An experienced and versatile film and television actor, having appeared in Fargo, Better Call Saul, and emotional drama Gifted alongside Chris Evans. This year she joined season 2 of Preacher, taking on the character of Lara Featherstone, and recently took some time to discuss the role with STARBURST.
STARBURST: Your character Lara is quite a complex one. How would you describe her to someone entirely unaware of her?
Julie Ann Emery: (laughs) And she gets more complex as the season goes on! I would say that, if I was speaking to someone who had no knowledge of her or the comics, Featherstone is a zealot. She is uber-dedicated to her cause and to The Grail. She would do absolutely anything to accomplish her mission and her goal, and by anything, I mean anything. In her mind, there is no line. And there’s very little space in her mind outside of her mission, and she’ll even do things that she would find unpleasant if other people did them. She also believes she’s one of the good guys.
It’s interesting you say that as there are blurred lines between good and evil for many of the characters.
Well, she really believes it, but very objectively speaking. I mean, I think we have that in our world. I think The Grail is very timely now for the world we live in today, and there’s something to be said for understanding an organisation like that and what their commitment level is.
Lara’s entrance is very vampish, very noirish; and you’re playing a character playing a character. How much fun was that?
It’s my favourite part of Featherstone, the transformation side to her, and I get to continue that as the season plays out. As an actor, it’s a great role. As far as my entrance goes, it felt like it was from another time; very noirish, a throwback. It’s interesting as I don’t think I fully understood how far we were going with it until I saw the set and the outfits. It was both fun and challenging as I wanted to make the character very different from Featherstone.
You mentioned the character is very single minded, but is it true you were also single minded in getting the role?
When you audition for roles you have only the time you’re given. Personally, I try and build the character and with Featherstone I felt I needed to do that. In the audition, one of the scenes was her entrance, and the other was in the van when she takes off the wig. I thought that if I can transform without the aid of hair and makeup, if I could do that then I’d have a shot. I guess we’re similar in that I’m very dedicated, and I enjoy hard work, and setting a goal and going after it. There are lines I won’t cross though (laughs)!
It sounds like you have a real affinity and understanding for the character.
I do I guess. I think I’ve grown an affinity for complex women. To be honest, I didn’t really understand Featherstone when I first read the script and that perplexed me. When you shine a light on someone, though, you start to understand them and that really turns me on. Digging into Featherstone, there’s a lot I respect about her. To be so dedicated, you realise you could achieve anything. And I love that she’s a bad-ass!
You’ve had a lot of recurring roles in some great shows, but it must be great to get a role like this that you can explore, as you say.
With a television character, you can live with them for a longer time and really get under their skin, but you shoot much faster than with film so you have to be ready. There’s a pressure to work quickly and sometimes you feel you might miss something, but I do enjoy living with her. On a movie, I wouldn’t get the opportunity to live with Featherstone for 6 months.
What’s the coolest thing you’ve been able to do, obviously without too many spoilers?
(laughs) I can’t tell you much without spoilers! I can say there are multiple, awesome things coming up but can’t say what they are. I promise there is a lot of The Grail coming, and I’m thrilled with where the character goes.
You’ve built a career with a great deal of variety in the roles you’ve played. Are you conscious of not being typecast or choosing a role similar to the previous one?
No-one wants to be typecast but I’m not sure how, personally, I’ve avoided it. I do look for things that are completely different to the role I just played. I’m really happy with how my career is; I mean who gets to move from Ida Thurman in Fargo to Betsy Kettleman in Better Call Saul and how different those characters are. It’s what really interests me; getting to know and figure out characters that are nothing like me. Maybe it’s partly down to luck.
What’s in your future?
I have a little Christmas film with Bonnie Bedelia coming out this year, and I’m working on a couple of independent films. And we’re hopeful for another series of Preacher of course!
Lauren James is a scientist who is best known for who books The Next Together and The Last Beginning. Her latest novel, The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is out now. We caught up with her to find out more.
STARBURST: What’s the elevator pitch for The Loneliest Girl in the Universe?
Lauren James: A girl alone on a spaceship finds a connection with another ship, just at the time she needs that the most.
How would you describe The Loneliest Girl in the Universe to an alien?
I’d probably start by trying to form a common communication method through sound or light and then establish a basic mutual understanding of the universe through mathematical and physical principles, before moving on to language-based nouns and verbs.
What inspired the story?
Funnily enough, it started with a question from some physics coursework at university! The question was about special relativity, and went something like this:
An astronaut travels in a spaceship to a new planet. After a few years, a newer faster ship is developed and launched, which overtakes the first ship. How old are the two astronauts when they each arrive on the planet?
I started thinking about what it would be like to be that first astronaut, and dedicate years to travelling alone in space, only for your ship to be overtaken by a faster one before you even arrive. What would that feel like? What kind of relationship would you have with the person on the faster ship? From that, the story of Romy Silvers was born.
Is writing an essentially lonely profession?
Being an author involves spending a lot of time alone, staying up late at night to write, summoning the devil in exchange for book ideas… wait, what?
It’s very lonely, but that’s exactly why I like it. And probably why Twitter was invented.
Why do you think ‘realistic’ science fiction is so popular?
I always try to make the science in my books as accurate as possible, and I did a lot of research into space travel and the theory of space travel behind NASA’s equipment when writing The Loneliest Girl in the Universe. I think there’s a danger of crossing over into fantasy instead of science fiction if you don’t base your technology in solid scientific concepts, and there’s never been as much appeal in writing Fantasy for me. As long as there’s some seed of truth, it’s very easy to make readers believe anything else.
Why is Young Adult fiction doing so well?
Personally, I am attracted to YA because it gives me things that simply aren’t available in adult fiction. I joke that as a teenager I read adult fiction, and as an adult, I read teenage fiction. That’s completely true, and I’ve spoken to many people with the same experiences. I want to read diverse, fresh and socially conscious stories that represent the reality of the world I live in. I really wasn’t finding that in the literary fiction I was reading. It may be aimed at teenagers, but YA is on the cutting edge of fiction, taking risks to do new things, which other areas of publishing have never done.
The YA reading community is so passionate and socially aware, and that demand online for better and more respectful diversity has encouraged more publishers to buy diverse books, meaning that YA books are on the forefront of change – one example being the huge increase in LGBT YA literature in recent years (like my second novel The Last Beginning, which has a lesbian relationship!). Things happen more rapidly and collaboratively here than anywhere else.
So it’s not really just Young Adults reading YA?
I think there are a lot of crossover these days, but while I’m delighted that adults read my books too, my main priority is getting the books to their intended readers. I wrote The Loneliest Girl in the Universe for girls who don’t feel brave or strong enough to be the hero in an adventure story. I wrote The Last Beginning for teenagers who have moved beyond the desire to read LGBT ‘Coming Out’ stories, and are desperate to find a book about a girl who loves a girl, just having an adventure.
YA authors write things that children read, things that can shape their views for life. The authors of YA have a huge responsibility to their young readers, and I think being aware of that responsibility creates very well-crafted books.
Is the sci-fi community as diverse as it thinks it is?
I think social media has done a lot for the diverse fiction movement, both good and bad. It’s brought a lot of attention to the issue and encouraged publishers to take strides to increase diversity on their list and in their offices, but at times it can feel quite forceful and angry.
I can completely understand why some authors have felt the need to include diversity in their fiction for fear of backlash. I’m sure that, on the other side, there are also authors who are afraid to write about minorities because social media is so vocal that they’re worried about the backlash if they got it wrong – or just not-quite-right.
I think, ultimately, you have to ignore all the chatter and just focus on what you, personally, think is right. Every book should be written primarily for the author, first and foremost. You have to look at the world around you and try to write about it as realistically as possible – or what’s the point of being a writer?
Is publishing more accessible these days? Is it easier to get published?
For me, the process was relatively straightforward – I found an agent after querying six, and after we submitted the draft to publishers we had two offers within a fortnight. However, it wasn’t easy – I worked on editing the draft for a year before submission. That isn’t something you can do unless you have the financial support to work speculatively without guarantee of income, which means writing isn’t an accessible industry for lower class demographics.
What’s next?
My next book (out with Walker in 2018) will involve mudlarking, time capsules, romance and – of course – more science. It’s kind of a sci-fi detective story about the extinction of humanity.
What authors are you reading? And why?
I love Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho, Radio Silence by Alice Oseman, Lirael by Garth Nix, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susannah Clarke and Far From You by Tess Sharpe.
I particularly love Neil Gaiman, Rainbow Rowell, Sarah Waters, P. G. Wodehouse, and Audrey Niffenegger… I could go on all day, I think! In particular, I’m always making notes when I read books by Douglas Adams – he’s the master of humorous sci-fi. I’ve adored his work since I was young.
You can find Lauren on Twitter at @Lauren_E_James, Tumblr at @laurenjames or her website http://www.laurenejames.co.uk, where you can subscribe to her newsletter to be kept up to date with her new releases and receive bonus content.
If you’re keeping up with our book reviews, it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that we are massive fans of Syd Moore’s Rosie Strange series. The first book, Strange Magic, was a breath of fresh air for a genre that is often mustier and more cobweb-ridden than the proverbial haunted house, and the latest – the recently published Strange Sight – builds masterfully upon Strange Magic‘s success with chills, dry humour and a powerful social message at its core.
Syd, whose eclectic career has also included marketing and PR, lecturing in publishing and presenting the Channel 4 book programme Pulp, was kind enough to take time off from writing the third (but hopefully not final) Rosie Strange adventure to talk to us about writing, witchcraft, Super Strumps, and Essex girls.
STARBURST: Rosie Strange is an Essex girl, as are the leading characters in your earlier books The Drowning Pool and Witch Hunt. Where does your fascination with the Essex girl come from?
Syd Moore: Being an Essex girl myself, I had to put up with an awful lot of shit during the eighties and pretty much from that point onwards. I lived in London for quite a long time and when I moved back to Essex about fourteen years ago and started lecturing at the local college I was blown away by the fact that the girls, after they’d gone off for a university interview, would often come back and say the guys who’d been interviewing them had looked at their details and opened with, “Ah, so you’re an Essex girl are you?” I don’t think it was meant to be a jab, it was meant to be amusing, an ice-breaker, but it left that student with two options: one was to challenge the interviewer’s idea of a stereotype (although they want to get into this educational establishment so they don’t want to start off with conflict) or the other option was to just giggle inanely and confirm the stereotype. So I started writing articles about the Essex girl for a magazine, asking the question – when you get away from the eighties Essex girl stereotype, is she actually in the 21st century just a sexually autonomous and liberated woman? And then I got together with a local artist called Heidi Wigmore and we made a pack of cards that looked at the Essex girl and all the different female stereotypes and examined them in a more positive way. We called the game Super Strumps, to spoof the whole Top Trumps thing.
One of the things that I’ve been aware of as I’ve made my journey through life is that if you’ve got a message and you want things to change you can’t just shout about it or bang on about it because people turn off, they won’t listen. But if you can do it with humour and get people to realise you’re not confronting them, you’re opening a conversation with them and they can laugh about it, they’re much more susceptible to the messages you’re trying to work with. So, in Super Strumps, the Essex girl’s positives are things like drinking capacity and being immune to cold whereas the career woman can penetrate glass ceilings and the old biddy can turn invisible at will. Using humour to get your message across in a non-confrontational way is really important and that’s one of the things I wanted to work within Strange Magic, so that I can get my message out to as big an audience as I possibly can.
So where is the link between Essex girls and witches?
When I started researching the witch hunts and looked at the characteristics of the women who were accused, a lot of them had bastard children and were very poor, most of them were on the lower end of the social scale and pretty much uneducated, and they were termed ‘loose women’. At that time ‘loose’ meant not being under the protection or control of a man. So, after thinking about that and how Essex was popularly known as ‘witch county’, I wondered if the stigma that was attached to the women and witches of Essex – who were notorious throughout the UK and across the continent – had never really gone, but just mutated. The Essex girl arrived because there was already this feeling that there was something a bit dirty and low class about the women of Essex and, just like the witch, the Essex girl challenges the norms of social behaviour. She is quite threatening to a lot of men and quite threatening to other women.
Why do you think Essex was such a hotbed for witches?
There are lots of theories: one idea is that it was cut off and very rural but at the same time people were using the waterways to get around – maybe traders brought back stories of the witch hunts that were happening over on the continent? There’s also a theory about ergot poisoning, although I don’t think that’s fashionable anymore. If you drill down into the statistics there are witch finders at the heart of all of this – Matthew Hopkins the ‘Witchfinder General’ was one, and then, before him, it was Brian Darcy. They ripped it up. Essex had more indictments for witchcraft than in any other part of the UK except for Scotland so maybe it was because of men like those, who were happy to go in and stir up these wild accusations.
A huge amount of research goes into your books. When you’re putting a new story together, how do you begin winding the fact into the fiction?
My progress through the historical stories has always been quite organic. When I was writing The Drowning Pool I was interested in the real-life ‘sea witch’ Sarah Moore (no relation) who I renamed Sarah Grey in the book. I first heard about Sarah Moore when a pub with her name opened in Leigh so I wanted to learn more and found out about the legend. After that, I started doing research into her, and asking at the heritage centre, and eventually, I found her burial registration at the records office. That gave me a concrete date to begin looking into her story.
When I first started researching Sarah, I found the statistic that between 1580 and 1690 there were 222 indictments for witchcraft in Hertford, Kent, Surrey and Sussex, but in Essex, there were 503. So I drilled down and found Matthew Hopkins, who eventually became my story for Witch Hunt, and while I was researching the Hopkins hysteria I came across Ursula Kemp who I decided to use for Strange Magic. Originally Strange Magic was called The Skeleton Key but when Oneworld bought it they wanted to turn it into a series – at that point, I was a bit witched out! For Strange Sight, I wanted to write a story about a really nasty, malevolent ghost and when I researched Elizabeth Brownrigg and found out about her crimes and the cruelty she inflicted, how she would exploit the charges from the foundling hospital, it occurred to me that this is still going on. When you look at the witch hunts and our hysteria and fear of the other, how we demonise certain people and exploit the most vulnerable, it’s still happening right now.
In Strange Fascination, which I’m writing at the moment, I’m looking at the story of another witch who actually existed – Anne Hughes, who lived in Great Leighs in Essex. She was burned at the stake and then they buried her remains and rolled a boulder across them to prevent her from rising again. The boulder’s in the carpark of a pub called The Castle in Great Leighs. When the Americans took over part of the pub during the Second World War they moved the boulder to bring their lorries on and allegedly unleashed all this rampant poltergeist activity. The ghost hunter Harry Price went down to investigate it.
Is the research your favourite part of writing a book?
I kind of love it all really. I’m a very sociable person so because I spend days and days in my little box room not seeing anybody, doing the research gets me out and about talking to people and interviewing people and it’s really good for my personality. I’ve always been intrigued by folklore and mythology and it’s fantastic to go to these eerie places and learn more about them. I love that part of it.
I also really like the characters of Rosie and Sam. It’s nice to spend time in their company.
Even though Strange Sight only takes place a few weeks after the events of Strange Magic you can see the development in Rosie and Sam’s relationship.
I’m glad you felt that. I like writing them and seeing how they react. There’s that writer’s cliché where you tell the characters what to do but then they react in a completely different way to what you were expecting. With Rosie, I picture her in my head and I just watch and listen – I’ll see Rosie kick something over and walk off and Sam roll his eyes. They develop a mind of their own. Sometimes I think I’m a bit of a channel for them. Was it Keith Richards who said about writing songs “I just catch them, they’re already there.” I think I do that a little bit with Rosie and Sam.
Did you already have an arc in mind when you wrote Strange Magic?
I did have a sense of arc. I knew it would be three books and I wanted to explore and develop the characters of Rosie and Sam and look into both of their backstories, to place them in time and investigate how people can be products of their families and background, how they reflect the past but are also very much of the present. And also how they change and react to their environment and how that shapes them. A bit of nature vs nurture I guess.
Bowie died while I was writing Strange Magic and I was listening to a lot of his songs. I kept coming back to ‘Changes’. I think the line “Turn and face the Strange” influenced me a fair bit! But there was much in that song, that jumped out as a perfect soundtrack for the Strange trilogy. I knew I wanted the third book to be titled Strange Fascination and that was also because of, amongst other things, the line “Strange fascination fascinating me”, which, I felt, resonated with the themes of the unexplored, the paranormal and the mysterious. I knew Rosie was going to become initially involved with them with great reluctance. But that her relationship with the external world and the nebulous would change her. I guess I wanted to say that it’s okay to be awed and floored and to live in a world where not everything has an answer like they tell you it does at school. Wonder is a beautiful thing. For Rosie, opening herself up and allowing herself to experience this with less prejudice, becomes formative. Her life becomes less ordinary, less mundane but more complex and problematic. But not bad. Certainly, at the beginning of the book, she is quite self-reliant and self-contained. As she moves through the stories she becomes more sensitized to other people’s pain, their conflicts and cruelties, but also finds herself more aware of some of the amazing human qualities that exist in our world – warmth, fun, laughter, fellowship and love.
So we’re going to find out much more about Rosie’s backstory in the next book?
Yes, we are. I’m really enjoying writing it. I’ve also been researching the MI6 occult bureau and Cecil Williamson, who had dealings with Otto Rahn, who was one of the architects of the Third Reich and very into the occult. That whole idea – that there was a black magic department in the government – I find really, really fascinating and we can research that area a little bit more freely now because the D notices are being taken off certain papers. These are very interesting times for looking at that period.
I’ll also be looking more at the idea of glamour, which I touched on in Strange Sight (note: in supernatural terms, glamour is an illusion cast by witches). The whole history of glamour is really interesting – glamour, artifice and dark deeds, and how it was a part of fairy magic. I’ve been looking at fairy myths where people have been glamoured and it’s fascinating.
Do you believe in the paranormal? Have you ever been on a paranormal investigation?
No, but I’d love to do an investigation and I’ve done research with people who have. I’m sensitive to atmosphere – I think we all are – and I think there are places all over the world where you can sense something. I have no idea where it comes from and I’m kind of like Rosie in that I have an open mind and a healthy scepticism – well, actually Sam’s more like that – but I think atheism is very arrogant, to close your mind to possible arguments about things that we haven’t discovered yet. I think that’s just as blinding as absolute faith. Things aren’t black and white, they are nuanced and lots of different shades of grey.
At the moment we’re in a very reductive problematic place – it’s all very binary – and nuance, sophistication, intricacy and complexity aren’t things we should be afraid of. Not to be open to argument is really dangerous.
In the Rosie Strange series, I always try to explain the supernatural phenomena, so there is an ‘is it or isn’t it?’ uncertainty that lets people come down on either side – for me, in the writing, I definitely think there are other forces at play that are helping to shape the other characters in the book. Rosie and Sam’s character arcs are changing. Rosie is a benefits fraud inspector so she can be quite reductive, so I wanted her to be a contradiction in herself – partly witch finder and partly witch because a benefits fraud inspector isn’t a million miles away from the witchfinder! She is incredibly insightful and perceptive and possibly developing powers that she doesn’t think exists. So I’m constantly playing with her self-awareness and how she’s perceived by other people.
Why do you think the series has hit such a chord with readers?
I’m really intrigued by ghosts, myths and legends and lots of the moments I put into my stories are things that have happened to me – where you see something but you’re not sure if you’ve seen it, or you have an odd experience and you try to find a rational way to explain it. I think there are bits in the books that people can relate to because they’ve done it themselves. I also think we have a lot to learn from history, and that it’s important to examine history and realise we need to learn and grow and sometimes change our behaviour.
But I really want my readers to have fun and enjoy a good story, to have a bit of a laugh but also be thrilled in that classic M.R. James ghost story sort of way. It’s not all about grimness and nastiness, it’s about bringing all of those elements together so I can talk about things that are important to me and also give people a bloody good time!
The Toxic Avenger musical has hit London’s West End, so we caught up with one of the co-writers – Bon Jovi keyboard player David Bryan – to find out all about it.
STARBURST: What gave you the impetus to turn The Toxic Avenger into a musical?
David Bryan: In 2010, Memphis came on Broadway and Toxic Avenger launched off-Broadway, and Memphis won a Tony for the Best Broadway show and then won the best off-Broadway show for Toxic Avenger. We were doing Memphis and then we had a three-year break, caused by some legal mumbo jumbo in the Memphis world, so Joe DiPietro, my collaborator, said what about Toxic Avenger? I said, well, write a treatment for it, so there wasn’t really a script for it so he made it up, came in and wrote the whole thing and it was funny as hell and we ended up nailing it in two weeks. I wrote most of the songs. We did it in New Brunswick at the George Street Playhouse and then we went onto off-Broadway for 2010.
Then it went into the licensing world and last year we were at Southwark Playhouse, to the Fringe and now to the Arts Theater. I saw it last year and it was just unbelievable. It’s a great show, it’s so wrong it’s right.
That should be on the poster! Stepping back a little bit, what made you want to step from the world that everybody knows you for being in Bon Jovi to doing musicals? Was that something you had an interest in before, or did it come out of the blue?
That journey for me started just from songwriting, I wanted my songs covered. This one script for the Sweet Valley High Musical didn’t really work out, then I got the Memphis script and that really worked out, but that was 2001, so it’s a long time ago. Then it took us 8 years to get to Broadway for Memphis, and it was in that gap that we made Toxic. Everything is good, Joe and I have two more new musicals coming out in the next three years on Broadway, so we’re killing it, it’s great.
What was it about Toxic that made you think this could really become something? Did it feel like an undiscovered gem, why did no one think of doing this before?
It was more about Joe DiPietro, he found it and said to me do you want to do this, and I said ‘let me read it’ and it was funny as hell, this is great. It’s really a love story. It’s almost a Beauty and the Beast story and it cares about the environment, so it’s doing two things at the same time so you’re just truly laughing your butt off.
That’s an interesting point. Is it written purely for comedy, is there an environmental edge to it? Is it multi-faceted?
It’s definitely multi-faceted. I don’t want to give it away because I want you to see it with no preconceived notions. I did that last year when we were at the Southwark Playhouse and a bunch of my friends went to it and I said I’m not saying anything, just go watch it. It’s really, really, really funny but at the heart of it there’s a love story and the underlying theme is that it’s all about the environment.
You mentioned Memphis which is one style of music, and Toxic is clearly another, you have two more on the go. Do you like to be a chameleon with the music that you write, compose things that people might not expect?
Yeah, it’s all different worlds. In a rock band, you write from the point of view of Bon Jovi, if you will. In a musical, you have an old guy, a young lady, a white person, a black person. Memphis was a whole different range and the same with Toxic Avenger. You have a mother, you have a mayor, the monster, the scientist, the blind girl, all these different characters. For me, I really immersed myself in the story and then thought about what the characters would say. Joe and I have a knack for coming up with songs. We were Skyping yesterday, he’s in New York and I’m in Rio and we wrote another song we needed for our new musical. I’d had 15 years of classical training, so that really helps out in different situations. I never really grew up on musicals but I just get it, we just click on something.
Years ago McCartney couldn’t read music and wondered if he knew how to, would he lose his magic touch? Spielberg the same about film. Do you think coming to this with an innocence has helped you, just to leap in and go for it?
I’ve always been that person I think. I’m the ‘blast in there and go for it’ person. I think if you’re a brain surgeon and you’ve got the brain open and you’re going to kill somebody and it’s one millimetre left or right and the person dies then I think you’ve got a lot of stress. I just write songs for musicals, so I blast in there and do it.
Thinking about your day job, if you can call Bon Jovi your day job, you’ve had big hits and being in a band like that there’s a huge pressure. Slippery was followed by New Jersey, and that was followed by Keep the Faith and you’ve got to keep stepping it up and up. Is this a different kind of pressure in that you want to keep doing things that are different and not the kind of stuff you’ve done before. Is there a freedom to that?
There’s a big freedom, yeah. In the band, it’s the same story. It’s the same musical, we’re just getting more mature and older. With musicals everything is different. Toxic has nothing to do with Memphis. I remember when Memphis opened up. We won two Olivier’s for it and it’s all about the birth of civil rights and the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and in America 1945, 1950 a white person and a black person weren’t allowed to get married in Memphis, it was against the law. We had a lot to say and I invited that whole cast to go and see Toxic Avenger and told them that this was going to be completely the opposite. They looked at me and said, you’re fucked up. For some reason, it’s been a calling, if you will, but I really love to do it. It’s like the most insane crossword puzzle in the world because it’s so complicated and I love figuring it out.
You mention the serious aspects of Memphis, which couldn’t be further away from Tromaville, which is its own craziness. As a writer, if you stepped outside yourself and watched them side by side, do you think you could tell it was David Bryan who was involved in both shows?
Yes, because the one Bon Jovi element that’s in my life, writing the kind of songs that people can remember and sing, anthems. When you look out tonight, 100,000 people will be singing our songs , that just is in you. When I write these songs, and people go ‘wow, I can sing back the songs’ and I’m like ‘you’re supposed to!’
Do you think that’s what you bring to the songs, that anthemic element, repetition in the best sense of people hearing the songs and feeling like they know the songs and remember them because musicals need that sense of familiarity?
There are different forms of a musical. There’s the form with a run-on sentence, and that’s fine. I don’t do that, for me, it’s a song, it started with The Beatles. You have a song, you have a first verse, the B-verse, a chorus, the second verse kind of has the same melody as the first with the storyline further on, then the same B-verse, double chorus, bridge that encapsulates the whole big thought and then chorus out. I kind of write in that world, then there are different things in a musical that you can’t do for every song. That’s the basic of it.
You mention that you and your writing partner are working on two different shows, given that Memphis and Toxic are so different, are these different again?
We have one that’s tentatively called Chasing the Song, that’s from 1960 to 1964, right before The Beatles came to America. Our story is about a woman who was a song publisher in the Brill Building where Don Kirshner was. In 1960, a woman couldn’t get a loan from the bank unless a man co-signed. We’re championing women’s rights when there was no such thing as a woman song publisher. We made up the story, wrote 25 songs for it. I write all of the music, Joe and I co-write the lyrics, Joe writes the story and then the story morphs as the songs are morphing. That one is all about women’s rights in the ‘60s.
Our newer one, we wrote a musical based on Princess Diana. Nobody’s ever done it and Joe said to me what about Princess Diana, because we would have been about the same age as her. I said ok, write a treatment for it and I read it and I thought wow, this is fantastic. The story that we’re telling is great. It’s different from for America than in England because we don’t have prince and princesses, kings and queens, we got away from that. It’s more fairy-taley for us, and it’s really about a woman that got into a bad marriage and situation and came out empowered, stronger and started the world of charity and cared about her kids. It’s a triumph and even though we all know how it ends we did it up at the New York College of Stage and Film and we gave ourselves a week to get 12, 13 actors, put it up and people just said it’s the best thing they’ve seen in 20 years there.
One thing that strikes me, a correlation between what you do in Bon Jovi and what you do with the musicals is it seems you like to write from the point of view of the underdog. Tommy and Gina are the obvious examples in Living on a Prayer. Do you think that there’s a link there?
You know, I think that’s a great point, I don’t think anybody’s ever said that. I love that. Yes, you know what, it’s always been we’re the 5 kids from New Jersey, that’s where we’re from. We were lucky enough to be 30 minutes outside of New York City, but we were just guys who came out of nowhere and we were the underdogs. I think it’s really important for me. I don’t know about the future but I think that any of the subjects that I do write about, it is that, it’s championing someone. Fighting for that underdog. That’s a really great point.
So what’s the ultimate aim, when you start with a project? Is there satisfaction in a slow build off-Broadway or would you rather it went over gangbusters from the off?
You always hope it’s going to be the best and biggest but we go into it going ’this is what we’re going to do, we’re going to write the best musical we can write’, and that’s it. We’re going to make the work the best. Look at the difference between a musical and a band. A band puts 12 songs out and it takes a long time, a year to write and record it. A musical I have 25 songs and it’s a huge undertaking. The one thing about a musical is you don’t tell it, it tells you. Once you write this thing and it looks great on paper and you put it up you go ‘wow, there are holes in there’ or ‘wow that’s great, or isn’t so great’. You fix and fix and fix, it tells you. The only reason why we ever get them right is we run out of ways to get them wrong.
Is there more light and shade when you write a musical in a sense that because you’ve got more songs you can ebb and flow with the emotions. You have the opening track, the mid-album anthem, the closer. It’s not formulaic but there’s a pattern. With a musical, it’s a different pattern. Is that liberating as well?
Kind of, and people get it subliminally, but I still make it like a mini concert. Here’s the big opener, then the little down part, then we drive it up to the first act, then bang, the second act and hit it big, come down a little bit and bang for the big finish. It’s kind of like a record or a rock show. I kind of give it that same kind of vibe because it’s ingrained in me.
Toxic Avenger is not like the movie, it’s different. There are little moments. It’s a love story, a comedy with the underlying thing of caring about the environment.
The Toxic Avenger Musical is at the Arts Theatre, London until December 3rd.
Following our recent chat with Twisted Showcase creator Robin Bell, we were lucky enough to grab some time with Twisted Showcase mainstay Gareth David-Lloyd. As the just-launched Series 4 premiere – Be My Head – sees Gareth make his directorial debut, we got the lowdown on this brand new episode of this much-lauded, critically-acclaimed webseries, discussed the challenges of sitting in the director’s chair, his work on last year’s impressive Dark Signal (for which there are spoilers ahead), and some of the preconceptions made about him due to his time playing the beloved Ianto on the genre favourite Torchwood series.
STARBURST: How would you best describe the Series 4 premiere episode, Be My Head?
Gareth David-Lloyd: I’d say it was a dark, zany, Lynchian little comment on the way we deal with depression and tragedy.
In that episode, you star opposite an extremely intense Mark Fleischmann. As the director here, did you ever feel the need to wind Mark in a little?
A little bit, but it’s good to set actors free. Usually, that’s where a lot of creative things happen, in those moments when they’re free. But in terms of telling a story, yeah, you have to reign them in at certain times.
This, of course, was your directing debut. Did you find that to be as challenging as you thought it would be, or was it relatively smooth sailing?
I’ve been working with things for so long that I was pretty prepared. I was actually surprised by how much we got done in the day that we had; I was expecting to walk away with a lot fewer shots and less time for ideas to play out. It went pretty smoothly. I think having the one location sort of helped. I was worried about having to direct and act in something I’d been part of writing, so that was quite nerve-wracking but I prepared a lot for it. But it actually went okay, although I think that was due to having such good people overseeing it. Robin was there to oversee it, and he’s had a lot of experience, then we had a great camera operator and a great DOP, Leonie , who also edited it. She instantly understood my creative language, which is important on set. You hear lots of horror stories from sets you go on where people don’t speak the same creative language and it can create friction and difficulties. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly it went, how lucky I was to have a good team around me and the elements working in my favour.
When we spoke to Robin, he mentioned that he’d popped over two or three scripts to you but that Be My Head was the one that you gravitated towards. What was it that particularly grabbed you about that tale?
I’ve always been curious about the idea of what we do to bury our pain. Using drugs, prescription or self-medicated, and those other things that numb the pain, and how far we should take that medication for our pasts and our pain before we lose our identities. I think that’s what I tried to achieve anyway. Robin sent a script which was quite quirky and funny. It was about a guy who had just had enough and wanted someone else to be his brain, hence Be My Head. Godfrey was almost an otherworldly Doctor Who-type character who came in to brain-swap with this guy. It was good, it was fun, but in between the lines I saw a much darker, more serious issue about a guy who could no longer bear being in his own head. Then all of these ideas of depression and self-medication came in. I had a little bit of a tinker with the script to make it darker, to bring those themes out. I put a tragedy at the centre of it, a real reason why this guy is unable to exist within himself. I basically wrote a little film that asked the question of whether we take treatment for depression – whether that’s administrated through a doctor or by ourselves – do we take that too far sometimes and lose our identity.
Gareth opening the door to something sinister in Be My Head
With you being, dare we say it, a bit of a veteran of Twisted Showcase by now, did your working relationship and friendship with Robin make this a natural fit as the place to make your directing debut?
Absolutely. I was speaking earlier about creative language, and I think that’s what made me feel comfortable enough to do it with Twisted Showcase. I knew Robin, I knew his creative language, I knew he wouldn’t mind me suggesting some new ideas or rewriting his script.
Was there anything you wanted to do with Be My Head but couldn’t for one reason or another?
These films are made for literally nothing. Where Godfrey worked from originally was this nondescript concrete room with files everywhere like The X-Files; it was going to have tapes everywhere, much more of an archive with an otherworldly contraption in the room that was very sci-fi. When we got there, it was just a garage full of junk because we didn’t have time to move everything. What I like about the finished version now, the garage itself could be anyone’s garage who hordes a lot of junk, who hordes a lot of memories, who has lots of stuff that they can’t quite get rid of because it’s a link to their past and who they are. It’s a great metaphor for Godfrey’s archive in the sense it’s where people go to dump their past, dump their memories, the things they don’t want any more but can’t quite let go of – as is the case with Lucifer . He comes back and he wants his pain back because he realises that in losing his memories of pain he’s also losing a lot of love and happiness. So the garage was quite a good metaphor in the end for the place where we dump our past.
How long have you been wanting to direct then? Has this been a few years in the making?
To be honest with you, if I can help tell a story that I believe in, that I think is honest or something that an audience can have a connection with, then I’m happy. I’ve been in a band, I’ve written songs, I act, so writing and directing’s always been in the back of my mind. I’ve just never felt confident enough in myself to get up and do it. Recently, with the connections I’ve made with Twisted Showcase and with being part of other low-budget projects that I’ve done, I’ve seen how people do it on their own from nothing; it’s inspired me and given me the confidence to tell my stories. So, I call myself a storyteller rather than an actor or a writer or director. I have experience in those different disciplines and I’m satisfied creatively.
How did you find it analysing the final product as the director rather than just being an actor looking at your own particular performance?
It was different because as a performer in someone else’s story you can’t help but analyse yourself. And I think it’s important for an actor to do that to hone their craft. This is very much looking at every detail, every cut, every edit, every light. There’s a lot more things you can wish to improve on or a lot more things that take you by surprise, the positive elements that you didn’t know were there. So it’s a different experience but still satisfying.
Gareth in one of his previous Twisted Showcase outings, Peter and Paul
One thing we couldn’t not ask you about is a film released last year called Dark Signal. That was a brilliant movie set in the landscape of North Wales where you play someone with a rather nasty edge. How was it to sink your teeth in to something like that?
Every actor likes to play a villain at some point in their career because then you can have a good vent. I really enjoyed it actually, and again it started off as a low-budget project so it was another chance for me to see how people with not much money or materials could generate something like that. So it was great all-round. And to play that double-sided character was great.
So many people associate you with Torchwood’s Ianto, so did that almost give a false sense of what to expect when Dark Signal progresses and there’s the big reveal that you’re really a sinister lunatic?
It was brilliant, and that’s why I injected a bit of Ianto in to the Ben character. When we first see him, there’s definitely some subtle Ianto mannerisms in there to give fans a false sense of security.
Of course, the Torchwood side of things brings such a huge fanbase with it. How is it for you, though, that people may often typecast you or have pre-conceptions about your possible roles because they associate you so much with the Ianto character. That brings with it a lot of attention, obviously, but can that be a bit of a double-edged sword at times, too?
I do feel that. I’d be lying if I was to say it didn’t. Because Ianto became a cult-ish figure and a very specific sort of character towards the end, I do feel that producers or casting directors see my resumé land on their desk and just think, “Oh, it’s the dry, gay one from Torchwood that’s got a shrine. We’ll leave that alone.” It is, it’s a very distinct character. I think with the mega machine it is and the turnover it has, people can’t help but pigeonhole you and I do feel I’ve suffered with that.
With some of the recent Big Finish audio releases, that’s given you the chance to reprise the Ianto role, but in terms of breaking those misconceptions and the typecasting element, is it just a case of trying to get out there and do as many varied projects – such as Twisted Showcase and Dark Signal – as you can?
That’s exactly what it is. There’s been a multitude of actors that have been lucky and talented enough, and worked hard enough, to get typecast in a role then land another role later in their career that redefined them as an actor and showcased their ability to be diverse. But for some actors, it is difficult. The way I’m trying to, not reinvent myself, but to show another side of myself through writing and directing, through working with Twisted Showcase inspired me to kick off my own webseries, which we launch a Kickstarter for later this month. If people aren’t seeing you for anything other than what you’ve done before then I think it’s up to you to stand on a bigger hill and make a bigger noise to take control of the situation yourself and do it that way.
Gareth as Torchwood‘s beloved Ianto Jones
We did hear some rumblings that you had maybe proposed a series to Amazon. Is there anything you can tell us about that?
I can talk a little bit about it. I sent my original idea for a six-part horror drama set in South Wales, I sent a pilot treatment to Amazon. They got back and said, “It’s a great idea but it doesn’t fit our development slate this year. But please, keep developing and resubmit at a later time.” I saw an option on there where you can add a short video or teaser just to give them more of an idea of tone and atmosphere, what we’re trying to achieve visually and aesthetically. So then I thought, “Why don’t I just do that but do three, open three windows to lives of character in the story?” – and then next year when I have a rethink, I can send them one of these episodes. Then I was talking to Robin – he’s done a Kickstarter, he’s got a successful webseries under his belt – and I thought he was the natural choice to join forces with. So he’s come on as executive advisor and writer. We’ve got the script for the first episode, we’ve got a near-assembled crew, our Kickstarter’s populated so we’re just waiting for the right time to launch it.
As we wrap things up, what’s the craziest Ianto story that you have regarding your fans? There’s obviously the shrine in Cardiff, but is there anything else that springs to mind?
Just having a shrine erected to a character that you worked on is probably the maddest story. Then I’ve had presents, like My Little Ponies dressed like Ianto, then coffee – lots and lots of coffee! My fans are pretty good. You hear some stories of fans jumping over desks at conventions or grabbing your arse at photos or stripping off and asking you to sign their bits, but my fans have been very respectful and nice. I’ve had strange presents and I’ve had a shrine erected to the character, but nothing too mad or too insane.
Finally, what’s next for you right now?
I’ve just recorded the voice for another game. That’s out next year, so that’s literally all I can say about it – but I’m happy, very happy with the work I’ve done on that. Then I’m shooting a low-budget film in South Wales this month but I can’t say anything about that either. And I’m writing as well for another thing.
You can check out Twisted Showcase’s Series 4 premiere, the Gareth-directed Be My Head, in the player below:
For the latest information on all things Twisted Showcase, be sure to check them out on Twitter, Facebook or TwistedShowcase.com. Similarly, you can keep find Gareth on Twitter @Pancheers.
Find your local STARBURST stockist HERE, or buy direct from us HERE. For our digital edition (available to read on your iOS, Android, Amazon, Windows 8, Samsung and/or Huawei device – all for just £1.99), visit MAGZTER DIGITAL NEWSSTAND.
Novelist Paul Hoffman is a former BBFC Censor and is best known for The Left Hand of God series, a fantasy series with strong religious themes. His debut novel The Wisdom of Crocodiles was turned into the 1998 vampire movie starring Jude Law. We caught up with him to find out more about his latest book, Scorn.
STARBURST: What’s the elevator pitch for Scorn?
Paul Hoffman: After an accident at the Large Hadron Collider, a scientist suffering from a deep depression caused by his brutal Catholic upbringing is transformed into a witty, articulate, madcap, murderous werewolf. After confronting and then eating the priests from his past he becomes ever more ambitious and turns his attention to the Archbishop of Westminster, Tony Blair and the unfortunate corgis of Queen Elizabeth. Finally, he challenges the Pope himself. But the meeting between Holy Father and werewolf ends in the most astonishing revelation in the history.
How would you describe it to an elderly relative?
“Well, Uncle Seamus, it’s a bit like Midsomer Murders.”
Why werewolves?
Zombies are inarticulate and have bad skin; Dracula is an aristocrat who’s never done a day’s work in his life, but werewolves have jobs requiring the ingenuity and analytical skills needed to enter on a long campaign of interpersonal and intellectual terror.
What’s the obsession with things that go bump in the night?
We’re all afraid of things that go bump in the night. but I’m more interested in what it would be like to be the creature doing the bumping!
How does it compare to The Left Hand of God series?
Oddly enough, unlike Scorn, The Left hand of God trilogy is a fantasy series without any fantasy. But I’m reasonably sure that anyone who’s followed the series will be at home with the book. It shares many of the same ideas and characters who are intelligent but keep making mistakes, goodies and baddies alike.
How is writing a film script different from a novel?
At one level, it depends on the kind of novelist. If you can’t write dialogue or think visually (and a great many novels don’t necessarily require either) then it’s likely to be a bewildering experience. I stopped writing scripts not because I didn’t love doing it but because each film I wrote ended up being more badly made than the one before. And most film scripts never get made no matter who’s behind them. A script I worked on for Francis Ford Coppola with the then A-lister Sharon Stone has never seen the light of day. As a generalisation, the difference between film scripts and novels (for professional writers) is that novels get published in the way you intended them to be read, and film scripts are hardly ever made and even if they are they’re unlikely to bear much resemblance to what you’ve written.
Do you have a cinematic take on Scorn?
I certainly could write a script that would work but for those reasons, I’m not going to. The difficulty of coming up with a workable film is that while half of it would be easy because there’s so much action, there are a great many scenes where the Werewolf is arguing at length with the people he’s about to eat. The final confrontation with the pope is long and complicated. This would make financiers nervous. But it can be done. Consider the long dialogue exchanges in Tarantino movies. I see dialogue as a form of action.
On the other hand, I’m now working with a leading computer games company to create a game version of Scorn called Angry Priests. This is an ‘Eat ‘Em Up’ in which Catholic priests and nuns chase and punish people for crimes against the Holy Ghost, eating meat on Fridays, and going on Grindr. Victims can earn points for good deeds such as recycling, being vegetarian, not throwing things at the blind, and exchange them for the protection of a cleric-eating werewolf
Has working for the BBFC skewed your view of media? If not, why not?
Unquestionably. But exactly how is too long to go into here. Let me plug my own work and point anyone interested in this question to my second novel The Golden Age of Censorship. In effect, everybody is now going through the experiences of the small number of privileged people at the BBFC in the book set in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I’ve still seen things that most people never will, but not many. Everyone has virtually free access to almost every kind of violence and pornography so I can’t begin to see what purpose the BBFC serves anymore beyond consumer advice. What happens to the censors in the Golden Age is that they become hyped up by watching too many films – everything in their personal lives becomes a near-hysterical drama. I think this is what’s happening to everyone else now.
What’s next?
I’ve just finished the fourth book in The Left Hand of God trilogy. It’s set twenty years later with Thomas Cale on the run. Faced with execution, he’s blackmailed into attempting to assassinate charismatic politician John of Boston when he comes to visit Dallas in the United Estates.
What’s your dream project?
Sorry to be smug, but as long as you’re prepared to take the risk of always writing what you please then isn’t that always the dream project?
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Try to be born as a Quaker.
How has Tolkien changed your life?
Depends on which Tolkien you’re talking about. The great man’s daughter-in-law, Faith Tolkien, was a teacher at the new school I went to when the appalling Catholic boarding school (identical to the one in Scorn) closed down. I was by then a deeply angry 16-year-old without any academic qualifications. She was endlessly patient with my bad and scornful temper and gradually dragged me back from the precipice. She shocked and appalled the other teachers at the school by deciding I should take the entrance exam for Oxford. It was just as well that I passed as no other university would even interview me because my academic record was so terrible. One day, I might write about my experiences there – working title: A Yob at Oxford.
Scorn by Paul Hoffman is out now, published by Red Opera, £7.99 paperback.
On Saturday, September 30th, the Royal Albert Hall will reverberate to the sound of Bond, for on that day David Arnold will host Casino Royale Live. Backed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Arnold’s powerful score will be performed in sync with a screening of Daniel Craig’s debut appearance in the role, and the 21st film in the Bond canon.
In a break from last-minute preparations, the Grammy and Emmy award-winning composer took some time to discuss the event, what it’s like to play that iconic theme and collaborating with the late, great Chris Cornell.
STARBURST: So, why Casino Royale?
David Arnold: There’s never been a Bond film performed with a live orchestra before, which makes the occasion very exciting. After Independence Day, just talking with the Albert Hall about doing another one, and knowing how popular these films are still, and how much reach they have, it was a bit of a no-brainer. Of course, there’s a lot of people involved in the rights and quality aspect. But EON said that if I maintained an overall control of the thing, then they’d let us do it. I did the music, but it’s their thing really. It’s a very exciting thing, though, to watch that film with around 4000 people because even if you see it in a multiplex it’s only ever around 400 at most. So, if it goes well, then hopefully they’ll be other ones.
Is there a fundamental difference between putting Casino Royale on to Independence Day Live a year ago?
Well, Independence Day was almost entirely an acoustic score in that it was performed by an orchestra, with a very traditional symphonic structure. Casino Royale is a film that has many sections that have electronic aspects; there’s a lot of African percussion at the front end, a slightly more high-tech angle as we go through Miami airport, as well as the glorious, sweeping vistas and soundscapes we’ve come to expect. It’s a lot more complicated technically as you need to have people who are playing synth parts. There are some parts that are coming off track as they can’t be performable by a standard symphony orchestra. So, instead of having 40 bongo players for the African section, who’ve nothing else to do for the rest of the film, that’s on track with the dialogue. Around 98% is performed live. Then you have the problem of synchronisation, as if everyone can’t hear everyone else, it can all get off track. Technically, it’s a much more demanding piece and has taken a lot more construction to get it into a performable piece. And then there’s all the things that can happen in the dub of a film, when they can control what you hear in the film, and that might not be exactly what we recorded. So, you have to go through the film from the first frame to the last, and make sure what you hear matches what you see on screen. All these things happen in any film, as the music gets moved around like the picture does, but you have to make it conform, and that happened to maybe 60% of the score.
Sounds exhausting?
Well it’s taken around six months to get it to a performable piece, where the orchestra will get the right music.
Given that preparation, are you able to relax on the day and enjoy it?
I’ve never done two shows in a day before, but I’m more worried about the band. On the Saturday we have a technical run through in the morning so on the day they’re going to have to perform the score three times in total, with only maybe 90 minutes in between. It’s going to be pretty exhausting. A lot of the time, the thrill of being in the Albert Hall, with an audience in front of you… Dr. Adrenaline does an awful lot in terms of making things work. But it has to be right in the first place and an awful lot of talented people have done an awful lot of work to get us to this point. And I’ve literally been the person who says, “That’s fine.” We’re very lucky that those talented people have done the heavy lifting as it could have been a year if I’d done it.
Sadly, we have to ask about Chris Cornell, given the significance of the song, and his part in what is such a significant film.
I’ve kept Chris’ vocal. It was such a horrible situation. I’d emailed the day of his death to ask if he’d sing at the premiere, and I know that he was extraordinarily proud to be a part of the history and the legacy of these films. Speaking for myself, I had the best time with him, and I’ve spoken about this in the programme notes. The thing for me, more than the working relationship, what I value more than anything is striking up a genuine friendship with someone, one based upon kindness, curiosity, and a need to look after people through the welfare of others. We would get together when he was in the country, and go out and eat and talk, and mainly about family rather than music. He was so proud of his kids and his wife, he seemed like a person with no concerns, and what demons he had seemed to be behind him. He was a wonderful person. He looked like a god, and sang like one. To have formed a genuine friendship out of these things is rare.
Hard to follow that, but to talk about You Know My Name a little, you’ve said before that this was a “less than subtle” introduction to Daniel Craig’s Bond. And there’s very little in film-related music that garners so much interest as a Bond song.
It was meant as a warning, from Bond. And Chris’ take on that was perfect. I needed someone who sounded how Bond looked. I needed someone who smashes through a wall vocally in the same way as Bond does in those early scenes on the construction site. For me, if you’re going to have a singer there’s not many who could do that, and Chris could. As for the event, the same amount of care goes into it regardless of the horrible circumstances, but I think that when the song comes on and Chris’ credit goes up, it will be a very poignant moment. As far as being involved in a Bond song, it’s like the Holy Grail of composition, not only doing the music but the theme song as well. It’s not often that happens, and it’s a tricky thing to navigate. You’re trying to get an understanding of the film, as you likely haven’t seen it all, and you need to get it done so they can cut and produce the credits. You don’t want to just write it to the picture, and you have to find something that goes a little below the surface of what’s going on. They’re not all like that. When Don (Black) writes Diamonds Are Forever or Thunderball there’s a very knowing aspect to the lyric, drawing you into the film you’re about to see. Daniel has brought a level of reality to the character and you have to respond to that.
You’ve talked before about playing the iconic Bond theme, and that it’s always been a thrill. Will you be playing it on the night?
The great thing about this film, and the reason we won’t be playing it before it appears in the film is that Bond hasn’t earned it until near the end. Probably one of my greatest experiences and memories from doing the five that I did, was playing the theme in Casino Royale. It all went down live, there weren’t any overdubs, and everyone was on the edge of their seats as you don’t hear it until that point. You hint at it, but never hear it. So, it feels like an explosion, and that’s how it is in the film, it just feels so full of energy. The guitar sounded good, the brass sounded great; everything about it just worked. That’s why I was super-pleased when they used it in Skyfall and SPECTRE. It just seems to belong to Daniel’s Bond. When it happens at the event hopefully it will be just as big a release. I have one guitar I play the Bond theme on, and that’s all I do on it. In all the films, but not always live; it’s too precious. I did it at John Barry’s memorial concert though. It’s a lovely, big old Gibson. That will be dusted off!
Three performances of Casino Royale in Concert will take place at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Saturday, September 30th (2 screenings at 2.30pm and 7.30pm) and Sunday, October 1st (one screening at 1.30pm). Check the website for last minute tickets.
Coming on the heels of Stranger Things, Nick Antosca’s mini-series Channel Zero: Candle Cove focuses on the 1980s and is one of the most intriguing and stylish horror series in recent years, airing on Syfy. With the success of Stephen King’s It, and a follow-up film confirmed for 2019 release, the 1980s continue to be a great point of reference for the horror genre. STARBURST had the pleasure of discussing Candle Cove with Nick recently.
STARBURST: Stephen King’s IT is doing excellent at the cinema and Candle Cove is timely alongside Stranger Things for tapping into the same period. Why is the 1980s still fascinating to filmmakers?
Nick Antosca: It’s relevant because the filmmakers are in the age for that nostalgia. I was a kid in the 1980s and I am sure that in ten years there will be a reflection of 1990s culture.
Fiona Shaw, one of the UK’s greatest theatre talents, gives a tour de force performance. What was working with her like and what factor led you to cast her in the part?
Working with Fiona was a real collaboration and she invested so much in her character. I knew her from her stage reputation. When we were thinking about her character, we were looking for someone with gravitas and she was always her first choice.
Children’s TV is all the more sinister in this show, albeit deliberately. As a child, I was freaked out by Children of the Stones, which scared this writer into the street. What were your key fears growing up?
I actually did watch old episodes of Children of the Stones on YouTube and Peppermint Park was another influence on Candle Cove. I was definitely afraid of death and this series certainly taps into that fear.
Don Mancini and Max Landis are your co-executive producers. How do you delegate your roles in this way?
Credits in television can mean different things. Max Landis optioned the rights to the story and Don Mancini was the creator of Child’s Play and I worked with him on Hannibal. Our writer’s room included myself and Don, who was a senior writer on the show.
Candle Cove impressed me with its editing and cinematography. We are certainly focused on the next scene and the unexpected moments. Tell us about your relationship with these people?
A lot of the credit for the outcome of the show does go to these people, particularly Noah Greenberg who was the cinematographer. There was a lot of attention that went into this show and we did storyboard religiously.
How long did it take to film and where did you shoot?
It was a quick shoot – about forty days overall and we shot in Manitoba, Winnipeg, which is an area that is rarely used for filming and it is for this reason that we used it. It was a very efficient shoot.
Let’s talk about the source material, which is based on a blog. Can we expect more net-based source material for future projects?
Eventually yes, because there is so much more content available online. There are always projects being developed for TV via blogs and posts.
How does Candle Cove compare to Hannibal and what lessons did you incorporate here?
On Hannibal, I was primarily a writer and not involved in production matters. However, I did want to get on that show because of the possibilities that were being created.
Candle Cove is a daring piece of TV. Certainly beyond the limit of what those 1980s shows were. What stands out for you from that time?
Not so much from the 1980s, but I did love things like The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, and Homicide.
What can we expect from future series of Channel Zero?
Well, Season Two has just started airing in the US and is on its way to the UK. This is influenced by the work of John Carpenter and Season Three will be influenced by the films of Dario Argento.
Channel Zero: Season One Candle Cove is released on DVD and Blu-ray October 9th, 2017
Here at STARBURST, we’re huge fans of the demented brilliance of Twisted Showcase. A hugely acclaimed webseries that began life back in 2012, the series has become a bit of a cult favourite throughout its three series and two eBooks to date. With genre favourites such as Norman Lovett and Gareth David-Lloyd part of the dark and sinister short films, many have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the show’s Series 4. As Robin Bell takes centre-stage while longtime collaborator Rhys Jones takes a backseat for now, we caught up with Robin to see what lies ahead for the webseries ahead of its impeding return.
STARBURST: So, Twisted Showcase is back for Series 4! Obviously a lot is being kept hush-hush right now, but what juicy details can you let us in on?
Robin Bell: The two big highlights are Gareth David-Lloyd is directing an episode – his directorial debut – and we’ve got a BAFTA winning writer writing an episode as well, Debbie Moon. I put together the trailer and it was really weird. I looked through previous trailers, and you don’t want to give the big plot details away, so I was thinking, “I can’t reveal that, I can’t reveal that, what can I put in to the trailer to make people want to watch this? They’ve been on TV, they’re a recognisable face.” Then I was like, “What am I going to cut out?!” Even though they’re not massive names, they’re people who have been in sitcoms, kids’ TV, Being Human, stuff like that. Like we’ve got Mark Fleischmann, who’s probably not a recognisable name but he’s been in Inception and Being Human and stuff like that. That was the most mental film, that was in Gareth’s film. His character’s this really out-there, weird kind of character, and he was so intense filming it that in between takes he’d go and have a sleep.
Did Gareth have any involvement in the writing side of that then, or was that just mainly you?
I remember you interviewed him for Series 3 and you asked him if he’d ever want to direct something, then I thought, “Maybe he’d direct one for Twisted Showcase,” so then I asked him. I said, “We’ve got three scripts that we’re working on for Series 4, I’ll send them over.” One stuck out, and he said he’d do it but asked if he can rejig a few bits. We passed it back and forth, but it’s really weird getting scripts from Gareth or from Debbie, giving them notes back; it’s crazy. It is really, really difficult.
This is the first season you’ve done without your longtime partner in crime Rhys Jones. Have you found it better or worse to be flying solo this time out?
Probably worse! It’s taken a lot longer. Even though I think Rhys would sometimes take a backseat, when we’re sending out press releases and stuff then we’d split it in half so it wouldn’t take all day.
And what’s it been like from a creative standpoint in that way? It makes more work for yourself but you can do whatever you want without having a sounding board.
I think it’s definitely changed the series a bit. All of the episodes were quite dark but Rhys always wrote the ones that were more comedy, like the one with Norman Gordon Mitchell’s directed two this year. I know he sometimes has all of these ideas in him, then he gets a bit stressed. A lot of the films he makes himself are with his mates and are over six months, picking it up on weekends. But we were shooting with Rachel Teate from Boy Meets Girl, and she was in Wolfblood that Debbie wrote. So we only had one day to shoot, so we just had to keep him calm. Once you guide Gordon and get him to get the stuff he needs, he’s brilliant in the editing.
Series 4’s Be My Head
In terms of the idea bank, is that purely you now then? Obviously you have some writers such as Debbie Moon involved, but do the crux of the episodes come from just yourself now?
With Debbie, I was meeting her in Wrexham – she was doing a talk at Glyndwr so we went for a coffee afterwards – and my plan was to ask her if she wanted to write Twisted Showcase. We sat down and she said, “I’ve got an idea for Twisted Showcase!” So she pitched this idea to me and it was like this kind of body horror. With a massage, it’s like different areas of the body hold different memories. There’s this person who’s suffered this trauma, and as they get massaged then these memories start coming out. It’s not gory in a body horror way like Cronenberg does, but it’s the secrets in the body that come out in this weird way that always creep me out. It’s like when people say you’ve got something wrong with your foot then it means you’ve got something wrong with your heart. You put your symptoms in Google and it says it’s cancer whatever you do. But that’s what I think Twisted Showcase is really; that thing that you fear, it’s just put through the Internet, put through Google, and it reaches this weird level where it’s terrifying.
How many episodes for this new series then?
Six episodes this time. We normally do five. We were doing five this time but we had this script left over which is a really kind of odd, small idea. We thought there’s no point doing this idea if we don’t get someone big in it to sell it, because it’s just such a weird idea. This one character just has this one word apart from this speech at the end. So we thought, “I wonder if Norman would be up for this?” It’s an odd episode, it’s in his sort of field, and I thought that it’s not as out-there and mental as Toilet Soup but it’s an odd idea that he might go for. I sent it to him, he got back straight away to say he was up for that. In Toilet Soup, he played the guy in the suit in the toilet. In the script, he was listed as “man in the suit”, so he was telling how he does actually have only one suit and so it’ll be the same suit he’ll wear.
So he could realistically be playing the same person in both episodes?
Well, this episode is kind of set in the future. We’ve got two episodes set in the future. There’s no flying cars or anything, though.
You’ve brilliantly utilised Kickstarter over the past few years, so how has that experience been?
We did two Kickstarters this time. We did five episodes then we thought we’d do a Kickstarter for Norman’s episode. They’re always really stressful, but it was really good; we exceeded the target for the first one, and did well for Norman’s episode. It’s really weird this time. I always feel that you always need something to draw people in, and that’s normally where we’d get Gareth or Norman.
And with both Norman and Gareth, they’ve both got a huge fanbase out there from their days on Red Dwarf on Torchwood, respectively.
It is, it’s insane! Gareth’s fanbase is really intense. He is a great actor, and I always remember the first film we did. We were all kind of, “What are we doing? We’ve got a plan, but…” And he came in and just told us all what we needed to be doing. He’s actually working on his own webseries. I met up with him a couple of weeks ago to talk it through. I think he wants me to co-produce it, so I said, “Well, if you let me write one…” So we’re kind of putting that together slowly.
Series 4’s Fortune Teller
As a writer with a visual eye, have you noticed whether your influences have changed since you first started Twisted Showcase?
The thing that’s changed is that instead of a four or five-minute John Squire guitar solo, I can get the same sort of emotion in thirty seconds now. When you’re trying to get a point across, it would’ve taken me four or five pages before. Now, I’ll get that in a line.
And do you feel that you can manage to make that line have the same impact as the four or five pages?
I think so, I hope so, yeah. Sometimes, I sit and watch an episode and think about how you need to pay attention to it. There’s one episode, there’s a guy in his sixties. He turns up at this girl’s door, she’s in her late-teens, early-twenties, and he’s telling her he’s her eighteen-year-old boyfriend. It plays out over a five-minute episode but there’s four or five twists in it, so you need to pay attention. And I do sometimes worry about that, that you might lose people.
Earlier this year saw you put out your first DVD, bring together all three series to date. How did things go with that?
It went better than expected really. We always said we wouldn’t release it on DVD. It’s free on YouTube so why would you want it on DVD? Then there were loads of people on Twitter asking if we were ever going to release it on DVD. So I put a Twitter poll up, and enough people said they would buy it. And I think we’ve only got, like, five left now.
Where was the furthest afield that you’ve had to send a copy?
That was the most insane thing! Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Russia, New York, somewhere in Texas, Atlanta. It’s crazy! When I got up in the morning and saw Japan, I was just, “This is mad, how did they find us?!”
How has your fanbase built and changed over the years?
It’s hard to tell really. I think more people watch the episodes as soon as they go up now, where before they might have gone, “Oh, that Twisted Showcase thing is up. I’ll watch that soon” and then forget about it and watch it in a month’s time. Now, even putting up videos to say who’s going to be in an episode brings in plenty of views. I think there’s more people looking forward to it. It’s been three or four years since the last series. With two Kickstarters and the DVD and the exhibition we did in Wrexham , we’ve managed to keep our name out there and ticking over. And we’ve cast people along the way, so that’s caught people’s attention.
In terms of stories, what can you tell us about the new series without giving too much away?
I think the first episode’s the one people will be talking about the most, the one Gareth’s directed. It sounds like a really difficult thing to watch, it’s all about grief. Basically, Gareth’s character is called Lucifer Jones, he’s gone through this massive tragedy. It opens up, he’s got a shard of glass against his wrist, so he’s suffering this intense grief. Then Mark Fleischmann‘s character, who’s called Godfrey Cavendish, turns up. He’s this whirling dervish of insanity, and he says he’s got this machine that can take away your grief. So it’s about what life would be like if you didn’t suffer grief. He goes to this machine and has his grief removed, and it spins off from there. It’s a black comedy really, it’s a really funny episode. People will either think Mark’s character’s insane or they’ll love it. We thought whether to reign him in or just let him go, but even just watching it back it sends chills down the spine. It’s not got special effects in it but it’s kind of got things in it that I didn’t think would look that good. The machine that takes away grief is a tape recorder and lights, but it looks quite impressive. And I think it might have the first Twisted Showcase wanking scene in it.
Series 4’s TheValley Below
How do you come up with these ideas, and do you ever feel that you need to reign yourself in at times?
I think when me and Rhys were together there were times where we thought things were too stupid.
Too stupid or too dark?
Too stupid, I think. We could go as dark as we wanted. We had an idea before, it’s a guy and a woman who have hooked up over a dating site that’s like Skype. For some reason, this guy’s an alien and the things that unlock him are “Arsehole, arsehole, bumhole, backdoor”. So Rhys has this idea that when she said arsehole, he starts rubbing his head and then eventually reveals himself as an alien. We thought that was brilliant! In the room at the time this was the best idea we’d ever had. Luckily, the next day we decided we weren’t going to do that.
Is there any part of you that feels like you miss having somebody to possibly pull you back at times with certain ideas and decisions?
Rhys was there in the script stages, so it was just the filming that he wasn’t there. Saying that, Gordon shot one of the films with his friends over six months, and Rhys said he’d chase that up for me. So he kind of still was there. We co-wrote the episode about the guy in his sixties who thinks he’s eighteen, and we filmed that at Rhys’ house, so he was there that day. But that was sad because that felt like the last time we’d be proper Twisted Show on set. It’s a lot more serious on set without me and Rhys. I was saying to Gareth the other day, me and Rhys would do this good thing. Being on set can be stressful, and me and Rhys would look like we’re messing about, but Rhys would always say, “It’s really weird because you’re messing about with me but I can see you’re watching what other people are doing. I’ve started doing it as well, and if something isn’t going on that should be happening then I’ll tell people to do it.” That was good and it creates a good atmosphere; me and Rhys would joke with each other yet still keep an eye on what was going on. I think after four seasons you stop worrying you’re going to get something because you know you can pull something together in the editing. The other episodes, I think one of the ones Gordon did was the darkest. I did send that to Rhys and he asked whether I really wanted to do something this horrible.
Is there anything at all that’s ever totally off limits?
I think showing it on camera, I think we wouldn’t show certain things. We did have one episode once where we thought we’d really make an exploitation episode. It wasn’t a Twisted Showcase script to begin with. It was one of the first things I wrote, and I was in touch with a producer who said he was looking to make really out-there short films that might not win awards but that would get lots of attention due to their content. I debated whether I really wanted to write something like that, but I started writing and it was quite fun when I realised I could just Spinal Tap this. If he wanted horrible, I was going to give him horrible. And I gave it him, and he said he wasn’t going to make it because it was disgusting. So I showed it to Rhys and told him, “I want to make it, I want to make it!” Rhys was really in to it for a bit, and I think we even put a casting call out for it. We had to put disclaimers about the kind of content it would involve, then loads of people applied! Then we decided that if so many people were taking it seriously then we couldn’t really make it.
Looking ahead past the fourth series, are there any tentative plans for more Twisted Showcase in the future, be that in eBook form or the webseries?
I think Rhys’ plan was to write more short stories for them, and I don’t think it’s kind of worked out. I think he’s got a couple of shorts bubbling away, but I think he’s trying to write something a little bit longer. So they’re probably on hold. If we’re going to do another series, we might try and do something different. We did write a sitcom actually. It was about two old guys and we thought that Norman Lovett would be brilliant for it. It’s about two characters, one’s an aging rock star, one’s his friend who’s a bit glum. I sent it to Norman and told him he’d be great for it. He read it and said, “I love it, I want to be in it, I want to be the rock star! Give me five minutes, let me dress up.” Then he sent me a picture to show what he’d look like. So we’re going to send that to a few places and see if people want to do it. If not, we’ll make it ourselves with Norman. That would be me and Rhys again.
Would that be a full episode format or still shorts?
Well, we’ve got half-hour scripts.
How do you feel about the idea of transitioning from five-minute shorts to a half-hour sitcom?
If we got the same budget that we got for a full series of Twisted Showcase then we could afford to do it. I don’t know if people would want that, though. Have you seen Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip? It’s basically a bit like that. It’s two old guys talking about their own mortality and realising they’re close to death – so it’s cheery! – but between that they’re just like two children. Norman’s character, the rock star, keeps asking his grumpy friend if he’s ever put his finger up his bum, if he’s ever tried that. So it keeps alternating between this really childish stuff and death.
So Norman would be the rock star?
That’s the plan. Maybe we could do it where he plays both characters, just that they’re never in the same shot. That saves money!
Series 4’s No Hotline
Is there any chance of fifth series of Twisted Showcase still, or are you just looking to go in a different direction with a different project next then?
I think if we’re doing more Twisted Showcase, I think we’d do a big, big kind of episode, like Be My Head. We usually try to keep them under ten minutes, usually around five to seven minutes, but Be My Head is fifteen minutes long. It’s an epic, it’s like Lord of the Rings for us! If we were going to do another one, we’d like to do a bigger budget. We do have an anthology feature script where it’s three twenty-five minutes stories with a linking device through them. So we have thought about maybe doing that. It’s tough because you’re not going to get in cinemas with anything low budget. Then selling an anthology of DVD to a regular punter is difficult unless you’ve got a main character that you can put on the DVD or maybe a big horrible puppet or something. Like The Value Below episode of the new series, it has no named cast in it, so that’s the one I thought had to be really dark. That was the one I worried about, because each time we release one without a name I always feel you need to give people a reason to watch.
How do you find that balancing act? On the one hand, a name such as Norman Lovett or Gareth David-Lloyd instantly brings people in, but then having relative unknowns means the audience has a fresh slate in their mind when thinking of what to expect.
I think that’s the good thing about The Value Below. It’s difficult to pick favourites, but when I saw it I thought it had come out much better than I ever thought. Even saying to Rhys, I’d said about how I’d written this one that was really dark – even when I was writing it, I thought it was far too dark. I think Gordon’s quite good with that heightened stuff, and this was in his ballpark. So it was going to come out terrible and over the top, or it could come out really well. It was a risk. So I gave it to Gordon to see what he could do. He shot it over six months, and I was thinking that he was never going to get it done. One of the cast worked on an oil rig or something where he had to go away for months, and he came back and said he couldn’t shoot this time because he’d had to shave his beard off for a job interview. So we were really panicking over that, that it was never going to get finished. Then we shot something in Undegun, we were going to shoot one time there but they didn’t have the availability. It was quite stressful and I thought it was going to come out terrible because there had been such a long gap. He sent me the film and I had such low expectations. I put it on and was just, “Oh my god, this is amazing!” I hadn’t even read the script for two years so I was trying to work out how it pieced together, what was going on through the story. Then there’s flashbacks and I found myself wondering what they all meant. I’m not sure if it was even in the script or if Gordon just put it in when he was editing, but all the flashbacks come back at the end. That was the first time I was watching one of my own things and just being amazed by how well it all comes together. I text Gordon to tell him that’s the best thing he’s done. He’s got a script from Debbie Moon that’s actually the best thing he’s done, but still. Then I had to decide whether to put this episode early on in the run.
We guess that’s the tricky decision of whether or not you launch the new series with an episode that’s headlined by a strong name or not.
We’re putting Gareth’s out first but then part of me thinks whether we should make people wait for that. I think if we had got the series out like we wanted to – a year after the last one – then I think we’d have made them wait for that because they know what’s coming.
Of course, Twisted Showcase made headlines a few years ago by being listed alongside some huge names on The Guardian’s Top 25 Must Watch Web Shows. How was that at the time?
The weirdest thing about it was that we got it when no one had heard of us. It was insane. I think Peter and Paul was our biggest episode, and that had just scraped a thousand views at the time. We thought nobody had seen this. There were three of us then, me, Rhys and Leigh . That’s the first female director we’ve had. I remember watching the first season and realising, “Oh god, there’s no women in this!” And Series 2 was the same. I think your instinct is to write from your perspective. As we’ve gone along, we’ve thought how we needed to open this up. But she was brilliant. She shot the last episode, which was the first one we shot, and it’s got this really weird effect in it. I’m not sure if we’ve pulled it off; it sort of works but we just about get away with it. I did think it was a bit overreaching for what we can do but we thought we’d see if we could pull it off. You need to try and push things like that. We’ve got no money but let’s try and do this effect that most big budget things couldn’t get away with! So we tried it. But she shot it so fast, she knew what she was doing. I wasn’t that together when I was that age, I was just a wreck.
Series 4 of Twisted Showcase premieres on October 3rd, and more details can be found on Twitter, Facebook or TwistedShowcase.com. In the meantime, be sure to check out the sinister trailer for this genre favourite’s return below:
Find your local STARBURST stockist HERE, or buy direct from us HERE. For our digital edition (available to read on your iOS, Android, Amazon, Windows 8, Samsung and/or Huawei device – all for just £1.99), visit MAGZTER DIGITAL NEWSSTAND.
Danay García is a hugely talented actress who many genre fans will fondly remember from her time on the monumental Prison Break. Several projects later, and she debuted as Luciana Galvez in Fear the Walking Dead’s second season. Having gone on to become a huge favourite of many Fear fans, Danay returned as a series regular for the series’ third season. With the show’s hotly-anticipated return just around the corner we were lucky enough to catch up with Danay to discuss Luciana, all things Fear the Walking Dead and even a bit of Bond ahead of the series’ mid-season return.
STARBURST: Having left one colony that was besieged by militia only to wind up in another, do you think Luciana may have no choice but to go it alone now?
Danay García: Absolutely. She’s lost so many people in her live. Everything she could possibly have or belong to has completely gone. Now landing in this other new place, it’s basically La Colonia run by a militia. She has no pack, she’s on her own.
Do you think that Luciana wants Nick to follow her to Mexico?
Absolutely, absolutely she wants to. She’s really conflicted about what’s happening with Nick. She often says we’re family, she likes family values. She understands what it means to has family now at the time of the apocalypse, but at the same time the rules that this family have… they have no rules, they don’t have any values than belong to her culture. These people killed colonies, so she can’t fight him but she can’t fight with him – she’s on her own. She wishes that the family weren’t there but she respects that. So it’s really conflicting what she’s going to.
In a world where happily-ever-afters are quite a rarity, what future do you think Luciano is hoping for?
Well, happily-ever-after, I think she’s looking for her own community, for her own pack of people. She understands that together we’re stronger, especially now. The zombies are obviously an obstacle, but the big obstacle now is the living not the dead, which is unusual. But in Mexico that’s how it works. So she’s looking for a family. It’s now conflicting her world. In a perfect world she would’ve loved to have had another La Colonia and everybody would’ve had their own command, then it would be this great place that could be safe for everybody. She’s not asking for much .
The comparisons are inevitable, but how do you feel that Fear the Walking Dead differs from the original The Walking Dead?
The one thing that we have in common is that we’re surviving the apocalypse, we’re doing everything we can. I think Fear is more family orientated, it’s more like what families are like. In your family, that’s how you learn to deal with people, like your mother, your father. Every member of the family has a different way of approaching life, even with kids you try to raise them the same but they’re different. So you kind of learn how to deal with them and them with you, so you become flexible in the society and the world. That’s family. And I feel that with Madison, Nick has been like the child that is abusive with the world of drugs, then having a daughter that hates the fact that he’s getting all the attention. With family, even though it’s not perfect, that’s how you learn to deal with society. I feel that in Fear we go in to dealing with what life is like in a family; it’s not perfect, the world is turning upside down, but how are we going to stay together because it’s challenging. I will always be your mother, I will always be your sister, so you just have to hang on together. In The Walking Dead, you have a group of people that become a family. In the apocalypse, they become a family. I feel that both of them are really interesting but I feel that in Fear it’s more like ‘you’re stuck with me’. Like Nick walks away from his own family but they follow him because they’re stuck with each other. You find your way back, it’s part of survival.
So if the zombie apocalypse really happened tomorrow, what three things would you grab from your apartment before you left?
I would grab a lot of water, like a lot of water. In a perfect world, I think I would have a lot of chocolate with me. I would think, “Oh, it’s really happening,” so the only thing I could think about would be, like, eating a load of chocolate for two hours. And the third thing, I would just grab a couple of weapons, like some knives and stuff. After eating a lot of chocolate, I would be, like, “Okay, okay, it’s time to do this.” I think a lot of water, chocolate, knives.
The release date for the next Bond movie was recently announced, would you be interested in appearing in a Bond film?
Absolutely! That’s actually one of my dreams. I actually auditioned for Quantum of Solace. I auditioned so many times. That was at the time of the writers’ strike, and I could do it but there was a clause in my contract that I could not work for a certain amount of time. Bond was looking to be a six-month commitment, and they went to the network but I couldn’t do it. I was so bummed. It’s been in the back of my mind to always be a Bond Girl. Or I could be Bond, why not?
You’ve worked incredibly hard on your career so far and things don’t seem to be slowing down, so what’s next for you?
I’ve got a movie coming out called Sniper: Ultimate Kill. I did this movie in my hiatus between Seasons 2 and 3. It was really challenging, and my character is this DEA agent who is looking for a guy who knows how to hide really well, like Pablo Escobar. So she’s really obsessed with finding this guy. It’s for Sony, it’s an American film. I have a team that are helping me find this guy, and there’s this woman that’s extremely obsessed with finding the truth behind a sniper, because it’s about this sniper, it’s about this bullet. And I get to the bottom of it. It was so fun shooting it. There was bombs and it was crazy, it was so fun, so much action, so much fighting. It’s a movie that I’m really excited about. It’s going to be my first real action movie. I’m really looking forward to this coming out October 3rd.
Fear the Walking Dead returns Sunday 10th September in the US and Monday 11th at 9pm on AMC UK, on BT TV.
Find your local STARBURST stockist HERE, or buy direct from us HERE. For our digital edition (available to read on your iOS, Android, Amazon, Windows 8, Samsung and/or Huawei device – all for just £1.99), visit MAGZTER DIGITAL NEWSSTAND.
If you’re keeping up with our book reviews, it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that we are massive fans of Syd Moore’s Rosie Strange series. The first book, 
Novelist Paul Hoffman is a former BBFC Censor and is best known for 
On Saturday, September 30th, the Royal Albert Hall will reverberate to the sound of Bond, for on that day David Arnold will host Casino Royale Live. Backed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Arnold’s powerful score will be performed in sync with a screening of Daniel Craig’s debut appearance in the role, and the 21st film in the Bond canon.
