An urgent new drama from Russell T Davies, starring Russell Tovey, is a very modern parable but has its roots in a 1970s Doctor Who story...
Add The War Between the Land and Sea to your watchlist When Russell T Davies goes walking near his home in Swansea, he follows the same path: over the hill, down to Langland Bay and along the seafront, until he reaches a weathered bench looking straight out to the water. “They’ve just rebuilt the sea wall there,” he says, “but you watch them, thinking they’ll have to rebuild it again in a few years’ time because of rising sea levels. You can’t live next to the sea and not be aware of this stuff.” Of course, when Davies isn’t staring out to sea, he’s creating some of the most acclaimed television drama of our time – his credits include such landmark works as Queer as Folk, Years and Years and It’s a Sin, not to mention his time as executive producer on Doctor Who. It was perhaps inevitable, given where he lives, that Davies’s anxieties about the environment might inspire his work. But how? “The problem with climate change is that it’s very hard to write about,” he says. “No one has yet worked out how to write about the weather changing slowly while we ignore it.” It was one of Davies’s neighbours who unwittingly helped him crack the problem. “There’s a marvellous woman who lives three doors down from me who is 70 years old,” he says. “I once met her and she was dressed as a fish with her friends marching up and down the seafront – protesting about climate change and saying, ‘This sea front will be gone in 20 years and these houses will be gone.’ “So I started thinking about that and put that together with my Doctor Who mind, which is always looking for new ways to invade the Earth, and it all coalesced into this story.” Enter a whole load of men and women in much more impressive, screen-ready fish costumes. The War between the Land and the Sea, Davies’s new five-part BBC drama, is about climate change, water pollution and the damage being done to the world’s oceans by mankind. But it’s also an enormously entertaining sci-fi series about an ancient species rising from the sea and threatening humanity with destruction. The series has its roots in an episode of Doctor Who broadcast in 1972, which Davies remembers watching as a young boy. “It’s a child of a Doctor Who story called The Sea Devils, which is well known as one of the most famous stories ever,” he says. “My generation thinks of it as ‘the one with the monsters coming out of the sea’. It’s an absolute classic.” In line with the new series, the BBC is also releasing a re-edited, 90-minute version of The Sea Devils, with new music. “The War between the Land and the Sea is in many ways the 2025 version of that story,” adds Davies. Back to the present day,this more modern story about Homo aqua (as the original Doctor Who Sea Devils are now referred to) has a cast that includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw (see overleaf), Jemma Redgrave and Russell Tovey. This other Russell plays everyman hero Barclay, who, much to his and everyone else’s surprise, is chosen to be ambassador for all humanity. Tovey, who landed his breakout role as Rudge in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys in 2004, was gripped by Davies’s script within a few pages. “Whenever I read scripts, dialogue is a thing that really makes me instantly connect to a character,” Tovey explains, “and after the first few lines I knew I wanted to play this guy. I just fell in love with him: he’s someone who has drifted into his late 30s and has no ambitions and desires – nothing but his pay packet and being a good dad to his child. And suddenly he’s thrust into this amazing position.” This is Tovey’s third collaboration with Davies. They first worked together when Davies cast him, aged 25, as Midshipman Alonso Frame in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas special Voyage of the Damned. He returned to the role for a cameo in The End of Time (2010), and their creative partnership deepened a decade later with Tovey’s acclaimed performance as Daniel Lyons in Years and Years. It’s been a long road together, but it’s clear Tovey, now 44, still can’t believe his good fortune. “He’s my hero. I look up to Russell,” he says. “I remember watching Queer as Folk and in equal measures it terrified and exhilarated me. I felt like I was seeing myself on screen and that was so important to me and so many other queer people of my generation.” Tovey recently won Man of the Year at the Attitude Awards, and Davies presented him with the award. “If I could talk to myself when I was a little scared, lost, 14-year-old boy trying to find his safe space in the world and finding Russell’s work,” he says, “and tell him that Russell would be presenting me with an award, I wouldn’t have believed it.” I ask Davies how it feels to hear Tovey speak about him like this. “It’s funny – we don’t hang out in-between shows with each other,” he says, “but we’ve got a lovely, great professional working relationship that goes back almost 18 years, to when we first worked together on Doctor Who, then Years and Years. I love him as an actor. I love him as a man.” Barclay, the character played by Tovey, is a reluctant hero, who would rather be with his family than saving the planet. “What I wanted with Barclay was someone who knows what it’s like to fail to pay the electricity bill,” says Davies, “who knows what it’s like to not afford Christmas – why can’t someone like that stand for Parliament and make our laws? That’s exactly what we need, and it’s exactly what we never get.” There are some scenes in The War between the Land and the Sea that are pure, fantastical sci-fi, while others feel pulled from the headlines. With references to pollution in the Thames and the amount of plastic thrown into the oceans, it might be politically engaged – but this drama is by no means a piece of worthy-but-dull social realism. “It is enormously entertaining,” says Davies. “It is epic and scary and tough and romantic – you’ll be gobsmacked by it.” Tovey nods in agreement. “When people watch it, they’re going to be really taken aback that this is a show that’s on the BBC,” he adds. “Because of the gubbins that we’ve been able to play with.” Given the environmental themes, it wouldn’t be wholly surprising if some critics on the right of the political spectrum accuse Davies – and by extension the BBC – of trying to shove their green agenda down viewers’ throats. The irony is that while the idea of using Doctor Who to highlight social-justice talking points might feel like a very modern development, Davies’s new series is actually in the spirit of the original 1972 version. The Sea Devils was written by Malcolm Hulke, a former Communist Party member who used Doctor Who stories to smuggle progressive themes into mainstream drama, turning alien races into allegories for class, race and colonial oppression. “In drama, messages get out clearer than articles in newspapers or alerts on the news,” suggests Tovey. “You humanise the plight and see the empathy and the struggles through characters that you recognise as yourself. We’ve seen it so many times through Adolescence, Mr Bates vs the Post Office… people are held accountable and the drama has allowed you to see yourself in their position. That’s one of the greatest gifts that art has.” One of the challenges of stories about climate change, beyond how to depict it, is to persuade ordinary people they still have reasons to feel positive. “We need hope,” agrees Tovey, “that’s what’s missing – we are told the whole time there is no hope.” So how does Tovey “hope” viewers will leave the series feeling? “I would want them to feel activated and angry,” he says. “I hope that there will be a whole generation who will watch this and feel that this is going to inspire them to do something. I hope, through the humanising of what the hell is happening on our planet, it will do what David Attenborough does, but through drama, to compel people to wake up and recognise that we have to do something about this.” It might well inspire some to do something. But given how vulnerable the BBC is to criticism at the moment, I also wonder if Davies ever worried that he might be told that he should stick to entertaining and drop the preaching? “One of the most boring things you can ever say to a writer is, ‘Don’t be preachy,’” he replies. “Quite a few religions have been based for thousands of years upon preaching. It’s not bad as a system, it works. The truth is, I don’t have to get on a high horse at all. If I’m writing about the oceans in 2025, then they really are filthy and stinking and half-destroyed. I would be lying if I didn’t mention these things. It’s only politically engaged because it has no choice.” A newly re-edited version of the Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils is on Sunday 7 Dec at 7pm on BBC Four/iPlayer
Russell T Davies argues new Doctor Who spin-off tackling climate change is only political because it has "no choice"
Climate - Sustainable contributions within wider content
"I don't have to get on a high horse at all... I would be lying if I didn't mention these things."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. When Russell T Davies goes walking near his home in Swansea, he follows the same path: over the hill, down to Langland Bay and along the seafront, until he reaches a weathered bench looking straight out to the water. “They’ve just rebuilt the sea wall there,” he says, “but you watch them, thinking they’ll have to rebuild it again in a few years’ time because of rising sea levels. You can’t live next to the sea and not be aware of this stuff.” Of course, when Davies isn’t staring out to sea, he’s creating some of the most acclaimed television drama of our time – his credits include such landmark works as Queer as Folk, Years and Years and It’s a Sin, not to mention his time as executive producer on Doctor Who. It was perhaps inevitable, given where he lives, that Davies’s anxieties about the environment might inspire his work. But how? “The problem with climate change is that it’s very hard to write about,” he says. “No one has yet worked out how to write about the weather changing slowly while we ignore it.” It was one of Davies’s neighbours who unwittingly helped him crack the problem. “There’s a marvellous woman who lives three doors down from me who is 70 years old,” he says. “I once met her and she was dressed as a fish with her friends marching up and down the seafront – protesting about climate change and saying, ‘This sea front will be gone in 20 years and these houses will be gone.’ “So I started thinking about that and put that together with my Doctor Who mind, which is always looking for new ways to invade the Earth, and it all coalesced into this story.” Enter a whole load of men and women in much more impressive, screen-ready fish costumes. The War Between the Land and the Sea, Davies’s new five-part BBC drama, is about climate change, water pollution and the damage being done to the world’s oceans by mankind. But it’s also an enormously entertaining sci-fi series about an ancient species rising from the sea and threatening humanity with destruction. The series has its roots in an episode of Doctor Who broadcast in 1972, which Davies remembers watching as a young boy. “It’s a child of a Doctor Who story called The Sea Devils, which is well known as one of the most famous stories ever,” he says. “My generation thinks of it as ‘the one with the monsters coming out of the sea’. It’s an absolute classic.” In line with the new series, the BBC is also releasing a re-edited, 90-minute version of The Sea Devils, with new music. “The War Between the Land and the Sea is in many ways the 2025 version of that story,” adds Davies. Back to the present day, this more modern story about Homo aqua (as the original Doctor Who Sea Devils are now referred to) has a cast that includes Gugu Mbatha-Raw (see overleaf), Jemma Redgrave and Russell Tovey. This other Russell plays everyman hero Barclay, who, much to his and everyone else’s surprise, is chosen to be ambassador for all humanity. Tovey, who landed his breakout role as Rudge in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys in 2004, was gripped by Davies’s script within a few pages. “Whenever I read scripts, dialogue is a thing that really makes me instantly connect to a character,” Tovey explains, “and after the first few lines I knew I wanted to play this guy. I just fell in love with him: he’s someone who has drifted into his late 30s and has no ambitions and desires – nothing but his pay packet and being a good dad to his child. And suddenly he’s thrust into this amazing position.” This is Tovey’s third collaboration with Davies. They first worked together when Davies cast him, aged 25, as Midshipman Alonso Frame in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas special Voyage of the Damned. He returned to the role for a cameo in The End of Time (2010), and their creative partnership deepened a decade later with Tovey’s acclaimed performance as Daniel Lyons in Years and Years. It’s been a long road together, but it’s clear Tovey, now 44, still can’t believe his good fortune. “He’s my hero. I look up to Russell,” he says. “I remember watching Queer as Folk and in equal measures it terrified and exhilarated me. I felt like I was seeing myself on screen and that was so important to me and so many other queer people of my generation.” Tovey recently won Man of the Year at the Attitude Awards, and Davies presented him with the award. “If I could talk to myself when I was a little scared, lost, 14-year-old boy trying to find his safe space in the world and finding Russell’s work,” he says, “and tell him that Russell would be presenting me with an award, I wouldn’t have believed it.” I ask Davies how it feels to hear Tovey speak about him like this. “It’s funny – we don’t hang out inbetween shows with each other,” he says, “but we’ve got a lovely, great professional working relationship that goes back almost 18 years, to when we first worked together on Doctor Who, then Years and Years. I love him as an actor. I love him as a man.” Barclay, the character played by Tovey, is a reluctant hero, who would rather be with his family than saving the planet. “What I wanted with Barclay was someone who knows what it’s like to fail to pay the electricity bill,” says Davies, “who knows what it’s like to not afford Christmas – why can’t someone like that stand for Parliament and make our laws? That’s exactly what we need, and it’s exactly what we never get.” There are some scenes in The War Between the Land and the Sea that are pure, fantastical sci-fi, while others feel pulled from the headlines. With references to pollution in the Thames and the amount of plastic thrown into the oceans, it might be politically engaged – but this drama is by no means a piece of worthy-but-dull social realism. “It is enormously entertaining,” says Davies. “It is epic and scary and tough and romantic – you’ll be gobsmacked by it.” Tovey nods in agreement. “When people watch it, they’re going to be really taken aback that this is a show that’s on the BBC,” he adds. “Because of the gubbins that we’ve been able to play with.” Given the environmental themes, it wouldn’t be wholly surprising if some critics on the right of the political spectrum accuse Davies – and by extension the BBC – of trying to shove their green agenda down viewers’ throats. The irony is that while the idea of using Doctor Who to highlight social-justice talking points might feel like a very modern development, Davies’s new series is actually in the spirit of the original 1972 version. The Sea Devils was written by Malcolm Hulke, a former Communist Party member who used Doctor Who stories to smuggle progressive themes into mainstream drama, turning alien races into allegories for class, race and colonial oppression. “In drama, messages get out clearer than articles in newspapers or alerts on the news,” suggests Tovey. “You humanise the plight and see the empathy and the struggles through characters that you recognise as yourself. We’ve seen it so many times through Adolescence, Mr Bates vs the Post Office… people are held accountable and the drama has allowed you to see yourself in their position. That’s one of the greatest gifts that art has.” One of the challenges of stories about climate change, beyond how to depict it, is to persuade ordinary people they still have reasons to feel positive. “We need hope,” agrees Tovey, “that’s what’s missing – we are told the whole time there is no hope.” So how does Tovey “hope” viewers will leave the series feeling? “I would want them to feel activated and angry,” he says. “I hope that there will be a whole generation who will watch this and feel that this is going to inspire them to do something. I hope, through the humanising of what the hell is happening on our planet, it will do what David Attenborough does, but through drama, to compel people to wake up and recognise that we have to do something about this.” It might well inspire some to do something. But given how vulnerable the BBC is to criticism at the moment, I also wonder if Davies ever worried that he might be told that he should stick to entertaining and drop the preaching? “One of the most boring things you can ever say to a writer is, ‘Don’t be preachy,’” he replies. “Quite a few religions have been based for thousands of years upon preaching. It’s not bad as a system, it works. The truth is, I don’t have to get on a high horse at all. If I’m writing about the oceans in 2025, then they really are filthy and stinking and half-destroyed. I would be lying if I didn’t mention these things. It’s only politically engaged because it has no choice.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out this weekend – subscribe here. The War Between the Land and the Sea is coming to BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 7th December. Add The War Between the Land and the Sea to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. 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Pierce Brosnan and Tom Hardy are no strangers to violent gangster dramas. But in Guy Ritchie’s MobLand, their frightening characters have nuance, depth – and even a sense of humour…
Add MobLand to your watchlist Bond and Bane, Mamma Mia! and Mad Max: Pierce Brosnan and Tom Hardy make a somewhat unlikely double act, but the pair have teamed up in MobLand, the ten-part Paramount+ drama that’s already been watched by nearly nine million viewers globally and is set to conclude this week. Brosnan plays Conrad Harrigan, a grizzled Irish “Godfather” at the head of an organised crime family that’s fighting for power within a global crime syndicate, while Helen Mirren is his wife, Maeve. Hardy is Harry Da Souza, their loyal fixer. The series is set in a dimly lit and frequently cloudy present-day London, where mobsters tell their henchmen to “call the Maltese and tell them there’s a gap in the market on the brown” and nightclubs are seemingly only allowed to play the Prodigy. In other words, it’s a gangster series directed by Guy Ritchie. “I have great admiration for Guy Ritchie’s work and the style that he has created for himself. The landscape of film-making that he has embroidered over the years is wildly entertaining,” Brosnan says. “And this family [the Harrigans] is so mangled and warped – it’s twisted, incestuous and dangerous.” Brosnan, a ridiculously well-preserved 72-year-old, is softly spoken and his voice is almost musical in its cadence. Hardy, 25 years his junior, by contrast, radiates an agitated restlessness and each question is met with a waterfall of words. I ask him what attracted him to the role of Harry. “The world [of MobLand] is something that I’ve already been a part of with lots of films and characters,” he says, “but this is long-form so there’s optionality for nuance and depth. It’s a good playground.” Brosnan and Hardy both have form in gangster films – Hardy played both Kray twins in Legend, he portrayed Al Capone in Capone and was in Guy Ritchie’s 2008 London gangster film RocknRolla. “I like to find the differences between similar types, perhaps,” he explains. Meanwhile, Brosnan, who first found fame in the 1980s TV series Remington Steele, made his big-screen debut aged 27 in the gangster classic The Long Good Friday, which of course starred Helen Mirren. He was listed as “1st Irishman” and although he didn’t share any scenes with his MobLand co-star, he says with pride: “It still holds up as a British gangster movie. And now, all these years later, Helen and I are working together again.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/05/MOBLAND109lv25021300315RT-fa32c03.jpg" width="8464" height="5643" alt="Mandeep Dhillon as Seraphina Harrigan, Anson Boon as Eddie Harrigan, Helen Mirren as Maeve Harrigan, Pierce Brosnan as Conrad Harrigan, Emily Barber as Alice, Joanne Froggatt as Jan Da Souza and Tom Hardy as Harry Da Souza in MobLand. Conrad is stood at the head of a dining table and the others are sat down around the table" title="Beggars Banquet" /> It was his performances as James Bond in four blockbusters from 1995 to 2002 that secured cinematic immortality for Brosnan, but since then he has chosen diverse roles in such films as The Thomas Crown Affair, The Ghost Writer, Mrs Doubtfire and two Mamma Mia! movies. “Every job is a challenge and it all comes with a thump of anxiety,” he reveals, “because you have to do something. What are you doing on the stage? Why are you there? So that’s constant. You live with that. You live with that stress all the time. And that’s what’s so exhilarating. That’s what makes you alive.” What made him anxious about this role? “You don’t need to know that,” he says. I don’t need to know but I’m interested, I respond. “It’s the excitement of making a very strong decision on a character – a voice and attitude,” he concedes. “And not knowing where it’s going story-wise.” Brosnan’s accent in MobLand has, as it happens, come in for some criticism. The Irish Independent’s review said Conrad’s speaking voice was “all over the shop and a huge distraction”. This must have been particularly upsetting given that Brosnan is actually Irish. “My own accent is very soft,” he says, “Conrad’s accent is a million miles away from me.” The inspiration for the accent was a man suggested by his dialect coach. “I told him that I needed a Kerry accent,” he explains, “so he gave me the name of a man and I googled the guy and that was it. It was a Kerry accent. And so, I just gave it full tilt.” Does he like Conrad? “I like him. I love him,” he says. “I enjoy him. I mean, I don’t want to be that person – he’s a psychopath.” He’s not exaggerating: within the first few minutes of the first episode, Conrad – a man who, in Brosnan’s words is “brutish, cunning, charming and dangerous” – has killed a man by crushing his windpipe with his shoes. Brosnan is no stranger to inflicting great violence on screen – as anyone who heard his version of SOS in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again will confirm – but it’s rare to see him play a villain. Is that liberating? “Yes, there are no holds barred,” he admits. “You own the stage, you have wings to fly and be anything you wish.” Hardy as Harry Da Souza also enforces his employer’s desires and needs through threats and violence. When he’s not killing gangsters, Harry is trying to salvage his marriage to avoid going to couples therapy with his wife, played by Joanne Froggatt. “He’s a dad, he has a partner and kills people,” says Hardy. “The compartmentalisation is what makes him fascinating because nothing spills into other compartments.” Harry is intense, troubled, capable of great violence but also very funny – when he visits a man in hospital to persuade him to cooperate, he says, “I, or possibly one of my associates, depending on my availability, will find you.” I tell Hardy that I was surprised how often I found myself laughing while watching MobLand. “I think making something very pedestrian or civilised can turn the tone of a scene into something with an element of comedy,” Hardy agrees. Hardy’s father used to write scripts for the Irish comedian Dave Allen, and as a young boy Hardy, who grew up in East Sheen and attended private school, would watch Hancock’s Half Hour and Monty Python. I wonder if he ever gets sent scripts for light-hearted comedies? “The scripts that I get are fairly funny but tend to often be connected to really dark matter, which others might find unpalatable but I find absolutely normal,” he says. “A lot of the things that I find subjectively funny deal with very dark stories of the tales of the human condition when they’re in utter crisis and despair. There’s a wicked humour in sitting in pain.” It’s just about possible to see MobLand as an exploration of a particular type of damaged masculinity. I ask Brosnan what he thinks is eating away at Conrad, what explains his need for power and his facility for violence, and he says it’s because “his was a youth that was twisted inside out by abandonment and there’s a deep anger there for the man he’s become”. So what does Hardy think MobLand says about men and masculinity? “What does MobLand specifically say about men and masculinity?”, he repeats the question and leaves it, and me, hanging. “You know what, you could open up an entire can of worms on that in a really interesting manner,” he says finally. “And I think this conversation is part of the reason why we make art. I also think that as part of the team that created it, it’s not for me to have that conversation whilst promoting it. But when people sit and watch it, I’d be interested to see what their discussions are.” So you’re saying it’s a good question but you’re not going to answer it? “Of course not,” he says. “Why would I?” I try again, MobLand is often very violent and the violence isn’t cartoonish. Did he have any worries that the series in any way glamorised violence? “It’s not glamorous – it’s horrible,” he says. “Violence and cruelty has existed in literature and theatre from the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the Bible and Dante’s Inferno. I think when it comes to art, nothing is really sacred – it’s a safe place to play and evoke conversation. We watch in order to better understand the human condition. It’s entertainment but there’s a lesson to be learnt from most stories.” A braver soul might have questioned whether MobLand stands comparison with the Iliad and the Bible, but if there’s a lesson to be learnt from talking to Tom Hardy it’s that it’s wiser to just nod and agree lest he – or possibly one of his associates, depending on his availability – finds you.
Pierce Brosnan, Tom Hardy on MobLand: "It's no holds barred"
Brosnan and Hardy spoke with Radio Times magazine ahead of the Paramount+ show's finale.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Bond and Bane, Mamma Mia! and Mad Max: Pierce Brosnan and Tom Hardy make a somewhat unlikely double act, but the pair have teamed up in MobLand, the ten-part Paramount+ drama that’s already been watched by nearly nine million viewers globally and is set to conclude this week. Brosnan plays Conrad Harrigan, a grizzled Irish “Godfather” at the head of an organised crime family that’s fighting for power within a global crime syndicate, while Helen Mirren is his wife, Maeve. Hardy is Harry Da Souza, their loyal fixer. The series is set in a dimly lit and frequently cloudy present-day London, where mobsters tell their henchmen to “call the Maltese and tell them there’s a gap in the market on the brown” and nightclubs are seemingly only allowed to play the Prodigy. In other words, it’s a gangster series directed by Guy Ritchie. “I have great admiration for Guy Ritchie’s work and the style that he has created for himself. The landscape of film-making that he has embroidered over the years is wildly entertaining,” Brosnan says. “And this family [the Harrigans] is so mangled and warped – it’s twisted, incestuous and dangerous.” Brosnan, a ridiculously well-preserved 72-year-old, is softly spoken and his voice is almost musical in its cadence. Hardy, 25 years his junior, by contrast, radiates an agitated restlessness and each question is met with a waterfall of words. I ask him what attracted him to the role of Harry. “The world [of MobLand] is something that I’ve already been a part of with lots of films and characters,” he says, “but this is long-form so there’s optionality for nuance and depth. It’s a good playground.” Brosnan and Hardy both have form in gangster films – Hardy played both Kray twins in Legend, he portrayed Al Capone in Capone and was in Guy Ritchie’s 2008 London gangster film RocknRolla. “I like to find the differences between similar types, perhaps,” he explains. Meanwhile, Brosnan, who first found fame in the 1980s TV series Remington Steele, made his big-screen debut aged 27 in the gangster classic The Long Good Friday, which of course starred Helen Mirren. He was listed as “1st Irishman” and although he didn’t share any scenes with his MobLand co-star, he says with pride: “It still holds up as a British gangster movie. And now, all these years later, Helen and I are working together again.” It was his performances as James Bond in four blockbusters from 1995 to 2002 that secured cinematic immortality for Brosnan, but since then he has chosen diverse roles in such films as The Thomas Crown Affair, The Ghost Writer, Mrs Doubtfire and two Mamma Mia! movies. “Every job is a challenge and it all comes with a thump of anxiety,” he reveals, “because you have to do something. What are you doing on the stage? Why are you there? So that’s constant. You live with that. You live with that stress all the time. And that’s what’s so exhilarating. That’s what makes you alive.” What made him anxious about this role? “You don’t need to know that,” he says. I don’t need to know but I’m interested, I respond. “It’s the excitement of making a very strong decision on a character – a voice and attitude,” he concedes. “And not knowing where it’s going story-wise.” Brosnan’s accent in MobLand has, as it happens, come in for some criticism. The Irish Independent’s review said Conrad’s speaking voice was “all over the shop and a huge distraction”. This must have been particularly upsetting given that Brosnan is actually Irish. “My own accent is very soft,” he says, “Conrad’s accent is a million miles away from me.” The inspiration for the accent was a man suggested by his dialect coach. “I told him that I needed a Kerry accent,” he explains, “so he gave me the name of a man and I googled the guy and that was it. It was a Kerry accent. And so, I just gave it full tilt.” Does he like Conrad? “I like him. I love him,” he says. “I enjoy him. I mean, I don’t want to be that person – he’s a psychopath.” He’s not exaggerating: within the first few minutes of the first episode, Conrad – a man who, in Brosnan’s words is “brutish, cunning, charming and dangerous” – has killed a man by crushing his windpipe with his shoes. Brosnan is no stranger to inflicting great violence on screen – as anyone who heard his version of SOS in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again will confirm – but it’s rare to see him play a villain. Is that liberating? “Yes, there are no holds barred,” he admits. “You own the stage, you have wings to fly and be anything you wish.” Hardy as Harry Da Souza also enforces his employer’s desires and needs through threats and violence. When he’s not killing gangsters, Harry is trying to salvage his marriage to avoid going to couples therapy with his wife, played by Joanne Froggatt. “He’s a dad, he has a partner and kills people,” says Hardy. “The compartmentalisation is what makes him fascinating because nothing spills into other compartments.” Harry is intense, troubled, capable of great violence but also very funny – when he visits a man in hospital to persuade him to cooperate, he says, “I, or possibly one of my associates, depending on my availability, will find you.” I tell Hardy that I was surprised how often I found myself laughing while watching MobLand. “I think making something very pedestrian or civilised can turn the tone of a scene into something with an element of comedy,” Hardy agrees. Hardy’s father used to write scripts for the Irish comedian Dave Allen, and as a young boy Hardy, who grew up in East Sheen and attended private school, would watch Hancock’s Half Hour and Monty Python. I wonder if he ever gets sent scripts for light-hearted comedies? “The scripts that I get are fairly funny but tend to often be connected to really dark matter, which others might find unpalatable but I find absolutely normal,” he says. “A lot of the things that I find subjectively funny deal with very dark stories of the tales of the human condition when they’re in utter crisis and despair. There’s a wicked humour in sitting in pain.” It’s just about possible to see MobLand as an exploration of a particular type of damaged masculinity. I ask Brosnan what he thinks is eating away at Conrad, what explains his need for power and his facility for violence, and he says it’s because “his was a youth that was twisted inside out by abandonment and there’s a deep anger there for the man he’s become”. So what does Hardy think MobLand says about men and masculinity? “What does MobLand specifically say about men and masculinity?”, he repeats the question and leaves it, and me, hanging. “You know what, you could open up an entire can of worms on that in a really interesting manner,” he says finally. “And I think this conversation is part of the reason why we make art. I also think that as part of the team that created it, it’s not for me to have that conversation whilst promoting it. But when people sit and watch it, I’d be interested to see what their discussions are.” So you’re saying it’s a good question but you’re not going to answer it? “Of course not,” he says. “Why would I?” I try again, MobLand is often very violent and the violence isn’t cartoonish. Did he have any worries that the series in any way glamorised violence? “It’s not glamorous – it’s horrible,” he says. “Violence and cruelty has existed in literature and theatre from the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the Bible and Dante’s Inferno. I think when it comes to art, nothing is really sacred – it’s a safe place to play and evoke conversation. We watch in order to better understand the human condition. It’s entertainment but there’s a lesson to be learnt from most stories.” A braver soul might have questioned whether MobLand stands comparison with the Iliad and the Bible, but if there’s a lesson to be learnt from talking to Tom Hardy it’s that it’s wiser to just nod and agree lest he – or possibly one of his associates, depending on his availability – finds you. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. MobLand continues on Paramount+ on Sundays. Add MobLand to your watchlist on the Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama 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.
Felicity Jones: "There's a real punk quality to The Brutalist"
The actor has a key role opposite Adrien Brody in the Oscar-tipped epic from director Brady Corbet.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Felicity Jones, 41, is an actor and producer who made her professional debut aged 12 in the 1996 TV drama The Treasure Seekers. Since then, she’s played Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything — which earned her Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar nominations — as well US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex. Now, in her latest award-tipped film, The Brutalist, she stars as Erzsebet, the wife of Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth (played by Adrien Brody), who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to the United States in search of the American Dream. You started acting very young. Were you driven at that age? I definitely had an entrepreneurial spirit quite young. I liked achieving things. I like the intellectual stimulation maybe, and the breadth of experience. My parents were so brave in letting me do a TV series when I was 12. I had a great time – we were a group of actresses living in a hotel together – and my parents were open to those opportunities. But I don’t know if I’d do the same with my children… What did you buy with your first paycheque? I don’t know if it was my very first, but I do remember spending one of my first paycheques on Alanis Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill. There was something about the independence that obviously comes from financial success. You’re not beholden to anyone, and that was quite core to me. There is definitely an intersection of business and art in being an actor. You're from Birmingham — did you ever have a Brummie accent? I actually didn’t! I grew up speaking RP [received pronunciation] and I remember being really embarrassed and thinking, why can’t we talk like everyone else? Why have we got this different accent? My parents didn’t have strong accents particularly, and my late uncle was a theatre actor and he didn’t have a very strong accent. So, I guess it’s all shaped by what you hear when you are growing up. Do you think the choices that you make now as an actor are different than when you were younger? I think having a family [Jones has two young children with her husband, director Charles Guard], there’s far more pressure on your time. So, it has to really count. I think, well, who’s going to see this? Is it just going to be another thing pumped out that no one cares about? What’s the point in doing that? View oEmbed on the source website The Brutalist is a three hours, 35 minutes-long movie about an architect. What made you sign on for that? There’s a real punk quality to The Brutalist. At the time it was sent I was saying no to so many things. I was thinking, am I ever going to work again? Because I was just not reading great stuff… but with The Brutalist I just knew it was the right thing to do. It was a very easy yes when I read the script. I was moved by it and it was unusually intellectual. I thought it was ideologically interesting. The film is so long it has an interval. Did you worry that might put people off? Brevity has almost become boring. I think, strangely, in being old-fashioned, it’s incredibly modern because we’re in a culture where the new is so powerful. There’s something exciting about The Brutalist because it’s so reactionary against what modernity demands of us. In what other ways does the film speak to our present moment? I think the film is incredibly timely. The thrust of the film is survival. How do you survive, not just physically, but also with your principles, morals and dreams intact when the world around you wants to take that away? It’s about fleeing fascism into the arms of capitalism, which without a doubt is political. Your character, Erzsebet, is obviously very different from you, as she's a Hungarian-Jewish woman in a wheelchair. What did you do to get into the role? The key was just a hard slog of doing the accent over and over again. There was an audio I listened to from the British Library of a woman who’d gone through a similar experience to Erzsebet, but had come to the UK. Increasingly I’ve become fascinated by roles that are different from me and that are maybe subversive in some way, or have some kind of edge to them. Did you wrestle with the question of whether somebody in a wheelchair should have played the role? It felt as though because of her physical transformation – at the end we see her standing and confronting [Guy Pearce’s] Van Buren – that it was ok for me, as an able-bodied person, to do. And finally, when you were preparing to play the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you became friends. Do you have any abiding memories of her? She had incredible temperance when it came to everything. I think we’re living in a time with such extremes and extremities. She very much believed in the swing of the pendulum – that in politics, things will go from one extreme to the other, and they will find a middle way. I would be intrigued to see what she thinks of where the world is now… The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Brutalist is released in UK cinemas on Friday 24th January 2024. 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.
The former child actor from Birmingham is Bafta-nominated for her challenging role in The Brutalist
The Brutalist is nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture, Actor and Supporting Actress for Felicity Jones. Add it to your watchlist Felicity Jones, 41, is an actor and producer who made her professional debut aged 12 in the 1996 TV drama The Treasure Seekers. Since then, she’s played Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything — which earned her Golden Globe, Bafta and Oscar nominations — as well US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex. Now, in her latest award-tipped film, The Brutalist, she stars as Erzsebet, the wife of Hungarian-Jewish architect Laszlo Toth (played by Adrien Brody), who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to the United States in search of the American Dream. You started acting very young. Were you driven at that age? I definitely had an entrepreneurial spirit quite young. I liked achieving things. I like the intellectual stimulation maybe, and the breadth of experience. My parents were so brave in letting me do a TV series when I was 12. I had a great time – we were a group of actresses living in a hotel together – and my parents were open to those opportunities. But I don’t know if I’d do the same with my children… What did you buy with your first paycheque? I don’t know if it was my very first, but I do remember spending one of my first paycheques on Alanis Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill. There was something about the independence that obviously comes from financial success. You’re not beholden to anyone, and that was quite core to me. There is definitely an intersection of business and art in being an actor. You’re from Birmingham — did you ever have a Brummie accent? I actually didn’t! I grew up speaking RP [received pronunciation] and I remember being really embarrassed and thinking, why can’t we talk like everyone else? Why have we got this different accent? My parents didn’t have strong accents particularly, and my late uncle was a theatre actor and he didn’t have a very strong accent. So, I guess it’s all shaped by what you hear when you are growing up. Do you think the choices that you make now as an actor are different than when you were younger? I think having a family [Jones has two young children with her husband, director Charles Guard], there’s far more pressure on your time. So, it has to really count. I think, well, who’s going to see this? Is it just going to be another thing pumped out that no one cares about? What’s the point in doing that? The Brutalist is a three hours, 35 minutes-long movie about an architect. What made you sign on for that? There’s a real punk quality to The Brutalist. At the time it was sent I was saying no to so many things. I was thinking, am I ever going to work again? Because I was just not reading great stuff… but with The Brutalist I just knew it was the right thing to do. It was a very easy yes when I read the script. I was moved by it and it was unusually intellectual. I thought it was ideologically interesting. The film is so long it has an interval. Did you worry that might put people off? Brevity has almost become boring. I think, strangely, in being old-fashioned, it’s incredibly modern because we’re in a culture where the new is so powerful. There’s something exciting about The Brutalist because it’s so reactionary against what modernity demands of us. In what other ways does the film speak to our present moment? I think the film is incredibly timely. The thrust of the film is survival. How do you survive, not just physically, but also with your principles, morals and dreams intact when the world around you wants to take that away? It’s about fleeing fascism into the arms of capitalism, which without a doubt is political. Your character, Erzsebet, is obviously very different from you, as she’s a Hungarian-Jewish woman in a wheelchair. What did you do to get into the role? The key was just a hard slog of doing the accent over and over again. There was an audio I listened to from the British Library of a woman who’d gone through a similar experience to Erzsebet, but had come to the UK. Increasingly I’ve become fascinated by roles that are different from me and that are maybe subversive in some way, or have some kind of edge to them. Did you wrestle with the question of whether somebody in a wheelchair should have played the role? It felt as though because of her physical transformation – at the end we see her standing and confronting [Guy Pearce’s] Van Buren – that it was ok for me, as an able-bodied person, to do. And finally, when you were preparing to play the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you became friends. Do you have any abiding memories of her? She had incredible temperance when it came to everything. I think we’re living in a time with such extremes and extremities. She very much believed in the swing of the pendulum – that in politics, things will go from one extreme to the other, and they will find a middle way. I would be intrigued to see what she thinks of where the world is now… The Brutalist is in UK cinemas from Friday 24 January
Angelina Jolie is one of the most famous women in the world, but has never felt seen as an artist – now she’s taken on her most exposing role yet
Add Maria to your watchlist Maria Callas was one of the most famous women in the world; an opera singer who was arguably as well known for her relationship with the equally famous Aristotle Onassis as her own work. Angelina Jolie is one of the most famous women in the world; an actress who is arguably as well known for her relationship with the equally famous Brad Pitt as her own work. These outward parallels are not, however, what led Jolie to portray the opera diva in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s latest film, Maria. “It was a challenge,” the 49-year-old says when I ask why she wanted to take on the role. “As artists you want to take on something that you are afraid of, that you’re not sure you can do.” It was also the opportunity to work with Larraín that ultimately convinced her to take on that challenge. “My first step in was Pablo,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to work with him.” Larraín has already made two dramas about famous 20th-century women: 2016’s Jackie (about Jackie Kennedy) and 2021’s Spencer (about Diana, Princess of Wales and written, like Maria, by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight). “Callas achieved such a level of beauty and perfection in what she did,” he says. “She changed opera and had a big influence in the history of fashion and yet really we know very little about her.” In past interviews, Larraín has said that the reason he believed Jolie was right for the role was that she and Callas both had a sense of mystery about them. But surely even those of us not obsessed with the minutiae of celebrity culture know plenty about Jolie. Wild child daughter of John Voight, she married Billy Bob Thornton and the couple wore each other’s blood in lockets around their necks. She then married Brad Pitt and they later divorced, leading to an acrimonious battle over custody of their six kids. She had a preventive double mastectomy after finding out she was at risk of breast cancer, and she is involved in refugee rights and humanitarianism. I know more about Jolie than is healthy or normal. So where is this mystery? “You don’t know me,” insists Jolie. “You think you know her because you might have seen her in movies, in newspapers, social media,” adds Larraín, “but one thing is the perception you might have, and the other is the reality. Angelina is very mysterious and the more known she is, the more there’s an element of mystery.” Jolie spent months learning to sing opera to play Maria Callas. In the film, her voice is mixed with Callas’s own, and the marketing campaign for Maria has stressed the intensity of the training she did – but why bother, when she could have just lip-synced. Was it, I ask cynically, because she was less likely to get any award nominations if she had not sung for real? She says not. “You really can’t fake opera. It doesn’t work. It has to be like a full-body thing for it to happen.” So, having learnt how to sing opera, does she now perform Ave Maria doing the dishes? Jolie smiles. “The thing with opera is you have to sing it pretty loud. I’ve had my moments when everybody’s gone out, because then I get to be loud.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2024/12/522Y0A3AH-a319246-e1733585479729.jpg" width="6142" height="4094" alt="Week 52/01 Angelina Jolie" title="Maria (2024) directed by Pablo Larrain and starring Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, the world's greatest opera singer during her final days in 1970s Paris. Publicity photograph ***EDITORIAL USE ONLY***. Credit: BFA / Pablo Larrain / Netflix" /> Maria is set in 1977, the final year of Callas’s life but also the year that the Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen and the Clash their debut album. Jolie was born two years earlier in LA, and growing up her musical tastes tended more towards the sounds of Lydon and Strummer than Caruso and Callas. Still, while the jagged fury of punk might seem far from the heightened drama of opera, for Jolie, the Clash and Callas had more in common than might be suspected. “Today, so much is about what is popular and what hits the algorithm,” she argues. “Punk was the opposite. It was defiance against what was shoved down your throat and what everybody liked and what was normal. Punk wasn’t complacency or following. So I think in her own way Maria Callas was a punk.” In person, Jolie occasionally shows flashes of unexpected rawness and honesty. She says that learning to sing opera forced her to “go to certain places that are not comfortable. I was not sure I was ready to visit that level of truth and pain”. She does this often – saying things about this role that could be seen as subtle references to her own life. “I can see her love of her work, but I can see also that there was a level of pressure and pain,” she says at another point about Callas, but maybe not only about her. “She was never free from it [the pressure and pain] because it wasn’t just associated with her creativity.” She adds, tellingly, that she found singing opera to be a form of therapy. “I would recommend it for anybody. When people go through things in their life it stores in their body. It gets in your stomach and your posture changes – but to sing opera you have to unlock all those parts. I became very emotional because when you start to let it out it’s very, very primal.” In preparation for meeting Jolie, I had watched footage of Callas being interviewed by Mike Wallace on American TV in 1974. The interview is confrontational and Wallace asks Callas questions about the quality of her singing voice and her relationship history that I can’t imagine any of today’s stars being asked. So, as I end my conversation with her and Larraín, I have to ask – does she feel like today’s celebrities are overly protected when it comes to interviews? “I don’t know if it’s protected, or if it’s turned into something cheaper,” she says. “When you think about the old interviews there was a fuller conversation that was able to be had. I watched Callas’s really old interviews and they spent hours talking to her about her craft. Nobody’s ever done that for me. She was taken seriously.” Of course, Jolie is now taken seriously as a human rights campaigner – but perhaps her commitment to playing Maria Callas, to singing for real, and exploring dark corners of her own life to do that, could be seen as a demand to be taken seriously for her art as much as any activism. “I haven’t allowed myself to just enjoy [being an artist], because things become about celebrity or business,” she says. “It is a gift to be allowed to live a life as an artist, and this role has helped make me rediscover art and being an artist. I am rediscovering that through Maria.”
Angelina Jolie: "Maria Callas was a punk"
The iconic actor plays legendary opera singer Maria in the latest film from Chilean director Pablo Larraín – who also made Spencer and Jackie.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Maria Callas was one of the most famous women in the world; an opera singer who was arguably as well known for her relationship with the equally famous Aristotle Onassis as her own work. Angelina Jolie is one of the most famous women in the world; an actress who is arguably as well known for her relationship with the equally famous Brad Pitt as her own work. These outward parallels are not, however, what led Jolie to portray the opera diva in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s latest film, Maria. “It was a challenge,” the 49-year-old says when I ask why she wanted to take on the role. “As artists you want to take on something that you are afraid of, that you’re not sure you can do.” It was also the opportunity to work with Larraín that ultimately convinced her to take on that challenge. “My first step in was Pablo,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to work with him.” Larraín has already made two dramas about famous 20th-century women: 2016’s Jackie (about Jackie Kennedy) and 2021’s Spencer (about Diana, Princess of Wales and written, like Maria, by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight). “Callas achieved such a level of beauty and perfection in what she did,” he says. “She changed opera and had a big influence in the history of fashion and yet really we know very little about her.” In past interviews, Larraín has said that the reason he believed Jolie was right for the role was that she and Callas both had a sense of mystery about them. But surely even those of us not obsessed with the minutiae of celebrity culture know plenty about Jolie. Wild child daughter of Jon Voight, she married Billy Bob Thornton and the couple wore each other’s blood in lockets around their necks. She then married Brad Pitt and they later divorced, leading to an acrimonious battle over custody of their six kids. She had a preventive double mastectomy after finding out she was at risk of breast cancer, and she is involved in refugee rights and humanitarianism. I know more about Jolie than is healthy or normal. So where is this mystery? “You don’t know me,” insists Jolie. “You think you know her because you might have seen her in movies, in newspapers, social media,” adds Larraín, “but one thing is the perception you might have, and the other is the reality. Angelina is very mysterious and the more known she is, the more there’s an element of mystery.” Jolie spent months learning to sing opera to play Maria Callas. In the film, her voice is mixed with Callas’s own, and the marketing campaign for Maria has stressed the intensity of the training she did – but why bother, when she could have just lip-synced. Was it, I ask cynically, because she was less likely to get any award nominations if she had not sung for real? She says not. “You really can’t fake opera. It doesn’t work. It has to be like a full-body thing for it to happen.” So, having learnt how to sing opera, does she now perform Ave Maria doing the dishes? Jolie smiles. “The thing with opera is you have to sing it pretty loud. I’ve had my moments when everybody’s gone out, because then I get to be loud.” Maria is set in 1977, the final year of Callas’s life but also the year that the Sex Pistols released God Save the Queen and the Clash their debut album. Jolie was born two years earlier in LA, and growing up her musical tastes tended more towards the sounds of Lydon and Strummer than Caruso and Callas. Still, while the jagged fury of punk might seem far from the heightened drama of opera, for Jolie, the Clash and Callas had more in common than might be suspected. “Today, so much is about what is popular and what hits the algorithm,” she argues. “Punk was the opposite. It was defiance against what was shoved down your throat and what everybody liked and what was normal. Punk wasn’t complacency or following. So I think in her own way Maria Callas was a punk.” In person, Jolie occasionally shows flashes of unexpected rawness and honesty. She says that learning to sing opera forced her to “go to certain places that are not comfortable. I was not sure I was ready to visit that level of truth and pain”. She does this often – saying things about this role that could be seen as subtle references to her own life. “I can see her love of her work, but I can see also that there was a level of pressure and pain,” she says at another point about Callas, but maybe not only about her. “She was never free from it [the pressure and pain] because it wasn’t just associated with her creativity.” She adds, tellingly, that she found singing opera to be a form of therapy. “I would recommend it for anybody. When people go through things in their life it stores in their body. It gets in your stomach and your posture changes – but to sing opera you have to unlock all those parts. I became very emotional because when you start to let it out it’s very, very primal.” In preparation for meeting Jolie, I had watched footage of Callas being interviewed by Mike Wallace on American TV in 1974. The interview is confrontational and Wallace asks Callas questions about the quality of her singing voice and her relationship history that I can’t imagine any of today’s stars being asked. So, as I end my conversation with her and Larraín, I have to ask – does she feel like today’s celebrities are overly protected when it comes to interviews? “I don’t know if it’s protected, or if it’s turned into something cheaper,” she says. “When you think about the old interviews there was a fuller conversation that was able to be had. I watched Callas’s really old interviews and they spent hours talking to her about her craft. Nobody’s ever done that for me. She was taken seriously.” Of course, Jolie is now taken seriously as a human rights campaigner – but perhaps her commitment to playing Maria Callas, to singing for real, and exploring dark corners of her own life to do that, could be seen as a demand to be taken seriously for her art as much as any activism. “I haven’t allowed myself to just enjoy [being an artist], because things become about celebrity or business,” she says. “It is a gift to be allowed to live a life as an artist, and this role has helped make me rediscover art and being an artist. I am rediscovering that through Maria.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Maria is in UK cinemas from Friday 10th January 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.
How did an Italian waiter bring Hollywood studio MGM to its knees – and live to tell the tale?
"He bought MGM and it unravelled within weeks. The money just wasn't there"
Add The Man Who Definitely Didn’t Steal Hollywood to your watchlist Hollywood has always attracted dreamers and storytellers, so it’s perhaps not so surprising that it welcomed Giancarlo Parretti. But Parretti, who certainly was both dreamer and storyteller, was not a writer, actor or director. He was a waiter turned hotel owner turned businessman and his dream was to own his own Hollywood studio. And he made it happen by telling an improbable story about his past and his wealth. In 1990, Parretti bought MGM – the studio responsible for The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and the Bond films – for $1.3 billion. But his brief tenure was a disaster, characterised by bounced cheques to movie stars, hundreds of job losses and an FBI investigation into alleged financial irregularities. How he did it and why is explored in a fascinating BBC feature documentary directed by John Dower, The Man Who Definitely Didn’t Steal Hollywood, which features interviews with Parretti himself. It’s also now set to to become a Hollywood movie. “It is quite a bonkers story,” says Dower. “I've been making documentaries for 25 years and I'd say he's one of the most fabulous storytellers. There were moments when I was filming when I was wondering why is he telling me all this stuff? It’s nuts.” Parretti was abandoned as a baby only hours after he was born. “He was found on the steps of Orvieto Cathedral,” says Dower. “We managed to stand that [fact] up.” He later became a waiter, working in London during the 1960s where, he claimed, he became friendly with the Beatles and Winston Churchill. Is any of that true? “He was definitely in London.” Parretti went from working as a waiter to owning a string of hotels in the 1970s, but how he did this is somewhat mysterious. “I never got to the bottom of that,” admits Dower. “He was just, like, ‘I'm a self-made man, I became successful. I bought one hotel and I buy a few others.’” By the late 1980s, with the help of what some might call creative accounting, Parretti was venturing into the film business, buying mini-studios and cinemas before securing over a billion dollars to buy MGM. Perhaps surprisingly for someone so keen to buy a film studio, Parretti’s movie knowledge was nonexistent. “He's not even heard of Citizen Kane,” says Dower. For Parretti, buying MGM was secondary to the lifestyle his money allowed him to enjoy, including owning a $9 million, 14-room Beverly Hills mansion decorated with paintings by Goya, Picasso and Miro – which may or may not have been genuine ­– and a mahogany desk once used by legendary MGM boss Louis B Mayer. He drove a brown $200,000 Rolls-Royce, flew in a private jet and hung out with film stars. “He liked the art of the deal,” says Dower, “and he liked the status.” Parretti’s disastrous ownership of MGM lasted a year and the film highlights the absurdities of his tenure – he brought an actual lion to his first press conference and named his 21-year-old daughter as vice-president of finance. In retrospect, the whole project seems like it was destined to fail, so why did a company with the reputation of MGM allow the sale to go through? “MGM are complicit,” says Dower. “Even at the time, nobody knew anything about this guy. [You would think] it would be a good idea to do some digging, some due diligence? But it was all about the money.” MGM saw an opportunity, and so did Parretti – and who cared if his reputed fortune was the work of smoke, mirrors and hundreds of shell companies? “I think he just overreached himself,” says Dower. “He got high on his own supply and just kept going. And he suddenly got to MGM and it unravelled within weeks. I think the problem was, the money just wasn't there.” So why did so many people fall for Parretti? “He’s lovely, he is utterly beguiling,” says Dower. “He is charming, funny and a fantastic cook. I’m a documentary film-maker, used to eating garage sandwiches in the back of the car. This guy was making us homemade ravioli, seafood risotto, cooking it himself with lovely wine.” In March 1999 Giancarlo Parretti was found guilty of misuse of corporate funds and fraud and sentenced to four years’ prison but fled back to Italy days before sentencing. MGM filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and emerged from bankruptcy later that year. In 2022, MGM Holdings was bought by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. As for Parretti, he is now 82 and lives quietly in Umbria. “He lives in a palace, so he is not struggling,” says Dower. “He plays tennis, he has nice lunches, he seems to enjoy life. I think he's very happy.” He got away with it, didn't he, I suggest. “Yeah, he did. He did. He got away with it.”
How did an Italian waiter bring Louis B Mayer's Hollywood studio to its knees – and live to tell the tale?
"He bought MGM and it unravelled within weeks. The money just wasn't there."
Hollywood has always attracted dreamers and storytellers, so it’s perhaps not so surprising that it welcomed Giancarlo Parretti. But Parretti, who certainly was both dreamer and storyteller, was not a writer, actor or director. He was a waiter turned hotel owner turned businessman and his dream was to own his own Hollywood studio. And he made it happen by telling an improbable story about his past and his wealth. In 1990, Parretti bought MGM – the studio responsible for The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and the Bond films – for $1.3 billion. But his brief tenure was a disaster, characterised by bounced cheques to movie stars, hundreds of job losses and an FBI investigation into alleged financial irregularities. How he did it and why is explored in a fascinating BBC feature documentary directed by John Dower, The Man Who Definitely Didn’t Steal Hollywood, which features interviews with Parretti himself. It’s also now set to to become a Hollywood movie. “It is quite a bonkers story,” says Dower. “I've been making documentaries for 25 years and I'd say he's one of the most fabulous storytellers. There were moments when I was filming when I was wondering why is he telling me all this stuff? It’s nuts.” Parretti was abandoned as a baby only hours after he was born. “He was found on the steps of Orvieto Cathedral,” says Dower. “We managed to stand that [fact] up.” He later became a waiter, working in London during the 1960s where, he claimed, he became friendly with the Beatles and Winston Churchill. Is any of that true? “He was definitely in London.” Parretti went from working as a waiter to owning a string of hotels in the 1970s, but how he did this is somewhat mysterious. “I never got to the bottom of that,” admits Dower. “He was just, like, ‘I'm a self-made man, I became successful. I bought one hotel and I buy a few others.’” By the late 1980s, with the help of what some might call creative accounting, Parretti was venturing into the film business, buying mini-studios and cinemas before securing over a billion dollars to buy MGM. Perhaps surprisingly for someone so keen to buy a film studio, Parretti’s movie knowledge was nonexistent. “He's not even heard of Citizen Kane,” says Dower. For Parretti, buying MGM was secondary to the lifestyle his money allowed him to enjoy, including owning a $9 million, 14-room Beverly Hills mansion decorated with paintings by Goya, Picasso and Miro – which may or may not have been genuine ­– and a mahogany desk once used by legendary MGM boss Louis B Mayer. He drove a brown $200,000 Rolls-Royce, flew in a private jet and hung out with film stars. “He liked the art of the deal,” says Dower, “and he liked the status.” Parretti’s disastrous ownership of MGM lasted a year and the film highlights the absurdities of his tenure – he brought an actual lion to his first press conference and named his 21-year-old daughter as vice-president of finance. In retrospect, the whole project seems like it was destined to fail, so why did a company with the reputation of MGM allow the sale to go through? “MGM are complicit,” says Dower. “Even at the time, nobody knew anything about this guy. [You would think] it would be a good idea to do some digging, some due diligence? But it was all about the money.” MGM saw an opportunity, and so did Parretti – and who cared if his reputed fortune was the work of smoke, mirrors and hundreds of shell companies? “I think he just overreached himself,” says Dower. “He got high on his own supply and just kept going. And he suddenly got to MGM and it unravelled within weeks. I think the problem was, the money just wasn't there.” So why did so many people fall for Parretti? “He’s lovely, he is utterly beguiling,” says Dower. “He is charming, funny and a fantastic cook. I’m a documentary film-maker, used to eating garage sandwiches in the back of the car. This guy was making us homemade ravioli, seafood risotto, cooking it himself with lovely wine.” In March 1999 Giancarlo Parretti was found guilty of misuse of corporate funds and fraud and sentenced to four years’ prison but fled back to Italy days before sentencing. MGM filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and emerged from bankruptcy later that year. In 2022, MGM Holdings was bought by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. As for Parretti, he is now 82 and lives quietly in Umbria. “He lives in a palace, so he is not struggling,” says Dower. “He plays tennis, he has nice lunches, he seems to enjoy life. I think he's very happy.” He got away with it, didn't he, I suggest. “Yeah, he did. He did. He got away with it.” The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. The Man Who Definitely Didn’t Steal Hollywood is available to watch now on BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Documentaries 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.
Adeel Akhtar turned his back on a legal career to try his hand at acting and made TV history. Now he’s starring in BBC1’s new thriller… as a lawyer
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in October 2024. Add Showtrial to your watchlist. Adeel Akhtar was at a crossroads. It was 2002 and he had just graduated with the degree in law he had taken to please his father. He was 21 and on the brink of pursuing a legal career when an opportunity came up. “My girlfriend at the time was auditioning for drama school in New York and I was her scene partner,” he says. “One day I came home and the drama school called to ask if I wanted a place.” Akhtar had been interested in drama since his teens and now faced a choice. “Do I become a lawyer,” he remembers, “or do I run away and start this new life for me that is full of unknowns and really terrifying?” Akhtar took a leap into the dark. He is now one of this country’s most in-demand actors, which suggests the gamble paid off. Since his breakout role in 2010’s Four Lions, he’s appeared in a string of acclaimed television shows including Sherwood, Utopia, Unforgotten and Sweet Tooth. In 2017, he became the first non-white person to win a Bafta television best actor award for his role in Murdered by My Father, and in 2022 received another Bafta nomination for his role in the acclaimed romantic drama Ali & Ava. View oEmbed on the source website We are meeting in a north London photo studio to talk about his latest primetime role in Showtrial, the second series of the BBC legal drama, in which he plays defence solicitor Sam Malik, tasked with representing a police officer (Michael Socha) who stands accused of murdering a climate-change activist. “I’ve definitely cornered the market in being the dishevelled lawyer or police investigator,” Akhtar says. “The parts I get asked to play are usually ones where the idea of them being dishevelled is usually in the stage direction somewhere.” The question bubbling across the five episodes of Showtrial is whether the activist’s death was an accident or something more sinister. The issue of police malpractice is rather timely, and I ask Akhtar if he has ever had any run-ins with the police. “I’ve been stopped and searched,” he says, “then they realised I had nothing on me.” A more frightening interaction took place when he flew into New York to start at drama school but was arrested by the FBI after being mistaken for a terrorist. “It was a terrifying thought as to what could have happened to me,” he says. “There were nightmare stories of people who just never went home from America. They were just stuck there and then sent to Guantanamo.” That experience of being singled out brought back unhappy memories of being a small boy and having stones thrown at him, wondering if that was always to be his life. Akhtar grew up in a village in Buckinghamshire, his Kenyan mother and Pakistani father having met while they were both working at Heathrow Airport. They first settled in Hounslow in west London and sent him to boarding school, Cheltenham College, to give him what they thought was a quintessential English education – except that Akhtar never felt he was quintessentially English. Was it traumatising, I ask, to have to leave your parents, aged 11, for boarding school? “When you’re a kid I don’t think you acknowledge what trauma is,” he says, “but I do remember being a minority in that school, and not having many people that looked like me. Now I’m 43, it makes me wonder how that affects a person’s development if you’re always seen as a minority.” View Green Video on the source website His parents sent him to a fee-paying school with good intentions but now he has children of his own (he has two sons with his documentary director wife Alexis Burke), Akhtar is not convinced about the merits of public school. “My kids go to a state school,” he says. “You send your kid to a school to be educated but also to give them an understanding of the world. I think going to state school better equips a kid to understand that you’re going to be entering a world where people are different but you have a commonality with them.” Whatever his later misgivings, it was at Cheltenham that Akhtar was given the opportunity to focus on acting. There was a role as a gravedigger in Hamlet and a production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming he staged with friends. “I felt like people were really listening to what I was saying,” he recalls. “There was an inherent power in this profession.” He had not felt seen on screen or stage growing up, not until he came across the work of Hanif Kureishi. “I read The Buddha of Suburbia and saw My Beautiful Laundrette,” he recalls. “Until then, the stories that we were allowed to see of ourselves on TV were siloed in the idea of culture, religion, or something quite issue-based – this was the first time that I felt myself reflected.” Akhtar continued with acting on the side, while following his father’s wish that he study law – two parallel roads that converged in the autumn of 2002 when he was given that opportunity to study at The Actors Studio in New York. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss. “I confronted him and explained that this was what I wanted to do, and he became emotionally absent,” he recalls. “He couldn’t stop me, but at the same time he was just really worried, because the idea of becoming an actor is terrifying.” Those worries seemed to be justified when, after leaving drama school, he drifted from one bar job to the next. “I was going out a lot and having a bit too much fun,” he says, “and then the fun stopped being fun.” In 2009, Chris Morris cast him in Four Lions – a role that would end up transforming his career. But Akhtar’s career did not immediately take off and he spent more than a year living in a camper van. “At that time you could just park up anywhere, so I would park outside my mates’ houses,” he says. When he needed to shower, he’d go to a yoga class to use the facilities. His parents must have been worried and disappointed? “We were estranged,” he admits. “We just weren’t around each other that much.” Gradually – and then suddenly – Akhtar’s fortunes changed. Television roles in dramas like The Night Manager alongside Olivia Colman and film roles like Victoria and Abdul with Judi Dench culminated in that 2017 Bafta, which made history. “It was just a very confusing feeling,” he says now about the win. “I couldn’t not acknowledge the work that I’d done, but it was also a bittersweet feeling because it was off the back of a lot of other unacknowledged people.” Six years later he won another Bafta, for his supporting role in the first series of the BBC’s Sherwood, and found himself at the awards ceremony sitting behind Meera Syal, who was being presented with a Bafta Fellowship. “It was a moment that would have been unimaginable for me when I was watching TV as a teenager,” he says. “I was silent. It was beyond words.” The increased visibility of actors from diverse backgrounds and the greater range of roles he was being afforded made it easy to believe the old battles had been won. It seemed a long way from the days of his youth, when he remembered his mother using her body as a barrier to protect him from being attacked by racists. And then, this summer, he turned on the TV to see race riots erupting across the country, with mosques and hotels housing refugees attacked. “It felt like a replaying of history,” he says. “After I had stopped being sad and depressed I thought about my kids, and I wondered, ‘What can I can do to protect them from this and make them feel like they’re an agent for change?’” He took his children for a walk to their local street market. “People say this doesn’t work – the project of multiculturalism,” he says, “but it works more often than it doesn’t and if you believe that it doesn’t work then they’ve kind of won.” The more he reflected on the riots, the more it brought him back to his work and the impact of the acting choices he has made, and that led him back to Showtrial and what appealed to him about the series. “The stories I am drawn to,” he says, “are a complete rejection of thinking that somebody can objectify you to the point where your own humanity becomes invisible to yourself. Acting can be a vehicle for some kind of change, even if it’s not revolutionary change. There’s a gradual soft power to this work – you enter in a space where everybody feels that they’re seen.”
Adeel Akhtar on Showtrial season 2, living in a camper van and the importance of being seen
Adeel Akhtar turned his back on a legal career to try his hand at acting and made TV history. Now he’s starring in BBC One’s new thriller... as a lawyer.
Adeel Akhtar was at a crossroads. It was 2002 and he had just graduated with the degree in law he had taken to please his father. He was 21 and on the brink of pursuing a legal career when an opportunity came up. "My girlfriend at the time was auditioning for drama school in New York and I was her scene partner," he says. "One day I came home and the drama school called to ask if I wanted a place." Akhtar had been interested in drama since his teens and now faced a choice. "Do I become a lawyer,” he remembers, "or do I run away and start this new life for me that is full of unknowns and really terrifying?" Akhtar took a leap into the dark. He is now one of this country’s most in-demand actors, which suggests the gamble paid off. Since his breakout role in 2010’s Four Lions, he’s appeared in a string of acclaimed television shows including Sherwood, Utopia, Unforgotten and Sweet Tooth. In 2017, he became the first non-white person to win a BAFTA television best actor award for his role in Murdered by My Father, and in 2022 received another BAFTA nomination for his role in the acclaimed romantic drama Ali & Ava. We are meeting in a north London photo studio to talk about his latest primetime role in Showtrial, the second series of the BBC legal drama, in which he plays defence solicitor Sam Malik, tasked with representing a police officer (Michael Socha) who stands accused of murdering a climate-change activist. "I’ve definitely cornered the market in being the dishevelled lawyer or police investigator,” Akhtar says. "The parts I get asked to play are usually ones where the idea of them being dishevelled is usually in the stage direction somewhere." The question bubbling across the five episodes of Showtrial is whether the activist’s death was an accident or something more sinister. The issue of police malpractice is rather timely, and I ask Akhtar if he has ever had any run-ins with the police. "I’ve been stopped and searched," he says, "then they realised I had nothing on me." A more frightening interaction took place when he flew into New York to start at drama school but was arrested by the FBI after being mistaken for a terrorist. "It was a terrifying thought as to what could have happened to me," he says. "There were nightmare stories of people who just never went home from America. They were just stuck there and then sent to Guantanamo." That experience of being singled out brought back unhappy memories of being a small boy and having stones thrown at him, wondering if that was always to be his life. Akhtar grew up in a village in Buckinghamshire, his Kenyan mother and Pakistani father having met while they were both working at Heathrow Airport. They first settled in Hounslow in west London and sent him to boarding school, Cheltenham College, to give him what they thought was a quintessential English education – except that Akhtar never felt he was quintessentially English. Was it traumatising, I ask, to have to leave your parents, aged 11, for boarding school? "When you’re a kid I don’t think you acknowledge what trauma is," he says, "but I do remember being a minority in that school, and not having many people that looked like me. Now I’m 43, it makes me wonder how that affects a person’s development if you’re always seen as a minority." His parents sent him to a fee-paying school with good intentions but now he has children of his own (he has two sons with his documentary director wife Alexis Burke), Akhtar is not convinced about the merits of public school. "My kids go to a state school," he says. "You send your kid to a school to be educated but also to give them an understanding of the world. I think going to state school better equips a kid to understand that you’re going to be entering a world where people are different but you have a commonality with them." Whatever his later misgivings, it was at Cheltenham that Akhtar was given the opportunity to focus on acting. There was a role as a gravedigger in Hamlet and a production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming he staged with friends. "I felt like people were really listening to what I was saying," he recalls. "There was an inherent power in this profession." He had not felt seen on screen or stage growing up, not until he came across the work of Hanif Kureishi. "I read The Buddha of Suburbia and saw My Beautiful Laundrette," he recalls. "Until then, the stories that we were allowed to see of ourselves on TV were siloed in the idea of culture, religion, or something quite issue-based – this was the first time that I felt myself reflected." Akhtar continued with acting on the side, while following his father’s wish that he study law – two parallel roads that converged in the autumn of 2002 when he was given that opportunity to study at The Actors Studio in New York. It seemed too good an opportunity to miss. “I confronted him and explained that this was what I wanted to do, and he became emotionally absent,” he recalls. "He couldn’t stop me, but at the same time he was just really worried, because the idea of becoming an actor is terrifying." Those worries seemed to be justified when, after leaving drama school, he drifted from one bar job to the next. "I was going out a lot and having a bit too much fun," he says, "and then the fun stopped being fun." In 2009, Chris Morris cast him in Four Lions – a role that would end up transforming his career. But Akhtar’s career did not immediately take off and he spent more than a year living in a camper van. "At that time you could just park up anywhere, so I would park outside my mates’ houses," he says. When he needed to shower, he’d go to a yoga class to use the facilities. His parents must have been worried and disappointed? "We were estranged," he admits. "We just weren’t around each other that much." Gradually – and then suddenly – Akhtar’s fortunes changed. Television roles in dramas like The Night Manager alongside Olivia Colman and film roles like Victoria and Abdul with Judi Dench culminated in that 2017 BAFTA, which made history. “It was just a very confusing feeling,” he says now about the win. "I couldn’t not acknowledge the work that I’d done, but it was also a bittersweet feeling because it was off the back of a lot of other unacknowledged people." Six years later he won another BAFTA, for his supporting role in the first series of the BBC’s Sherwood, and found himself at the awards ceremony sitting behind Meera Syal, who was being presented with a BAFTA Fellowship. "It was a moment that would have been unimaginable for me when I was watching TV as a teenager," he says. "I was silent. It was beyond words." The increased visibility of actors from diverse backgrounds and the greater range of roles he was being afforded made it easy to believe the old battles had been won. It seemed a long way from the days of his youth, when he remembered his mother using her body as a barrier to protect him from being attacked by racists. And then, this summer, he turned on the TV to see race riots erupting across the country, with mosques and hotels housing refugees attacked. "It felt like a replaying of history," he says. "After I had stopped being sad and depressed I thought about my kids, and I wondered, ‘What can I can do to protect them from this and make them feel like they’re an agent for change?’” He took his children for a walk to their local street market. "People say this doesn’t work – the project of multiculturalism," he says, "but it works more often than it doesn’t and if you believe that it doesn’t work then they’ve kind of won." The more he reflected on the riots, the more it brought him back to his work and the impact of the acting choices he has made, and that led him back to Showtrial and what appealed to him about the series. "The stories I am drawn to," he says, "are a complete rejection of thinking that somebody can objectify you to the point where your own humanity becomes invisible to yourself. Acting can be a vehicle for some kind of change, even if it’s not revolutionary change. There’s a gradual soft power to this work – you enter in a space where everybody feels that they’re seen." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Showtrial will return to BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Sunday 6th October. Check out more of our Drama 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.
Rory Kinnear on Tom Bombadil, losing his father, and challenges of the Bond franchise
Kinnear is tackling a new challenge as the much-loved Tom Bombadil in Prime Video series The Rings of Power.
In the course of a career that has spanned film, television and theatre, Rory Kinnear has played Hamlet, Iago, a British prime minister and MI6’s chief of staff. He’s been Lord Lucan, Denis Thatcher and Karl Marx – but it’s safe to say he has never played an ancient and mysterious woodland character with an enormous beard, eclectic wardrobe and a penchant for magical songs. Until now, that is. Kinnear will soon be starring as Tom Bombadil in the second series of The Rings of Power, the Amazon Prime epic set a few thousand years before Tolkien’s original novel, The Lord of the Rings. The role, Kinnear agrees, is something of a departure for him. “I like to do things I haven’t done before,” he tells me over coffee in a Soho hotel. “From doing big action films to studio sitcoms, to television dramas to Shakespeare. But I’ve never done a fantasy thing before. I’ve never really understood it – it’s never been my bag.” Kinnear had met the series’ showrunners and they had explained the character to him. “I told my partner [actor Pandora Colin, with whom he has two children] and she said ‘He’s the best character in the whole book’, so I went away and read the chapters he appears in and thought he seemed really interesting. He has a quite jovial positivity, but there is this notion that he has seen all of life and everything that has gone before – and in that way has a sense of everything that will happen in the future as well.” Apart from the large, bushy beard, there are a few other differences between Bombadil and Kinnear. Bombadil is described by Tolkien as being “older than the old”, while Kinnear is 46; Bombadil lives in Middle-earth while Kinnear lives in London. But what they both do share, according to Kinnear, is that they are both “phlegmatic about the small things in life and not particularly easily stressed or flustered by too much”. This, in Kinnear’s childhood and in more recent years during the Covid pandemic, has clearly proved an invaluable skill. Born in 1978, Kinnear grew up in Twickenham, south-west London, with two older sisters and parents who were both actors. His mother Carmel Cryan was in EastEnders, while his father was the comic actor Roy Kinnear, famous for his appearances in the satirical '60s sketch show That Was the Week That Was and as Veruca Salt’s dad in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). As a boy, Rory would go to see his dad record shows such as Blankety Blank and be introduced to the likes of Les Dawson (“I was a huge fan”), Sooty and Roland Rat. It was a fun childhood – Kinnear recalls he “liked books and sport and mucking about”. However, Roy Kinnear’s final shoot changed everything. In the summer of 1988, when Rory was 10 years old, his father died after falling from a horse in Spain while filming a stunt for The Return of the Musketeers. “It forms how you look at life,” he says now of the impact it had on him. “I remember about a year after he died, watching one of his TV shows and getting that pain and ache of missing someone.” I share that I have friends who also lost a parent at a young age, and they were all in some way damaged by the death. This, it seems, was something that worried Kinnear at the time. “I was desperate for his story to not ruin my life,” he says. “I knew that I had a comfortable enough life. I had so many things in which I had won the lottery. I had all the best groundwork for dealing with it – a loving family, a supportive network of friends and a school that made sure that I was all right.” And so he kept going. Kinnear attended St Paul’s School in west London and then read English at Balliol College, Oxford, before going on to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. “I always really loved acting, because people said I was good at it. I had an instinct for it and I enjoyed the showing-off element of it.” Viewed from the outside, Kinnear’s career trajectory seems to have been effortless – working with such theatrical luminaries as Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Gregory Doran before landing roles in television dramas, such as Russell T Davies’s Years and Years and comedies like Count Arthur Strong. I wonder, did it feel as easy to him at the time? “It definitely doesn’t feel like I’ve dragged myself up,” he concedes. And in an industry where it can be about who you know – and as the son of two established actors – does he think he has benefited from nepotism? “I was aware that if people wanted to interview me [early in my career] it was because of that,” he says. “But I don’t think it was getting me jobs.” If there is one role that did bring Kinnear global recognition, it was that of MI6 chief of staff Bill Tanner in the last four Bond films. Being in a franchise so huge and beloved was, he says, something of a learning curve. “You don’t get a script, so you have no idea what your role is,” he reveals. “I remember the first day that I was filming with Judi Dench and just before going for a take thinking, ‘F**king hell, everyone will watch this…’ and I immediately f**ked up the take. You have to try and park all the outside noise.” He’s now more confident on big sets – and, following his father’s accident, one subject which Kinnear is always happy to speak about is safety in filming. “On set people can feel squeezed by the pressures of time and money to do things which they’re not fully sure have been thought through,” he says. “So that’s something that I like to speak out on. I will always put my hand up and say I don’t feel happy doing something. It’s so that everyone gets the message that the worst can happen – no shot is worth what happened to me.” Kinnear has lived through some of the worst things that can happen, losing his father as a young boy and one of his sisters, Karina, during the pandemic (which inspired him to pen blistering critiques of the Conservative government’s handling of the crisis in The Guardian). But, he tells me, he “remains a very optimistic, positive person”, who still sees his late father in dreams 36 years after his death. “I am able to go into that imagined dream landscape and have a hug from him and talk with him,” he says. “It’s a wonderful thing, what we are able as humans to do with our imaginative life.” It’s a power that Kinnear also credits to the fantasy worlds of writers like JRR Tolkien – even if, as he admits, he’s not a fantasy fan, he now believes he knows why The Lord of the Rings has remained so popular for so long. “I think it’s because Tolkien’s stories offer worlds that are so different from our own, but familiar enough to give a sense of comfort and continuity,” he suggests. “They provide escape and essentially that is art: it can provide escape, or it can provide reflection. And sometimes it provides both.” Read more: Rings of Power bosses tease "most ambitious battle in TV history" in season 2 Rings of Power bosses confirm The Stranger's identity will be revealed in season 2 The Rings of Power season 2 will launch on Prime Video on 29th August – you can sign up now for a free 30-day Prime Video trial. If you’re looking for something else to watch in the meantime, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide, or visit our dedicated Fantasy hub. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Rory Kinnear says that fantasy fiction has never been his bag – so what has reading Tolkien taught him about life?
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in September 2024. Add The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power to your watchlist. In the course of a career that has spanned film, television and theatre, Rory Kinnear has played Hamlet, Iago, a British prime minister and MI6’s chief of staff. He’s been Lord Lucan, Denis Thatcher and Karl Marx – but it’s safe to say he has never played an ancient and mysterious woodland character with an enormous beard, eclectic wardrobe and a penchant for magical songs. Until now, that is. Kinnear will soon be starring as Tom Bombadil in the second series of The Rings of Power, the Amazon Prime epic set a few thousand years before Tolkien’s original novel, The Lord of the Rings. The role, Kinnear agrees, is something of a departure for him. “I like to do things I haven’t done before,” he tells me over coffee in a Soho hotel. “From doing big action films to studio sitcoms, to television dramas to Shakespeare. But I’ve never done a fantasy thing before. I’ve never really understood it – it’s never been my bag.” Kinnear had met the series’ showrunners and they had explained the character to him. “I told my partner (actor Pandora Colin, with whom he has two children) and she said ‘He’s the best character in the whole book’, so I went away and read the chapters he appears in and thought he seemed really interesting. He has a quite jovial positivity, but there is this notion that he has seen all of life and everything that has gone before – and in that way has a sense of everything that will happen in the future as well.” Apart from the large, bushy beard, there are a few other differences between Bombadil and Kinnear. Bombadil is described by Tolkien as being “older than the old”, while Kinnear is 46; Bombadil lives in Middle-earth while Kinnear lives in London. But what they both do share, according to Kinnear, is that they are both “phlegmatic about the small things in life and not particularly easily stressed or flustered by too much”. This, in Kinnear’s childhood and in more recent years during the Covid pandemic, has clearly proved an invaluable skill. Born in 1978, Kinnear grew up in Twickenham, south-west London, with two older sisters and parents who were both actors. His mother Carmel Cryan was in EastEnders, while his father was the comic actor Roy Kinnear, famous for his appearances in the satirical 60s sketch show That Was the Week That Was and as Veruca Salt’s dad in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). As a boy, Rory would go to see his dad record shows such as Blankety Blank and be introduced to the likes of Les Dawson (“I was a huge fan”), Sooty and Roland Rat. It was a fun childhood – Kinnear recalls he “liked books and sport and mucking about”. However, Roy Kinnear’s final shoot changed everything. In the summer of 1988, when Rory was ten years old, his father died after falling from a horse in Spain while filming a stunt for The Return of the Musketeers. “It forms how you look at life,” he says now of the impact it had on him. “I remember about a year after he died, watching one of his TV shows and getting that pain and ache of missing someone.” I share that I have friends who also lost a parent at a young age, and they were all in some way damaged by the death. This, it seems, was something that worried Kinnear at the time. “I was desperate for his story to not ruin my life,” he says. “I knew that I had a comfortable enough life. I had so many things in which I had won the lottery. I had all the best groundwork for dealing with it – a loving family, a supportive network of friends and a school that made sure that I was all right.” And so he kept going. Kinnear attended St Paul’s School in west London and then read English at Balliol College, Oxford, before going on to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. “I always really loved acting, because people said I was good at it. I had an instinct for it and I enjoyed the showing-off element of it.” Viewed from the outside, Kinnear’s career trajectory seems to have been effortless – working with such theatrical luminaries as Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Gregory Doran before landing roles in television dramas, such as Russell T Davies’s Years and Years and comedies like Count Arthur Strong. I wonder, did it feel as easy to him at the time? “It definitely doesn’t feel like I’ve dragged myself up,” he concedes. And in an industry where it can be about who you know – and as the son of two established actors – does he think he has benefited from nepotism? “I was aware that if people wanted to interview me [early in my career] it was because of that,” he says. “But I don’t think it was getting me jobs.” If there is one role that did bring Kinnear global recognition, it was that of MI6 chief of staff Bill Tanner in the last four Bond films. Being in a franchise so huge and beloved was, he says, something of a learning curve. “You don’t get a script, so you have no idea what your role is,” he reveals. “I remember the first day that I was filming with Judi Dench and just before going for a take thinking, ‘F***ing hell, everyone will watch this…’ and I immediately f***ed up the take. You have to try and park all the outside noise.” He’s now more confident on big sets – and, following his father’s accident, one subject which Kinnear is always happy to speak about is safety in filming. “On set people can feel squeezed by the pressures of time and money to do things which they’re not fully sure have been thought through,” he says. “So that’s something that I like to speak out on. I will always put my hand up and say I don’t feel happy doing something. It’s so that everyone gets the message that the worst can happen – no shot is worth what happened to me.” Kinnear has lived through some of the worst things that can happen, losing his father as a young boy and one of his sisters, Karina, during the pandemic (which inspired him to pen blistering critiques of the Conservative government’s handling of the crisis in The Guardian). But, he tells me, he “remains a very optimistic, positive person”, who still sees his late father in dreams 36 years after his death. “I am able to go into that imagined dream landscape and have a hug from him and talk with him,” he says. “It’s a wonderful thing, what we are able as humans to do with our imaginative life.” It’s a power that Kinnear also credits to the fantasy worlds of writers like JRR Tolkien – even if, as he admits, he’s not a fantasy fan, he now believes he knows why The Lord of the Rings has remained so popular for so long. “I think it’s because Tolkien’s stories offer worlds that are so different from our own, but familiar enough to give a sense of comfort and continuity,” he suggests. “They provide escape and essentially that is art: it can provide escape, or it can provide reflection. And sometimes it provides both.”
The role model for oldies is cashing in on Cameo and always has an onion in her handbag
Add Miriam Margolyes: a New Australian Adventure to your watchlist As an actor, 83-year-old Miriam Margolyes is probably best known for her roles as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, Mother Mildred in Call the Midwife and her Bafta-winning role in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. But her talents don’t stop there — she’s also the author of three books, with her memoir This Much Is True selling more than three million copies. In recent years she’s become renowned for her outrageous tell-all appearances on chat shows, as well as her work presenting documentaries. Her latest is a three-part BBC travel series Miriam Margolyes: a New Australian Adventure. So, Miriam, what inspired you to make this new series about Australia? I’ve been going to Australia since 1980 and it has changed a lot. I wanted to make a series about belonging, to find out what tribes people feel they belong to – I hope viewers find it to be truthful, revealing and entertaining. Over three episodes you meet a lot of ordinary Aussies — do you find talking to strangers easy? I love to meet people. I love to ask questions. If I see a park bench that’s empty, I go to the other one where there’s somebody sitting. My gift is that when people meet me they are unafraid, and that is a very big part of why I can get people to talk to me. In the series you’re filmed travelling around on a mobility scooter — how do you feel about being a role model for older people? When I started kind of failing physically, I remember saying to directors and producers, please don’t show me clambering out of a car or climbing upstairs on my hands and knees. I didn’t want people to see that because I was embarrassed to see myself looking so pathetic. But, subsequently, I’ve met loads of people who have said I gave them the courage to do things that they never thought they could. So I’m very pleased about that. You’ve had a long career in acting but in recent times have become as well-known for chat show appearances, writing books and making documentaries. Why do you think you’re having such an extraordinary second act? I find it puzzling and very gratifying. I can’t totally explain it, but I do credit Graham Norton with a great deal of my success. I was always told that I would come into my own when I was older – I just didn’t know I would have to be this old for it to happen. You have a lucrative side business filming video messages for fans on the website Cameo, and you recently revealed you had earned £365,000 from that since Covid. What’s the most common thing you’re asked to say? It’s usually to celebrate someone’s birthday, wedding anniversary or marriage. I’ve got 30 of them to do today… You often talk about how much making money matters — you said you did this new series for the money and were paid £250,000 for your recent memoir. Have you got a gigantic gambling addiction we don’t know about? No, I don’t gamble at all! I’m worried that I won’t have enough money for carers when I finally get paralysed or whatever it is that’s going to happen to me. I’m saving up cash so that I can pay people to look after me and my partner. We don’t have children, so I need to make sure I’m going to be looked after in the way that I’ve become accustomed. You had a recent heart procedure — how did that influence how you felt about death and mortality? I’m always quoting William Saroyan, who says: “I know that everyone has to die, but I thought an exception might be made in my case.” I know now that is definitely not true. What do I think happens after death? My therapist used to say there may be a party. I honestly don’t think there’s anything, I think you just stop, but it would be nice if there’s a party. You seem utterly fearless about talking about sex, religion, death and politics. Are you an open book — or is there some stuff that you hold back? I’m a completely open book, which is a bit sad. It would be good to say I think there’s something that’s being held back, but I don’t think there is. Really, what you see is what you get. I’m just Miriam Margolyes doing my best. Can you tell me something about you that might surprise people who think they know you? I suppose it would be that I want to be taken seriously. That is something that people might not expect of me. They might think I like rolling around, making people laugh and I do – genuinely I do love that – but I do also want to be taken seriously. And finally… is it really true that you always keep a raw onion in your bag at all times? Yes! I like the taste of onion and nearly everything is a bit peely-wally these days. There isn’t a lot of sharpness about flavour and I like to have a strong flavour. So I really love onion. But I think I may shift to garlic because it’s easier to carry.
Miriam Margolyes talks BBC Two travel series, A New Australian Adventure
The actress sits down with Radio Times as she discusses her new series.
As an actor, 83-year-old Miriam Margolyes is probably best known for her roles as Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, Mother Mildred in Call the Midwife and her BAFTA-winning role in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. But her talents don't stop there — she's also the author of three books, with her memoir This Much Is True selling more than three million copies. In recent years she's become renowned for her outrageous tell-all appearances on chat shows, as well as her work presenting documentaries. Her latest is a three-part BBC travel series Miriam Margolyes: A New Australian Adventure. So, Miriam, what inspired you to make this new series about Australia? I’ve been going to Australia since 1980 and it has changed a lot. I wanted to make a series about belonging, to find out what tribes people feel they belong to – I hope viewers find it to be truthful, revealing and entertaining. Over three episodes you meet a lot of ordinary Aussies — do you find talking to strangers easy? I love to meet people. I love to ask questions. If I see a park bench that’s empty, I go to the other one where there’s somebody sitting. My gift is that when people meet me they are unafraid, and that is a very big part of why I can get people to talk to me. In the series you’re filmed travelling around on a mobility scooter — how do you feel about being a role model for older people? When I started kind of failing physically, I remember saying to directors and producers, please don’t show me clambering out of a car or climbing upstairs on my hands and knees. I didn’t want people to see that because I was embarrassed to see myself looking so pathetic. But, subsequently, I’ve met loads of people who have said I gave them the courage to do things that they never thought they could. So I’m very pleased about that. You’ve had a long career in acting but in recent times have become as well-known for chat show appearances, writing books and making documentaries. Why do you think you’re having such an extraordinary second act? I find it puzzling and very gratifying. I can’t totally explain it, but I do credit Graham Norton with a great deal of my success. I was always told that I would come into my own when I was older – I just didn’t know I would have to be this old for it to happen. You have a lucrative side business filming video messages for fans on the website Cameo, and you recently revealed you had earned £365,000 from that since Covid. What’s the most common thing you’re asked to say? It’s usually to celebrate someone’s birthday, wedding anniversary or marriage. I’ve got 30 of them to do today… You often talk about how much making money matters — you said you did this new series for the money and were paid £250,000 for your recent memoir. Have you got a gigantic gambling addiction we don’t know about? No, I don’t gamble at all! I’m worried that I won’t have enough money for carers when I finally get paralysed or whatever it is that’s going to happen to me. I’m saving up cash so that I can pay people to look after me and my partner. We don’t have children, so I need to make sure I’m going to be looked after in the way that I’ve become accustomed. You had a recent heart procedure — how did that influence how you felt about death and mortality? I’m always quoting William Saroyan, who says: “I know that everyone has to die, but I thought an exception might be made in my case.” I know now that is definitely not true. What do I think happens after death? My therapist used to say there may be a party. I honestly don’t think there’s anything, I think you just stop, but it would be nice if there’s a party. You seem utterly fearless about talking about sex, religion, death and politics. Are you an open book — or is there some stuff that you hold back? I’m a completely open book, which is a bit sad. It would be good to say I think there’s something that’s being held back, but I don’t think there is. Really, what you see is what you get. I’m just Miriam Margolyes doing my best. Can you tell me something about you that might surprise people who think they know you? I suppose it would be that I want to be taken seriously. That is something that people might not expect of me. They might think I like rolling around, making people laugh and I do – genuinely I do love that – but I do also want to be taken seriously. And finally… is it really true that you always keep a raw onion in your bag at all times? Yes! I like the taste of onion and nearly everything is a bit peely-wally these days. There isn’t a lot of sharpness about flavour and I like to have a strong flavour. So I really love onion. But I think I may shift to garlic because it’s easier to carry. Miriam Margolyes: A New Australian Adventure airs on Friday 2nd August on BBC Two at 9pm. Check out more of our Documentaries 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.
Wonka's Paul King on the character's origins: "He had a life beyond Charlie"
The acclaimed film starring Timothée Chalamet is nominated for Outstanding British Film at this year's BAFTA Film Awards.
Wonka writer and director, Paul King, is reflecting on the film’s success following its nomination for Outstanding British Film at the BAFTAs later this month. So, how does it feel to have made a film that has earned more than half a billion dollars at the box office? "Well, it's certainly an eye watering sum of money," he says, adding - "it's a lot more than the Paddington films [which he also wrote and directed] combined, so it's definitely new territory for me and very exciting." When King was first offered Wonka he was apprehensive but changed his mind after returning to the original books. When he started - with his writing partner Simon Farnaby - to imagine an origin story for Willy Wonka they were helped by having access to the Roald Dahl archive. "There’s pages and pages of him trying different paragraphs and rewriting each time in longhand and Willy Wonka was a character he came back to time and again," King reveals. "He was obviously aware that he had a life beyond Charlie." Revisiting the books also shed new light for King on the Oompa Loompas which led to the genius casting of Hugh Grant as Lofty. "I think he’s one of the funniest people on the planet," King says of Grant. "As I started reading the Oompa Loompa’s songs which are very sardonic and cutting and judgmental, I began to hear Hugh's voice and then it wasn't a huge leap from there, to imagine him looking like an Oompa Loompa." Grant of course, also starred in King’s Paddington as a master villain so duly agreed to bring King’s vision to life. Both films share are, in the best sense, family films. "We try to craft something that everyone can enjoy equally and in the same way," explains King. "I always think about Charlie Chaplin as a real touchstone because I found those films really funny when I saw them as a kid, and I still find them equally funny now. That’s what the great family films do, it is what we aspire to." The box office success suggests it is an aspiration he has fulfilled but having made such a colossal amount of money surely, I suggest, he can’t also want to win a BAFTA, that’s just greedy. "I'm probably a deeply greedy person - I want everyone in the world to love the movie and take it to their hearts." View Green Video on the source website Read more: Wonka stars Olivia Colman and Tom Davis pitch spin-off for characters Wonka's Paterson Joseph: "Timothée Chalamet worthy of Gene Wilder role" Wonka is available on Digital Download now and 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD from 4th March. 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.
Tommy Jessop on his Line of Duty breakthrough and why he went to Hollywood
Tommy and Will Jessop spoke with Radio Times magazine about their new BBC One special Tommy Jessop Goes to Hollywood.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Tommy Jessop has spent his life surprising people. He surprised his mother when he was born one month early. He surprised the doctor who warned his parents that, because Tommy was born with Down’s syndrome, he might never learn to read (in fact, Tommy went on to not only read but to write his own memoir). And he surprised his family when he told them that he wanted to be an actor. Tommy, 38, made his TV debut in 2004 sibling drama Coming Down the Mountain, while his performance as Terry Boyle in the fifth and sixth seasons of Line of Duty catapulted him to a new level of success and celebrity. "When Tommy was in Line of Duty it felt as if that was an incredible breakthrough," says his older brother Will, 40, a documentary director. "Fifteen million people watched it, and Tommy was at the centre of all the attention." Unsurprisingly, Tommy thought the phone would be ringing constantly with the offer of more acting work. "I kind of expected to get more TV and film roles," he tells me. But the calls never came. "I went to my agent to see what the problem was," he recalls. The problem was more of a question: was there a lack of offers because Tommy was an actor, or because he was an actor with Down’s syndrome? Tommy and Will decided that, instead of getting frustrated, they would get busy. Which is why we’re sitting in a light-filled house just outside Winchester, where Tommy lives and where the siblings are preparing for RT’s photoshoot, to discuss their new BBC1 documentary Tommy Jessop Goes to Hollywood. The programme follows Tommy as he tries to pitch his own movie, featuring a superhero called Roger (named after his teddy bear), in Hollywood. Why a superhero? "I want to play a character who makes his presence felt and saves the day," says Tommy. "It’s about being someone with agency in control of his own story." Will adds, "The thing about being a superhero is that it’s about acceptance and representation and giving people a version of themselves on screen." This exchange is typical of our conversation: Tommy responds first with a fairly brief answer, then Will offers a helpful supplementary. The love and tenderness between the siblings is palpable. When I ask Tommy to name his real-life superhero, he points to his brother. "He is," he says, "because his past work in the film and TV industry has really inspired me." One of the most powerful scenes in the documentary is when their mother, Jane, recalls Tommy’s birth. The hospital staff couldn’t bear to tell her that her son had Down’s, but she remembers seeing a young midwife walk past crying. Tommy’s parents didn’t know whether their son would live or die. "Mum and Dad would cry at night," Jane tells Tommy in the documentary. "We didn’t know how to make you better." But Tommy did get better, and went on to attend a mix of mainstream schools and schools for those with special educational needs. When he was 18, his mother assembled a group of friends to eat pizza and ask Tommy what he wanted to do with his life. The assumption was that he would want a job in his local library, but instead Tommy said he wanted to be an actor. "I love being the centre of attention," he says, "and making the viewers laugh and cry." Will recalls that "there weren’t any opportunities for people with Down’s Syndrome, so my mum, being the wonderful woman that she is, said, 'OK, we’ll start our own theatre company.'" In 2005, Jane started the Winchester-based Blue Apple Theatre to give people with learning disabilities opportunities to perform in dance and drama. "That’s how Tommy and his friends were exposed to acting," says Will. "I helped out as a writer and started making films with them at the same time." His credits have since included Investigating Diana: Death in Paris, 25 Siblings and Me, and Growing Up Downs. Watching Tommy Jessop Goes to Hollywood and seeing the role Jane and Will had in supporting him, it’s clear how much Tommy’s success is a family affair. "It’s definitely true that most people with Down’s who are doing really well have a very strong relative who is helping them to do well," says Will. Tommy enjoyed the fame that came with Line of Duty – being photographed, attending awards ceremonies, meeting famous people. When Line of Duty won best drama at the 2021 National Television Awards, he stole the show by breaking out into a dance while accepting the award. "Being the centre of attention and having people applaud is about acceptance," says Will, "and that’s something that Tommy and people like him don’t necessarily find in other people." That brings us back to their new documentary. In his career, Tommy has often broken new ground – the first actor with Down’s to play Hamlet professionally, the first actor with Down’s to star in a major TV drama (Coming Down the Mountain). "Being the first to do things is exciting and it carries its own responsibility," adds Will, "but, really, we’re desperate to live in a world where he no longer has to be the first, where it becomes routine that other people [with Down’s] have the opportunities. The roles that come through [can feel] typecast; victims, people in hospital beds, people who need support." Alongside his acting, Tommy has become an activist and spokesperson. "I want to be a voice for people with Down’s," he says. He spoke in support of the Down Syndrome Act, which became law last year and requires the government to publish guidance on the specific needs of people with Down’s syndrome. This comes as optional prenatal testing means that expectant parents can now detect Down’s earlier in their pregnancy, with about 90 per cent of women choosing to terminate a pregnancy after a diagnostic test confirms that the baby has Down’s. Tommy might be part of the last generation with Down’s; it is perhaps not accidental that the villain in his superhero story is a scientist trying to eradicate anyone with the anomaly. There are some 40,000 people with the syndrome in the UK. I ask Tommy what he thinks of a future world without Down’s. "A mixture of anger and sadness," he replies. If he knew a mother who was pregnant and she was going to have a baby with Down’s, what would he tell her? "Go for it," he says, "because it really is a life worth living." Tommy Jessop’s life and career is a testament to the rewards that come from going for it. He and Will are currently working on a script for their superhero movie that they hope will eventually be funded and produced. A Hollywood superhero movie starring an actor with Down’s might sound far-fetched, but I suspect Tommy Jessop might just surprise us all again. View Green Video on the source website Tommy Jessop Goes to Hollywood will air on BBC One on Monday 21st August 2023. Check out more of our Documentaries 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, PLUS a £10 John Lewis and Partners voucher delivered to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Cillian Murphy on Oppenheimer, the Peaky Blinders movie and struggling with fame
The star talks his collaborations with Christopher Nolan and the similarities between J Robert Oppenheimer and Tommy Shelby.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Tommy Shelby and Robert Oppenheimer are, at first sight, men with starkly different biographies. Shelby was a gang leader in 1920s Birmingham who wore a razor-trimmed cap, ran gambling rackets, smuggled drugs and killed in cold blood. He’s also a fictional character. Oppenheimer wore a fedora and was the real-life American scientist dubbed "the father of the atomic bomb". But Cillian Murphy thinks they have more in common than you might expect. He played Shelby in the popular, influential Peaky Blinders for six series and returns to 20th-century period drama to take on the title role of Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s latest film. What the men have in common, Murphy tells me, is that they’re unusually contradictory. "I love the naughty, strange, weird, unpredictable areas of psychology that you get into where it doesn’t seem straightforward. They’re the best characters." Alongside his cruelty, Shelby defends the oppressed and is traumatised from fighting in the First World War; Oppenheimer, having helped create the atom bomb, becomes deeply ambivalent about his role in history. "Chris [Nolan] used the expression that, in terms of his morality, Oppenheimer was always dancing between the raindrops," says Murphy. "That’s the stuff that I’m interested in – human behaviour and what pressure does to the human psyche." It’s 21 years since Murphy’s major film debut in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and, in his relationship with burgeoning fame, he has effected a similar dance. He’s been the star of huge international hits but chooses to live in Ireland rather than London or LA. His face – with distinctive pale blue eyes – is instantly recognisable around the world, but he hates being photographed by fans in public. "When I’m not working, I disconnect completely from the business. I need that. That’s the way I’ve always worked." He prefers, he says, to let the work speak for itself. His roles have ranged from a transgender foundling in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto and an Irish republican soldier in Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley, to the supervillain Scarecrow in three Nolan-directed Batman movies. Oppenheimer is Murphy’s sixth film with the director, but until now he was only cast in supporting roles. Does it feel that, after 18 years, Nolan has finally given him a job promotion? Murphy laughs. "I’ve done my apprenticeship. I feel incredibly privileged to have worked with him all these years and it’s changed my life creatively and professionally, but I think he knew that I would love to play a lead for him. It just happened that this project came along and he felt I was right for it." In fact, Nolan wrote the script for Oppenheimer with Murphy in mind, calling him "one of the great actors of his generation" – and the admiration is mutual. When Murphy got the screenplay, he considered it the best he’d ever read. "It was the ambition, scale, intelligence and profundity of it. "Oppenheimer is one of the most notable figures of the 20th century, and Chris managed to distil the book [the film is based on American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin] into a screenplay that has elements of thriller and horror. It’s definitely not your run-of-the-mill biopic." Taking on such a big role could have been daunting – but after working with Nolan for two decades, Murphy says they’ve developed a shorthand. "You get to a level where you really understand each other and there’s a trust. I used to play a lot of music and what I loved about music was the non-verbal communication you get when you’re playing with someone." Indeed, before he aspired to acting, Murphy wanted to be a rock star. Born in 1976, the eldest of four children (with both parents working in education), he grew up in Ballintemple, Cork, as a music-obsessed teenager. It wasn’t long before he started making his own songs, playing guitar and singing in a band called Sons of Mr Green Genes (named after a Frank Zappa song). "It was kind of jazz and early Pink Floyd," is how he describes their sound. "It was long, long songs with guitar solos." And they were good – in fact, the band were offered a multi-album deal by Acid Jazz records in the summer of 1996. The only reason we have "Cillian Murphy: actor" instead of "Cillian Murphy: Glastonbury headliner" is down to his parents, who vetoed the deal because they thought his brother, who was also in the band, was too young. "It was pretty devastating, but music is a young man’s game," he says. "The world isn’t lacking our music, so I feel like perhaps we did swerve something." It’s a remarkably magnanimous outlook on what must have been a crushing disappointment – though, admittedly, Murphy’s quick swerve into an even more successful creative path probably helped soothe the pain. The year before his music ambitions stalled, he had seen Cork theatre company Corcadorca’s production of A Clockwork Orange staged in a nightclub. "It was life-changing. It blew my mind and sowed a seed in my head about this other world of performance." In 1996 – the same year he met Yvonne McGuinness, whom he’d later marry and have two children with – Murphy was cast in Disco Pigs, a two-hander play written by a then-unknown Enda Walsh. "Looking back," says Murphy, "that was a massive crossroads in my life." Disco Pigs was booked to run for a few weeks at an arts theatre in Cork, but was so successful it eventually transferred to Dublin, then to Edinburgh, London, Europe, Australia and North America. When Danny Boyle saw it and cast him in the film 28 Days Later, Murphy was on his way. And among those who noticed him in Boyle’s film was Nolan, who asked him to audition for the title role in Batman Begins. He didn’t get to play the Caped Crusader (the role went to Christian Bale) but was cast to play Scarecrow in all three Batman films, and took supporting roles in Nolan’s Inception and Dunkirk. On the small screen, Murphy was catapulted to a new level of fame in the BBC’s Peaky Blinders, the stylishly violent historical drama about a criminal gang in Birmingham, first broadcast in 2013. "It started off as a tiny show on a Sunday evening and it grew very slowly and without any hype, without any billboards, without any advertising campaign," he says. "It just grew because people told other people to watch it. I’m really proud that it has never plateaued and each series has become richer and stronger than the last. That’s a tribute to [writer and creator] Steven Knight." Intriguingly, Knight was recently quoted in the press saying he had completed a script for a feature film version of Peaky Blinders – has he been in touch with Murphy? "That’s probably the worst thing about Peaky Blinders – getting asked about the movie all the time!" he laughs. "I would love to do a movie if there’s more story to tell. I’ll wait and see but I have no update for you on that." It’s no surprise that Murphy gets frustrated with these sort of questions – after all, he’s famously wary of the press, which can make going into an interview with him daunting. But in conversation, he’s open, relaxed and funny, albeit frustrated by the superficiality and artificiality of most media encounters. "I still struggle with the ancillary aspects of the entertainment business," he says. "There’s an assumption that you have to be a personality. I think that’s not fair, really. If your job is to disappear into character and portray a person, surely the sensible approach is to not to reveal too much of your own self. "I’m loath to be one of those whingeing f***ing actors going, ‘Woe is me,’" he adds. I’m really lucky, happy with my life and, you know, that is part of the bargain. You do sell anonymity and you sell some level of privacy. And that’s what you have to live with. I’d love to just do the work and go home." At least for today, he can. With our time over, Murphy can get back to real life – and keep dancing between the raindrops of superstardom. View Green Video on the source website Oppenheimer opens in UK cinemas on Friday 21st July. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight. Try Radio Times magazine today and get 12 issues for only £1 with delivery to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Richard E Grant on hosting the BAFTAs: "It’s like a dream come true"
Speaking to Sarfraz Manzoor in Radio Times magazine, Richard E Grant discusses his life, his career and his "dream come true" of hosting the BAFTA Film Awards.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Richard E Grant is hugely excited. And this is not hugely surprising – because frankly, being hugely excited is very much Grant’s brand these days. It started when he posted a video of himself in 2019 standing outside his flat in London, reacting to the news that he had been nominated for an Oscar for his role in the film Can You Ever Forgive Me? He was, suffice to say, hugely excited. In the same year he was hugely excited when he stood outside the home of his childhood hero Barbra Streisand, with a letter he’d sent to her when he was 14 years old – and even more excited when Streisand replied to his Tweet about it. And he is – you guessed it – hugely excited about his new role hosting this year’s BAFTA Film Awards. "It’s like a dream come true," he tells me when we meet at BAFTA’s offices in central London. "I was astonished to be asked because I always thought that the people who host awards are comedians. I was surprised that they chose an actor… who’s not Ricky Gervais." Usually, when a comedian like Gervais or Chris Rock is given an awards hosting job, their role is to mock and tease the nominees – but Grant sees things differently. "I’ve always been a fanboy," he says, "so having the opportunity to host means [being able to] share my unabashed fandom and celebration of the movies." View oEmbed on the source website I ask what he’s enjoyed the most among this year’s crop of film nominations. "Cate Blanchett in Tár," he says. "It’s the kind of movie that Meryl Streep would have been in in the '80s or '90s. With the vogue for Marvel and superhero stuff, to see a movie that is a real character study is something that I hadn’t expected would come around again so soon." He also loved The Banshees of Inisherin. "I was astonished it had such awards traction," he says. "It is so local and specific to Ireland, and a chamber piece where not really a lot happens – but everything happens. I am so relieved that these movies are being made and celebrated and recognised." Since his breakout role in Withnail & I in 1986, Grant has become one of the most established actors in Britain, appearing in such films and TV shows as LA Story, The Player, Gosford Park, Downton Abbey and the aforementioned Can You Ever Forgive Me?, for which he received his first Oscar and BAFTA nominations. His love affair with film started young. Born in Swaziland, he came to Britain every three years with his parents, and it was on one such visit to London when he was 12 years old that he saw Oliver! at a cinema in Leicester Square. It was 1969. "It made an extraordinary impression on me, because it had child actors in it," he recalls. "As somebody who wanted to be an actor secretly, seeing Mark Lester and Jack Wild was a very concentrated moment of understanding that you could become an actor, and still be young." Living in Swaziland – the smallest country in the southern hemisphere – the idea of pursuing acting as a career was "completely fantastical and ludicrous", and not exactly welcomed by his father, a heavy drinking government administrator. When Grant was 15, he managed to see A Clockwork Orange. "It had a triple-X rating, and you couldn’t see it until you were 18 years old," he says, "so I snuck in by telling the woman who was at the box office that she looked just like Elizabeth Taylor." Grant saw the film – but when he returned home his drunken father was so angry at him, he put a gun to his son’s temple and took a shot. Fortunately, he missed. Still, Grant’s enthusiasm for acting remained undimmed and he enrolled at drama school. At the end of the course, his professor told him he didn’t think Grant was likely to succeed as an actor "because I was very odd-looking, with a very odd face". Undeterred, Grant left Swaziland and arrived in Britain in the spring of 1982, working in a brasserie in London’s Covent Garden while trying to secure acting work. He recently met Paul Mescal – who is nominated for a BAFTA and an Oscar for the independent film Aftersun and is currently appearing on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire. "It’s an incredible thing for a young actor like that," he says. "He’s got his whole career ahead of him." I wonder if Mescal’s current moment in the sun (he already has a TV BAFTA for Normal People) reminded Grant of the initial excitement around his own debut in the generation-defining Withnail & I. "No, because Withnail was seen – and is still only seen – by such a tiny percentage of people," he says. "But it got a long life as a result of video and DVD and a sort of student cult following. And it remains as such." Withnail led to offers to work in the US with the likes of Steve Martin in LA Story – "I’ve been friends with Steve now for 33 years" – and some of Hollywood’s finest directors: Robert Altman in Gosford Park, Martin Scorsese in The Age of Innocence and Francis Ford Coppola in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As someone who, in his own words, has been a movie buff his whole life, how did it feel to work with the men behind some of the greatest films ever made? "Genuine gratitude coupled with real disbelief," he says. "We rehearsed [Dracula] in a big warehouse at Francis’s Napa Valley estate where there was the boat from Apocalypse Now and the desk from The Godfather. You could actually go and sit at the desk, and sit in the boat. I defy anybody not to be thrilled and overwhelmed by that. That’s why I’ve kept a diary all my life – because it’s the one way of making what seems unreal and unbelievable somehow concrete, because once you’ve done it, you can say, 'This actually happened.'" In fact, Grant started his diary at the age of 11 after waking up in the back seat of a car and seeing his mother having sex with his father’s best friend. The young Richard couldn’t tell anyone, so confided in his diary. That childhood trauma and his parents’ troubled marriage taught Grant lessons about love and secrets. "I saw the cost of divorce, because my father suffered unrequited love for my mother and essentially drank himself to death," he says. "So I thought the best way to protect myself was to never get married, and to never fall in love. But of course, as you know, real life happens in between your plans." In real life, Grant fell in love with and married dialect coach Joan Washington in the 1980s, and they were married for 35 years before her death in September 2021. Grant later wrote about his marriage and Washington’s life and death in a book based on his diaries called A Pocketful of Happiness. Speaking to Radio Times magazine last December, Grant said that writing the book helped him "navigate the abyss of grief" he found himself in. Much of his life is an open book: his early years were also mined for his 2005 film Wah-Wah. "Having to keep a lid on my parents’ divorce and adultery and alcoholism was so toxic," he reveals. "I find that being open about everything seems the best form of protection." Though being that open does make Grant something of a pathological over-sharer, particularly on social media. "That’s an English thing," he insists. "In America, Australia, Scotland and Ireland, over-sharing is not something that I’ve ever heard mentioned. But in England it is. There’s obviously something [I’m doing that runs] against the English sensibility to 'rein it in'. But you are who you are. I don’t have that amount of self-control where I can think, 'I’m going to rein this in.'" His dislike of the English stiff upper lip reminds Grant that, while he may have made a career playing quintessentially British roles, that is not how he sees himself. "No matter how long you’ve been in a place," he says, "and I’ve been in England for 41 years – you’re still an outsider, looking in." So do you feel like an immigrant, I ask. He pauses. "I do," he says. "People remind you that you’re not from here. Somebody will always say, 'Oh, you’re from there, aren’t you?' And every now and again, somebody will say, 'Oh, gosh, you’re not from here.' All the people that I grew up with have been in contact with me, and said, 'God, you’re hosting the BAFTAs?' Their disbelief exactly matches what I feel. That hasn’t changed even though I’ve been doing this for so long." View Green Video on the source website Following the BAFTA presenting gig, Grant will return to the day job – upcoming projects include a role in the new film from Emerald Fennell and a three-hander with Julie Delpy and Daryl McCormack (BAFTA-nominated twice for best actor and rising star this year for his role in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande with Emma Thompson). I ask who else he would like to work with. "Do you know Quentin Tarantino?" he asks. "Can you please tell him that I want to play a washed-up, sleazy Las Vegas crooner. That’s what I want to do. There are so many directors I want to work with. And when I saw Paul Mescal the other day, I said, 'I hope that within my lifetime, I get to work with you.' There’s extraordinary talent emerging all the time." The publicist indicates it’s time to wrap up, so I return to Grant’s trickiest role to date – BAFTA frontman. Is he at all intimidated about standing in front of his acting peers as their work is judged? "I’m just nervous about BAFTA putting a clause in my contract that I can’t walk around the Royal Festival Hall with my camera, taking selfies with people who I’ve long admired," he says. It’s an answer that in its combination of starriness and humility feels quintessentially Richard E Grant – simultaneously playing the insider and outsider, the film star and the fan. The EE BAFTA Film Awards 2023 will air on BBC One from 7pm on Sunday 19th February 2023. 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 12 issues for only £1 with delivery to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times View From My Sofa podcast.
Ben Elton: 'My stuff was so unfashionable as to be morally wrong'
I’m on my way to interview Ben Elton and trying to come up with questions, but my brain is too distracted by memories: of how my teenage years were so enlivened by The Young Ones; of how I watched Blackadder so often that I knew the scripts off by heart; and of how much I used to look forward to seeing his stand-up routines on Saturday Live. The interview is taking place in a studio in west London and the reason we are meeting is that Saturday Live, the groundbreaking comedy variety show that launched Elton’s television stand-up career and also introduced the likes of Fry and Laurie, French and Saunders, Paul Merton, Jo Brand and Julian Clary to television audiences (see page 19), is returning for a one-off special as part of Channel 4’s 40th birthday celebrations. The timing of its return feels freakishly perfect. “The last time we did it a right-wing Tory lady was Prime Minister, we had City bankers coining it, and Cliff Richard was releasing a Christmas record,” Elton says. “Literally nothing has changed in 34 years.” The return of Saturday Live (or rather, strictly speaking, its successor, Friday Night Live) is a chance, he feels, to settle some unfinished business. “Channel 4 has never really celebrated a show that changed British entertainment,” he tells me. “It was the most influential variety show since Sunday Night at the London Palladium. The world of modern stand-up started with Saturday Live.” The original Saturday Live aired from 1985 to 1987, followed by Friday Night Live in 1988, and left an awesome legacy. Some of those who made their earliest appearances on the show might have started as part of the vanguard of alternative comedy, but they are now household names. “I have a set of friends who all became very famous, but none were famous when we became friends,” Elton says. “I met Stephen [Fry], Hugh [Laurie] and Emma [Thompson] on the same day in December 1981 when Granada was assembling a group of unknown talents to do a show. The show failed, but the friendships have lasted ever since. I’m having lunch with Hugh and Emma next weekend and I’m seeing Ade [Adrian Edmondson] tomorrow night.” It isn’t just the acts who appeared on Saturday Live who became mainstream. Back in the 1980s Elton and his cohort were dismissed as being excessively “right on” and alternative comedy would be mocked as an alternative to comedy. “Nobody ever really knew what that phrase meant,” recalls Elton “but it did have a meaning. The one thing that was a feature of most new acts coming through in the '80s was an active movement against racist and sexist comedy. We had a new mindset and wanted to find new ways to be funny.” That was ridiculed then, but time has vindicated them. Saturday Live helped Ben Elton make his name, but the fame came with a price. Too many people saw a sparkle-suited shouty young man banging on about politics, a revolutionary when all he ever wanted to be was an entertainer. They thought he was obsessed with Margaret Thatcher when he was actually obsessed with Morecambe and Wise; they imagined he wanted to topple the comedy old guard when in fact he had written jokes for the Two Ronnies. It probably didn’t help that Elton, whose mother was an English teacher and father a professor of physics, adopted an exaggerated mockney accent on stage, which led some to accuse him of inauthenticity. When he later collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer and Conservative Party supporter, on the stage musicals The Beautiful Game and Love Never Dies, the accusation of inauthenticity was joined by allegations that the Labour-supporting Elton was a hypocrite. All of which helps explain why, while Fry and Laurie, French and Saunders and the rest are universally admired, Ben Elton’s public reputation is more contested. It might have all been so different had he never appeared on Saturday Live. “If I had not been given that gig, my whole life would have been completely different,” he says. “I only ever became a comedian to get my writing around and I always thought that the minute I become a successful playwright I would stop this [stand-up], because it’s horrible. So I would have done it less and less. I was already a very successful television writer before Saturday – The Young Ones and Blackadder II had been hits.” It’s astonishing to remember that Elton was only 23 when he co-wrote the game-changing The Young Ones and that he had already co-written Blackadder II with Richard Curtis before he appeared on Saturday Live. After Blackadder, Richard Curtis went on to write Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and a string of other films, and I had always presumed that Elton and Curtis were both now far too rich, successful and busy to imagine ever working together again. “We were a great team and I’ve talked so many times about doing something else,” reveals Elton. “Not Blackadder again. I don’t think either of us feel any appetite to do that.” So what’s stopping them from working together again? “It’s Richard,” says Elton “I think I’ve been more needy about it. I’m always the one saying we should try. And he sort of says yes, but then doesn’t because Richard spends half of his entire life working solely for charity, so he has to focus on his movies, and I guess he doesn’t need me helping him with them, considering the success he’s had.” Elton’s post-Saturday Live career hasn’t exactly been short of success: 16 novels, five West End plays, four stage musicals including the Queen musical We Will Rock You and the Rod Stewart musical Tonight’s the Night, three film screenplays as well as the sitcoms The Thin Blue Line and, more recently, Upstart Crow, which he has also adapted into a play currently showing in the West End. In 2019, he returned to touring with his first stand-up show since 2005, in which he reflected on how much has changed in culture and comedy. “I think it’s a shame that there are no rules,” he says when I ask him what he thinks of modern sitcoms. “We were so lucky because we had all these very difficult strict rules – ‘you can’t swear, you can’t talk about sex’ – and that meant we had to be very creative to find ways to do just that. But if you’re basically able to say anything, then nobody’s going to bother thinking of any more interesting way of saying it.” The irony is that, even though there is this freedom to say everything, that freedom is arguably more curtailed than it was in the 1980s. I ask him if he agrees that these days the left are more censorious than the right. “My wife [he is married to the Australian musician Sophie Gare, with whom he has three grown-up children] came up with a good observation the other day,” he says. “She said our generation was all about breaking rules and it seems like the younger generation is all about making rules: these are things you can no longer say, these are things you should now be saying. There is a whiff of Maoism in the air, the whiff of cultural revolution. There is now a new way of thinking, and you will be required to think it. Much of these new ideas I like, but I’m slightly worried about being told I have to.” He then adds that I shouldn’t assume any of this means he is anti-woke. Nor should I assume that he is a curmudgeon who believes everything new is rubbish. He loved The Office, but is less enamoured of what followed in its wake. “The idea that the only legitimate way to be amusing is to be underplayed and wry and basically do a sub-Gervais is a very corrosive attitude,” he says. “Comedy that admits that its purpose is to make you laugh went badly out of fashion, and I suffered terribly for that. Some of my stuff maybe wasn’t that good, but it was castigated because it was so unfashionable as to be deeply, morally wrong.” In other interviews that I have read, Elton is often described as being brittle and defensive, and there are flashes of that today – defending criticisms I have not made and answering questions I have not asked, for instance. “I just got a lot of s**t,” he says. “I could never do an interview without being asked, ‘So are you a sellout?’ ” I haven’t used that word in this whole conversation, I tell him. “No, but I’m talking about what happened in the old days,” he says. “It’s only relatively recently that I have not been answering for some supposed crime which I know I didn’t commit.” View oEmbed on the source website I tell him that he reminds me of Paul McCartney: a slightly needy desire to please, a preference for hummable melodic tunes and a lack of cynicism meant that he was never viewed as the cool one or accorded the respect the more abrasive John Lennon was given. He doesn’t baulk at the comparison. “That’s why people always thought Alexei Sayle was so special – because he was rude to everyone,” he says. “I always want to be nice. I am like Paul, I’ll try to be polite. Farties never get to be thought cool.” When he first appeared on Saturday Live, Ben Elton was in his mid-20s and represented the future of comedy. He returns to the show as a 63-year-old – does he worry about trying to stay relevant? “I had my chance to make an influence,” he says. “I take great pride that the language of The Young Ones and Blackadder is still part of the culture to this day, but nothing I write now will enter the language. No act I do will be considered cutting edge because I’ll never be young again. I’ll never be the game-changer I was, so I’ll just carry on expressing myself as honestly as possible and trying to find as large an audience as I can.” In recent years that audience has, much to his evident delight, started to change. “I was used to going to the stage door and seeing people who were my age, but suddenly there are the 50- and 60-year-olds, but they’ve brought their children to the show,” he says. “That was joyful to me. To realise you can still be relevant and amusing to younger people is a lovely thing to imagine.” Joyful and, I suspect, deliciously vindicating to know that after all these years his work is enjoyed and respected, not only by the ageing members of his own generation but also by their young ones. Loved this Big RT Interview? Check out these... Jeff Hordley on the explosive future for Cain Dingle as Emmerdale turns 50 Funding, streaming and the future: BBC boss on the next 100 years Charlie Hunnam: "I'm not fully proud of my conduct through those years" This interview originally appeared in Radio Times magazine. If you're looking for something to watch, check out our TV Guide. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times View From My Sofa podcast.
John Lithgow talks The Old Man, playing Winston Churchill and writing poetry
John Lithgow has played an alien and a prime minister, and is thrilled to be acting with Jeff Bridges – but mostly he's just happy to be working.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. John Lithgow isn’t one for being typecast. He is probably best known to British audiences for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in The Crown, but during his career he has also played, among others, a bumbling alien in 3rd Rock from the Sun and a serial killer in Dexter. “A lot of it comes from the fear that nobody will want me,” he says about his acting choices, which have included roles in films as diverse as Footloose, Shrek and Blow Out. “I have a kind of restless creative energy.” The latest outlet for this restlessness is new Disney Plus series The Old Man, a brooding cat-and-mouse spy drama in which Lithgow plays Harold Harper, an FBI man charged with apprehending his former colleague turned rogue CIA spy Dan Chase, played by Jeff Bridges. The two veteran actors (both in their 70s) had admired each other’s work for decades but this is the first time they have acted together. “I think Jeff is right up there as the biggest reason for me to do this show,” Lithgow tells me. “He’s amazing, and I thought it would be an interesting combination of two actors. He’s got this wonderful, off-hand, relaxed and unfussed style; I am sort of brainy and come from theatre.” Lithgow might have been excited by the prospect of working with Bridges, but he was made to wait. The Old Man tells two separate stories that don’t come together until late into the series, and not only was filming paused firstly for the pandemic, but then also after Bridges was diagnosed with cancer. By the time Lithgow and Bridges were finally able to act together, almost two years had passed since production had started. “It was very disorienting to pick up after 18 months,” Lithgow says. “I had practically forgotten my character’s name, so it was in many ways like a brand new job.” The drama is set in the present day but past traumas weigh down on both the lead characters. Harper, whom Lithgow plays, is reeling from the death of his son when he receives a phone call and learns he has to deal with an international scandal from three decades earlier concerning Bridges’ character. “The inciting event for this whole series is something that happened 30 years ago during the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan,” Lithgow says, “and then Russia invaded Ukraine. You just sort of felt it in the air; it supercharges the story and makes it a much more resonant series. It’s like history had caught up with us.” This isn’t the first time Lithgow has appeared in a television drama concerned with history and war, of course. How did he feel about portraying Winston Churchill, a role played in recent years by, among others, Brendan Gleeson, Albert Finney, Gary Oldman, Simon Russell Beale, Robert Hardy and Timothy Spall? “Yes, of course I was intimidated,” he says. “I sat [The Crown director] Stephen Daldry down after I’d accepted the part and asked him, ‘Why did you think to cast me?’ and he said, ‘Well, Churchill’s mother was an American.’ He didn’t mention the fact that I was about a foot and a half taller!” Lithgow prepared for his turn as Churchill by doing a huge amount of reading and concluded that rather than focusing on Churchill’s political views, he would explore his emotional life. “What interested me most in him was his childhood,” he says. “He was such an unhappy and neglected child and couldn’t have a lower self-esteem. He just grew up feeling like such a disappointment. I just got the sense of this extremely insecure man, desperate to compensate.” I’m talking to Lithgow just as Boris Johnson is in his final weeks as prime minister. Would Lithgow fancy a go at portraying Johnson? “I remember when I was doing press for The Crown and Johnson was making a slightly earlier fool of himself,” he says. “And I said, ‘Oh man, do I want to play Boris Johnson.’ And if Peter Morgan is in charge, I’m up for it.” Lithgow was born in New York to an actress mother and a theatre producer father who staged Shakespeare festivals. “I think of myself as pure American, but my formative years were all around a Shakespeare Festival, hearing an awful lot of lofty Shakespearean language. I then went to Harvard and on to England.” He is also a staunch supporter of Liverpool Football Club. Lithgow studied drama in London between 1967 and 1969. That must have been fun, I say, to be in Swinging Sixties’ London. “I loved being there during that time,” he says. “It was a fantastic time for English theatre. I was seeing two and three plays a week, minimum. I saw Laurence Olivier, I saw Maggie Smith, I saw Ralph Richardson. I was drunk on it.” View oEmbed on the source website Lithgow returned to the United States after studying and made his film debut in 1972. In the years since, he has starred on stage as well as film and television and has been nominated for an Oscar twice, and has six Emmys. I had read that he had turned down the role of Frasier Crane in Cheers and wondered if that was a regret. “I never really regretted that because I couldn’t have been as good as Kelsey Grammer,” he says. “It was offered to me but I didn’t even pay it any attention. I was told that the offer had come in and I just brushed it aside, but I don’t regret it at all. I did 3rd Rock from the Sun and they were six of the happiest years of my life." Acting remains at the heart of Lithgow's work but in recent years he has explored new outlets for his creativity. He has written a series of New York Times best-selling poetry collections, complete with his own illustrations, that satirise the Trump administration and look back through history to find Trump’s precursors. “I turn to things when I feel nothing is going on,” he says. “The advice I always give young actors is give yourself a goal or a project that requires a lot of work and work toward that – you’ll never get there for the best reason in the world, which is that someone will hire you to act.” It’s now 50 years since Lithgow made his film debut but, talking to him, I’m struck by how enthused and grateful he remains. He has not succumbed to jadedness. “I consider myself extremely lucky,” he says. “I move from job to job and it’s like collecting the very best people everywhere.” He’s particularly pleased that with The Old Man he has, in his 70s, got to act alongside someone he has admired for so long. “There is a long scene in the last episode that took us six days to film,” Lithgow says. “It was just Jeff and me in a car crossing a desert. The crew would ask us if we wanted to get out and stretch our legs and we said no, we were having a great time. I mean, I got to sit in a car with Jeff Bridges for six days – and it was work!” The Old Man is streaming on Disney Plus now – sign up to Disney Plus for £7.99 a month or £79.90 a year now. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.
Michael Parkinson talks 50 years interviewing the biggest stars in the world
Sarfraz Manzoor meets Sir Michael Parkinson.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. I’m on a train heading to meet Sir Michael Parkinson and I have butterflies in my stomach. I rarely get nervous ahead of meeting anyone, but I have spent the past few weeks rewatching old episodes of Parkinson and seen him talking to John Wayne and Fred Astaire, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, David Bowie and Madonna. It was deeply enjoyable to revisit these classic interviews, but it was also rather intimidating to realise that I was about to interview the greatest talk-show host in British television history. I shouldn’t have worried. Sir Michael Parkinson, who is now 86 but in great health mentally and physically, is everything one might wish him to be – engaging, personable and bracingly forthright. It’s 50 years this summer since Parkinson first launched (the anniversary is being marked by a BBC1 documentary on Saturday). The son and grandson of miners who grew up within sight of the Grimethorpe Colliery near Barnsley, Parkinson started out in local newspapers at the age of 16 before being lured on to television at Granada in Manchester. “I was very ambitious,” he recalls in the garden of his riverside home, “and secretly I wanted to be famous as well. I love being in showbiz. I love asking questions. I love meeting people. In that sense I was ideally created for television.” In the early 1960s Parkinson was presenting shows on Granada that frequently featured performances by a new band from Liverpool called the Beatles. Paul McCartney asked for his autograph for his mum. He later worked on a film show called Cinema when he received a phone call from the BBC asking if he fancied presenting a late-night talk show. The first episode of Parkinson aired on 19 June 1971 and guests in the first series included John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, George Best, Michael Caine and Orson Welles. An impressive list – but not impressive enough for the BBC, who wiped the tapes. Virtually nothing from the first series has survived. “The BBC had a committee that sat down and decided what they would get rid of,” says Parkinson. “They thought, ‘Nobody wants to watch that.’ I mean, why would you do that?” The first incarnation of Parkinson ran from 1971 to 1982 and particularly in the early 70s the show featured guests who are now considered among the immortals of the silver screen – James Cagney, Gene Kelly, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall. “I was desperately in love with Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall,” Parkinson says. “Bacall – I fantasised about running away with her. Shirley MacLaine, I fell head over heels with. Her brother [Warren Beatty] came on the show and said, ‘Are you the guy trying to date my sister?’ And I said yes.” In his memoir, Parkinson recalled David Niven vomiting from nerves before coming on the show and it made me wonder if he had suffered the same – did he not have sleepless nights ahead of meeting such icons? “I don’t get nervous as such – I get properly on edge,” he says. “I had to overcome a fear that I wasn’t up to it. The bigger the name the greater respect I had.” The biggest name and the person Parkinson routinely cites as the most extraordinary person he interviewed was Muhammad Ali. Parkinson met Ali four times and each time a slightly different Ali showed up, from cocky to angry to vulnerable. “What a figure, what a personality,” says Parkinson. “I’ve seen some beautiful men in my time but he was gorgeous. Beautiful – but the gibberish he talked was extraordinary.” In 1974, Parkinson flew to the United States to interview Ali alongside the American talk-show host Dick Cavett. The two men were meant to be co-hosting the interview, but Cavett completely took over and Parkinson barely got a question in. “That didn’t play well with me at all,” he says. Did he feel humiliated? “I did, yes,” he replies. “I was looking forward to having a word in his ear but at the end of the show he did a backflip over the settee, went to the back of the set, went to the car and drove off.” Parkinson didn’t hear from Cavett for another three years when he suddenly received a phone call. “He said, ‘Hi Mike, do you know Larry Olivier? Do you think you could give me an introduction?’ I wanted to say, ‘F*** off.’ But I didn’t. I just said, ‘I don’t know him that well.’“I thought, ‘You cheeky bastard!’ I mean, he knew how badly he’d treated me.” One talk-show host with whom Parkinson did enjoy a deep friendship was David Frost. “We enjoyed each other’s company over many years. We were bonded by a deep love of cricket. He was a very interesting man and I admired him greatly.” Frost was arguably Parkinson’s only rival during the 70s but, unlike him, Frost had also forged a successful US career having landed now legendary interviews with, among others, the Shah of Iran and Richard Nixon. “I was in Los Angeles when he was doing preparation for the Nixon interviews,” Parkinson reveals. “We were staying in the same hotel. And I saw how hard he worked to get that right. He had to. He’d mortgaged his house. I liked that about David. He was a gambler.” The other interviewer whom Parkinson venerated was Alan Whicker. “If I had a hero in terms of interviewing, it was him,” Parkinson says. “He was wonderful. He played the pauses better than anyone else. I’ve rated him all my life. He was a star. He was also a very nice man and generous to other performers.” Whicker was a guest on Parkinson in 1982 in what turned out to be the final series of the show’s original run. Why did it end? “I can’t remember. Why would I walk away? I don’t think I did. I think I was quietly shown the door.” The 80s saw Parkinson follow other adventures: he was part of the launch team for ITV’s breakfast show TV-am, he forged a new television career in Australia and took over from Roy Plomley as the presenter of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. I tell him that my favourite edition of Desert Island Discs was the one with Robert Maxwell. “He was overwhelming and he never understood a question you asked,” recalls Parkinson. “He just ploughed on. I think he used to get up in the morning, start talking and didn’t shut up until he fell asleep at night. He was totally, utterly, disgracefully awful. There was nothing about him to like.” Parkinson left the programme in 1988 after only three years. “I always thought Desert Island Discs was a lovely idea but it had its problems,” he says, adding, “The music interrupted too much.” In 1998, Parkinson returned to BBC television. “When the show came back it was better. I was much more confident, I was older and I’d done it once so I knew I could do it better.” The second manifestation produced many memorable moments, among them Victoria Beckham revealing she called David “Golden Balls” and Paul McCartney singing Yesterday. “They are the moments you treasure. You look back and think whatever else went wrong, that was right and that was a privilege. In the end, that’s what you’re looking for – the possibility of sitting next to someone like McCartney who, by any stretch, is a genius and a nice lad, our Paul.” There were also some rather less comfortable encounters, such as Woody Allen becoming tetchy when questioned about his marriage to Soon-Yi. “You can do as much research as you need and you can feel confident that you know more about the guest than they know themselves,” he says, “but you can’t actually predict human relations. You can meet people you don’t like, or who don’t like you, and then you’re in trouble.” In October 2003, Meg Ryan was a guest on the show. It would become one of the most awkward of encounters. Parkinson has talked often about their meeting and the narrative I had accepted about the interview was that essentially Ryan had been a hostile and uncommunicative guest, Parkinson the innocent victim. But when I rewatched it ahead of speaking to him today, that wasn’t my impression at all. Ryan was uncomfortable, yes, but she also appeared vulnerable and Parkinson seemed determined to make her feel more uncomfortable with slightly needling questions. I tell Parkinson that in watching the interview again, my strongest impression was that he could have been kinder to her as she seemed rather fragile. “I wish I hadn’t lost my temper with Meg Ryan,” he says, “I wish I’d dealt with it in a more courteous manner. I was quite obviously angry with her and it’s not my business to be angry towards the guests. I came across as kind of pompous and I could have done better.” What would you say to her, I ask, if you saw her again? “I’m sorry,” he says, adding, “but you must understand that you played a part in it, too. Neither of us were on top form, and we were both discomforted.” The Ryan encounter is one that – along with Rod Hull and Emu in 1976 – is most often cited when discussing Parkinson, which is rather unfair because what struck me when revisiting old episodes was how often he was able to create an atmosphere where stars felt relaxed. I think of Madonna being charming and funny, and how at ease David Bowie was – even telling Parkinson that he reminded him of his father. “My nature has been to create an atmosphere in which the guest feels comfortable,” he says. “In the end it’s a relationship between two people. The two people needn’t necessarily adore each other but they’re interested enough in each other to respect them and answer the questions properly. That’s when it really works.” Parkinson finally ended its run in 2007, following a three-year spell on ITV. The talk-show hosts who followed in his wake might occupy the same space in the schedule, but Parkinson has a point when he says there’s no one doing what he did. I ask him if he rates Piers Morgan. “I enjoy a lot of the stuff that he does because I do think we need a voice like that. I miss him on television.” Graham Norton? “He is the best at it,” he says. “Graham invents a party and he has the best jokes and gets them all together. But there’s a problem: I feel that we’ve heard it all before.” The other problem with all of today’s talk shows is that in their desperation to entertain they have less faith in the audience than Parkinson. Norton and Jonathan Ross can feature Madonna in their respective shows (and they have) but Parkinson also featured remarkable interviews with the historian and television presenter Dr Jacob Bronowski, who talked about visiting Auschwitz. He also invited Harold Pinter, WH Auden, John Betjeman and Gore Vidal on to his show. It’s hard to imagine Norton or Ross introducing any of them. He has no regrets about no longer being on television, he says. “In this ultra-sensitive world I doubt I could actually do an interview nowadays without being sent off. There are so many pitfalls and booby traps in life now. I think I had the best of it.” What does he think the secret to longevity was in having a television career? “I think people have to like you,” he says. “It’s as simple as that. It’s about what they make of you, warts and all. That’s crucial – and if you knew the answer to it, you’d be a rich man indeed.” I don’t know the definite answer but I would hazard a guess that part of the reason why the audience took to Michael Parkinson was that he never thought it was his role to outshine his guests. For all his success there was a part of him that was still that little boy in Barnsley staring in awe at the silver screen. “When you’re a child and you are sitting there watching glamorous film stars, to think you might one day say, ‘My next guest is Lauren Bacall’ is too fantastic to even contemplate. But I did that, and I never got bored with it. I had a weekly sense of wonder.” This week's Radio Times magazine is out now. Parkinson at 50 airs tonight at 8:30pm on BBC One. If you're looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide.
James Nesbitt on new BBC drama Bloodlands and getting the chance to work with Jed Mercurio
Sarfraz Mansoor talks to Bloodlands actor James Nesbitt.
There is a scene in the first episode of new BBC One drama Bloodlands in which Northern Irish detective Tom Brannick (played by James Nesbitt) is urged to let go of his investigation into a series of mysterious disappearances whose trail went cold years before. The more he digs, the deeper embroiled he becomes in his own troubled past. A colleague tells him, “At some point the past has to die.” To which Brannick grimly responds, “Not for me.” The line had special resonance for Nesbitt. “I think that relates to me,” he says. “I’ve never really left Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland has never really left me.” Bloodlands was filmed early last year and it was due to wrap almost a year ago, on 13th March. And then lockdown happened, but rather than return to London, Nesbitt remained in Northern Ireland at his house in Portrush, as it offered him a chance to, as he puts it, “continue my relationship” with the country. Nesbitt’s involvement with the drama can be traced back to a party in London at which the actor bumped into Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio. “I said, ‘Come on, Jed, when are we going to get a chance to work together?’” he recalls. “Even though Line of Duty had been shot here for years I was never considered for it, which has always slightly galled me.” Mercurio promised to bear him in mind and sent over a script that HTM Productions, the company he runs with Have I Got News For You supremo Jimmy Mulville, had in development. Nesbitt says he was “immediately arrested” by Bloodlands, the first drama series from writer Chris Brandon. In particular, Nesbitt identified with his character Brannick and his investigation of the disappearance during the Troubles of several figures across the Catholic/Protestant divide at the hands of an assassin known as Goliath. “I recognise a lot in Tom,” says Nesbitt. “There’s an affability, a quiet strength. He’s someone who has really been through a lot in the Troubles, one of the silent ones who never reveal what they’ve been through.” Revisiting this turbulent time in Northern Ireland’s recent history inevitably opens up questions about the fragility of the current situation. Could the Troubles return? “Things have moved on irrevocably because there is a generation that has grown up in peace,” says Nesbitt, who has just finished a 10-year tenure as Ulster University chancellor. “Those graduates are the first generation to have grown up inside peace in Northern Ireland. Is there fragility to that because of border checks? Yes. The more vulnerable a situation is, the more vulnerable people are.” Bloodlands has echoes of the 2014 BBC One drama The Missing, in which Nesbitt played a man haunted by the disappearance of his son; here, it’s the memories of his dead wife that dog the detective. Nesbitt laughs at the similarity. “As someone who started out as a comedy actor, who went into acting to meet girls and have a laugh: where are the bloody laughs?” Nesbitt was born in Broughshane, near Ballymena in Antrim, next door to the one-room Protestant primary school where his father James was headmaster and taught a class of around 30 children, including his own son. “I had three older sisters, Margaret, Kathryn and Andrea, who adored me. As brilliant as that was, on some kind of level I was always chasing the adoration of women.” His sisters all followed their father into teaching, but Nesbitt took his own path. “I knew I could never be the teacher my dad was – or the one I would have wanted to be.” He first tasted success on the stage aged 13, in a 1978 Christmas production of Oliver!. Five years later, he left to study acting in London. “My father imbued me with enough of the good bits of him and was very supportive, if wary, of my choice,” he says. “He took enormous pride in it, but he knew it was an unstable profession to go into. There weren’t a lot of young country Protestants going into acting at the time. “I’m not the first artist, for want of a better word, to feel the need to become an exile. I suppose there was a bit of me that felt constrained by Northern Ireland. I was someone who was proud of Protestant culture but the rest of the world was viewing the people of my identity as very dour, immovable, frightening straitjacketed unionists.” It was Cold Feet, which launched in 1997, that turned Nesbitt into a household name for his performance as lothario Adam. “Guys would have liked to have a drink with him and he would drive women mad – but they’d find him quite attractive,” he reflects. The success of the ITV comedy-drama opened doors to meatier roles, not least as SDLP co-founder Ivan Cooper in Paul Greengrass’ powerful 2002 ITV drama Bloody Sunday. “Paul told me, ‘You should look at the Troubles as your Lear’, just one of those things you have to take on from time to time.” Other heavyweight roles followed: a Catholic man out to avenge his brother’s murder at the hands of a UVF loyalist in Five Minutes of Heaven, a police chief in Murphy’s Law, a police commissioner in Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s Babylon and an army sergeant in Basra in Peter Bowker’s Occupation. The success brought fame, which came with a price. “The enormity of the public exposure was quite hard to handle at times,” he says. “It’s easy to lose sight of yourself a little bit.” It’s now 18 years since the end of Cold Feet’s original run and it took 13 more to bring it back to the screen in 2016. “They tried to revive it for a number of years and I thought it would be the worst thing,” Nesbitt says. “It was an important programme for a lot of people. The idea of bringing it back and it not working, of destroying its legacy, would have been awful. But I was delighted when it returned with new resonance.” One criticism occasionally levelled at Nesbitt is that he is a lazy actor. “A lot of the naysayers go – because I always do my own accent – ‘Oh, he always does the same bloody thing’,” he says. “But I would say that Tom Hanks is always just using his own accent too.” He is, he says, proud that across his body of work, he has helped to challenge associations of a Northern Irish accent with conflict. “The idea of having a leading character in a primetime comedy drama speaking with my accent but having no real political baggage was deemed quite unusual,” he says of his work on Cold Feet. “I’m lucky to have been involved in getting that accent into living rooms all over Britain, where I could put a dent in the notion that that sound was only associated with conflict.” It was also what amused him about starring in Sky 1’s superhero drama Stan Lee’s Lucky Man. “There’s only ever going to be one middle-aged, Northern Irish superhero created by Stan Lee, and it’s me,” he says. View oEmbed on the source website Nesbitt turned 56 last month. Given that he has been a household name now for going on 25 years, what ambitions remain? “When I was 44, I was still worried about the work,” he says. “But now, I’m happy to be still balancing on the ladder. I’d love to do a big musical extravaganza. When I did Steven Moffat’s Jekyll back in 2007, I bloody loved it. I’d love to have another crack at something like that – a showy character who isn’t always haunted and looking in the mirror, wondering where it all went wrong.” And not looking tearfully at a photograph of his late, beloved wife? “Yeah, yeah,” he says, laughing. “I’ve had plenty of practice at that.” For the latest news and expert tips on getting the best deals this year, take a look at our Black Friday 2021 and Cyber Monday 2021 But in a poignant twist to this homecoming tale, filming Bloodlands presented not only an opportunity for Nesbitt to reconnect with Northern Ireland but also to spend time with his father while he still could (his mother, a civil servant, died from Alzheimer’s 10 years ago, aged 79). “It’s turned out to be difficult at times but ultimately the most rewarding twist of fate that I happened to be here,” he says. “My father was my best pal growing up and so it has been a blessing for me in so many ways to spend time with him and rekindle the friendship.” His father died in August, aged 91, from natural causes. “I think we got to a place where before he died, I was able to look at him and he knew that I was grateful,” says Nesbitt. “I knew he was looking at me, glad I was his son, and he was more supportive than I’d given him credit for; he said he had known, more than I had, that acting was where my home and my life would be. I got to share the memories and see the man he was. He’d been through many volte faces in his beliefs and identity, but at the end of his life, he was fiercely proud of being from Northern Ireland. That was an important moment. Everything from now on is a bonus.” Bloodlands starts on BBC One on 21st February. If you're looking for more to watch, check out our handy TV Guide. 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.
Divided nations: a snapshot of life on either side of the India-Pakistan border
It’s one of the most contentious strips of land in the world – but how is day-to-day living on the partition line? A pair of BBC journalists investigate...
Adnan Sarwar explains what life is like on the Pakistan side of the border My family is originally from a village between Islamabad and Lahore, and we came to Britain during the 1970s and settled in Burnley in Lancashire. When I was little, I understood little about partition – I knew India and Pakistan had split but I had no idea just how great a tragedy it was. In the programme [Dangerous Borders: a Journey across India and Pakistan, Mon 9pm, BBC2] the film crew and I took a road trip through Pakistan that lasted five weeks, during which we travelled along the spine of the border. India tends to be seen as a safe country, while Pakistan is viewed as the bad one next door, a dangerous place full of terrorists. We expected there to be some security issues, but the Pakistanis we met were really welcoming. One of the crew was white and kept being pulled out of his vehicle. He was worried why it kept happening, but they just wanted to take photographs of him because they hadn’t seen a white person for such a long time. We wanted to get behind the headlines to understand what Pakistan is like today. It was so enlightening to see so many stereotypes turned on their heads – women who were fighter pilots, men who were fashion designers and so on. I asked everybody what they felt about India. The people I met on my travels had less of a problem with Indians than some of the Pakistanis I used to know in Burnley. Partition wrecked people’s lives, and neighbours and friends killed each other. I remember sitting with a Sikh man in a temple in Lahore and thinking, 70 years ago you might have tried to kill me, and me you. That just seems extraordinary. Adnan Sarwar meets members of the Siddi community in Pakistan The British were in India and now we have Indians and Pakistanis in Britain. People in this country need to study partition because it created a massive amount of bloodshed. I remember reading about a British officer during partition who recalled how helpless he had felt as hordes of people went past him. I served in the British Army for eight years in Iraq, Kuwait and Cyprus, and that officer’s words reminded me of when I was a soldier in the Iraq War and being told that we were there to help people, but feeling unsure if that was really what we did. When I first went to Pakistan I was travelling through a country that was completely alien to me. But by the time we reached the halfway point in the journey – when I went to meet my mum, who had flown out to join me – I felt like I knew her and myself so much better. I’m planning on taking a few white friends on holiday there next year, and my hope is that by watching the programme it may show Pakistan in a different light and persuade others to visit, too. Babita Sharma explains what life is like on the Indian side of the border I am familiar with India because of my job as a BBC journalist. I covered the 2014 Indian general election, but I’d only really been to Delhi and Mumbai, and had never visited the border regions. In making this programme, I got the chance to walk in the footsteps of my parents and grandparents. My father was only four years old when he and his family went from what became the Pakistan side of Punjab to the Indian side in 1946, the year before partition. I’d heard stories from them, but it was only when I got there that I really understood the level of destruction and tragedy that partition created. I travelled 2,000 miles along the Indian border, from Gujarat to Rajasthan and then on to Punjab, the region that bore the brunt of partition. I got a sense that a seed was planted in Punjab that people there have never been able to reconcile, a deep burden they still carry with them to this day. The further north we went, the heavier the journey became. In Kashmir, we found ourselves getting tear-gassed after Friday prayers and had to film on our phones because the Indian authorities would have confiscated our footage if we had got caught. Babita Sharma in the Thar Desert, which spans both India and Pakistan Before making this programme, I hadn’t realised that there are 20,000 families in Kargil in Kashmir who are permanently divided because their relatives live on either side of the line of control. Talking to people there, they feel that the British left some of the border towns in a complete mess. As a British Indian, I was trying to work out what that meant for me. If it wasn’t for partition, after all, my father might have stayed on the Pakistan side and not come to England. Going there gives you a bit of clarity. I have a much clearer understanding of what my parents and grandparents went through and the way I have been wired. My parents are from India, but my dad was born on what is now the Pakistan side. I had hoped that we would get to visit Sialkot, the village in Punjab where he was born, but travelling there from the Indian side was impossible. We were eight miles from the border and could see Pakistan, but there was no way I could cross. That is the reality – partition has meant that there is a permanent division between the two countries, and I can’t visit the place where my father was born because of everything that has happened since. As told to Safraz Manzoor Dangerous Borders: a Journey across India and Pakistan Monday 9.00pm BBC2
Lady Macbeth’s Florence Pugh: “It’s very interesting to make the audience love you while you are doing horrendous things”
Pugh’s character in the new period drama may start out as a victim – but she slowly turns into a villain
The first thought that crossed Florence Pugh’s mind when her agent called to ask her to audition for a film called Lady Macbeth was: “Oh crap, it’s Shakespeare.” Pugh took the call while on a boat to the Isle of Wight. She promptly took another boat back to the mainland to attend the audition. Two weeks later, she was sent the script. “It was then that I realised,” recalls the 21-year-old actor, “this wasn’t Shakespeare – this was a very different story.” Indeed it was – this Lady Macbeth is an adaptation by Alice Birch of a 19th-century Russian novella, relocated to north-east England in 1865. Shot on a tiny budget in only 24 days and directed by William Oldroyd, the film tells the story of Katherine, a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage who embarks on a passionate but dangerous relationship with a farmhand. The summary makes it sound like a cosy period drama when, in fact, it’s darker, more interesting and a lot more violent than that. Katherine begins the film as a victim but slowly becomes more of a villain. “As an actor, it’s very interesting to make the audience love you while you are doing horrendous things,” explains Pugh. “That is pretty exciting.” View oEmbed on the source website Right now things could hardly be more exciting for her. She is extraordinary in Lady Macbeth, by turns vulnerable, flirty and utterly compelling. The performance has led to Pugh being named as a star of tomorrow by Screen International, and winning a Bafta breakthrough Brit award and the Evening Standard breakthrough award. “It’s always surprising to see yourself on the underground,” Pugh admits when I tell her I have seen her face plastered on three posters on the way to meet her – and what makes it even more surprising is that only four years ago Pugh was still in school. She grew up in Oxford and had always known she wanted to perform. “I played Mary at the age of seven in my first nativity play and I loved it – there is something so fascinating about embodying someone else.” The opportunity to act came through drama classes at St Edward’s, an expensive boarding school that includes Sir Laurence Olivier, Emilia Clarke and Jon Snow among its alumni. “It is so easy for schools to say we did that to her, but no school has made me, no school has prepared me,” she says. Did she feel her career has benefited from the opportunities at her school? “Everybody’s story of getting into the industry is just as difficult as the next person,” she declares, “whether you come from money or no money, it’s not easy... you have to offer yourself, you can’t expect someone to get you.” Pugh was in her final year of A-levels when she saw a leaflet at her school from the producers of The Falling, Carol Morley’s 2014 drama about a mysterious fainting epidemic at an all-girls school in the late 1960s. She auditioned and eventually won a part alongside Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams. “It was bizarre to get the part because I had learnt from my brother [Toby Sebastian, who happens to play Trystane Martell in Game of Thrones] that you will get told ‘no’ about 70 per cent of the year. So the fact it was my first audition was pretty fluky – right place and right time.” The Falling In Lady Macbeth (in cinemas now), Pugh plays a young woman living during a time when wives were considered their husband’s property, with lives as restrictive as their corsets. “The film is as relevant about today as it is about 1865 because there are still places in the world where women are considered property,” she says, adding, “I don’t think we do have equality today especially in the industry I am in. You hear horror stories of women being paid less than half of what the man is being paid – I mean, that is baffling to me.” Another example of on-screen inequality is that we tend to see more naked women than men, and in Lady Macbeth Pugh is frequently nude. “With any naked scene I do, or any sex scene,” says Pugh, “as long as it makes sense to the story and it feels real then I don’t mind, I don’t find it terrifying to show natural bodies.” There will be few natural bodies in Pugh’s next major feature, Fighting with My Family, for which she will swap a corset for a wrestling costume. The film – based on a true story – will see Pugh playing a woman from Norwich who becomes a WWE wrestling star. A dark castle in Northumberland may seem a long way from a wrestling ring in LA alongside Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but it is another strong female role that is both intimidating and fascinating. “When I look for roles, I am looking for incredibly powerful women,” she says. ‘I am pretty picky with scripts now and the bar has been raised thanks to Lady Macbeth.”
Olivia Newton-John on how cancer and the loss of her sister inspired her
Before Grease, the actress was famed for her career as a country singer, now she revisits music with an album about loss and grief
Olivia Newton-John is most famous for summery feel - good pop music that’s still loved decades after it was released. She will, for millions, always be Sandy in Grease who wore an off-the-shoulder black top and skin-tight trousers as she danced with John Travolta and sang You’re the One That I Want. But there was always much more to Newton-John than her public image suggested – years before Grease she had been a Grammy-winning country singer and it’s that spare sound that is evident in the 68-year-old’s latest album. Liv On is a collection of 11 songs about illness and death that was inspired by the sudden loss of Newton-John’s sister Rona from a brain tumour aged 70 in 2013. “It was a terrible shock – she was a very healthy fit person who exercised every day and ate well,” she says. “She died very quickly and it put me in a spin for about a year.” To help process the pain, Newton-John wrote a song and recorded it with her friend, the Canadian singer and producer Amy Sky. “It was something I was going to send to family and friends,” she explains, “but after we finished we were discussing that there isn’t much music specifically made for people going through loss and grief. It was then I had the light-bulb moment – maybe there is a need for this music.” Newton-John brought country singer Beth Nielson Chapman on to the project. What made the writing process especially meaningful was that all three singers had personal experience of loss and illness; Sky has depression and Chapman has survived breast cancer and a brain tumour. “Olivia looks like a big pop icon singing Grease,” says Chapman “but she did a fantastic album called Grace and Gratitude – so she has stepped into these waters before.” Grace and Gratitude was written in the aftermath of Newton-John being diagnosed in 1992 with breast cancer at the age of 44. “My father died on the same weekend I was diagnosed,” recalls Newton-John. “It all happened at the same time. I was frightened because I was worried about how I would get through it because I had my young daughter.” Newton-John went through a year of chemotherapy and was eventually given the all-clear. Since then she has become a champion of breast cancer awareness and established a hospital and wellness centre in her hometown of Melbourne. The songs for Liv On began with Newton-John, Sky and Chapman gathering at sessions at Newton-John’s home and in Las Vegas where she was doing a residency. “We would sit down with our notepads and a cup of tea and exchange stories from our experience,” recalls Sky. “There were laughing sessions and deep crying sessions – they were like therapy in a way.” Newton-John is a passionate advocate for positivity and she radiates optimism despite the many tragedies in her personal life. Her 31-year-old daughter Chloe was revealed to have spent most of her adolescence struggling with anorexia and substance abuse, and former boyfriend Patrick McDermott mysteriously disappeared from a boat off Los Angeles during an overnight fishing trip in 2005. It was thought that McDermott drowned after falling from the boat, but there have been persistent rumours that he faked his own death and is now living with a new girlfriend in rural Mexico. Newton-John, who has been married to businessman John Easterling since 2008, has said in the past that she refuses to believe McDermott faked his disappearance, but was it harder to grieve for him than it was for her sister because of the absence of any closure? There is a long pause. “It was very painful,” she says finally. “There are no tricks to those things – they’re just things you have to learn to live with.” This “when life gives you lemons you make lemonade” attitude extends even to her feelings towards illness – she tells me she considers her breast cancer experience to have been a gift. “I am grateful for the experience because without it I would not have done many of the things I have done in my life,” she says. “It’s taught me compassion for those going through difficult times.” The ambition for Liv On is that it will help listeners who’ve gone through their own difficult times. “I know that music can be healing: it can make an actual difference.” Olivia Newton-John is performing on Celtic Connections tonight at 7pm on Radio 2
Dev Patel: I struggled to find "substantial" roles after Slumdog Millionaire
“It’s hard when there is nothing good out there that is not your usual goofy best friend/funny sidekick/techie role," says the Lion actor
Dev Patel has become used to appearing in films speaking in an accent other than his own. In Slumdog Millionaire and the two Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies he adopted an Indian accent, but in Lion the 26-year-old was finally able to ditch sing-song Indian for an Australian accent. “I’ve been yearning for a role like this where I can play a young, modern guy, he says. “It was such a beautiful, profound script, and the fact that it is all based on a real story makes it even more incredible.” The plot of Lion, which also stars Nicole Kidman, Rooney Mara and an extraordinary performance from newcomer Sunny Pawar, would be dismissed as utterly implausible but for the fact that it actually happened. Patel plays Saroo Brierley, who was born in a tiny village in India but became separated from his older brother in a railway station. The five-year-old Saroo fell asleep while waiting for his brother, but when he awoke, his brother had not returned and Saroo ended up thousands of miles from his home and family. Rooney Mara and Dev Patel in Lion The little boy was placed in an orphanage, where he was adopted by an Australian couple. He was brought up in Australia, but the past would not release its grip, and Saroo set about using Google Earth to try to locate the village that had been his home. All this is depicted in Lion (in cinemas from Friday 20 January), a beautifully made and incredibly moving film that has earned five Bafta nominations, including a supporting actor nod for Patel. “As soon as I got the role,” says Patel, “I called my manager and said for the next eight months I don’t want to do anything else but commit every fibre of my being to getting the journey right.” Patel visited the gym every day to bulk up for the role, he worked on an Australian accent and he visited India to retrace Saroo’s journey. “I was travelling the trains and seeing the landscape change and getting a taste of the isolation he would have felt. I also visited orphanages and wrote a diary – all of that went into trying to make the character feel truthful.” Saroo is a man of Indian extraction who had tried to forget his heritage. “I could relate to that duality,” Patel says. “I didn’t fully embrace my culture when I was at school because I wanted to fit in and not get bullied.” Patel grew up in Harrow in west London, where he went to his local comprehensive. His acting break came thanks to his mum, who saw an ad for an audition for C4 youth drama Skins. “Her tearing out that little piece at the back of the Metro and dragging me to the open casting changed my life,” says Patel. What would you be doing had she not done that? “I don’t know – working the tills at Budgens?” he says laughing. His portrayal of Muslim teenager Anwar in Skins turned him into a TV star, but it was being cast at the age of 17 in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire that transformed both Patel’s career and his relationship with India. “It was only when I went to India with Slumdog that I started to appreciate the country,” he says. “I was educated out of all those preconceived stereotypes about my culture.” Slumdog went on to win eight Oscars, but success also brought frustrations as casting agents assume he is Indian rather than British Indian. Dev Patel in Slumdog Millionaire “After Slumdog I found it hard to find substantial follow-ups,” he admits. “It’s hard when there is nothing good out there that is not your usual goofy best friend/funny sidekick/techie roles, so when a script like this comes by, it’s very rare.” The first hour of Lion is set in India with characters only speaking in Hindi and Bengali. The fact mainstream audiences will accept this in a film is in part thanks to Slumdog Millionaire. “That film broke the mould,” says Patel. “A lot of the film was in subtitles, there were no real known actors and yet it was a success, so that created a new narrative in the industry.” Nicole Kidman as Sue Brierley and Sunny Pawar as a young Saroo Brierley Patel, who now lives in LA, has in the past expressed frustration at the limited opportunities available to actors from diverse backgrounds. “You can only go as far as the scripts that are landing on your agent’s desk,” he says. “So I am trying to be the person who isn’t waiting for the phone to ring but can generate their own material.” The success of shows like The Night Of with Riz Ahmed and Quantico with Priyanka Chopra suggest, I say, that things are improving. “Those guys are complete inspirations,” he agrees. “And we are getting access to more varied roles. There is still a long way to go, but I am really confident in the way it’s moving right now.” View oEmbed on the source website Lion hits UK cinemas today
The trials and tribulations of choosing a baby name
Tonight’s episode of Call the Midwife: the Casebook shows the struggle of birth – but what about all the tough decisions that come afterwards?
Giving birth has never been straightforward, as Call the Midwife: the Casebook reminds us this week. But as a father I can tell you that once the baby has been born, the hard work begins. We knew we were having a boy in June, and our son was born in November. You would think that five months was quite enough time to choose a name for the little fellow but we didn’t finally settle on a name until four weeks after he was born. I wasn’t expecting it to be such an epic struggle – we had named our daughter Laila within a fortnight – but it was a total nightmare and even now I’m not fully certain we did the right thing. It’s an awesome power to name another human being. My wife Bridget and I had three tests that any potential name had to pass. First, it had to be easy to say and spell. I have spent my entire life having to spell my name out or trying to explain how to pronounce it and I did not wish that on my child. Second, the name should have some history or meaning behind it. Layla and Majnun is a 12th-century poem from Persia that predates Romeo and Juliet and is said to have possibly inspired Shakespeare. That story also inspired a classic Bollywood song called Laila O Laila, which I remember hearing when I was young. I had loved the name ever since. Sarfraz Manzoor is a journalist, documentary maker and broadcaster So we needed a name that was easy to spell and had a great meaning behind it, but that wasn’t all. I have Pakistani Muslim heritage and my wife is white Scottish. Our third condition was that the name needed to work across cultures. There are names that have crossover appeal – Adam, Daniyal, Harris – but they didn’t appeal to us. We wanted a name that was as quirky, cool and curious as we hoped our little boy would be. The questions we were wrestling with, we realised, were whether a name should honour the past or reflect the present, and whether a name had to mean anything or just sound good. We had one name we really loved. It was easy to say and spell, it was unusual and it meant “help”, which I was hoping he would offer when Bridget and I were older. The only trouble was that it was, well, a wee bit Jewish. It was the name of a prophet who appeared in both the Old Testament and the Koran, but the spelling we preferred was the Hebrew version. That worried me – it might not go down well in Lahore, or even my home town of Luton. They might have preferred a name that reflected the culture they’d come from. How we anguished! I went on Twitter and searched for people called it and found that in Indonesia it was considered a Muslim name, which was a bit helpful, but would have been more so if we were planning on relocating to Jakarta. On the day we were meant to be officially naming our son, we still had not decided. In desperation I called a friend who is an imam and Islamic scholar and who had officiated at our religious wedding. His name is Usama, so he knows a little about how names can have unhelpful connotations. Did it matter that our preferred name was not technically Muslim, I asked him? “There is no such thing as a Muslim name,” he said. “People think to have a Muslim name you need to have an Arabic name but that’s not true – a Muslim name is just any name that has a good meaning.” He then reminded me that my own name wasn’t Arabic. “Sarfraz is Persian,” he said. Emboldened by Usama we made our decision: we were unlikely to have any more children so we would give our boy the name we most loved, the name that works best in this country, and worry less about the past or Pakistan. And that was how we came to name our little boy Ezra. Call the Midwife: The Casebook is on BBC1 tonight at 5.05pm
Adam Driver on joining the army and why he considered turning down Star Wars
The man behind Kylo Ren's mask also talks about starring in upcoming Martin Scorsese movie Silence
When Adam Driver was a teenager, growing up in small-town Indiana, he discovered his grandfather’s collection of videotapes. The collection ran to 500 films, each one numbered and labelled. It was through this film library that Driver was first exposed to the work of Martin Scorsese. “The first Scorsese film I watched was GoodFellas,’’ he recalls. “And that led me to Mean Streets, Casino and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” The director quickly became Driver’s hero, which makes the fact that we are meeting to talk about his role in Scorsese’s latest film hard for him to process. Driver – best known as Lena Dunham’s boyfriend in HBO drama Girls and as Kylo Ren in JJ Abrams’s first Star Wars episode, The Force Awakens – has already worked with an impressive array of directors including Clint Eastwood in J Edgar, the Coen brothers in Inside Llewyn Davies and Steven Spielberg in Lincoln. But “Scorsese is at the top of the pyramid in terms of people I have wanted to work with.” View oEmbed on the source website When we meet, Driver, 33, is dressed in a slate grey suit, and is polite, softly spoken and understated. He has a distinctive face – sharp angles, prominent nose, wide ears – but it isn’t only his unconventional looks that set him apart from his contemporaries. Before he was an actor, Driver was in the US marines. He signed up as a 17-year-old in the days after the 11 September attacks in 2001. “I got swept up in the fervour,” he says. “I was of the age where you wanted to do something and be involved.” But mainly Driver enlisted because life in his hometown was so uninspiring. He was born in San Diego, the son of a preacher, but his parents divorced when he was seven and his mother took him and his sister to Mishawaka, Indiana. “I was a transplant from California so I always felt like I was outside the world that I was raised in,” he says. To alleviate the boredom, Driver set up his own Fight Club, inspired by the movie. “It was on the weekends,” he explains – breaking the first rule of Fight Club. “People would ride by on their bikes and we would ask if we could fight them. I’m not quite sure what we gained from it apart from injuries,” he laughs. “But we needed a physical release. I needed a challenge.” The US Marines provided another challenge. Driver spent two years with 1st battalion at Camp Pendleton in California. “I loved being in the military,” he recalls. “I feel like I took the best parts of it with me – relationships, a work ethic…” How prepared was he to take part in actual combat? “It is your job to be prepared for that,” he states plainly, “and I was ready and willing to be on the front line.” Driver would have seen combat had he not suffered a mountain bike accident three months before his unit was to be deployed to Iraq. He broke his sternum and was deemed unfit for service. Was it like rehearsing for a production and not getting to first night? “That’s a great way of putting it! I felt guilt. I regretted it for a long time, still regret that I didn’t get a chance to go over with my guys and do my job – that sucks.” His military dreams over, Driver applied to study drama at New York’s Juilliard School where he met his future wife, Joanne Tucker, with whom he would later set up a charity that performs theatre for military audiences. After graduating, he appeared in a few off-Broadway plays before landing the part in Girls. “I had spent 27 years of my life with people not knowing who I was,” he recalls, “so for people to suddenly call you out in a crowd was a very interesting experience… very interesting,” he says, with an intonation that strongly suggests “seriously weird”. Driver was on the set of Girls when he received a call saying JJ Abrams wanted to meet him to discuss a role in Star Wars. “I remember being overwhelmed by the size of it,” he says about the prospect. “I was nervous and had to think about it for a couple of months.” He eventually took the role of Kylo Ren because, “I found myself feeling anxious about it, and that made me think it was a good thing to do. If you are lucky enough to work outside your comfort zone, that is good.” For his role in Scorsese’s Silence (in cinemas from New Year’s Day), Driver was also forced out of his comfort zone. Silence is less GoodFellas and more “God fellows”: Driver and Andrew Garfield play two 17th-century Jesuit priests who face persecution when they travel to Japan to locate their mentor, played by Liam Neeson. View oEmbed on the source website In preparation for the role, he lost over three-and-a-half stone. “I was drinking a lot of coffee and smoothies, and running in full sweats for seven miles,” he recalls. The regime sounds almost military and it makes me wonder about the direction Driver’s life may have taken had he not had his mountain bike accident. “I would have stayed in the military,” he says matter-of-factly. “I would have probably ended up in Iraq and Afghanistan.” At the time, not serving in the military felt like cruel luck, but perhaps it was the best thing to ever happen to him. “Was it a lucky break? At the time I didn’t think so but now, maybe,” he says, and then adds with a half smile, “It is a good thing to be alive.” Silence is out in cinemas from New Year’s Day