Björk

Interview

‘I like to break the rules’: Björk on comedy, darkness and the most flamboyant tour of her career

The musician describes herself as many things: artist, introvert, activist, Scorpio, matriarch, punk, joker, optimist… We step inside the multiverse of the incomparable Björk

Rebecca Nicholson

Sun 12 Jan 2025 07.00 GMT

Björk is in Paris, and her laptop camera isn’t working. The laptop is eight years old, she explains, and she doesn’t want to replace it, for environmental reasons. “But let’s just say I haven’t exactly been crying about the fact that it doesn’t work.” She is a black square on my computer screen, which feels quite un-Björk-like, somehow, and yet also very Björk-like, too. Even without the visuals, she is instantly familiar. She jokes, she teases, her answers unravel slowly as she weighs up every side of a response, pin-balling between as many angles as she can find.

Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind review – essential viewing

 

Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind review – essential viewing

A sweeping but gossipy behind-the-scenes look at the off-screen dramas that made prestige TV

Rebeca Nicholson

Friday 24 November 2023

Peter Biskind is a cinema man. Best known for 1998’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and other books about the meaty, macho movie business, he has turned his attentions to the growth of streaming services and what might be the end of the current golden age of TV. The swaggering Pandora’s Box attempts to wrangle a complex tale into some sort of order, from the early days of prestige TV, to the high-stakes and seemingly bottomless business of “content creation”. But in the acknowledgments that conclude the book, Biskind still offers a secular prayer for the return of his preferred medium. “Movies, I hope, will one day make a comeback,” he writes. For now, television will have to do.

Holy Trinity … Carrie-Anne Moss, star of The Matrix: Resurrections.
 Photograph: Brian Bowen Smith

 

Interview

Carrie-Anne Moss: ‘There was a scene in the first Matrix with me in stilettos. I could barely stand straight’

Twenty years after first playing kick-ass hacker Trinity in The Matrix, Moss is returning to the role in The Matrix: Resurrections. Thankfully, she wasn’t asked to wear heels this time …

Rebecca Nicholson
Saturday 11 December 2021

When The Matrix asks us all to take the red pill again on 22 December, Carrie-Anne Moss, 54, will return to the role that made her famous. Moss first played Trinity, a motorbike-riding, badass, PVC-clad hacker, in 1999, and despite the character not surviving the original trilogy, she is back, along with her co-star Keanu Reeves, for the fourth instalment, The Matrix Resurrections, directed by Lana Wachowski, this time without her sister Lilly. Moss, who was born in Canada, started her career as a model and had several small parts on television and in films before The Matrix struck gold. She played Marvel’s first on-screen lesbian character, Jeri Hogarth, in the Netflix series Jessica Jones, and away from the acting world, she runs a “labour of love” lifestyle site called Annapurna Living. She lives with her husband and three children in the countryside in California, which means she does not see the current trend for Matrix-inspired fashion such as big stompy boots and tiny sunglasses out on the streets.

Charlotte Rampling: ‘My career has been sort of marginal ...’ 

Charlotte Rampling: ‘Depression makes you dead to the world – you've got to build yourself up again’

The actor on her new film, Hannah, 2016’s ‘racism’ row, her silence on #MeToo and learning to care for herself

Rebecca Nicholson

Friday 1 March 2019

Charlotte Rampling is sorry for being late. She arrived at Gare du Nord in time to catch her train from Paris to London, but when she got there, she realised she had left her passport at home. She has just moved, she explains, to a new place in Paris, the city in which she has lived for decades, and nothing is where she expects it to be.

“When you move, it’s quite disorienting. You don’t quite know where you are.” Not that she is in any way ruffled by the train fiasco. It is hard to imagine her being ruffled by anything. She needs a minute to put her bags down, she says, as she checks in at the hotel, then I should come up to her room and we can talk. She puts on her sunglasses and disappears into the lift.

Tilda Swinton / Championing talent, regardless of gender

 

Tilda Swinton at the Venice film festival for the premiere of The Human Voice

Tilda Swinton: championing talent, regardless of gender

The star was the first to welcome the abolition of male and female awards at the Berlin film festival

Rebecca Nicholson
Saturday 15 September 2020

I

t is rare that a move being described as “eminently sensible” is newsworthy; still, at the Venice film festival last week, this is how Tilda Swinton referred to the fact that the Berlin film festival will no longer be handing out acting awards by gender.

“I think it’s pretty much inevitable that everybody will follow. It’s just obvious to me,” she said. Cate Blanchett also expressed her support, explaining that she prefers to be known as an actor. “I am of the generation where the word actress was used almost always in a pejorative sense. So I claim the other space,” she said.

Take it from me, little occasions as much commenter wrath as following this publication’s style guide and referring to a woman who acts as an “actor”. The notion of rewarding good performance by performance alone already exists for some award shows and, as Swinton says, it is inevitable that more will follow.

Splitting acting categories into two genders, and only acting categories, is something that makes less sense the more you think about it, like saying a word over and over again, until it no longer sounds like a word. Extend it to any other category – best costume (male), best sound design (female) etc – and it is anachronistic and strange. And as the non-binary actor Asia Kate Dillon, star of Billions, asked the Emmys in 2017: “If the categories of ‘actor’ and ‘actress’ are meant to denote assigned sex I ask, respectfully, why is that necessary?”

Some say that without splitting awards by gender, women would be underrepresented, as they are in, say, best director, a category that is usually all-male, regardless of who is making films that year. But that argument is unconvincing, half-hearted, and it no longer feels good enough.

I love awards ceremonies so much that I feel real fury when a deserving winner is robbed, yet it seems to me that the only downside would be cutting the number of acting awards, and therefore acceptance speeches, in half. While I am here for equality, I am not here for being deprived of the opportunity to decide whether tears are real or to spot those “accidental” omissions from the thank-yous.

On the other hand, nobody who wasn’t stuck right there in the room has ever watched the entirety of the Grammys. Abolish gendered categories and we can zip through everything in an hour, argue about the winners for a bit, then go home and have an early night. An eminently sensible suggestion.

THE GUARDIAN

This much I know / Jane Birkin / ‘I learned French off a tape recorder. All the French people laughed’

‘I was rather a bad version of Jean Shrimpton’Jane Birkin
Photo by Nico Bustos

This much I know

Jane Birkin: ‘I learned French off a tape recorder. All the French people laughed’

The singer and actor, 70, on sexy pictures, Glenda Jackson and her first concert – at the Bataclan

Rebecca Nicholson
Saturday 22 April 2017

If your mother has been an actress and your grandmother’s been an actress, there’s certainly an encouragement. My father wanted me to be a painter, so my mother helped me on the secret side. She got a lot of stick for that. But in the end my father adored me in films.

Had it all worked out with John Barry [her first husband, whom she married at 18], I would never have been curious to know what was going on anywhere else. I would have just gone on being his wife, I would have been delighted. But because he went off with someone else, and I was left with Kate [their daughter, who died in 2013], I had to find a job quite fast.

I learned French off a tape recorder and from what Serge [Gainsbourg] would teach me, which was slang. Everybody laughed. I don’t know how much I genuinely wanted to get better at it or how much I wanted to make all French people laugh.

I did comedies and sexy pictures. The sexy pictures are a bit depressing when you come out of a wonderful concert and somebody turns to you with nude photographs for you to sign. I’d quickly sign over the bottom. It happens more and more now because they get them off the internet.

I was a rather bad version of Jean Shrimpton. That’s who I wanted to look like. When I look back at photos and see myself in Blow Up or La Piscine, I’m not very interesting.

We were on a television programme just before Serge died. They asked me, what’s he to you? And I said, “toi”, which means “you”, a stupid answer, but it was all I could think of. And then they asked Serge what I was to him, and he said “émoi”. I thought he’d said, “et moi”, but he said émoi, which means to be moved, emotion. I think that’s why he wrote for me. Those songs were messages. They’re really quite strange to sing.

Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus, with no make-up and dressed like a boy – that was pretty gorgeous. And Serge was gorgeous, too. It was the prettiest time.

When I saw pictures of Glenda Jackson at 80, I thought, ‘Oh wow, if I could be like her!’ It’s probably to keep your own morale up, but you find people getting more and more gorgeous the older you get.

I’m not curious, but I’ve got very curious friends. I’ve got a friend who takes me to the theatre three times a week and a girlfriend who takes me to see three movies in a night, sometimes. A few years ago I realised how much it helps to go into other people’s stories. I’m a great follower. If someone’s got a great idea of what to do then I simply love it.

I was 40 when I did my first concert, at the Bataclan. I cut my hair off like a boy, I wore men’s clothes. I only wanted people to hear the music and the words. It was fantastic. And it was so frightening. Serge was there and he kept lighting his cigarette lighter to make everybody put their lighters on when I sang Fuir Le Bonheur. All this began at 40. People should never think it’s all over when you’re very young.

Jane Birkin’s first studio album in nine years Birkin/Gainsbourg Le Symphonique is out now

THE GUARDIAN

THIS MUCH I KNOW

2002
001 Ann Widdecombe / "We're far too obsessed with sex"

002 David Bailey / This much I know / Les is more. Except for sex 
003 Peter Ustinov / This much I know / Children are close to the mystery of birth and old people are close to the mystery of death 

004 Fay Weldon / This much I know / There's a time and a place for everything

2004

Carlos Santana /  ‘War is not the answer’

2005

Val Kilmer / "I think heaven is a state of mind. As hell is."

Brooke Shields / This much I know / Finding a therapist is like shopping for a husband 

2006

Jane Birkin / This much I know / "I see the best qualities of my three husbands  in each of my children" 
Tom Jones  / I might have become a miner like my father 

2007
Gene Wilder / This much I know / "What if I'm not funny? What if I fail?
Jane Birkin / I learned French off a tape recorder. All the French people laughed.

Dita von Teese / This much I know / The young Marilyn Monroe was a pretty girl in a sea of pretty girls

2010
Malcolm Gladwell / This much I know / I've nearly died several times

2011

Seal / This much I know / Having children is the hardest thing in the world

2012

Donald Trump / This much I know / I think I like Prince Harry

2013

Jane Champion / This much I know / I thought I was a sarcastic bitch

2014

David Bailey / Cockneys don´t cry

Malcolm Gladwell /  This much I Know / ‘No one thinks of me as a potential terrorist any more’

2015

Kim Cattrall / ‘For me, sex starts in the brain’

Al Pacino / This much I know / ‘It’s never been about money. I was often unemployed’
Georgia May Jagger / ‘With modelling, sometimes you’re punky, other times girly and sweet’

Tom Jones / ‘Fame allows you to release things that were already in you. It’s like drink in that respect’

Kim Wilde / ‘I felt caged in by Kids in America’

2016

Miriam Margolyes / ‘I adore being Jewish but I’m not a believer in God’
Kathleen Hanna / ‘I'm a punk rock stripper with sexual abuse counsellor training’
Emma Donoghue / This much I know / ‘I’ve ended up having a family as well as being a lesbian’

Donovan  / This much I know / ‘The songs try to say important things with lightness’

Erdem Moralioğlu / ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the way women look’

Elvis Costello / This much I know / ‘Believing you’re being watched or overheard is no longer a paranoid fantasy’ 
Ennio Morricone / This much I know / ‘I don’t know the names of any pop musicians’

Carlos Santana  / ‘You can get high on what’s within you’

Holly Willoughby /This much I know /  ‘I’m definitely the person you see’

Richard Dreyfuss / ‘When I die I want the chance to hit God in the face’ 

Priscilla Presley/ 'My fear is that people will forget about Elvis'

Jessica Alba / This mucho I know /  ‘With this new film I wanted to kick some butt again’
Courtney Barnett / ‘When I go into a house I have to look in all the cupboards’

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge / 'Pleasure is a weapon'

Phil Collins / This much I know / 'I realise in hindsight how annoying I was'
Cornelia Parker / This much I know / I dressed up a statue of Churchill as a Dadaist ac

Tricky / This much I Know / ‘I've got family members I haven't spoken to in 15 years’

2017
Natalia Vodianova / This much I know / 'I have an animal sense for danger’
Ethan Hawke / This much I Know / ‘The most romantic thing I’ve done is have sex’

2018
Dita Von Teese / This much I know / ‘Staying pale takes some effort in LA’ 

2020
Michael Rosen / This much I know / "The incredible NHS saved my life"
Jonathan Pryce / This much I know / "Love is the most important thing"

Drew Barrymore / 'I don't pretend to be perfect'

Drew Barrymore 

'I don't pretend to be perfect'

Drew Barrymore is back on our screens, this time as a flesh-eating estate agent. She tells Rebecca Nicholson about the endless ups and downs of her life – from child star to teen rebel, and savvy producer to business woman – and explains why she’ll ‘fight to the death to be happy’

Rebecca Nicholson
Sunday 29 January 2017 07.00 GMT

 ‘I stopped working to have my kids,
and so I was nervous about working again’:
Drew Barrymore on her return to acting
Photograph: Danielle Levitt

Drew Barrymore walks into the hotel room in Berlin flanked by assistants, caked in heavy TV make-up and wrapped in a brown fluffy jacket that makes her look like a very glamorous teddy bear. Within seconds, the entourage has disappeared, she’s wiped every last scrap of foundation from her face and she’s rummaging around underneath her dress, a kind of earth mother hippy smock, regretting her decision to wear tights on this sub-freezing day. “Why does anyone wear pantyhose?” she exclaims, barefaced, faux-exasperated, shifting in her armchair, trying to get comfortable. “They’re so fucking sadistic! They’re not even control pants,” she says, conspiratorially, “but I’m forcing them to be.”