Mel Gibson reveals the reason behind Lethal Weapon 5 delay

'Who cares?': Denzel Washington dismisses cancel culture

Perth Now

32 minutes ago

Perth Now

'Who cares?': Denzel Washington dismisses cancel culture

Denzel Washington doesn't care about cancel culture. The Oscar-winning actor was dismissive of the concept when asked if he feared being "cancelled" during an interview to promote his new movie Highest 2 Lowest. Denzel asked Complex News in response: "What does that mean - to be cancelled?" When told by interviewer Jillian Hardeman-Webb that "it means you lose public support", the Gladiator II star said: "Who cares? What made public support so important to begin with?" Washington also poured scorn on the interviewer's claim that "followers are now currency". The 70-year-old star said: "I don't care who's following who. You can't lead and follow at the same time, and you can't follow and lead at the same time. I don't follow anybody. I follow the heavenly spirit. I follow God, I don't follow man. I have faith in God. I have hope in man, but look around, it ain't working out so well." Denzel continued: "You can't be cancelled if you haven't signed up. Don't sign up." The star has won two Oscars for his roles in Glory and Training Day and says that he's "not that interested" in landing another Academy Award. Denzel - who has received 10 Oscar nominations during his career - told Jake's Takes: "I don't do it [make movies] for Oscars. I really don't care about that kind of stuff. "I've been at this a long time, and there's times when I've won, shouldn't have won, didn't win, should have won. "Man gives the award, God gives the award. I'm not that interested in Oscars. People say: 'Well, where do you keep it?' I say: 'Next to the other one.'" He went on to add: "I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you how I feel about it. On my last day, it ain't going to do me a bit of good." Denzel found it hard to take when he missed out on the Best Actor gong at the 2000 ceremony for his role in Hurricane to Kevin Spacey's performance in American Beauty. He recalled to Esquire magazine: "At the Oscars, they called Kevin Spacey's name for American Beauty. I have a memory of turning around and looking at him, and nobody was standing but the people around him. "And everyone else was looking at me. Not that it was this way. Maybe that's the way I perceived it. Maybe I felt like everybody was looking at me. Because why would everybody be looking at me? "Thinking about it now, I don't think they were. I'm sure I went home and drank that night. I had to. I don't want to sound like: 'Oh, he won my Oscar', or anything like that. It wasn't like that."

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

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

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'Who cares?': Denzel Washington dismisses cancel culture

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

Mel Gibson reveals the reason behind Lethal Weapon 5 delay

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'Who cares?': Denzel Washington dismisses cancel culture

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

Why Uma Thurman said no to action roles for two decades, and what brought her back

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