‘I’ve tried to separate myself from this job’: The Witcher’s Anya Chalotra on fan abuse, Henry Cavill and saying goodbye to the show
After seven years in Netflix’s fantasy epic, the actor has cast her final spell. She talks about the genre’s toxic fans, welcoming new boy Liam Hemsworth to the cast – and what sorcery really sounds like
British actor Jason Isaacs, on March 18, 2025 in Pollença (Mallorca).CATI CLADERA (EFE)
HOLLYWOOD
Jason Isaacs: The villain who managed to dodge fame until ‘The White Lotus’
The British actor, with a decades-long career and iconic roles like Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter saga, managed to stay out of the media spotlight until his starred in one of today’s biggest television phenomena
‘Henry VIII is a serial killer and abuser’: why is Britain still so obsessed with the Tudors?
England has long adopted the version of events informed by the Victorians’ biases and neuroses. But what is behind the flood of 21st-century retellings, including the new TV series The Mirror and the Light?
Zoe Williams
Tuesday 12 November 2024
The TV adaptation of the third of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels – The Mirror and the Light – arrived on Sunday on BBC One to rave reviews. “Six hours of magic” was the Guardian’s verdict. The series had been eagerly awaited, but nothing like as eagerly as the book itself. Mantel’s legions of fans waited eight years from the publication of Bring Up the Bodies for the finale to arrive in 2020.
How James Gandolfini’s addictions to alcohol and drugs caused chaos during filming of ‘The Sopranos’
In a new book, the locations manager on the emblematic HBO series reveals the difficulty of working with the actor who, despite everything, was a beloved presence on set
Emma D’Arcy in ‘House of the Dragon’ and Morfydd Clark in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’
‘Rings of Power’ vs ‘House of the Dragon’: Which show is winning the popularity battle?
Audience and social media data give a sense of the results of the confrontation between the two epic fantasies
NATALIA MARCOS
Madrid, 3 November 2022
It wasn’t a battle, but it was. It wasn’t, because there didn’t have to be a victor and a loser – both could have triumphed (and lost). But the simultaneous release ofHouse of the Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Powerinevitably pitted them against one another. Now that the voyages back to Middle Earth and to Westeros have ended, and the first seasons are over, which has won in terms of popularity.
Aerial views of the mansion in Mallorca, Spain, featured in the final season of 'The Crown.'
The villa featured in ‘The Crown’ is located in Mallorca, Spain, and can be rented for €60,000
The mansion, where the Princess of Wales once vacationed in real life, recreates the Al-Fayed family property in Saint-Tropez in the show’s final season
Lucía Bohórquez
Palma, 6 January 2924
Wearing a short red dress, Diana of Wales climbs the stone steps of a staircase that runs from a small private jetty to the entrance of a majestic villa with a yellow facade. Accompanied by her sons, William and Harry, the princess greets Mohamed Al-Fayed, who opens his arms to her as her children splash in a pool built on the edge of a cliff with the immense blue Mediterranean stretching into the horizon. The Al-Fayed family’s summer home in Saint-Tropez figures prominently in the first episodes of the sixth and final season of the hit show The Crown, which fictionalizes the life of Queen Elizabeth II. The splendorous villa, christened The Yellow Castle, is not actually in France, but rather in Mallorca, Spain, where Princess Diana of Wales had spent some summer days during her youth, before she married then-Prince Charles.
Harry Collett, Emma D'Arcy and Oscar Eskinazi, in a scene from the second season of 'House of the Dragon.'THEO WHITEMAN
War comes to ‘House of the Dragon’: ‘It’s a story about two women and it will continue to be until the end’
The second season of the ‘Game of Thrones’ spinoff delves into the confrontation between two sides of the Targaryen house. ‘We want to reward the audience for sticking with us,’ says showrunner Ryan Condal
NATALIA MARCOS Paris, 18 June 2024
The Dance of Dragons is about to begin. On one side, the Black Council, with Rhaenyra claiming her place on the Iron Throne. On the other, the Green Council, with Aegon on the throne, backed by his mother, Alicent Hightower. The rifts within the very broken Targaryen family have turned into gaping divides, accentuated by painful deaths. Tragedy struck at the end of the first season of House of the Dragon, the series that has returned to the phenomenon that was Game of Thrones to tell the past of this saga of dragon riders. The Dance of Dragons, the civil war in the Targaryen, is imminent and inevitable.
Retired actor David Caruso has resurfaced after stepping away from the Hollywood spotlight following his hit show “CSI: Miami.”
The 67-year-old was photographed out and about in a rare appearance on Nov. 15.
During the rare spotting, the “NYPD Blue” alum sported a denim jacket, a black tee and gray sweatpants as he pumped gas and took a walk in San Fernando Valley, California.
The graffiti on the left says: ‘Freedom … now in 3D’. The one on the right says: ‘Homeland is watermelon’ (which is slang for not to be taken seriously).
Photograph: Courtesy of the artists
'Homeland is racist': artists sneak subversive graffiti on to TV show
Street artists say they were asked to add authenticity to scenes of Syrian refugee camp, but took chance to air criticisms of show’s depiction of Muslim world
Three graffiti artists hired to add authenticity to refugee camp scenes in this week’s episode of Homeland have said they instead used their artwork to accuse the TV programme of racism.
In the second episode of the fifth season, which aired in the US and Australia earlier this week, and will be shown in the UK on Sunday, lead character Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, can be seen striding past a wall daubed with Arabic script reading: “Homeland is racist.”
The difficult reconciliation of the memory of World War II with mass tourism in the Netherlands
Residents of the Dutch estate portrayed in the TV series ‘Band of Brothers,’ produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, will install a fence and charge for photos to stem the flow of tourists
ISABEL FERRER
THE HUGUE, JUNE 28, 2023
In uniform, with his helmet resting on his side and a slight smile on his face. This is how U.S. Major Richard Dick Winters posed in 1944 under the archway at the entrance to an estate in the east of the Netherlands. The complex is called Schoonderlogt and is located in the village of Elst, in the Betuwe region. The Allied troops called the area The Island and the fighting there lasted 198 days during World War II. Winters and his men, members of Easy Company, transcended the realm of military memory thanks to a television series released in 2001: Band of Brothers (HBO), co-produced by filmmaker Steven Spielberg and actor Tom Hanks. British actor Damian Lewis plays Winters, and the image of him, posing in the same place as the U.S. officer, has become so famous over time that the owners of the property are going to install a fence and charge for photos to stem the flow of tourists.
The mastermind casting director behind Peaky Blinders
By Emma Brown
October 30, 2017
If you are a fan of contemporary British film and television—not the lace and pomp PBS period pieces, but those gritty, award-dominating independent dramas—you’re almost definitely a fan of Shaheen Baig. Originally from Birmingham, smack dab in the middle of England, Baig is the casting director behind all four seasons of Peaky Blinders and films like Control (2007), Lady Macbeth (2016), and God’s Own Country (2017).
The Handmaid's Tale Hits Hard in Covid-Era America
Hulu's adaptation of Margaret Atwood's book has always felt of-the-moment—now more than ever.
30 APRIL 2021
The Handmaid’s Tale’s gift is prescience. From Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book being a harbinger of the conservative politics of the Reagan era, to the Hulu show’s eerie echoes of Donald Trump’s presidency, every incarnation speaks to the generation that receives it.
The current season of The Handmaid’s Tale, which launched Wednesday, functions quite the same. The totalitarian theocracy of Gilead still looks like an America where the country’s puritanical politics have run amok. Its antihero protagonist June (Elisabeth Moss) still serves as a stand-in for any woman who has seen her autonomy stripped away, and an avatar for the anger they feel when it is. All of the parallels that existed in seasons past between Handmaids and modern women seeking self-determination are still there. Yet, in the show’s fourth season, it is the nuances—the subtle grief, the lost moments—that hit the hardest.
Westworld Is Back - And We Couldn't Be More Excited
By Sharp Staff February 21, 2020
HBO just dropped the trailer for season 3 of its crown jewel Westworld – and, as usual, there’s a lot going on. The Emmy award-winning sci-fi western drama set in a theme park where guests can experience the American Old West (stay with us) is back with new robots, exploding cars and a sweet orchestral version of Sweet Child O’ Mine. And surprise: Aaron Paul (!) is starring this season, joining an already-stellar cast that includes Evan Rachel Wood, Tessa Thompson and Ed Harris. Sadly, Anthony Hopkins’s character, Dr. Robert Ford, is off the show. If you need your fix, Hopkins’s Twitter presence serves as endless entertainment. Season 3 of Westworld airs March 15 on HBO.
Game of Thrones: how it dominated the decade – then lost its way
It was the fantasy juggernaut that everyone from Obama to Snoop Dogg loved. So why did it fall from grace so swiftly?
Sarah Hughes
Monday 30 December 2019
In the 2010s, there were TV shows and then there was Game of Thrones. HBO’s adaptation of George RR Martin’s epic fantasy series dominated the entire television landscape. Endlessly dissected online and beloved by everyone from former president Barack Obama to Snoop Dogg, it became the subject of countless fan videos and closed out the decade as the most popular show on earth, averaging more than 25 million viewers per episode (an official figure that didn’t even take into account the illegal downloads, which also saw it win the dubious accolade of the globe’s most pirated TV show).
It was also the last piece of true event television in an age where our viewing is increasingly splintered by the rise of streaming. While other shows exist to be binged in one greedy gulp, Game of Thrones had to be watched weekly – a fact that only boosted its appeal, making it the show on everyone’s lips every Monday.
For so long it was the only show on everyone’s lips ... Jaime and Cersei in Game of Thrones. Photograph: Helen Sloan/HBO
Most of all, though, it changed the way the world thought about fantasy on the small screen. Prior to Game of Thrones, accepted wisdom said it was impossible to turn fantasy into a TV hit. Post-Game of Thrones, TV executives seem unable to stop commissioning variations on the theme.
Westeros DNA can be spied in everything from straightforward historical epics such as The Last Kingdom to the weird, wild world of Sky Atlantic’s Britannia. Netflix’s The Witcher is the latest show to conform to the fantasy juggernaut’s template of gruesome violence and largely gratuitous nudity.
It wasn’t always this way. When Game of Thrones began in 2011, the focus was as much on the sharp one-liners and the cunning political machinations as it was on the big twists and even bigger spectacle. But as the show progressed – and crucially, as creators David Benioff and DB Weiss were forced away from Martin’s books due to lack of new material – the show became less character driven and ever more bombastic.
Never was this clearer and more devastating than in the season six finale, The Winds of Winter. At the time of airing, the episode – in which Cersei Lannister wiped out Baelor’s Sept and with it much of the cast – was hailed as a triumph, a sure sign that Benioff and Weiss had a thrilling endgame in mind. In reality, it was the moment that fatally weakened the foundations on which the series was built – and provided proof that, when in doubt, the writers would always blow things up first and ask questions later.
Blow things up, ask questions later ... was The Winds of Winter the show’s death knell? Photograph: HBO
Having established Cersei as a master villain, Benioff and Weiss appeared to have no idea what to do with her, largely deserting the intrigue in King’s Landing to concentrate on the epic fights. That was understandable given the importance of a final showdown between the Night King’s undead army and the rest of humanity, but the gaping hole where politics used to be ensured that the last two seasons prized showy did-you-see-that? moments – the sudden death of Littlefinger, Daenerys’s fiery destruction of King’s Landing – over carefully nurtured plots and character development.
This obsession with style over substance also had a knock-on effect on the shows that came after. Many of those big-budget projects such as Troy, The Bastard Executioner and American Gods were flops, made in the most shallow image of Game of Thrones and ignoring the fact that what originally made the show a hit were its quieter moments.
Conversely, the series that have worked – Outlander, Penny Dreadful, the BBC’s recent adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials – did so because, like Game of Thrones, they put the story they were telling above flashy special effects. Each also exuded the feeling that this was fantasy adapted by people who adored the source material, not just executives scrabbling around for a hit.
Not that the high-profile failures have stopped the commissions coming. Huge adaptations of Lord of the Rings, Robert Jordan’s classic fantasy The Wheel of Time and Patrick Rothfuss’s cult series The Kingkiller Chronicle are in the works.
Some may prove to be worth the wait, although it’s hard not to wonder if TV will already have moved on by the time they arrive because perhaps the most interesting thing about Game of Thrones is the way that – despite all its noise and thunder – it faded so swiftly from the collective memory, slipping down the best-of-the-decade lists and increasingly attacked for being not so much the story of Shakespearian grandeur it promised to be but instead, in Macbeth’s words, a tale “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”.
At its best, though, Game of Thrones was addictive and unmissable TV, filled with great lines and genuinely surprising and well-earned moments. But history can be cruel to shows once lauded as the best of their era.
Its limitations were built in ... Game of Thrones. Photograph: HBO
It is also true that its limitations were built in. Race was badly handled from the beginning, with the Dothraki presented as violent savages and Daenerys’s storyline constantly flirting with white saviour tropes. It also consistently courted controversy over its handling of sex, from the decision to shoot Sansa’s brutal wedding to Ramsay entirely through Theon’s gaze to the mishandling of a scene between incestuous siblings Jaime and Cersei that turned it from reunion to rape.
Such issues – coupled with the sense that this was ultimately a show comprised more of bombast than brilliance – means that Game of Thrones’ greatest legacy may turn out not to be the myriad copycat shows it spawned but rather the silly sums of money the makers of those shows willingly spent. Game of Thrones is dead; long live Game of Thrones.
Westworld Is Back - And We Couldn't Be More Excited