Jackie Chan thought Michael Cera was a competition winner
The martial arts legend was at the BBC Radio 2 studios to promote his new film 'The Karate Kid: Legends', while Michael had been plugging his latest project 'The Phoenician Scheme', and when he heard Jackie was in the building, he couldn't resist the chance to get his photo taken with him, though he admitted the 71-year-old star had no idea who he was.
Speaking to NME, Michael explained a photographer told him Jackie was in the building.
He added: 'She asked if I knew Jackie Chan, which I don't, so she said 'come meet him'. That was that.
'When I met him though, he was like 'who is this person, what's going on?'. We took a picture but I think he thought I was a competition winner.
"He was like, 'OK let's do a picture real quick. Come on.' Not rudely. But I felt like I was invading his little personal time with his team before he goes on the radio.
"So I was like, 'What am I doing here?' But everyone was very sweet and I got to meet Jackie.'
The 36-year-old actor is a big fan of the Beatles and though he thinks it would be "cool" to meet surviving band members Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Ringo Starr, he'd also find it "weird".
He said of the possibility: 'It would be cool but also strange. I don't know what I'd say [if I did meet them]. It would be weird to say anything. They'd be so bored by whatever I had to say, because they've heard it eight billion times from every other person on the planet. It must be hard to be a Beatle.'
Michael - who has two sons with wife Nadine - released his debut album 'True That' in 2014 but hasn't released further music since 2017's 'Best I Can' and admitted he simply doesn't have the time to work on any at the moment.
He said: 'I haven't really been creating any music recently.
'I play music every day but I have little kids now, so I just don't have time or focus to do anything productive in that way. I hope to again though.
"Normally [everything I make] is for a specific project or has a specific intention but it's just my time management [right now].'
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Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Still stings': Why Carey Mulligan is tapping into childhood heartbreak over Take That split
There's one scene in Get Back that will break any Beatles fan's heart. John and Paul are facing each other on the studio floor, guitars in hand, eagerly tallying the new titles they're in the throes of recording. Two of Us, Oh Darling, Don't Let Me Down … 'There's a story,' McCartney observes. Lennon laughs. 'Yeah, it's like you and me are lovers.' It really is, in that blissful moment of creation. Even if the whole blessed affair would so soon be over forever, leaving the world to an era of mourning and denial not uncommon to broken marriages, but of exceptional duration and intensity. 'Didn't you feel, when you watched that documentary, that they broke up again?' Carey Mulligan enquires, leaning forward with dark eyes pleading like only Mulligan's eyes can. 'I remember at the end of that feeling devastated. Did you watch that, Tom?' Tom Basden nods. It's still painful and beautiful and complicated — very much like the bittersweet terrain of their film, The Ballad of Wallis Island. Its story revolves around another musical-romantic break-up: a long-ago separation made infinitely more difficult by a shared catalogue of cherished songs. In some of its more intimate scenes, 'that Beatles documentary is definitely the spirit that we were trying to tap into', says Basden, who wrote the film with his longstanding comedy partner, Tim Key. 'You see two people totally at ease with each other but there's just so much going on underneath.' So much. The Ballad of Wallis Island is a kind of musically coded three-way romcom. Mulligan and Basden play Nell Mortimer and Herb McGwyer, a British folk duo that split nine years earlier. They're brought back together by Charles (Key), an eccentric 'superfan' who lures them to his island for a cosy reunion show. Charles is evidently at the traumatised end of the spectrum, but it's fair to say that all music fans are the recovering children of broken bands. 'I was only eight when the Smiths broke up,' Basden says, 'so I sort of missed the heartbreak part, but…' The words for his loss still elude him. 'I took it pretty hard when Take That broke up,' Mulligan confesses. She was 10, already writing letters to Kenneth Branagh but more than a decade away from her first BAFTA and her first Oscar nomination for Lone Scherfig's An Education. The Take That slap 'still stings', she says, drawing her jacket around her shoulders. The chill can linger, for sure. I remember interviewing a man who had travelled the world to confide in all four estranged members of ABBA, finally weeping in the arms of an adorably sympathetic Anni-Frid Lyngstad at some stage door in Europe. Super or regular, fans command powerful energy like that. Remember watching Simon and Garfunkel succumb to public demand — heavy word, demand — for that sweet but awkward Central Park reunion? Shades of a hostage video. Fans and money are reckless collaborators. The duress is more subtle in Wallis Island — certainly financial but driven mostly by the aching need of the jovial if obviously haunted Charles. From here, we can identify the common delusion of para-social attachment in his obsession with Herb and Nell's pastoral folk-harmony past. He would just call it love. We can't blame him. It's soaked into the songs, from the opening needle-drop close-up to the crucial coda beneath the closing credits. Written by Basden in the eerie nostalgic register of lost early '70s folkie Nick Drake, they act in the film exactly as they did for the actors: a map into the broken heart of McGwyer-Mortimer's past. 'The more that I got to know the songs, the more I understood of Nell and Herb's history as a couple,' Mulligan says. 'I found it really emotional and sweet, the heartbreak of one of them not being able to play those songs, and the other one being fine playing those songs … 'We would practice,' she says, 'in the makeup van when we were getting ready. But they had so much history already baked in … throwing back to a time where they were falling in love and they were young and happy, and then you knew the songs that were the heartbreak songs ...' 'I had a very nervous time waiting for her to get back to me after I sent her all my dodgy home demos,' Basden says, not unreasonably. Not only is Mulligan among the most highly regarded actresses in Hollywood (Gatsby, Drive, Shame, Promising Young Woman), she's married to Marcus Mumford of folk-rock chartbusters Mumford & Sons. The songwriter's self-doubt proved unfounded, but getting the songs up to operating temperature was more challenging. The low-budget shoot on a weathered outcrop of Carmarthenshire on the Welsh coast spanned just 18 days between Mulligan's commitments to Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Adam Sandler's Spaceman and the birth of her third child. 'We were fighting against the weather and the tide and all these things,' Basden says, confiding he was sure that Mulligan was going to quit after day one. 'We had to just kind of attack it and trust our instincts, but there is a real benefit in not overthinking stuff and analysing the joy out of it. 'We found a tone that we all really liked, and we just played with it, both in terms of the dialogue and the music. Hopefully, you do feel that organic connection. There are moments in the film — little laughs, nods, little exchanges happening — that are somewhere between the characters and us.' 'Somewhere between the characters and us' is, as it happens, exactly the space where this story resonates. It's the space where all great actors and singers blur into their songs and stories and, if the illusion is truthful enough, where fans fall head over heels after them. Forever. As potent as the Mulligan-Basden-McGwyer-Mortimer chemistry is, the film's bigger love story is between Charles and their songs: a world suspended in the past where his ideal of romantic union can live on without end. That story plays out between Basden and Key, partners for decades on stage and screen (and apart: see Ricky Gervais' Brent; Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge). They developed their first film from their award-winning two-handed short of 2007, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, also directed by James Griffith. In another neat meta-twist, Mulligan was a big fan. 'I loved the short so much,' she says, 'and I just wanted to be in the film. That was my first reaction: just to get to watch these two work because I love their dynamics so much. I thought 'Great, I can get a front-row seat to watch Tim and Tom be very funny'. 'The more emotional side of it came when we really figured out what's happening. At least I did. When I got on set it was like, 'Oh, this friendship between these two men is really something special'.' Basden says the spark for Wallis Island goes back around 25 years, to a night when he and Key were hired for a private comedy gig in some wealthy Devon family's dining room: 'eight posh people, sort of watching and then saying, 'No, can we have the other chap back?'' The gig was funny, humiliating and transactional. In the film, Charles' money buys more than a gig. It buys intimacy, or at least the illusion of it: the same illusion that makes us think that ABBA or Simon and Garfunkel or Oasis or Fleetwood Mac or the Bootleg Beatles should get back together: because we love their songs that much. The tension is comic when Key and Basden play it, but the questions it raises are not trivial. What do artists owe their fans? Not their souls, but not nothing either. Basden shrugs: 'I'm not famous enough for it to be a real issue. I have a few superfans but they're lovely. Most of the time I just feel compelled, when I meet a musician I love, to tell them how much they mean to me. And then I regret it because I've probably just made their day worse.' Mulligan feels the line is different in music than in acting. When a film is over, audiences generally understand the actors were pretending. Maybe it's something about the way songs endlessly conjure the same emotion, whether echoing in our heads or streaming in our supermarkets, that makes us believe the singer is stuck inside them. 'Music soundtracks life,' she says. 'I felt it the other day. I was watching Madison Cunningham performing … and she sang this song I listened to on repeat when my third child was born, Life According to Raechel.' It's a song, not irrelevantly, with themes of regret, memory and cherishing what remains. 'I was just sobbing in the wings because she sang it unbelievably beautifully, but also because I had connected that song to this moment in my life that was so beautiful and gorgeous. I just stood there crying, she came offstage and I threw my arms around her, and she probably didn't need that … 'You do form these incredible bonds with words and songs, and then through that route to the musicians. That's undeniable.' Bonds between cinema fans and The Ballad of Wallis Island have forged strong and fast. Mulligan has spent 'the last couple of months sitting with audiences who are not just hysterically laughing, but also lots of grown men crying. 'Really, that hasn't happened much in my career at all. I said to Tom after the screening at Sundance, 'By the way, this isn't normal for people to react like this to a film: everyone cries and gives a standing ovation for 10 minutes. This is because this film is so special'.' Credited to Basden and Mulligan, the film's soundtrack album is special too. Its hundreds of thousands of streams won't trouble Mumford & Sons for a while, but it's an apt slow burn for a semi-mythical folk duo who were only ever a cult act in somebody's movie. Loading Weird, though, how the make-believe duo's songs are now free to circulate like any other band's lost classic, ready to be folded into weddings, break-ups and other real-life memories of joy and grief and movies. 'The music will always be very special to me. Big time,' Mulligan says. 'I mean, my baby was 10 weeks old when we started, and we shot it basically where I went on all my summer holidays when I was a kid. It was just the most joyful, lovely and probably the shortest shoot I've ever been involved in. I was really sad when my bit was done.' Asked how he'll feel when he hears it streaming in a supermarket in 20 years' time, Basden isn't so sure. 'I imagine I'll probably feel a bit like Herb, and a bit soggy-eyed about this great time that we had in Wales making this film … and I'll also be listening to things that I did slightly wrong in the guitar playing.'
The Age
a day ago
- The Age
‘Still stings': Why Carey Mulligan is tapping into childhood heartbreak over Take That split
There's one scene in Get Back that will break any Beatles fan's heart. John and Paul are facing each other on the studio floor, guitars in hand, eagerly tallying the new titles they're in the throes of recording. Two of Us, Oh Darling, Don't Let Me Down … 'There's a story,' McCartney observes. Lennon laughs. 'Yeah, it's like you and me are lovers.' It really is, in that blissful moment of creation. Even if the whole blessed affair would so soon be over forever, leaving the world to an era of mourning and denial not uncommon to broken marriages, but of exceptional duration and intensity. 'Didn't you feel, when you watched that documentary, that they broke up again?' Carey Mulligan enquires, leaning forward with dark eyes pleading like only Mulligan's eyes can. 'I remember at the end of that feeling devastated. Did you watch that, Tom?' Tom Basden nods. It's still painful and beautiful and complicated — very much like the bittersweet terrain of their film, The Ballad of Wallis Island. Its story revolves around another musical-romantic break-up: a long-ago separation made infinitely more difficult by a shared catalogue of cherished songs. In some of its more intimate scenes, 'that Beatles documentary is definitely the spirit that we were trying to tap into', says Basden, who wrote the film with his longstanding comedy partner, Tim Key. 'You see two people totally at ease with each other but there's just so much going on underneath.' So much. The Ballad of Wallis Island is a kind of musically coded three-way romcom. Mulligan and Basden play Nell Mortimer and Herb McGwyer, a British folk duo that split nine years earlier. They're brought back together by Charles (Key), an eccentric 'superfan' who lures them to his island for a cosy reunion show. Charles is evidently at the traumatised end of the spectrum, but it's fair to say that all music fans are the recovering children of broken bands. 'I was only eight when the Smiths broke up,' Basden says, 'so I sort of missed the heartbreak part, but…' The words for his loss still elude him. 'I took it pretty hard when Take That broke up,' Mulligan confesses. She was 10, already writing letters to Kenneth Branagh but more than a decade away from her first BAFTA and her first Oscar nomination for Lone Scherfig's An Education. The Take That slap 'still stings', she says, drawing her jacket around her shoulders. The chill can linger, for sure. I remember interviewing a man who had travelled the world to confide in all four estranged members of ABBA, finally weeping in the arms of an adorably sympathetic Anni-Frid Lyngstad at some stage door in Europe. Super or regular, fans command powerful energy like that. Remember watching Simon and Garfunkel succumb to public demand — heavy word, demand — for that sweet but awkward Central Park reunion? Shades of a hostage video. Fans and money are reckless collaborators. The duress is more subtle in Wallis Island — certainly financial but driven mostly by the aching need of the jovial if obviously haunted Charles. From here, we can identify the common delusion of para-social attachment in his obsession with Herb and Nell's pastoral folk-harmony past. He would just call it love. We can't blame him. It's soaked into the songs, from the opening needle-drop close-up to the crucial coda beneath the closing credits. Written by Basden in the eerie nostalgic register of lost early '70s folkie Nick Drake, they act in the film exactly as they did for the actors: a map into the broken heart of McGwyer-Mortimer's past. 'The more that I got to know the songs, the more I understood of Nell and Herb's history as a couple,' Mulligan says. 'I found it really emotional and sweet, the heartbreak of one of them not being able to play those songs, and the other one being fine playing those songs … 'We would practice,' she says, 'in the makeup van when we were getting ready. But they had so much history already baked in … throwing back to a time where they were falling in love and they were young and happy, and then you knew the songs that were the heartbreak songs ...' 'I had a very nervous time waiting for her to get back to me after I sent her all my dodgy home demos,' Basden says, not unreasonably. Not only is Mulligan among the most highly regarded actresses in Hollywood (Gatsby, Drive, Shame, Promising Young Woman), she's married to Marcus Mumford of folk-rock chartbusters Mumford & Sons. The songwriter's self-doubt proved unfounded, but getting the songs up to operating temperature was more challenging. The low-budget shoot on a weathered outcrop of Carmarthenshire on the Welsh coast spanned just 18 days between Mulligan's commitments to Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Adam Sandler's Spaceman and the birth of her third child. 'We were fighting against the weather and the tide and all these things,' Basden says, confiding he was sure that Mulligan was going to quit after day one. 'We had to just kind of attack it and trust our instincts, but there is a real benefit in not overthinking stuff and analysing the joy out of it. 'We found a tone that we all really liked, and we just played with it, both in terms of the dialogue and the music. Hopefully, you do feel that organic connection. There are moments in the film — little laughs, nods, little exchanges happening — that are somewhere between the characters and us.' 'Somewhere between the characters and us' is, as it happens, exactly the space where this story resonates. It's the space where all great actors and singers blur into their songs and stories and, if the illusion is truthful enough, where fans fall head over heels after them. Forever. As potent as the Mulligan-Basden-McGwyer-Mortimer chemistry is, the film's bigger love story is between Charles and their songs: a world suspended in the past where his ideal of romantic union can live on without end. That story plays out between Basden and Key, partners for decades on stage and screen (and apart: see Ricky Gervais' Brent; Steve Coogan's Alan Partridge). They developed their first film from their award-winning two-handed short of 2007, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, also directed by James Griffith. In another neat meta-twist, Mulligan was a big fan. 'I loved the short so much,' she says, 'and I just wanted to be in the film. That was my first reaction: just to get to watch these two work because I love their dynamics so much. I thought 'Great, I can get a front-row seat to watch Tim and Tom be very funny'. 'The more emotional side of it came when we really figured out what's happening. At least I did. When I got on set it was like, 'Oh, this friendship between these two men is really something special'.' Basden says the spark for Wallis Island goes back around 25 years, to a night when he and Key were hired for a private comedy gig in some wealthy Devon family's dining room: 'eight posh people, sort of watching and then saying, 'No, can we have the other chap back?'' The gig was funny, humiliating and transactional. In the film, Charles' money buys more than a gig. It buys intimacy, or at least the illusion of it: the same illusion that makes us think that ABBA or Simon and Garfunkel or Oasis or Fleetwood Mac or the Bootleg Beatles should get back together: because we love their songs that much. The tension is comic when Key and Basden play it, but the questions it raises are not trivial. What do artists owe their fans? Not their souls, but not nothing either. Basden shrugs: 'I'm not famous enough for it to be a real issue. I have a few superfans but they're lovely. Most of the time I just feel compelled, when I meet a musician I love, to tell them how much they mean to me. And then I regret it because I've probably just made their day worse.' Mulligan feels the line is different in music than in acting. When a film is over, audiences generally understand the actors were pretending. Maybe it's something about the way songs endlessly conjure the same emotion, whether echoing in our heads or streaming in our supermarkets, that makes us believe the singer is stuck inside them. 'Music soundtracks life,' she says. 'I felt it the other day. I was watching Madison Cunningham performing … and she sang this song I listened to on repeat when my third child was born, Life According to Raechel.' It's a song, not irrelevantly, with themes of regret, memory and cherishing what remains. 'I was just sobbing in the wings because she sang it unbelievably beautifully, but also because I had connected that song to this moment in my life that was so beautiful and gorgeous. I just stood there crying, she came offstage and I threw my arms around her, and she probably didn't need that … 'You do form these incredible bonds with words and songs, and then through that route to the musicians. That's undeniable.' Bonds between cinema fans and The Ballad of Wallis Island have forged strong and fast. Mulligan has spent 'the last couple of months sitting with audiences who are not just hysterically laughing, but also lots of grown men crying. 'Really, that hasn't happened much in my career at all. I said to Tom after the screening at Sundance, 'By the way, this isn't normal for people to react like this to a film: everyone cries and gives a standing ovation for 10 minutes. This is because this film is so special'.' Credited to Basden and Mulligan, the film's soundtrack album is special too. Its hundreds of thousands of streams won't trouble Mumford & Sons for a while, but it's an apt slow burn for a semi-mythical folk duo who were only ever a cult act in somebody's movie. Loading Weird, though, how the make-believe duo's songs are now free to circulate like any other band's lost classic, ready to be folded into weddings, break-ups and other real-life memories of joy and grief and movies. 'The music will always be very special to me. Big time,' Mulligan says. 'I mean, my baby was 10 weeks old when we started, and we shot it basically where I went on all my summer holidays when I was a kid. It was just the most joyful, lovely and probably the shortest shoot I've ever been involved in. I was really sad when my bit was done.' Asked how he'll feel when he hears it streaming in a supermarket in 20 years' time, Basden isn't so sure. 'I imagine I'll probably feel a bit like Herb, and a bit soggy-eyed about this great time that we had in Wales making this film … and I'll also be listening to things that I did slightly wrong in the guitar playing.'
Perth Now
a day ago
- Perth Now
The Cribs tackle 'punk rock guilt' with plans for 'pop' album
The Cribs are overcoming their "punk rock guilt" and embracing their "pop side". The indie rockers - made up of brothers Gary, Ryan and Ross Jarman - are set to release their ninth album Selling A Vibe on January 9, 2026, and singer Ryan has opened up on the impact of working with Chairlift's Patrick Wimberly, who has collaborated with the likes of Lil Yachty, Beyonce and Ellie Goulding. He told NME: "We've always had a real pop side to the band, and we love pop music. We always really liked pop melodies and a lot of pop devices, like big hooks and all that stuff. "We've often – just out of some punk rock guilt – buried it. We focused more on the noisier side. "So when we worked with Patrick, we felt like we had a good set of pop songs. We wanted to work with him so he could work on bringing that out." The record is preceded by new single Summer Seizures. Ryan insisted he, his twin brother Gary and their younger sibling Ross have don't have "anything left to prove, as far as the indie and punk s*** goes" after eight albums in that realm. He added: "We really liked the idea of working with someone who challenges and takes us outside our normal working environment. It was something we hadn't done before. "It's like, 'How are we going to add to our catalogue at this point?' We really wanted to commit to trying to work with someone that was outside our world. "We need to do stuff like that to keep us engaged and keep us fresh, you know? So it was a conscious decision.' Meanwhile, the band have also announced a UK headline tour in Spring 2026, starting in Newcastle on March 18. From there, they'll play shows in Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Cardiff before the run ends on March 28 in Brighton. Before that, they'll be playing a special gig at London's Shackleworth Arms on Saturday (23.08.25) for War Child, before performing at All Points East the next night. The Cribs - Selling A Vibe album tracklisting 1. Dark Luck 2. Selling A Vibe 3. A Point Too Hard To Make 4. Never The Same 5. Summer Seizures 6. Looking For The Wrong Guy 7. If Our Paths Never Crossed 8. Self Respect 9. You'll Tell Me Anything 10. Rose Mist 11. Distractions 12. Brothers Won't Break
