Wild claims about ‘idolised' Netflix star
The extraordinary claims about Outback Wrangler Matt Wright were made this week during his trial in the Northern Territory Supreme Court, where he is charged with three counts of attempting to pervert the course of justice.
The 45-year-old celebrity is accused of failing to accurately record flight times in the Robinson-R-44 that crashed in February 2022, killing his co-star Chris 'Willow' Wilson. It is not alleged Mr Wright is responsible for the crash.
Mr Wilson, 34, was dangling from a sling attached to the helicopter during a dangerous crocodile egg collecting mission when the chopper crashed in Arnhem Land. Outback Wrangler Matt Wright is accused of fudging the chopper log books. NewsWire / Pema Tamang Pakhrin Credit: NewsWire
CHOPPER RECORDS ALLEGEDLY FUDGED
Pilot Seb Robinson, who survived the crash but is now a paraplegic, testified his former boss was an 'anti-vaxxer' despite Mr Wright going to two Covid restricted areas – the remote helicopter crash site and the injured pilot's Brisbane hospital room.
He told the jury the main reason Mr Wright was not on the egg mission was 'because he was an anti-vaxxer'.
At the time, there were strict Covid rules for anyone entering remote areas in the Territory, where they needed to provide proof of vaccination and take a rapid antigen test.
The jury previously heard Mr Wright flew to the crash site with Wild Harvest NT director Mick Burns and off-duty senior NT Police officer Neil Mellon.
Following the crash, Mr Robinson spent one month in hospital, where Covid restrictions meant two people could visit and everyone needed to provide a valid vaccination certificate.
Mr Robinson said he had just come out of a coma, was heavily sedated and 'hallucinating' but 'vaguely' remembered a visit from Mr Wright and his wife Kaia on March 11.
'I have a vivid memory of him having some sort of paperwork in his hands,' Mr Robinson said. Seb Robinson is now a paraplegic. Instagram Credit: News Corp Australia
He alleged his boss wanted to move 'a few' hours from the crashed helicopter – with the call sign IDW – to Mr Robinson's personal chopper, with the call sign ZXZ.
Mr Robinson, 28, also alleged Mr Wright 'asked to go through my phone and delete a few things'.
'I remember looking over and seeing him holding my phone and flicking through it and deleting things,' Mr Robinson said.
The jury heard the former pilot also deleted 'some stuff', including phone notes for start and stop times for IDW during egg collection trips.
'It was a very hard time for me. I didn't know who to trust and I panicked and went along with it,' he said.
Mr Robinson alleged on Mr Wright's second hospital visit he brought Jai Thomlinson to again discuss the transfer of hours from IDW to ZXZ.
'I just remember having concerns about what was happening,' Mr Robinson said.
'I said I didn't feel comfortable doing it,' he said.
'I don't think (Mr Wright) was upset … he sort of said: 'That's OK.''
A secret mobile audio recording of this hospital visit allegedly captured Mr Wright talking about IDW flight times over the phone.
Mr Robinson admitted he initially repeatedly lied to investigators because he 'panicked' and was worried about losing his pilot's licence. Chris Wilson's widow, Dani Wilson, has been attending the trial. NewsWire / Pema Tamang Pakhrin Credit: NewsWire
PILOT'S COCAINE PARTYING
Mr Robinson admitted he used cocaine 'a couple times a year' – up to 10 times over 12 months – but he denied he was a 'raging cocaine junkie'.
The former pilot said he had never flown a helicopter while intoxicated, either by drugs or alcohol.
He admitted he sometimes supplied cocaine for his mates and footy players, as well as flying small amounts of booze into Aboriginal communities.
But Mr Robinson denied being a 'drug dealer' while being questioned about a series of texts about his wild partying.
Mr Wright's defence counsel David Edwardson accused Mr Robinson of 'sourcing and supplying' cocaine from 2018 to the time of the crash.
Mr Edwardson read messages from the pilot's friends asking 'are you getting more coke?', 'Seb any chance you know where to get the good stuff?' and 'anyone got bags?'.
In one message exchange, Mr Robinson told a friend he was 'crook as a dog', with his mate replying 'snorting too much coke out of Matty's arse?'.
Mr Robinson said the friend knew Mr Wright. But the lawyer has said the reality star had a 'zero tolerance' approach to drugs.
Under cross-examination, Mr Robinson was also grilled about a message sent to a mate in November 2019, saying there were 'footy players in town wanting bags' and other texts referring to 'zingers' and 'pills'.
'Are you implying I'm a drug dealer? … No,' Mr Robinson said. Crown Prosecutor Jason Gullaci outside court. NewsWire / Pema Tamang Pakhrin Credit: NewsWire
While Mr Robinson did not believe he was a trafficker, Justice Alan Blow explained: 'It is trafficking, even if you're not making any money for yourself.'
Trace amounts of cocaine were detected in Mr Robinson's blood, which prosecutor Jason Gullaci said experts were likely to say was from use days before the crash.
Mr Robinson admitted to flying in booze to remote communities, but said he did not sell the alcohol.
He said 'on occasion' he would take a small amount of alcohol under the seat of his chopper for people in Arnhem Land.
PILOT'S INJURIES
Mr Robinson said his last memory from that fateful day was 'having a laugh' with his mate in the chopper.
The jury was shown a photo of Mr Wilson piloting the Robinson R-44, with the image appearing to capture the fuel gauge between three-quarters and completely full mark.
Mr Robinson said at that level, the helicopter should have been able to travel from Noonamah to King River and back.
He became emotional as he shared his next memory – waking up in hospital, then being told his friend was dead and he would likely never walk again.
Mr Robinson's spinal cord was completely severed, he had 12 broken ribs and puncturing in his lungs. His neck, elbow and both ankles were also fractured.
He said he struggled with his memory due to a traumatic brain injury. Mr Wright has pleaded not guilty to the charges. NewsWire / Pema Tamang Pakhrin Credit: NewsWire
NETFLIX STAR AN 'IDOL'
Fellow helicopter pilot Jock Purcell told the jury he took official aviation records from Mr Robinson's home two days after the crash but could not recall who asked him to do it.
He said he did not show the logbook to anyone or take photos of the official records, but was later asked by Mr Robinson to return the records.
'I took it home, and then Seb's brothers come and got it from my house,' Mr Purcell said.
However, in a tapped telephone conversation between Mr Purcell and Mr Wright five months after the crash, the pair allegedly discussed Mr Robinson talking to investigators, the crashed chopper's maintenance release and Hobbs Meter, which records flight hours.
'Something had gone on with the Hobbs there, I dunno, they've moved it forward or some f***ing thing as well,' Mr Wright said.
'I'm just trying to think how much Sebby's, or what Sebby's tried to say to them, if anything even.'
The pair then said some of that information could have been gathered from the maintenance release, which pilots fill out to record flight hours and service histories of helicopters.
Three years after the bugged call, Mr Purcell told the court he was unsure if it was related to the crash investigation.
Mr Purcell, who arrived at the crash scene, initially said he did not remember anyone approaching but then said the only thing removed were a few headsets.
However, under cross examination, Mr Purcell said: 'I know someone lifted the dash of the helicopter.' Outback Wrangler Matt Wright has been supported in court by his wife Kaia. NewsWire / Pema Tamang Pakhrin Credit: NewsWire
Mr Purcell said he checked to see why the chopper might have gone down, and happened to notice the Hobbs Meter was connected.
But Mr Gullaci alleged the sole purpose for Mr Purcell to look under the dash was to inspect this device 'because you knew there was a practice among Matt Wright's helicopters of the Hobbs Meter being disconnected'.
'And you wanted to see whether it was connected or not, for when investigators turned up to look at the crashed helicopter?' Mr Gullaci asked.
Mr Purcell said he did not believe that was the case.
When asked what else he could have been inspecting, the experienced pilot said: 'I'm not an investigator so I don't know.'
However, Mr Purcell had already conceded there was a pattern of not recording flight hours, and had previously seen both Mr Wright and Mr Robinson disconnect the Hobbs Meter. Helicopter pilot Jock Purcell worked for Outback Wrangler Matt Wright. Credit: News Corp Australia
He said there were times when the flight hour recorder was disconnected because 'it was getting close to service'.
Mr Robinson also made full admissions to the jury of his own dodgy record keeping practices, which he said were common across the Territory helicopter industry.
After almost a decade in the industry, Mr Robinson alleged he had worked for two other businesses which had similarly failed to properly record flight hours.
Mr Robinson agreed he continued to 'break the rules' while working at Mr Wright's company.
'(Mr Wright) would say 'pop the clock for this trip',' Mr Robinson alleged.
He also said Mr Wright 'controlled all aspects of his aircraft regarding maintenance scheduling'.
Mr Robinson said employees 'absolutely' followed Mr Wright's directions.
'We were young men, we looked up to him,' he said.
'Everyone looked at Matt as an idol. He'd say 'jump' and they'd say 'how high?'
'He had an aura about him.
'Everyone wanted to be around him, work for him, everyone bent over backwards to try and be a part of what he was doing.'
The trial continues.
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Sydney Morning Herald
2 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back
This story is part of the August 17 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. There is something deliciously subversive about Uma Thurman. We are talking over Zoom, Thurman in the top-floor bedroom of her rural retreat just outside New York, wearing what looks like a gamekeeper's gilet, with no make-up and her hair unruly; gorgeous even when off-duty. 'You don't want to make a girl be obedient; it's not in her best interests,' she is saying, her voice patrician but her smile somehow naughty; it's in her eyes, too. We are talking about our daughters, both 13 and liable to barge in at any moment despite being told not to. 'It's kind of wonderful that they know the rules and don't always listen.' She could be talking about herself. Thurman – famous for her totemic performances in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2, as well as for movies like the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons, the sci-fi Gattaca and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac – likes to confound expectations. After Pulp Fiction, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, she did not make a big-budget film for three years. And since making Kill Bill, in which she plays a vengeful assassin expertly schooled in martial arts, she has not wielded a sword on screen. Instead, she has spent the past two decades turning down action roles, doing rom-coms and contemporary drama and appearing on Broadway. 'I did anything but, many times,' she says. 'I didn't grind out a whole bunch of follow-up action movies because I felt I had done something significant in the field. And it was fun to not overplay it,' she says with a smile. 'But at the same time I can't stay out of it forever.' And so we now have two opportunities to see Thurman kick butt once again. In fact, towards the end of the new Netflix film The Old Guard 2, there is a scene that will have a certain sort of cineaste very excited indeed. Thurman, who plays a jaded 5000-year-old immortal called Discord, has an epic sword fight in front of a secret nuclear facility with her fellow immortal, Andromache, played by Charlize Theron – also a co-producer of the film and its predecessor. 'Andy' is a Scythian warrior whose preferred weapon is a hefty axe. It's Kill Bill' s bloody Bride versus Mad Max' s Imperator Furiosa, two icons of female vengeance and power, a fever dream of steel on steel. And even though it has been more than 20 years, Thurman, now 55, hasn't forgotten all her moves. 'Thank God for that, because I signed on quite late for this project so I didn't have time to do proper training,' she says. 'Fortunately I had put in hundreds of hours learning how to hold a sword.' For the two Kill Bill films, Thurman trained for eight hours a day for three months. 'You may not be limber and strong,' she continues, 'but if your brain has learnt how to memorise sequences of movements, you can get back in that zone.' The film, which is based on a comic book, is essentially about a band of age-old warriors using their supernatural powers to assist their less-gifted fellow humans. Theron's Andy is their leader, and both the original and the sequel were directed by women, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Victoria Mahoney respectively. 'With The Old Guard, I thought that first movie was really unusual, a superb female-led action film that had depth, drama and really beautiful, naturalistic acting,' Thurman says. Another draw was the opportunity to work with Theron. 'Charlize is a miraculous performer, a very powerful individual and as charismatic in person as on screen. And I liked the idea of playing a supporting role to another actress who I thought had done really significant work in the drama/action field.' Likewise, Theron had long wanted to cross swords with Thurman. 'I have always admired Uma from afar,' she reveals via email. 'From Dangerous Liaisons to Kill Bill, her work is a masterclass in finding the micro in characters. She knows exactly how to change her cadence in a second to convey something so intimate, so subtle, just out of nowhere. In moments I got so lost watching her in scenes we had together that I had to remind myself I was in the scene with her. She's that captivating! I love her curiosity. Her willingness to switch things on the spot. And her truly good nature. She is kind to the bone.' Thurman's other big project this year is Dexter: Resurrection, a reboot of the celebrated mid-noughties TV series Dexter about a serial killer with a moral compass. In this new season, Michael C. Hall returns in the titular role, while Thurman plays the head of security to a billionaire, played by Peter Dinklage, who is so obsessed with serial killers that he hosts a sort of psychopaths' convention in his fancy mansion. In the second episode we see Thurman's character about to do away with an errant serial killer with a nail-studded baseball bat. 'It has a real black humour to it, but it takes itself seriously enough that it doesn't take the bite out of the blackness,' she says. Thurman was 24 when she appeared in Pulp Fiction. She played Mia Wallace, the wife of a crime boss. She danced barefoot with John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, overdosed on heroin, was brought around by a shot of adrenaline to the heart and became a cultural icon: her black-fringed bob and monochrome wardrobe a defining 1990s aesthetic. Thurman says she didn't realise the film would have such an impact while she was making it. 'I knew it was special, you could tell from the writing, the uniqueness, but it was a relatively small film.' And by this point she had been working as an actress for nearly a decade. Thurman's childhood defied conventions. Her father, Robert Thurman, is one of the world's foremost professors of Tibetan Buddhism, having been ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama in 1965. In 1967 he married the German-Swedish model turned psychotherapist Nena von Schlebrügge, who had been previously married to the LSD guru Timothy Leary. The pair bought some land in Massachusetts, built a house and raised their four children, three boys and Uma, although there were occasional stints in India. 'I didn't really understand that I was an American until I was about 13,' Thurman says. 'I was raised by a very European woman, so it was kind of late news to me that I wasn't really a Swedish girl.' Both of her parents were extraordinary in their own ways. 'My mother had a very eventful life. She was discovered by [British photographer] Norman Parkinson in a schoolyard in Stockholm when she was 13. He took a test photo of her and gave her his card. Two years later, when she was 15 or 16, she took off, rang him up and became a model.' So when Thurman, aged 15, her parents on sabbatical in Japan, decided to leave her boarding school to go to New York, by herself, to pursue an acting career, her parents did not try to stop her. 'I knew very clearly that I was going to be an actress and I very much wanted to go out on my own,' she says. 'Both my parents did the same sort of thing when they were young. They were very independent. So I think there was a certain amount of being raised to be independent.' Today Thurman has her own family. There are her children from her second marriage to her Gattaca co-star Ethan Hawke: Maya Hawke, 27, and Levon Hawke, 23, both in the family business. (Thurman's first marriage, to Gary Oldman, was brief and tempestuous; she was 19 and he was 31, and they divorced in 1992.) The father of Thurman's 13-year-old, Luna, is the financier Arpad 'Arki' Busson, with whom Thurman had a relationship between 2007 and 2014. As a mother she finds the freedoms she was given as a teenage girl 'mind-boggling. I mean, it's unimaginable. Those were different times.' Aged 15, she was making her own money, finding her way around the city, going to auditions, 'with just a Filofax and a quarter in case I got lost and needed to call someone'. She did some modelling to help pay for acting classes, appearing on the cover of British Vogue in 1985, travelling to Europe for work. Thurman says this period was both scary and exciting. 'It was very much navigating an adult world, so there was a lot of pretending to be older.' Aged 17, she was cast in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as the goddess Venus, emerging naked from an enormous clamshell, her husband, the uxorious Vulcan, played by Oliver Reed. 'That really turned the dial for me,' she says. 'Before that, a part of me didn't know whether it would all be a dead end, as a good Swede is likely to tell you. It was at that moment I realised that I wasn't going back to school. Seeing a great director on a mad project, it was the moment I saw that I was truly on my path.' The path was never direct. Thurman's approach has always been to jump between genres, to take on odd projects, like Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, rather than obvious ones, like The Lord of the Rings. This was in part because she did not have formal training as an actor and so saw each project as an opportunity to learn. 'I kept finding different, unique projects that would really require me to stretch. And from that kind of elasticity, that's how I helped myself grow.' Loading I ask what advice she has given to her daughter Maya. 'Oh, she knows what she's doing. She went to [the acting school] Juilliard, thank god. She actually finished high school. And what I did learn [about mothering] is that nobody listens. So it's really about being there for them rather than telling them what to do.' She has let Maya have free range in her wardrobe, ransacking it for the Nineties classics; Thurman was famously the first person to wear Prada to the Oscars. 'There's very little left of it; she's done a good job,' she says, not seeming to mind. 'I don't spend a lot of my everyday life dressing up.' After almost three decades of parenting, with her youngest now a teenager, Thurman is reaching what she calls her 'sunset period' of mothering. 'It's beautiful and there's not that much time left in the day,' she says. She is starting to think about what comes next, when she doesn't have to invest so much energy in 'shopping and driving and emailing teachers and all the things we do'. She has always had an ambition to direct, but that is for when she has more time. For now she's still just trying to fit it all in: work, parenting, looking after herself. To relax she does yoga and Pilates, goes for walks, cooks. She used to be a big reader of non-fiction but no more. 'Now non-fiction is just too brutal,' she says. I ask what she does read. 'Oh, the world has driven me to romantasy. Really, really teenage stuff. It's a great alternative to the newspapers right now.' Does she have any recommendations? 'I can't tell you. It will make me blush,' she says, smiling, delighted, it seems, to continue to defy expectations. The Sunday Times/The Times UK
The Age
2 hours ago
- The Age
Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back
This story is part of the August 17 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories. There is something deliciously subversive about Uma Thurman. We are talking over Zoom, Thurman in the top-floor bedroom of her rural retreat just outside New York, wearing what looks like a gamekeeper's gilet, with no make-up and her hair unruly; gorgeous even when off-duty. 'You don't want to make a girl be obedient; it's not in her best interests,' she is saying, her voice patrician but her smile somehow naughty; it's in her eyes, too. We are talking about our daughters, both 13 and liable to barge in at any moment despite being told not to. 'It's kind of wonderful that they know the rules and don't always listen.' She could be talking about herself. Thurman – famous for her totemic performances in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Volume 2, as well as for movies like the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons, the sci-fi Gattaca and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac – likes to confound expectations. After Pulp Fiction, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe, she did not make a big-budget film for three years. And since making Kill Bill, in which she plays a vengeful assassin expertly schooled in martial arts, she has not wielded a sword on screen. Instead, she has spent the past two decades turning down action roles, doing rom-coms and contemporary drama and appearing on Broadway. 'I did anything but, many times,' she says. 'I didn't grind out a whole bunch of follow-up action movies because I felt I had done something significant in the field. And it was fun to not overplay it,' she says with a smile. 'But at the same time I can't stay out of it forever.' And so we now have two opportunities to see Thurman kick butt once again. In fact, towards the end of the new Netflix film The Old Guard 2, there is a scene that will have a certain sort of cineaste very excited indeed. Thurman, who plays a jaded 5000-year-old immortal called Discord, has an epic sword fight in front of a secret nuclear facility with her fellow immortal, Andromache, played by Charlize Theron – also a co-producer of the film and its predecessor. 'Andy' is a Scythian warrior whose preferred weapon is a hefty axe. It's Kill Bill' s bloody Bride versus Mad Max' s Imperator Furiosa, two icons of female vengeance and power, a fever dream of steel on steel. And even though it has been more than 20 years, Thurman, now 55, hasn't forgotten all her moves. 'Thank God for that, because I signed on quite late for this project so I didn't have time to do proper training,' she says. 'Fortunately I had put in hundreds of hours learning how to hold a sword.' For the two Kill Bill films, Thurman trained for eight hours a day for three months. 'You may not be limber and strong,' she continues, 'but if your brain has learnt how to memorise sequences of movements, you can get back in that zone.' The film, which is based on a comic book, is essentially about a band of age-old warriors using their supernatural powers to assist their less-gifted fellow humans. Theron's Andy is their leader, and both the original and the sequel were directed by women, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Victoria Mahoney respectively. 'With The Old Guard, I thought that first movie was really unusual, a superb female-led action film that had depth, drama and really beautiful, naturalistic acting,' Thurman says. Another draw was the opportunity to work with Theron. 'Charlize is a miraculous performer, a very powerful individual and as charismatic in person as on screen. And I liked the idea of playing a supporting role to another actress who I thought had done really significant work in the drama/action field.' Likewise, Theron had long wanted to cross swords with Thurman. 'I have always admired Uma from afar,' she reveals via email. 'From Dangerous Liaisons to Kill Bill, her work is a masterclass in finding the micro in characters. She knows exactly how to change her cadence in a second to convey something so intimate, so subtle, just out of nowhere. In moments I got so lost watching her in scenes we had together that I had to remind myself I was in the scene with her. She's that captivating! I love her curiosity. Her willingness to switch things on the spot. And her truly good nature. She is kind to the bone.' Thurman's other big project this year is Dexter: Resurrection, a reboot of the celebrated mid-noughties TV series Dexter about a serial killer with a moral compass. In this new season, Michael C. Hall returns in the titular role, while Thurman plays the head of security to a billionaire, played by Peter Dinklage, who is so obsessed with serial killers that he hosts a sort of psychopaths' convention in his fancy mansion. In the second episode we see Thurman's character about to do away with an errant serial killer with a nail-studded baseball bat. 'It has a real black humour to it, but it takes itself seriously enough that it doesn't take the bite out of the blackness,' she says. Thurman was 24 when she appeared in Pulp Fiction. She played Mia Wallace, the wife of a crime boss. She danced barefoot with John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, overdosed on heroin, was brought around by a shot of adrenaline to the heart and became a cultural icon: her black-fringed bob and monochrome wardrobe a defining 1990s aesthetic. Thurman says she didn't realise the film would have such an impact while she was making it. 'I knew it was special, you could tell from the writing, the uniqueness, but it was a relatively small film.' And by this point she had been working as an actress for nearly a decade. Thurman's childhood defied conventions. Her father, Robert Thurman, is one of the world's foremost professors of Tibetan Buddhism, having been ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama in 1965. In 1967 he married the German-Swedish model turned psychotherapist Nena von Schlebrügge, who had been previously married to the LSD guru Timothy Leary. The pair bought some land in Massachusetts, built a house and raised their four children, three boys and Uma, although there were occasional stints in India. 'I didn't really understand that I was an American until I was about 13,' Thurman says. 'I was raised by a very European woman, so it was kind of late news to me that I wasn't really a Swedish girl.' Both of her parents were extraordinary in their own ways. 'My mother had a very eventful life. She was discovered by [British photographer] Norman Parkinson in a schoolyard in Stockholm when she was 13. He took a test photo of her and gave her his card. Two years later, when she was 15 or 16, she took off, rang him up and became a model.' So when Thurman, aged 15, her parents on sabbatical in Japan, decided to leave her boarding school to go to New York, by herself, to pursue an acting career, her parents did not try to stop her. 'I knew very clearly that I was going to be an actress and I very much wanted to go out on my own,' she says. 'Both my parents did the same sort of thing when they were young. They were very independent. So I think there was a certain amount of being raised to be independent.' Today Thurman has her own family. There are her children from her second marriage to her Gattaca co-star Ethan Hawke: Maya Hawke, 27, and Levon Hawke, 23, both in the family business. (Thurman's first marriage, to Gary Oldman, was brief and tempestuous; she was 19 and he was 31, and they divorced in 1992.) The father of Thurman's 13-year-old, Luna, is the financier Arpad 'Arki' Busson, with whom Thurman had a relationship between 2007 and 2014. As a mother she finds the freedoms she was given as a teenage girl 'mind-boggling. I mean, it's unimaginable. Those were different times.' Aged 15, she was making her own money, finding her way around the city, going to auditions, 'with just a Filofax and a quarter in case I got lost and needed to call someone'. She did some modelling to help pay for acting classes, appearing on the cover of British Vogue in 1985, travelling to Europe for work. Thurman says this period was both scary and exciting. 'It was very much navigating an adult world, so there was a lot of pretending to be older.' Aged 17, she was cast in Terry Gilliam's film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as the goddess Venus, emerging naked from an enormous clamshell, her husband, the uxorious Vulcan, played by Oliver Reed. 'That really turned the dial for me,' she says. 'Before that, a part of me didn't know whether it would all be a dead end, as a good Swede is likely to tell you. It was at that moment I realised that I wasn't going back to school. Seeing a great director on a mad project, it was the moment I saw that I was truly on my path.' The path was never direct. Thurman's approach has always been to jump between genres, to take on odd projects, like Gus Van Sant's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, rather than obvious ones, like The Lord of the Rings. This was in part because she did not have formal training as an actor and so saw each project as an opportunity to learn. 'I kept finding different, unique projects that would really require me to stretch. And from that kind of elasticity, that's how I helped myself grow.' Loading I ask what advice she has given to her daughter Maya. 'Oh, she knows what she's doing. She went to [the acting school] Juilliard, thank god. She actually finished high school. And what I did learn [about mothering] is that nobody listens. So it's really about being there for them rather than telling them what to do.' She has let Maya have free range in her wardrobe, ransacking it for the Nineties classics; Thurman was famously the first person to wear Prada to the Oscars. 'There's very little left of it; she's done a good job,' she says, not seeming to mind. 'I don't spend a lot of my everyday life dressing up.' After almost three decades of parenting, with her youngest now a teenager, Thurman is reaching what she calls her 'sunset period' of mothering. 'It's beautiful and there's not that much time left in the day,' she says. She is starting to think about what comes next, when she doesn't have to invest so much energy in 'shopping and driving and emailing teachers and all the things we do'. She has always had an ambition to direct, but that is for when she has more time. For now she's still just trying to fit it all in: work, parenting, looking after herself. To relax she does yoga and Pilates, goes for walks, cooks. She used to be a big reader of non-fiction but no more. 'Now non-fiction is just too brutal,' she says. I ask what she does read. 'Oh, the world has driven me to romantasy. Really, really teenage stuff. It's a great alternative to the newspapers right now.' Does she have any recommendations? 'I can't tell you. It will make me blush,' she says, smiling, delighted, it seems, to continue to defy expectations. The Sunday Times/The Times UK
Perth Now
14 hours ago
- Perth Now
Quentin Tarantino explains why he pulled the plug on The Movie Critic
Quentin Tarantino "wasn't really that excited" about The Movie Critic. The 62-year-old director has long declared he will retire after making his 10th movie and after previously announcing what his last project would be, it was revealed last April he had had a change of heart, and he's now shared some insight into his decision. Speaking on The Church of Tarantino podcast, the Kill Bill filmmaker was "very happy" with what he had originally written as an eight-part series before turning it into a script for a feature film, but ultimately lost enthusiasm in pre-production. He said: 'No one's waiting for this thing per se. I mean, I can do it whenever I want. I mean, it's already written. So OK, let me just not start it right now. 'Let me try writing it as a movie and let me see if it's better that way. And I was like, 'Oh, OK, no, I think this is going to be the movie.' And then it wasn't. I pulled the plug on it. And the reason I pulled the plug, it's a little crazy.' Tarantino noted he "really,really likes" The Movie Critic but it had given him a "challenge". He said: "There was a challenge that I gave to myself when I did it. Can I take the most boring profession in the world and make it an interesting movie? 'Every Tarantino title promises so much, except The Movie Critic. 'Who wants to see a TV show about a f***ing movie critic? Who wants to see a movie called The Movie Critic? If I can actually make a movie or a TV show about somebody who watches movies interesting, that is an accomplishment... "'I was so excited about the writing, but I wasn't really that excited about dramatising what I wrote once we were in pre-production.' Tarantino dismissed reports that Brad Pitt would reprise his One Upon a Time... in Hollywood character Cliff Booth for The Movie Critic. He said: 'It's a spiritual sequel to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood in so far as they take place in the same world and they take place in the same town. But there were no crossover characters. Cliff Booth was never in The Movie Critic. That's all a bunch of bull****. That never was the case ever, ever, ever.' The director had set The Movie Critic in California in 1977 and it was 'based on a guy who really lived but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.' While there were no plans for Brad to return as Cliff in the film, the actor will be portraying the stuntman again in Netflix's upcoming off-shoot The Adventures of Cliff Booth, which will be directed by David Fincher.
