Actor Leslie Bibb tells Hollywood Authentic about laundry, lazing about and her love of Polo cologne.
How important is a little bit of nonsense now and then to you? Oh God, I think very important. I feel like in the nonsense, in the fun, in the imperfect, in the silly, lies great depths for me to swim around. It’s like daydreaming to me… it’s imperative. Also, I like being a little devious…
What, if anything, makes you believe in magic? I was born believing in magic. I don’t know why I do, but I do and it’s as true to me as anything. For me, holding this belief makes me not take anything for granted. Me running into Greg Williams in Venice, in that hallway, it’s cosmic. I think that’s magic. It’s glorious.
What was your last act of true cowardice? Not standing up to this woman who I was working with on a project. I abandoned myself and let her gaslight me. It’s a longer conversation, but I am disappointed in myself. But, whoosh, I learned a lot of lessons.
Do you have any odd habits or rituals? I don’t walk under ladders. Why test the fates? I don’t like to talk about jobs too much before they happen. Don’t want to jinx anything.
What single thing do you miss most when you’re away from home? Sammy and Gus, our German Shepherd. And sleeping in our bed. Our bed is delicious, but so is Sammy [Leslie’s partner, Sam Rockwell]. Also, our washer and dryer. I loathe sending my clothes out to be laundered. I like to wash my own things.
What is your party trick? I always throw the party, so I fancy that’s the best trick.
What is your favourite smell? It’s not so much a smell, but I love when I am cooking and the house is full of whatever that aroma is. It’s the way I feel about a stocked fridge. It makes me so happy. And, this is gonna sound nuts, but I love Polo cologne. Sam wears it and it reminds me of growing up in Virginia and I just fucking love that smell, especially on Sammy.
What do you always carry with you? A excerpt from Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural speech. I have carried it in my wallet for 25 years. I have it laminated.
What is your guilty pleasure? Being lazy. It’s hard for me. I feel guilty if I have too many lazy days. I don’t know, I think we should take advantage of how much time we are alive. Wasting that, wasting a moment of being curious feels… oh I can’t bear it.
What’s your idea of heaven? Sitting on a screen porch in the country, the sun is setting, music is playing, fridge is full, friends are in the house, I can hear their laughter, Gus is laying down next to me, and Sammy is walking out onto the porch with cocktails for us. Yeah, that’s heaven.
Actor and producer Leslie Bibb began her career as a model before moving into acting, her big break arriving with Popular. She made her film debut in Private Parts and is known for her roles in Iron Man, Talladega Nights, Tag and About My Father. She’s most recently been seen in Palm Royale and the third season of The White Lotus.
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
*Arguably one of the most memorable (and quotable) scenes in 1971’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is when Mr Salt mumbles, ‘It’s a lot of nonsense,’ to which Wonka replies, in a sing-song voice, ‘A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.’
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told to JANE CROWTHER
The Midlands-born Finding Emily actor takes Greg Williams on a visit to the coal-mining home town that is the key to keeping him grounded as his career takes off.
On a bright February morning, I meet actor Spike Fearn as he alights off the London train at Tamworth Station in Staffordshire. It’s the closest station to his hometown of Coalville and we’re heading back to the house and neighbourhood that made him – before he moved to the UK capital to pursue acting. Though he grew up in the small village of Ravenstone, Coalville was the place where he regularly went to Blockbuster and the cinema, fell in love with the idea of film and dreamt of making a career out of it.
Next month, the 25 year-old will make his leading role debut in Finding Emily, a Brit rom-com following an affable student (Fearn) as he tries to locate the titular girl he connected with but didn’t grab her number. His star is rising and a few weeks previously we’d met at a Cartier dinner, Fearn hanging out with the likes of Paul Mescal, Tilda Swinton, Robert Aramayo and Kate Hudson as I shot them at play in the kitchen of a luxury restaurant in London. ‘I’m still at the very, very start of my career,’ he says bashfully when we discuss the evening. ‘You know, maybe the shoelaces aren’t tied yet, but the shoes are definitely on.’ As we drive through the English countryside, Spike tells me that his background and the place he comes from are important to him as he negotiates his career. ‘I hold Leicestershire as my little place, you know? As a sort of medal in a way.’ He slows us down in the car on the B5493 road to show me a tree with a tiny front door in its trunk. ‘My dad pointed it out once. Maybe someone interesting lives there – a fairy, or an elf, or the Yucca Man from Joshua Tree…’
Though he now makes a trade from make-believe, Spike initially wanted to be a MotoGP racing driver as a kid. ‘Valentino Rossi was my first idol. I was obsessed. I used to wear a t-shirt with Valentino Rossi on it all the time. And that was what I really wanted to be, a bike racer.’ Though he still fancies playing a racer (citing Barry Sheene as the biker he’d like to play), the closest he’s got to being a sports star is the film he’s about to start work on. ‘I’m doing a running movie. I’m not a runner but I’ve been training – going out, doing 5K, running on a track with a lot of people. It’s been great fun.’ That, though, is his work life. When he wants to re-ground and settle, he returns home. Now he’s taking me to Snibston Colliery Park, which is in the shadow of the giant coal mine wheels that used to be the main industry of the area. As we walk towards the old colliery, I start to take photographs, and Spike tells me about his discomfort in front of a stills camera. ‘Video cameras and cinema cameras are very different. You’re playing a part at the time. Whereas you always feel like you have to take yourself so seriously when taking photos. I’m not going to lie: I always find myself smouldering in the mirror or something beforehand, and trying to find a good face. And I hate taking myself so seriously.’
Alien was definitely a step up. That was the first time – and the only time, still – of being on something of that size. The things they built inside those studios were insane and everyone was quite young on it. It felt like we were all very fresh then. I’m desperate to do something of that size again
We look at the old mining infra-structure, now a kids playground with machinery looming overhead. ‘The whole place was built on coal mining. The people that worked down here should be remembered like the people that fought in the war. I used to hang out here with my mates. We’d go to the top where the wheels are. You’d go up there, and do what young teenagers do who grew up in a town that has no money pumped into it, and there’s not much resources. Just hang out, and do stuff that you would lie to your mum about.’ It was his mum, a school teacher, who encouraged Spike to try acting and follow in the footsteps of another of his heroes and a Midlands local, Jack O’Connell. He applied for a place at Nottingham’s Television Workshop, which had fostered talent such as O’Connell, Samantha Morton, Toby Kebbell, Tom Blyth and Bella Ramsey. He got in, trained and began building a resume with small roles in The Batman, Sweetheart and Aftersun, before graduating to TV with Tell Me Everything. He played Amy Winehouse’s best mate in biopic Back to Black before landing a role in Alien: Romulus alongside David Jonsson and Cailee Spaeny.
‘Alien was definitely a step up. That was the first time – and the only time, still – of being on something of that size. The things they built inside those studios were insane and everyone was quite young on it. It felt like we were all very fresh then. I’m desperate to do something of that size again.’ He pauses. ‘I enjoyed it, but I never wanted to. At the very start, I just wanted to do movies about the Midlands. I wanted to just work with Shane Meadows and Stephen Graham, who lives a couple of towns over – these people who I think are like trophies. I didn’t want to go to America. I didn’t want to do any of that. And now I’m finding all these great things in America, and these great experiences, and these filmmakers. I’m like, “Wow.”
America brought work with James L. Brooks and an all-star cast on Ella McCay, with Liam Neeson on graphic novel adap 4 Kids Walk Into a Bank, and with Cate Blanchett on Alice Birch’s fantasy drama, Sweetsick. ‘That was the best experience I’ve had in an acting sense,’ he says of Sweetsick. ‘When I was at The Television Workshop we were doing a lot of improv and script work – that was where I figured out that I want to be an actor. And it wasn’t just something to fuel the ADHD that I had. That’s where I learned most things. I would put that, and then working with Cate, in the same category. I learned so much from watching her… I don’t even think she ever knew that she was teaching me anything. Now I’m excited to step back in front of a camera and on a set, and be like, “I’ve learned these things, or these techniques that I think I’ve learned from watching her.” What makes her so great is that she’s such an amazing performer, but she also understands cameras perfectly. I was like, “If I’m half as good as you when I’m older, I’m going to be happy.”
His mention of having ADHD makes me ask about school. ‘I didn’t do that well at school,’ he winces. ‘I struggle with dyslexia and instead of trying harder at work, I shied away. I wish I hadn’t, but I actually thought dyslexia was a punishment, in a way. I always had a helper come in, who would help in classes and I kind of hated that. I hated all the attention on me. Which is actually weird, because of being an actor now.’ He admits he still struggles with scripts. ‘Sometimes it feels like you’re learning French or something.’
We move onto Coalville town centre and the shuttered Rex Cinema, a 1938-opened two-level auditorium with a glorious retro marquee sign. ‘It wasn’t a cinema when I was a kid. It was a carpet store. And across the street used to be a Blockbuster. So that was the only thing I knew about movies.’ The Blockbuster is now a Subway and Spike turns to look up at the faded grandeur of the Rex. ‘I’d love to eventually be able to buy this place and do what Robert Redford did with the Sundance Film Festival. Imagine a film festival in this beautiful place. Imagine being able to go and see Scarface on 35mm in here.’
When I was at The Television Workshop we were doing a lot of improv and script work – that was where I figured out that I want to be an actor. And it wasn’t just something to fuel the ADHD that I had. That’s where I learned most things. I would put that, and then working with Cate [Blanchett], in the same category. I learned so much from watching her… I don’t even think she ever knew that she was teaching me anything
It’s lunchtime so we head to a local chippie where we both order the kids’ fish and chips and gravy, ‘as if I’m a child’. As we wait for our order (and he requests ‘loads of salt and vinegar’), he tells me about the micro-budget indie drama he’s making in New York, Pocket Dreams. Spike plays a waiter who makes an unhappily married woman question the American Dream. ‘Going from stuff like Alien, to doing these really small, tiny things – especially in New York… Being from here, you would never think you would be in New York shooting anything, you know?’
He’s about to start the running movie that will film in LA, Gavin O’Conner’s Nike movie with Apple, simply entitled Running. Then he’ll work with Renée Zellweger in London and Montreal on David Yates’ psychological thriller Phantom Son, where he plays a homeless teen taken in by a mother whose own son is missing. ‘I’m trying to be flat-out,’ he says of his productivity and admits to ambitions of creating his own stories particularly with some of his favourite actors. ‘Jack O’Connell, Stephen Graham, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke, Ryan Gosling,’ he reels off. ‘Actually, a funny story about chip shops is, apparently, Stephen Graham brought Leo in one of these somewhere in this area. But every chip shop says it’s their chip shop, and some say, “Oh, yeah, it was Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio.” It was one of them. But which one is it? So I’ve been in every chip shop now, around this area, trying to find out.’
We arrive in Spike’s village and decide to eat our chips as he used to as a kid, walking the fields behind his house. ‘They’re building houses on all these fields now, and they’re going to destroy it with all these new builds. But growing up as a kid, I used to walk through these fields, and I used to pretend that I hadn’t seen civilization in a very long time. And that I had a broken ankle or something. I would walk up this hill, listening to ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’ from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and as I see that house for the first time, it was like pure joy that I was walking across this field with a broken ankle, you know? It was way before I wanted to be an actor. I guess I’ve always just been obsessed with pretending, in a way.’
He looks across the fields, chip fork in hand. ‘I talk about Leicestershire like it’s a personality, because I feel so proud of it. But I think this is the place that I spend time doing the most thinking. I haven’t really left yet. I’m not as far forward in this career as some people that I watch and look up to. But I feel like I’m getting inches and inches away from this area every time I go back to London. And I like to just come back, and be free. I’m really in this weird decision right now of whether to move back here, or stay, or try to fly away further. Every time I come here, I feel like there’s this special ball around me with friends and family and greenery. The air feels more crisp here. And also no one cares about anything other than just their lives here, you know?’
He points out the highest point in Leicestershire, Bardon Hill, and tells me that his parents often drive up to watch the sunrise from there. ‘When I came off of doing Alien, I was in this bubble. I was doing a thing that I’d always dreamed of. I came from here to being in Budapest, in these huge studios. I didn’t really know how to deal with the contrast. At that point, I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be there. Always there. But then I’d come back…’
A keen painter from being a teen, Spike still enjoys losing himself in the activity when he comes home. ‘I once painted in my mum’s garden with my niece in the summer, and I remember feeling, “I never want to lose this. I have to be here to be the human I want to be.” I want to be a complete chameleon in the acting space. But here, I don’t want to be a chameleon. I want to be myself and this place still holds that for me.’
We finish the mini fish and chips, something of a treat for Spike as he’s shedding weight for two upcoming roles. ‘I’ve never lost weight for anything. But the role I’m about to go and do is the type of role I’ve thought about since I was 16 years old. It’s really gritty, but it has a twist. So I don’t want to half-arse it. I get scared of messing up anyways. But with something like this, I’d kick myself for the rest of my life if I messed up.’
We decide to head to Spike’s parents’ house where Jodie the dog is waiting. Spike picks up a guitar in the front room and noodles – he learned to play for his role in Finding Emily. ‘There used to be a little box TV that we used to sit in front of and watch old films on,’ he reminisces of his childhood with his sister. ‘I remember watching Jaws and Alien very young. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was always on, is still always on.’ His dad is a film and music enthusiast who has been a big part of Spike’s cinematic education. Dad is also key in his interest in fashion, which Spike studied at school. The actor regularly raids his dad’s vintage closet for clothes, even now. He shows me a hand-me-down military green jacket that he cherishes. ‘The first play I ever did at the workshop was called Middletown. I played an alcoholic drug addict when I was 17 years old, and I wore this jacket. I feel like Taxi Driver, you know?’
The front door bangs and Spike’s mum, Jadie, has just returned from work. She greets me warmly and we’re soon in conversation about crystals, Action Man’s ‘eagle eyes’ and her memories of the pits closing locally. She tells me she studied film as a Theatre Studies uni student in the early ’90s and I wonder if this might have partly inspired Spike’s creative path. She agrees there may be something in the DNA but like her son, thinks the place he grew up is special. She tells me their town is a deprived area but that ‘in the poverty of Coalville you’ve got the heart. That lingers on’. She looks fondly at Spike. ‘He’s full of light. He’s got his divine purpose, hasn’t he? He’s got his divine soul, and he’s driven by that.’
Spike nods. ‘At school I wanted to be an artist in some way. I was studying art and fashion at the time. But when I found movies, that became the art that I wanted to jump myself into. But I don’t just want to be thrown everything, and do everything. I want to really do it smartly, and be around for a long time and be remembered for being an actor, rather than someone who was once smiling on social media. That’s how I’d rather be seen…’
Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS As told to JANE CROWTHER Finding Emily is in cinemas on 22 May
Words & Interview by ARIANNE PHILLIPS As told to JANE CROWTHER
The award-winning British designer who has worked repeatedly with Mike Leigh and Joe Wright unpicks the fantasy element of period costumes in creating unforgettable looks for films such as Anna Karenina, Atonement, Little Women and Wuthering Heights.
James Mcavoy and Keira Knightley in Atonement (2007). Working Title
Jacqueline Durran is a British costume designer celebrated for psychologically nuanced, texturally rich films that are both historically accurate and conceptually modern, across period-dramas and contemporary film. With a career spanning more than two decades, Jacqueline has become one of the most respected voices in costume design – and one of my favourite designers. She is known for her work with some of the most celebrated, respected and visionary directors, including Sally Potter, Steve McQueen, Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, Emerald Fennell, Bill Condon, Sam Mendes, Pablo Larraín, and most notably her enduring collaborations with Mike Leigh, with whom she’s designed 10 films on which she has developed a documentary-like sensitivity with character and social texture.
Jacqueline rose to prominence through her ongoing collaboration with Joe Wright, with whom she designed nine films beginning with Pride & Prejudice in 2005. Notable films Jacqueline has designed include Atonement, Macbeth, Cyrano, 1917, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Blitz, to name just a few. Her versatility extends beyond literary period-drama and across genres that include The Darkest Hour, Beauty and the Beast, Steve McQueen’s television series Small Axe, Spencer, Barbie and, most recently, Jay Kelly and Wuthering Heights. Jacqueline stands as one of contemporary cinema’s defining costume designers, bridging classical craftsmanship with modern sensibility. She is an eight-time Oscar nominee, of which she won two (for Anna Karenina and Little Women), an 11-time BAFTA nominee and three-time winner (for Vera Drake, Anna Karenina and Little Women), and a five-time Costume Designers Guild nominee.
Keira Knightley in Anna Karenina Year (2012). Universal Pictures
AP: Where did you grow up and what inspired you to go into costume design?
JD: I grew up in the south of England. And I hadn’t gotten the idea that I would be a costume designer at all, ever. I didn’t even know that it existed all the way through to the end of university. I was a great reader, and I was quite academic. I did philosophy at university, and I left university and I just wasn’t sure where to go, or what to do. I sold vintage clothes at Portobello and Camden [markets], because I’d always loved clothes. I wasn’t brought up with film as a great part of my life, but one day I was watching a soap opera on British television, and I thought that the costumes were terrible. It was the thing in my brain that made me realise that somebody did costume. A good costume is so good that it’s almost beyond explanation or analysis, or you can’t identify with it, or you can’t see anything that you could bring to it, because it’s already perfect. My mother met someone who was filming a commercial in one of the buildings she was looking after. And she just said to them, ‘My daughter wants to do costume. What do you think she should do?’ And they said, ‘Oh, she should work in a costume house.’ So then I wrote to the costume houses, and the one that said yes was Angels. And then the whole world of costume opened up to me. Lindy Hemming was one of the designers that came in that I really connected with, and I really loved working on her shows with her. When I became freelance, I started working with her; Topsy Turvy was one of the first jobs I did with her as a full-time employee. She is entirely responsible for me being a designer. I don’t know if I would have done it, but at the time when Mike [Leigh] was doing his next film, which was All or Nothing, she said, ‘You’ve got to do it. I’m just going to tell him.’ And so she did. And I felt a terrible imposter, but I got the hang of it. And now, finishing on what might be his final film, I’ve done 10 Mike Leigh films.
AP: The fact that you studied philosophy, and that you were an academic makes perfect sense with not only projects that you choose to design, but the work itself. I would imagine you must enjoy research as much as I do?
JD: Yes I do love research but for me that is just the foundation on which you build the costumes. I find it hard to define the process of designing. Each project creates its own problems and its own patterns. Anna Karenina, for instance, was never going to be set in a theatre. It only became a theatre 10 weeks out. Prior to that, it was just going to be a period-drama set in period locations. But for one reason or another, Joe [Wright] decided to pivot and make it a theatrical movie. The switch taught me something – I realised that you picture a scene to understand what the costume is going to be. But if you can’t picture the scene or understand the location it’s a block to where you are going costume-wise. And you realise that everything is connected.
Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake (2004). Album
AP: People talk about your work all the time: the green dress in Atonement; the tailoring in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; those gowns in Anna Karenina, which I feel are reminiscent of Piero Tosi’s work. And then of course there’s Barbie and Wuthering Heights….
JD: Joe and I came to Atonement having already done Pride & Prejudice together. Obviously I read the book and the dress is such a pivotal moment in the film. Joe would just say to me, ‘It’s just got to be the most amazing dress ever.’ I went through books of different dresses, different designers for the period and I just chose all the elements that I liked. The motivation for the costume is: what would you put on if it was the hottest day of the year and you couldn’t bear the heat? Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Joe and I came up with a stack of green swatches, which I gave to Tim Shanahan, the dyer, and he created that beautiful green colour from the range of greens. The fabric for it was fine cream silk from a wholesaler called Whaleys – its lightness because of the heat of the day. And then the detailing on the bodice was taken from a Lartigue photograph where the dress was beaded. But because of the logic of the heat, and because we were trying to take away any weight or depth, I laser-cut that instead of beading it. So everything was about reducing and minimising the weight of this dress. And obviously it came to haunt me because every five minutes this bodice split. We made absolutely loads of them. I was always fully aware of the fact that I wasn’t sticking to period, because obviously if I take all these different elements from these different period references and put them in one dress, the dress is no longer period, because I’ve messed with it.
Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in Barbie (2023). Warner Bros. Pictures
AP: I really appreciate that because we’re making films, we’re interpreting a story and we’re creating a world. I think the greatest gift for me, working with a director, is that ability to interpret, and what’s appropriate for the story that we’re telling. It’s all taking cinematic license.
JD: When you’re working on the costumes of a period film you have to communicate the character. I do not believe that most of the audience would be able to interpret and understand a period costume if there was no license taken with how you communicate that. Anna Karenina was a good example of an artistic decision made in order to communicate a position, a theme and a meaning that Joe was bringing out in his telling, which was about consumption and opulence and display. So conspicuous consumption and the 1950s and the New Look after the war create a moment that you can transpose into the past. It is something a contemporary audience understands and it opens up the story set in the 1860s – it’s a key into the story but when you mix the two together, you are telling a new story. Costumes sometimes have to be invented for modern tellings of stories set in the past because the action in the script is not something that would have happened in the past. In Little Women, Greta asked for Florence [Pugh] to be downstairs in pyjamas, not fully dressed. If your director is telling a story, you may have to costume it in a way that is not accurate – but it is the director’s story that counts.
AP: What were your conversations like with Emerald Fennell when discussing Wuthering Heights?
JD: During the time that Emerald had been writing the script, she’d put together this huge file of reference pictures from cinema, old paintings, photographs, fashion, the catwalk… This whole collection that probably spanned five centuries, and was completely eclectic. So that was my starting point. The film falls roughly into three acts. So you have Wuthering Heights, and you have Thrushcross Grange, and then you have Act 3, when Cathy is in mourning but she’s also in the full throes of passion with Heathcliff. Each act has a silhouette, to define it. The first costume that we see Margot [Robbie] in at Wuthering Heights was the result of my favourite piece of reference that Emerald gave me, which was the cover of a paperback edition of Angelique. It’s a drawing of a made-up character in a costume that’s from no period at all. It’s just imagined. And that was always the thinking in the process of Wuthering Heights – to hit this imaginary level all the time, and to hover somewhere in the past that’s non-specific. Margot jumps into the movie. She is in a costume. She is an imagined paperback novel cover. She is not in linen. She’s in silk. It’s not real. It can’t possibly be justified in any way, apart from in the imagination, and in what this woman is representing to the 14-year-old Emerald. Again we are telling Emerald’s version of the story, so I tried to incorporate as many of her references as I could. The wedding night costume came from a picture of a woman sitting wrapped in clear cellophane plastic with a big red ribbon wrapped round it. We wanted to use it because it worked symbolically – the woman was a gift. It doesn’t really have any period context at all!
Rosamund Pike and Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice (2005). Universal Pictures
AP: The wedding dress was just beautiful.
JD: And it goes back again to the story that directors are telling. It’s not at all likely that that woman would have been walking across the moors on her own with a huge veil and a white, sparkly dress covered in glitter.
AP: Your work in Lovers Rock is one of my favourites…
JD: We shot it in 10 days, with two or three weeks of prep. I did a lot of research into different kinds of street looks of that period in Brixton. The one thing I noticed quite often was that at particular types of parties, West Indian women wore a particular type of dress that seemed to be quite proper. There was a soundsystem look, and then there was this other look, which was dressy and quite feminine. And Steve [McQueen] said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ He created this room of people who were so in tune with each other. I think it’s an amazing piece of work.
AP: Is it important to work with a director with a real vision?
JD: The more precise the brief is, the more you’ve got the challenge of meeting that brief, but you’ve also got the excitement of getting there. If there’s never a brief, how can you ever arrive? That frustrates me. I can be given a really minute destination to land on, but if I don’t have anything to aim for, if I don’t understand what we’re doing, then I find it really hard to be creative. The greatest joy of making a costume is nailing it. Looking at it, and saying, ‘That is it. It’s the right costume for the right film, right now.’
Benedict Cumberbatch and Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011). Entertainment Pictures
AP: Do you draw? Do mood boards? Collages? Do you drape? How do you help your director understand your volume and your colour and the feeling?
JD: I really like mood boards. I just like the way that they’re incomplete. They’re like a suggestion of where you’re going. It’s going to be a combination of this and this and this. And I really like that. I like to get the fabric, and I like to look at it and see what it will do, and then start to look at the proportion on the stand. Interestingly I learnt the other day that Coco Chanel didn’t draw and she built a whole empire! I have often collaborated with Chanel on movies and we used their jewellery in Wuthering Heights. We were looking for fantastic large beautiful costume jewellery. They went through their archive and found an amazing selection from the ’50s to contemporary – it was perfect, especially the large jewelled gothic crosses which were so much a part of Cathy’s look. Over the years, Chanel have supported different movies I’ve worked on. Their contribution is so wonderful because they have a sensitivity to what the movie is and want to support that rather than impose themselves upon it.
AP: It makes me think of Kate Hawley’s relationship with Tiffany this year, for Frankenstein, and how she went into the archive. I had my experience when I did W.E. with Cartier and Van Cleef. It can be such a wonderful asset. I dressed Margot for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and we got a couple of pieces of Sharon Tate’s real jewellery from her sister. And that just became such a touchstone for her.
JD: Yeah, totally. And on Anna Karenina, it was diamonds. Chanel lent us millions of pounds of diamonds. I used to bring them out in a tray to Keira [Knightley]. This tray would be shining with diamonds, and it was a great Anna Karenina thing, because it was about that kind of conspicuous consumption. The diamonds were real, and I felt it was a really good kind of contribution to the whole costume.
A London institution since the 1840s, this grand Italianate palace on Pall Mall has hosted numerous film and literature greats including James Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Paddington Bear. Hollywood Authentic invites you inside the exclusive private members’ space that is a home for progressive thinking and a bastion of tradition: the Reform Club…
It’s fitting that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself was once a member of London’s exclusive Reform Club; the palazzo that has been the Club’s home since 1841 (five years after the club was founded) has served as a shooting location for countless sleuthing films and shows. At least three films based on Doyle’s most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, have filmed within its Italianate walls. Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Guy Ritchie’s 2009 reboot starring Robert Downey Jr., and Will Ferrell’s comedy interpretation, Holmes & Watson (2018), have all used the rarefied setting for a touch of historic British glamour. True to the Conan Doyle tradition, the spirited spin-off featuring Sherlock’s kid sister, Enola Holmes (2020), also paid a visit.
The Reform Club has also hosted a broader variety of screen spies, from both the big and small screen. Two generations of 007 movies have visited the Club’s gilded interiors: Pierce Brosnan’s Die Another Day (2002) and Daniel Craig’s Quantum of Solace (2008). Brosnan even had a fencing match with Madonna in the building, which probably contravenes several guidelines in the Club’s strict rulebook. Operation Mincemeat – which features Ian Fleming as a character – also filmed here.
Spies flock to the Reform Club like moths to a flame, for reasons that aren’t particularly complicated. Situated on Pall Mall in the heart of St. James’s, minutes from Buckingham Palace, it’s at the heart of London’s most influential district. Politics and decision-making are entwined in its legacy, and the building itself has a rare grandeur and exclusivity (spies needing to be more mindful than most of the company they keep).
When the Reform Club was established in 1836, its initial membership brought together the Radicals and Whigs, progressive factions that would later merge to form the Liberal Party. Requiring a grand hub in which to hold their meetings, the Building Committee invited several prominent architects to submit ideas, and Sir Charles Barry – notable for his work on the Houses of Parliament – won the job of designing the political headquarters. The Committee was seeking a home that would ‘excel all other clubs in splendour and convenience’.
Barry had studied in Rome and was inspired by the Italian Renaissance, a notable shift from the gothic style of the ‘Palace of Westminster’. Of particular inspiration to Barry was Rome’s Palazzo Farnese, completed in 1859 by Michelangelo. Running over budget, the clubhouse cost £82,000 to build, and has remained largely unchanged since then, save for careful restoration. The symmetrical Portland stone facade boasts nine bay windows over three floors, and the Italianate door case, at the top of a steep flight of stone steps, is an almost-modest entryway into such a grand and imposing building, which received Grade I-listed status in 1970.
Jules Verne chose to start and end Phileas Fogg’s globe-trotting journey Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1872, at the Reform Club; and where Michael Palin bookended his celebrated TV show following the same route and deadline
The politics of the Reform Club are not what they once were. It now regards itself as a politically neutral, albeit progressive, space. As early as the 1920s, it had become a purely social spot, though it did still attract important political figures (Churchill resigned after a spat in 1913). It was the first of the traditional gentlemen’s clubs to welcome women as members, which it did in 1981. Though its political leanings may have changed, elsewhere the insides are preserved in time, which is why it’s such a popular spot for filming – used as often for its intricate period detail in the likes of The Four Feathers (2002), Nicholas Nickleby (2002) and Miss Potter (2007) as it is for modern espionage thrillers. And its popularity in fiction is nothing new: Jules Verne chose to start and end Phileas Fogg’s globe-trotting journey Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1872, at the Reform Club; and where Michael Palin bookended his celebrated TV show following the same route and deadline.
After entering through the main door, the so-called ‘saloon’ is palatially impressive, rising up above to a spectacular atrium, overlooked by the gallery and covered by a glass roof comprising 750 lead crystal lozenges. The mosaic tiled floor of this wow-factor room is hued blue and brown, recalling the Whig political colours (the tones now seen in the club’s signature tie). Though the Club dress code is particular (gentlemen must wear a jacket and shirt with full collar, ladies are required to dress with similar formality), Paddington Bear’s signature duffel coat and hat were allowed through the doors when he arrived there (the building played the Geographers’ Guild) looking for answers to his past in Paddington (2014). The grand room required little dressing to play such a learned institution; viewers can spot former members and founders on the walls as Paddington wanders through. Today, Queen Victoria’s bust presides over the real fire warming the place. For olfactory time travel, the smell of old-fashioned coal smoke permeates throughout this centrepiece space, which leads off to several other key areas in the building.
The restaurant – still known as The Coffee Room from days when a cup of Joe first became fashionable – runs the entire width of the building and overlooks the garden. At the time of the clubhouse’s creation, the kitchens were a priority. Barry designed them in collaboration with noted Victorian chef Alexis Soyer, a French expat who still inspires the restaurant today. His signature dish – lamb cutlets Reform – remains on the menu, its sauce a secret recipe passed down for posterity. Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi twist on a Bond movie, Tenet (2020), saw John David Washington’s protagonist meet Michael Caine for an intel briefing over a (rushed) lunch, with the establishment formality a signifier of the previously hidden strata our hero now has access to. For a more casual dining option, the so-called ‘Strangers’ Room’ offers a buffet lunch most of the year round. Or for that extra indulgent touch, there are bells on the walls that members can press for waiter service for food and drinks.
The Library, Smoking Room and Card Room all also lead off from the Gallery. The gold-leaf-accentuated library is home to over 85,000 books, and offers a sanctuary for quiet repose with a book. Many of the members are authors and their latest works are contributed to the shelves. The Library, established in 1841, will be one of the most recognisable parts of the Reform Club for cinephiles, its mirrored fireplace overmantels boosting the scale and drama of the room. Among the scenes shot here is a moment from the first season of Bridgerton that would no doubt make the founding members blush. In the corner of the Library is a red velvet seat that belonged to former prime minister H.H. Asquith. No one is allowed to sit in it. And be sure not to scale the Victorian library steps that wheel around the room to reach higher shelves. These aren’t the only rules you have to follow, should you ever find yourself inside.
No mobile calls or laptops are allowed, apart from in designated areas (the Study Room is recommended for undisturbed work). The original rules dictate that ‘the open transaction of business is forbidden’. Also a no-no? The games of Hazard and Chance are blacklisted, although for the competitive-minded the Reform Club does have an active bridge and chess club that operates out of the Card Room. In Men in Black: International (2019), Agent H (Chris Hemsworth) finds himself in a high-stakes card game with some unsavoury extra-terrestrials. If golf is more your bag, there are clubs for those too; just don’t go asking for a snooker room, as it’s strictly billiards only here. In the book-lined Smoking Room, there’s a secret door hidden in the bookcase that a waiter will emerge from when delivering drinks, and small lockers are a throwback to where members would store their cigars. The Committee Room continues to be the place ‘where decisions affecting the Club’s affairs have been made since 1841’.
Today, the Reform Club has around 2,900 members. There are 46 bedrooms upstairs for any members and their guests requiring a lengthier stay (Henry James lived at the Club in his final years). Any non-members wanting to peer inside can do so either via the Club’s charitable arm, which offers pre-booked tours to private groups, or via London’s Open House Festival, which runs in September. So if you do want to snoop around it yourself, you don’t have to join the secret service just yet…
Photographs by MARK READ Words by MATT MAYTUM The Reform Club 104 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5EW www.reformclub.com
Writer/director Ben Wheatley tells Hollywood Authentic how Ridley Scott’s game-changing sci-fi made an indelible impression on a young future filmmaker – and an industry.
Warner Bros. Pictures
BLADE RUNNER (1982) The first time I encountered Blade Runner was as a Marvel comic adaptation. I read the comic first, and then I read the book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? As a kid who was really into film, I’d heard talk about Blade Runner but at that time I couldn’t see it – once it was out of the cinema, it was gone. I’d heard adults talk about it, and I was very excited about it. But it was too high a certificate to go and see it on a big screen at that point in my life. Back then, I felt starved for science-fiction; if you’d seen Star Wars, Silent Running and 2001, and made your way through Star Trek and Forbidden Planet, you were looking for more. So it was really amazing to see any kind of science-fiction. But to see this sci-fi… I finally saw the film as a teenager on VHS in the mid-’80s – the original version with the voiceover. Blade Runner was a gateway for me to the likes of Metropolis, noir movies and French comics like Métal Hurlant. In that respect, it was a fundamental education for me.
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Part of why I kept going back to it as I got older, is that I appreciated it more and more in terms of the technology of it, and also the way it’s a film that, above all others, bears repeat viewing because it’s so visually dense. The imagery is very hard to take in on one watch. I’m watching it now, years later, and I’m still seeing new things. The way the sets were totally unapologetic – you don’t have to make any excuses for them, they just felt real. The model work, the flying spinners and all of the world-building was incredible. But then add to that the depth of the designs – it’s something that gives it long legs, because you can keep looking at it. Within every frame there’s so much incredible, thought-through imagery. That surely comes from Ridley Scott’s background of doing adverts in the ’70s, and this absolute command of the mid-ground and foreground and background. He’s using the parallax and planes of imagery to really impact on the viewer as they’re watching it. It’s taken me decades to unpack what he’s done, and understand it.
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There’s an incredible moment where Deckard (Harrison Ford) shoots the replicant that falls through the window of the shop, and then suddenly it’s snowing. It took me about 10 years to work out that the snow is actually inside the shop. And these elements of snow, reflections and blood are all happening at the same time. Scott doesn’t skimp on giving the viewer things to look at. What’s happening directly within a few millimetres of the lens and 50ft away from the lens at the same time are equally complex – it’s part of the magic that just pulls you into the movie, that you can’t escape from. I don’t think you see it in many other films – the command of the images is across all his movies (Gladiator has it, and so does Black Hawk Down), but Blade Runner is the most intense. Perhaps it’s the connection to artist Moebius (aka Jean Giraud); when you see Scott’s storyboards, you see the connection between his – drawings and Moebius’ drawings such as those in comic story The Long Tomorrow, written by Dan O’Bannon, which heavily influenced the look of Blade Runner and Star Wars. You start to join all the dots. Moebius is a very important character in all of this, and also in the unmade version of Dune by Jodorowsky, the main creative team of which would end up working on Alien. It’s heavily French-influenced, but also Japanese-influenced. If you look at Miyazaki’s work, there’s a direct line back to Métal Hurlant. There’s this amazing cross-pollination of culture going on.
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It’s difficult to choose a favourite moment but some of the scenes in Deckard’s apartment… there’s something about that scene where he’s poking around in his mouth, and he takes a shot, and a little bit of blood goes into the vodka. As a viewer you’re thinking, ‘I’m in his apartment. I feel like I’m totally there. This is in the future.’ It’s also the light coming through the window and Ford’s performance. He has this particular position of being a massive movie star, but totally naturalistic. As an actor, it seems like he’s always in a documentary about the film that he’s making. Over time, I’ve looked at his performances, and I really appreciate his hand acting. And he always looks really pained when he’s doing action. It’s part of why you empathise with him. You believe in him, and you want him to survive.
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The scene where he gets taken to the police station is a good example of Ford’s naturalistic performance. He’s a man in a police car, driving somewhere; he’s eating some food, and looking out the window, looking bored. In most science-fiction, everybody’s really amazed about the world that they’re in, because it’s the future. But Ford is bored with this future because it’s his world. There’s nothing to see there that’s interesting. That feels so real. You feel totally immersed. A lot of that immersion is Vangelis’ score, which sounds like nothing else. There’s something about that sweeping electronic sound, which feels like the future. To me, it has never dated. It’s the grandeur of it. The sound is thick. It’s like a syrupy, electronic, unnatural sound. It’s being created by one man, but it feels like a thousand people. The locations are also key to the real-world feeling, too. Scott grounds his story and action in physical locations like the Bradbury Building and the Ennis House in LA. Both buildings have been used in numerous movies, but the way Scott shoots and treats them within the frame makes them feel tangible and unique.
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The behind-the-scenes story of the film not being quite finished, and then coming back in this special director’s version helps to keep it intriguing for each new generation to discover. I was talking to someone the other day about the film, and they were saying it was a failure at the time it came out, but I don’t believe that. The box office is one thing, but in terms of cultural impact, it was huge. When I started making movies, Ridley Scott seemed totally unobtainable and mysterious – the mastery of what he’s doing seems so far from what you can achieve. It almost seems like magic. I felt that about Michel Gondry, Spielberg and Scorsese. You can’t get a purchase on what they’re doing. But then, over time, you start to understand a little of what they might have done, how they’re thinking. I’ve been given the opportunity to work on a big scale in films like High Rise. Once you graduate out of ultra-low-budget, and you can actually afford to have an art department, then you get a taste of what it could be like to work like Scott. It’s a massive difference between shooting on location where you’re dressing locations, and then being able to control the colours of rooms, the design aesthetic, the story… I can’t imagine the massive pressure he was under as a big studio film, but at the same time to be so singular. It’s still possible, but it’s a set of circumstances that you need to have. To do something so singular now, the studio has got to trust you, and you probably need to have had a string of projects that have made money for everybody.
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I’ve fanboyed about the film and over the years I’ve tracked down storyboards and memorabilia, which is fascinating. I remember having a meeting at RSA Films once, and on the table there was this silver thing that was really familiar. And then I started to realise it was one of the plungers from Alien that Ripley has to push in to blow up the Nostromo. But I’ve not met Ridley. It can’t be underestimated what an influence he’s had on modern cinema. Modern action cinema owes him a massive debt. There are certain factions that suggest that directors don’t get better as they get older, but I don’t believe that. He’s as vital now as he was then. There’s no ‘new Ridley Scott’ working now. He’s it.
Lewis Pullman is having an extended moment. Having impressed in Marvel fare, competed with the flyboys as Bob in Top Gun: Maverick and showed off his pipes and moves in The Testament of Ann Lee, he’s dipping his toes in sentimentality and romance in this, a whimsical adap of Shelby Van Pelt’s bestseller. He’s Cameron, a young drifter on a personal mission along the Cascadia coast, stuck in the small town of Sowell Bay when his crappy camper van conks out. Strapped for cash to fix it, a cheery local (Colm Meaney, emanating kindness) gets him a temp job night cleaning at the local aquarium.
Netflix
The job is available because widowed Tova (Sally Field) has bust her ankle and can’t polish and mop as thoroughly as she’d like. Tova isn’t only nursing a sprain, she’s heartbroken from long-term grief and the growing realisation that her age and loneliness might mean she needs to leave her lush waterside cabin for a nursing home. Tova chats about all her feelings when she cleans to the aquarium’s octopus, Marcellus, who narrates his own version of events (voiced soothingly by Alfred Molina) as we follow a trio of arcs of three lonely beings who find unexpected connection.
Diyah Pera/Netflix
A rom-com of sorts that is gently amusing and romantic in platonic love as Tova and Cameron create a slow bond (though he also tries, spikily and entertainingly, to woo a local surf shop owner), Remarkable Bright Creatures is a balm to watch. Filmed in Deep Cove, near Vancouver, the locations are travel porn alone – a beautiful backdrop for the halting relationship between both Tova and Cameron, and Tova and a would be paramour.
Netflix
While Marcellus is entirely CG (and excellently rendered), the bright spark between a wounded OAP and hurting young man feels authentic and moving thanks to natural chemistry between Pullman and Field. With nuanced performances that travel from comedy to deep sadness, both make their characters real within a picture postcard setting. The only false note is the gaggle of horny retired friends that Tova has, their hijinks in emotional relief to the quiet work Field is doing.
Diyah Pera/Netflix
Though the ‘twist’ might be predictable and the action gentle, Remarkably Bright Creatures is the sort of cosy hug of a picture that might take tear ducts by surprise as well as prompt googling trips to British Columbia. Deep Cove is likely to have a busy summer and Pullman net more fans.
When watching Damien McCarthy’s Irish folk horror it’s impossible not to think about The Shining – and that’s no bad thing. Stephen King’s creeper, and the movie from Kubrick, haunt the odyssey of a misanthropic, depressed and alcoholic writer, Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) who’s trying to crack the end of his bestselling trilogy and heads to the Emerald Isle to spread the ashes of his dead parents in a spot they apparently loved. Oh, and during Halloween. Though we see Ohm at home (and during the course of proceedings, in a hospital room) the tale essentially unspools as a bottle episode, confined to the environs of the dated and remote Billberry Woods Hotel. A chintzy, rustic place where goats high on magic mushrooms butt the parked cars, the proprietor tells children stories of local witches who lure victims to a hellscape below ground and the honeymoon suite is locked up to prevent some mysterious horror, it’s the sort of establishment most of us might shudder at and pull a u-turn in the drive.
But Ohm is a glutton for punishment. Harbouring psychological wounds carried from childhood and a mean streak a mile wide, he glugs whiskey in the bar, belittles and burns a fan bellboy and declares the barkeep’s assertion that a witch is trapped in the honeymoon suite as ‘hokum’. He’s just here to write and not engage in such nonsense. But all work and no play makes Ohm a dull boy. A dark night of the soul brings him close to the glimmer of death and sets him on a quest to find a missing woman (Florence Ordesh), investigate the suite upstairs and come to terms with demons – his own and those that lurk.
McCarthy’s set up ignores mobile phones from the get-go (no inelegant ‘oh, there’s no signal here’ nonsense, they simply do not exist) and builds a plan of the hotel for audiences to understand. The honeymoon suite is reached by a lurching lift, there are a series of cellars under the hotel, woods surround the property and the hotel is on the cusp of closure for the season. That leaves Ohm alone to battle what he finds upstairs, no staff or passing traffic. And what he discovers is genuinely unsettling – production and sound design combining to create a suite of nightmares, jump-scares deftly deployed to ratchet bpm. It’s impressive how terrifying McCarthy can make the drawing of a chalk circle in the dark or a rabbit TV show on a flickering screen. And the increasing compression of spaces is unpleasantly claustrophobic: scaling the action down from hotel complex to single suite, to a tight-squeeze dumb-waiter system and the corner of a dank cellar. (Definite Blair Witch vibes.)
Key to selling the scares is Scott – playing an asshole who deserves comeuppance, but with enough soul to deserve our sympathy and good will too. To see such a sardonic man who has no magic in his life understand the darkness at the edge of our physical world feels authentic, his catharsis earned. His unpicking of Ohm’s pain as he’s terrorised makes Hokum a satisfying horror: both thrillingly scary and emotionally resonant– might make you reconsider staying in a rural hostelry.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Pictures courtesy of Black Bear/Neon Hokum is in cinemas now
Twenty years after aspiring journalist Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) finally earned the grudging respect of Runway magazine maven – and thinly disguised Anna Wintour avatar – Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) via frenemy and tough love shenanigans with assistant Emily (Emily Blunt) and stylist Nigel (Stanley Tucci), the quartet returns. Of course. In the light of Maverick suiting up again and the SATC girls stepping back into their Manolos, legacy sequels and nostalgia-core is big business (Dirty Dancing revisit incoming). The question of whether beloved characters should be exhumed is moot, it’s whether the 2.0 can stand on its own feet as something more than mere fan service, with plenty of cocklewarming callbacks.
Macall Polay
Devil 2 manages the trick, but only just. In 2026 Andy is a serious award-winning journalist who’s just been made redundant as her paper downsizes, and returns to the Runway offices as features editor after Miranda suffers near-cancellation for her accidental promotion of sweat shops. Nigel is still consigliere to Miranda, Emily is now the head of Dior. There’s a new assistant, Amari, who schools Miranda in what she can’t say during her withering put-downs (Simone Ashley) and a plot that revolves around Andy having to prove her worth to Miranda again as publishing becomes irrelevant in a world of social media. There’s fashion, Diet Coke placement, celebrity cameos (Donatella Versace and Gaga working better than others) plus an awkward romantic sub-plot and a Justin Theroux turn that both feel surplus to requirement.
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It’s hitting all the right notes of the original (female empowerment, OTT fashion, a nice nod to cerulean) and Streep does get to flex that calm delivery and imperious stare while MVP Blunt brings her excellent comedic timing (biggest laugh is her Italian gag with Versace). But the story situates Miranda as a victim from the start and diminishes her bite, which was a huge part of the deliciousness of the first film. Though she has more fashion, she has fewer words; leaving Andy and Emily to spat in a corporate takeover narrative that doesn’t feel high stakes enough.
Macall Polay
Though the denouement of the characters is placed very firmly in this decade and current media landscape, it feels non-essential to non-fans – the pleasure to be found in seeing ‘Spring Florals’ as the theme of the Runway Ball at the Met, understanding why one should never go upstairs in Miranda’s brownstone, the significance of soup in the canteen and the return of a revamped lumpy blue sweater. And Milan looks glam for a third-reel romp. It’s all perfectly entertaining, without being, as Miranda would say, groundbreaking.
Macall Polay
Words by JANE CROWTHER Pictures courtesy of 20th Century Studios The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in cinemas now
That a biopic made with the blessing of the Jackson estate would be a hagiograph of the King of Pop should hardly surprise – so don’t arrive at this rhinestone-covered account of MJ’s rise to superstardom expecting any reference to his personal life or allegations made against him. There’s potential for a probing character study of a damaged Peter Pan figure and the horrors of fame, but this is not that film.
The movie went into reshoots and was recut after a historical legal NDA was unearthed preventing any deviation from the narrative of The Gospel According to St Michael – so leaving the elephant in the room out of the equation, is Jackson, purely as an artist, brought alive?
Glen Wilson/Lionsgate
Certainly, if you want to see spot-on facsimiles of his most famous pop-culture moments then Antoine Fuqua’s almost mechanical recreations hit the spot. We meet Michael as an Indiana moppet in 1966, the 10-year-old lead singer of a sibling band with stars in his eyes and belt strap welts across his back. Terrorised by unforgiving patriarch Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo with gimlet-eyed intensity) who doesn’t intend to work in a steel mill for the rest of his life, Michael (Juliano Valdi) and his brothers are drilled in their performance with the promise of violence, regardless of the time or the quiet pleas of their mother (Nia Long). Joe’s vicarious drive for fame and fortune takes the Jackson 5 up the charts, to Motown and onto LA where Michael’s growing obsession with animal ‘friends’ and his need to escape his father coalesces.
Glen Wilson/Lionsgate
As a young man denied a childhood, suffering from vitiligo and squirming under constantly being called ‘big nose’ by his Dad, Michael (Jackson’s real-life nephew, son of Jermaine, Jaafar Jackson) begins to craft his own identity; musically and physically. He starts work on the solo album Off the Wall, sets off on his life-long plastic surgery odyssey, hones his uniform (make-up, aviators, military chic, sequinned socks) and learns to moonwalk.
Glen Wilson/Lionsgate
There’s no denying that Jackson is uncanny as Jacko; nailing his breathy voice, the dazzling smile, the dance moves and the performative shyness. And there’s also no denying the global success of MJ with the bangers that are reenacted with his real vocals. Beat It, Thriller, his electric turn of Billie Jean at the Motown 25 celebration and the iconic Bad tour showstopper are highlights and genuine cultural touchpoints, while fans are catered for with extended worship of his performance of Human Nature at the 1984 Jackson 5 Victory Tour. The dazzle and sparkle, the spins and tippy-toe flexes are all on point, the costumes unimpeachable, the hair and make-up masterful.
Glen Wilson/Lionsgate
But the film comes unstuck in trying to find the soul. Michael is defined only by his hurt and his publicised childlike, messianic qualities (his menagerie of pets, his visits to hospitalised kids, the donation of his payout from Pepsi to a burns unit, his love of Neverland). We are never invited in to understand his unique and bewildering point of view. ‘I want to be a mystery,’ he tells his team, and he certainly remains that here. His motivation, his damage is kept as intangible as all the CGI animals (yes, even Bubbles is rendered in uncanny valley visuals). And leaving the film in 1988 with the promise ‘his story continues…’ allows for any later unpleasantness to go unaddressed.
Glen Wilson/Lionsgate
Viewed merely as a jukebox musical, Michael works – as shiny and showbiz as a bejewelled white glove. As an intimate portrait of an artist and a person, it fails to wrestle with the man in the mirror.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Pictures courtesy of Lionsgate Michaelis in cinemas now
