Big stars shine on small screen
Streaming TV is ushering in a high-rolling, gold rush era, with Hollywood actors signing up to a slew of big-budget shows. This month, two hotly anticipated shows will launch that encapsulate the genre’s newfound popularity. Julia Roberts stars in the Amazon series Homecoming, earning a reported £450,000 per half-hour episode, while YouTube makes its biggest foray into UK programming with the sci-fi series Origin — directed by the Resident Evil and Event Horizon director, Paul WS Anderson, and featuring Natalia Tena and Tom Felton, who both starred in the Harry Potter film series.
Roberts is not the first film A-lister drawn to the small screen of the streamers; Drew Barrymore and Winona Ryder have appeared in hit shows such as the Netflix zombie comedy Santa Clarita Diet and the supernatural series Stranger Things, while Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston are due to star in a new Apple drama based on a CNN journalist’s book called Top of the Morning.
Nicole Kidman also starred with Witherspoon in HBO and Sky Atlantic’s Big Little Lies, and other well-known actors are following in their footsteps as bigger budgets and a broader choice of channels has opened up what the agent Sophie Laurimore calls a “gold rush” for talent.
Netflix is forecast to spend about $12bn (£9.2bn) globally on its shows this year, while Amazon is due to spend $5bn, HBO $2bn and Apple more than £1bn, so it is no surprise to see filmstars rushing to the new entertainment suppliers.
Dramatic defamation trial unfolds
Some time during his bruising cross-examination of Eryn Jean Norvill, Geoffrey Rush’s barrister paused to ask the actor what she thought of the character Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear.
Norvill played Cordelia alongside the Oscar winner in the Sydney Theatre Company’s troubled 2015 production. The play, and Norvill’s role in it, is at the centre of a high-profile defamation trial that could have profound implications both for the reporting of alleged sexual misconduct in Australia in the age of #MeToo, and the limits of the movement in the face of the justice system.
“I was in two minds about it, if I’m honest with you,” she told the court this week as she described her stage role. “I mean, her journey is to be the moral turning point … her sacrifice, her death, means that the man has an awakening [but] she doesn’t get a lot to say or a lot to do.”
Like the character she played, Norvill has, until this week, been marked by her lack of power.
Rush is suing the Sydney tabloid newspaper the Daily Telegraph — which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and not linked to the British broadsheet — over a series of articles published at the end of November and beginning of December 2017 alleging he behaved inappropriately during the production.
One front-page story was headlined “King Leer”, and featured a portrait of Rush in character from the play’s promotional material.
Celebs seek justice for Khashoggi
Meryl Streep, JK Rowling, and Zadie Smith have all added their names to an open letter calling on the United Nations to investigate the death of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. More than 100 artists, writers and activists have shown support on the international day to end impunity for crimes against journalists, a month after the Washington Post journalist was killed at the Saudi consulate in Turkey. “The violent murder of a prominent journalist and commentator on foreign soil is a grave violation of human rights and a disturbing escalation of the crackdown on dissent in Saudi Arabia, whose Government in recent years has jailed numerous writers, journalists, human rights advocates and lawyers in a sweeping assault on free expression and association,” the letter reads. It’s addressed to António Guterres, the UN secretary general, and calls on him to initiate an independent investigation into what really happened to Khashoggi. Since his disappearance, Turkish officials have said they have evidence that he was dismembered and his body was dissolved.
