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Business Insider
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
'The Phoenician Scheme' has a star-studded cast — here's where else you might have seen them
Benicio Del Toro plays Zsa-Zsa Korda "The Phoenician Scheme" follows Zsa-zsa Korda, an arms dealer, as he tries to teach his daughter how to run his organization after a near-successful assassination attempt. Benicio Del Toro, who plays the character, who won an Oscar in 2001 for his supporting role in "Traffic." He previously worked with Anderson on his 2021 movie " The French Dispatch." Del Toro also appeared in three Marvel movies as the Collector, and starred in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," "Sicario," and "The Usual Suspects." Mia Threapleton as Liesl Liesl, Zsa-Zsa's eldest daughter, was raised in a convent away from her family's criminal enterprise. Although she wants to be a nun, her father wants her to be the heir to his estate, distracting her from her faith. Mia Threapleton, who plays Liesl, may seem familiar to fans even if they haven't seen her act before. That's because she's Kate Winslet's daughter. Threapleton made her acting debut at 13 with "A Little Chaos." Before "The Phoenician Scheme," her biggest role was playing Honoria Marable in the AppleTV+ series "The Buccaneers." Michael Cera plays Bjorn Bjorn joins Zsa-zsa and Liesl on their adventure as Zsa-zsa's personal tutor about insects. He is played by Michael Cera, who is best known for his roles in films such as "Barbie," "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World," "Juno" and "Superbad." Steve Park plays the pilot Early in the film, Steve Park appears as a pilot for Zsa-zsa. This is the third Anderson film Park has appeared after starring in "The French Dispatch" and "Asteroid City." Park has also starred in "Death of a Unicorn," "Mickey 17," "Do the Right Thing," and "Fargo." Rupert Friend plays Excalibur Excalibur leads the shady consortium attempting to sabotage Zsa-zsa's organization in the movie. Rupert Friend, who plays Excalibur, starred in Anderson's 2021 movie "The French Dispatch" and his 2024 short films "The Swan" and "The Rat Catcher." Friend also played Mr Wickham in the 2005 version of "Pride & Prejudice," and starred in the "Obi-Wan Kenobi" and "Anatomy of a Scandal" series. Riz Ahmed plays Prince Farouk Riz Ahmed stars as Prince Farouk, the son of the King of Lower Western Independent Phoenicia, who has partnered with Zsa-zsa to build a tunnel across the region. This is Ahmed's first Wes Anderson movie, but he has starred in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," "Venom," and "Sound of Metal." Tom Hanks plays Leland Leland is part of the Sacramento Consortium, which is in business with Zsa-Zsa and Prince Farouk to build the tunnel. Beloved American actor Tom Hanks plays Leland. Hanks starred in Anderson's 2023 movie "Asteroid City," but is better known for his older roles like "Forrest Gump," "Cast Away," and "Big." Bryan Cranston plays Reagan Reagan is Leland's brother, also part of the Sacramento Consortium. Bryan Cranston, who plays Reagan, has starred in two of Anderson's movies — "Asteroid City and "Isle of Dogs." Cranston is best known for starring in the TV drama "Breaking Bad" and "Malcolm in the Middle." Mathieu Amalric plays Marseille Bob Marseille Bob is a French nightclub owner and leader of the Savarin-Montrachet Gang. He is also part of Zsa-zsa's Phoenician business scheme. Mathieu Amalric, who starred in Anderson's "Isle of Dogs" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel," plays Marseille Bob. Amalric has also played a Bond villain, Dominic Greene, in 2008's "Quantum of Solace." Richard Ayoade plays Sergio Sergio is the leader of the Intercontinental Radical Freedom Militia Corp jungle unit, which attacks Marseille Bob's nightclub in the movie. Richard Ayoade, a British comedian, plays Sergio after starring in two of Anderson's short films, "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" and "The Rat Catcher." Ayoade mainly has voice acting roles, but has appeared on-screen in the sitcom "The IT Crowd" and "Paddington 2." Jeffrey Wright plays Marty Marty is a shipping magnate and the leader of the Newark Syndicate gang. He is also in cahoots with Zsa-zsa. Jeffrey Wright plays Marty, making "The Phoenician Scheme" his third Anderson movie. He also starred in "Asteroid City" and "The French Dispatch." Wright has also starred in "American Fiction," "The Batman," "Quantum of Solace," and three "Hunger Games" movies. Scarlett Johansson plays Hilda Sussman-Korda Hilda Sussman-Korda is Zsa-zsa's second cousin and has an intimate relationship with him. She is also part of Zsa-zsa's business scheme because she is constructing a trans-basin hydroelectric embankment within her private utopian outpost in Phoenicia. Scarlett Johansson, who is best known for her roles in Marvel movies, "Her" and "Lost in Translation," plays Hilda. Johansson has worked with Anderson twice before, starring in "Asteroid City" and "Isle of Dogs." Benedict Cumberbatch plays Uncle Nubar Benedict Cumberbatch plays Zsa-zsa's brother, Uncle Nubar. Though Uncle Nubar is part of Zsa-zsa's business plan, the brothers often oppose each other. Benedict Cumberbatch, another Marvel star, plays Uncle Nubar. He starred in Anderson's 2024 short films "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" and "Poison." Cumberbatch is also known for his roles in "Star Trek: Into Darkness," "The Imitation Game," and the "Sherlock" TV series. F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Bill Murray, Hope Davis have small cameos in the movie Though they do not appear in the film's trailers, F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Murray all have cameos in hallucination scenes. Abraham, who cameos as a prophet, has starred in Anderson's 2014 movie "The Grand Budapest Hotel," "Amadeus" and HBO drama "The White Lotus." Dafoe has brief appearance as a knave and has appeared in 4 of Anderson's films since starring in 2004's "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." Dafoe has also starred in four "Spider-Man" movies, "Aquaman," "Poor Things," and "Nosferatu." Murray makes a cameo as god and has made appearances in 10 of Anderson's films, skipping only "Bottle Rocket" and "Asteroid City." Murray is best known for starring in "Lost in Translation," "Groundhog Day" and the "Ghostbusters" movies. Hope Davis, who makes a small appearance in the trailers, plays Mother Superior in the movie, Liesl's superior in her convent. She also appeared in Anderson's last feature "Asteroid City," "Captain America: Civil War" and the "Succession" TV series.
New European
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Matthew d'Ancona's culture: The Phoenician Scheme, a gem of a film
PICK OF THE WEEK The Phoenician Scheme (Selected cinemas) It is 1950, and the private plane of Anatole 'Zsa-zsa' Korda (Benicio del Toro), who is engrossed in a book, cruises 5,000 feet over the 'High Balkan Flatlands'. An explosion rips through the fuselage, cuts his administrative secretary in two, and forces a crash landing – the tycoon's sixth, we are told. Even as his death is reported on the news, he stumbles from a cornfield into shot, clutching a 'vestigial organ' to his belly. A headline flashes on screen: 'Ha! I'm still in the habit of surviving'. Wes Anderson's latest movie is one of his very best, not least because it is draped over the charisma of del Toro (for whom it was specifically written by the director and Roman Coppola). Based on the plutocrat Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), aka 'Mr Five Per Cent', and Anderson's late father-in-law, the Lebanese construction entrepreneur Fouad Mikhael Malouf (to whom the movie is dedicated), Korda is planning a mighty infrastructural project, the 'Phoenician Land and Sea Infrastructure Scheme', but must first secure the necessary finance, which he calls 'the gap'. Along for the trip is his 20-year-old daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, terrific), a pipe-smoking novitiate nun from whom Zsa-zsa has been estranged for six years, but whom he how regards as his heir; and his Norwegian family tutor, Bjorn Lund (Michael Cera), now doubling up as his administrative secretary. Bjorn quickly falls for Liesl, who is initially more preoccupied by suspicions that Korda killed her mother ('I was very fond of your mother – and would never have murdered her under any circumstances whatsoever!'). Though debonair and (mostly) unflappable, he is also a man of eccentric habits, offering those he encounters a hand grenade as a gift, and full of Darwinian mottos: 'If something gets in your way, flatten it'; 'Who could lick who, or whom, I guess'; 'I don't need any human rights'; and, cryptically, 'Break, but don't bend'. He has nine adopted sons, confined to a dormitory. The investors visited by Zsa-zsa and Liesl are played by an extraordinary ensemble cast: Prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), the 7th King of Lower Western Independent Phoenicia; the Sacramento Consortium, Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), with whom Korda and Farouk play a high-stakes basketball game; the fez-wearing 'Marseille Bob' (Mathieu Amalric), the 'Newark Syndicate', represented by Marty (Jeffrey Wright); Korda's second cousin, Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), to whom he proposes marriage; and his wicked younger half-brother, Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch). Such is Anderson's cachet as an auteur that A-list actors now queue up for a cameo role in one of his movies. Rupert Friend plays 'Excalibur', leading a shadowy group of US government officials determined to destroy Korda by (among other secret ops) driving up the cost of 'bashable rivets'. At his palazzo, the mogul is attended by his butler (Alex Jennings), while Jason Watkins pops up occasionally to notarise a document. Richard Ayoade is Sergio, leader of a group of freedom fighters straight out of Luis Buñuel. In Zsa-zsa's black-and-white near-death experiences, God is played (of course) by Bill Murray, alongside the celestial figures of Willem Dafoe and F Murray Abraham. The narrative is punctuated by Anderson's signature rectilinear tableaux – an overhead shot of a bathroom, a cabin on a ship, the interior of a plane – an aesthetic reminiscent of Peter Greenaway's movies or the Bloomsbury Group's fixation with 'significant form'. What he himself has called his 'visual handwriting' is sometimes criticised as too mannered or too predictable; but one has only to think of Douglas Sirk, John Ford or Andrei Tarkovsky to recall that many of the greatest directors have a distinctive cinematic sensibility. It matters, too, that Anderson's style is not chilly, but a means of fascinating and reeling us in so that we may be immersed in his surreal but sincere emotional universe. The heart of The Phoenician Scheme is Korda's search for redemption as a parent, allied with his growing awareness that, independent of his schemes and avarice, 'maybe I matter'; that, in the end, he must close 'the emotional gap'. Oscillating between apparent invulnerability and a sense of his mortality, he reaches for a better way of living and takes the audience with him. An absolute gem of a film. FILM Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (General release) Does anyone now remember the original CBS television series of Mission: Impossible that ran from 1966 to 1973? Almost 30 years after Brian De Palma directed the first spin-off movie in 1996, the brand, which has already clocked up $4 billion at the box office, and its distinctive theme tune, have become inseparable from the superstardom of Tom Cruise. This, the eighth instalment and the fourth to be directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is the franchise at its most entertainingly deranged and delivers in every way you might expect. Cruise, who turns 63 in July, returns as Ethan Hunt, the agent whose messianic capacity to save the world is now more reminiscent of Keanu Reeves's Neo in the Matrix movies than an American James Bond. Indeed, Angela Bassett, as US president Erika Sloane, is ready to defy the entire military-industrial complex as she entrusts Hunt personally with the preposterously difficult task of stopping an AI super-being called 'the Entity' from triggering global nuclear apocalypse. At his side once again are Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames) and Grace (Hayley Atwell); joined, this time, by Paris (Pom Klementieff) a former assassin who owes her life to Hunt. The plot, such as it is, sets them against the dastardly Gabriel (Esai Morales), and involves the matching of a cruciform key to the mysteriously named 'Podkova' device. All of which is really a MacGuffin to set up Cruise for a series of sprints across bridges, against-the-odds fight scenes and (of course) extraordinary stunts. These include breaking into a long-sunk Russian submarine deep below a polar ice cap and a biplane chase sequence that combines Buster Keaton gymnastics with Top Gun aeronautical action. There are plenty of callbacks to the previous seven movies, as well as a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Is this truly the final Mission: Impossible? That's classified. BOOK The Director, by Daniel Kelhmann (Riverrun) 'The important thing is to make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in': so says Daniel Kelhmann's fictionalised version of the Austrian director G.W. Pabst (1885-1967) in this wonderful novel, published in Germany as Lichtspiel in 2023 and now translated by Ross Benjamin. First in Hollywood, then in Austria after the Nazi annexation, Pabst is portrayed as hovering in a world of dream and nightmare, as if he himself is a character in an expressionist movie. Though he helps to launch the careers of Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks – the love of his life, in this account – he struggles in Tinseltown, mistaken for Fritz Lang and FW Murnau. His encounter with Goebbels (not named, but unmistakable) has the quality of phantasmagoria: 'the room had folded over so that he was suspended from the ceiling, walking upside down'. At his country estate, Pabst finds that the caretaker Jerzabek and his family are now zealous Nazis, and very far from deferential. Meanwhile, the director's son, Jakob, learns the art of brutality and the psychological surrender that are necessary to prosper in the Nazi era: 'When you can't do something and at the same time have no choice but to do it, there's only one solution: have someone else do it. Someone who looks like you and who uses your body'. PG Wodehouse, a prisoner of war, is a guest of the Reich at the premiere of Pabst's Paracelsus (1943); as is Leni Riefenstahl, whom the English satirist describes as 'a peculiarly spine-chilling creature' As they work on The Molander Case (1945), Franz Wilzek, the director's assistant, asks him whether he finds it strange 'that we're making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse'. As in Andres Veiel's recent (and fantastic) documentary Riefenstahl, this is the heart of the matter: a question to which Pabst has no satisfactory answer and a dilemma superbly explored by Kehlmann in one of the best novels of the year. STREAMING Code of Silence (ITVX, all episodes) Four years since she won Strictly, and three since she left EastEnders, Rose Ayling-Ellis is now in the top rank of British dramatic actors. Weeks after her role in the BBC's ground-breaking series Reunion, she stars in this compelling six-episode crime thriller, written by Catherine Moulton, as Alison Brooks, a deaf woman working in a police canteen in Canterbury, who becomes embroiled in an investigation because of her lip-reading skills. In less confident hands, this could have been a patronising gimmick – but, as framed by Ayling-Ellis, who has been deaf since birth, and Moulton, who also has hearing loss, the concept works brilliantly. As Alison looks for cues, plosives and gestures, we watch the words forming on screen; and soon she becomes indispensable to DS Ashleigh Francis (Charlotte Ritchie) and her boss DI James Marsh (Andrew Buchan) as they pursue a gang planning a big jewellery heist. In spite of warnings from the cops to stick to her specific role, Alison cannot help chasing the leads that her lip-reading delivers, and she soon finds herself talking to, and attracted by, the gang's tech expert, Liam Barlow (Kieron Moore). Her increasingly risky inquiries are made plausible by her exasperated longing to be taken seriously and for her sharp intelligence to be acknowledged. 'I'm really fed up trying to prove myself,' she says, after losing yet another part-time job. The villains – codenamed 'Wolf', 'Hulk', and 'Cruella' – are properly nasty, too; though Liam is clearly cut from gentler cloth, which makes Alison all the more conflicted by her feelings about him. A first-class police drama, which fully deserves a second season. …and finally I'll be interviewing the great Anne Applebaum at Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, on Tuesday May 27 at 5pm, to mark the paperback publication of her best-selling Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (Penguin) – a masterly exploration of global kleptocracy, authoritarian regimes and the networks that link them that seems all the more prescient now that Donald Trump is back in the White House. You can get tickets here. (You can also hear TNE founder and Editor-in-Chief Matt Kelly and I talking to Anne on The Two Matts in July).
New Statesman
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Wes Anderson's sense of an ending
Photo by Focus Features Wes Anderson's films either entrance or fail. I am a devotee of earlier work, up to The Grand Budapest Hotel of 2014, but The French Dispatch (2021) was intolerably twee, without any of the emotional depth that his best films have, that intuition of pain under the capering, that connection with childhood. Asteroid City (2023) was even more mannered, lapsing into self-parody. The Phoenician Scheme, let's say straight away, is a treat. Unlike its predecessors, it has a story to tell, rather than being an anthology of incidents. It uses all of Anderson's stylisations but is not primarily about them, as his later films had started to seem. He takes his own cinematic language almost for granted here, rather than foregrounding it relentlessly. In a recent interview, he seemed almost to acknowledge that his 'visual handwriting' had become a burden, a distraction from content: 'You can tell it's me… But, for me, each one is a different story, a different set of characters, and it's a whole undertaking.' He even protested: 'I am me, I'm not like me… The only thing I want is for people to look at the movie for what it is, not for what it's like.' Recently, that had become difficult. Not here. It's 1950. Anatole 'Zsa-zsa' Korda (Benicio del Toro) is one of the richest men in the world, a domineering international entrepreneur, frequently targeted for assassination by his rivals, plotted against by an international cabal. In the opening sequence, we see him survive, just, his sixth plane crash. Bloodied and battered, he emerges from a cornfield, just as reporters are gleefully delivering his obituary, trying to stuff a 'vestigial organ' back inside his body. 'It's not as easy as it looks,' he says. Del Toro, who previously played the deranged artist in The French Dispatch, is tremendous, magnetic and imperious, compelling your attention as much as Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums or Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Anderson wrote the film for him and didn't consider anyone else for the part. His character is modelled quite closely on the tycoon and art collector Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), dubbed 'Mr Five Per Cent' for his custom of retaining that much interest in every deal he put together, including the Turkish Petroleum Company that controlled oil in Iraq and elsewhere. Korda has a massive plan, the Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme, exploiting an entire region. He must get the support of multiple backers, including Prince Farouk, the 7th King of Lower Western Independent Phoenicia (Riz Ahmed), the Sacramento Consortium (Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston), Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), the Newark Syndicate (Jeffrey Wright), his cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson), and his sinister younger brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch, looking very much like Gulbenkian's real-life playboy son Nubar). Meanwhile, the markets, particularly in the bashable rivets he needs, are being manipulated against him. Plus, as he mildly complains, people keep trying to assassinate him. So he recruits his estranged 20-year-old daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), whom he hasn't seen for six years, having sent her to a nunnery as a child. He will make her his sole heir, he tells her, so that 'if they get me, you get them'. He shows her all his plans neatly arranged in a set of shoeboxes (it is a Wes Anderson film, after all). Liesl agrees, for a trial period, provided Korda abandons slave labour, famine creation and confining her nine adopted little brothers to a dormitory. Off they go to persuade the backers, accompanied by Korda's new private tutor, Bjorn,an entomologist from Oslo who may not be entirely what he seems (a brilliantly funny Michael Cera in his first role for Anderson). Threapleton, 24, the daughter of Kate Winslet, is a revelation. Liesl is touchingly resolute: she boldly stands up to her outsize father, earning his love, changing his sense of what matters most. The sense that this part must itself have been a big challenge for Threapleton at this stage in her career plays into the character beautifully. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The film's emotional core is this evolving father-daughter relationship, which Anderson acknowledges comes out of both his relationship with his wife's father, Fouad Malouf, a Lebanese businessman, to whom the film is dedicated, and the fact that he himself has a nine-year-old daughter. Those intimate origins can be sensed, for all the crazy capers: classic Wes Anderson, all over again. 'The Phoenician Scheme' is in cinemas now [See also: Gertrude Stein's quest for fame] Related
