Toby Jones
Photograph: Nadav Kander

Interview

Toby Jones: ‘Do you think I play losers? They're just people'

This article is more than 9 years old

Nobody plays flawed heroes like actor Toby Jones, from Capote to Hitchcock to Captain Mainwaring. But they’re winners in his eyes, he tells Simon Hattenstone

Simon Hattenstone

14 November 2015

 

Tortured soul ... Rossellini opposite Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, 1986. Photograph: Pictorial Press/Alamy

Interview

Isabella Rossellini: ‘Ageing brings a lot of happiness. You get fatter – but there is freedom’

This article is more than 4 years old

The actor’s latest project is about the joy of sex, as well as its capacity to exploit, control and kill. She discusses the pleasure of life after being written off by Hollywood and the beauty business

Simon Hattenstone

Tuesday 13 October 2020

Isabella Rossellini is a busy woman. It is hard to know how the model, actor, writer, animal behaviourist and farmer finds so much time to talk about sex. But she does. In recent years, she has made numerous tiny films about the sex lives of animals under the umbrella titles Green Porno and Seduce Me. Now she hopes to take them to a larger audience – or, to be more accurate, she hopes to bring a larger audience to her farm.

’Eventually I’ll be able to sign one of my own books again. That would be a big deal for me.’ Photograph: Spencer Murphy/The Guardian. Grooming: Victoria Poland

‘My body is broken, but I’m not going to give up’: Hanif Kureishi on life after the accident that paralysed him 

He was known for taboo-busting, transgressive stories about identity, sexuality and belonging. Then the author and screenwriter broke his neck. But he’s still every bit as provocative …

Simon Hattenstone

Sat 12 Oct 2024 07.00 BST

“Iwasn’t even pissed,” Hanif Kureishisays, as if somehow that would have made it better. The writer is talking about the accident that left him a tetraplegic. Or, as he likes to call himself with classic Kureishian brutality, a vegetable. Though he’s not. His body may be broken, but his brain isn’t.

Marina Abramović talks friends, enemies and fear / ‘I face so much jealousy’

Marina Abramović

‘I face so much jealousy’: Marina Abramović talks friends, enemies and fear

The artist has always pushed herself to the limit, letting strangers cut her and turning her breakup into a performance. But only now does she understand why

• ‘Why don’t we have a ménage à trois?’ – an extract from her new memoir

Simon Hattenstone
Saturday 22 October 2016 09.00 BST

“Y

ou are 10 minutes early,” Marina Abramović says. The performance artist leads me to her bedroom in the Greenwich Village apartment where she lives alone – minimalist, lime green sheets, huge TV on the wall – and hands me a book. “You have not seen final copy of my book yet? Now with pictures. Here, look. I am back in 10 minutes.”

Rebecca Hall
Photograph by Jake Chessum for the Guardian

Who, me? Why everyone is talking about Rebecca Hall

Rebecca Hall is used to people always wanting to talk about her dad, but now the Bafta-winning actor is having to get used to another line of questioning: her role in the break-up of a Hollywood golden couple. She talks gossip, girls' schools and growing up


Simon Hattenstone
Saturday 12 June 2010 00.02 BST

Rebecca Hall is a fine actor who starred in the best Woody Allen film in years, but she's better known now for her role in a recent tabloid splash, after she was cast as the femme fatale, or deadly English rose, who could, possibly, have destroyed the marriage of Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet. After all, she had worked with Mendes, they were friends, and apparently she was his type of girl (brainy, arty, good-looking).

We meet in a Manhattan cafe. She arrives on foot, alone, long, black dress, no make-up, flat sandals, sore ankles from where high heels have been rubbing. I look for Sam Mendes hiding round a corner with his high-art posse. Nothing doing. Does she live round here? No, she says apologetically, she's not been here before. So where is home these days? "That's a good question."

Simon Hattenstone / The dark side of Carey Mulligan

Carey Mulligan: 'I used to be crippled by fear. Standing in front of a photographer was a nightmare.
Now, as of last week, I’ve done a talkshow where I wasn’t freaking out. Usually I’m weird.'
Photograph: Stevie and Mada for the Guardian

THE DARK SIDE OF CAREY MULLIGAN

by Simon Hattenstone

She likes dark, difficult characters. She doesn't like questions about her faith, her pop star husband, pet pigs, politics…

The Guardian

Saturday 28 January 2014

Something strange is going on. Carey Mulligan has requested me as her interviewer of choice. I'm not sure why, but this kind of thing doesn't happen often. If ever. One of Britain's brightest stars has insisted on unburdening herself to yours truly. We've never met. I'm baffled, but excited. Maybe she's got something she wants to get off her chest and sees me as the father confessor of celebrity journalism. I'll take that.

Mulligan, 28, doesn't give many interviews. Nor, for that matter, does she make many films. While in-demand actors churn out movies by the dozen, she is ever so picky about her parts. After being Oscar-nominated for her breakthrough film, An Education, in which she played a version of the young Lynn Barber, betrayed by an older man whose life was a lie, she took a year-long sabbatical because she couldn't find a role that satisfied her. She returned to work with some of cinema's best-known directors (Baz Luhrmann, Steve McQueen and now the Coen brothers) and leading men (Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling). Then she took another 18-month break while she waited for the next challenging role.