Latest news with #Who'sAfraidofVirginiaWoolf?
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Steven Soderbergh Wanted ‘Black Bag' to Feel Like the ‘Espionage Version' of ‘Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'
Never satisfied with convention, director Steven Soderbergh saw his latest feature 'Black Bag' as an opportunity to not only deconstruct the spy genre, but also challenge preconceived notions around marriage. The film stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as married intelligence agents forced to reassess their loyalties to one another. A noted cinephile, Soderbergh recently shared during a recent interview with Variety that he and screenwriter David Koepp took inspiration from a classic source. 'David and I talked about what it would be like if George and Martha were spies,' he said. 'We wanted to make an espionage version of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'' More from IndieWire Scarlett Johansson Wants Marvel Fans to Know She Really Is Done: 'Natasha Is Dead' 'Take No Prisoners' Review: An Inside Look at America's Top Hostage Negotiator and His Battle Against Wrongful Detention The Edward Albee play was famously adapted in 1966 for a film by Mike Nichols starring real-life husband and wife Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Soderbergh is a huge fan of the film and was a close associate of Nichols before he died in 2014. They even did a commentary track together for the DVD release of 'Virginia Woolf.' Though the material he chose to reference for the film is rather dour and dark, Soderbergh nonetheless wanted 'Black Bag' to be more of a blockbuster than a serious affair. 'There's a version of this movie where you go a very different way. Where you don't glam it up and you make it grittier and harder and kind of less fun. And that just wasn't what I had in mind,' said Soderbergh. 'We felt this was a real Hollywood movie and you should get movie stars, and you should make them look great. That was the movie I wanted to make.' While 'Virginia Woolf' may have been a strong reference, the film also owes a lot to the spy genre, with Fassbender even resembling John le Carré's beloved George Smiley to a certain degree. At the same time, Soderbergh and Koepp didn't want this to be just another 'Bourne' movie or variation of the like. 'David found a way to keep it fresh,' Soderbergh told Variety. 'He found a way to differentiate it by going kind of narrow and deep on the character work, as opposed to let's turn it into an action spectacle. It's an emotional, psychological spectacle.' Another subversion Soderbergh and Koepp slipped into 'Black Bag' is how the relationship between Fassbender and Blanchett's character isn't as toxic as one may assume. Though their jobs are to keep and collect secrets, there's a refreshing affection between the two that feels unexpected and will keep audiences on their toes. 'It's also unusual to see a movie about a marriage in which an affair is not the point,' said Soderbergh. 'And I like this idea that the other people they work with are kind of annoyed at how well their marriage works.' 'Black Bag' is currently in theaters from Focus Features. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
Washington Post
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Black Bag' is a spy story with a marital twist
That three-star rating for the new Steven Soderbergh movie 'Black Bag' is a matter of personal preference. Kick it up by half a star if your tastes run to John le Carré espionage thrillers crossed with marital cage matches like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Dock it the same amount if you don't like talky, complex, fiendishly intelligent head games.
Telegraph
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Tom Burke: ‘Things got a bit weird with Alan Rickman – for reasons I'll never tell'
'How do I know you're telling the truth? That's a question people like to ask actors,' says Tom Burke. The 43-year-old, best known as the star of Strike – the BBC detective series based on the novels written by J K Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith – shakes his head. While he reckons he's 'actually not a bad liar', he insists that, 'in general', actors are no better at real-life deception than the rest of us. 'We need quite a bit of infrastructure around us to make a fiction convincing.' Like spies, I suggest? 'Ha! I suppose so...' Burke finds himself playing a spy in Steven Soderbergh's deliciously twisty new thriller, Black Bag. Set in London, it begins when an MI6 power couple (played by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender) invite two other couples from the service to a dinner party at their exquisite home in the hope of exposing a traitor. The result, as Burke puts it, is 'a cross between Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a John le Carré story'. In a witty piece of casting, Pierce Brosnan, a former James Bond, plays the head of MI6, and Burke chuckles that 'the scene I shot with him felt like being in the headmaster's office'. Meanwhile, he says that Fassbender came to work every day with a fresh and very American zeal for some new lifestyle trend – 'ice baths, intermittent fasting, you name it' – while Blanchett cracked the jokes. 'She's mesmerising, mercurial, magical,' he alliterates, in praise of the Australian Oscar-winner. 'Very, very funny and not afraid of flirting with antipathy in performance.' Often, he explains, actors 'want the audience to just love them the whole time. But it's always more interesting if you can pull them up short, make them think, 'Ooh, I don't think I like you!'' On the day we meet over tea at one of his favourite London cafés, near Waterloo station, Burke has been working with Blanchett again. They've been rehearsing for Thomas Ostermeier's Barbican production of Chekhov's The Seagull, in which Burke plays Trigorin, the arrogant novelist and lover of Blanchett's grand, great actress Arkadina. Flipping through Burke's battered script while he pops to the loo, I notice stage directions referring to characters vaping. So it's a modern production? 'Yeah,' he nods, amused to catch me snooping. He hopes the German director's 21st-century take will shake off 'some of the baggage we've collected around Chekhov. In this country, we fall into the trap of being overly consistent about who these characters are, when they're really incredibly protean. They change almost every moment, each reacting every second. If you honour the jaggedness of that, it should be thrilling to watch and also very funny.' I first noticed Burke in the BBC's 2016 adaptation of War & Peace, and wonder if there isn't something vaguely Russian in his soul. 'My mum thinks there is,' he chuckles. 'There may be something a bit Russian in my tendency to go all the way to the end of a feeling before pinging back again...' Sipping his rooibos tea, Burke reminds me that Chekhov wrote The Seagull in 1895, a decade after being diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would kill him, and having spent three months carrying out a census in a Siberian penal colony. 'He'd seen hell on earth: forced prostitution, death everywhere,' says Burke. 'He wrote this play having seen how precious life is and how easily we torture ourselves, even if we appear to have most of what we need. He has enormous compassion for the privileged people who are going through these dilemmas. He understands that whatever the problem is, it always feels real to the person going through it. That's why the pain is so real, but it's also a comedy.' And that humour, he believes, is 'absolutely' key. 'I can be very emotionally open about stuff I'm going through if I know there is a punchline at the end. Laughter helps me to be more honest. If a joke gives you the structure to tell people what's going on, that's a good thing, isn't it? Otherwise you just scream, you know?' Burke is an intriguingly ursine character with a fizz of ideas buzzing like bees beneath his beard, and there's a cuddly kindness to his demeanour. But the warmth and dry wit are matched by wary silences and the occasional warning growl – 'How dare you!' – when I stray into territory he considers off limits. He will talk neither about politics, 'no matter how often the soapbox is pushed at me', nor his personal life. He tells me that while he never cringes about his performances on stage and screen, he has winced over the way he's come across in interviews. 'You mention things in an interview which are of minimal consequence, but because they're in print, you're then eternally asked about them.' As the son of two actors, Burke knew what he was getting into. His father, David Burke, played Dr Watson to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes on British TV in the 1980s. His mother, Anna Calder-Marshall was in Pussycat, Pussycat, I Love You (1970). And, growing up, Burke knew he'd become an actor, too. 'I think I always just thought, I'm one of those guys,' he says. 'That was my mum and dad's gang, and I liked the vibe. For whatever reason, actors tend to talk to children in a different way to doctors or lawyers or whatever. Just like you're another person. It's a very nice thing to feel.' They assume less hierarchy between adults and children? 'Yes, maybe that's it.' Burke was born with a cleft lip, but – now widely cast as a heartthrob – he says that the scar from corrective surgery has never felt like an impediment. 'I don't think I was that aware of it, as a boy. My parents always said I looked lovely. I can only remember one kid at school who kept sneering his lip at me and I genuinely didn't know what he was doing! Although there were moments later in my career it was an issue for some people...' Helping guide him through such moments was his godfather, Alan Rickman. Today, he laughs about the Shakespeare tour on which Rickman first bonded with his father. 'They went to Germany, doing Measure for Measure, I think. Alan didn't have a great experience at some hotel in Munich, so he stole a spoon. After they got back, my dad – who had a naughty side – phoned him up pretending to be from the German embassy in London, following up on a report of some missing cutlery. Alan totally fell for it.' Burke worked with his godfather on several occasions, the last of which saw him star in a production of Strindberg's Creditors, directed by Rickman, first at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, in 2008, and then, two years later, when it transferred to Brooklyn. 'Things got a bit funny after we went to New York,' Burke reveals now. 'Weird. For reasons I probably won't ever want to talk about. Then there was a bit of space for a year or two, which I didn't know were two very important years.' (In that time, Rickman's health worsened, before his eventual death from pancreatic cancer in 2016, aged 69.) When I tell Burke I'm sorry to hear this, he bats me away. 'It's OK. You hit a funny point after you turn 40,' he shrugs. 'You know as many people who are dead as those who are alive. And there are some people still alive who you are starting to slightly slip away from.' Even now, he says, 'there's an Alan bit of my brain that's always there'. He gives an example from when he appeared in an episode of The Crown, playing the priest Derek 'Dazzle' Jennings opposite Helena Bonham Carter's Princess Margaret. 'There's a bit where Helena first sees me down the corridor. The director said, 'I'd like to see you improvise a bit.' Then I heard Alan's voice in my head, saying, 'Dancing should be the first thing they do.' And they did dance down that corridor. I thought it really set the mood of that relationship.' I assumed Burke was a sci-fi fan, given his appearances in George Miller's female-led blockbuster Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) – the disappointing box-office performance of which Burke blames on audiences who were 'either sexist or didn't understand the singular vision' – and in the forthcoming series Blade Runner 2099 (due next year on Amazon). But he tells me he's often struggled to engage with either sci-fi or fantasy. However, there are exceptions: 'If a show has pathos, I'm hooked,' he says. 'I loved James Callis in Battlestar Galactica because he was a villain who's a coward and a sex addict while everybody else was running around being beautiful and heroic. In reality, most of us would run away from the explosions.' When it comes to upping his action-hero game, Burke sighs over the fact that, sooner or later, Cormoran Strike 'is going to have to start looking after himself. So many crime shows start with the hero out for a run, don't they? It's become a trope. Yet because he only has one leg, I realised Strike can't do that. So I thought, I bet they'll have him doing chin-ups. Then I realised, I will have to do chin-ups.' He groans. 'Keeping in shape is not natural to me, but I suppose the job makes me do it.' While he'll do the heavy lifting for his character, Burke won't be drawn on the debate surrounding Rowling's stance on trans issues. 'I don't think the media attention helps anything,' is all he will say today. But he's chuffed that playing the part of the one-legged veteran 'earns me about one extra handshake on the high street each day'. We say goodbye outside the café, and Burke ambles, bearishly, off to get his beard trimmed. 'I think I'm going to ask them to make it less Brian Blessed,' he says.
Yahoo
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Riff Raff' director cast Jennifer Coolidge after watching her on 'The White Lotus': 'That's freaking Elizabeth Taylor'
Director Dito Montiel knows the cast of his movie Riff Raff is completely stacked. 'I hit the jackpot,' he told Yahoo Entertainment ahead of his film's premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It's in theaters now. The movie follows a former criminal who must confront his past when his old connections show up at his house for a long-overdue reckoning. It stars Jennifer Coolidge, Gabrielle Union, Pete Davidson, Ed Harris, Bill Murray and newcomer Miles J. Harvey. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. 'I directed all of them, so they're all great,' Montiel said with a laugh. 'I'd like to take credit for it, but these people know who they are. I'm an innocent bystander.' When casting the role of Ruth, the frequently intoxicated and scorned matriarch of Riff Raff, Montiel knew he needed to pick someone 'kind of like Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' 'I was the last person on earth who didn't know who Jennifer Coolidge is. I'm watching [The White Lotus] and I go, that lady — that's freaking Elizabeth Taylor!' he said. 'I was the last person to know her, but I'm so glad I did get to know her.' Montiel was a longtime fan of Murray, who plays a nefarious henchman named Lefty. He ran into the actor years ago when working as a foot messenger in Manhattan. 'I was in an elevator while I was making a delivery. He still doesn't know!' Montiel said. 'I just remember thinking, man, that guy is taller than I thought. Just to be in a room with him is very exciting.' Though Murray and Coolidge are the biggest scene-stealers in a sea of buzzy actors, the film's star is Harvey. He plays DJ, a young man on the cusp of leaving for college when he finds himself in the middle of long-standing family tension. 'He's so freaking good. And he's kind of mean!' Montiel said of Harvey. 'He doesn't mean to be! … We met on Zoom, and he blew me away. Usually, you meet a young actor and they're trying to be nice, but I said, 'Man, you are great.' And he was just like, 'Yeah.'' Montiel said Harvey's muted reaction to his praise made him question whether he wanted the role, but he was 'too darn good' to pass on. Ultimately, he joined the project, and their bond grew. 'He was maybe the most fun person to be around amongst a lot of fun people,' Montiel said. 'All of them — Pete, Bill, Ed, Gabrielle — it's a lot of fun people to be around.' Together, the cast forms a 'dysfunctional family,' just like the characters they play. 'And who doesn't come from one!' Montiel said. 'I love all the people in this film for their flaws. I come from a wacky family, so maybe that was part of it.' is in theaters.
The Independent
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
White Lotus star Carrie Coon clarifies comments about marriage to Tracy Letts after interview goes viral
The White Lotus star Carrie Coon has clarified the comments she made about her husband, Tracey Letts, in a viral interview. The 44-year-old actor spoke candidly about the dynamics with her partner, whom she's been married to since 2013, during Monday's episode of the WTF with Marc Maron Podcast. She confessed that she and Letts don't get jealous easily, so they often talk about other people they're attracted to. 'It's nice to be in a relationship where we can always talk about, 'Well who are you attracted to on set?'' she explained. 'He notices every single woman on the street, and he always tells me who he has a crush on. It's fun. It's interesting to know what your partner is into.' Maron then interjected to ask: 'But it doesn't ever go over the line?' In response, Coon replied: 'We don't really like lines. Lines are really boring... Life is short. Finite! '... [Letts] would never begrudge anyone the human experience,' she said. 'He's embraced being a person of appetites and acknowledging we have these proclivities.' She continued: 'Monogamy is sort of something we've imposed on ourselves, we were supposed to have babies and die at like 30. And that's not how life is anymore. So you have to kind of be open-minded about what engages you in the world, what sparks your imagination, and what your passion is. 'I think if you're willing to stay open to that, you're living more of a full life. And I don't think either one of us would want to keep the other from living,' she added. Coon's comments quickly gained traction on X, with one fan tweeting a clip of the interview with the caption: 'Finding out Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts have an open marriage has been a really great way to start my week.' On Tuesday, Coon shared a tweet clarifying the status of her marriage and shutting down speculation. 'Settle down, internet! I said 'open minded' not 'open,'' she wrote. Coon and Letts met in 2010 while starring in the Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They got married three years later before welcoming their first child, Haskell, in 2018. They also welcomed a daughter in 2021, but have yet to share her name publicly. The Gilded Age star has previously gushed about how grateful she is for her marriage while reflecting on some of the past relationships she'd been in. 'I have a healthy, happy marriage. When I was younger, let's say I didn't always conduct myself with integrity in my relationships. Now I've found a partner who I can be truly honest with, I never want to go back,' she told The Guardian in 2021.
