Billie Piper on Scoop: "Telling their story felt important to me"
Piper and Keeley Hawes spoke to Radio Times magazine about how the Netflix film tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Prince Andrew Newsnight interview.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. "I don’t know that I’ll ever see an interview like that again in my lifetime," says Billie Piper. "Especially nowadays, where everything is so censored and controlled. That access and exposure… that self-exposure." She pauses. "Actually, I’m not sure that I saw anything like that before." There is, of course, only one interview that Piper could be talking about – the fateful 22-minute conversation between Prince Andrew and Emily Maitlis on Newsnight on 17th November 2019. It has become one of the most raked-over TV moments of our times. You might wonder if we really need to revisit it so soon. What can we possibly learn from a drama that we haven’t already seen ourselves? The interview largely came about because of two formidable women: the former Newsnight interviews producer Sam McAlister, played by Piper, and Amanda Thirsk, played by Keeley Hawes, who served as Andrew’s private secretary until 2020, and who met McAlister several times before the actual interview went ahead. Peter Moffat and Geoff Bussetil’s script, adapted from McAlister’s book Scoops, gives a fascinating insight into the workings of two troubled British institutions: the BBC and the royal family. "It’s a bit like The Crown," says Hawes. "What’s really interesting is seeing behind the curtains. And it read like a thriller! It was unlike anything I was expecting it to be." It’s a particularly great showcase for Piper, who says she had been following the Jeffrey Epstein story for many years – even before the Prince Andrew interview. "Whenever there’s a story about abuse of women, I pay attention," she says. "I’m an ambassador for Refuge [the domestic abuse charity], so this is something that I feel passionately about: the protection of women and children specifically." Still, she’s careful to point out that this isn’t a story about Epstein or his victims - rather about the women who brought a particular aspect of the story to our screens. "The interview, whatever you feel about it, was such an important part of exposing this story. And [Sam and Amanda] were integral to that. So telling their story felt important to me. And seeing the things that we didn’t know about the interview, like the fact that it was signed off by the Palace, was fascinating to me." This, indeed, is one of the extremely surprising aspects of the interview: not only that it happened at all, but that almost all of the talking points were raised in discussions between the two teams beforehand. As far as Thirsk is concerned, Hawes believes her intentions came from a "good place". "I think that was probably a consequence of being in that bubble. She simply thought, 'This is what we need.' I think she was probably right: we did need to hear from him at that moment." If Thirsk is the consummate palace insider, McAlister cuts an outsiderish figure in the newsroom. Her Newsnight colleagues prefer to stage endless debates about Brexit rather than chase down royal stories, and are sceptical about her ability to land the interview. The tenacious McAlister is determined to prove them wrong. It’s clear that Piper feels a strong admiration for her. "When I met her, I thought, 'Oh my god, your spirit is unlike anyone I’ve ever met in your industry!' And it’s obviously the key to her success. "We have quite similar working-class backgrounds. She’s also this absolute force of nature. Not chilly. Not steely – although I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her – but incredibly likeable and bright. Those are the kind of women I feel compelled to be more like as a person, but also to play in my work." Read more: Scoop producers explain why it’s the right time for Prince Andrew drama Scoop gets new trailer as Rufus Sewell talks transforming into Prince Andrew It’s not so long ago that we saw Piper in I Hate Suzie, a panic attack of a series in which she played a celebrity whose private life becomes public property. Here, she plays a woman who is working to expose someone else’s deepest secrets. I wonder if she enjoyed seeing things from the other side? "It’s all fascinating material for me, to be honest," she laughs. "But when it comes to people in positions of power, people that have to be accountable, I feel a bit differently. I think we deserve to know the truth about what they’re up to and what they’re doing. More so than, let’s say, Britney Spears on a Friday night." As for what the interview achieved – that’s harder to say. Piper declines to be drawn on the royal family as a whole. "I have very strong feelings about them – but it’s not necessarily helpful for me to put them into the world. It just contributes to this endless discourse that I can’t be bothered with." But when we know so little of what goes on behind the scenes, it’s drama that fills in the gaps. Hawes notes that there has been a trend in recent years for dramatising the recent past. "I suppose it’s just a question of wanting more," she says. "It’s a bit like doom-scrolling through the never-ending news. People are just there for it. Every single bit of information." Overall, Hawes hopes that Scoop will serve to celebrate an "extraordinary piece of journalism". "It doesn’t feel like we’re sensationalising it – and it’s not something that should be sensationalised," she says. "It’s celebrating the work these women put in. And it’s just horribly entertaining." Scoop will be available to stream on Netflix from Friday 5th April 2024. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10 – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The Singapore Grip's Luke Treadaway explains why ITV empire drama is 'interesting, weird and dark'
Luke Treadaway tells Richard Godwin about ITV's new big budget show, The Singapore Grip.
Before he was cast as the idealistic son of a rubber magnate in The Singapore Grip, Luke Treadaway hadn’t given much thought to the Japanese invasion of Singapore in the Second World War. Nor, he admits, had he spent much time pondering the finer points of the colonial rubber trade, or the lives of British imperialists in the Malay Peninsula, or the people they were there to exploit. And, in fairness, how many British people have? “It’s not on the syllabus is it, the Fall of Singapore?” says the 36-year-old actor from his coronavirus retreat in rural Devon. He’s wearing a grey cap and sweatshirt, curls and beard untroubled since lockdown began, bearing the dreamy air of a child who has been yanked away from his game to say hello to a grown up. “We don’t go there in school, funnily enough. We dwell on the victorious battles,” he says. Having once played a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp in Angelina Jolie’s movie Unbroken, he was vaguely familiar with the history, but not the wider context. “So being in this was eye-opening to me.” The sumptuous new drama, adapted by Christopher Hampton from JG Farrell’s 1978 novel, ought to be eye-opening for TV audiences, too. In February 1942, 80,000 British, Indian and Australian soldiers surrendered to a Japanese force roughly half that size, thanks to a familiar combination of British hubris, aristocratic incompetence and casual racism. Winston Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”, and all those captured, soldiers and civilians alike, suffered some of the worst PoW conditions of the war at the hands of their Japanese captors. The surrender is often described as the “day the Empire died”, but given the depiction of those doing the surrendering in Farrell’s book, it’s hard to feel too sad about that part of it. “Empire”, as George Orwell had it, was “in essence nothing but mechanisms for exploiting coloured labour” – and there’s plenty of that going on in the rubber plantations of Blackett and Webb, the family firm at the centre of The Singapore Grip. But lest you think you’re in for a finger-wagging history lesson, can I stress how sultry, how swoonsome, how delectably cast and darkly comic The Singapore Grip is? Think jazz bands tootling on tropical lawns, spoilt young rubber-brats careering around in vintage Lagondas, Charles Dance pruning roses in a sarong – and Luke Treadaway perspiring handsomely at the centre of it all. “It’s got a different vibe,” is how he describes it. “It’s interesting and weird and dark.” Filmed on location in Malaysia last year, it’s an immersive treat at a time when the mere thought of foreign travel feels off-limits. The novel was the final part of Farrell’s Empire Trilogy, published a year before the Irish author drowned at the age of 44, cutting short a brilliant career. The first book, Troubles, was set during the Irish War of Independence of 1919; the second, the Booker Prize-winning The Siege of Krishnapur, unfolded the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The Singapore Grip refers to – well, I wouldn’t want to spoil it. But Treadaway wolfed it down (“Even the bits about rubber taxation are fascinating”), while Hampton sees it as the greatest of the three books and Farrell as a natural successor to Evelyn Waugh. As with Waugh’s greatest fiction, the six-part series moves from satire to romance to deep gnawing tragedy. “There’s something quite karmic about these characters, who have gone around the world taking what they want from the local people, suddenly realising that they can’t actually escape,” says Treadaway. David Morrissey plays the buccaneering Walter Blackett, head of one of the most successful enterprises in Singapore and father of two of its most dislikeable children, Joan and Monty (played by Georgia Blizzard and Luke Newberry). When the series opens in 1941, business is booming – the armies in Europe need rubber – but Blackett hopes he can double-lock his future by marrying his daughter to the son of his business partner and mentor, Mr Webb (Charles Dance). However, when young Matthew Webb arrives in Singapore, fresh from a spell in the charitable sector, he has different ideals. Much to the disgust of the Blacketts, he worries about the condition of the native population – and falls for Vera Chiang (Elizabeth Tan), an enigmatic Chinese refugee taken in by his father. The series arrives at a moment when discussion of the British Empire is more heated than it has been for a generation – witness the toppling of the statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol and the Rule, Britannia! episode at the Proms. Treadaway is extremely reluctant to wade into all that (“It’s all so much and so big isn’t it? It’s hard to even wrap your head around. I mean the history and the weight of that…”), but feels the drama has lessons for today. “It doesn’t feel like a massively didactic piece telling you the Empire was bad,” he says. “It’s showing you the people who were involved in it and allowing them to have conversations about it themselves. People will take different things from it. But what I liked about it is that we are left under no illusions about these characters.” While much has changed since that time, the characters are still recognisable types. Matthew would surely have just completed a worthy gap-year project. Walter would be the director of a multinational mining company, or perhaps a tax fiddler for a Silicon Valley giant. “There’s still colonialism and imperialism, but they go by different names don’t they?” reflects Treadaway. “Walter thinks that only by driving profit up and sending it back to the shareholders in England will we bring these poor people into the modern world. But these people weren’t asking to be treated like slaves. It wasn’t a fair pact, it wasn’t a joint decision was it? You can’t claim you’re helping a country if you’re just doing it all on your own.” It’s a great part for Treadaway – you can almost see him losing his innocence through the series. His most celebrated roles so far have been boyish outsiders: Christopher, the 15-year-old autistic hero in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, whom he played around 300 times between the National Theatre and the West End, winning an Olivier Award in 2013; and the homeless James Bowen in A Street Cat Named Bob (2016). Here, he emerges as a romantic lead. Treadaway grew up in rural Devon with identical twin brother Harry and older brother Sam. Their mother was a primary school teacher, their father an architect. The twins’ early career moved in lockstep. They entered the LAMDA drama school in the same year and were all but welded together in Brothers of the Head (2005), an indie film about conjoined twins in a punk band. View oEmbed on the source website They have long been central to a sprawling set of now-not-so-young British stage talent that includes friends Benedict Cumberbatch, Matt Smith and playwright Polly Stenham. Both brothers are in long-term relationships with actors, too: Harry’s partner is Holliday Grainger (currently starring in Strike, Sun BBC1); Luke’s is Ruta Gedmintas – they have a son Bodhi, two and a half, and another on the way. Treadaway winces, in a polite sort of way, when I ask if there is any brotherly rivalry – but laughs when I ask if they have a pact never to work together again. “I would never say never. Possibly, but it’s not something we’re actively pursuing.” While in the past they talked over roles (“It’s always helpful to be able to discuss your industry”), now that task is largely outsourced to partners. When I ask how his lockdown has been, he does a lot of earnest equivocating. “God, every time I speak about this, I feel it will come across as incredibly unthoughtful as it’s horrendous for so many people.” But yes, he’s had a pretty idyllic time down in Devon. “We were living in a tiny flat in Highgate before lockdown and we just thought, ‘Nah’. We had an option to stay with my brother in Devon, and then we got a place down here ourselves.” The first couple of weeks were spent “bubbling” with Harry and Holliday, but since then he’s been reconnecting with his country roots, climbing trees, building sandcastles and going for walks along rivers with his son. “I’ve experienced what a lot of people have told me they’ve experienced, which is having that time to pause. Just having time with my boy. He’s that age where they start coming out with bonkers stuff all the time, but he’s also impressing you every day with how he can climb over this or open that. It’s a brilliant age isn’t it?” If not for coronavirus, he would have spent the summer in New York, where he had two plays lined up, while Gedmintas was due to film in Italy. But Treadaway is remarkably sanguine about the fate of the industry. “The small theatres are going to really struggle, I feel so sorry for them. I hope the Government puts its hand in its pocket for culture as much as it has for other industries. But I’m not like, ‘Oh, I must work next week’. I can’t see that happening. It will happen when it happens. There’s no point getting stressed about it.” Has lockdown changed him? “Yeah, I’ve started looking at the farmers and their tractors ploughing the fields and thinking, ‘Actually I’d like to be doing that’.” He laughs, but leaves a long enough gap for me to wonder if he’s being serious. Sure he misses London, friends, work, haring around Soho. But if we take one thing from this strange time? “I would just like everything to calm down and everyone to just realise that we’re on this tiny bloody marble, hurtling around space.” Read more about The Singapore Grip Where was ITV's The Singapore Grip filmed? What is the 'Singapore Grip'? The meaning behind the name of ITV's new period drama Meet the cast of ITV period drama The Singapore Grip This interview originally appeared in the Radio Times magazine. For the biggest interviews and the best TV listings subscribe to Radio Times now and never miss a copy. If you’re looking for more to watch, check out our TV guide.Head to Amazon now to purchase your copy of The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell.
Cheat's Tom Goodman-Hill: Playing an adulterer is “cathartic”
The Humans actor reflects on how his real-life experiences informed his role in ITV's psychological thriller
"What is it, 12 and a half years before it’s irreversible?” Tom Goodman-Hill and I are sitting on a park bench in east London. It’s a glorious day and the unseasonable warmth has prompted thoughts of climate change and the imminent destruction of the planet. “It’s terrifying!” he says. “Waaaargh!” He performs an actorly shake-out of his features. I’m sure you would recognise them – the pale eyes and red beard – even if the name doesn’t trip off the tongue. The actor has had prominent roles in Humans and Mr Selfridge – mildly exasperated nice guys are a speciality. He has done acclaimed theatre work, too: Spamalot, Enron, Earthquakes... It was during that last production in 2010, Mike Bartlett’s play about climate change and intergenerational conflict, that he met his wife Jessica Raine, a former star of Call the Midwife and more recently in Baptiste. They married in 2015. Everything you need to know about ITV's Cheat Meet the cast of ITV's Cheat Follow our Instagram account for the latest TV and Entertainment news in pictures The fact that the relationship spelt the end of his marriage to his first wife, Kerry Bradley, the mother of his two children, and the fact that adultery is the central theme of his new four-part ITV drama, Cheat, might account for Goodman-Hill’s slight twitchiness today. He’s keen to stress how much “fun” Cheat is, which is strange as it’s actually rather dark. “We’re so happy with it,” he says. “It was such a lot of fun to do and, usually, there’s a weird law where the more fun you have, the worse the project turns out!” View oEmbed on the source website ITV has high hopes of the campus thriller, written by newcomer Gaby Hull and directed by Louise Hooper. It opens with sociology lecturer Leah (Katherine Kelly) and student Rose (Molly Windsor of Three Girls) talking to one another through prison glass. Later, we see the body of Leah’s husband Adam (Goodman-Hill) in a morgue. “You don’t know who did it or how or why,” he says. “There are two women facing each other in a prison interview room and you don’t know who pushed whom too far.” Cheat centres on the mutual toxic obsession of the vulnerable but vicious Rose and Leah, who takes a little too much pleasure in humiliating the student when she plagiarises an essay. Rose fixates on Leah’s husband as a means of taking revenge and Adam becomes a pawn in their psychological games. Meet the cast of ITV's new thriller Cheat When I remark that it’s usually the wives and girlfriends who are bumped off, he says, “It’s about bloody time!” All the same, the “hapless husband” is now a familiar figure in TV drama. I wonder when male actors will start complaining that there are no decent parts for middle-aged men – all they can be is useless or murdered. Goodman-Hill laughs. “I would never ask for the male character to be given more intrigue,” he says. “I’m more: ‘Who is that man and why is he like that?’ There are plenty of fathers in the playground who like to divide their time between parenting and work, and plenty of couples who do that successfully. The annoying thing is that we haven’t seen more of it on screen sooner.” Goodman-Hill, 50, grew up middle class in Northumberland and still considers himself a northerner, even though he doesn’t sound it. “I’ve always enjoyed playing with people’s expectations. People see my double-barrelled name and assume I’m posh.” In fact, it comes from his parents splitting up when he was 12. His mother had a variety of jobs – speech therapist, domestic science teacher – but her passion was amateur dramatics. He followed her into the People’s Theatre in Newcastle and then London’s National Youth Theatre, before training to become a teacher. His tutor there was the now bestselling author Sir Ken Robinson, who spotted Goodman-Hill’s true passion: “He assessed my final practice and said, ‘You’re a fantastic teacher. Now go and be an actor.’” Everything you need to know about ITV's Cheat Goodman-Hill’s first professional role was in Stephen Daldry’s An Inspector Calls – and while theatre is his first love, he’s picky. “I’m too long in the tooth to do something I don’t feel is exactly right,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like a bit of an arse for thinking like that – but theatre is incredibly hard. You have to love it. For me, it has to be new writing, and it has to be relevant.” Earthquakes was just such a play. It was also responsible for his relationship with Raine, now 36. “It works brilliantly,” he says of being married to another actor. “You understand each other, the pressures you’re under and the rejection involved. You support each other. And we’re both on very different trajectories, which helps. “It’s amazing watching Jess go from role to role. I…” He dabs a tear away. “I get rather emotional talking about her, I’m so sorry. She’s away filming and I really miss her.” He composes himself. “People have started to see, with Patrick Melrose and Informer and Last Post, that she can be mercurial. It’s fantastic to see her do that.” The couple live in south London, not too far away from where his first family still are. His son, 22, recently graduated as a graphic designer, while his daughter, 20, is studying fashion. “They’re both fantastically talented. I have to say I’m quite pleased they’re not actors.” Raine is also now pregnant. “It’s the most exciting time and we’re both thrilled,” he says. He acknowledges that the end of his first marriage was messy. Details ended up in the Daily Mail. Goodman-Hill was reportedly organising a surprise 40th-birthday party for his wife, but cancelled it at the last minute; a friend of the couple claimed Bradley remained “furious” even two years later. “It was painful enough without it being all over the papers,” he says. “But it’s all good now. It’s in the past.” Still, wasn’t it awkward making a drama that centres on adultery? In Mr Selfridge he also had an adultery storyline, as did his character in Humans. “I was very conscious of that when I picked up the script,” he begins carefully. “But it’s inevitable as an actor. If you understand the map… If you know how that feels, you’re going to bring something of that to the part. You draw on your experiences and choose moments from your life that resonate with your character.” Overall, he says, it’s been “healthy”. Explain? “Part of your job is to help people understand what emotions people go through in any given situation so, inevitably, someone who can access it and understand it is going to, perhaps, do that more successfully than someone who can’t.” So, there was something redemptive in playing an adulterer? “I don’t think it’s redemptive, no! That implies some kind of martyrdom. But it is cathartic… And it’s therapeutic.” Turning 50 last May, he says, has led to a reassessing of priorities. “I suppose it also comes from your children being independent adults. You’re like: ‘I need to find something else to do with my life.’ When you’re breadwinning, there’s an onus on you to accept whatever comes in. But the moment that stops being your primary concern…” He’s now developing a drama for Channel 4 and co-writing a sitcom. “I feel like if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.” And on screen, he is fine with playing hapless husbands. “At 50, you realise you’re not going to be James Bond. If you’re an average-looking character actor, red-haired and pale, you struggle to find a tone you’re happy with. When you find it, it’s like a weight off your shoulders.” Cheat will air stripped across the week, every evening at 9pm on ITV from Monday 11th March until Thursday 14th March.
Ant-Man and the Wasp's Michael Douglas: "I thought I'd never act again"
The Marvel star talks surviving cancer, #MeToo, the role that rescued him... and Swansea City
“Oh God,” says Michael Douglas. “Oh Jesus.” He can’t quite believe what is happening to him. “This is terrible!” The American actor, 73, has scaled the heights of Hollywood and descended to the depths of despair in his long and eventful career. But it seems nothing – not surviving cancer; not seeing his son Cameron incarcerated for drug offences; not even coming up against Sharon Stone’s murderess in Basic Instinct or Glenn Close’s bunny boiler in Fatal Attraction – has prepared him for the glass of green juice that has just been placed in front of him. View oEmbed on the source website “Oh Jesus,” he says again. “This is punishment.” I personally found the kale-ginger-apple concoction to be quite pleasant. Douglas disagrees: “Nothing that tastes that bad can be good for you,” he says with a sly smile. And I suppose he’d know. Meet the cast of Ant-Man and the Wasp Paul Rudd admits the “ego blow” of being left out of Avengers: Infinity War RadioTimes.com newsletter: get the latest TV and entertainment news direct to your inbox View oEmbed on the source website We’ve convened at a London hotel to discuss Douglas’s latest role: Dr Hank Pym in Ant-Man and the Wasp, the follow-up to Ant-Man (2015), which introduced the tiniest superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (played by Paul Rudd). I know what you’re thinking: what’s an actor of Douglas’s Academy Award-winning, era-defining calibre, doing wasting his time with this hokum? Isn’t it a bit depressing to see the man who played Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko reduced – boom boom – to this? I was thinking along those lines when I picked up my 3D glasses at Cineworld Imax in Leicester Square. But for two hours, I laughed like a tickled child with Douglas increasingly reminiscent of the late Robin Williams. “It’s truly a family picture,” says Douglas. “There was a lot of humour in the first one and that gave us the confidence to go more in that direction with this one.” Douglas saw this as an opportunity to impress his children. “At last I have some movies on my resumé that they can see,” he says. “I remember after the first Ant-Man, my son looked at me very philosophically and said, ‘Dad. This could be very good for your career. You should think about doing a sequel.’ He was right!” As a clincher, most of the movie’s filming was done in Atlanta and there happened to be a direct commuter flight between Atlanta and Westchester County Airport north of New York, which is ten minutes from the home he shares with Catherine Zeta-Jones and their two children, Dylan, 18, and Carys, 15. “So I said, ‘Why the hell not? Let’s go!’” It’s hard to tell how serious Douglas is being at any given moment, which is of course one of the reasons he is so watchable. Today, he’s wearing a short-sleeved linen shirt, chinos and brown leather sandals. With his hair a silvery sweep and his face a weathered tan, he looks like he’s just come down to sniff the breakfast buffet at a well-heeled yachting resort. But there’s a certain cramped crabbiness to his bearing, as if he’s spent too much time laughing or wincing and his muscles have congealed that way. He has an Andy Warhol way of saying how wonderful everything is, all delivered in a voice that somehow embodies “Hollywood” more than any other: colourful but understated, wonderstruck but streetwise, one-part New York hustle, one-part groovy California. The film also has the improbable distinction of being the first Marvel movie to give equal billing to a female superhero – Hope van Dyne, Dr Hank’s daughter, who’s played by Evangeline Lilly. About time, too, says Douglas. “I must say, with this #MeToo political and social movement, there has been a groundswell of female employment. All power! There’s been an opening of the floodgates. “Although I was disappointed to see the attacks on Matt Damon for basically saying there’s a difference between jaywalking and first-degree murder. There is a difference between saying something in a flirtatious way and raping someone. I think, now, people understand that there is some disparity in that area. It’s been a really constructive movement.” Was it something he discussed with Zeta-Jones? “She doesn’t seem to have had any major issues. She did a movie [Chicago] with Harvey Weinstein – she won an Oscar for it – and she had no issues with him.” These days, where the talk in Hollywood doesn’t concern sexual harassment or Donald Trump, it centres on Silicon Valley’s power play. Recently, the sorts of grown-up dramas Douglas used to make are more likely to be found on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Facebook Watch. “It’s changed everything,” Douglas says. “They all have deep pockets. Even my wife is doing a comedy for Facebook!” (Queen America, in which the former Darling Bud of May stars as a ruthless beauty-pageant coach.) Some people are critical of the switch to streaming, says Douglas. “But that’s the medium that allows you to see the sort of pictures I was doing in the 70s and 80s. The reality is that the marketing costs are so prohibitive that to try to release a smaller movie is just so difficult these days. “I got turned off as I had a couple of little pictures – Solitary Man, King of California – that we worked so hard on and they ended up playing one week in a movie theatre.” Douglas himself has made ten episodes of a half-hour, single-camera comedy for Netflix called The Kominsky Method. He plays an actor-turned-acting coach, with Alan Arkin co-starring as his agent, and seems to have had a blast. “There’s no commercials. You can make the episodes longer or shorter if you want. There’s no restrictions on language. There’s a built-in audience of 110 million people. This is the future!” He sensed that the wind was blowing that way after starring as the flamboyant, secretive, Aids-suffering pianist Liberace in Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra (2013) – a wonderful performance, but one that came close never to being realised. View oEmbed on the source website “It was turned down by every studio. We tried to do it as a feature. It wasn’t expensive. It had Matt Damon and myself as stars. But we could not get a studio to do it. HBO picked it up like that and it was a joy.” It was a role that arrived at a crucial time for Douglas – in 2010, he revealed that he had been diagnosed with stage-4 throat cancer. Many feared the worst. A long fight ensued. “That to me was the most valuable part I ever got offered. It was a time where I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll never act again.’” Shooting was delayed as it became clear that Douglas needed more time to recuperate and regain his fighting weight – and that, he says, was crucial to the film’s success. “They gave me a little extra time, and that allowed me to rehearse and rehearse in a way I never had before.” Douglas has suggested in interviews that his cancer was brought on by stress after his first son Cameron’s incarceration for drug offences. He ended up spending seven years in prison. “My son’s struggle was a nightmare. It was stressful for all involved, very painful and difficult. I’m happy to say he’s in wonderful shape now. He’s been out of federal prison a year and a half and he’s actively pursuing his career.” He found the experience of visiting his son eye-opening. America incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than any other country in the world. “There are a lot of private prisons: these great profitmaking centres. But if you take the pharmaceutical industry, too, there are a lot of industries that are not taking our physical and mental health as their number one priority.” Douglas’s family life is looking a lot rosier now. His legendary father Kirk is still going strong at 101 – apparently he has just discovered FaceTime: “You never know when he’s going to call! But God bless him, he’s doing well. He’s going to be 102 in December. It gives me a lot of optimism for the future.” Cameron recently became a father, too. And Douglas’s two children from his current marriage regularly update their Instagram pages with warm tributes to both parents. The family don’t come back to Zeta-Jones’s native south Wales as much as they used to. “But Catherine feels it’s very important for the kids to maintain that half of their roots and to know who they are.” He describes the Gower Peninsula as one of the most beautiful locations in the world. “But I’m suffering for my Swans!” he laments – meaning Swansea City, who were relegated to the Championship last season. “They’re out of the Premiership, which is really sad.” Is there anything he would still like to achieve? “I’d like a good balance in life. Right now, my health is good. I’m enjoying my career. It’s my 18th year of marriage to Catherine and it couldn’t be better. All my kids are doing well. So I have very few complaints and that doesn’t happen very often in life. I’m a happy camper.” The only real ant in the ointment would seem to be America’s political situation. Douglas is a lifelong Democrat, anti-gun campaigner and UN peace ambassador. He also once played the American president. How does he think the current one is doing? “One of the joys about movies is that I don’t really have to get into this,” he laughs. “Our president has a way of consuming all the air in the room. We’re talking the day after a very disheartening meeting in Helsinki with President Putin that’s left a lot of us feeling… really lost. “Maybe this is part of the success of Ant-Man and the Wasp and these superhero movies. It’s a couple of hours of pure escapism and laughter. Maybe that’s why we need so many superheroes; we all feel the need for someone to come and save us.” Ant-Man and the Wasp is in UK cinemas from 2 August Sign up for the free RadioTimes.com newsletter
Sir Patrick Stewart reveals his greatest fears – and a lifelong addiction to jigsaws
The British acting veteran says he still gets afraid he won’t find work – but that Logan is the most interesting X-Men movie yet
A couple of weeks ago, Sir Patrick Stewart was sitting in his hot tub in the hills above West Hollywood, trying to set his racing cranium at rest. “I realised that what I was feeling wasn’t anxiety – it was actually fear,” says the 76-year-old actor. “I know this will sound crazy, but it was fear that I will not work again.” It is a surprising admission for a man who has just emerged from the most hectic year of his career. Stewart recently finished a rapturously received run of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land in the West End with his old friend Sir Ian McKellen. He is reprising his role as mutant mentor Professor Xavier in Logan, his seventh movie in the X-Men franchise. And his unabashed politics (he’s an ardent socialist, Remainer, feminist and anti-Trumper) have earned him 2.45 million followers on Twitter. And why wouldn’t you wish to see a knight of the realm tweet a picture of himself in a bath dressed as a lobster? This Yorkshireman always looks like he knows how to have fun. Nevertheless, when we meet at Soho House on Sunset Boulevard, Stewart is contemplating endings. Or rather his laptop. “Emails... Dreaded emails!” he intones when I arrive, snapping the damn thing shut. We’re here to talk X-Men, which he does with no less enthusiasm than if it were Pinter or Beckett. After all, he was only a middle-ranking, middle-aged member of the Royal Shakespeare Company when he was given the career-changing role of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: the Next Generation in 1987. He only said yes because he was assured it would flop and he’d be able to get back to iambic pentameter forthwith. In the event, it ran for seven seasons and four films and made him a much wealthier – and healthier – man. He has a certain Californian radiance, and credits his wife, 38-year-old American musician Sunny Ozell, with keeping him on his toes. Of all the X-Men movies, Logan is the one that asked the most of him. It’s viscerally violent, the first in the series to have an R-rating in the States (it’s been awarded a 15 certificate in the UK and is in cinemas on 1 March). The opening sequence features Hugh Jackman making full use of those adamantium Wolverine claws to fettuccini a few assailants. Does Stewart have any reservations about the violence? He pauses. “None whatsoever.” But it’s also a more intimate and sombre movie, with writer/director James Mangold (Walk the Line) underlining themes of mortality and ageing. It’s set in 2029, where Logan (Jackman) is hiding out on the Mexican border, working as a limo driver for cash and trying to nurse the ailing Xavier (Stewart). “From the first moment I opened the script, we were barely in an X-Man movie at all,” Stewart says. “If you strip out all your knowledge of the backstory, it’s a movie about a couple of strange guys hanging out in Mexico. And it’s uneasy – it’s a dark situation we find them in.” Jackman has said this will be his last turn as Wolverine. Stewart is more reluctant to close the door. “My character has already exited the series twice,” he reflects. “You can’t rule anything out in sci-fi and fantasy.” All the same, he does carry with him a sense of an ending. He recalls the last time he left LA, back in 2004. Vaughan Williams came on the car radio, and he pulled over and wept. “What I had been in denial of was that I was incredibly homesick. Not sick for my home, but for the landscapes and for my friends and for the work I was made to do, which is classical theatre.” Stewart has spent much of the last decade or so scratching that itch in acclaimed productions of Macbeth, The Tempest, Waiting for Godot. He returned to LA a couple of years ago for Blunt Talk, a TV sitcom in which he stars as a British army veteran-turned-cable newscaster, opposite his son, Daniel. It was, to his dismay, cancelled after its second season – and hasn’t yet been shown in the UK. “I’m really disappointed by that. It’s left all of us feeling a little hung up.” Moreover, he cannot disguise his dismay at the dystopian turn that the world has taken this last year. He has been a vocal supporter of the anti-Trump demonstrations in the US. “It was not simply about Donald Trump. There was a sense that there is a movement determined to narrow civil liberties, to control people’s lives and to elevate the lie. I have a fundamental belief in human decency – and I believe that there are more decent people in the world than there are villains – but I’m actually scared. I’m scared about what’s happening here and I’m very scared about the outcome of Brexit.” View oEmbed on the source website He was born in 1940 in working-class Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire to a regimental sergeant major who was a war hero but struggled to adjust to civilian life. “The memories of the first ten years of my life remain very vivid and uncomfortable,” says Stewart. Having seen a continent “ripped apart by bloodshed and warfare” and then painstakingly rebuild itself, he cannot help but see Brexit as a reversal. He recently made his first visit to continental Europe since the vote, travelling to Ghent to look at the Van Eyck altarpiece. “I felt a kind of despair that this union that had been so difficult to create should be unravelling. As far as I can see it is a completely retrograde step. Ah, but let’s talk about other things...” Stewart’s greatest indulgence, he admits, is his art. “My wife thinks I’m a bit crazy. I have a wonderful Van Gogh pencil drawing of a man with folded arms looking straight at you out of the drawing. She came into the room and I was talking to him. ‘Hey, good to see you. I missed you.’” Of all his passions, however, the one that seems to give him most pleasure is – wait for it – jigsaw puzzles. “At first I was a little embarrassed about it, as it was something I’d done as a kid,” he winces. “But when I would occasionally mention it, people would whisper: ‘Oh, you do jigsaw puzzles, too? What kind? How many pieces?’ It’s like a secret society.” He likes to have a puzzle on the go in each of his homes – one in LA, one in Brooklyn, one in London – and he’s currently about a third of the way through an early Cubist portrait of a woman in a chair by Picasso. “It’s quite tricky as there are big areas of solid colour. But it truly makes you look at the painting and its detail, it teaches you a lot.” He will have plenty of jigsaw time this year as he has vowed to take a new approach to work. Hence his aforementioned hot-tub crisis. “An agent once said to me, ‘Your availability is your greatest asset.’ So that’s what I’m trying this year. I’m trying to be brave and see what happens.” He wants to have the freedom to take the sort of work he never had time to take. “The process of acting, the demands and challenges have become even more interesting to me as years have gone by. I’m trying not to be a faker any more.” A faker? Thou? “I was a very good faker,” he smiles. “This is very much how British acting was. Our actors were fantastic at pretending that something was real when it wasn’t.” He believes there’s a singular Britishness to winging it, to turning up and aceing the task with seemingly no preparation. “I never believed for a moment that what I was seeing was real with [Laurence] Olivier. I admired it. It was clever and brilliant and dazzling. But it wasn’t life. It was style. British actors were brilliant at style – but where was the truth? “So that’s what this year is about. I want to discover that.” Logan is in UK cinemas now
Mahershala Ali on faith, Moonlight and the impact of his absent father
The favourite for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars has become an overnight sensation – after decades of hard work
Mahershala Ali has waited so long to realise his potential, he’d pretty much ruled out the idea he ever would. When I meet the frontrunner for best supporting actor at this week’s Oscars, he has an air of being caught off guard, humbled beyond the usual platitudes by the acclaim he has won for his role as the conflicted mentor figure in coming-of-age drama Moonlight. “When you’re thinking about what you want to do in life, you ask yourself: What’s the highest point I can get to?” reflects the 42-year-old over coffee at the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills, California. “But having acted for 23 years, it feels strange to get any recognition. At a certain point, you cease to have that as a possibility.” He chooses his words deliberately – but then everything he does feels carefully weighted. Perhaps it comes with the territory, when you’re a Muslim of colour playing a drug dealer in a gay narrative in America, 2017. Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight Like all overnight sensations, Ali spent a long time getting here. After years of TV work and small parts in films, the role that really opened doors was conscience-struck lobbyist Remy Danton in Netflix’s House of Cards (2013-16). Now he has a memorable turn in Hidden Figures, the NASA drama that’s been a surprise hit, and he’s the villain in Netflix series Luke Cage, a reboot of Marvel’s Blaxploitation comics of the 1970s. But it’s his performance in Moonlight (from an autobiographical play by Tarell Alvin McCraney and now in cinemas) that means the most to him. Ali once had dreams of being a basketball player as well as a poet, and he thinks in a very physical way. As he talks, his huge hands slowly move as if sculpting thoughts into being. He feels that Moonlight’s message is “right for its time”. With its almost entirely African-American cast and its tough lyricism, Moonlight feels like a welcome expansion of the range of storytelling, particularly after last year’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy. “I can’t say for sure if it would have been made five years ago,” says Ali, “but I’m glad it exists now. House of Cards “It was greenlit before the Donald Trump stuff – but it’s interesting that it’s alive and out in the world exactly when we need it,” he says. “You know, the day after the election, the box office went up 40 per cent. On a Wednesday. That’s evidence to me that it’s a film that resonates with people who feel marginalised. And you don’t have to be a gay African-American boy from Liberty City to feel marginalised. Someone like Chiron [the film’s central character] comes to represent how we all feel.” Ali was raised in the blue-collar suburb of Hayward, California, in a family with strong political and spiritual ties. His grandfather was the president of the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People), while his mother, Willicia Gilmore, is a Christian minister (she named him Mahershalalhashbaz after the longest prophetic name from the Bible). But he cites his father, Phillip Gilmore, as the strongest influence. “My parents split when I was three and he passed away when I was 20, so I can count on my digits the amount of times I saw him. But for somebody who I didn’t see very much, he may have been the strongest influence on my life.” In 1977, Phillip won a dance competition on Soul Train, the influential TV music show, and moved to New York where he began a successful career on Broadway. Ali would only go to see him for a couple of weeks each summer, but the visits made an indelible mark. “He’d take me to the theatre, to museums, to Broadway, to early Soderbergh films. He was always mad at Woody Allen as there were never black people in his movies. But if Spike Lee or Robert Townsend made a movie, we had to go and see it the first weekend. I was being cultured by him for the two or three weeks I’d see him – and then I’d go back to Hayward, which was almost too normal compared to what I’d been exposed to.” With Taraji P Henson in Hidden Figures As a teenager, he found it hard to connect with his peers. “I felt like I had an artist’s heart but an athlete’s experience.” His mother (who gave birth to him while still in high school) became increasingly devout in her faith. He left home at 16 before going to college on a basketball scholarship. It was only after Phillip died that he switched to acting. “I feel like he planted seeds, sending me back to California having seen something of the world. I think about him a lot. I always have – but especially with this project.” The other defining decision in Ali’s life was his conversion to Islam. “At graduate school in 1999, I finally had the chance to examine why I believe what I believe. I realised that I’d had no period in my life where I’d consciously tried to develop my own theology. I wanted spiritual peace.” He read up on Bahá’í and Buddhism, toyed with agnosticism, but had a strong reaction to a prayer when he visited a mosque. “It just felt like a life sign. I’d come from sports, so I appreciated the discipline that the religion requires of you. For me, it was a way of living more deliberately. I felt I was connecting to something that was making my physical experience more peaceful.” Ali is familiar with discrimination. A few years after 9/11, an airport worker let slip that he was on an FBI watchlist. Recently, he and his wife, artist Amatus Sami-Karim, wanted to rent a property – but found his funds frozen. His accountant explained his name had been flagged. “My wife stopped wrapping [wearing a head scarf ] in New York, as she had so many bad experiences. She didn’t feel safe anymore. But I will say, if you convert to Islam after a couple of decades of being a black man in the US, the discrimination you receive as a Muslim doesn’t feel like a shock. I’ve been pulled over, asked where my gun is, asked if I’m a pimp, had my car pulled apart. Muslims will feel like there’s this new discrimination that they hadn’t received before – but it’s not new for us.” All the same, he sees many reasons for optimism – not least the impending arrival of his first child. “I do believe in the potential of like-minded people coming together. As individuals in our respective fields, we have to draw on the energy of the culture and take the pulse of the world. And, in taking the pulse, we can make some of the best work of our time. In turn, I hope that can inspire people to be their best.” You can watch the 89th Annual Academy Awards & Red Carpet tonight from 11.10pm on Sky Oscars Moonlight is in UK cinemas now
NW author Zadie Smith on TV adaptations and Brexit Britain: "Sometimes it's good to be stressed out"
The novelist has swapped London for New York, but still can't quite let go of her home town as a new BBC2 adaptation airs
Zadie Smith feels bad for the people of Britain. Here she is, safely exiled in New York, with her stellar career, her beautiful family and her sparkling social circle. The one-time darling of the London literary scene, whose debut novel White Teeth was published in 2000, having gained her a £250,000 advance before she had even left Cambridge, nowadays teaches and writes in the US. The reviews for her fifth novel, Swing Time, are coming in and everyone agrees, it’s her “most mature work yet”, “a successful return to her roots”, “a reminder of why we need her”. For the homeland she left behind, there’s the feature-length BBC adaptation of her brilliant but bleak 2012 novel NW. “It’s pretty hardcore, isn’t it? I do feel sad I have to emotionally stress out viewers with it. I know this is a hard time for Britain and everyone wants to watch shows about baking. But what can I say, sometimes it’s good to be stressed out.” View oEmbed on the source website She admires how director Saul Dibb has captured her old manor of Kilburn in London with such an astute eye, his camera lingering lovingly on council bins, market barrows and bed frames propped up against walls. “They filmed in every street! I kept expecting to see my mum in the background.” And yes, she does worry what her social-worker mum Yvonne will say about her painting Kilburn as a place of irredeemable misery, but she admits that since moving to the US six years ago, she has developed a faintly apocalyptic vision of events back home. Nikki Amuka-Bird and Phoebe Fox star in NW Due to an illness in her husband Nick Laird’s family, she did relocate to London last year, but left again just after the EU referendum. In an essay for The New York Review of Books she reflected that the result felt like a rejection of the optimistic, multicultural world she grew up in – one that she celebrated (and lightly satirised) in her debut novel White Teeth in 2000. She has noted that since the vote to leave the EU, more of her compatriots are doing the same as she is – “playing hookie from real life”, as she puts it. “I was at a party at Emily Mortimer’s house in Brooklyn and it struck me how many expats there were. It’s an exodus. That’s a shame. I love Britain. I’m as British as they come. It will get it back. It’s just a bad moment.” And while she still relies on BBC online for weather reports and cake recipes, she has embraced the US – which has, after all, helped her to escape the pressure that came with her early success. “I feel much more optimistic here,” she says. American habits – exercise, therapy – have worked for her, much to her surprise. “I sometimes fall in with the latest exercise cults, but mostly I just run by the river. Even that sentence sounds ridiculous to me.” We meet at the Lafayette Café, a gleaming French brasserie not far from her SoHo apartment and just around the corner from New York University where, since 2010, she has been teaching creative writing (a lot of her work is remedial, she says: social media has destroyed a generation’s grammar). She’s dressed in a black T-shirt and well-cut jeans, looking a decade younger than 41, but charmingly all over the place. Her table is scattered with the detritus of her morning – green juice slowly separating in a glass, caffè macchiato cups, an endearingly basic $20 phone that doesn’t do emails or emojis. Nick Laird, Zadie Smith and Richard Brody Her schedule is hectic, with publication events for Swing Time (her talks are all sold out), play-dates for her two children, Kit (seven) and Harvey (three). At one point her husband, Laird, the Northern Irish poet and novelist, calls to compare notes on Ariel Levy’s memoir, An Abbreviated Life. “Did you cry?” she asks him. “I thought Ariel picked up on something that a lot of our generation deny, which is that life does have limits,” she says, keen to share. “We can’t do whatever we want, whenever we want. We can’t have babies whenever we want to have them. A lot of the girls I teach – they really feel that they’re limitless. And then they have to live and find it’s a pretty brutalising experience.” When we last spoke, soon after Harvey was born, she seemed anxious about motherhood and the sacrifices it would bring. “I convinced myself that I was terrible at it when I was trying to be a mother and write at the same time. But I’m not bad at it. You just need the time. It’s not the parenting, it’s the strain of trying to do too many things at once. New York women have this idea that it’s going well when everything’s organised and scheduled. It might be functioning – but it’s not the same thing as going well. Being there is different.” Still, she concedes, such values are now old-fashioned. “I sometimes feel like an Ancient Mariner wandering around. I was talking to a young actress recently, who will remain nameless, and she said, ‘If I get married and have kids or whatever, does that mean I have to stop smoking weed and screwing everybody?’ I don’t know what she wanted me to say. I don’t want to impinge on her freedom. But you know what kids are like. They’re incredibly conservative. They like consistency, they like to see their mother and father in the same room. To this actress, it was like this outrageous imposition.” Of the BBC adaptation of NW, she freely admits, she had “literally nothing to do with it”. But she’s happy with the way screenwriter Rachel Bennette has reshaped the story, externalising the interior struggles of main characters Leah and Natalie. “I know it’s not easy adapting my stuff with its basic non-shape,” she says. She once described herself as “overwhelmed by nausea” on reading White Teeth (she took its critics to heart) and doesn’t betray much affection for her later novels The Autograph Man or On Beauty, either. However, she has silenced her auto-critic for the new novel, Swing Time. “I’m pleased with it. It’s actually got a plot. It goes in a straight line.” Swing Time’s title is both a reference to the classic 1936 musical comedy and to the experience of living in a diaspora. To be black, Smith feels, is to be removed from your own timeline, radically disrupted. “But it [the novel] is a lot more fun than it sounds,” she smiles. What does come through – joyously! - is Smith’s first true love, music. Her late father Harvey kindled in her an early love for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and she once had a sideline impersonating Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald in libraries and hotel bars, before her brothers (both musicians) made her too self-conscious to continue. “They’d always be: ‘Too much vibrato’ or ‘You’re overdoing it’.” Earlier this year, she sang in public for the first time in 20 years, performing Easy Living by Boz Scaggs for a New York Times charity gala in a tremulous alto. “I wanted to rehearse it 100 times. The piano players said, ‘We’re going to rehearse it once.’ If you rehearse something too much in jazz, you kill it.” She is similarly ill at ease with public speaking. “I always feel like I’m a disappointment to people when I’m on the road. They expect a fluidity when I speak, and I can’t give them that.” She froze when asked for her thoughts on Hillary Clinton during a recent podcast. “The truth is, I can’t say anything more intelligent about politics than my seven-year-old can.” Indeed, she has no compulsion to write about politics at all: “None. None.” All the same, it’s the tension in contemporary politics that makes the 1990s setting of Swing Time so poignant. Smith looks back on it as a golden age for classless, cosmopolitan, optimistic Britain. “It was a different universe – everybody was working,” she says. “For my students now, it’s completely different.” She resists the comforting idea that, by most measures, life is vastly improved for most people. “There are many places in the world where things have stalled at best or are actively getting worse. In the west, everything functions OK, but people’s emotional lives seem to be in trouble, and I include my own. An intimate life seems to be unclear to people. When the person you’re dating turns out to be depressed, or you need to get an abortion, common sense says, why stay? There are a million other options out there.” When she was at university, it all seemed simpler. “You needed someone to love you and you felt so lucky to meet them. When were you going to meet another one? So you held on to them like a piece of driftwood.” She and Laird were college sweethearts and retain a close professional relationship, always the first to read one another’s work. It’s rewarding, but it clearly comes with its pressures. “There will be periods of almost intolerable unhappiness in a long relationship. And people can’t see the point of that. It looks like some remnant of Christian theology, this idea that you must be crucified and for some reason it will be worthwhile. But something does deepen, day by day, in this feeling of knowing someone for so long.” After a pause, she says: “Life’s a lot harder than I thought. And we’re the lucky ones. Isn’t that funny? To have nothing but luck and still find things so hard. When I was in college, I thought you could get through on charm alone. It turns out it’s the least important part – it’s like totally irrelevant.” She laughs ruefully. “Oh man.” NW is on BBC2 tonight at 9pm Swing Time is published by Penguin Books on 15 November
Helen Mirren: "I'm tired of being called 'sexy'"
The Oscar award-winning actress discusses opportunities for women, living in the digital age and the morals of war ahead of new movie Eye in the Sky
It’s unreasonably cold in LA, but this is the way that Dame Helen Mirren likes it. "I love it when it's raining here,” she says when we meet, the day after drizzle has dampened the West Coast vibe. “It was just like an English day yesterday, wasn’t it? And then it all clears and you have something like this.” She gestures to the fresh blue skies outside. We’re perched on a sofa at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and Mirren looks as dewy bright as the morning. She’s wearing a Ralph Lauren dress in imperial purple and a fake fur stole that has already been hailed as the latest in “airport chic” after she was papped travelling with her husband, American director Taylor Hackford. At 70, Mirren remains one of the most bank-able British stars – everyone who circles her seems delighted to be in her presence. An Oscar winner for The Queen back in 2007, she has added a Tony and an Olivier (as the Queen again in The Audience), plus enough Screen Actors Guilds, Golden Globes and Baftas to require a special wing. With recent roles as a waspish Hollywood gossip columnist in Trumbo, and a Jewish lady trying to recover family art stolen by the Nazis in Woman in Gold, she’s as prolific as ever – always radiating intelligence and elegance, but ever ready to subvert expectations. “Would you like me to say, ‘**** *** *** ****,’ is that it?” she purrs when I allude to her penchant for swearing – which she assures me she picked up from her years at the Royal Shakespeare Company. We’re here to talk about her latest role, as Colonel Katherine Powell in Eye in the Sky. Directed by the South African Gavin Hood (inspired by his own unhappy experience of national service), the film is a tense tale following a secret British/American drone strike in real time. “It looks at the morality and ethics and philosophy of warfare in a way that is... well, if not entertaining then very watchable,” says Mirren. “I think of it as a courtroom drama – and the audience is the jury.” Guy Hibbert’s script, which has mordant echoes of Dr Strangelove, creates a global drama from a few claustrophobic locations. There’s a house in Nairobi, where a group of Al-Shabaab militants are preparing for a suicide attack on a shopping centre; there’s an underground control centre, where Mirren’s colonel stalks her targets remotely, desperate not to waste a rare chance to take them out; there’s a Westminster meeting room where a British Lieutenant General – played by the late Alan Rickman in his last screen role – tries to secure political authorisation for the attack; and there’s a USAF command centre in Nevada where a conscience-stricken drone pilot (Aaron Paul) is charged with “prosecuting” the action 10,000 miles away. As the decision-makers discuss the morality and legality of the strike in sinister euphemisms, we see operatives take far more personal risks; there’s another movie-stealing turn from Barkhad Abdi of Captain Phillips as a Somali Special Forces agent. Meanwhile, audience sympathies shift. “There’s the character of the female politician who is arguing that it’s unacceptable to kill innocent civilians; but then she comes out with the most unbelievably cynical reasoning, which is all about winning the propaganda war. But then again, it’s true: you do have to win the propaganda war. But that’s the beauty of the film. You see the issue from all sides.” Mirren says that one of things that attracted her to it was the fact that female protagonists are at the heart of the action rather than reduced to the “long-suffering wife” or “victim” roles she has spent a career avoiding. Does she feel that having more women in power would create a more peaceful world? “Oh, I don’t know about that. I think that the process that women have to go through to get to that point means you have to have a certain mentality and have made certain pacts with the devil. Our political world is masculine. It means that women can only gain power by becoming masculinised themselves.” She comes out as a Hillary Clinton admirer: “You can criticise her, but whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, she’s so unbelievably resilient and courageous.” However, she feels that real change will only come when women across the world are empowered. “Women need to be economically and sexually empowered, in the sense of choosing when they have children. Then those women, as they travel through levels of society, might make a change.” Has the film changed her own views on the way we conduct warfare? She falters, uncharacteristically. “I don’t like the idea of drones. There’s something horrible about them. My mother was in London during the Blitz. She said that of course it was terrifying when the German planes came over but by far the most terrifying thing was the doodlebugs... early drones, really. She said that just to see this unmanned object in the sky made you feel so helpless.” Though she was born two months after VE Day, Mirren says the war still haunts her. “I was in my mother’s womb during the last few months of the war. At night, I have this unreasoned terror of hearing aeroplanes. I have nightmares about things coming out of the sky. I know this sounds ridiculous but I think my mother must have somehow communicated her fear to me. So I can only imagine the psychological damage that drones are doing to the local populations.” She feels that the film’s themes were close to Alan Rickman, too. He and Mirren were about the same age and both entered the theatre from relatively humble backgrounds (Mirren’s father was a Russian émigré who worked as a viola player, a taxi driver and a civil servant; Rickman grew up in a council house but got a scholarship to Rada.) She describes him as a “great friend” and recalls the salutary experience of a rare critical drubbing in 1998: “We did Antony and Cleopatra together at the National Theatre, rather disastrously actually, but with great love for each other”. In Eye in the Sky, she loved watching his exasperated Lt General. “It was the Alan that I know: the witty, thoughtful Alan rather than the villain that he played so brilliantly. I hope I don’t speak out of place, but I think that if Alan had the choice, he would have been proud of this as his last movie. The subject matter is absolutely where his intelligence was. He was very politically aware, conscientious and thoughtful. I’m sure that’s why he would have chosen it in the first place.” View oEmbed on the source website I ask whether she feels any different since turning 70 last year – and she expresses a sort of airy bafflement. So I rephrase the question. What’s the best thing about turning 70? She brightens. “Oh, there are lots of great things. Not the least of which is the last 70 years of experience. I always feel as if I will be a few steps behind, but I’m very grateful to have witnessed the world without modern technology and then to have seen it arrive. I feel sorry for people who have never known the world without computers and social media.” Does she think it would have been fun to date in the age of Tinder? “Oh yes, more fun than going to bars. It’s very difficult to go to a bar to find a date.” But her status as a pensionable pin-up makes her a little more uneasy. In 2008, a photographer snuck up on her and Hackford sunbathing in Italy; photos of Mirren in a red bikini inspired orgiastic coverage in newspapers across the world. “I’ve always been tired of being called ‘sexy’. It’s annoying and irritating – I just have to put up with it,” she says. She recalls an infamous 1975 interview with Michael Parkinson, in which he dismissed her RSC career with a stunningly lecherous line of questioning (“Do you ever feel your equipment gets in the way of your performances, heh heh?”). “He always denied he was being sexist. How could he deny it?! But this is what we were up against.” She is glad that female actors now feel able to speak out and cites Patricia Arquette’s Oscar acceptance speech last year calling for wage equality and equal rights for women. “You can argue that an awards show is not the right forum, but you can bang on about it, as I have, and nobody listens and nobody reports it, and then the moment comes when people are ready. The great thing is that she wasn’t just talking about Hollywood, she was talking about women in all industries. In my lifetime I’ve seen things go from utterly iniquitous to fairly iniquitous to slightly iniquitous – but at least we’re moving in the right direction.” As we say goodbye I notice the tattoo on her left hand – interlocking Vs, inked on a native American reservation in the 1970s. She told Parkinson she would never regret it. Has she? “Oh, no, I’ve never regretted it. I want to get another one, actually. I’d like a whole sleeve. As you get older, I think it’s a better and better idea.” What would she get? “Oh I don’t know, some sort of curving pattern running up my arm, perhaps? Maybe a snake – I quite like snakes.” A national treasure she may be, but she hasn’t lost her desire to subvert.
David Harewood nearly quit acting before Homeland
The actor talks about how he almost became a lorry driver, his career and the #OscarsSoWhite scandal
David Harewood is a failure. I’m sure the 50-year-old Birmingham-born actor won’t mind my saying that. In recent years, he’s had his fair share of success, too. Since he landed the role of CIA honcho David Estes in Homeland in 2011, his career revival has taken in a turn as Oberon in a New York production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as roles in Sacha Baron Cohen’s forthcoming film Grimsby and the cult US TV series Supergirl. However, as he makes clear in his forthcoming documentary, David Harewood’s F Word, an actor’s life is likely to contain many more lows than highs. The programme is part of Sky Arts’ Failure season, which examines the crucial role of rejection in artistic creation. Through interviews with fellow actors (including Damian Lewis, Olivia Colman, Eddie Izzard and Zachary Quinto) about their screw-ups and maulings, Harewood hopes to overturn preconceptions about his line of work. He gets Lewis to open up about his part in the disastrous Dreamcatcher, which one critic described as “a monster movie of stunning awfulness”. Colman tells him, surprisingly, that she didn’t get offered a thing for six months after Broadchurch, which ought to have been a career-defining success. “There’s this idea that we’re all choosing our roles and casting aside scripts we don’t like – but the reality is very different for most actors,” Harewood says. “We all face rejection.” We meet in Beverly Hills at “pilot season”, the time of year when most of the major American TV series are cast. “If you look around this area, it’s full of actors sitting in cars waiting for their auditions, mouthing their lines and trying desperately to keep their s*** together,” Harewood says. Last year, that was him – but now that he is taken up with season two of Supergirl (airing on Sky1 next month), he’s more laid-back. “Before Homeland, I had £80 in the bank and no idea what I was going to do,” he says. “I seriously considered giving it all up and getting a job as a lorry driver.” Harewood’s father was a lorry driver and his mother a caterer. He grew up in Birmingham’s Small Heath, where a teacher saw that his penchant for silly voices might contain the seedlings of theatrical talent – otherwise, he says, he’d have probably ended up as the factory clown. As it was, he secured a place at London’s National Youth Theatre – still a vital access point for inner-city kids – and then went on to Rada. His career has contained many highlights. He played Othello at the National Theatre, and was such a fierce presence as an African warlord in Blood Diamond in 2006 that the script was rewritten to give him more screen time. However, by the time of Homeland, Harewood was in such a deep depression, he could barely contemplate the audition. He traces this back to 2009 when his best friend from school, Luigi Belcuore, died after a routine operation. “It completely knocked me for six. He was always the one who believed I was going to make it.” He was so despondent that he dismissed the Homeland script without even reading it – despite the mounting pressure to support his wife, Kirsty, and two daughters, Maize and Raven (now 12 and 9). But his manager pressed him and eventually: “I propped up my iPhone on the window sill, called my wife down so she could do Carrie’s lines, and just pretty much read it. I never even did an American accent.” As luck would have it, his unsmiling intensity was exactly what the casting directors were after. Since then, his career has been on an upturn – and he feels more able to cope with whatever comes his way. “If I don’t get a part it’s disappointing but not devastating.” Harewood does worry that the path he took into the profession is disappearing. Failure is something that actors from more wealthy backgrounds can afford far more than people like him. “There’s a lot of talent that never gets to see the light of day. I got a grant to go to drama school – that’s all gone now.” He remains concerned that the limited opportunities for black actors in Britain mean they go to America young. “There are 17-year-olds who come here now – they don’t want to be doing Shakespeare at the National as they feel it’s not going to get them anywhere. But this place will chew you up if you don’t have that grounding.” He welcomes the protests over the lack of diversity in the Academy Award nominations. “In England, you feel like a member of the revolutionary guard the minute you even mention race. But I do think that the #OscarsSoWhite phenomenon will have to reflect back on England. What people are essentially saying is that they want to see more diverse stories. It’s not about putting three black people in the back of the shot. It’s about making it normal to see a black actor in a leading role. It still amazes me that Idris Elba is the only black actor in a lead role on British TV.” So has all this reflection given him any advice to pass on to aspiring actors? Just a simple, “Good luck!”