‘I'm working hard at not being a negative person'
The hugely popular TV presenter, baker and author opens up about her anxiety and PTSD, and highlights how she strives to challenge herself. 'I love driving, yet suddenly I was too anxious to drive,' she says. 'I made myself believe I couldn't do it, but when my husband needed a lift I did it – I was so proud of myself.'
Faith and her family play a huge part in her life, and her latest book Rooza focuses on cuisine inspired by Ramadan. The 2015 The Great British Bake Off winner also explains how the whole family uses a calendar app to coordinate five busy lives, and why baking is an excellent antidote to her anxiety. She also reveals a more unexpected way to unwind: 'My husband and I practise archery, and there's a perfect moment of stillness when you pull back the arrow.'
For all of Nadiya's tips, life hacks, insights and stories, catch the latest episode of Bright Ideas with Anita Rani on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays.
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BBC News
10 minutes ago
- BBC News
FKA Twigs and Shia LaBeouf reach settlement in abuse lawsuit
British singer-songwriter FKA Twigs and Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf have reached an agreement in her 2020 abuse lawsuit. FKA Twigs, whose real name is Tahliah Debrett Barnett, had accused her former partner of physical, mental and emotional a joint statement, their lawyers confirmed the settlement, but said the details would "remain private".LaBeouf previously said many allegations against him are untrue but apologised for the hurt he had caused. The settlement puts an end to a case that has dragged on for five years with little legal documents seen by Us Weekly, Barnett asked the court to dismiss all claims against LaBeouf with prejudice, meaning that she cannot refile them in the future.A trial had been initially set for last year but was later postponed. On Tuesday, Barnett's lawyer Bryan Freedman and LaBeouf's lawyer Shawn Holley said both parties wished each other well."Committed to forging a constructive path forward, we have agreed to settle our case out of court," they said in the statement."While the details of the settlement will remain private, we wish each other personal happiness, professional success and peace in the future."The pair met on the set of the movie Honey Boy in 2018 and dated for nine months, before splitting in 2019 citing conflicting work in legal documents filed in 2020, Barnett accused LaBeouf of "relentless abuse" including "mental and verbal harassment" that eventually turned into "physical violence".She detailed incidents of LaBeouf waking her up in the middle of the night and "strangling" her, throwing her against a car during an argument and becoming angry when she spoke to other men. In a 2021 interview with Louis Theroux on his BBC Radio 4 Grounded podcast, Barnett said she felt "scared and intimidated and controlled" by LaBeouf, and was left with ongoing mental trauma from their relationship."I was left with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] from that, which again is just something that I don't think we really talk about as a society just in terms of the healing when leaving, and how much work that has to be done to recover, to get back to the person that you were before," she said at the previously told The New York Times that many of Barnett's allegations are not true but said he owed her and Karolyn Pho, another woman whose claims featured in the lawsuit, "the opportunity to air their statements publicly and [for me to] accept accountability for those things I have done"."I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years. I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I'm ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt. There is nothing else I can really say," he added in another released her latest album Eusexua earlier this year and has received multiple accolades including two Brit Award nominations for best British female solo latest film was this year's crime drama Henry Johnson. He is known for the Transformers franchise and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The Guardian
10 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘You think God didn't make gay men?' Comedian Leslie Jones on religion, grief and getting famous at 47
It's early evening in a photography studio in west London, and the American comedian Leslie Jones is capering about, dressed in a full-length gold lamé ballgown and smoking. 'Make me look skinny,' she says to the photographer's departing back. 'I'm 6ft tall – I can't cut my feet off,' she says, later. 'I can't stop being a scary motherfucker. This is who I am – let me work with who I am.' Yet, she is the opposite of scary. Statuesque, no question, but whatever she's doing, whether peering into a bag of fish and chips as if it's alive, or telling her assistant to read The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho's trust-the-universe novel, for the 100th time, there is always somebody laughing. She brings an air of deliberate chaos, which you just have to surrender to, wherever the conversation leads, until you find yourself nodding along with the most crackpot conclusion. (The birthrate is low because men spend too much time in hot tubs, and their sperm has become lazy and complacent? 'It's funny, but it's true. Go look that shit up – I'm not saying something that's not factual. I hope.') She knows this about herself: 'I'm the type of person who, if I'm happy, everybody in the room is going to be happy, and if I'm sad, it's going to be very quiet and tense. I'm a temperature guider in the room.' I didn't see her sad, so I only know that the first bit is true; not every comedian even wants to spread joy, but Jones wants to, and does so raucously, effortlessly. So it's a surprise that the first thoughts out of her mouth are serious ones. 'We're repeating the worst part of history right now,' she says, 'but maybe it's for the lesson that we didn't learn the last time.' We're talking about Donald Trump, of course, who that day had been blocked by a court in his attempt to end birthright citizenship, and imposed blanket tariffs on Canada and even more swingeing ones on Brazil. It sounds, though, as if she's saying this is part of God's plan. 'I definitely believe in something other than ourselves,' she says. 'I believe in a higher power. We're in his image. So when you see someone, you're looking at God.' It's hard (but maybe just for an atheist like me) to square this trenchant, evangelical certainty with her politics, and those, generally, of Saturday Night Live, the flagship US sketch show that doesn't just take casual aim at religiosity, but makes the most complicated, long-form scriptural points about race, politics, capitalism and Trumpism. Respect for faith at absolutely no time gets in the way of a joke. The problem, Jones says, is not God, but the rightwing capture of Christianity. 'He made all these animals, he made all these plants – you think he didn't make gay men? A transgender man or woman?' Yes, of course. 'How can you look at a platypus and not see a woman who is not as beautiful? Does that makes sense?' Not really, no. But even the intonation on 'platypus' is mysteriously hilarious. Her grandmother was funny, her dad was funny, her brother was 'kind of goofy funny'; if any of them had become comedians, she would have been out of a job, she says. 'My mom wasn't funny, but she was a very joyful woman.' Yet her childhood and indeed life have not been easy, as she detailed in her memoir, Leslie F*cking Jones, two years ago, which she prefaced: 'Now I'm gonna be honest: some of the details might be vague because a bitch is 55 and she's smoked a ton of weed. A lot of it is hazy, but I will give you the best recollection of it that I can.' Her dad was an army veteran who became an electrical engineer. He was also an alcoholic, who moved the family from Memphis to LA when he got a job at Stevie Wonder's radio station, but then lost that job. Meanwhile, her mother had a stroke when Jones was very young, and both parents died within six months of each other, her dad in 2000, her mum in 2001, when Jones was in her early 30s. Jones missed both funerals because she was working to pay for them. Her brother died in 2009, when he was only 38, having been found unconscious in a park in Santa Barbara. Jones describes her young life as a series of glorious flameouts. Having a natural height advantage, she wanted to be a basketball player. 'When I had my mind on it', she says, 'I was so good, but most of the time, I was inconsistent. But I could coach my ass off.' She got a basketball scholarship to Chapman University in California, then switched to Colorado State University, changed her major several times, started off doing computer science, dropped it, spent a term and some determination on being 'not just law enforcement, a serial-killer finder', but couldn't shoot a gun. 'I thought: 'I can be Columbo. You don't see him shooting a gun.' And everybody was like: 'Columbo totally had a gun. He was a cop.' Then I was going to be a lawyer, because I love to talk. I was not going to be a lawyer when they handed me all those books and wanted me to read them.' She eventually settled on communications. She was, however, a natural comic, winning 'funniest person on campus' in 1987. After that, 'there was never a point of giving up, because comedy was my thing. When it didn't pay the bills, I'd have to get a job and still be a comic. Because I'm a comic.' After the bereavements of the 00s, though, it was a different kind of comedy. Particularly after her brother died, 'I was evil. Not evil, just angry. Performing, and angry. My routine was raw, it started getting to where I thought: 'I don't give a fuck whether you all laugh.' I was destroying it. That's when I started wearing a mohawk. People thought I did it for fashion – no, I just didn't want to comb my hair. I was bare minimum getting out of bed.' She was taking drugs, she says, and she doesn't mean weed, 'I mean drugs drugs. Speed.' Of all the rotten substances, I say, why speed? 'Because I was having sex with a guy. I mean, listen, if we're going to be honest, let's be honest. He was hot, first of all. He was really good in bed. And he would do speed, so I did it because he would do it. I did not know how it was affecting me.' I come out of this unclear on a lot of the causal links, but with a pretty clear read on the mix of nihilism and life force that messed her up but propelled her along at the same time. 'I was like: 'Hey, everybody's gone; if it's time for me to die, then I'll die.' Then I saw this couple, who you could tell were on drugs, and I thought: 'That's going to be you if you don't stop this foolishness.' I busted up laughing. That was hilarious.' In 2013, Saturday Night Live held an unusual mid-season casting call to add at least one African American female comic to the cast, in response to the criticism by two cast members that the show was too white. Jones was hired as a writer, rather than a featured player, later appearing on screen the following May. At 47, she was the oldest new hire the show had ever made, but none of this was an easy fit. She was not political, she says. 'I was just a regular person that thought the government did its thing, I ain't got time to worry about what they doing, I'm going to work every day. If you guys raise the gas price, it doesn't matter, because I'm still going to put $20 in my car. I had not a clue. And you know, I am the average American. We just think, 'The government's going to take care of that shit,' and when people complain about the government, you think: 'Oh, that's just because you're trying to get one over on the government.' I might have been kind of a Trumper and didn't know it.' For a long time, she relentlessly harassed her main mark on the show, co-star Colin Jost, who she adored, wrestled and kind of manhandled in a way that really foregrounded her attachment to comedy so physical it's almost mime-adjacent. 'People don't understand in that first year, maybe the first two seasons, I was really in love with Colin. I didn't know how it was going to happen, whether we would just work late together and make out in his office and drink whiskey. I had all the visions. He was so cute, and funny, and he was just so white. Such a white nerd frat boy, that I was like: 'I want him.' Every time I would see him in the corridor, I'd shout: 'I love you, Colin, you beautiful white stud!'' Nothing came of the crush, except that it became a recurring joke on the show. Jost got together with Scarlett Johansson in 2017, and they married in 2020. Last year, Jones told Drew Barrymore on her chatshow that she'd sworn off men for good, having grown 'tired of raising boys', and she picks up this theme with gusto. 'People talk about society going through a 'lonely man' phase. It comes back to you all won't do the work to become the person that you really can be. You're waiting for me to solve your problems. You're waiting for me to give you permission. Grow up – I'm not Build-A-Bear. Fuck that shit. Every time I get on the dating apps, I'll be like: 'I want to call the FBI. All of the serial killers are here.'' If she struggled to settle in at SNL, it wasn't just because she wasn't 'woke' enough. She was also still grieving, and 'I was not acting out, but I wasn't well. I wasn't cognisant of how my behaviour was affecting others. I remember Lorne [Michaels, producer and creator of SNL] texting me; I had said, 'I'm so sorry how I'm acting,' and he said, 'I talk to my wife about a lot of things, and she says: 'I am so glad you are talking about these things, but can you not talk about them to me? Can you find somebody else?' That's when SNL found me a therapist.' She speaks more highly of therapy than anyone I've ever heard, but really for what it did for her comedy: 'To be a good comic, you have to go deep into yourself, and have empathy and love yourself. It takes years to get fucked up; it's gonna take years to clean up. So, you know when you go to a psychic?' Not really, but go on … 'And you're, like, 'Bitch, you're not going to tell me shit,' and then by the 40th minute, she has broken you down? That was therapy. It made me a better person, made me a better friend, for sure, made me a better comic.' Three years into her SNL work, she got the role of Patty Tolan in what turned out to be an ill-fated reboot of Ghostbusters, which spawned a depressing wave of racist and misogynistic abuse on what was then Twitter. 'The platform is the first thing I went after, because I was like: 'Hey, I'm in your club; you're supposed to have security. People are shooting at me. I shouldn't have death threats on here.' People were like, 'Ignore it', and I absolutely was not going to ignore it. I am so tired of this attitude, I am so tired of being the bigger person. No, meet these motherfuckers where they at and fight back. I am not a victim – you're an asshole. It's wild to me that we can build these glorious things, we can build an iPhone, and we still can't beat racism.' She left SNL in 2019, and has since hosted the reboot of Supermarket Sweep, as well as an MTV awards ceremony, guest-hosted The Daily Show, voiced animated projects for film and TV and written her memoir. For her next move, she says, 'I want to do a serious acting role, maybe play some kind of detective. I could find the serial killer or I could be the serial killer.' She dissolves into laughter, as it is not lost on her how often she talks about serial killers. In a way, there's nothing more serious than her mission as a comic to get funnier the worse things get. 'That's my job, to bring some joy – you can't cry all day. That's what they want, they want you sad. They want you to see no light.' Leslie Jones is on tour in the US from 19 September to 22 November
BBC News
10 minutes ago
- BBC News
Ozzy Osbourne: Bandmates and fans pay tribute to Black Sabbath singer
Fans, musicians and former bandmates have paid tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, the frontman of pioneering heavy metal band Black Sabbath, who has died aged Sabbath have "lost our brother", says the band's co-founder Tony Iommi, while bassist Terence "Geezer" Butler remembered their final gig and drummer Bill Ward shared a photo of them music icon's death on Tuesday, announced by his family, came just weeks after his band played their farewell gig in his home city of Birmingham."It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning," his family said. "He was with his family and surrounded by love." Osbourne, known for energetic and controversial live shows, inspired a generation of musicians. US heavy metal band Metallica said "it's impossible to put into words" what Osbourne meant to them."Hero, icon, pioneer, inspiration, mentor, and, most of all, friend are a few that come to mind," Metallica members Noah Abrams and Ross Halfin wrote on rock band Aerosmith called him "our brother in rock", saying its love "goes out to... the millions around the world who felt his fire".Less than three weeks ago, the self-styled "prince of darkness" performed in Birmingham supported by many of the musicians he had inspired, including Metallica and Guns 'n' Corgan, lead singer of The Smashing Pumpkins - one of the many bands that performed alongside them - said: "Some of the biggest musical artists in the world travelled from all over the world to be there literally to celebrate the legacy of this band."It's one of the greatest musical moments of my life," added Corgan, who spoke to BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight. "For him to have been that close to death on July 5 and still get up there and perform like he promised... Wow! That puts him in a category of his own," Sammy Hagar, the lead vocalist of Van Halen who also played at the farewell concert for Osbourne, wrote on shared fond memories of Osbourne's larger-than-life magazine's senior entertainment editor Jem Aswad recalled the first time he met Osbourne, he was "nervous" to meet the prince of darkness."It was just this sort of really bizarre scene," Aswad told the entered the room near noon in a bathrobe, having "just woken up", wearing loads of jewellery and accessories and "a lot of gold", Aswad said, though adding that Osbourne was "perfectly nice, perfectly friendly".Meanwhile, fans gathered at the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, where they laid flowers on the star dedicated to Osbourne. "Osbourne was more than a rock legend - he was a cultural icon who reshaped music and defied expectations," said Ana Martinez, the venue's Sabbath were pioneers in the heavy metal genre of music, writing classic tracks like Paranoid, War Pigs and Iron leaving the band in 1979 over rising tensions with its other members, Osbourne had a lengthy solo music career releasing more than a dozen albums. His debut single released the next year, Crazy Train, is arguably one of his most famous is survived by his wife Sharon and six children, three from each of his two marriages.
