April 9, 2022

sophia boutella, hollywood authentic, cover story, greg williams, greg williams photography

How important is a little bit of nonsense now and then to you?
Nonsense to me is, among many other things, at the very core of being human – it’s essential to keeping me sane.

What, if anything, makes you believe in magic?
Nature makes me believe in magic. I am in awe and intimidated in the face of the force of nature – the vastness of it and its power. It makes me feel that anything is possible – like a drop of water in the middle of the Sahara desert… magic.

What was your last act of true cowardice?
I just saw a cockroach which sent me into an emotional spiral. I felt like it was crawling on me and I screamed my lungs out!

What single thing do you miss most when you’re away from home?
I think of the whole world as my home. But I have also not lived in my family home [Algeria] for my whole career. I always miss my family – I miss my family all the time as they are not where my current home is either – they are in France and I am in America. My work takes a lot of space in my life and I grew up being encouraged by my artistic family to follow my dreams; but by doing so I am away from them – so yeah, I just miss them. At this point I haven’t seen them in a year, but I hold them in mind and they are in my heart always.

Do you have any odd habits or rituals?
I still suck my middle two fingers like when I was a child from time to time… Whenever I do, my brain releases serotonin and I feel comforted.

What is your party trick?
I play the ukulele bent over backwards while doing the splits… LOL!

What is your mantra?
I am good enough.

What is your favourite smell?
The grass in a field after the rain.

What do you always carry with you?
Love to give to others. 

What is your guilty pleasure?
Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in cheap cones!

Who is the silliest person you know?
I’m honestly right up there… I am goofy and I am clumsy. Dancers can be incredibly clumsy, which I know sounds odd. 

What would be your least favourite way to die?
Drowning. Or worse: drowning and being liquefied in a pool of sulphuric acid…

Sofia Boutella, actor, dancer and model, left her home country of Algeria in 1992 during the civil war there. She was 10, and journeyed to France with her mother, an architect, and father, a composer, and they settled there. She had studied classical dance since she was five, and at 18 made the French national rhythmic gymnastics team. But while dance has always been a passion (she names Bob Fosse and Fred Astaire as inspirations), and her career as a professional dancer has seen her perform alongside Rihanna and Madonna, lately, acting has taken precedence. You will no doubt remember her break-out role as the lethal, high-kicking blade-shod double-amputee Gazelle in Kingsman: The Secret Service. Since then, there have been many more roles and she is currently filming the lead in Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon.   


*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.’

There is this practitioner called Peter Brook, a famous theatre director, and he says: an actor walks across an empty space and there’s just already so much story. So before you open your mouth you’re already performing, you’re already telling that story.

When someone walks into a space, you immediately have a story about them, be that their skin colour, the way they cut their hair, the clothes they’re wearing, whether they walk with a limp or not, the shoes they have on. There’s so much story that’s given before they even open their mouth and tell you what their name is. And I think that’s the same for all of my characters. 

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For example, when I was doing His House, there was a man called Mawan Muortat who was our Dinka expert [the Dinka people are a large ethnic group in South Sudan]. And I just watched him all the time to see how he moved; he’s a lot taller – South Sudanese people are a lot more, what I suppose you would call, lankier. So I was just interested in the way that they move and that grace that they have, because I needed to try and incorporate that in my characterisation. 

The same with Elliot in Gangs of London… because he boxes, because he’s been in the army, and he’s been a police officer, there’s a physicality. He’s got this entire story of violence that he’s carrying with him. And I think it’s important to be able to tell that. When you see his silhouette from a way back, you think, ‘OK, that guy looks like he can handle himself’. So I try and make sure that I’ve got that physicality by day one of shooting; that I’ve practised that.

sope dirisu, hollywood authentic, cover story, greg williams, greg williams photography
sope dirisu, hollywood authentic, cover story, greg williams, greg williams photography

And then everything else is sort of built on top of that. The way he speaks; where his voice is in his body comes from the muscularity or the size of his chest. And that speaks to his history as well, where he grew up and who he needs to be for different people – I think there’s definitely an element of code-switching with him. 

That’s not really perceptive, but it’s important for me to know that it’s there because the detail of a performance [is important]. The more detailed I am, the more the audience can pick up on it, and even if they don’t pick up on it, it’s really important to me that it’s there. Because that’s just the work I’m doing. It’s the job. 


Written by Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù

April 9, 2022

simone ashley, bridgerton, sex education, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

‘I like making breakfast; whether it’s a smoothie or just scrambled eggs, it’s the first thing I think about, to be honest, in the morning,’ announces Simone Ashley. But her signature dish is curry. ‘I’m South Indian, so I’m Tamil, and the food… I mean my mum, she cooks the most amazing food.’ Today, in honour of Mum, Simone is making us a vegan curry. It’s vegan ‘because it’s just easier to do’, though she was vegan for a while, but started to eat meat again on the set of Sex Education, the Netflix series that turbo-charged her career. 

Today’s recipe is, says Ashley, nothing special, just a go-to from a book. First up is the rice: ‘The trick is getting your ratios right. Ratio of rice to water and just low heat. You don’t want it to burn at the bottom, you don’t want it to overcook. Just take your time with it.’

Then she takes command of the kitchen, asking for a vegetable peeler – ‘This is a weak peeler!’ – and adds coconut oil, garam masala and black mustard seeds to butternut squash, not to mention the ready-peeled garlic she’s brought with her, as if she always travels with ingredients to hand. ‘I love cooking,’ she says. ‘I don’t really get to do it much with traveling around all the time and being on set, so it’s nice and a bit therapeutic to use my brain in a different way.’

simone ashley, bridgerton, sex education, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

Simone Ashley, now 27, says she grew up on Disney classics. ‘We always had The Jungle Book playing or Snow White… We went to Disneyland all the time.’ She knew the words to the whole of the remake of The Parent Trap – ‘Me and my brother used to recite that film in the car whenever we had long journeys’ – but admits that she thought the Lindsay Lohan character was played by real twins. 

Then in adolescence it’s fair to say she developed very non-Disney tastes: one favourite film was Boogie Nights, and another, Kill Bill. ‘I loved Uma Thurman in Kill Bill… Everything about that film, the colours, the cinematography, the music, everything, and just how driven this character was.’ Tarantino’s world was, however, a far cry from her own, growing up in Surrey with her parents, both academics, who were first-generation immigrants from India. She did the normal teenage things like waitressing and getting fired from a hairdressers – ‘I messed someone’s highlights up and I washed them off in the wrong way’ – and claims that unlike her Sex Education character, she was not ever part of the cool gang at school.

‘I failed at everything in school. It was just my attention that was bad,’ she says. And she also failed to learn Tamil or Hindi, which her mother encouraged her to do. In the end, Mum got her playing French video games to try and get her to pick up the language, reasoning that as she’d been named Simone, French might be the answer. It wasn’t. ‘I was awful – at maths, all of that stuff. Just had no interest. And my brother would force me and sit me down, bless him, and get me to revise, get me to study. He tried so hard and I just had zero interest in it. I was very stubborn in that sense. If I didn’t like it, then I just wouldn’t do it.’

That stubborn streak paid off, though, when she found acting. She says now that she was just determined to make it work. Shortly after her first job as ‘a background artist’ in Straight Outta Compton, she did more TV work in the UK and then landed the role of the bubble-gum-bubble-blowing Olivia in Sex Education.

During lockdown she moved to LA to try and jump-start things stateside. ‘I do love LA,’ she says. ‘I have more fun here, when I’m out here, and I eat better; I think it’s the sun. It just makes me feel a bit more energised and proactive.’ She spent her days walking a secret hiking trail through Griffith Park to admire the view of Los Angeles spread out below while eating sandwiches. And then occasionally she’d hit the road. ‘I used to drive a little Mustang when I was living out here, and I loved it. I’d always have Fleetwood Mac blasting and I’d just take off.’ The music was inherited from her dad, she says: ‘I grew up listening to that kind of music. The Doors, Rolling Stones, Fleetwood.’

Ironically, the next job required Ashley  to relocate back to the UK for Bridgerton, the hit period drama, famous for being colour-consciously cast. Ashley is front and centre of Season 2, so front and centre that when she looks out of her hotel window on Sunset today, what stares back at her is an enormous billboard: ‘When I wake up and I’m getting hair and makeup done or I’m having breakfast or a coffee, I’m literally looking outside at mine and Johnny [Bailey]’s and Charithra [Chandran]’s faces!’

simone ashley, bridgerton, sex education, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

She’s been overwhelmed by the response to the series: ‘We’ve seen such really positive feedback from people seeing people that look like me and Charithra on this show,’ she says. And she admits that the role has changed her. ‘I used to think, “Oh, I want to just be seen as an actress”, but I now realise that in this line of work you are representing and you do have a voice. I think a part of me was quite scared of owning the fact that, yeah, I am representing a minority. And I think it would be quite naive of me to think I’m just an actress, because, to think that is to think that the problem’s been solved and that we are in an industry and in a world where it’s completely normalised, and we’re far from it. Hopefully, in 20 years’ time it won’t be an issue, but we’re not there yet.’

She confesses she hasn’t talked about this before because ‘there is something quite scary about owning that position’. But then she smiles. ‘But I can have so much fun with this and I don’t need to be afraid. And it’s not about just me. It’s about sharing space with so many other amazing South Indian, South Asian actors.’

It sounds like she’s had a revelation. ‘Whatever industry you’re in, whatever you do, we all have a voice, we all have the power to speak,’ she says. ‘And I think that’s something I’ve never addressed in my life until now, when I’m dipping my toes a bit further in, I guess. Yeah it’s a bit scary, but it feels limitless when it’s positive, like you can just keep going downhill, like on a bike, speeding forward. It’s like when you’re on a swing, that stomach feeling. There’s nothing to stop you.’ And we’ll eat to that.  


Peter Howarth is the former editor-in-chief of Arena, British Esquire and Man About Town

April 9, 2022

fantastic beasts, eddie redmayne, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which is set decades prior to the Harry Potter series, feels strangely prescient: Newt Scamander must help Professor Albus Dumbledore and a band of outsiders to stop the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald from seizing control of the wizarding world. As Dumbledore says to Newt, ‘The world as we know it is coming undone. Grindelwald is pulling it apart with hate.’

fantastic beasts, jude law, harry potter, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts, jude law, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

But let’s rewind. Last October, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first of eight Potter films, was re-released after 20 years. In that film Richard Harris played Albus Dumbledore (after two outings as the wizard, he was replaced following his death by Michael Gambon), and today the role of inhabiting the character’s back story in the Fantastic Beasts films belongs to a bearded Jude Law. In the new film, Law is reunited with Eddie Redmayne as “magizoologist” Newt Scamander, an experience that he says ‘is like spending time with an old friend… He’s both great fun and very entertaining to be with, interested and interesting. And he’s also someone that takes it to another level when it comes to prep.’ Director David Yates, who directed four of the Potter films and all three Fantastic Beasts movies, agrees: ‘Eddie works harder than any actor I know. He is an absolute workaholic and a perfectionist. I think the thing I love about him most is he’s transformative.’

fantastic beasts, jude law, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

The first Potter book was published in 1997, with a print run of just 500, after author JK Rowling was famously rejected by 12 publishers. Warner Bros bought the rights for a reported $1 million, and the first Potter film was shot at Leavesden in Hertfordshire, in a former aircraft engine factory that had previously provided the setting for GoldenEye and The Dark Knight.

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fantastic beasts, ezra miller, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

Warner Bros Studios at Leavesden quickly became the exclusive home to the franchise and then, in 2016, to its extension, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. One of the Potter series’ biggest achievements is the way in which it helped to cement the UK’s status in the special effects industry. On the first Potter film, complicated visual effects were done on the west coast of America, but by the second, they were assigned to the UK. As Tanya Seghatchian, who executive produced several Potter films, has pointed out, ‘Now we’re recognised as the leading provider for visual effects in the world. Every facility is fully booked and that wasn’t the case before Harry Potter.’

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In 2009, when I was invited on the set of the sixth Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, it was eight years since the release of the first movie in the franchise, and Leavesden studios had already morphed from what had been essentially some sheds without sound stages into something altogether slicker. I was struck by the scale of the vast metal hanger at its core, but also by its capacity for intimacy. Cast and crew had pushbikes to pedal from one location to the next, Hogwarts’ Great Hall was built to scale and the Weasleys’ small, cold and dark living room had a strong smell of washing powder which was at odds with its dankness. Daniel Radcliffe, an engaging Harry Potter on screen and a thoughtful young man off it, explained how he learned to dive for an underwater scene in The Goblet of Fire in Europe’s largest film-making tank, which was set up in a corner of the studio. 

Fast forward to the pandemic and it is Eddie Redmayne whose swimming skills are called into action. Because of Covid-19 restrictions, a sequence in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore in which Newt enters summer waters had to be shifted to night shoots in Leavesden in December. Not the warmest of prospects, but achievable at the Warner Bros Hertfordshire studios, which in the decade since my visit have grown even further into an astonishing state-of-the-art operation.

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Director David Yates told me that he likes ‘the infrastructure of making a blockbuster; it’s like having a big train set’. A huge train set: Christian Mänz, the Oscar-nominated VFX supervisor on Harry Potter and then Fantastic Beasts, has a team of 1,500 people working on the creation of visual effects. He also collaborates closely with Stuart Craig, production designer on all eight Potter films, and whose job it is to bring the wizarding world to life. Craig has described asking JK Rowling about the geography of Hogwarts: ‘She immediately took out a pen and paper, and made the most extraordinarily complete map on a sheet of A4. I was still referring to that map on the eighth film.’ 

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was written by Rowling and Steve Kloves, who wrote all the Potter screenplays. If production designer Craig creates the universe, then VFX supervisor Mänz augments that reality. The Fantastic Beasts films are set in the historical past, with this latest taking place in the ’30s, in the build-up to World War II, and featuring global locations that have been specially created at Leavesden. For example, to prepare a scene set in Paris, 90 digitally-scanned locations helped recreate a version of the French capital so that the team could work out what could be physically built and what then had to be digitally recreated. 

fantastic beasts,mads mikkelsen, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Grindelwald, explains the benefit of such technical expertise: ‘We didn’t have to pretend. It’s a minimum of green screen work; everything is there.’ Law, too, is enthusiastic: ‘It’s a total dream for actors because you just step on [set] and you don’t have to do an awful lot of imagining. It’s all there with trams and cars and shop fronts or vistas and views, whatever. And we jumped through various cities around the world at various times. Being on something this scale is very rewarding.’

fantastic beasts,eddie redmayne, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts,eddie redmayne, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts,eddie redmayne, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
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fantastic beasts, ezra miller, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts, ezra miller, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts,jessica williams, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts,jessica williams, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts,jessica williams, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts,jessica williams, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts, jude law, harry potter, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography
fantastic beasts,mads mikkelsen, hollywood authentic, greg williams, greg williams photography

Amy Raphael is a journalist, critic and novelist. She has written for The Face, NME and British Esquire; her books include the biographies of Mike Leigh and Danny Boyle