Scarlett Johansson on becoming more comfortable with herself and why it would be "reductive" to politicise her directorial debut
The A-list actor has stepped behind the camera for new film Eleanor the Great which stars June Squibb as a 94-year-old Jewish widow who does something terrible.
At this year’s Cannes Film Festival, in the Un Certain Regard strand, three major actors made their directorial debuts. While Kristen Stewart and Britain’s Harris Dickinson went full arthouse with their films – respectively, addiction drama The Chronology of Water and homeless study Urchin – Scarlett Johansson took another path. Eleanor the Great is a comedy-drama about a 94-year-old Jewish widow who does something terrible. It’s funny, poignant and stars the wonderful June Squibb, whose late-career blossoming since films like Nebraska and Thelma has been a sheer delight. “This film appeared to me to have a commerciality to it, which is important,” says Johansson, and she should know. Since she started acting three decades ago, her films have accumulated more than $15 billion at the box office. While this is chiefly down to her role as Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in multiple films from Iron Man 2 to Avengers: Infinity War, this year saw her help relaunch Universal’s prestige dinosaur franchise with Jurassic World: Rebirth, grossing $868 million at the box office. Johansson knows a hit when she sees one. Curiously, she’s been wanting to direct almost as long as she’s been acting. “When I was a teenager, I thought that I would direct and probably not act,” she tells me. “I mean, because I think I didn’t have an insane passion for acting when I was a teenager.” It’s an interesting answer to the question ‘How long have you wanted to direct?’ Most actors build their way gradually towards going behind the camera. But the precocious Johansson has always harboured those dreams, even as an adolescent growing up in New York. It’s also intriguing to hear that acting was not her cultural North Star back then, despite making her debut opposite Bruce Willis in the 1994 comedy North and rising to prominence alongside Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer four years later, when she was 13. “I did [have a passion to act] when I was really young,” she continues, “and then it was so hard to find projects that were engaging, I was not as engaged in the process. I mean, I would find some projects here and there, but it was hard. Now there’s a lot more opportunity for young people to play very interesting roles. But it wasn’t the trend as much when I was a teenager.” By the time she was in her teens, she established herself as an actress with indie credentials, thanks to films like the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There and Terry Zwigoff’s cult teen tale Ghost World. “I would find little things here and there,” she adds, “but I thought, ‘Well, I probably will end up directing.’ And then, when I got to be in my twenties, I became more interested in understanding my job as an actor better, and I was very focused on challenging myself in different kinds of ways.” Long after establishing herself as an A-List star, in 2017, Johansson started her own production company, These Pictures, which she co-founded with partners Keenan Flynn and Jonathan Lia. Even then, the idea of stepping behind the camera to call the shots didn’t exactly thrill her. “I was like, ‘I definitely would never want to direct’ because that job is only problem solving, and it feels like a nightmare! But I think I just assumed at some point I could potentially direct. It was just hard...some projects at some point or another were compelling but weren’t [right].” Then along came the script for Eleanor the Great, written by Tory Kamen, who was inspired by her own Jewish grandmother. With Squibb already attached, Johansson was immediately struck by this story of Eleanor Morgenstein, a shrewd and spiky nonagenarian who is living in Florida when the story starts. “I actually called my producing partners...I think I can actually direct this. And then we had to scramble to put it together. The scramble to put it together was very, very stressful. It was crazy.” Of course it meant raising finances with her producer’s hat on. She’s produced before, notably the 2024 astronaut romance Fly Me To The Moon in which she starred with Channing Tatum. But now she was putting herself on the line as the number one creative. “When you’re making a film, you have to ask people to give you a lot of money. And even if it’s a small film, it’s still going to be a lot of money. It’s millions of dollars. It’s maybe not hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s an important amount of money.” To help, Johansson gathered an impressive cast around her, including British actors Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave) and Erin Kellyman (Raised By Wolves), who play a father and daughter who encounter Squibb’s Eleanor when she moves to New York to be near her family after bestie Bessie passes away in Florida. The crux – that terrible thing that Eleanor does – comes when she visits a Jewish Community Centre and stumbles upon a Holocaust Survivor’s Group. A convert to Judaism herself, Eleanor passes off the late Bessie’s history as her own, pretending she too survived the Holocaust. Johansson identifies as Jewish (her mother is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, with family origins in both Poland and Russia) and calls Eleanor’s moment of madness “unforgivable” but she understands “this urgency to share the story that will disappear with this person”. The script has a deeper resonance, ensuring that – like Bessie’s story – those that survived the worst atrocity in the history of mankind are not forgotten. “So you can forgive it, hopefully. I mean, that’s the goal anyway, and I think that’s actually really important.” While forgiveness and tolerance are two major themes of the film, Johansson doesn’t want it to be yanked into conversations around the Israel-Palestine conflict, at a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise. “I mean, it’s such a complicated question. And I think it would be reductive to politicise this film,” she says. Her French-born cinematographer Hélène Louvart (The Lost Daughter) was in Israel at the time of the October 7th attacks, as she was preparing to shoot another movie, just as Johansson convinced her to join the project. Johansson is particularly fond of Louvart, and the intimate relationship they fostered on set. “Hélène and I spent a lot of time breaking the script down before we shot it...that’s when our work together really began. We understood we were talking, seeing the same thing, and she’s just amazing. She’s really the most observant woman. She’s always watching everything, and it just feels like she’s just observing the entire world around her all the time. She’s so present when you’re talking to her. She’s extraordinary.” Although Johansson may be best known for her action heroine in the MCU, along the way, she’s worked with some of the most innovative filmmakers around, including Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), Spike Jonze (Her) and Christopher Nolan (The Prestige). Was she influenced by any of her past collaborators when making Eleanor the Great? “Maybe inadvertently. I think sometimes directors have great references. And I’ve worked with directors that have great references. They’re making their version of an Antonioni film. Or it’s a Bergman moment. I didn’t have that as much.” That’s Johansson’s commercial instincts speaking again; Bergman moments don’t tend to fly with the masses anymore. Instead, like her former collaborator Woody Allen, she ploughed a furrow of Jewish humour. “The script was very funny,” she adds. “I think the film’s hilarious! I hope that other people also find it funny.” She even found herself guffawing at Squibb’s performance in the cutting room, alongside editor Harry Jierjian, who previously cut Fly Me To The Moon. “I laughed so much…the whole room was laughing,” says Johansson, praising Squibb’s impeccable comic timing. With Johansson now in the director’s chair, making artistic choices, it puts her in a position of strength that she maybe didn’t have as an actress. But Johansson has always been one of the Hollywood stars who was unafraid to speak her mind. In the past, she’s criticised the media’s obsession with body image and with objectifying her when she was younger. She’s also been an advocate for women issues, with everything from equal pay to reproductive rights. Now, as a 41 year-old mother-of-two, has it been easy to continue to speak up in this way? “I think I usually speak in my own voice,” she says. “I’m pretty comfortable being myself and continue to become more comfortable with being myself as I get older. It’s great. It’s maybe the best thing about getting older. There’s other things that suck and continue to suck more, but that part’s great.” The question remains, where does Johansson go next? This week, reports have circulated that she is close to signing on for an unspecified role in Matt Reeves’ blockbuster The Batman: Part II, opposite Robert Pattinson, which will only increase her box office clout. But what about directing? Could she ever see herself making a bigger film than Eleanor the Great? “As long as I felt like it was a film that had a good shot of people going to see it…that’s important.” Spoken like someone who truly understands the movie industry. Eleanor the Great is out now in UK cinemas. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Blue Moon review: Ethan Hawke and Andrew Scott shine in tender portrait of an artist
The new film from Richard Linklater focuses on American lyricist Lorenz Hart after his split from songwriting partner Richard Rodgers.
"He was the saddest man I ever knew." This quote from Mabel Mercer begins Blue Moon, Richard Linklater’s snapshot of Lorenz Hart. The American lyricist spent 25 years partnered with the younger Richard Rodgers, in which time they wrote such standards as My Funny Valentine and Blue Moon (a song that Manchester City fans have adopted as they own). But it was Rodgers’s next partnership, with Oscar Hammerstein, that is the one still remembered to this day. Set chiefly across one night, Blue Moon takes place on the cusp of this changing of the guard. It’s March 1943, and Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) have just unveiled their first collaboration, Oklahoma!, to 1600 enthusiastic audience members in New York. With the critics ecstatic, Hart (Ethan Hawke) leaves early to head to the after-party at famed midtown restaurant Sardi’s. Drinking heavily, he props himself up at the bar (run by Bobby Cannnavale), awaiting the arrival of Rodgers. "Am I bitter?" he announces. Of course he is. He knows that the "inoffensive" Oklahoma! will run and run. But he hates this "cornball" take on an Americana that never even existed. "Who wants inoffensive art?" he splutters. Speaking with all the grace and incision of Oscar Wilde, Hart has talent to burn; but it’s his struggles with alcohol that will be his undoing. Sponsored by Vue Save up to 30% on the latest releases at Vue in 2025 Are you a movie lover who always wants to be up to date with the latest releases? Then you're in luck, as RadioTimes.com readers can enjoy new films at Vue for less. Customers will receive up to 30% off films with Vue Pass, as long as they have a RadioTimes.com account. It's a great time for new releases, with films such as Wicked, Nosferatu, The Brutalist and Moana 2 taking UK cinemas by storm. Head to your nearest Vue to catch these movies and more for up to 30% less if you're signed up as a RadioTimes.com member. Save up to 30% with Vue Pass The film comes scripted by Robert Kaplow, who previously worked with Linklater on Me and Orson Welles, another film that dived into the American showbiz world of the era. This takes bigger risks, not least because it’s nearly all set inside Sardi’s as Hart holds court with anyone that will listen. The 1942 Humphrey Bogart classic Casablanca is referenced – there’s even a pianist (Jonah Lees) on hand to tinkle the ivories from time to time. There are some affectionate moments, not least when Hart is introduced to a young male admirer – and an aspiring director – who introduces himself as George Hill. "Be careful of love stories," Hart advises. "Think about friendship stories." George Roy Hill, to give him his full name, would go on to make one of the great friendship stories of all time, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Another encounter sees him meet "Stephen", a young musical theatre aficionado (who happens to be Stephen Sondheim) who seemingly has no love for Hart’s work. Read more: Wake Up Dead Man review – Is this the best Knives Out film yet? Wicked: For Good review – Oz saga conclusion will satisfy its extensive army of devotees Looking blonde and demure, Margaret Qualley pops up as Elizabeth Weiland, the young woman that Hart is obsessed by (although his sexuality, and his preferences for men, are frequently alluded to). Hawke, on his ninth movie with Linklater, is dexterous here in a difficult role, although some creative choices don’t work. The bald cap and combover worn by the actor are very distracting. Likewise, the fact that Hawke has been made to look shorter (Hart was under five foot in height) against his co-stars feels odd. Yet this is a sparkling script by Kaplow, brought to life by an enthusiastic Hawke, especially in his exchanges with Rodgers, when the man of the hour finally arrives. Sherlock and All of Us Strangers star Scott captures the essence of a creative catapulted into the stratosphere with real elan. Rather than leave Hart in the dust, he feels for his erstwhile partner. "I owe my professional life to you," he says. But their working relationship has become untenable. The longer Blue Moon goes on, the more tragic it becomes, as Hart is haunted by the songs he’s written, the love he yearns for and the career he is about to lose. Alcohol has taken a grip of him. It’s a tender – and sometimes affecting – portrait of the artist, one that hopefully will allow modern audiences to remember the contributions Lorenz Hart made to popular culture. Blue Moon is now showing in UK cinemas. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Jay Kelly review: George Clooney's comedy drama is glossy and navel-gazing – but Adam Sandler excels
Noah Baumbach’s new Netflix film plays like a loving tribute to its lead star.
★★★☆☆ Jay Kelly is in cinemas now and on Netflix from December 2025. Add it to your watchlist George Clooney skates close to his own life – or at least tries to make us think he is – in Noah Baumbach’s new film Jay Kelly. The story of a famous actor undergoing a late-career crisis, it’s an inward-looking navel-gaze that starts well but veers dangerously close to indulgence. Clooney pays the titular star, just wrapping up his latest movie, a corny-looking thriller called 'Eight Men from Now'. A multiple divorcee, he’s got two weeks before his next opus rolls, and he wants to spend it with younger daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards), only to discover she’s heading to Europe for the summer. Then two things happen to give him pause for thought. Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), the director who gave him his big break as a young actor, dies. And, at the funeral, he meets Tim (Billy Crudup), an old acting class buddy. As they catch up over a beer, it becomes clear Tim holds a grudge that Jay ‘stole’ his role at an audition way back when and they fight in the car park. The next day, and now sporting a black eye, Jay decides to ditch the new movie and fly to Paris to intercept Daisy. And so he takes a private plane with his entourage, including long-time manager Ron (Adam Sandler) and publicist Liz (Laura Dern), as well as his hair stylist (Emily Mortimer) and other assorted hangers-on. His excuse? That he’s going to attend a career tribute in Tuscany, one he previously rejected. The film’s central sequence, and its most amusing, sees Jay and his team on board a public train to Italy. With no first class, he has to sit with the “plebs”, as Stath Lets Flats’ Jamie Demetriou – one of the passengers – puts it. Amazed to see such a mega-star in the wild, they flock around him. “When I see you, I see my whole life,” cries one man, delighted, like something out of Fellini’s 8½. Behind the scenes, Ron and Liz are trying to firefight an escalating situation, as Tim looks to sue Jay for the injuries he suffered in their bar fight. Increasingly, Jay starts to reflect on his own life, especially his poor relationship with older daughter Jessica (Riley Keough). It doesn’t help when Ron’s other actor client Ben (Patrick Wilson) turns up to accept another tribute, with his lovely family in tow. Nor when his “working stiff” father (Stacy Keach) arrives, gently berating his son where possible. By this point, though, Baumbach’s movie is starting to wallow in cliché, especially with Alba Rohrwacher’s over-the-top ‘Eye-talian’ handler. View oEmbed on the source website At its best, Jay Kelly offers an understated performance from Sandler, reuniting here with Baumbach after 2017’s The Meyerowitz Stories. It’s a tender, heartfelt turn from Sandler, far removed from his comedic man-child schtick, as he plays a man who comes to realise he needs to support his own family (including his wife, played by Baumbach’s partner and Barbie co-writer Greta Gerwig), rather than devote his life to Kelly’s stardom. As for Baumbach, this glossy first team-up with Clooney feels far removed from the edgy indies he made with Gerwig like Frances Ha and Mistress America. In some ways, it feels like a tribute to Clooney (see the concluding montage, featuring clips of Clooney in Syriana, Leatherheads, The Thin Red Line and others). The trouble is, everyone knows Clooney’s life is not as empty as Jay Kelly’s; quite the opposite in fact. The desired effect, for us to feel for his character mid-crisis, never quite works.
10 Questions with George Clooney and Adam Sandler
The real-life Hollywood pals bring their bromance to the screen in new movie Jay Kelly
Add Jay Kelly to your watchlist Both fixtures on the Hollywood A-list, George Clooney and Adam Sandler have careers going back to the late 1980s. With that wealth of experience, it’s no wonder Clooney, 64, was cast as the titular movie star in Noah Baumbach’s sparkling new comedy-drama Jay Kelly, while Sandler, 59, plays his long-suffering manager, Ron, for ever trailing after him. They’re an unlikely pair, but they make quite the double act… George, your character Jay Kelly is a famous movie star. In your own life, did you ever consider if fame was really for you? GEORGE I don’t think you have the luxury of saying, “Well, I don’t know if I’m really up for fame” when you’re a young actor just trying to get a job. You’re not really thinking about fame. Have your careers and ambition changed over the years? George I have eight-year-old kids, so I had to change my career choices. Directing means 10 months on the road, so it’s not something I can do any more, because I want to be home. ADAM You’ll be back in 10 years! GEORGE It’s a lot easier to make those decisions later in life when you’ve succeeded. It’s a lot harder for people who have to make those decisions when they’re trying to make their mark. There’s certainly decisions that are made easier when you’re 64 and too old to be having young children. Adam, how have you juggled the work/life balance? ADAM I was raised in a family-comes-first home. I have an enormous amount of guilt if I’m not with my family. If I’m away too long, I’m feeling it the whole time. So, prioritising family came easy. You’re familiar faces — how do you cope with being recognised? ADAM I jump in there. I live my life and don’t really change much. It’s a different energy when you walk into a restaurant, everybody knows you and says hello. But then that calms down, and life feels good. Which of each other’s performances have you admired? GEORGE I was so blown away by The Meyerowitz Stories. There’s a gentleness and a vulnerability that’s very hard to do as an actor… you stole that show. ADAM How about I just talk about George’s play [Good Night, and Good Luck]? What he did setting records all over Broadway… I was baffled with how steady, how charismatic you were, and how deep the performance was. You’ve both starred in comedy and intense dramas. Which is harder to play? GEORGE Comedy feels infinitely more stressful. I feel like there’s more pressure on you. Adam, do people come up to you all the time and go, “Be funny?” ADAM That has happened. I don’t usually rise to the occasion. GEORGE Well, you’re not right now, that’s for sure. You’re bringing us all down! Jay Kelly had cheesecake as one of the demands on his rider. What’s on yours? ADAM In the early days, if it was hot, I would go, “Oh God, why is it so damn hot in here?” Somehow that later became “Adam likes it cold”. After that, I would walk onto set and it’s freezing and when I asked, “Why is it like this?” They would say, “You like this, right?” I said it one time! That’s my cheesecake. Jay is forced to come face-to-face with the people he has wronged from his past. Do you believe it’s ever possible to fix what’s behind us? GEORGE I would hope so, because I’ve often tried to repair things. I’ve come to people and said, “I didn’t handle that very well.” You hope to be able to do that, but sometimes maybe not. Are you still in touch with old friends? GEORGE Thom Mathews [a US actor]… we went on the same auditions all the time. If I didn’t get it, I wanted him to get it. So there was a great camaraderie. He and I have been friends for over 40 years. ADAM I’m in touch with a lot of people from the old days, but Jay Kelly definitely made me feel for the people who have been with me this whole time. When I had a movie open up at the box office and it did well, I’d call the guys who work with me, and they were feeling exactly what I was feeling. This excitement. And then when I had ones where I’d get punched in the face, they were feeling that too. Jay and Ron have an interesting relationship — how do you get on with your own agents? GEORGE My agent is a guy named Bryan Lourd, who’s one of the great guys in the business. He’s also one of my best friends. He and I have four schools that we put together across the country, getting young people who don’t look male and white working in editing and visual effects. So my relationship with him is nothing but admiration and respect. And I’m really happy to say that because I’ve been in situations with agents 25 years ago where none of that was true. ADAM I’ve had several over the years. I stole from all of them [to play Ron]. Man, it’s a selfless job. You’re all about the client, and I enjoyed being that man for George. But not in real life!
Jay Kelly stars George Clooney and Adam Sandler reveal how age has changed ambitions and talk correcting past mistakes
The real-life Hollywood pals bring their bromance to the screen in new movie Jay Kelly.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Both fixtures on the Hollywood A-list, George Clooney and Adam Sandler have careers going back to the late 1980s. With that wealth of experience, it’s no wonder Clooney, 64, was cast as the titular movie star in Noah Baumbach’s sparkling new comedy-drama Jay Kelly, while Sandler, 59, plays his long-suffering manager, Ron, for ever trailing after him. They’re an unlikely pair, but they make quite the double act… George, your character Jay Kelly is a famous movie star. In your own life, did you ever consider if fame was really for you? GEORGE CLOONEY: I don’t think you have the luxury of saying, “Well, I don’t know if I’m really up for fame” when you’re a young actor just trying to get a job. You’re not really thinking about fame. Have your careers and ambition changed over the years? GEORGE: I have eight-year-old kids, so I had to change my career choices. Directing means 10 months on the road, so it’s not something I can do any more, because I want to be home. ADAM SANDLER: You’ll be back in 10 years! GEORGE: It’s a lot easier to make those decisions later in life when you’ve succeeded. It’s a lot harder for people who have to make those decisions when they’re trying to make their mark. There’s certainly decisions that are made easier when you’re 64 and too old to be having young children. Adam, how have you juggled the work/life balance? ADAM: I was raised in a family-comes-first home. I have an enormous amount of guilt if I’m not with my family. If I’m away too long, I’m feeling it the whole time. So, prioritising family came easy. You’re familiar faces – how do you cope with being recognised? ADAM: I jump in there. I live my life and don’t really change much. It’s a different energy when you walk into a restaurant, everybody knows you and says hello. But then that calms down, and life feels good. Which of each other’s performances have you admired? GEORGE: I was so blown away by The Meyerowitz Stories. There’s a gentleness and a vulnerability that’s very hard to do as an actor… you stole that show. ADAM: How about I just talk about George’s play [Good Night, and Good Luck]? What he did setting records all over Broadway... I was baffled with how steady, how charismatic you were, and how deep the performance was. You’ve both starred in comedy and intense dramas. Which is harder to play? GEORGE: Comedy feels infinitely more stressful. I feel like there’s more pressure on you. Adam, do people come up to you all the time and go, “Be funny?” ADAM: That has happened. I don’t usually rise to the occasion. GEORGE: Well, you’re not right now, that’s for sure. You’re bringing us all down! View oEmbed on the source website Jay Kelly had cheesecake as one of the demands on his rider. What’s on yours? ADAM: In the early days, if it was hot, I would go, “Oh God, why is it so damn hot in here?” Somehow that later became “Adam likes it cold”. After that, I would walk onto set and it’s freezing and when I asked, “Why is it like this?” They would say, “You like this, right?” I said it one time! That’s my cheesecake. Jay is forced to come face-to-face with the people he has wronged from his past. Do you believe it’s ever possible to fix what’s behind us? GEORGE: I would hope so, because I’ve often tried to repair things. I’ve come to people and said, “I didn’t handle that very well.” You hope to be able to do that, but sometimes maybe not. Are you still in touch with old friends? GEORGE: Thom Mathews [a US actor]... we went on the same auditions all the time. If I didn’t get it, I wanted him to get it. So there was a great camaraderie. He and I have been friends for over 40 years. ADAM: I’m in touch with a lot of people from the old days, but Jay Kelly definitely made me feel for the people who have been with me this whole time. When I had a movie open up at the box office and it did well, I’d call the guys who work with me, and they were feeling exactly what I was feeling. This excitement. And then when I had ones where I’d get punched in the face, they were feeling that too. Jay and Ron have an interesting relationship – how do you get on with your own agents? GEORGE: My agent is a guy named Bryan Lourd, who’s one of the great guys in the business. He’s also one of my best friends. He and I have four schools that we put together across the country, getting young people who don’t look male and white working in editing and visual effects. So my relationship with him is nothing but admiration and respect. And I’m really happy to say that because I’ve been in situations with agents 25 years ago where none of that was true. ADAM I’ve had several over the years. I stole from all of them [to play Ron]. Man, it’s a selfless job. You’re all about the client, and I enjoyed being that man for George. But not in real life! The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday – subscribe here. Jay Kelly is available to stream on Netflix from 5 December. Add Jay Kelly to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Wicked: For Good review – Oz saga conclusion will satisfy its extensive army of devotees
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are back in top, lung-busting form in another wondrous, multi-colour extravaganza.
After last year’s Wicked: Part I, we’re back for some more Ozploitation. Jon M Chu’s two-part adaptation has already been a wild ride, tapping into the perennial enthusiasm for the long-running stage show by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, which itself came inspired both by Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel and, of course, Hollywood Golden Age musical The Wizard of Oz. Part I conjured a healthy $756 million global box office, followed by ten Oscar nominations and two wins. There’s no reason to think Wicked: For Good won’t perform the same trick, or better it, with Chu bringing events to a rousing close. While he infuses enthusiasm into every frame, the same can be said for his leading ladies. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are back in top, lung-busting form as, respectively, the pink-hued Glinda the Good and Elphaba, the green-skinned witch who has been cast out of Oz, thanks to the machinations of the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum, wickedly charming as ever), the ultimately carney-man. Now in exile, the demonised Elphaba’s name has been stained by the Wizard, in league with her one-time tutor, the former Dean of Sorcery at Shiz University, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh, still wearing that delicious Mr Whippy ice-cream hair-do). The slightly vapid Glinda, meanwhile, thinks they need to be trademarking the word "good", while she’s also caught up in preparations for her impending wedding to Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who has been charged with capturing Elphaba. Early on, we see her deftly flying her broomstick and causing disruption as workers build the famed Yellow Brick Road – and that won’t be the only reference to The Wizard of Oz. Wicked: For Good weaves around events of the 1939 movie, as a certain house from Kansas comes tumbling from the sky. Chu, wisely, never makes this about Dorothy, Toto and the others, but rather places them in the backdrop – a move that respectfully doesn’t trample on the memory of the iconic star of the original, Judy Garland. There are new songs penned by Schwartz – No Place Like Home and The Girl in the Bubble. But you’d be hard pressed to claim these lift the show into a new stratosphere. And in truth, whether or not splicing the stage show in two was a cash grab, you’re always left wondering what a one-movie approach would’ve been like. Try as he might, Chu doesn’t quite generate the same emotional heft as the previous film, but that’s always likely when the audience has been made to pause halfway through the story. View oEmbed on the source website Despite some cool visual treats (flying monkeys!), there’s also some questionable CGI/make-up effects involving both Goldblum and Bailey, in a meme-worthy transformation, and a lot less of Bowen Yang, as Pfannee, which is a shame. But gripes aside, it hardly matters when you’ve got Erivo and Grande hitting the highest of notes. Both Oscar nominees last time out, in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories respectively, it’d be no shock if Academy voters were keeping their powder dry to award these divas this time around. In both cases, it’d be richly deserved. Read more: Keeper review: An unsettling, compelling but ultimately unsatisfying chiller from Oz Perkins The Running Man review: Glen Powell proves a charismatic hero in Edgar Wright remake There are some lovely interactions – including one hilarious fight – as Glinda confronts her feelings about Elphaba, whose quest to save the animals, banned from Oz along with the Munchkin people, has led her to this life on the outside. Once again, Nathan Crowley’s production design is wondrous, a multi-colour extravaganza that truly brings Oz to life. Simply spending time there – with its fields of tulips and fireworks in the sky – is one of the great pleasures of this movie. A film that will surely satisfy Wicked’s extensive army of devotees. Wicked: For Good is scheduled for release in UK cinemas on 21st November 2025. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Wicked: For Good review – A conclusion of the Oz saga to surely satisfy its extensive army of devotees
Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo return in top, lung-busting form for another wondrous, multi-colour extravaganza.
★★★★☆ Wicked: For Good is in cinemas from 21 November. Add it to your watchlist After last year’s Wicked: Part I, we’re back for some more Ozploitation. Jon M Chu’s two-part adaptation has already been a wild ride, tapping into the perennial enthusiasm for the long-running stage show by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, which itself came inspired both by Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel and, of course, Hollywood Golden Age musical The Wizard of Oz. Part I conjured a healthy $756 million global box office, followed by ten Oscar nominations and two wins. There’s no reason to think Wicked: For Good won’t perform the same trick, or better it, with Chu bringing events to a rousing close. While he infuses enthusiasm into every frame, the same can be said for his leading ladies. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are back in top, lung-busting form as, respectively, the pink-hued Glinda the Good and Elphaba, the green-skinned witch who has been cast out of Oz, thanks to the machinations of the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum, wickedly charming as ever), the ultimately carney-man. Now in exile, the demonised Elphaba’s name has been stained by the Wizard, in league with her one-time tutor, the former Dean of Sorcery at Shiz University, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh, still wearing that delicious Mr. Whippy ice-cream hair-do). The slightly vapid Glinda, meanwhile, thinks they need to be trademarking the word "good", while she’s also caught up in preparations for her impending wedding to Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), who has been charged with capturing Elphaba. Early on, we see her deftly flying her broomstick and causing disruption as workers build the famed Yellow Brick Road – and that won’t be the only reference to The Wizard of Oz. Wicked: For Good weaves around events of the 1939 movie, as a certain house from Kansas comes tumbling from the sky. Chu, wisely, never makes this about Dorothy, Toto and the others, but rather places them in the backdrop – a move that respectfully doesn’t trample on the memory of the iconic star of the original, Judy Garland. View oEmbed on the source website There are new songs penned by Schwartz – No Place Like Home and The Girl In The Bubble. But you’d be hard pressed to claim these lift the show into a new stratosphere. And in truth, whether or not splicing the stage show in two was a cash grab, you’re always left wondering what a one-movie approach would’ve been like. Try as he might, Chu doesn’t quite generate the same emotional heft as the previous film, but that’s always likely when the audience has been made to pause halfway through the story. Despite some cool visual treats (flying monkeys!), there’s also some questionable CGI/makeup effects involving both Goldblum and Bailey, in a meme-worthy transformation, and a lot less of Bowen Yang, as Pfannee, which is a shame. But gripes aside, it hardly matters when you’ve got Erivo and Grande hitting the highest of notes. Both Oscar nominees last time out, in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories respectively, it’d be no shock if Academy voters were keeping their powder dry to award these divas this time around. In both cases, it’d be richly deserved. There are some lovely interactions – including one hilarious fight – as Glinda confronts her feelings about Elphaba, whose quest to save the animals, banned from Oz along with the Munchkin people, has led her to this life on the outside. Once again, Nathan Crowley’s production design is wondrous, a multi-colour extravaganza that truly brings Oz to life. Simply spending time there – with its fields of tulips and fireworks in the sky – is one of the great pleasures of this movie. A film that will surely satisfy Wicked’s extensive army of devotees.
Dragonfly review: Brenda Blethyn is at her very best in frequently heartbreaking film
This new film from writer/director Paul Andrew Williams is a bleak but captivating study of loneliness and social care set in contemporary Britain.
Two actors, among the very best of their respective generations, come together for Dragonfly, a bleak but captivating study of loneliness and social care set in contemporary Britain. Brenda Blethyn plays Elsie, an ageing pensioner who lives in a semi-detached bungalow. Elsie has been a widow for 13 years and has one son, John (Jason Watkins), who rarely visits. The only people she regularly sees are the carousel of care workers who bustle in to wash her and fix her tea before scooting off to their next appointment. Next door is Coleen (Andrea Riseborough). She lives alone with her bullish-looking dog, an animal she loves dearly but barely has control over. Her hair scraped back, her skin is pale and, despite her protests to the contrary, she looks far older than her 35 years. Living on benefits, she slouches on the sofa all day watching TV, sinking into a malaise. But gradually, she finds company when she offers to buy provisions for Elsie from the corner shop. From this little acorn, an oak tree of friendship grows, as these two lost souls find solace together. Writing and directing is British filmmaker Paul Andrew Williams, who adds yet another intriguing addition to his body-of-work, one that kickstarted with the visceral London to Brighton almost two decades ago. Williams errs on the darker side in his films, as his last movie, the 2021 hallucinatory revenge tale Bull shows, and Dragonfly is no different. The companionship that Elsie and Coleen conjure is destined to take a disturbing twist, although it’s likely you won’t see it coming until it’s too late. The film toys with social realism, albeit on Williams’s terms. The low-key electronic score by Raffertie, who previously scored Oscar-nominated horror The Substance, occasionally punctuates unsettling shots of Elsie’s home, empty hallways and so on that suggest how little she has left in her life. Shooting in natural light, there’s a gloom that envelops this film, made more poignant when Elsie suddenly cries out at one of her care workers, “What’s my name? You don’t know, do you?” Casually, this is a portrait of Britain at breaking point. A busted flush. Opening with shots of a depressed-looking British town centre (it was filmed in West Yorkshire), Williams never patronises his characters, or the positions they are in. Despite the bleakness, he mines a strain of gentle humour, notably when Coleen buys a walkie talkie set so the two can chat. Needless to say, Elsie struggles with the buttons. “I can hear you better through the door,” she wails, amusingly. But, as funny as this is, those rudimentary communication devices take on a more poignant meaning later in the film. Blethyn arguably hasn’t had a role this good since Mike Leigh’s 1995 Cannes-winning Secrets & Lies, although any comparisons to Leigh should be dismissed. Williams’s approach has sharper teeth than Leigh’s domestic portraits, as good as they are. Riseborough, meanwhile, is at her chameleonic best here. It’s remarkable that two decades into her career, one that’s seen her work frequently in Hollywood, she’s still almost unrecognisable from role to role. Here, she sinks right into Coleen, a woman who has suffered a painful existence, living on government hand-outs, her mental health hitting the red zone. Williams handles her with care for the most part, although one shot of her face pressed against Elsie’s door feels overcooked. She and Blethyn have been nominated at the forthcoming British Independent Film Awards for Best Joint Performance, and it feels an entirely apt choice. They play off each other brilliantly, the centrepiece in this highly astute and frequently heartbreaking film. Dragonfly is in UK cinemas from Friday 7th November 2025. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Kenny Dalglish reflects on his glory years, the tragedy of Hillsborough and the joy of still attending Anfield
The Liverpool and Celtic legend is the subject of a new documentary from Amy and Senna director Asif Kapadia.
When Kenny Dalglish took to the stage at London’s Picturehouse Central cinema recently, accompanied by his daughter and Match of the Day presenter Kelly Cates, the Liverpool footballing legend was in wonderfully jovial form. In front of friends and admirers, including ex-player Jamie Carragher and actor Damian Lewis, he was there to present Kenny Dalglish – the new documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Asif Kapadia. The 74-year-old Glaswegian joked that he was the first of Kapadia’s subjects to be alive – a nod to the director’s multi award-winning docs Senna, Amy and Maradona, which took on, respectively, the tragic tales of Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna, singer Amy Winehouse and football icon Diego Maradona. The man they call ‘King Kenny’ is a very different prospect – at once a man of the people and one of the greatest footballers of his generation. Kapadia’s film steers us through Dalglish’s early years and his time at Celtic before, in 1977, Liverpool manager Bob Paisley paid a British transfer record of £440,000 to bring the striker south of the border as a replacement for the departing Kevin Keegan. As he always does with his documentaries, Kapadia doesn’t feature talking heads, but rather mixes candid audio recordings of his interviewees and compelling archive clips. “There wasn’t a camera, there wasn’t a crew, there wasn’t lots of people, it was quite relaxed,” says Kapadia, who did most of the recordings in Liverpool, sitting Dalglish down with a cup of tea and some Dairy Milk chocolate. Their exchanges were often humorous, Dalglish even telling Kapadia to get a haircut before one recording session. One day, Kapadia couldn’t make it to Liverpool, and Dalglish came down on the train (arriving suited and booted, “for an audio interview!” the director laughs). “Most people don't do that. You have to go to them.“ It’s just one example of how down-to-earth Dalglish is. Can you imagine David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo jumping on British Rail without an entourage? Here is a man, as Kapadia’s film so carefully points out, who always put the collective ahead of the individual. In 1977, Dalglish’s arrival at Liverpool coincided with the club’s most successful period, winning three European cups and six First Division leagues during his time as a player. “I think it's nice to reminisce when you’ve been through what I’ve done. It’s brilliant isn't it?” Dalglish tells me, cheerfully, when we meet. “Obviously, there’s some other things you wouldn’t want to be repeated, which has nothing to do with a game. It’s to do with what happened at a game. So that’s emotive and touching.” He is, of course, referring to the events he witnessed at both Heysel and Hillsborough, two of the most horrifying tragedies to ever take place inside football grounds. The first, in 1985, took place on the night that Liverpool played Juventus in the European Cup Final. 39 souls, mostly Juventus supporters, lost their lives, when a wall collapsed following an altercation with Liverpool fans. Shortly afterwards, Liverpool’s manager Joe Fagan resigned and Dalglish took over, initially as player-manager. Even then, the idea of a player-manager was a rarity. “Especially at 34 years of age,” he says. “But if they were prepared to take a chance, then what right did I have to say no?” Dalglish’s first year in charge ended with Liverpool winning the double – shockingly, it remains the only time still the club has won the league title and the FA Cup in the same year. Needless to say, Kapadia features the iconic moment when Dalglish famously clinched the league for Liverpool on the final day of the 1985-’86 season, scoring the only goal in the game against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Again, Dalglish is not one to accept the glory all for himself. “That was only a culmination of some fantastic work a load of other guys had done for me. On and off the pitch. I mean, remember Ronnie Moran, Roy Evans, Tom Saunders, they were there beside us off the pitch and on the pitch, every single one of them was an ally. So I thought that [scoring the winner] was a nice way to say thank you!” Kapadia’s film largely skips over Dalglish’s international career (he won 102 caps in fifteen years for Scotland and played in three World Cups), focusing on his time at Liverpool. The 1987-’88 season remains a high point in the club’s history, winning the league with a stylish team Dalglish rebuilt, bringing in John Barnes, Peter Beardsley, John Aldridge and Ray Houghton. Again Dalglish deflects praise away from himself and onto the club. “I gave them a list in players, and they brought them in,” he shrugs. Kapadia, a devoted Liverpool FC fan, remembered Dalglish from his childhood, and wanted to make a love letter to him and to a time before Sky Sports and the Premier League changed football irrevocably. “When I started this film, I thought, ‘Is it possible to make a film about Kenny and just talk about football? Can I just make a football film about him?’ But then I spoke to people and they said, ‘Well, you missed the point of the man.’” Dalglish may not be a politician, but his time with Liverpool showed him as a resolute leader in the wake of the Hillsborough tragedy, which ultimately saw 97 fans lose their lives due to overcrowding on the terraces during the 1989 FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest. Dalglish led the club with dignity during this period, attending funerals and remaining on the side of the fans, even when they were falsely accused of vile behaviour. There’s no doubt its a chilling moment in the film, whether you’ve seen the footage before or not. Kapadia reports of a screening they had for the survivors of Hillsborough and their families recently in Liverpool. “It was so emotional. And Kenny was there. He spoke to everyone. He knows most of them, of course, as you would. So I feel like that's another part of the story, telling his story, but him also saying, ‘We’re not going to forget what you did.’ I think that's really important.” As the film shows, Liverpool FC was in turmoil after that, the board, players and manager uncertain whether to even continue in the FA Cup. Eventually, it was decided they would carry on – and the team beat Forest in the re-arranged semi-final to set up a date with their Merseyside neighbours Everton (a repeat of the 1986 FA Cup final, when Liverpool won the double). This time, they won 3-2, a game that Dalglish calls the “the most meaningful success” in his time at the club. "For me, that’s the most relevant. It was unfortunate if you were an Evertonian, because the world and his dog was against them, wasn’t it? Everybody wanted us to win it. But in saying that it also put pressure on the boys that were playing." As emotional as that was, Hillsborough took its toll on Dalglish, who ultimately resigned in 1991. “I was just fortunate enough that I could make that decision,” he reflects. “There’s a lot of people who go past the point of no return and, medically, I was glad that I was able to make that decision. I wasn’t happy with the decision I had to make, but it was necessary. In some ways you’re happy that you were able to do that. In other ways, you're disappointed it came to that level.” While Kapadia’s film stops with Dalglish’s departure, his career continued, becoming the only manager to win the Premier League with Blackburn in 1995. He later returned for a second spell at Liverpool in 2011 after the sacking of Roy Hodgson during a particularly barren period for the club. Dalglish led the team to its first trophy in five years, a League Cup win against Cardiff in 2012, and an FA Cup Final appearance the same year. “I was glad I went back. It was a huge honour to be able to go back, and to win a trophy during that spell, and to get to the final of the FA Cup as well in the same year…[that] was very rewarding. We were a wee bit in transition then, changing over. But as I say, enjoyed it, and I'd still make the same decision again.” With humility, he adds: “The unfortunate thing about getting back is a very, very good man lost his job – and that was Roy.” You might say this is typical of Dalglish. “This idea of caring for people, doing the right thing…that’s how he was brought up in Glasgow,” says Kapadia. “I think that's what comes across...it’s always doing the right thing for your people, whether it’s your family, whether it’s your team, whether it’s the city.” Unsurprisingly, a willing roster of family, friends and fans speak about Dalglish in the film, including teammates Alan Hansen and Graeme Souness and Beatles star Paul McCartney. These days Dalglish can still regularly be seen attending games at Liverpool’s ground, Anfield. “It's always important to get enjoyment of your life, isn't it?” he says. “Going to Anfield, it's never going to be a chore, is it? It’s always going to be tinged with happiness.” I jokingly ask if he’d consider a third spell as manager of the club. “That means somebody’s been unsuccessful,” he replies. When it comes to Kenny Dalglish, there really is no ‘i’ in team. Kenny Dalglish is now streaming on Prime Video. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
As Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein lurches into life, the director reveals how true horror has seen him tackle ‘the real monsters’ – inside and out
Frankenstein is in cinemas now and on Netflix from 7 Nov. Add it to your watchlist. A director who has given us some of the most indelible monsters in screen history, Guillermo del Toro has had a fascination with the macabre from an early age. Very early. He was no more than two when he saw an episode of TV series The Outer Limits. “I got scared so bad that I started dreaming of monsters in a lucid way,” he recalls. “I would wake up in my room and there would be creatures that were not real… I offered to become their friend if they let me climb out of the crib to go to the bathroom.” Across his childhood in Mexico and a three-decade career in Hollywood, Del Toro has made peace with those monsters. Think of the Pale Man, the humanoid with eyeballs in his palms, in 2006 fascism allegory Pan’s Labyrinth. Or the amphibious captive in 2017’s The Shape of Water, the film that won Del Toro two of his three Oscars (the third was for his beautifully animated Pinocchio in 2022). Now the director is taking on the greatest monster of them all: the Creature at the heart of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, in a mesmerising adaptation starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. Del Toro was 11 when he first read the gothic classic, a Spanish-language copy he picked up in a supermarket that he still has to this day. But his obsession was fired four years earlier, when he saw Boris Karloff’s unsettling monster in James Whale’s seminal 1931 Frankenstein. He calls it his St Paul on the road to Damascus moment. “I went into some sort of seizure of joy,” he says, when we meet at the Venice Film Festival, where his impeccably crafted Frankenstein received its world premiere. Now 61, he’s dreamed of making this film his entire career – longer, even. “I wanted to make this movie before I had a camera, before I knew what a camera was,” he explains. “There are a few seminal figures in my childhood that loom large. Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera, Dr Frankenstein, the Hunchback, Pinocchio. And those are sort of my holy touchstones. Because I identify. I identify with the Hunchback. I identify with the Phantom. I identify with the Creature of Frankenstein. You take pieces of self from the world and create a composite.” All his life, he’s collected Frankenstein memorabilia – including a life-size sculpture of Karloff by Mike Hill, the creature designer who worked on Frankenstein. Del Toro, who has been married to American critic and screenwriter Kim Morgan since 2021, has them all on display at home. “I call that area the living room,” he chuckles. “When you go to a Catholic home, you see Virgin Marys. You see crucifixions on the walls. They’re the same in my house, but for monsters.” A reaction to his strict Catholic upbringing, perhaps. Raised in Guadalajara, he had a privileged childhood – not least because his father Federico won the lottery when Del Toro was small. A car dealer, Del Toro Senior had always been strict with money. But after the windfall, two things made an incredible impact on his son. “Firstly, we could go to Disneyland every year. Which was very formative for me. The second thing is that somebody told him, ‘Now that you are rich, you should have a library.’ And my dad bought a bunch of books that he never, ever read. But I did. That changed my life.” Del Toro devoured encyclopaedias of art and anatomy, which became his roadmap for Frankenstein, the timeless story of a scientist who recklessly plays creator, bringing life to a cadaver, stitched together from body parts. With Oscar Isaac cast as egomaniac Dr Victor Frankenstein, the 6ft 5in Jacob Elordi, star of Saltburn and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is the perfect Creature – physically imposing, yet struck by the wonder of the world as he experiences it afresh. For Del Toro, it was all in Elordi’s eyes. “When I saw them, I said, ‘This is the Creature. No doubt about it.’” One of the most faithful adaptations of Shelley’s book, the film is a sure-fire front-runner in this year’s Oscar race. But for Del Toro, it’s bigger than that. It’s about evolution. Once upon a time, his movies were “close to fairy tales or fables where the monster was good and the humans were bad”. Then came 2021 period noir Nightmare Alley, with Bradley Cooper. “That was the first time that I really thought, ‘Well, can the protagonist be the antagonist?’ And Frankenstein is that, too. Can the protagonist be the antagonist? Can the monster also kill people instead of being just a victim?” Although Del Toro prefers the word “creature” to “monster”, which has a more human connotation. “Monsters in real life have expensive suits and wear smiles on TV. That’s the real monstrosity,” he says. “When you say, ‘Country, motherland, patriotism’, these are things that sound very good, but the way they are enacted is monstrous. Or when people are selling the marvels of AI, and at the same time they’re saying, ‘Look, knowledge is not important. You have an app. Ask it.’ At the purely biological point of view, your synapse is not going to fire. How is that good for you?” Politicians and tech moguls aside – the obvious villains of our time – Del Toro has experienced real monsters. In 1998, his father was kidnapped, with a $1 million ransom demanded. Del Toro was broke; he’d sunk all his money on 1997’s Mimic, and had also made a loss of $250,000 on his 1992 debut film, Cronos. Fortunately, his friend – Titanic director James Cameron – gave him the money to hire a hostage negotiator, who saw to it that Federico was freed after 72 days. Even now, Del Toro gets the shakes thinking about it. “Since my father was kidnapped I simply have an amount of PTSD that I cannot really handle, because it’s on a visceral level.” Returning to Mexico [he has homes in Toronto and Los Angeles] still gives him the fear. “I go back, I go back, and I love going back, but very soon I feel shortness of breath, or I feel agitation, and then I leave.” The abduction was “second in my catalogue of pain”, he says, now almost in a foetal position. “I think Mimic was worse.” The sci-fi/horror brought fierce clashes with now-jailed producer Harvey Weinstein. Since Mimic, Del Toro craftily built up his Hollywood stock, switching between big-budget studio pictures such as Blade II (2002) and Pacific Rim (2013) and more personal films such as The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Crimson Peak, his 2015 gothic drama that, in many ways, was an aesthetic dress rehearsal for Frankenstein. While there have been high-profile disappointments – notably, pulling out of The Hobbit in 2010 – he’s one of those rare directors who is able to paint his visions on a grand scale. But it has been far from easy. When it comes to being a director, “You have to be a mixture of a poet and a boxer and a pusher,” he says. “What I hate is when people say ‘visionary’. It’s like you’re on ayahuasca on a chaise longue! You’re not. You’re crossing the jungle with a machete.” Del Toro may joke that he’s been “cursed” with his bulky physique, but there is something of the adventurer or athlete about him. “It’s a contact sport, making movies. It’s not a delicate, languishing, dictation of poetry.” Since 2022, he’s worked with Netflix – Pinocchio, anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities (both 2022) and now Frankenstein. It will be shown in a few cinemas, but Del Toro is unconcerned that most people will watch Frankenstein at home, on a small screen. “I saw 90 per cent of my Universal monster movies as a kid on TV,” he shrugs. He also understands how the business works these days. “First of all, you make it for whoever pays for it.” Never mind the size of the screen, he adds: “What you don’t sacrifice is the size of the ideas.” Fortunately for Del Toro, horror is a box office evergreen. “I think that we need horror to understand the world, because beauty can be pretty oppressive,” he reasons. “Horror is very liberating.” It’s also the perfect genre to smuggle across different ideas, “from the flights of philosophy of David Cronenberg; the social horror of Jordan Peele; or straight-down scare-horror, beautifully executed, like [Zach Cregger’s 2025 film] Weapons, which I adored.” Now, with Frankenstein finally on our screens, Del Toro is in mourning. “There’s a bereavement and an achievement at the same time,” he says. So what next? He recalls A History of Violence director Cronenberg, “a friend for almost 30 years”, once telling him: “The only way to stay alive as a director is to try something that is different and that scares you into being someone else.” To that end, he’s planning a violent thriller, Fury, with Oscar Isaac in the lead. Maybe this time he’ll find the monster within.
Guillermo del Toro reveals his favourite horror films
The director of Frankenstein says choosing just a few of his favourite horror films is an impossible task, but he's happy to have a go…
Add Frankenstein to your watchlist What are your favourite horror films? It’s difficult. It’s like, what are your favourite dishes? You want a burger and a pizza? I can show you great burgers and pizzas. Or if you want a five-star deconstructive molecular cuisine, I’ll give you another list. If I was looking for scary horrors, then I would say the original Ring, Jaws, Alien, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And I would say Weapons too. Those are very scary to me. If you wanted to think "moving", I would say Creature From The Black Lagoon, Charles Laughton’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, and [the 1931 film] Frankenstein.
Emotive reason Jacob Elordi was cast as Frankenstein’s Monster revealed by Guillermo del Toro as director also shares his family trauma
“When I saw them, I said, ‘This is the Creature. No doubt about it.’”
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. A director who has given us some of the most indelible monsters in screen history, Guillermo del Toro has had a fascination with the macabre from an early age. Very early. He was no more than two when he saw an episode of TV series The Outer Limits. “I got scared so bad that I started dreaming of monsters in a lucid way,” he recalls. “I would wake up in my room and there would be creatures that were not real… I offered to become their friend if they let me climb out of the crib to go to the bathroom.” Across his childhood in Mexico and a three-decade career in Hollywood, Del Toro has made peace with those monsters. Think of the Pale Man, the humanoid with eyeballs in his palms, in 2006 fascism allegory Pan’s Labyrinth. Or the amphibious captive in 2017’s The Shape of Water, the film that won Del Toro two of his three Oscars (the third was for his beautifully animated Pinocchio in 2022). Now the director is taking on the greatest monster of them all: the Creature at the heart of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, in a mesmerising adaptation starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi. Del Toro was 11 when he first read the gothic classic, a Spanish-language copy he picked up in a supermarket that he still has to this day. But his obsession was fired four years earlier, when he saw Boris Karloff’s unsettling monster in James Whale’s seminal 1931 Frankenstein. He calls it his St Paul on the road to Damascus moment. “I went into some sort of seizure of joy,” he says, when we meet at the Venice Film Festival, where his impeccably crafted Frankenstein received its world premiere. Now 61, he’s dreamed of making this film his entire career – longer, even. “I wanted to make this movie before I had a camera, before I knew what a camera was,” he explains. “There are a few seminal figures in my childhood that loom large. Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera, Dr Frankenstein, the Hunchback, Pinocchio. And those are sort of my holy touchstones. Because I identify. I identify with the Hunchback. I identify with the Phantom. I identify with the Creature of Frankenstein. You take pieces of self from the world and create a composite.” All his life, he’s collected Frankenstein memorabilia – including a life-size sculpture of Karloff by Mike Hill, the creature designer who worked on Frankenstein. Del Toro, who has been married to American critic and screenwriter Kim Morgan since 2021, has them all on display at home. “I call that area the living room,” he chuckles. “When you go to a Catholic home, you see Virgin Marys. You see crucifixions on the walls. They’re the same in my house, but for monsters.” A reaction to his strict Catholic upbringing, perhaps. Raised in Guadalajara, he had a privileged childhood – not least because his father Federico won the lottery when Del Toro was small. A car dealer, Del Toro Senior had always been strict with money. But after the windfall, two things made an incredible impact on his son. “Firstly, we could go to Disneyland every year. Which was very formative for me. The second thing is that somebody told him, ‘Now that you are rich, you should have a library.’ And my dad bought a bunch of books that he never, ever read. But I did. That changed my life.” Del Toro devoured encyclopaedias of art and anatomy, which became his roadmap for Frankenstein, the timeless story of a scientist who recklessly plays creator, bringing life to a cadaver, stitched together from body parts. With Oscar Isaac cast as egomaniac Dr Victor Frankenstein, the 6ft 5in Jacob Elordi, star of Saltburn and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, is the perfect Creature – physically imposing, yet struck by the wonder of the world as he experiences it afresh. For Del Toro, it was all in Elordi’s eyes. “When I saw them, I said, ‘This is the Creature. No doubt about it.’” One of the most faithful adaptations of Shelley’s book, the film is a sure-fire front-runner in this year’s Oscar race. But for Del Toro, it’s bigger than that. It’s about evolution. Once upon a time, his movies were “close to fairy tales or fables where the monster was good and the humans were bad”. Then came 2021 period noir Nightmare Alley, with Bradley Cooper. “That was the first time that I really thought, ‘Well, can the protagonist be the antagonist?’ And Frankenstein is that, too. Can the protagonist be the antagonist? Can the monster also kill people instead of being just a victim?” Although Del Toro prefers the word “creature” to “monster”, which has a more human connotation. “Monsters in real life have expensive suits and wear smiles on TV. That’s the real monstrosity,” he says. “When you say, ‘Country, motherland, patriotism’, these are things that sound very good, but the way they are enacted is monstrous. Or when people are selling the marvels of AI, and at the same time they’re saying, ‘Look, knowledge is not important. You have an app. Ask it.’ At the purely biological point of view, your synapse is not going to fire. How is that good for you?” Politicians and tech moguls aside – the obvious villains of our time – Del Toro has experienced real monsters. In 1998, his father was kidnapped, with a $1 million ransom demanded. Del Toro was broke; he’d sunk all his money on 1997’s Mimic, and had also made a loss of $250,000 on his 1992 debut film, Cronos. Fortunately, his friend – Titanic director James Cameron – gave him the money to hire a hostage negotiator, who saw to it that Federico was freed after 72 days. Even now, Del Toro gets the shakes thinking about it. “Since my father was kidnapped I simply have an amount of PTSD that I cannot really handle, because it’s on a visceral level.” Returning to Mexico [he has homes in Toronto and Los Angeles] still gives him the fear. “I go back, I go back, and I love going back, but very soon I feel shortness of breath, or I feel agitation, and then I leave.” The abduction was “second in my catalogue of pain”, he says, now almost in a foetal position. “I think Mimic was worse.” The sci-fi/horror brought fierce clashes with now-jailed producer Harvey Weinstein. Since Mimic, Del Toro craftily built up his Hollywood stock, switching between big-budget studio pictures such as Blade II (2002) and Pacific Rim (2013) and more personal films such as The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Crimson Peak, his 2015 gothic drama that, in many ways, was an aesthetic dress rehearsal for Frankenstein. While there have been high-profile disappointments – notably, pulling out of The Hobbit in 2010 – he’s one of those rare directors who is able to paint his visions on a grand scale. But it has been far from easy. When it comes to being a director, “You have to be a mixture of a poet and a boxer and a pusher,” he says. “What I hate is when people say ‘visionary’. It’s like you’re on ayahuasca on a chaise longue! You’re not. You’re crossing the jungle with a machete.” Del Toro may joke that he’s been “cursed” with his bulky physique, but there is something of the adventurer or athlete about him. “It’s a contact sport, making movies. It’s not a delicate, languishing, dictation of poetry.” View oEmbed on the source website Since 2022, he’s worked with Netflix – Pinocchio, anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities (both 2022) and now Frankenstein. It will be shown in a few cinemas, but Del Toro is unconcerned that most people will watch Frankenstein at home, on a small screen. “I saw 90 per cent of my Universal monster movies as a kid on TV,” he shrugs. He also understands how the business works these days. “First of all, you make it for whoever pays for it.” Never mind the size of the screen, he adds: “What you don’t sacrifice is the size of the ideas.” Fortunately for Del Toro, horror is a box office evergreen. “I think that we need horror to understand the world, because beauty can be pretty oppressive,” he reasons. “Horror is very liberating.” It’s also the perfect genre to smuggle across different ideas, “from the flights of philosophy of David Cronenberg; the social horror of Jordan Peele; or straight-down scare-horror, beautifully executed, like [Zach Cregger’s 2025 film] Weapons, which I adored.” Now, with Frankenstein finally on our screens, Del Toro is in mourning. “There’s a bereavement and an achievement at the same time,” he says. So what next? He recalls A History of Violence director Cronenberg, “a friend for almost 30 years”, once telling him: “The only way to stay alive as a director is to try something that is different and that scares you into being someone else.” To that end, he’s planning a violent thriller, Fury, with Oscar Isaac in the lead. Maybe this time he’ll find the monster within. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Ben Stiller has made a film about his parents, who were comedy stars in 1960s USA. But does the film actually say more about him?
Add Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost to your watchlist Comic double act Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were huge in the 60s. They regularly appeared on the American variety programme The Ed Sullivan Show, while Jerry went on to play the short-tempered Frank Costanza, George’s father, in Seinfeld, and Anne – who died in 2015 – appeared in movies like The Boys from Brazil and Fame. Now, in his documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, actor-director Ben Stiller paints a tender portrait of his famous folks. When Jerry died in 2020, Stiller began filming the New York apartment his parents shared. A way to remember the place he grew up in before it was sold, it was the start of something highly personal. “I thought, ‘I want to do something that is going to be some sort of tribute to my parents,’ ” he explains, over Zoom. “This was at the beginning of Covid, and there was no chance to do a memorial for my dad. I just felt like this was a way to connect with him after losing him.” From Jerry’s home movies to cassette recordings, photos and newspaper clippings, the archive was plentiful. Stiller and his sister Amy (also an actor) even found love letters. The silver-haired Stiller, 59, was particularly taken by this intimate insight into his mother and father’s inner life. “When you think of your parents, you don’t think of them in that first blush of young love. And it was amazing to see how much passion they had for each other. I knew my dad was so devoted to my mom his whole life. But to read this frisky back and forth… it was pretty surreal, I have to say.” Stiller has always been close to his parents, lines between family and work blurring. His mother appeared in his 1994 directorial debut Gen X romance Reality Bites and hit comedy Night at the Museum, while his father played the shell-suit-wearing manager Maury Ballstein in Zoolander, Stiller’s cult 2001 comedy about a dumb-bell fashion model. “I wasn’t stupid – they were funny… I was completely using them,” he admits in the documentary, clearly unconcerned about the “nepo baby” tag. For a long time, their fame cast an uncomfortable shadow, though. “When I was a teenager, I thought I wanted to be a serious director and make serious movies,” he explains. “I think I was rebelling against my parents, the comedians, but at the end of the day you just go with what makes you happy, and what you enjoy. It’s also a period in your life when you’re trying to separate yourself from your parents, so it’s complicated. As my parents were in the business, it took me a while to figure out what I liked doing for myself.” If the film sees Stiller explore complex feelings towards his upbringing, fame and the vagaries of showbiz, it’s also a very public form of therapy after the loss of his parents. “I was definitely processing the grief of losing them, but also trying to connect with them more, too,” he says. That his dad obsessively documented their lives – even recording arguments between him and Anne – surprised him. “That deep interest he had in that history and exploring his own issues is something that I really came away with, something that maybe people who know him just from television might not know about him.” For an entertainer famed for precision-tooled Hollywood comedies like Dodgeball: a True Underdog Story and Meet the Parents, this first documentary of Stiller’s career was a learning curve. “Documentaries are hard. You have to live in the world of not knowing for a very long time, and that’s not something that really comes naturally to me,” he says. “I went through different phases with it. There were times when I was excited by the process. There were times I was really daunted by it and didn’t want to deal with it, to be honest. I was like, ‘Oh no, I’ve started this thing, what is it going to be?’” What emerges, ultimately, is also a frank look at his own life and a career that frequently took him away from his family. He notes how he’d fly home from shoots on weekends or organise “special places” for his kids to visit on set – “I thought I was doing so much better than my parents,” he says in the film. But he wasn’t. On camera, his son Quinn, 20, vents his frustration about a recent restaurant visit, when Stiller fussed over a photo with a fan rather than spending quality time with him. Home truths were spilled with Quinn and his daughter Ella, 23, who was cut out of Stiller’s 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, much to his shame. “I was able to really hear what my kids were saying to me and really accept the reality of being who I am, as opposed to the idea of who I wanted to be, and that reality of not living up to something you want to be,” he says. “I’m talking in terms of family relations and really being able to accept that more… which, honestly, I think has helped us.” Showbiz also put a strain on his marriage. In 2017, Stiller split from wife, actor Christine Taylor, after 17 years. Compared to his parents’ 50-plus years union, he felt like a failure. But, during Covid, he and Taylor moved back in together, forming a bubble for the sake of the kids, and began what Stiller calls in the documentary “a sort of coming together”. Five years on, their marriage is back on track. “I’m really happy right now,” he smiles. “I’m in a great place in my life. I’m very grateful for that.” Recently, Stiller’s pivoted into television, as one of the creatives behind the Emmy-winning Severance – fulfilling that teenage dream of directing more serious fare. Of course, he still adores comedy, but compared to his parents’ more innocent time, he says things have changed. “We live in a world where taking chances with comedy is more challenging. You’re seeing that front and centre in our country. But I think it’s important that comedians keep doing what they’re doing, speaking truth to power and being free to say what they want. That’s the most important thing.” He is alluding, of course, to the recent issues faced by Jimmy Kimmel, whose chat show was suspended after comments he made on screen in the wake of political activist Charlie Kirk’s murder – even if that suspension has since been revoked. In his line of work, social media has changed everything, for good and bad. “You have things that go out to huge audiences very quickly,” he says. But are bite-sized, TikTok-friendly gags dumbing down comedy? “I think we’ve reduced our attention spans down a little bit,” he nods, sighing. “I feel lucky to have grown up in the analogue world.”
The Mastermind review: Josh O'Connor leads an art-theft film that will stay with you
Director Kelly Reichardt offers a crime tale tale starring Josh O'Connor and Alana Haim.
★★★☆☆ The Mastermind is in cinemas from Friday 24 October. Add it to your watchlist “Honestly, I don’t think you’ve thought things through enough.” So James Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is told in Kelly Reichardt’s art-theft tale. Unveiled in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, The Mastermind might yet be Reichardt’s most commercial vehicle, although up against her earlier films like Wendy and Lucy, First Cow and Certain Women, all delicate, nuanced and often slow-moving works, that’s hardly saying much. Set in the early 1970s, O’Connor’s James is an unemployed carpenter in Framingham, Massachusetts, married to Terri (Alana Haim) and father to their two boys, Tommy and Carl. In need of money, early on, we see him requesting funds from his mother (Hope Davis). She suggests that his father, a Circuit County Judge (Bill Camp), can’t know. But it’s clear that life hasn’t quite worked out the way James, an art school dropout-out, has wanted. When the film opens, he’s casing Framingham’s art museum, even lifting a small figurine from a glass display case while his kids lark around. However, the real plan he hatches is to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the building, along with his cohorts. The heist itself is both comical and shocking. Two of the gang, wearing stockings to disguise their features, sneak the paintings past a security guard, who seems to be forever dozing. Things go awry when one, Ronnie (Javion Allen), pulls a gun on a teenage girl who encounters them. Thankfully, no bullets are fired, but suddenly this art theft takes on a deadly slant. Worse is to come as James’ plans to sell the paintings go disastrously wrong, while Gibson is caught for a bank robbery, immediately pointing the finger at James as the mastermind of the museum theft. James has little choice but to go on the run, leaving Terri and the kids at his parents’ house. View oEmbed on the source website Scored with a jazzy, double-bass and percussion-heavy sound, Reichardt’s film is certainly not a thriller. Rather, it’s a character study of a man who gets it all wrong, and maybe always has. He visits friends (Gaby Hoffman, John Magaro) who are astounded at his crime, before attempting to make his way to Toronto to escape, even looking to counterfeit his passport. The longer it goes on, the more desperate he becomes. Typically of a Reichardt movie, not a great deal happens on the surface. There’s even a protracted sequence where James hides the paintings in a barn on a farm, painstakingly taking them up a ladder to a loft area, then lugging a wooden storage box up there. It seems to go on for an eternity, and Reichardt clearly wants it this way. Likewise, most of the drama is off-screen, such as the fight that James and Terri have, which causes a cut over his eye. We also never even see his father’s reaction to his son’s theft. With the backdrop of the Vietnam War era (“weird times, huh?” as one character puts it), The Mastermind is one of those films that does stay with you in its aftermath, especially thanks to a sublime, morally snappy ending. Yet, whether that will be enough for some is another matter. Those expecting some sort of Michael Mann-esque tale will be sorely disappointed. An on-form O’Connor reprises, to some degree, the role he played in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, as a man who robs antiquities. What is a pity is how underdeveloped Haim’s character is. The musician and star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, is sadly given little to do here (though she makes a fair fist of a thin role). In the end, The Mastermind is exactly what you might expect from its director: another low-key look at human foibles.
Ben Stiller says new Apple TV film allowed him to ‘process the grief’ of losing his parents
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Comic double act Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were huge in the 60s. They regularly appeared on the American variety programme The Ed Sullivan Show, while Jerry went on to play the short-tempered Frank Costanza, George’s father, in Seinfeld, and Anne – who died in 2015 – appeared in movies like The Boys from Brazil and Fame. Now, in his documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, actor-director Ben Stiller paints a tender portrait of his famous folks. When Jerry died in 2020, Stiller began filming the New York apartment his parents shared. A way to remember the place he grew up in before it was sold, it was the start of something highly personal. “I thought, ‘I want to do something that is going to be some sort of tribute to my parents,’ ” he explains, over Zoom. “This was at the beginning of Covid, and there was no chance to do a memorial for my dad. I just felt like this was a way to connect with him after losing him.” From Jerry’s home movies to cassette recordings, photos and newspaper clippings, the archive was plentiful. Stiller and his sister Amy (also an actor) even found love letters. The silver-haired Stiller, 59, was particularly taken by this intimate insight into his mother and father’s inner life. “When you think of your parents, you don’t think of them in that first blush of young love. And it was amazing to see how much passion they had for each other. I knew my dad was so devoted to my mom his whole life. But to read this frisky back and forth… it was pretty surreal, I have to say.” Stiller has always been close to his parents, lines between family and work blurring. His mother appeared in his 1994 directorial debut Gen X romance Reality Bites and hit comedy Night at the Museum, while his father played the shell-suit-wearing manager Maury Ballstein in Zoolander, Stiller’s cult 2001 comedy about a dumb-bell fashion model. “I wasn’t stupid – they were funny… I was completely using them,” he admits in the documentary, clearly unconcerned about the “nepo baby” tag. For a long time, their fame cast an uncomfortable shadow, though. “When I was a teenager, I thought I wanted to be a serious director and make serious movies,” he explains. “I think I was rebelling against my parents, the comedians, but at the end of the day you just go with what makes you happy, and what you enjoy. It’s also a period in your life when you’re trying to separate yourself from your parents, so it’s complicated. As my parents were in the business, it took me a while to figure out what I liked doing for myself.” If the film sees Stiller explore complex feelings towards his upbringing, fame and the vagaries of showbiz, it’s also a very public form of therapy after the loss of his parents. “I was definitely processing the grief of losing them, but also trying to connect with them more, too,” he says. That his dad obsessively documented their lives – even recording arguments between him and Anne – surprised him. “That deep interest he had in that history and exploring his own issues is something that I really came away with, something that maybe people who know him just from television might not know about him.” For an entertainer famed for precision-tooled Hollywood comedies like Dodgeball: a True Underdog Story and Meet the Parents, this first documentary of Stiller’s career was a learning curve. “Documentaries are hard. You have to live in the world of not knowing for a very long time, and that’s not something that really comes naturally to me,” he says. “I went through different phases with it. There were times when I was excited by the process. There were times I was really daunted by it and didn’t want to deal with it, to be honest. I was like, ‘Oh no, I’ve started this thing, what is it going to be?’” What emerges, ultimately, is also a frank look at his own life and a career that frequently took him away from his family. He notes how he’d fly home from shoots on weekends or organise “special places” for his kids to visit on set – “I thought I was doing so much better than my parents,” he says in the film. But he wasn’t. On camera, his son Quinn, 20, vents his frustration about a recent restaurant visit, when Stiller fussed over a photo with a fan rather than spending quality time with him. Home truths were spilled with Quinn and his daughter Ella, 23, who was cut out of Stiller’s 2013 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, much to his shame. “I was able to really hear what my kids were saying to me and really accept the reality of being who I am, as opposed to the idea of who I wanted to be, and that reality of not living up to something you want to be,” he says. “I’m talking in terms of family relations and really being able to accept that more… which, honestly, I think has helped us.” Showbiz also put a strain on his marriage. In 2017, Stiller split from wife, actor Christine Taylor, after 17 years. Compared to his parents’ 50-plus years union, he felt like a failure. But, during Covid, he and Taylor moved back in together, forming a bubble for the sake of the kids, and began what Stiller calls in the documentary “a sort of coming together”. Five years on, their marriage is back on track. “I’m really happy right now,” he smiles. “I’m in a great place in my life. I’m very grateful for that.” Recently, Stiller’s pivoted into television, as one of the creatives behind the Emmy-winning Severance – fulfilling that teenage dream of directing more serious fare. Of course, he still adores comedy, but compared to his parents’ more innocent time, he says things have changed. “We live in a world where taking chances with comedy is more challenging. You’re seeing that front and centre in our country. But I think it’s important that comedians keep doing what they’re doing, speaking truth to power and being free to say what they want. That’s the most important thing.” He is alluding, of course, to the recent issues faced by Jimmy Kimmel, whose chat show was suspended after comments he made on screen in the wake of political activist Charlie Kirk’s murder – even if that suspension has since been revoked. In his line of work, social media has changed everything, for good and bad. “You have things that go out to huge audiences very quickly,” he says. But are bite-sized, TikTok-friendly gags dumbing down comedy? “I think we’ve reduced our attention spans down a little bit,” he nods, sighing. “I feel lucky to have grown up in the analogue world.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Documentaries coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
From fears to ears and stealing art, the actor discusses his new film — and his toe-curling audition for Les Misérables
Add The Mastermind to your watchlist Southampton-born actor Josh O’Connor, 35, has gone from Lawrence Durrell in the ITV drama The Durrells to repressed farm-hand in God’s Own Country and Prince Charles in The Crown. This month, before starring in the forthcoming Knives Out movie and taking on a lead role in Steven Spielberg’s new top secret sci-fi film, he’s back on the big screen in The Mastermind, playing a failed carpenter who turns to robbing art… unsuccessfully. Over the years, you’ve played characters different to you, like Prince Charles in The Crown and a washed-up tennis pro in the film Challengers. Is it hard taking on new personalities? Actors are all deeply insecure. That’s why we do what we do. If you break down what an actor is being asked to do, to become someone else and step into the shoes of a character that oftentimes barely resembles them, the skill is bringing elements of yourself to that character. With Prince Charles, there was a fear of admitting that there’s a part of me that’s anything like him. Initially, I was like, “No, I can’t, it’s just the ears, it’s the ears!” But then with Challengers, it was different. I knew Luca [Guadagnino, the director] wanted this very confident, chest-out, cocksure guy, and I didn’t recognise that in myself, necessarily. Most of the time, you’re answering out of fear. Work fears aside, what are you most scared of in life? Honestly, I’m scared of everything! What’s the hardest part of acting? The reality is it’s not easy and it is quite difficult and there are times when you feel quite isolated and lonely and you’re not around your friends an awful lot. How were your early years when you started out? I had years of auditioning and not getting roles, and sometimes getting really close to roles, but then not getting them. Are there any experiences that still haunt you? My first ever audition was for the Russell Crowe Les Misérables [2012]. They were auditioning everyone! But I didn’t know that. I don’t have any actors in my family, so everything was new to me. I’d never seen Les Misérables – I have now! I went in and I sang the Marius song, Empty Chairs and they said to me, “Josh, we would love you to come back”. So I got a recall, which was good, but I’m very dyslexic, so I didn’t read the full email. I just read, “We want you to come back!” A week later, I’m on my way, walking through central London to go to my recall and I bump into a friend of mine who was doing the play Richard II with Eddie Redmayne. He’s like, “Where are you going?” And I was like, “I’m really nervous. I have a recall to be in the movie of Les Misérables.” And he said, “My friend Eddie is playing Marius!” I then realised my recall was for a very minor role, but I hadn’t learned the song… I didn’t even know the song. And it was awful. I didn’t get that part [O’Connor did get to play Marius in the BBC’s non-musical adaptation of Les Misérables in 2018]. In your new film, The Mastermind, you play James Mooney, who is your second art thief in a row after La Chimera in 2023. How different are they? Arthur in La Chimera has a conscience about stealing, he feels very uncomfortable about it. The stealing is just his way of getting closer to what he’s trying to find. Whereas this guy… Mooney’s less conscientious… and ambitious? He just gets it wrong at every step! I remember Kelly [Reichardt, the director] discussing whose art to steal. Arthur Dove is great because he was sort of loved, but it wasn’t like stealing a Jackson Pollock. Dove’s worth some money, but it’s not crazy-crazy. So, all round Mooney just gets it wrong. Did you enjoy dipping into the film’s very 70s vibe? I remember we had some boys playing our children and in a dinner scene they started making sculptures out of the mashed potato – it was so nostalgic going back to a time when there were no mobile phones, no television and kids were kids. You had to make fun wherever you could, even if it was with mashed potato! The film is really about the best laid plans of mice and men going wrong. Are you a good planner? As an actor, you can’t really plan anything. I haven’t been able to book a holiday any further ahead than two weeks for the last 13 years, because you have no idea where you’re going to be week to week. So, I stopped making plans. The ability to be malleable is essential. Otherwise, you don’t see anyone, you don’t do anything. Away from acting, is it true you’re into making ceramics? Yes! The dream is to have my own studio with a kiln. The Mastermind is in cinemas from Friday 24 October
Josh O’Connor on "awful" audition for movie blockbuster – and why he was afraid of being similar to Prince Charles
From fears to ears and stealing art, the actor discusses his new film — and his toe-curling audition for Les Misérables.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Southampton-born actor Josh O’Connor, 35, has gone from Lawrence Durrell in the ITV drama The Durrells to repressed farm-hand in God’s Own Country and Prince Charles in The Crown. This month, before starring in the forthcoming Knives Out movie and taking on a lead role in Steven Spielberg’s new top secret sci-fi film, he’s back on the big screen in The Mastermind, playing a failed carpenter who turns to robbing art... unsuccessfully. Over the years, you’ve played characters different to you, like Prince Charles in The Crown and a washed-up tennis pro in the film Challengers. Is it hard taking on new personalities? Actors are all deeply insecure. That’s why we do what we do. If you break down what an actor is being asked to do, to become someone else and step into the shoes of a character that oftentimes barely resembles them, the skill is bringing elements of yourself to that character. With Prince Charles, there was a fear of admitting that there’s a part of me that’s anything like him. Initially, I was like, “No, I can’t, it’s just the ears, it’s the ears!” But then with Challengers, it was different. I knew Luca [Guadagnino, the director] wanted this very confident, chest-out, cocksure guy, and I didn’t recognise that in myself, necessarily. Most of the time, you’re answering out of fear. Work fears aside, what are you most scared of in life? Honestly, I’m scared of everything! What’s the hardest part of acting? The reality is it’s not easy and it is quite difficult and there are times when you feel quite isolated and lonely and you’re not around your friends an awful lot. How were your early years when you started out? I had years of auditioning and not getting roles, and sometimes getting really close to roles, but then not getting them. Are there any experiences that still haunt you? My first ever audition was for the Russell Crowe Les Misérables [2012]. They were auditioning everyone! But I didn’t know that. I don’t have any actors in my family, so everything was new to me. I’d never seen Les Misérables – I have now! I went in and I sang the Marius song, Empty Chairs, and they said to me, “Josh, we would love you to come back”. So I got a recall, which was good, but I’m very dyslexic, so I didn’t read the full email. I just read, “We want you to come back!” A week later, I’m on my way, walking through central London to go to my recall and I bump into a friend of mine who was doing the play Richard II with Eddie Redmayne. He’s like, “Where are you going?” And I was like, “I’m really nervous. I have a recall to be in the movie of Les Misérables.” And he said, “My friend Eddie is playing Marius!” I then realised my recall was for a very minor role, but I hadn’t learned the song… I didn’t even know the song. And it was awful. I didn’t get that part [O’Connor did get to play Marius in the BBC’s non-musical adaptation of Les Misérables in 2018]. In your new film, The Mastermind, you play James Mooney, who is your second art thief in a row after La Chimera in 2023. How different are they? Arthur in La Chimera has a conscience about stealing, he feels very uncomfortable about it. The stealing is just his way of getting closer to what he’s trying to find. Whereas this guy… Mooney’s less conscientious… and ambitious? He just gets it wrong at every step! I remember Kelly [Reichardt, the director] discussing whose art to steal. Arthur Dove is great because he was sort of loved, but it wasn’t like stealing a Jackson Pollock. Dove’s worth some money, but it’s not crazy-crazy. So, all round Mooney just gets it wrong. Did you enjoy dipping into the film’s very 70s vibe? I remember we had some boys playing our children and in a dinner scene they started making sculptures out of the mashed potato – it was so nostalgic going back to a time when there were no mobile phones, no television and kids were kids. You had to make fun wherever you could, even if it was with mashed potato! The film is really about the best laid plans of mice and men going wrong. Are you a good planner? As an actor, you can’t really plan anything. I haven’t been able to book a holiday any further ahead than two weeks for the last 13 years, because you have no idea where you’re going to be week to week. So, I stopped making plans. The ability to be malleable is essential. Otherwise, you don’t see anyone, you don’t do anything. Away from acting, is it true you’re into making ceramics? Yes! The dream is to have my own studio with a kiln. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Mastermind arrives in UK cinemas on Friday 24th October. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Tron: Ares review – A beautifully designed but slightly hollow sci-fi blockbuster
At times watching this sequel feels like stepping into the future – but it requires a much-needed humour injection.
★★★☆☆ Tron: Ares is in cinemas from Friday 10 October. Add it to your watchlist "We are a hundred per cent expendable." So says Jared Leto’s Ares, the military-grade AI soldier at the heart of this third film in Disney’s Tron franchise. No doubt Leto and the acting community at large are probably feeling that this week following the unveiling of AI actress Tilly Norwood, which has left Hollywood up in arms. Still, that development is an unexpected, if weird, publicity boost for Tron: Ares, a beautifully designed, if slightly hollow, blockbuster. With its landmark visual effects, the first Tron (1982) sucked Jeff Bridges’ programmer Kevin Flynn into the mainframe ‘grid’ of the company he once worked for, a world where computer programs appear as living human entities. The franchise went back online with 2010’s Tron: Legacy, a disappointing sequel distinguished by Daft Punk’s thunderous score. Fifteen years on from that, Tron is back – with a twist. This time, the computer programs come into our world. View oEmbed on the source website Evan Peters plays Julian Dillinger, grandson of David Warner’s character from the original. Drunk with power, he’s recently taken over the Dillinger company from his mother Elizabeth (Gillian Anderson, in a thankless role), as he looks to create the ultimate security software. Ares, along with several other cohorts, live inside the ‘grid’, but can materialise in our world. “Military AI is the future,” Dillinger beams to his investors, who aren’t aware of one fatal flaw in his plan. After 29 minutes, these AI beings evaporate. Dillinger is seeking what’s called "the permanence code" to change all that, but he’s not alone. Over at ENCOM – the company that Flynn once worked for and Dillinger’s grandfather unscrupulously ran – rival tech genius Eve Kim (Greta Lee) is doing the same. Whoever finds it first will have quite the breakthrough on their hands. Peters, who famously played real-life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in the Netflix show Dahmer, is of course the unhinged villain of the piece, only interested in profit and gain. The film comes directed by Joachim Rønning, the Norwegian filmmaker who has become a sequel specialist, after 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and 2019’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. He competently handles the action, especially a thrilling chase through the city when Ares and his fellow program Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) pursue Eve on Light Cycles, the digital motorbikes previously only seen on the grid. Watching the Cycles trail deadly beams of light in their wake through the cityscape is a compelling sight, and Rønning exploits this to the max. Same goes for the splendid black-and-red colour scheme that runs through the film, neatly deployed by production designer Darren Gilford. With its gleaming feel, Tron: Ares feels truly like stepping into the future at times. Jared Leto and the excellent Jodie Turner-Smith add to this with their otherworldly sentient soldiers. The music is courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the ubiquitous composers who are producing the soundtrack under their Nine Inch Nails banner. No doubt, there’s something cool about NIN and Tron together, but this electronica-driven score (which feels highly indebted to Radiohead’s Kid A at points) doesn’t touch what Daft Punk achieved for Tron: Legacy. Still, it’s atmospheric, energising and befits Rønning’s heart-pumping action. Without giving too much away, there is room for a Jeff Bridges appearance, and also a nostalgia-driven sequence that fans of the original Tron will love. What a pity the script itself flounders, hampered by the fact Hollywood has churned out numerous AI stories of late. Certainly, this lacks the cheekiness of, say, M3GAN. With the exception of an amusing riff about Depeche Mode (better than Mozart, according to Ares), it requires a much-needed humour injection. In Tron terms, the future is less bright than po-faced.
After the Hunt review: This Julia Roberts academia drama doesn't make the grade
A starry cast including Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri can't save a script that too frequently gets bogged down in philosophical debates.
★★☆☆☆ After the Hunt is in cinemas from 17 October. Add it to your watchlist Julia Roberts has never been afraid of heavyweight subject matter, on the rare occasions Hollywood has given her the chance. Take Erin Brockovich, a film about a class action suit brought against a water company that was perfectly tailored to her skillset. And so it goes with After the Hunt, a campus-set story of abuse, privilege and the generational divide all set in the world of academia. She plays Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor at Yale, who lives in one of those luxurious houses you only ever see in movies. Aiming to become tenured, she spends her days debating the finer points of Kierkegaard and Hegel, with her acolytes, including flirty fellow academic Hank (Andrew Garfield) and earnest PhD student Maggie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri). At the outset, she and her husband Fredrik (Michael Stuhlbarg) are hosting drinks. Maggie, who is gay and in a relationship, is escorted home by Hank. But before long, she is back on Alma’s doorstep, sobbing. She explains: Hank came up for a drink, while Maggie’s partner was absent. They kissed, but it went further than she wanted. “He assaulted me,” she says. But did he? View oEmbed on the source website When Alma confronts Hank, he claims it all stems from a discovery he made about Maggie, that she plagiarised her dissertation. With her parents billionaire donors to the university, Maggie comes from a background of wealth and entitlement. That she is also Black adds to the complex dynamic, with Maggie operating in a world largely dominated by straight white cis men. As tempers flare, Maggie decides to press charges against Hank, while Alma tries to steer clear, fearful of her own position. Scripted by actress Nora Garrett, making her debut as a screenwriter here, what follows is a battle of wills. Suffering from an illness that’s causing her to vomit, Alma starts to unravel as relations between her and Maggie morphs into something more pernicious. Directing this is Luca Guadagnino, the Italian filmmaker behind the more plainly enjoyable Call Me by Your Name (which featured Stuhlbarg) and Challengers. But After the Hunt feels like a muddled film that gets away from him, too often filled with characters mired in academic debates about morals and ethics that will likely go over most viewers’ heads, unless you happen to be a philosophy graduate. Bizarrely, the film also starts exactly like a Woody Allen film: the jazzy score, over black-and-white titles, with the cast listed in alphabetical order, a tradition that Allen employed for years across his canon. Is it an homage to Allen? Or a subtle nod to the personal issues that have blighted his life in later years? According to Guadagnino, it could be a bit of both. It’s not the only time the director borrows from other, better works. Todd Field’s cancel culture tale Tár, set in the similarly cloistered world of classical music, tackled the subject with much greater complexity. And then, Justine Triet’s Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall, with its prickly use of loud music interrupting a conversation, gets a nod, in a grating dinner scene involving Maggie, Fredrik and Alma. With a whiny score by the usually on-point Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, at least it has Julia Roberts in full swing. The actress relishes shouldering such a wannabe watercooler film, and there’s something pleasurable in watching her character gradually lose it (including her shocking abuse of Maggie’s non-binary partner). But this isn’t an easy film to digest, perhaps because it’s filled with “privileged, coddled hypocrites”, as one person says. Still, as a portrait set on the frontlines of ‘woke-dom’, it gives a hornets’ nest a real kicking.
Frankenstein review: A gory and glorious triumph from Guillermo del Toro
Saltburn's Jacob Elordi delivers a standout performance in this beautiful adaptation of the classic novel.
Frankenstein is in cinemas from 17 October and on Netflix from 7 November. Add it to your watchlist ★★★★★ A work of Gothic fiction that has fascinated filmmakers for almost as long as cinema has existed, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus finally gets what might be considered its definitive movie version. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, and set to be released by Netflix, this two-and-a-half-hour love letter to Shelley’s work comes from Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican monster-loving maestro who has already brought us such delicious creature features as Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water (2017). A film del Toro has been tinkering with for years, his Frankenstein is far removed from the 1931 James Whale version, perhaps something closer to Kenneth Branagh’s gleaming 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which featured Robert De Niro as the creature brought to life by the egotistical, god-playing scientist, Victor Frankenstein. Here, he casts the younger, physically-imposing Jacob Elordi, an actor who truly shows his dexterity in a performance of few words but grand and sometimes heartbreaking gestures. Opposite him is a compelling Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, a character first glimpsed prostrate in the icy wastes of the Arctic. It’s 1857 and an expedition to the North Pole, led by Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen), has seen its ship run aground, frozen in the ice. When the injured Frankenstein is discovered, he’s brought aboard just as Elordi’s creature – his face almost entirely concealed – goes on the rampage. “It cannot die,” cries Frankenstein, as his creation throws men around like rag-dolls and survives countless bullets. View oEmbed on the source website As Frankenstein recounts his story to the Captain, we are taken back to his youth, when his mother (Mia Goth) dies, leaving the distraught boy to vow to his strict father (Charles Dance) that he will overcome mortality. “No one can conquer death,” comes the stern reply. When we next glimpse Frankenstein, it’s 1855 and he’s at the Royal College of Medicine, demonstrating his attempts to inject life into a stitched-together cadaver. This “abomination” – beautifully animated, with animatronics by the way – sees him dismissed. Yet his pioneering work attracts the erudite arms trader Harlander (Christoph Waltz), whose own niece Elizabeth (also played by Goth) is engaged to Victor’s younger brother William (Felix Kammerer). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/08/frankenstein-mia-goth-felix-kammerer-0b2ed70.jpg" width="3600" height="2400" alt="Felix Kammerer as William Frankenstein and Mia Goth as Elizabeth in Frankenstein, sitting in a carriage. She is looking anguished as she brings her chain up to her mouth, with eyes closed." title="Felix Kammerer as William Frankenstein and Mia Goth as Elizabeth in Frankenstein" /> As Harlander becomes Frankenstein’s patron, so the work begins as the scientist strives to harness nature’s majesty and bring life to his creature, culled from body parts. Of course, Frankenstein’s unwillingness to treat his creation with any humanity – referring to him as “It” – inevitably leads to destruction, pain and sorrow. With del Toro’s script switching to the Creature’s perspective, we get to see its encounter with a blind man (David Bradley), who shows compassion and warmth, even sharing his books, including Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s here where del Toro finds the story’s core humanity and Elordi – his torso made up with scars, with prosthetics make-up artist Mike Hill doing sterling work – comes into his own. There’s something almost balletic about his performance, the way he moves, the way the Creature discovers itself as a sentient being. With burnished, beautiful cinematography from Dan Laustsen, a highly-charged score from Alexandre Desplat, and exquisite production design from Tamara Deverell, del Toro’s film is unquestionably one of the most beautifully crafted films you’ll see this year. Everything feels tangible, with CGI backdrops kept to a minimum. The sheer invention is bewildering, notably when the camera plunges inside the Creature’s body the moment life takes hold of it. Perhaps it's hyperbole to call the film del Toro’s masterpiece – especially a story that has been told countless times. But this is a work that is the accumulation of three-and-a-half decades of filmmaking knowledge. Gory and grim it may be, but it is a tragic tale told in a captivating manner.
Tron: Ares review – A beautifully designed but slightly hollow blockbuster
"We are a hundred per cent expendable." So says Jared Leto’s Ares, the military-grade AI soldier at the heart of this third film in Disney’s Tron franchise. No doubt Leto and the acting community at large are probably feeling that this week following the unveiling of AI actress Tilly Norwood, which has left Hollywood up in arms. Still, that development is an unexpected, if weird, publicity boost for Tron: Ares, a beautifully designed, if slightly hollow, blockbuster. With its landmark visual effects, the first Tron (1982) sucked Jeff Bridges’ programmer Kevin Flynn into the mainframe ‘grid’ of the company he once worked for, a world where computer programs appear as living human entities. The franchise went back online with 2010’s Tron: Legacy, a disappointing sequel distinguished by Daft Punk’s thunderous score. Fifteen years on from that, Tron is back – with a twist. This time, the computer programs come into our world. Evan Peters plays Julian Dillinger, grandson of David Warner’s character from the original. Drunk with power, he’s recently taken over the Dillinger company from his mother Elizabeth (Gillian Anderson, in a thankless role), as he looks to create the ultimate security software. Ares, along with several other cohorts, live inside the ‘grid’, but can materialise in our world. “Military AI is the future,” Dillinger beams to his investors, who aren’t aware of one fatal flaw in his plan. After 29 minutes, these AI beings evaporate. Dillinger is seeking what’s called "the permanence code" to change all that, but he’s not alone. Over at ENCOM – the company that Flynn once worked for and Dillinger’s grandfather unscrupulously ran – rival tech genius Eve Kim (Greta Lee) is doing the same. Whoever finds it first will have quite the breakthrough on their hands. Peters, who famously played real-life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in the Netflix show, is of course the unhinged villain of the piece, only interested in profit and gain. The film comes directed by Joachim Rønning, the Norwegian filmmaker who has become a sequel specialist, after 2017’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and 2019’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. He competently handles the action, especially a thrilling chase through the city when Ares and his fellow program Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) pursue Eve on Light Cycles, the digital motorbikes previously only seen on the grid. View oEmbed on the source website Watching the Cycles trail deadly beams of light in their wake through the cityscape is a compelling sight, and Rønning exploits this to the max. Same goes for the splendid black-and-red colour scheme that runs through the film, neatly deployed by production designer Darren Gilford. With its gleaming feel, Tron: Ares feels truly like stepping into the future at times. Jared Leto and the excellent Jodie Turner-Smith add to this with their otherworldly sentient soldiers. The music is courtesy of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the ubiquitous composers who are producing the soundtrack under their Nine Inch Nails banner. No doubt, there’s something cool about NIN and Tron together, but this electronica-driven score (which feels highly indebted to Radiohead’s Kid A at points) doesn’t touch what Daft Punk achieved for Tron: Legacy. Still, it’s atmospheric, energising and befits Rønning’s heart-pumping action. Without giving too much away, there is room for a Jeff Bridges appearance, and also a nostalgia-driven sequence that fans of the original Tron will love. What a pity the script itself flounders, hampered by the fact Hollywood has churned out numerous AI stories of late. Certainly, this lacks the cheekiness of, say, M3GAN. With the exception of an amusing riff about Depeche Mode (better than Mozart, according to Ares), it requires a much-needed humour injection. In Tron terms, the future is less bright than po-faced. Tron: Ares is in UK cinemas from Friday 10th October. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The actor on working with family, mankind versus Mother Nature and what makes a real-life hero. Just don’t mention his political aspirations…
Add The Lost Bus to your watchlist Heroes come in all shapes and sizes — even if they’re all played by the same man. Over the course of his career, Matthew McConaughey has played action roles (Sahara, Fool’s Gold), legal crusaders (A Time to Kill, The Lincoln Lawyer), selfless astronauts (Interstellar) and Aids-medicating cowboys (Dallas Buyers Club, which won him an Oscar). Now the 55-year-old Texan is behind the wheel in The Lost Bus, the true story of a school bus driver who saved 22 children during the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California — a wildfire that claimed 85 lives. Kevin, your character in The Lost Bus, is an unlikely saviour. What’s your definition of a hero? There were a lot of heroic people and heroic acts at the time of this fire. Whatever that crisis is, heroes will run to it instead of away. What’s the biggest difference between playing a real person and a fictional one? With a fictional character, you can go to your imagination quicker. When you’re doing something that’s based on, or inspired by, actual events, I always want to go to reality, what really happened, and see what inspiration there is before I let my imagination go. You are acting alongside your son Levi and your mother Kay, playing your on-screen son and mother. How was it blurring those lines between fact and fiction? Because my relationship [with Levi] is a healthy one in real life, it made it easier to play a relationship that’s not healthy. And Mama didn’t find anything challenging about acting with her grandson and her son. She just wanted more camera time! As a parent, what’s your number-one rule? Being delighted in who your kids are – just what they are, nothing else. Not how good they are at something. A pastor friend of mine said in church, if a child knows they’re loved at home they’ll be less afraid to fail outside. It’s a very good rule. And I’d be remiss to not admit that ability, comfort, significance in my own home has something to do with the work I’m doing, the way I feel like flying higher and further. Were you well behaved when you were a kid? I was very good at getting away with stuff! But I did get caught a few times. The last thing you’d want to do in my family was lie. Don’t lie to Mom and Dad – because if you got caught, you’d get in more trouble for the lie than the deed! While we’re looking back, there’s a sad scene in The Lost Bus where Kevin puts down his dog. Could you relate to that? Oh! I mean, regretfully, I’ve had to do that three, four times in my life. And it’s a horrible day and a horrible thing to have to do, even if it’s the best thing for the dog. You don’t forget that feeling. I remember when I had to put down my last dog, we went to the drive-thru and got him a cheeseburger first, for his last meal. He was happy about it. It’s just so damn sad. They’re sitting there looking at you. And then I’ve had a couple dogs that were looking at me, going: ‘I’m ready…’ Oh, man. The Lost Bus deals with the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, which were the deadliest wildfires in Californian history. What with those and the deadly fires that swept through Hollywood in January, have your thoughts turned to the state of the planet? It’s a delicate balance as civilisation takes over Mother Nature and the wild. We overcompensate sometimes and throw it out of that balance – and usually Mother Nature, through some way, will let us know. We’re out of whack right now. And like with this film, that relationship that mankind has [with our environment] is out of whack in dangerous ways. You’ve talked about running for Governor of Texas in the past. Is that still on the cards? Lets talk about the movie! I’m not gonna talk any politics right now. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt in your career? I learned to love the craft. I mean, I liked what I was doing in the beginning, but I didn’t actually know what I was doing. I had instincts when I first started, 30-whatever years ago. Then after about eight years, I started to learn the craft of acting. When I did that, I started learning how to love it. I started to learn what to do if I got in trouble, if I got in a funk, if I was stuck. And then I learned how to break down characters, and that took 25, 30 years. But I’ve got a good basis now. So, what’s next? Now I always want to go and have an experience, a personal experience when I’m taking on a role. And these days, when I want to go act, I do feel like that’s happening. The Lost Bus is available on Apple TV+ from Friday 3 October
Matthew McConaughey says true story The Lost Bus shows our relationship with nature is “out of whack in dangerous ways”
Climate - Sustainable contributions within wider content
The Oscar-winner has the lead role in the new film from Paul Greengrass.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes — even if they’re all played by the same man. Over the course of his career, Matthew McConaughey has played action roles (Sahara, Fool’s Gold), legal crusaders (A Time to Kill, The Lincoln Lawyer), selfless astronauts (Interstellar) and Aids-medicating cowboys (Dallas Buyers Club, which won him an Oscar). Now the 55-year-old Texan is behind the wheel in The Lost Bus, the true story of a school bus driver who saved 22 children during the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California — a wildfire that claimed 85 lives. Kevin, your character in The Lost Bus, is an unlikely saviour. What’s your definition of a hero? There were a lot of heroic people and heroic acts at the time of this fire. Whatever that crisis is, heroes will run to it instead of away. What’s the biggest difference between playing a real person and a fictional one? With a fictional character, you can go to your imagination quicker. When you’re doing something that’s based on, or inspired by, actual events, I always want to go to reality, what really happened, and see what inspiration there is before I let my imagination go. You are acting alongside your son Levi and your mother Kay, playing your on-screen son and mother. How was it blurring those lines between fact and fiction? Because my relationship [with Levi] is a healthy one in real life, it made it easier to play a relationship that’s not healthy. And Mama didn’t find anything challenging about acting with her grandson and her son. She just wanted more camera time! As a parent, what’s your number-one rule? Being delighted in who your kids are – just what they are, nothing else. Not how good they are at something. A pastor friend of mine said in church, if a child knows they’re loved at home they’ll be less afraid to fail outside. It’s a very good rule. And I’d be remiss to not admit that ability, comfort, significance in my own home has something to do with the work I’m doing, the way I feel like flying higher and further. Were you well behaved when you were a kid? I was very good at getting away with stuff! But I did get caught a few times. The last thing you’d want to do in my family was lie. Don’t lie to Mom and Dad – because if you got caught, you’d get in more trouble for the lie than the deed! While we’re looking back, there’s a sad scene in The Lost Bus where Kevin puts down his dog. Could you relate to that? Oh! I mean, regretfully, I’ve had to do that three, four times in my life. And it’s a horrible day and a horrible thing to have to do, even if it’s the best thing for the dog. You don’t forget that feeling. I remember when I had to put down my last dog, we went to the drive-thru and got him a cheeseburger first, for his last meal. He was happy about it. It’s just so damn sad. They’re sitting there looking at you. And then I’ve had a couple dogs that were looking at me, going: ‘I’m ready…’ Oh, man. The Lost Bus deals with the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, which were the deadliest wildfires in Californian history. What with those and the deadly fires that swept through Hollywood in January, have your thoughts turned to the state of the planet? It’s a delicate balance as civilisation takes over Mother Nature and the wild. We overcompensate sometimes and throw it out of that balance – and usually Mother Nature, through some way, will let us know. We’re out of whack right now. And like with this film, that relationship that mankind has [with our environment] is out of whack in dangerous ways. You’ve talked about running for Governor of Texas in the past. Is that still on the cards? Lets talk about the movie! I’m not gonna talk any politics right now. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt in your career? I learned to love the craft. I mean, I liked what I was doing in the beginning, but I didn’t actually know what I was doing. I had instincts when I first started, 30-whatever years ago. Then after about eight years, I started to learn the craft of acting. When I did that, I started learning how to love it. I started to learn what to do if I got in trouble, if I got in a funk, if I was stuck. And then I learned how to break down characters, and that took 25, 30 years. But I’ve got a good basis now. So, what’s next? Now I always want to go and have an experience, a personal experience when I’m taking on a role. And these days, when I want to go act, I do feel like that’s happening. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – <a class="_mizu194a _1ah31bk5 _ra3xnqa1 _128m1bk5 _1cvmnqa1 _4davt94y _4bfu1r31 _1hms8stv _ajmmnqa1 _vchhusvi _syaz14q2 _ect41gqc _1a3b1r31 _4fpr8stv _5goinqa1 _f8pj14q2 _9oik1r31 _1bnxglyw _jf4cnqa1 _30l314q2 _1nrm1r31 _c2waglyw _1iohnqa1 _9h8h16c2 _1053w7te _1ienw7te _n0fxw7te _1vhvg3x0" title="https://www.buysubscriptions.com/print/radio-times-magazine-subscription" href="https://www.buysubscriptions.com/print/radio-times-magazine-subscription" data-renderer-mark="true" data-is-router-link="false" data-testid="link-with-safety">subscribe here. The Lost Bus is on Apple TV+ from Friday 3rd October 2025 – sign up to Apple TV+ now. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The Smashing Machine review: Dwayne Johnson steps out of his comfort zone and wrestles with greatness
The WWE star shines as a UFC fighter who goes from the heights of glory to rock bottom.
The Smashing Machine is in cinemas from 3 October. Add it to your watchlist ★★★☆☆ Dwayne Johnson takes on a role not a million miles from his former life in The Smashing Machine. The WWE star here plays real-life UFC competitor Mark Kerr, in a film that is less sport biopic and more a portrait of a wrestler as a young man. Premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival, it’s a fine showcase for an actor who is better known for family films and action blockbusters than hard-hitting dramas. Set between 1997 and 2000, when the mixed-martial arts sport of UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) was just taking off, the undefeated Kerr is at the top of his game. He’s a freestyle wrestler, but UFC pits him against those with other backgrounds, whether it’s boxing, Jiu-jitsu or karate. It’s brutal, bloody and arguably one of the most punishing sports out there. View oEmbed on the source website It’s also big in Japan, with a fair chunk of the movie set in Tokyo, as Kerr plies his trade in a competition dubbed ‘Pride’. With controversy surrounding the sport, the organisers are planning to tone it down: no eye-gouging, head-butting, biting or kneeing an opponent’s head when he’s on the ground. But that doesn’t stop Kerr’s rival in the ring, causing Kerr to lose his first fight, despite it being what he believes is a blatant foul. While this loss is ultimately called “no contest”, Kerr is scarred by the experience. Worse still, his addiction to opioids, used to medicate the constant pain he’s in, is gripping him. And then there’s his tumultuous relationship with girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), who flies out to Japan to see him, only to find him spaced out and barely able to communicate. Tempers flare, as the once impregnable Kerr starts to crumble. Written, directed, produced and edited by Benny Safdie, who is making his first movie without brother Josh, following their acclaimed efforts Good Time (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019), The Smashing Machine won’t get you off your seat, pumping your fists in triumph. It isn’t that kind of sports movie. Rather, it’s a story of frayed relationships, whether it’s Dawn and Kerr, or Kerr and his good buddy/trainer/competitor Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader, one of several real-life MMA fighters featuring). Safdie tones down the amped-up, angst-riddled style that he and his brother cultivated in their recent films, allowing Johnson and Blunt to flourish. Arguably, Kerr’s life – despite facing addiction issues and the rollercoaster emotions of winning and losing in this extreme sport – doesn’t quite bring us the high drama you’d expect. The obvious comparison is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, although that was more of a last-chance-saloon story. Here, we get a snapshot of Kerr’s life at the top, what it’s like to hit the skids, and how his battle for sobriety affected his relationship with Dawn. Sometimes, it’s a little too on-the-nose, like the use of Elvis’s version of My Way on the soundtrack. “Regrets, I’ve had a few,” croons the King, words that could easily apply to Kerr. Maybe Safdie could’ve delved further into the “animal instinct” that Kerr speaks about, the testosterone that was constantly flowing through his body. Yet Johnson, looking radically different under a cropped black wig, takes this opportunity and wrestles with it. Not since his work for Michael Bay in Pain & Gain has he done anything this out of his comfort zone. If the rumours are true, and he is set to work with Martin Scorsese on a Hawaii-Set crime thriller, with Blunt and Leonardo DiCaprio co-starring, from a book Johnson co-authored no less, then this more than proves he’s ready to work with the master. Here? He smashes it.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale review – Julian Fellowes's final chapter is a pleasant stroll with characters you know and love
The closing chapter is a slightly muted but still warm-feeling film that should please long-term fans.
★★★☆☆ Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is in cinemas from 12 September – add it to your watchlist. All seasons of Downton Abbey are available to stream on ITVX. With its aim to wrap up one of British popular culture’s most endearing franchises, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale runs the risk of being a bit of a – if you excuse the pun – downer. For starters, the passing of Lady Violet Crawley at the end of the preceding film was always likely to remove one of creator Julian Fellowes’ greatest weapons, her withering put downs no more. Of course, her painting still hangs in the grand hallway of Downton, and this film finishes with a touching dedication to the legendary actress who played her, Dame Maggie Smith, following her death last year. This slightly muted but still warm-feeling third movie, which, like the two previous films, succeeds the long-running TV show, has its work cut out as a result. Times are a changing, with Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) and her divorce causing scandal in polite society. “Families like ours must keep moving to survive,” she says. Meanwhile, Lady and Lord Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern, Hugh Bonneville) give thought to selling the glorious Downton estate. “We’ve done our duty,” surmises Lord Grantham. “I’ve given half my life to Downton.” You imagine Fellowes probably feels the same. Thankfully, the film holds back on the gushing sentimentality, instead introducing some fun new characters, including Alessandro Nivola’s suave American, Gus Sambrook, an acquaintance of Lady Grantham’s brother, Harold (Paul Giamatti), and the ultra-pompous local Sir Hector Moreland (theatre maestro Simon Russell Beale, having a ball here). There’s also an encounter with real-life playwright Noël Coward (Arty Froushan), who becomes the toast of Downton after a visit (even if the suggestion of how he came up with the title for one of his most famous plays is a little silly). While Lady Violet is left to merely glower from her artfully framed painting, there’s still some neat humour to be had, including a priceless scene where Lord Grantham visits a potential new residence, a flat seemingly around the corner from the Royal Albert Hall, and is shocked to discover there will be others living above and below him. "What if I want to go up to bed?" he asks. "You don’t go up, you just go…along," Lady Mary replies. And Downton wouldn’t be Downton without the daft-but-loveable footman-turned-screenwriter Joseph Molesley (Kevin Doyle) Director Simon Curtis, familiar with it all after helming 2022’s more sun-kissed Downton Abbey: A New Era, doesn’t spare the horses when it comes the requisite glamour, from the opening trip to London, where even Piccadilly Circus looks romantic, to the obligatory swooping shots of Downton and a sequence at Ascot as the gang head to the races for The Gold Cup. Costumes by Anna Robbins, from the gowns to the tuxes to the glittering jewellery all look glorious too, immediately transporting you back to the period. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/09/4226D04702294R-47ef7f6.jpg" width="4500" height="3000" alt="(L to R) Hugh Bonneville stars as Robert Grantham, Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Grantham, Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith and Harry Hadden-Paton as Bertie Hexham in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale" title="(L to R) Hugh Bonneville stars as Robert Grantham, Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Grantham, Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith and Harry Hadden-Paton as Bertie Hexham in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale" /> As ever in such a wide-ranging ensemble, some characters get a little short-changed, with Lady Mary’s sister, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) a casualty here. Likewise, Carson (Jim Carter), Downton’s ever-faithful manservant doesn’t quite have the impact he’s made in previous outings, although his line, “London finished me off”, will likely draw a smile. Arguably, Fellowes’ script is not out of the top-drawer, but then again, it’s nigh-on impossible to bring a beloved franchise like Downton to a truly satisfying close. There are also nods to past characters, gone but not forgotten, although the nostalgia isn’t tear-stained. At one point, Bonneville’s Grantham quotes T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” It would be unfair to claim this closing film concludes on a whimper. But neither is it quite the grand finale the title would have us believe. More like a pleasant stroll with characters you know and love.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale review – A pleasant stroll with characters you know and love
With its aim to wrap up one of British popular culture’s most endearing franchises, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale runs the risk of being a bit of a – if you excuse the pun – downer. For starters, the passing of Lady Violet Crawley at the end of the preceding film was always likely to remove one of creator Julian Fellowes’ greatest weapons, her withering put downs no more. Of course, her painting still hangs in the grand hallway of Downton, and this film finishes with a touching dedication to the legendary actress who played her, Dame Maggie Smith, following her death last year. This slightly muted but still warm-feeling third movie, which, like the two previous films, succeeds the long-running TV show, has its work cut out as a result. Times are a changing, with Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) and her divorce causing scandal in polite society. “Families like ours must keep moving to survive,” she says. Meanwhile, Lady and Lord Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern, Hugh Bonneville) give thought to selling the glorious Downton estate. “We’ve done our duty,” surmises Lord Grantham. “I’ve given half my life to Downton.” You imagine Fellowes probably feels the same. Thankfully, the film holds back on the gushing sentimentality, instead introducing some fun new characters, including Alessandro Nivola’s suave American, Gus Sambrook, an acquaintance of Lady Grantham’s brother, Harold (Paul Giamatti), and the ultra-pompous local Sir Hector Moreland (theatre maestro Simon Russell Beale, having a ball here). There’s also an encounter with real-life playwright Noël Coward (Arty Froushan), who becomes the toast of Downton after a visit (even if the suggestion of how he came up with the title for one of his most famous plays is a little silly). While Lady Violet is left to merely glower from her artfully framed painting, there’s still some neat humour to be had, including a priceless scene where Lord Grantham visits a potential new residence, a flat seemingly around the corner from the Royal Albert Hall, and is shocked to discover there will be others living above and below him. "What if I want to go up to bed?" he asks. "You don’t go up, you just go…along," Lady Mary replies. And Downton wouldn’t be Downton without the daft-but-loveable footman-turned-screenwriter Joseph Molesley (Kevin Doyle) Director Simon Curtis, familiar with it all after helming 2022’s more sun-kissed Downton Abbey: A New Era, doesn’t spare the horses when it comes the requisite glamour, from the opening trip to London, where even Piccadilly Circus looks romantic, to the obligatory swooping shots of Downton and a sequence at Ascot as the gang head to the races for The Gold Cup. Costumes by Anna Robbins, from the gowns to the tuxes to the glittering jewellery all look glorious too, immediately transporting you back to the period. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/09/4226D04702294R-47ef7f6.jpg" width="4500" height="3000" alt="(L to R) Hugh Bonneville stars as Robert Grantham, Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Grantham, Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith and Harry Hadden-Paton as Bertie Hexham in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale" title="(L to R) Hugh Bonneville stars as Robert Grantham, Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Grantham, Laura Carmichael as Lady Edith and Harry Hadden-Paton as Bertie Hexham in Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale" /> As ever in such a wide-ranging ensemble, some characters get a little short-changed, with Lady Mary’s sister, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) a casualty here. Likewise, Carson (Jim Carter), Downton’s ever-faithful manservant doesn’t quite have the impact he’s made in previous outings, although his line, “London finished me off”, will likely draw a smile. Arguably, Fellowes’ script is not out of the top-drawer, but then again, it’s nigh-on impossible to bring a beloved franchise like Downton to a truly satisfying close. There are also nods to past characters, gone but not forgotten, although the nostalgia isn’t tear-stained. At one point, Bonneville’s Grantham quotes T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” It would be unfair to claim this closing film concludes on a whimper. But neither is it quite the grand finale the title would have us believe. More like a pleasant stroll with characters you know and love. Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale will be released in UK cinemas on 12th September 2025. All seasons of Downton Abbey are available to stream on ITVX. Check out more of our Drama coverage or Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Spike Lee on Denzel Washington, whether he'd do Marvel and the Viagra musical he still wants to make
The legendary director speaks exclusively to RadioTimes.com about his new film Highest 2 Lowest and much more.
Spike Lee wasn’t built for Zoom. The famed director of Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman is sitting in a plush, cream-furnished room, wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and bespoke, white-rimmed glasses. That’s about all that can be glimpsed, given the angle of the laptop camera that’s been plonked in front of the 5ft 7in filmmaker. You sense if he was directing this interview, it’d look a lot more polished. The 68-year-old director is back with his latest film, , a “re-interpretation” of Ed McBain’s 1959 pulp novel King’s Ransom, which was later adapted by the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa into 1963’s influential crime procedural High and Low. That film starred Toshiro Mifune as a business tycoon running a shoe company who faces a terrible quandary when a kidnapper accidentally nabs his chauffeur’s son rather than his own. Lee is no stranger to re-working Asian cinema. He previously took on 2003’s bloodthirsty Oldboy, the South Korean-made revenge thriller directed by Park Chan-wook. His remake, a decade on, starred Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen. Now he’s back with his long-term collaborator Denzel Washington, who plays David King, a New York music mogul and the owner of the label Stackin’ Hits. “He’s considered, in the music business, to have the best ears,” says Lee. When King’s son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) is seemingly taken, King’s world appears to be crumbling. A ransom of 17.5 million Swiss francs is set. But as with Kurosawa’s yarn, the wrong boy is snatched – the son to King’s best friend and driver, Paul (Jeffrey Wright). “For me, I think the foundation of the film is morality,” says Lee, alluding to the dilemma King faces. Pay the ransom or risk being lambasted on social media. With King and Paul’s sons both teenagers, it’s one of several differences to the Kurosawa version, in which the kidnap victim is a child. “With his son being older, it emphasises, for me, more the father-son relationship, because he’s at the age of a young man, and he goes this way or that way. Here’s the thing: this is a reinterpretation, not a remake. So when you reinterpret something, you’re making changes, right? It’s not the same. With the upmost respect, it would be impossible to remake it. Also, it’s different cultures. That film was post-war Japan, 1963. This is modern day New York City.” Lee is brazen enough to take on a film most will associate with Kurosawa, a risky move in some eyes. “I got introduced to Mr. Kurosawa when I was in NYU grad film school. Rashomon was related to my first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It,” he says. Indeed, his 1986 debut, about a woman and her relationships with three men was inspired by Kurosawa’s 1950 crime film, which examined the same events from different perspectives. Did he feel he was able to explore modern-day Black America in Highest 2 Lowest? “I did not just turn African-American for this film,” he says. “That’s who I am. So that’s infused in the films I do. And it’s also the artwork. Look at the artwork, on the wall. Basquiat, you got all these things. And it’s the music that’s chosen, the characters that are here. So I did not have to flip a switch for Blackness to be in this and at the same time respecting what the great Akira Kurosawa did in his film from 1963.” As it happens, Lee did not originate the project. It actually came via Washington, who last worked with the director on his 2006’s bank robbery tale Inside Man – the biggest box office hit of Lee’s career (taking $186 million worldwide). “He called me up…he said, ‘It takes place in New York. I’m sending the script.’ Hung up the phone on me practically, and I just said, ‘I’m in’ before I ever read the script. And then I see [that it’s] Kurosawa! Let’s go! Let’s go!” says Lee, excitedly. Lee was shocked when he discovered that it’d been almost two decades since he worked with Washington. “I did not even know that that many years had expired till journalists brought it up. I didn’t know. We’ve seen each other during that time…so I don’t think our relationship is just based upon the time we’re working together. So we see each other and our families are together. Our wives definitely. So that’s maybe the reason why I didn’t think about it.” He and Washington first worked together back in 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues, with Lee directing and co-starring in this jazz-infused tale. Just Lee’s fourth movie, it came directly after 1989’s incendiary race relations tale Do The Right Thing, which saw him nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and truly put Lee on the map. Two years later, they made Malcolm X, which saw Washington up for an Academy Award for playing the revered Black Nationalist leader, before reuniting for 1998’s basketball drama He Got Game. “Speaking from my heart, it was just a joy to be with my brother, Denzel, working together as a team, individuals that trust each other,” he says. But even if he hadn’t noticed the gap in time – partly because he worked with Washington’s son John David Washington on 2018’s BlacKkKlansman, the film that finally won Lee an Oscar for Best Screenplay – others did. “Every now and then I would show Inside Man to my film class [Lee is a tenured professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts]. We always have Q&A and my students say, ‘So when’s the next time you’re working with Denzel?’” With the film so deeply entrenched in the music industry, that feels spot-on for Lee, who has been working with musicians his whole career. As a student at NYU, he directed an unofficial video for Grandmaster Flash’s White Lines (Don’t Do It). Since then, he’s filmed promos for Prince, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Kelly Rowland and The Killers, to name just a handful. He’s also made music documentaries, notably Bad 25 – which chronicled the making of Jackson’s album Bad. “Michael Jackson told me, ‘Spike, don’t say music video.’ He used to keep reminding me.” He starts to impersonate Jackson’s famed high-pitched accent, before revealing that sometimes his voice could turn into a growl. “[He’d go] ‘Spike, I’m not going to tell you anymore. We’re not doing music videos. We’re doing short films!’ Sometimes we were shooting one of those things...someone say, ‘Spike, Spike. Spike.’ I’m like, ‘Who’s calling me?’ I turn around, ‘Oh, what do you want Michael? I didn’t even recognise you!’ True story." View oEmbed on the source website On Highest 2 Lowest, he cast rapper (and partner to Rihanna) A$AP Rocky, who had previously acted in 2018’s Monster – alongside John David Washington. The film was produced by Lee’s wife, Tonya Lewis Lee. “I knew he could act. From that he wasn’t posing. I mean, a lot of times, historically, there have been musicians in films. I understand that. But he’s a serious actor. He would not been in a film if that wasn’t the case.” Lee cast him in a role not a million miles from the Harlem-born Rocky’s own life – a rapper from the streets named Yung Felon. “He came for a semi audition. I didn’t tell him it was an audition, but we just had him come in. Denzel and I just read a couple of scenes, but he was the guy, no doubt. I mean, he’s multi-talented.” Rocky’s also not the only rapper in the film, with the 25-year-old Ice Spice making her feature debut here too. The film certainly offers up a potent portrayal of modern-day showbiz. “It asks a question, ‘What’s the value of talent? Are you gonna put followers and fame over talent?’ And that’s a big, big thing. At least it’s how the entertainment world is running today.” Lee even took to social media to seek out new talent for the movie. “Three or four people in this film, I found on Instagram,” he says. While Lee has made 25 feature films (as well as numerous documentaries), if there’s one thing he’s never done, it’s direct a big superhero blockbuster. “Marvel’s never asked me to do a film yet,” he shrugs. “They got my brother [Ryan Coogler] who does Black Panther.” So would he ever do it, if the opportunity arose? “It’d have to be the right film, the right superhero.” Maybe he could do a Nick Fury movie, taking on the character played by Samuel L Jackson across multiple Marvel movies. Like with Washington, Jackson and Lee have worked together multiple times, going back to his second movie School Daze. Does he have a film he still wants to get made? “Hopefully one day – a musical. The origin of Viagra!” he reveals. Titled ‘Boner’, this tale about the famed impotence medication, he’s been working on it for several years. “Hopefully we’ll get it. It’s a musical, singing and dancing! It’s about the origin. Pfizer. The blue pill.” Now that would make a perfect show-stopping finale to an illustrious career. Highest 2 Lowest is in cinemas and streams on Apple TV+ from September 5. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Denzel Washington on ageing, AI panic and the final act of his career: "Time marches on"
Washington stars in Spike Lee's new film Highest 2 Lowest.
Very few actors get to curate the final act of their careers. But then again, very few actors are Denzel Wasington. The 10-time Oscar nominee – yes, 10! – who won the gold statue twice, for 1989’s Glory and 2002’s Training Day, remains one of Hollywood’s most supremely talented leading men. Still in demand – he turned 70 last December – there’s renewed vigour in his work too. Perhaps because he knows there’s only a limited number of films left in the tank. “I will say that as I approached my 70th birthday, between the 65th and 70th birthdays, and understanding and starting to feel like there is some end to this, [I asked myself] ‘Who would I like to work with before I finish?’” he says, when we meet over Zoom in the very week his latest movie Highest 2 Lowest has just received its New York premiere. “It’s just where I was at in life, where I am in life, where I was then in life…who do I want to work with?” It’s wise thinking from Washington, an actor who has played so many great men in his career – from Steve Biko to Malcolm X to the (semi) fictional lawyer in Philadelphia who fights the corner for Tom Hanks's AIDS victim. No wonder he’s lining up some of the best directors in the world for his curtain call. “I’m about to work with Fernando Meirelles and I’m about to work with Ryan Coogler,” he reveals. “And we haven’t found the right thing yet, but I’ve been talking with Steve McQueen.” That’s quite a line up right there. Just the thought of Washington teaming up with Britain’s McQueen, the director of Shame and 12 Years a Slave, is mouthwatering. Before that possibility, Washington is readying for Here Come the Flood, a heist thriller by Brazilian City of God director Meirelles. And then there’s the prospect of him joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Coogler directing him in an as-yet unspecified role in Black Panther 3 (Washington recently revealed that he had to call Coogler and apologise for blurting this secret out). For the moment, though, he’s revelling in Highest 2 Lowest, a film that marks his fifth collaboration with the irrepressible Spike Lee. The film is a “re-interpretation”, as Lee has pointed out, of the 1963 thriller High and Low by Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa, itself a take on Ed McBain’s pulp novel. Here, the story is transposed to modern-day New York, with Washington playing David King, the head of a record label, Stackin’ Hits Records. He’s about to strike a major business deal when tragedy strikes: he hears his son has been kidnapped. As anyone who has seen High and Low will know, that’s not quite the case: the abductor has snatched the wrong boy – in this case, the son of King’s long-term friend Paul (Jeffrey Wright). Suddenly, King’s in a bind: pay the expensive ransom on behalf of his friend or risk the boy dying. Intriguingly, it wasn’t Lee that initiated the project. “The material came to me before it came to Spike,” reveals Washington. “And I said, ‘No question. I gotta call my boy. Bang.’ And here we are.” The actor points out that their film differs from the original, what with the kidnap victim a teenager rather than a child. “Ours is a different set of circumstances the way the story is written. But I think it hit on something interesting by talking about the boy being older because he’s at the cusp of manhood, when all those dangers are there, and he can see and understand what his father is and isn’t doing. And we get to see the world through the eyes of our young people today. So I think that was a wise decision, which makes for more fertile drama.” With this aim of curating the final years of his career, Washington says it’s “no coincidence” that he went to Lee, who has form in remaking Asian movie classics (think of his 2013 take on the South Korean revenge drama Oldboy). Their collaborations stretch back thirty-five years to 1990’s jazz tale Mo’ Better Blues, though Washington has no wish to reflect on how their relationship has changed. “I don’t analyse like that. I don’t think of other people like that, or how much they’ve changed. I don’t know.” He pauses. “Well, we have gotten older. Our knees hurt more!” His appreciation and admiration for Lee is huge, however. “Spike was the first director I worked with that would make a documentary in the middle of making a film, in the middle of making a documentary, in the middle of making a film. So you’d be shooting Mo’ Better… while he’s shooting Robin Harris doing stand-up. He’s in the movie, but he’s also just shooting him doing his stand-up. So there were moments like that in our relationship, over the five films where I would see, ‘Oh, he’s always aware.’ He’s aware of more than just the character in the script. He’s aware of the culture in a way that an actor doesn’t have to think about.” Since then, they reunited for 1992’s epic activist biopic Malcolm X – a film and a Washington performance that Lee believes will stand “the test of time”. Six years later, they followed it with basketball drama He Got Game before coming together for a fourth outing, 2006’s Inside Man, a bank robbery tale that became the biggest hit of Lee’s career. Since then, Lee worked with Washington’s son John David Washington on his Oscar-winning BlacKKKlansman. But it’s only now, almost two decades since their last encounter, that they’re back for Highest 2 Lowest. Washington is no stranger to remakes – 2014’s violent The Equalizer and its two sequels stems from the 1980s TV show about a vigilante, while he even took on The Magnificent Seven, a take on the classic 1960 western that itself was based on another Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai. As with The Magnificent Seven, the actor took the same approach when it came to High and Low. “I didn’t study it. It really wasn’t going to affect what it was I was doing. We had a different story. I mean, inspired by that story, and I didn’t want to see something that I really liked, and then then go, ‘Oh, I don’t want to imitate it.’” While Kurosawa’s High and Low starred Toshiro Mifune as the head of a shoe company, Highest 2 Lowest deals with the modern-day music industry. Fame, we’re told, is the only currency. “I don’t know what the deep meaning is, but I mean, it’s just increasingly the world we live in. How many followers, how much fame, and you can monetize that?” says Washington, whose own breakthrough as a youngster came through more traditional means, treading the boards in theatre and later, on television, in the popular medical drama St Elsewhere. Yet, he understands that even in his day, fame sometimes came to the undeserving. “It’s easy to say to ‘Oh, back in the day, you had to have talent to become famous’, but there were just different ways of creating fame, then, maybe more behind-the-scenes, strings being pulled. Even in the studio system, back in the day, a hundred years ago, it wasn’t necessarily the most talented actors and actresses [that shone], but they could make stars. Now wannabe stars can make themselves.” He considers for a second. “Or at least, people think they can make themselves stars. I guess it’s just more people have access now [to instant exposure]…you had to come through the studio or come through something before.” Certainly, social media has allowed people to showcase their talents – with Lee even admitting that he cast smaller roles in the film by seeking people on Instagram. The crossover between film and music is also deeply apparent, with the casting of rappers A$AP Rocky and Ice Spice in key roles. If Lee’s film is brash and sometimes over-the-top, it also touches on pertinent topics currently plaguing the entertainment business, including the use of Artificial Intelligence. Washington merely shrugs at the mention of AI and its impact. “Time marches on. The technology is the technology,” he says, well aware that the furore currently surrounding AI – whether its used to generate scripts or even replicate performances – is the same panic that spread with the arrival of other technologies. “That’s what they said about radio two hundred years ago.” The use of AI in movies may not fully be initiated until after Washington has retired but he’s not worried. “The difference is we have a soul, heart. We can be hurt, and we can react and create based on our pain. I don’t know if a machine can do that yet. Can they feel? It’s called feelings. You have to feel something. Not just imitate something. You have to feel it. So I don’t know if they figured that out yet, but we’re just at the infant level of it, like they were at the infancy of radio or the infancy of television or the infancy of computers.” Surely, a machine will struggle to replicate the power and potency of a Denzel Washington performance. Highest 2 Lowest is in cinemas and on Apple TV+ from Friday 5th September – sign up to Apple TV+ now. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Spike Lee on Denzel Washington, if he would ever direct a Marvel film – and the Viagra musical he still wants to make
The legendary director speaks exclusively to RT about his new film Highest 2 Lowest and much more.
Highest 2 Lowest is in cinemas and on Apple TV+ from 5 September. Add it to your watchlist Spike Lee wasn’t built for Zoom. The famed director of Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman is sitting in a plush, cream-furnished room, wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and bespoke, white-rimmed glasses. That’s about all that can be glimpsed, given the angle of the laptop camera that’s been plonked in front of the 5ft 7in filmmaker. You sense if he was directing this interview, it’d look a lot more polished. The 68-year-old director is back with his latest film, a “re-interpretation” of Ed McBain’s 1959 pulp novel King’s Ransom, which was later adapted by the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa into 1963’s influential crime procedural High and Low. That film starred Toshiro Mifune as a business tycoon running a shoe company who faces a terrible quandary when a kidnapper accidentally nabs his chauffeur’s son rather than his own. Lee is no stranger to re-working Asian cinema. He previously took on 2003’s bloodthirsty Oldboy, the South Korean-made revenge thriller directed by Park Chan-wook. His remake, a decade on, starred Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Olsen. Now he’s back with his long-term collaborator Denzel Washington, who plays David King, a New York music mogul and the owner of the label Stackin’ Hits. “He’s considered, in the music business, to have the best ears,” says Lee. When King’s son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) is seemingly taken, King’s world appears to be crumbling. A ransom of 17.5 million Swiss francs is set. But as with Kurosawa’s yarn, the wrong boy is snatched – the son to King’s best friend and driver, Paul (Jeffrey Wright). “For me, I think the foundation of the film is morality,” says Lee, alluding to the dilemma King faces. Pay the ransom or risk being lambasted on social media. With King and Paul’s sons both teenagers, it’s one of several differences to the Kurosawa version, in which the kidnap victim is a child. “With his son being older, it emphasises, for me, more the father-son relationship, because he’s at the age of a young man, and he goes this way or that way. Here’s the thing: this is a reinterpretation, not a remake. So when you reinterpret something, you’re making changes, right? It’s not the same. With the upmost respect, it would be impossible to remake it. Also, it’s different cultures. That film was post-war Japan, 1963. This is modern day New York City.” Lee is brazen enough to take on a film most will associate with Kurosawa, a risky move in some eyes. “I got introduced to Mr. Kurosawa when I was in NYU grad film school. Rashomon was related to my first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It,” he says. Indeed, his 1986 debut, about a woman and her relationships with three men was inspired by Kurosawa’s 1950 crime film, which examined the same events from different perspectives. Did he feel he was able to explore modern-day Black America in Highest 2 Lowest? “I did not just turn African-American for this film,” he says. “That’s who I am. So that’s infused in the films I do. And it’s also the artwork. Look at the artwork, on the wall. Basquiat, you got all these things. And it’s the music that’s chosen, the characters that are here. So I did not have to flip a switch for Blackness to be in this and at the same time respecting what the great Akira Kurosawa did in his film from 1963.” As it happens, Lee did not originate the project. It actually came via Washington, who last worked with the director on his 2006’s bank robbery tale Inside Man – the biggest box office hit of Lee’s career (taking $186 million worldwide). “He called me up…he said, ‘It takes place in New York. I’m sending the script.’ Hung up the phone on me practically, and I just said, ‘I’m in’ before I ever read the script. And then I see [that it’s] Kurosawa! Let’s go! Let’s go!” says Lee, excitedly. Lee was shocked when he discovered that it’d been almost two decades since he worked with Washington. “I did not even know that that many years had expired till journalists brought it up. I didn’t know. We’ve seen each other during that time…so I don’t think our relationship is just based upon the time we’re working together. So we see each other and our families are together. Our wives definitely. So that’s maybe the reason why I didn’t think about it.” He and Washington first worked together back in 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues, with Lee directing and co-starring in this jazz-infused tale. Just Lee’s fourth movie, it came directly after 1989’s incendiary race relations tale Do The Right Thing, which saw him nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and truly put Lee on the map. Two years later, they made Malcolm X, which saw Washington up for an Academy Award for playing the revered Black Nationalist leader, before reuniting for 1998’s basketball drama He Got Game. “Speaking from my heart, it was just a joy to be with my brother, Denzel, working together as a team, individuals that trust each other,” he says. But even if he hadn’t noticed the gap in time – partly because he worked with Washington’s son John David Washington on 2018’s BlacKkKlansman, the film that finally won Lee an Oscar for Best Screenplay – others did. “Every now and then I would show Inside Man to my film class [Lee is a tenured professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts]. We always have Q&A and my students say, ‘So when’s the next time you’re working with Denzel?’” With the film so deeply entrenched in the music industry, that feels spot-on for Lee, who has been working with musicians his whole career. As a student at NYU, he directed an unofficial video for Grandmaster Flash’s White Lines (Don’t Do It). Since then, he’s filmed promos for Prince, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Kelly Rowland and The Killers, to name just a handful. He’s also made music documentaries, notably Bad 25 – which chronicled the making of Jackson’s album Bad. “Michael Jackson told me, ‘Spike, don’t say music video.’ He used to keep reminding me.” He starts to impersonate Jackson’s famed high-pitched accent, before revealing that sometimes his voice could turn into a growl. “[He’d go] ‘Spike, I’m not going to tell you anymore. We’re not doing music videos. We’re doing short films!’ Sometimes we were shooting one of those things...someone say, ‘Spike, Spike. Spike.’ I’m like, ‘Who’s calling me?’ I turn around, ‘Oh, what do you want Michael? I didn’t even recognise you!’ True story." View oEmbed on the source website On Highest 2 Lowest, he cast rapper (and partner to Rihanna) A$AP Rocky, who had previously acted in 2018’s Monster – alongside John David Washington. The film was produced by Lee’s wife, Tonya Lewis Lee. “I knew he could act. From that he wasn’t posing. I mean, a lot of times, historically, there have been musicians in films. I understand that. But he’s a serious actor. He would not been in a film if that wasn’t the case.” Lee cast him in a role not a million miles from the Harlem-born Rocky’s own life – a rapper from the streets named Yung Felon. “He came for a semi audition. I didn’t tell him it was an audition, but we just had him come in. Denzel and I just read a couple of scenes, but he was the guy, no doubt. I mean, he’s multi-talented.” Rocky’s also not the only rapper in the film, with the 25-year-old Ice Spice making her feature debut here too. The film certainly offers up a potent portrayal of modern-day showbiz. “It asks a question, ‘What’s the value of talent? Are you gonna put followers and fame over talent?’ And that’s a big, big thing. At least it’s how the entertainment world is running today.” Lee even took to social media to seek out new talent for the movie. “Three or four people in this film, I found on Instagram,” he says. While Lee has made 25 feature films (as well as numerous documentaries), if there’s one thing he’s never done, it’s direct a big superhero blockbuster. “Marvel’s never asked me to do a film yet,” he shrugs. “They got my brother [Ryan Coogler] who does Black Panther.” So would he ever do it, if the opportunity arose? “It’d have to be the right film, the right superhero.” Maybe he could do a Nick Fury movie, taking on the character played by Samuel L Jackson across multiple Marvel movies. Like with Washington, Jackson and Lee have worked together multiple times, going back to his second movie School Daze. Does he have a film he still wants to get made? “Hopefully one day – a musical. The origin of Viagra!” he reveals. Titled Boner, this tale about the famed impotence medication, he’s been working on it for several years. “Hopefully we’ll get it. It’s a musical, singing and dancing! It’s about the origin. Pfizer. The blue pill.” Now that would make a perfect show-stopping finale to an illustrious career.
A House of Dynamite review: Kathryn Bigelow's terrifying nuclear thriller is among her very best
Rebecca Ferguson and Idris Elba face a living nightmare in this nerve-shredding drama.
Kathryn Bigelow returns with A House of Dynamite, her first film in eight years, since the incendiary urban tale Detroit. This latest work, premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival before a Netflix-backed release in the autumn, is up there with her very best. A tense, taut drama for the nuclear age, it’s a multi-perspective look at the precious few minutes that tick by when a launched missile, or “object” to use the jargon, enters United States airspace. As the opening caption reminds us, after the Cold War, political agreements looked to dismantle the nuclear arms race, but “that era is now over”. As we all know, countries including the US, Russia, China, North Korea and India all have nuclear arsenals. The question is, is anyone ready to push the button? In Bigelow’s film, scripted by Noah Oppenheim, an unidentified enemy launches an unprovoked single missile strike against America. “Is this real?” asks one character, as the realisation dawns that this is not a drill. Events are initially played out largely in the White House Situation Room, as Rebecca Ferguson’s Captain Olivia Walker attempts to handle the situation, whilst also coping with the fact her husband and young son are at home, and, like millions of others, in grave danger. GBIs – Ground Based Interceptors – are launched, but as one character notes, knocking a nuclear missile from the sky is like “hitting a bullet with a bullet”. Keeping it tight, the storyline covers about a third of the film’s running time, before Bigelow then switches locations, repeating events from other perspectives, including the Secretary of Defence (Jared Harris) and the President of the United States (Idris Elba), who is making a visit to a sporting arena, greeting young basketball players (he enters to rapturous cheers and the sound of Phil Collins’s drum-heavy anthem In the Air Tonight). Bigelow has been here before, more or less. Her rather ponderous 2002 film K-19: The Widowmaker dealt with an impending nuclear submarine disaster. But A House of Dynamite is far more urgent, far more, well, explosive. Of course, the film draws comparisons with the likes of Fail Safe and even Stanley Kubrick’s satire Dr Strangelove, but Bigelow’s relentless pacing and contemporary setting makes it feel utterly of the moment. With a shrewdly-chosen cast, this is an ensemble to savour, including Jason Clarke, who featured in Bigelow’s hunt for Bin Laden tale Zero Dark Thirty, and Past Lives’ Greta Lee (as an expert in North Korean intelligence). But this is not a film with a grandstanding singular performance (although Tracy Letts’s hard-hitting general comes close to stealing it). Rather, it’s a group of actors harnessing a collective energy to bring to life a terrifying story. Giving you a unique fly-on-the-wall look at decisions that ultimately rest with the President, as he must consider whether to retaliate and usher in World War III or risk further strikes on American soil, it shows with clarity just how little time there is when it comes to deciding mankind’s fate. “Surrender or suicide,” as the President is told, when he’s confronted with the “nuclear decision handbook”, which outlines three response strategies – “rare, medium and well-done”, as one operative says in a rare moment of black humour. Although much of A House of Dynamite takes place in claustrophobic interiors – a world of big-screen monitors, desks, and half-drunk coffee cups – there are expansive moments that hit home, like the shot of buses pulling into Raven Rock in Pennsylvania, an underground facility for sheltering during a nuclear attack. For sure, Bigelow has crafted a film that works both as nerve-shredding entertainment and as a thought-provoking anti-nuclear statement. A House Of Dynamite is released in cinemas on 10th October 2025 and on Netflix on 24th October 2025. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.