
Why Malin Akerman connects her Hunting Wives character to Melania Trump
Akerman's character, a wealthy housewife, sees her expectations shift when her husband pursues a career in politics, mirroring Melania Trump's public trajectory.
The series, an adaptation of May Cobb's 2021 thriller, follows Sophie (Brittany Snow) as she moves to East Texas and becomes involved with a group of socialite housewives.
Akerman described Margo as a 'survivor' whose actions are driven by necessity to advance her personal agenda.
The Hunting Wives has recently seen a surge in viewership, ranking highly on Netflix's top 10 most-watched series.
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Daily Mirror
29 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
Thursday Murder Club creator shares 'mistake' with initial scripts
The film is based on Richard Osman's 2020 novel of the same name, but not everything has made it into the adaptation. The Thursday Murder Club, which now has a full trailer, airs on Netflix on August 28 and fans of Richard Osman's novel are desperate to see how it has been adapted for the small screen. Boasting a star-studded cast, the movie follows four retirees who spend their time solving cold case murders for fun, but they end up with a real whodunit on their hands. The film stars Helen Mirren as Elizabeth, Pierce Brosnan as Ron, Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim and Celia Imrie as Joyce, and it was directed by Chris Columbus. Chris said of the film: "There's a wonderful mystery at its core, so fans of detective and thriller films will not be disappointed. "Thematically, I found it interesting that at the heart of the novel, there are four elderly people, living in a retirement community, who are obsessed with death and murder. "They are in the last act of their lives, facing their own mortality, yet they are somehow obsessed with studying cold cases that deal with violent murders. I fell in love with that concept. It's darkly comedic and deeply emotional.' Translating the complex 350 page novel, which is full of plot twists, into a screenplay was actor and comedian Katy Brand's responsibility. 'I remember thinking 'there's so much to play with here – it's such an explosion of ideas.' My immediate sense regarding adapting the book was that I wanted to draw out the emotion and Chris Columbus seemed to respond to that when we first met," she said. Chris opened up about how he initially became involved in the project, admitting the first scripts were not to his liking. He said: "I was a fan of the books, but the initial scripts I read veered far from the novel. I felt that this was a mistake and I wanted to preserve what everyone loved about the book. "When I first met with the writer, Katy Brand, I was convinced that she not only understood what made the novel so incredibly popular with readers around the world. "But she also had the vision to write a film that was faithful to the source material. Katy's draft was wonderful. "And it was because of that draft that we were able to get so many British acting legends to commit to our film." The film also stars Naomi Ackie as PC Donna De Freitas, Daniel Mays as DCI Chris Hudson, Tom Ellis as Jason Ritchie, Jonathan Pryce as Stephen Best and David Tennant as Ian Ventham. The Thursday Murder Club airs on Netflix on August 28


The Guardian
29 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Can't pay, won't pay: impoverished streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy
With a trip to Florence booked, all I want is to rewatch Medici. The 2016 historical drama series tells of the rise of the powerful Florentine banking dynasty, and with it, the story of the Renaissance. Until recently, I could simply have gone to Netflix and found it there, alongside a wide array of award-winning and obscure titles. But when I Google the show in 2025, the Netflix link only takes me to a blank page. I don't see it on HBO Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, or any of the smaller streaming platforms. On Amazon Prime I am required to buy each of the three seasons or 24 episodes separately, whereupon they would be stored in a library subject to overnight deletion. Raised in the land of The Pirate Bay, the Swedish torrent index, I feel, for the first time in a decade, a nostalgia for the high seas of digital piracy. And I am not alone. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. For my teenage self in the 00s, torrenting was the norm. Need the new Coldplay album on your iPod? The Pirate Bay. The 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet? The Pirate Bay. Whatever you needed was accessible with just a couple of clicks. But as smartphones proliferated, so did Spotify, the music streaming platform that is also headquartered in Sweden. The same Scandinavian country had become a hub of illegal torrenting and simultaneously conjured forth its solution. 'Spotify would never have seen the light of day without The Pirate Bay,' Per Sundin, the then managing director of Universal Music Sweden, reflected in 2011. But music torrenting died out as we all either listened with ads or paid for the subscription. And when Netflix launched in Sweden in late 2012, open talk of torrenting moving images also stopped. Most of the big shows and a great collection of award-winning films could all be found for just 79 SEK (£6) a month. Meanwhile, the three founders of The Pirate Bay were arrested and eventually jailed. Pirating faded into the history books as far as I was concerned. A decade and a half on from the Pirate Bay trial, the winds have begun to shift. On an unusually warm summer's day, I sit with fellow film critics by the old city harbour, once a haven for merchants and, rumour has it, smugglers. Cold bigstrongs in hand (that's what they call pints up here), they start venting about the 'enshittification' of streaming – enshittification being the process by which platforms degrade their services and ultimately die in the pursuit of profit. Netflix now costs upwards of 199 SEK (£15), and you need more and more subscriptions to watch the same shows you used to find in one place. Most platforms now offer plans that, despite the fee, force advertisements on subscribers. Regional restrictions often compel users to use VPNs to access the full selection of available content. The average European household now spends close to €700 (£600) a year on three or more VOD subscriptions. People pay more and get less. A fellow film critic confides anonymously: 'I never stopped pirating, and my partner also does it if he doesn't find the precise edition he is looking for on DVD.' While some people never abandoned piracy, others admit they have recently returned – this time turning to unofficial streaming platforms. One commonly used app is legal but can, through community add-ons, channel illicit streams. 'Downloading is too difficult. I don't know where to start,' says one film viewer. 'The shady streams might bombard me with ads, but at least I don't have to worry about getting hacked or caught.' According to London‑based piracy monitoring and content‑protection firm MUSO, unlicensed streaming is the predominant source of TV and film piracy, accounting for 96% in 2023. Piracy reached a low in 2020, with 130bn website visits. But by 2024 that number had risen to 216bn. In Sweden, 25% of people surveyed reported pirating in 2024, a trend mostly driven by those aged 15 to 24. Piracy is back, just sailing under a different flag. 'Piracy is not a pricing issue,' Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world's largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. 'It's a service issue.' Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance. Whether piracy today is rebellion or resignation is almost irrelevant; the sails are hoisted either way. As the streaming landscape fractures into feudal territories, more viewers are turning to the high seas. The Medici understood the value linked to access. A client could travel from Rome to London and still draw on their credit, thanks to a network built on trust and interoperability. If today's studios want to survive the storm, they may need to rediscover that truth.


The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Drag Me to Hell star Lorna Raver dies aged 81 after lengthy career appearing in ER, Desperate Housewives & Star Trek
THE actress Lorna Raver, who starred in the horror movie Drag Me To Hell, has died at the age of 81. Raver died on May 12 but her death wasn't announced until earlier this week. 2 2 Her career spanned decades, which saw her make cameo appearances in shows such as ER, Desperate Housewives, and Star Trek: Voyager. .