the ring. Remarkably, the film involves another car crash, as horrific as Teller’s own. Pazienza was left with a broken…

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Judi Dench and the stars of Tim Burton’s new movie share their childhood secrets
type: item
date: 2016-09-30T09:22:00.000Z
creator: Danny Leigh
subject: Fantasy
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The cast of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children have a tale or two
encoded: Tim Burton's adaptation of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, the debut novel by Ransom Rigg, is an eccentric, fantastical, mysterious story of childhood. Read about the early memories of its stars Judi Dench, Tim Burton, Eva Green and Chris O'Dowd, below... Tim Burton: “I was young but I felt 80 years old” I grew up in Burbank, California, which I remember being very bright, very square and very stark. I ended up watching a lot of monster movies on TV. My parents said even before I could walk I was watching them. I was never a studious kid. From the beginning to the end, I faked my way through school. You put those things together, and that’s probably why I became a director. I was a shy boy. I don’t think people realised I could speak until I was into my 20s. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I did have a subversive streak. Part of me enjoyed staying home and drawing, but I also liked scaring the other kids in the neighbourhood, faking alien invasions with weird homemade wreckage and footprints in the park. And eventually I started making little movies with a Super 8 camera, roping in those same kids to help out. The huge thing for me was Jason and the Argonauts, which I saw when it came out in 1963. I was five. I saw it at this old movie theatre on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, this old amazing cinema covered with murals of sea life. It was like being in the sea, and the movie hit me like a dream. Seeing it on the big screen, I think it shaped something in me. The world is such a different place now. I was a television kid myself... anyone seeing me would have said ‘Get that kid away from the TV.’ But I do think the world of screens kids live in now is different, because there’s always more than one of them and it feels like they end up getting in between the kid and a real experience. But that’s not just children, it’s everyone. When I was young I felt 80 years old, but now I still feel like the kid I was. Whenever I’m back in suburbia, it still …

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Bryan Cranston's life goes on after Breaking Bad
type: item
date: 2016-02-07T09:00:00.000Z
creator: Danny Leigh
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: TV
description: The critically acclaimed actor talks about moving on from one of the most popular shows in history and his new movie, Trumbo
encoded: For 50 years, Bryan Cranston was a stranger to fame. Not any more. On my way to meet him, a teenage boy passes me in a T-shirt he might have bought in a thou- sand different places. Printed on it is a crude sketch of a man’s face – a flat black hat, moustache and sunglasses. Many of you would instantly know it as Heisenberg, the brutal alias of Walter White, the character that made Cranston a star in the wildly successful series Breaking Bad. A little later, Cranston himself sits quietly sipping coffee. A few weeks off 60, he is kind- eyed and sandy-haired, dressed in knitwear and cords. When I tell him about the T-shirt, he smiles wryly. “An odd world, isn’t it?” Is he often recognised in the street, given he is now a pop culture icon? “Not a lot. I keep my head down. Becoming famous has changed me, and not necessarily for the better.” You can’t just leave that hanging, I say. “Well, I often now opt to stay home, when I may have had a desire to go out. I’m less social than I used to be. I have a tendency to hide away.” Cranston is deeply likeable company. For him this is a happy moment: he is in the running for a best actor Oscar, nominated as the star of the movie Trumbo (with winners to be announced on 28 February). It’s the story of Dalton Trumbo, the flamboyant left-wing Hollywood scriptwriter who was blacklisted by the studios during their postwar anti-communist purges. You wonder if he saw Trumbo as a risk. It still feels daring to play a paid-up communist, and the blacklist remains a dark memory for Hollywood. “Right, it was shameful, which was exactly why I wanted to be a part of exposing it.” He is confident audiences of all persuasions can relate to Trumbo, a man whose politics didn’t preclude him “loving being rich”. Still, the film enjoys slaying sacred cows: John Wayne is depicted as a bullying phoney. But then, for Cranston, debate is king: “You and I could have a conversation from different sides of an issue, and I would find it fascinating. I want t…

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Ian McKellen on playing an ageing Sherlock in Mr Holmes
type: item
date: 2015-06-19T13:00:00.000Z
creator: Danny Leigh
subject: Drama
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: TV
description: “When I was a young man, people would ask how I remembered my lines, and I’d think ‘That’s the easy part!’ Well, these days it’s one of the problems. I do find myself thinking ‘How am I going to remember it?’”
encoded: On a damp day in London, Ian McKellen clutches his side. His body contorts. An agonised wince takes hold of his face. “So that’s what you do,” he says, suddenly cheerful. This, in brief, is the McKellen guide to playing characters in old age. “You imagine aches and pains, and how the person accommodates them is part of who they are.” He smiles. “It’s just acting.” When we meet, McKellen has just celebrated his 76th birthday, a rangy, white-haired figure in a lilac shirt and charcoal suit. A few years ago, he says, birthdays began to slip by unnoticed, but as a keen user of social media, he is now wished well online. He looks a little tired, but he’s faultlessly polite. “Ah yes, ah yes,” he says when I remind him of the last time we met, at an interview before a charity screening of The Hobbit. He brought along the hat he wore as Gandalf, offering fans the chance to wear it (he made me model it for them). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qng3t9RZk6Q His latest film involves another much-loved literary icon: Sherlock Holmes. Mr Holmes is a charming yarn set in 1947, with its hero now 93 years old. Retired to the country with little company beyond his housekeeper and her son, he tackles one last case, although his own frailty proves more pressing. There is a further twist: instead of the fictional creation of Arthur Conan Doyle, the detective is a real man whose exploits were immortalised on the page by Dr Watson. What he calls the “cheek” of the film (in cinemas from Friday 19th June) also, he says, distinguishes his Holmes from those before him. As a young man, McKellen’s favourite was Basil Rathbone in the films of the 1940s, though of course, for many people, Holmes currently means the version played on TV by Benedict Cumberbatch. McKellen says he watches Sherlock – “Oh yes, great fun” – but feels no rivalry. “I hope Benedict doesn’t feel we’re trampling over his territory.” None of his predecessors daunt him. “It’s odd. It doesn’t worry me one little bit,” he says,…

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Mark Strong: Benedict Cumberbatch can't walk down the street. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy
type: item
date: 2014-09-05T10:20:00.000Z
creator: Danny Leigh
subject: Movies
subject: News
description: The Before I Go to Sleep star on why he's frightened of fame...
encoded: Mark Strong looks at me with distaste. “I can’t stress enough how totally uninterested I am,” he says. Fortunately, he is talking about fame. “There is no part of me that wants to have to pull the blinds down when I’m talking to my wife about dinner because some photographer is in a bush outside.” One of Britain’s most respected character actors – and perhaps its very busiest – he’s aware of the irony in criticising celebrity while giving an interview. He does them, he says, only when he has made a film he believes in. He has two such movies coming out, thriller Before I Go to Sleep (in cinemas from Friday 5 September) with Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth and The Imitation Game (opening in November), a portrait of wartime codebreaker Alan Turing. Strong will be Stewart Menzies, head of MI6; Turing is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Given his aversion to fame, Strong can only sympathise. “It’s awful, because everyone wants a picture for Facebook, and if you’re Benedict you now can’t walk down the street. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, and I think he’s lovely.” Strong met Cumberbatch on the 2002 TV drama Fields of Gold where he also met his wife, producer Liza Marshall. “It was Benedict’s first job. Tiny part. He was a guy being told to get out of a toilet. I remember being by the bar at the wrap party and wishing him good luck.” Before I Go to Sleep (left, also produced by Marshall) is a twisting tale where Strong’s Before I Go to Sleep (left, also produced by Marshall) is a twisting tale where Strong’s villainous image sits front and centre, echoing his icy stillness in Kick-Ass, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. “Well, heroes don’t get the outrageous costume or the fantastic one-liner. And I find villains interesting because they’re exotic. I don’t actually go home and menace the neighbours.” Sipping bottled water in a crisp blue shirt, he looks a figure of gleaming health at 51, amiable and dry with a certain steel beneath. He could…

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Brenda Blethyn: “I’ll always be working class”
type: item
date: 2014-04-27T08:01:00.000Z
creator: Danny Leigh
subject: Drama
subject: News
subject: TV
description: Vera star talks shoes, dream jobs and her fascination with people
encoded: Brenda Blethyn is fresh off the Eurostar. She’s spent the last three days in a Paris hotel promoting a film she’s in with Forest Whitaker. He was there, and so was her husband, Michael Mayhew, though her workload confined them to meeting in the evenings. But he did buy her some shoes. “Hang on, I’ll show you,” she says, producing a pair of elegant black-and-white numbers. “Spats! That’s what me and him call shoes! Isn’t it a nice word?” It’s lunchtime, and the actress takes a seat in the bar at London’s National Theatre. She looks spruce and lively, younger than her 68 years, her hair russet red, a blue scarf around her neck. It’s on her way back home to south London, she says, and anyway, she’s done enough plays here that the place makes her feel comfortable. Right on cue, an old colleague notices her and delivers a giant hug. It’s exactly now I realise the batteries in my tape recorder are dead. Blethyn is eager to help – and a National Theatre sound engineer is dispatched to find me new ones. It would be useful to have her with you all the time. She is frequently funny, occasionally pensive. Married life is still a novelty – she and Mayhew were together 35 years before they wed in 2010. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how lucky I am to have him.” Her best-known role is probably still Cynthia, the troubled heroine of Mike Leigh’s 1995 film Secrets & Lies, for which she was Oscar- nominated – but it’s one accompanied by four decades’ work on stage, film and TV. Today she’s actually here on behalf of Vera, the ITV detective drama set in Northumberland that’s about to begin its fourth series. Playing the lovably dishevelled DCI Vera Stanhope, a woman unlikely to have French spats in her wardrobe, the show has struck a chord with viewers. A fifth series has already been commissioned. “I’ve got my teeth into it now,” she says. She talks fondly about the setting – “the people up there are so warm” – and Vera herself is someone she respects, “a female of a certain…

Richard Ayoade on acting: "My range is so ridiculously narrow I don’t know if it counts"
type: item
date: 2014-04-04T05:04:00.000Z
creator: Danny Leigh
subject: Movies
subject: News
subject: Interview
description: The IT Crowd star is back in the director's chair for The Double, but auditioning for his own film made him shudder
encoded: Richard Ayoade is often recognised when he’s out. “People say, ‘Oh – you sound exactly like Moss.’ And I think ‘Ah. OK. I don’t feel that I sound like that’.” He looks perturbed. “It’s a strange sight, I guess – this thing that was contained in a rectangle in their living room, now floating freely is Asda. They look at you as if there’s been a spillage. The confusion of his fans is understandable. For seven years and four series of The IT Crowd, Ayoade played socially inept computer techie Maurice Moss in one of TV’s most beloved shows. But in fact, he doesn’t sound like him at all, though he could be his worldly older brother. Dapper in a modish suit, he considers each question, littering his answers with self-deprecating asides and references to Kubrick and Kafka. However, he’s not here as a sitcom star, but as a film director. His second movie, The Double, is about to be released in cinemas (from today Friday 4 April). It’s another story of office life – but one that’s a long way from The IT Crowd. Rather, The Double is a loose adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novella about a timid clerk (Simon) befriended by his arrogant doppelganger. Both parts are played by Jesse Eisenberg, who’s the face of a nightmarish but very funny film infused with the surrealist spirit of David Lynch. Ayoade’s first film was the coming-of-age comedy Submarine, the story of a precocious 15-year-old schoolboy doing battle with the world in Swansea. Now, he’s moved on to working life – but his two protagonists still have plenty in common. “Each of them may seem sweet or vulnerable, but ultimately they’re really not that nice. In The Double, Simon isn’t actually interested in other people. He just wants to collect them.” If Ayoade isn’t Moss, he also isn’t Simon. In a certain light he can pass for awkward – photos of him routinely capture an expression somewhere between confused and terrified. But his manner is wryly self-aware, and while his characters exist in un-splendid isolation, he is a …

Dustin Hoffman on directing national treasure Maggie Smith in Quartet
type: item
date: 2013-01-04T11:40:00.000Z
creator: Danny Leigh
subject: Comedy
subject: News
subject: TV
description: "She will put her foot down, and she will say, I don’t know what the bleep this scene is about. And when she says it, you pay attention!”
encoded: Why now? Dustin Hoffman smiles and sighs. Why, after a life in front of the camera, has he waited until the age of 75 to direct his first film? “Well, it has to do with our demons,” he says. “But at my stage of life, you get a glimpse of the end of the tunnel – so the question becomes if not now, when?” The voice, that familiar nasal rush of words, is unmistakeable. His hair stands in a luxuriant shock, now more white than grey, his shirt sleeves rolled up as he prepares to discuss his belated debut – Quartet, a gentle tale of retired British opera singers starring Maggie Smith (who has been nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance) and Tom Courtenay. “You know, a friend said to me recently ‘live your dash.’ I said, what do you mean? and he said, ‘On your tombstone, there’s the date you’re born and the date you die – and in between there’s a dash.’ So maybe I finally realised how to live my dash.” He smiles again, a pithy description of a 45-year process – the urge to direct starting, he says, soon after his breakthrough in 1967’s The Graduate. Between then and now were decades of procrastination, ending only when a friend passed him the script for Quartet before a flight home to LA. Abruptly, struck by the story’s portrait of the ageing process, he decided to make it himself. “Which is not to say,” he goes on with a snuffling laugh, “that my wife and my agent didn’t both then have to spend the next year coaxing me along before we started. I was constantly aware these were uncharted waters.” So there were moments when he thought of backing out? “Long moments.” These would be the demons. It’s strange – for all his gifts, it can’t be easy being Dustin Hoffman. As a young actor, an early lack of success and hang-ups about his looks and his Jewishness propelled him into therapy, where he’s stayed “off and on” ever since. Even now, while some stars of his status would barely acknowledge an interviewer, he’s obliging verging on the anxious. “If you want me to stop…