First Showing – “It’s great characters in a world… a sport that’s so dramatic.” The 70th Monaco Grand Prix just took place and perfectly timed with that, the BBC has released a video featurette with a first look at Ron Howard’s new F1 film Rush. We’ve been hearing about casting, and it’s already shooting around the world now. The film focuses on the rivalry between drivers Niki Lauda (played by Daniel Brühl) and James Hunt (played by Chris Hemsworth). For those that aren’t inherently familiar with Formula 1 racing and this rivalry, the featurette does a superb job of recapping the history, and gives us a tease at the intensity and drama in this.
Ron Howard’s new movie Rush, from a screenplay written by Peter Morgan (The Last King of Scotland, The Queen, Frost/Nixon, Hereafter), is a biography about Formula 1 champion driver Niki Lauda and the 1976 crash that almost claimed his life. Mere weeks after the accident, he got behind the wheel to challenge his rival, James Hunt. The movie is set in the 1970s and follows the on-and-off track lives of Hunt and Lauda and their racing teams of McLaren and Ferrari. The cast also includes Olivia Wilde, Natalie Dormer, Alexandra Maria Lara and Christian McKay. No official release date has been set for Howard’s Rush, but we’ll definitely keep you updated on this – it looks like it could turn out pretty damn good.
There’s a featurette but Natalie is not in it, so I’m not going to post it.
Natalie Dormer may have been topless during one of her first scenes in Game of Thrones, but it was her character’s attitude about sex with her husband that made the biggest impression.
In Sunday’s episode, Dormer had to play the not-so-shy virgin Margaery Tyrell, who tries to consummate her marriage with Renly Baratheon (Gethin Anthony). When he can’t quite rise to the occasion, she offers to enlist the help of her brother Loras (Finn Jones), who just so happens to be Renly’s lover.
Game of Thrones’ Joe Dempsie on Gendry: I have “bastard” written all over me
“I think she’s empathetic and understanding. There is no malice, there is no anger toward Renly and his love for her brother,” Dormer tells TVGuide.com. “The family bonds between the Tyrells is incredibly strong. She has a lot of love and respect for Loras, and since Loras chooses Renly to love, I think she tries to be supportive.
“The political aspect is a practicality of the marriage in order to benefit all parties, to benefit their house, to benefit Renly. The Baratheons may be the future of Westeros,” she continues. “I think that she genuinely sees that they can be a trinity and that they can work as three. They say that the strongest shape is a triangle, so I think she believes there is an exciting, plausible future of the three of them working together.”
Check out what else Dormer has to say about Margaery’s practicality, locking horns with Littlefinger and wearing that plunging neckline.
You’re best known in the U.S. as Ann Boleyn on The Tudors. You’ve become quite the go-to girl for period drama on cable!
Natalie Dormer: [Laughs] My range does exchange beyond that. But I hear it’s a commonality to jump between HBO and Showtime and vice versa, so I take it as a compliment really.
Game of Thrones and The Tudors star Natalie Dormer will play the title role in the Young Vic’s forthcoming revival of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie.
The production, which runs from 21 March to 14 April 2012 (previews from 15 March), marks a return to the Young Vic for Dormer following her performance in Luc Bondy’s revival of Sweet Nothings in 2010.
In After Miss Julie she’ll star opposite Kieran Bew as John, the object of Miss Julie’s affections, and Polly Frame as Christine.
Bew’s recent credits include Reasons to be Pretty and The Knot of the Heart at the Almeida, while Frame was recently seen in the National’s Earthquakes in London.
After Miss Julie, which is directed by Natalie Abrahami, has extended by a week and will now run until 14 April.
Marber’s 2003 play relocates Strindberg’s tale about a footman who seduces a count’s daughter on the night of a midsummer festival to an English country house in July 1945 on the night of the British Labour Party’s election victory.
The new production is a pilot for a new series at the Young Vic called Classics for a New Climate. According to press material, “Throughout the creative process the team will investigate and experiment with approaches to making theatre while taking as little electricity off the national grid as possible.”
The British actor will play merchant prince Xaro Xhoan Daxos in the HBO fantasy drama’s new run.
“He’s the prince of Qarth, and Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) runs into him,” Anozie told Coming Soon. “It’s pretty damn good. Game of Thrones just exceeded all expectations. Everyone’s on top of their game. It’s just amazing.”
Anozie also hinted that fans can expect “a lot of action” from the new episodes.
“Season two is bigger,” he said. “It goes deeper into the politics of what is going on. There is a whole episode devoted to a war, that’s going to be big, but I can’t say anymore!”
Natalie Dormer, Carice van Houten, Stephen Dillane, Liam Cunningham and Hannah Murray are among the other actors to have signed up for roles on Game of Thrones.
Dog Soldiers’ director Neil Marshall will helm an episode for the second season, as will The Pacific‘s David Nutter, Rubicon‘s Alik Sakharov and Boardwalk Empire‘s David Petrarca.
Game of Thrones will return to HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic later this year.
Watch a teaser trailer for Game of Thrones season two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBrsM_WlfV8
Anozie stars opposite Liam Neeson in the new wilderness thriller The Grey; it opens in cinemas on Friday January 27.
The first season of British supernatural drama The Fades is a blend of teen angst, family dynamics, and the paranormal. A mix that may not seem to make much sense on paper, but one that Skins veteran and The Fades creator and writer, Jack Thorne, understand well. Thorne’s experience with both teenagers and their relationships with their families is certainly his strong suit, and by introducing supernatural elements, the series achieves a nice balance that lends all aspects more depth—and higher stakes.
The premise of the series rests on the concept of Fades, dead souls that have for some reason stayed in a limbo state among the living without being able to interact with them. To play off of the Fades, Angelics are also a key element to the series, as they are those rare people who can actually see Fades. The main conflict revolves around the two sides struggling to understand each other and their efforts do what each side believes is the right thing for both humanity and the spirit world.
Paul (Iain de Caestecker) is 17 years old and an Angelic, and his dramatic introduction into the world of the Fades sets the entire season in motion. As Paul is drawn into this supernatural world, those closest to him are also affected: his best friend, Mac (Daniel Kaluuya), a motormouth movie obsessive; his twin sister and polar opposite, Anna (Lily Loveless), popular and embarrassed by Paul’s social ineptitude; his understanding mother, Meg (Claire Rushbrook); and Jay (Sophie Wu), Anna’s best friend and Paul’s crush.
It just doesn’t seem right watching Natalie Dormer act in contemporary clothing, let alone with her natural blond hair.
“I do quite a lot contemporary stuff,” Dormer told me, laughing, during a phone interview from London, “but the American audience perhaps wouldn’t know me so well for that.”
What Americans do know the British actress for is her role as the brunette Anne Boleyn in “The Tudors,” Showtime’s bodice-ripping take of the lives and wives of 16th century British King Henry VIII. BBC America currently airs repeats of that series on Wednesdays, but fans can see the modern, blond Dormer in the network’s horror-comedy mashup “The Fades,” in which she plays Sarah, a ghost-fighting “angelic.”
Without spoiling—the network airs the fourth of six episodes at 8 p.m. Feb. 4 (but I recommend you find them and start from the beginning; my review here)—Dormer’s character is put through the wringer.
“I got a great kick out of this show because it was so physically demanding,” Dormer said. “A lot of extreme stuff happens, without giving too much away, we all had ash being blown in our faces or were covered in goo and glue or had to deal with peculiar, extreme physical situations.”
Dormer dons period costumes again for her role in Season 2 of HBO’s fantasy hit “Game of Thrones,” which begins April 1. She finished filming in December, but did not want to reveal too much about her character, Margaery Tyrell. Like Sarah in “The Fades,” practically anything you say about Margaery is a spoiler.
Awkward teen Paul sees dead people. So what, right?
As you begin to read this review of BBC America’s “The Fade,” (8 p.m. Jan. 14, BBC America; 3.5 stars out of 4), you’re likely going to shrug, thinking you’ve seen plenty of ghost stories, not to mention TV shows and movies about teen outcasts trying to fit in and/or get lucky.
You haven’t seen “The Fades.”
Created by Jack Thorne (British versions of “Skins” and “Shameless”), this six-part horror series skillfully crosses “Superbad” with “The Sixth Sense” and just a drop of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It’s a funny, creepy, touching thriller that had me laughing one second and peeking between my fingers the next.
When Paul (Iain De Caestecker) witnesses a dying woman and a man attacked by an inhuman creature with a tongue that would make KISS frontman Gene Simmons jealous, he’s so freaked out he can’t even tell his best friend, sex- and “Star Wars”-obsessed Mac (Daniel Kaluuya), what he saw.
The least surprising thing to happen in Venice this month has not been a tourist going slack-jawed at the price of a gondola ride, or at least one Bellini cocktail being sunk in Harry’s Bar, but that, at the city’s annual film festival, Madonna’s new film should have been widely panned. Widely but not universally, for while its harshest critic (from The Guardian) dismissed her Wallis Simpson biopic, WE, as “a primped and simpering folly”, The Independent’s man on the Lido, Geoffrey Macnab, found much to admire in Madonna’s second turn behind the camera – noting that, while “the film is no masterpiece… many in Venice were anticipating (and some actively hoping) for a prize turkey and they’ll have been disappointed by the sheer zest and craftsmanship of WE.”
Andrea Riseborough’s sympathetic portrayal of the monarch-marrying American divorcee was particularly admired, but there has yet to be word on the actress playing Simpson’s dedicated foe, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future consort of King George VI. Those of us with any interest will therefore have to wait until the film’s general release next January to catch Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of a woman we are used to thinking of as ‘the Queen Mum’, but who, as far as Madonna is concerned, is the villain of the piece.
“It’s true… she is the baddie,” says Dormer when we meet.” There are two sides to every story, and this is the counter-argument. What has timed very nicely is the success of The King’s Speech, which means that the general public is informed about the abdication from the other side, as well.”
But more of Madonna and the Queen Mother later, because those readers not acquainted with a certain TV history drama called The Tudors may not be familiar with Natalie Dormer, either. Those of us who were glued to this sudsy mix of sex and 16th-century politics will however know that the spark went out of the series when Dormer’s Anne Boleyn was sent to the scaffold, leaving centre-stage to Jonathan Rhys Meyer – never the most compelling of leading men – as a rather too trim King Henry VIII. Or as the Boston Herald put it: “Dormer’s unconventional beauty and frantic scheming made the first two seasons crackle every week and her departure leaves a void.”
“I didn’t just want to play her as this femme fatale – she was a genuine evangelical with a real religious belief in the Reformation,” says Dormer, showing how she might have been accepted for a place to study history at Cambridge University (fatally, she misread a question in her A-level exam and didn’t get the necessary grade). “The show was an absolute joy because it was an amalgamation of my two greatest passions – drama and history. I read everything by Starkey… good old Starkey… opinionated Starkey [this was soon after the historian’s controversial utterances about the August riots]… Antonia Fraser, all of them. But there is a lot of sex and violence in the programme, so it’s hard to explain it to the guy in the street who’s saying, ‘The Tudors? Tits, man!’.”
What can you tell us about your character, Sarah?
“She’s married [to Mark, played by Miranda’s Tom Ellis] and Sarah has this double existence, because she is an Angelic. Her gift is that she’s a seer, she can see the future, and she has visions which she then relays to other Angelics. So she’s normal, but she’s got a history of mental illness and it’s obviously something she’s really struggled to come to terms with. Mark has been her saviour from that. The marriage has broken down for a plethora of reasons, the most pertinent being that she’s living a double existence that he doesn’t understand, which creates a lot of friction. She’s been clutching at straws, trying to maintain a normal life, pretending to herself, lying that she can have a normal, average, uneventful life – and she can’t.”What attracted you to The Fades?
“The strength and the dexterity of Jack’s writing. Everyone loves a good love story, and everyone loves a bit of action, and everyone loves a bit of guts and gore, you know, even the girls do. Nothing in this is gratuitous – everything that is done is done to create true, weighty emotion. So there’s no horror pornography in this. When it gets really dark, it gets dark for intelligent reasons.”Does Sarah see her gifts and status as an Angelic as a blessing or a curse?
“When you meet her at the beginning of the series she would definitely say it was a curse, because her marriage and her life have been destroyed by it. And that’s something that Iain’s character Paul has to face. It’s about finding your place in the world, where you belong, and not denying who you really are. Identity and self-identity is a very strong theme of the show. There is real, genuinely intelligent writing behind it, behind all the fun and the running around and the entertainment.”
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