Aug. 3 (UPI) — BBC’s Radio 4 will explore the Nuremberg Nazi trials that proceeded World War II in a new audio drama that stars Natalie Dormer, Freddie Fox and more.
Nuremberg will be presented as an eight part series on Radio 4 starting on Aug. 27 and will be released as a 16-part podcast on BBC Sounds the same day.
The show will track how Nazi commanders were arrested and held and how the trial was pulled together. Listeners will hear the tense court proceedings, testimonies and the first hearing of evidence on the Holocaust.
Kate Phillips, Alex Kingston, Ed Stoppard, Henry Goodman, Elliot Cowan, Luke Norris, Amanda Ryan, Nigel Lindsay, Joseph Alessi, Joseph Mydell, Nicholas Woodeson, Forbes Masson, Clive Wood, Mark Edel-Hunt, Nathan Wiley, Hari Dhillon, Ilan Goodman, Jasper Britton, Jonathan Cullen, Andrew Woodall, Rosie Sheehy, Sophia Pettit and Lewis Macleod also star.
Jonathan Myerson serves as the writer. Myerson and producer Nicholas Newton went over 20 volumes of court transcripts, 2,000 hours of audio and newsreel and contemporary news reports and interviews to achieve accuracy.
“It’s been nearly 75 years since the sentencing, and this comprehensive drama recreates for listeners an important and world-changing story and offers fascinating insights stretching beyond the better-known Nuremberg narratives,” Alison Hindell, Radio 4’s commissioning editor for drama and fiction said in a statement.
Tremendous sad news has broken that Dame Diana Rigg has passed away at the age of 82 on 10 September 2020 from cancer. She was surrounded by family and went peacefully. The news was announced by her agent Simon Beresford and followed by a statement from her daughter Rachael Stirling. The official Game of Thrones Twitter has shared a tribute to an industry legend.
You will recognise Diana as Lady Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones starring as Margaery Tyrell’s formidable Grandmother. In an interview with Collider (2013), Natalie described what it was like to work with Diana, “She’s a vet, so for very young actresses like Sophie, and reasonably young actresses such as myself, working with someone as experienced, and who is a Tony Award-winning actress, is just a joy. We watch and learn a bit. We shut up and watch.”
Although this was only one fabulous role amongst many, Dame Diana Rigg has had a phenomenal career expanding fifty years across stage, television and film including roles in The Sentimental Agent (1963), The Avengers (1965-68), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1965), Macbeth (1972) and Madear (1992). Please head over to Entertainment Weekly who have put up a slideshow of Dame Diana’s most memorable roles.
On behalf of Captivating Natalie Dormer I express my deepest condolences to Diana’s family and friends at this difficult time. Please respect the family and give them privacy during their time of grief.
Sources:
– Herald Sun (2020)
– Entertainment Weekly (2020)
– Collider (2013)
Sad news everyone, hugely disappointing. I will be deleting the season 1 category in the gallery, so if you see some broken images for a bit that will be why.
There will be no second season for Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. Showtime has canceled the sequel drama series after one season, Deadline has confirmed.
“Showtime has decided not to move forward with another season of Penny Dreadful: City of Angels,” the network said in a statement Friday. “We would like to thank executive producers John Logan, Michael Aguilar and the entire cast and crew for their outstanding work on this project.”
Nathan Lane, Natalie Dormer, Daniel Zovatto, Kerry Bishé, Rory Kinnear, Adriana Barraza, Michael Gladis, Jessica Garza and Johnathan Nieves starred in the follow-up to Penny Dreadful from the original series’ creator, writer and executive producer John Logan.
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels opens in 1938 Los Angeles, a time and place deeply infused with social and political tension. When a grisly murder shocks the city, Detective Tiago Vega (Zovatto) and his partner Lewis Michener (Lane) become embroiled in an epic story that reflects the rich history of Los Angeles: from the building of the city’s first freeways and its deep traditions of Mexican-American folklore, to the dangerous espionage actions of the Third Reich and the rise of radio evangelism. Before long, Tiago and his family are grappling with powerful forces that threaten to tear them apart.The sequel series was executive produced by Logan and Aguilar, along with the original series’ EPs Sam Mendes and Pippa Harris, both of Neal Street Productions. Logan’s Desert Wolf Productions will produce, and James Bagley will serve as co-executive producer.
The mothership series Penny Dreadful premiered in 2014 and ended its three-season run with a twisty finale in June 2016. The series received 13 Primetime Emmy nominations, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for lead actress Eva Green, and won three BAFTA Awards. Penny Dreadful had developed a loyal fanbase who call themselves “The Dreadfuls.”
Natalie Dormer loves a challenge. The actress who broke the period drama mould when she burst onto screens as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors and slayed Game of Thrones as Margaery Tyrell is back with Sky Atlantic’s new show, Penny Dreadful: City of Angles, and she doesn’t just play one character, she plays FOUR.
Set in 1938 Los Angeles with swirling racial tension, the first of these characters is Magda, a shape shifting demon who has a penchant for causing maximum chaos wherever she goes. The resulting chaos causes a race war and the show could not be more apt for the times we find ourselves in right now. That is the power of this story – it will provoke conversation.
Here, Natalie discusses the meanings behind the show, her faith in her physicality and finding her voice with age…
You are fierce with a capital F in this. The fact you play four of these formidable characters is incredible. How much of an amazing experience was it to find a script and a project like this for you?
I mean one of the reasons I said yes was because how many times am I going to be offered to play four roles in one gig? And it is quite a bit of range for fun, have some playtime in the dressing up box with voices, physicality and the whole characterisation. So that was obviously one of the main attractions that made me want to take the job. It’s a good bit piece of gymnastic exercise because you need to sort of flex your muscle and ask yourself, ‘can I do this?
TheWrap Emmy magazine: “Ordinarily I would stay in an American accent entire time — but in this job is there was no point in that, because I was jumping around so much,” the British actress says
If Natalie Dormer did nothing in “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels” but play the dark goddess Magda, the British actress would have had a juicy role as a supernatural force intent on pushing the human race into turmoil in 1930s Los Angeles. But one of Magda’s special powers is that she can assume any form she wishes — so in addition to appearing on screen as Magda, Dormer also gets to play three of her human iterations in the mousy but scheming political aide Alex, the German-American housewife Elsa and the zoot-suited gang leader Rio.
“For any actor, I think your ears prick up when you get offered the chance to play four roles for the price of one — how many times is that going to happen in your career?” Dormer said of her reaction when she got the script from creator John Logan. “I was intrigued by it, and excited by the idea of this workout both physically and mentally.”
But when she was working out how she’d play Magda’s three human forms, “Game of Thrones” vet Dormer said she didn’t dwell on the fact that they were all versions of the goddess. “I came at the iterations from a very technical perspective, because I wanted give them clear lines of identity — physicality and voice and accent and so forth,” she said. “But when it comes to psychology, John and I realized very quickly that the only way to play Elsa, Alex and Rio is as fleshed-out human individuals. You don’t get that wink at the camera, because we found it undermined the scenes that those individuals are in.”
In the hit series The Tudors, Natalie Dormer plays the ambitious and beautiful Anne Boleyn. Thrust into the spotlight by the scheming men in her family, Anne catches the eye of Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). They fall in love and Anne somehow manages to get Henry to forget all about his wife and marry her instead. However, things don’t last and Anne eventually loses her head, literally.
Anne Boleyn falls hard for Henry VIII, and she ends up losing her head for it
Fans of The Tudors get to watch how Henry moves from woman to woman like it’s nothing. However, Anne manages to bring out something special in Henry and he considers her over all the rest. In a time when every woman is hoping the king will notice them, Anne gets him to absolutely adore her, for a time.
Anne marries Henry and he even breaks from the Catholic church to be with her. She gives him a daughter, Elizabeth, who would be the future monarch, Elizabeth I. Anne suffers miscarriages and eventually Henry sets his eyes on another woman, Jane Seymour. The flames start to die out between Anne and Henry. He actually arrests her for treason and wants her to be executed, and fans know Henry always gets what he wants.
The original Penny Dreadful was a series about monsters, mostly of the literal variety, featuring stories about witches, werewolves and other dark creatures right alongside real-life versions of Victor Frankenstein and Dorian Gray. Its sequel series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, tells a similarly dark tale, but chooses to set its story in a land filled with sunshine, a world whose monsters wear beautiful fashions and bright surfaces often cover rot underneath.
At the center of this beautiful, complicated mess sits Magda (Natalie Dormer), a shape-shifting demon whose love of chaos and violence appears to be as rooted in the joy of breaking things and making messes she doesn’t have to clean up as it does any hard and firm spiritual guidelines.
“There will come a time when the world is ready for me,” Magda intones in the series’ opening moments, predicting a dark and dire future for humanity that involves global conflict and fratricide.
The world she’s referring to is 1930s Los Angeles, which teeters on the verge of tearing itself to pieces as a race war bubbles in the streets and fascists creep toward positions of governmental authority. But in the larger world of our television landscape, her presence makes a similarly outsized impact from her very first scenes.
Magda, it would appear, is not here to punish or destroy so much as to illuminate, to sow the seeds of chaos that might prove to her reclusive holy sister Santa Muerte that humanity is unworthy of her. Why? Well, we don’t entirely know. But in every folklore, aren’t there always divine beings who are simultaneously symbiotic partners and rivals, who dance around their hatred for and need of one another for all eternity? Given that Santa Muerte, to date, hasn’t seemed terribly interested in diverting her sister’s quite literal highway to hell, it seems safe to assume that’s in some way what’s happening here.
Meet the human forms of shape-shifting demon Magda.
When EW spoke with Natalie Dormer last year to get the goods on her new role… well, roles in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, the Game of Thrones vet promised Magda, her shape-shifting demon persona, will take three different guises that she’ll use to manipulate humankind in 1938 Los Angeles. “The audience will discover who those identities are as they continue to watch the show,” she said at the time.
In a brand-new sneak peek, which EW can exclusively debut, we see these different forms and learn more about how she’ll use them over the course of season 1.
First things first, this is not Penny Dreadful season 4. City of Angels is more a “spiritual descendant,” as creator John Logan once put it, to the original series, which placed actress Eva Green in a gothic London setting.
“The continuity from the first iteration of Penny Dreadful to this one is the supernatural element in which monsters are present but the main monsters are within the characters,” explains Rory Kinnear, who played Frankenstein’s monster in the original and now returns as a German Nazi living in America as a physician.
Magda is what makes City of Angels a Penny Dreadful story.
As the sister of Santa Muerte (Lorenza Izzo), who is the Holy Angel of Death and ferry woman of souls to the afterlife, she is an agent of chaos who believes humankind is inherently evil — and she’ll use her changeling powers to prove that point. The video, shown above, sees Magda taking on various forms as she speaks of a “time when nation will battle nation, when race will devour race, when brother will kill brother.”
At the center of it all is Tiago Vega, played by Here & Now‘s Daniel Zovatto. The first chicano police detective on the L.A.P.D. force, Tiago works to solve a case seemingly linked to Día de Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, while the planned construction of L.A.’s Arroyo Seco Parkway threatens to displace his family and neighborhood. Zovatto calls it “a roller coaster of emotions” as Tiago grapples with racism, Nazism, police brutality, and demagoguery.
“It’s intense,” he says. “I mean, it is dreadful.”
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels — also starring Nathan Lane as a Jewish detective and a mentor figure for Tiago — premieres this April 26 on Showtime.
Watch in higher resolution in the video archive.
The actress has had many memorable roles, but her next projects are set to make the biggest impact yet. And that’s by design
It’s the eve of Natalie Dormer’s 38th birthday, and the thesp is cozied up on a beige suede sectional inside a private home full of retro flair that’s tucked away in Granada Hills, an hour outside of Los Angeles. The star of the upcoming television series Penny Dreadful: City of Angels had spent the better part of the day there shooting our cover.
“I’m an Aquarian. What are you?” she asks in her charming British lilt.
“Scorpio,” I reply.
“Ah, Scorpio,” she says with a smile as she leans against a furry cream-colored pillow with a bottle of Trader Joe’s spring water in her hand. There is a disarming warmth about her—a calming quality—and an innate, introspective wiseness of someone who has learned through what she’s lived through. When Dormer speaks, she looks right at you, and when she’s discussing her passions, her blue eyes sparkle with intensity as she rakes her platinum-blond locks off her face.
Her motivational mantras, which she shares throughout our chat, make me want to snap my fingers as if I were in the midst of a poetry slam.
“This is very Buddhist of me,” she says with a laugh as she talks about the many lessons she’s learned in Hollywood and why she launched her own production company, Dog Rose Productions, in December. “It’s that old saying that if you wait to feel ready, you’ll be waiting forever,” adding that that was also one of the biggest messages instilled in her while working alongside costars like Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Banks, and Julianne Moore.
“I think women, we sometimes feel like we have to be 100 percent sure that we can achieve something before we dip our toes in the water,” she says. “It’s like it’s socially innate in us. It’s not that we’re not risk-takers, because I think women are courageous, and they’re brave, and they are risk-takers. But sometimes we’re naturally too modest. I think what I’m increasingly learning, especially about the industry, is you’re going to learn on the job. That’s how you get your Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours, is doing it, and it’s the trial and the error. And that is how you learn. And that is how you grow and jump in, sister. What’s the worst that can happen?”
Murder, Los Angeles, Satan, the Third Reich, anti-Mexican bigotry, an Aimee Semple McPherson-style evangelist and Nathan Lane with a Tommy gun – the new trailer for Showtime’s Penny Dreadful: City of Angels packs quite the wallop.
Billed as a “spiritual descendant of the original Penny Dreadful story,” the new series, kicking off next month and mixing historical reality with the supernatural, opens in 1938 Los Angeles with a grisly murder shocking the city (we see the mutilated, Joker-looking corpse in the trailer). Detective Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto) and his partner Lewis Michener (Nathan Lane) investigate the crime, getting drawn into a tale that encompasses the building of L.A.’s first freeways, the city’s traditions of Mexican-American folklore, Nazi espionage, and the rise of radio evangelism. Before long, Vega and his family “are grappling with powerful forces that threaten to tear them apart.”
In addition to Zovatto (Here and Now) and Lane, the new Penny Dreadful stars Natalie Dormer, Kerry Bishé, Rory Kinnear, Adriana Barraza, Michael Gladis, Jessica Garza and Johnathan Nieves. Tony winner (for Red) and three-time Oscar nominee John Logan, the creator, writer and executive producer of the original Penny Dreadful, continues in those same roles. Michael Aguilar serves as executive producer, along with Sam Mendes and Pippa Harris, both of Neal Street Productions. Logan’s Desert Wolf Productions produces, and James Bagley serves as co-executive producer.
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels premieres Sunday, April 26 at 10/9c on Showtime.
Watch in higher resolution in the video archive.
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