Are any of our UK readers currently watching Russell Tovey's new new show Flesh and Blood? I think it's airing right now? It's the one where Imelda Staunton plays a widow who starts dating and her kids, including Russ here, don't take it easy. Coming off of his terrific (and terrifically upsetting) sci-fi and politically tinged series Years and Years with Queer as Folk creator Russell T. Davies -- which just hit DVD this week and which I very much recommend checking out if you missed it when it aired -- we're here for whatever he does.
Not that that's exactly a new development, given our history stretches back some time. I never watched Being Human, the show that gave him his career, so I think it was maybe the very fun horror movie Grabbers in 2012 where I finally paid attention to him? And then came Looking a few years later and forget about it. Anyway there's a new chat with him over here about all this that includes this photo-shoot, the latter of which I'll share after the jump...
I haven't had the opportunity to see Christian Cooke in anything in too long a time (and yes that means I still haven't watched the western series That Dirty Black Bag that he co-starred in with my boy Dominic Cooper a couple of years ago, shame on me) but that will clearly change soon, as he's just co-starred in the gay policeman drama Plainclothes opposite Russell Tovey and Tom Blythe. I told you about this previously (of course I did) a few weeks back -- the entire movie has shot already, which I know because it shot in Syracuse near where I grew up and so I kept tabs on that in case its shoot overlapped with my trip upstate for the eclipse (it did not). Anyway the photo above (via, click to embiggen, thx Mac) is an excellent reminder that Christian Cooke should always, always be in front of me (or behind me, I am not picky) and I am real glad we'll be rendezvousing again shortly. Bring it on, Plainclothes! And in related news:
Obsessed with Russell Tovey trying to tag Luca Guadagnino in Insta stories showing off his bulge pants at the Challengers premiere pic.twitter.com/FA0I8SJpwQ
According to his Instagram ol' Russell's been hanging out in NYC this week, including the "3am pee break" he captured for all of our benefits above -- thanks for the sight-seeing, Russ! That's the New York I know and love. Anyway this reminds me I need to catch back up with his new show Years and Years, which I haven't watched since I shared the sexy bits from the first episode a couple of weeks ago. I am guessing there are more sexy bits! Gotta get on that. Now... how do I identify that bathroom? Bring me my spy-glasses and Sherlock cap, stat! ETA Russell just added this "Before" picture for everybody's dirty-minded benefit:
I guess I totally forgot to write anything about this news -- Queer as Folk creator (the good QAF in the UK, not that American crud) Russell T. Davies has a new series for the BBC called Years and Years and it stars Russell Tovey (and Emma Thompson and Rory Kinnear, among others) and it premiered on Tuesday night. You know, over there. Don't know when it's hitting the US (ETA it's apparently an HBO show here in the US, and will premiere on June 24th!) but I watched it all the same and I am good and hooked one episode in. I hadn't watched any of the trailers beforehand so I had no idea where it was going at all, a feeling the show revels in -- I recommend going that route yourself. It surprised me. Anyway Tovey's playing gay again (thank god), which you'll seef below -- he gave an interview this week (thx Mac) where he talked about the "graphic sex scenes" and said:
“This is the world we're living in so we should be able to see this and your children should be able to... Everything has to be shown because, otherwise, if you don't show diversity, if you don't show gay sex, if you don't show men in love, or women in love, or whatever, then how the hell do you normalise it?”
Hear hear, Russ. And in the spirit of his wise words let's normalize it some more right here after the jump with more gifs (although there are spoilers so keep that in mind)...
I keep on saying I'm gonna do a "Gratuitous Dino Fetscher" here on the site and I keep... not. So we'll stick our little toe in the water this morning with this photo above that the actor -- ahem excuse me, the openly gay actor -- just shared on his Insta. And oh look and this was the top photo in his boyfriend's feed:
Well I assume that's his "boyfriend" given their interactions but it's not my job to be labeling other people's lives, I suppose. His very handsome friend who takes pictures of him sleeping probably naked and uses the phrase "find yourself someone" when talking about him on their social media then. That's just a bit long to type is all.
Anyway Dino was on the terrific Years and Years last year (that show with Russell Tovey I talked a bit about) and he was on Humans (which I never saw) and a little further back he was on Queer as Folk creator Russell T. Davies 2015-ish series' Cucumber and Banana, which I will just admit I somehow still haven't seen, much to my own shame and degradation. (Fight off the impulse to make a comment about how Dino can degrade you any time, Jason, fight itttttttt.....)
I know the reason why not is "he is openly gay" but
Dino Fetscher really should be a bigger thing, can we make him a bigger thing pic.twitter.com/OIrOVpuc6R
--- Hero Worship - Now that he's Batman (try hearing that phrase in your head in anything but Christian Bale's rasp, I dare you) Robert Pattinson is abandoning the art-house movies that made us respect him, the sellout - he's dropped out of Joanna Hogg's sequel to The Souvenir, which is apparently a thing that's happening? (I'm just teasing Rob, by the way, save your hate mail.) On the Souvenir tip though I saw the film last week and thought it was fine but I don't really entirely get the rapturous responses it got earlier this year. It's certainly aware of its privilege (the main character expresses some guilt) but that didn't make the privilege of its world feel any less exhausting to maneuver as a viewer.
.
--- My Commitment - This interview is a real long one so you'll have to set aside some time for it but if you haven't yet read Collider's long chat with our beloved character actress and saint Beth Grant then I recommend you do - give or take a couple of big star names its interesting folks from below the title like this who have quirks and are individuals that I'd much rather read pieces like this devoted to. Beth has stories and has lived and is a hoot.
.
--- Jude Island - Jude Law is heading back to TV again, this time with nary a Popemobile in sight, to make The Third Way for HBO (alongside ITV in the UK) -- it's a six-part miniseries (produced by the guy who made the original Utopia) that sounds kind of like The Island of Dr. Moreau or maybe The Wicker Man, something like that, with an island and a bunch of isolated weirdos and hallucinations. Basically me on vacation. Speaking of vacations Jude was recently on his honeymoon (congrats!) in Sardinia and JJ got a bunch of pictures of him looking mighty fine a la that shot to the right, see them here. (Thx Mac)
.
--- More Scary - When we listed our most anticipated movies of the remainder of 2019 one of the runners-up was the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark film that Trollhunter director André Øvredal has coming out in August -- well Rue Morgue sat down with Andre to chat about his next much anticipated by me flick, which is an adaptation of Stephen King's short story The Long Walk, read that chat here. TLW is kind of a teenaged They Shoot Horses Don't They, or maybe Forrest Gump meets Battle Royale. Okay I'm just saying movie titles now. You get the idea.
.
--- Ears and Ears - I am a couple of episodes behind on Years and Years but Russell Tovey's already gone and signed on for another television miniseries in his homeland -- this one's called Flesh and Blood and it's another tale of a large sprawling family in which he's a sibling, this time about a trio whose old-age mum (played by Imelda Staunton) gets romanced by a dude (Stephen Rea) they don't trust.
.
--- Gesserit Who - Denis Villeneuve is currently shooting his Dune movie with Timothee Chalamet & Co -- see some pictures we shared a couple of weeks back right here if you missed 'em -- and that's probably going to be going on for awhile, and now an even longer while because he's also making a Dune TV series now too. It'll be about the Bene Gesserit, the female religious order of Frank Herbert's stories who predict all sorts of spicy shenanigans with their witchery. In the movie Rebecca Ferguson is playing Lady Jessica who's a part of the order, so perhaps she'll be a part of the television show too; Villenueve is only set to direct the pilot.
.
--- Man o' Paradise - Josh Hartnett, so very good on Penny Dreadful, is returning to TV for a series calledParadise Lost, which apparently has nothing whatsoever to do with the Milton book -- it's about a married couple (Hartnett alongside Bridget Regan from Jane the Virgin) who return to the husband's Mississippi hometown only to "uncover shameful secrets that irrevocably change the lives of everyone involved." That is vague enough a description that I have absolutely no idea what this show might be, except they also call it a "Southern Gothic mystery" which helps a little. Barbara Hershey and Nick Nolte are also set to co-star.
.
--- Cue the Keymaster - It's become completely impossible to keep straight what's happening with the Ghostbusters franchise - I think where we stand is Jason Reitman is making a direct sequel to his father's films with all the original 'Busters in tow? Anyway Sigourney Weaver has let slip that she's returning for the movie as good ol' dog-lady Dana Barrett once more, so whatever it is I am there.
Playing catch-up with some terrific news that dropped earlier this week -- the line-up for NewFest's summertime series "NewFest Pride" dropped and the mini-fest (which runs here in NYC from May 29th to June 2nd) will get include my favorite film I saw at Sundance earlier this year, the gay drama Plainclothes starring Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey! Here is my review of that movie -- granted as I say there this movie was kinda sculpted in my image given it is about being gay in Syracuse in the 1990s and I was all of those things once upon a time. How could I resist? I love it when things are about me, after all! But the entire weekend is stacked with gay goodies -- I missed the Olivia Colman and John Lithgow drama Jimpa when it screened at Sundance and that's the series' opening night film... I do wonder if Lithgow will attend and if he will have to answer for his shitty comments about the whole Harry Potter debacle? He might wanna steer clear of a room full of queers right now. Anyway if you're going to be in town I always recommend going to NewFest events, they're always a great time with an enthusiastic audience and they've got an excellent batch of programmers working for them. And if you wanna see the entire line-up and buy tickets hit that link, or if you just want to see the entire line-up and press release on their own hit the jump for them...
Don't you heart queers? And some of our most favorite queers are getting together to make a series of short 15-minute monologue films for the BBC called, you guessed it, Queers, to mark the 50th anniversary of the "Sexual Offenses Act of 1967," which "partially decriminalized sex between men," as Variety puts it. For more specifics on the law click here. But to think dirty thoughts about the actors they've lined up for this thing, stay put! MNPP faves pictured above Russell Tovey and Ben Whishaw will both participate...
... that's a picture of Ben in his segment, which is called "The Man on the Platform" and will be about a soldier returning from WWI. The series will, and I quote, "explore some of the most poignant, funny, tragic
and riotous moments of British gay history and the personal rites of
passage of British gay men through the last 100 years." Mkay. Among others the series will also star Alan Cumming and Kadiff Kirwan and Fionn Whitehead; Whitehead can also be seen in Christopher Nolan's upcoming film Dunkirk...
I will admit that this is a dark way to follow my earlier post saying that we should look for light in dark days, but this one demands our attention -- on the same morning that there's a really fucking upsetting article in the NYT about how our not-esteemed President's healthcare cuts are mucking up the imminent cure for HIV I stumbled upon this video of Russell Tovey doing a reading of a famous letter by John Waters' star and downtown goddess Cookie Mueller. In it she talks about the devastation of AIDS, which would later claim her life as well. If you need a more succinct rundown on the background of Cookie than the many I've given over the years, read this wonderful piece. I think this is really the only note we can end Pride on in 2025. Be furious. We need to be furious. We need to summon the rage of those we lost, and those we will lose. They're coming for every one of us and throwing trans people under the bus isn't going to stop them from shipping a white homosexual like me to a gulag. We're in this together y'all. Make art, make violence, just scream. Scream in the motherfuckers face. Make them uncomfortable. Fucking fight y'all. Things are not okay. So dark days, yes, but we can be the light. Bright violent light if need be -- the sort of light that snuffs out the darkness in a explosion of itself.
--- QueersQueued - I mentioned this here once before and then I mentioned watching it on Twitter but now you'll all get the chance, and it's worth the chance -- BBC America is going to air the series of eight short monologues titled Queers
that the plain ol' BBC just got done airing in the UK. They will show
them in October. Each one is around 20 minutes and features a single
actor (including Ben Whishaw, Russell Tovey, and Dunkirk's Fionn
Whitehead, among them) giving us a little piece of gay history in the
form of some character's experience in a different time period. Like Ben
Whishaw plays a WWII era soldier who tells us about falling in love
with another soldier (and he is typically brilliant while doing so).
(thx Mac) . --- Bozo the Gay Basher - I started to re-read Stephen King's It earlier this year but I'm no good with books that are too big to lug around on the subway and It is way too fucking big to lug around so I only made it part of the way through, much to my chagrin. I've got to give it another go before the movie comes out next month, and this piece my pal Tom Blunt wrote up on one specific scene in the book is giving me some renewed vigor - head over to Signature to hear his spin on the importance and strength of the gay-bashing scene in the book. Honestly I don't even remember the scene it's been so long since I read it and that scene obviously wasn't getting anywhere near the TV movie. .
--- Just Say Milla - We were already on board with the Hellboy reboot the second that they announced Neil Marshall was doing to direct it - while he's been relegated to TV for a few years (just little things like Game of Thrones, ya know) his "D" trilogy of the Aughts - Dog Soldiers, The Descent, and Doomsday - are all super duper genre works. Then they stuffed chunky-bummed David Harbour in the lead and we signed on for that too. But now the underrated and delightful Milla Jovovich has joined the cast and we feel even smarter about our early enthusiasm than before.
. --- Libraries Are Literally Heaven - This is probably the
coolest thing that has happened to NYC cinephiles this year (and we get
some pretty spectacular stuff here, let's be real) - the public library
system has teamed up with a streaming service to offer free movie streaming to anybody with a library card. (thx Mac) I've admitted this before but for all my
supposed big-time library fetish I don't have a library card - it's a
dumb long story - but this got me over it real quick. .
--- Nic the Destroyer - Super happy to hear that Karyn Kusama is getting together her next project after The Invitation blew me away, and super happy to hear she might get Nicole Kidman to star in the thing! If it does happen (it hasn't been officially announced yet) the movie is called Destroyer and it's a "crime thriller" that Kusama says is "another chapter in investigating how we come to face ourselves as lonely people on this planet." Mkay. .
--- Ah Woo Hoo - It feels really very weird, getting old enough to have the silly cultural artifacts of your childhood become the stuff of very serious attention in somewhat serious magazines, but here we are and it's the year 2017 and Vanity Fair has written up an oral history of sorts of the theme song from DuckTales. What a world, what a world. It also feels weird to me because my DuckTales fandom happened in the most solitary period of my life when I had less than zero friends in Junior High School, and so it always surprises me that other people were watching too. If I'd had the internet back then i could've known I wasn't nerding out all alone. .
--- Everything After Adam Bomb - And as long as we're talking about my child nerd obsessions here's something even better - the documentary about the Garbage Pail Kids is finally coming out! I'm too lazy to look up the last time we posted about this but it was quite awhile back. BD says the movie will actually get a small theatrical run on August 18th (and I'm guessing that means it will play here in NYC somewhere since we are the place of small theatrical runs so I will keep my eyes peeled) and then it will hit VOD on September 30th. . --- And Finally I forgot to share this a couple of weeks ago when it dropped but today's "Siri Says" post where I listed my favorite movies of 2017 (so far) reminded me - the trailer for My Friend Dahmer was finally released, and you can see it below. The movie is out some time this fall. I reviewed it out of Tribeca, and I highly recommend it. (thx Mac) . .
I saw these gifs of Russell Tovey on Looking making the rounds on Tumblr yesterday and I realized I don't think I ever posted these shots here before? Which is insane. And so here they are, Russ in all his glory. Or you know, 85% of his glory anyway. Can you believe Looking is 10 years old already? We are all on death's door. Happy Friday!
--- Hot Priors - The restaging of Angels in America starring Andrew Garfield and Russell Tovey premiered this week and the reviews appear to be out of this world - see a few twitter reactions gathered up right here. What do we think the chances are of this getting carried over here to the US? Any? Man I want it. Anyway as you see with that picture there the boys are on the cover of the new issue of Gay Times and you can see some behind-the-scenes video from the shoot over here. (BONUS -- click over to the Tumblr for gifs I made of the fellas together.)
--- Six Degrees - Speaking of theater I can't afford, I saw an ad for the new staging of Six Degrees of Separation starring the always awesome Allison Janney on TV this morning and thought about how much I'd love to see that show if I wasn't totally broke right now (sigh) and as if to twist the dagger there's a great big fun article today in The New York Times talking about how the idea of "six degrees" took off as a forever meme thanks to the show.
--- Fifties Freaks - Free Fire is out in theaters this weekend and so director Ben Wheatley's been doing the rounds, and as pumped as I am to see Free Fire I'm even moreso about his next not-yet-filmed movie called Freakshift, which stars Alicia Vikander and Armie Hammer as cops fighting monsters - in a chat with Collider Wheatley says the movie will feel full-on like a 50s B-movie, lots of goofiness plus monsters, which I'm totally there for.
--- The Monster - I expressed my dismay at having blanked on this news on Twitter last night with a remembrance of Brenda Fraser's Hot Moment so you probably want to see that, but seriously - how could I forget that Bill Condon, director of the brilliant film Gods & Monsters, is in talks to direct the newBride of Frankenstein movie? If a new Bride of Frankenstein has to be made (and apparently it must) well, there's probably not a better choice, director-wise.
--- Superheroes Ahead - A bunch of folks got to see a bunch of Marvel stuff this week, including a super early look at the Black Panther movie, and it sounds like Marvel is really pumped about what they're getting from director Ryan Coogler and stars Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong'o and Queen Angela Bassett, of course. And also of utmost importance - it sounds like all of the films will keep sexualizing their leading men in the correct ways, too.
--- Oh Norman - As Bates Motel finishes up its run I find myself getting angrier and angrier that its two leads haven't been feted appropriately - the show's often too messy for its own good (I don't care about 85% of its subplots) but Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore have given tremendous performances for five straight years now. You do hear about Vera now and then though, so I was happy to see Freddie get some love thanks to this Gold Derby piece - he has been unjustly overlooked. His Norman Bates can stand proudly alongside Anthony Perkins.
--- Sweet Cheeks - I guess there was a teaser for the trailer for the Kingsman sequel yesterday that flashed by a full trailer in super quick succession -- if you care enough not to wait for the actual trailer to show up you can see captures of its many images over at DH. All I want for this movie, all I demand from it really, is that it end exactly like the first one did, only instead of zooming in on some random girl's butt it's Taron now giving it up for god and country.
--- And Finally I haven't watched this yet but smebody put together a video about "The Cinematic Universe of Andrea Arnold" I am so there for that idea I will watch it as soon as I get the chance. I love thinking about her movies like they're superhero movies. . .
There are actually two more Josh O'Connor photoshoots that I am ignoring at the moment in order to share this one for the Wall Street Journal first -- so it goes when our big eared boy has a new movie coming out! The photographers and stylists (and Russell Tovey) all love Josh right now. (PS that WSJ article is paywalled so I haven't read it and I scrounged up what photos I could from other sources but this might not be everything.) And so do we, although I am very much feeling the "hey we were there years ago" vibe. But after seeing Challengers a second time this past Monday night it's clear there's no fighting it -- this is a star-making role for Josh and to my eye he walks away (struts away, really) with the whole movie. But more on Challengers later this week when I finally drop my review! For now enjoy the photos (this first batch), after the jump...
"I too quit smoking (2013) AND find this type of pictures cool. Also, PSA: if you're feeling like you want to start smoking again, just remind yourself "I do not want my body and house to stink like stale horseshit", then go drink one more glass of water to entertain your hands and lips. Congrats, btw."
Posts
