Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes has been finalising his cast for the new James Bond movie and it includes classically trained star Helen McCrory and French beauty Berenice Marlohe as the latest Bond girl.
Ms Marlohe has screen tested for Mendes at Pinewood Studios and met with approval.
The director, plus producer Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, are in frantic pre-production mode before shooting begins.
Bond bombshell: French actress Berenice Marlohe has been approved for the role of 007's latest girl
Daniel Craig returns as Bond and Judi Dench is back as M (Rory Kinnear will once again play her assistant).
Javier Bardem appears as a guy who'll be causing 007 a lot of grief, while Ralph Feinnes will play a role so top secret, I swallowed a pill to make me forget what I was told.
And, as this stage was first to reveal, Naomi Harris will play Miss Moneypenny.
Ben Whishaw and Ms McCrory have as yet unspecified roles.
McCrory was Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter pictures.
She was also in Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya, Mendes's final productions at the Donmar Warehouse - as was Simon Russell Beale, who had been in discussions about taking a role in Bond 23 until scheduling got in the way.
In any even, Russell Beale is in rehearsal at the National, he'll play Joseph Stalin in John Hodge's play Collaborators for director Nichols Hytner.
Soon-to-be enemies: Javier Bardem (left) has been cast to give James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) grief in the film
During the repertory run of the play, the actor will tackle the part of Falstaff in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 for BBC2, projects executive produced by... Sam Mendes.
I also understand Russell Beale will do another play at the National in April. Watch this space.
Watch out for Charlie Creed-Miles and Will Poulter, who play father and son in Dexter Fletcher’s heartfelt directorial film debut Wild Bill.
Creed-Miles plays Bill, who is let out of jail after eight years.
He goes to his council flat to discover his wife has skipped off, leaving his two sons aged 11 and 15 to fend for themselves.
Poulter plays the elder boy and he’s terrific. And Creed-Miles is like a stick of dynamite with a long fuse: when he goes off, it’s whoosh!
But the actor also gives you a sense that his Wild Bill wants to try to make up for the years he stole from his boys.
As Fletcher noted: ‘Will plays the son who has had to become a man, and Charlie is the man who behaves like a little boy and has to grow up.’
The film is being screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 21 and 23.
Nick Blood, Andrew Knott, Daniel Healy, Will Payne and Oliver Bennett, who portray (respectively) Stuart Sutcliffe, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best in Backbeat, a play featuring songs such as Be Bop A Lula, Money (That’s What I Want) and Please Mr Postman, that The Beatles covered during their early gigs in Hamburg.
Flashback: George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr of The Beatles in 1965
Producer Karl Sydow has also secured permission to use PS I Love You and Love Me Do.
The show is based on the movie that Iain Softley directed years ago that centred on the relationship between Sutcliffe and Astrid Kirchherr; and John, Paul and George.
It’s an engrossing show that shifts the facts a little for dramatic effect, but stays close to what we know.
It’s one of those great surprises the West End comes up with every once in a while and is a genuine pleasure to sit through. But be prepared to get up on your feet during the finale and shake it!
It’s a smashing counterpoint to Martin Scorsese’s extraordinary documentary George Harrison: Living In the Material World, which is out on DVD, and which the BBC will be screening later in the year on Arena.
Eddie Redmayne will star in Richard II at the Donmar
Michael Grandage has decided to add some karma to his final production at the Donmar Warehouse.
The award-winning director has assembled his company for Richard II, which begins performances at the Donmar on December 1.
Most of the cast, including Eddie Redmayne in the title role, are people he has worked with over the years in Covent Garden.
Pippa Bennett-Warner, who will play Queen Isabella, was in his acclaimed King Lear with Derek Jacobi (she was Cordelia).
‘It was one of the happiest companies I’ve worked with, and I thought I’d have a bit of that karma in my final show,’ Grandage told me.
Ron Cook — another Lear alumnus — will play the Duke of York.
Redmayne appeared at the Donmar in Red, with Alfred Molina. (There’s talk of Grandage and his Red team re-assembling the production next year, at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.)
Michael Hadley, meanwhile, will play the part of John of Gaunt. Grandage recalled that Hadley was in The Vortex — one of the first pieces he directed for the Donmar. Also returning will be Andrew Buchan (as Bolingbroke).
Not everybody has been here before. Sian Thomas will play both the Duchess of York and the Duchess of Gloucester, marking the first collaboration between actress and director.
Grandage has also gone after new faces such as Royal Academy of Dramatic Art graduate Daniel Easton.
‘It’s a play about the young, and looking forward,’ Grandage said, as well as a piece about a divided Britain.
The director, who is staging an opera at the Met in New York at the moment, will work with Redmayne in Manhattan for a few days next week to study Shakespeare’s poetic monarch.
Celia Imrie, Janie Dee, Aisling Loftus, Jonathan Coy, Robert Glenister and Jamie Glover will lead Michael Frayn’s classic comedy Noises Off in a run at the Old Vic from December 3.
Lindsay Posner will direct.
Done right, this can be one of the funniest shows on earth, and everybody in this line-up has expert comic timing.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Noises Off concerns an am-dram touring production of a tarty sex comedy called Nothing On.
If it works, Christmas is coming early to the Old Vic.
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