Set in Jerusalem in the year 33 A.D., “The Book of Clarence,” now playing in theatres, is unlike any other biblical epic.
Funnier than “Ben Hur” and more faith-based than “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” it has to be the first biblical story to feature chariot races, a disco dance number and language that might make your pastor blush.
“Atlanta” star LaKeith Stanfield is Clarence, the “village mischief-maker” (and resident drug dealer) who admits, “I am not a man without faults.” And how.
His twin brother Thomas (also played by Stanfield) is an Apostle, but Clarence is too busy trying to hustle a buck to buy into any kind of organized religion.
But when he loses a chariot race to Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor) and ends up deep in debt to merciless gang leader Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi Abrefa), he takes note of the attention Jesus Christ (Babs Olusanmokun) is getting and hatches a plan to present himself as a new Messiah sent by God.
“I can just replicate what he does,” he says. “Imagine the money people will give us.”
John the Baptist (David Oyelowo) calls him a “blasphemous swine,” but his pals Elijah (R.J. Cyler), Zeke (Caleb McLaughlin) and Barabbas (Omar Sy) are all in. Thomas, however, has doubts. “You know what it takes [to be spiritual],” he says, “but you do not possess what it takes.”
“Clarence,” says Elijah, “you need miracles.”
“I have a plan,” says Clarence.
Just as Clarence gains traction as a new Messiah, however, Pontius Pilate (James McAvoy) and the Romans crack down, announcing, “Clarence, you are guilty of the crime of fraud for your ill-gotten gains.”
Subversive, yet somehow solemn, “The Book of Clarence” is a brash alternate gospel buoyed by Stanfield‘s charismatic performance. For much of its running time writer/director Jeymes Samuel presents an irreverent biblical reimagination, but then takes a pious, respectful u-turn in the film’s final third.
Before the traditional ending, Samuel takes us on a wild ride where Clarence and his friends float through the air, high on “lingonweed,” while the soundtrack plays like a best of old Hollywood with a contemporary bent to catch the ear. It’s bold, with traditional epic style photography and setting (it was filmed in the ancient city of Materna, Italy) mixed with Samuel’s often restless camera. It’s brash, exciting filmmaking that gives the biblical epic genre a facelift.
As Clarence, Stanfield leads the cast, and it is his shift from shiftless charlatan to conscientious do-gooder, that lies at the heart of the story. Clarence doesn’t suddenly become religious, he simply accesses the good part of his humanity, by thinking of others before himself. It’s this performance that smooths the film’s abrupt shift in tone, from sweeping epic to a personal story of suffering and redemption.
Clarence’s mother, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, tells him, “Be the body, not the shadow. Hold space,” and it’s clear Stanfield took the advice to heart. The final third is more traditional, less bold than the first two, but Stanfield’s magnetism keeps it on track.
He’s aided by an eager supporting cast, including McAvoy, who is equal parts imperious and manipulative as Pontius Pilate, Sy as the immortal and loyal Barabbas and Oyelowo as a quick-tempered John the Baptist.
“The Book of Clarence” is so layered, so original its reimagination of the gospel and pointed look at racism, that the odd misstep, like a third act miracle that seems like a plot contrivance rather than an organic story element, is easily forgiven.
On paper “Chaos Walking,” a new dystopian movie starring Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland and now on PVOD, seems like a can’t fail for sci fi fans. In execution, however, the story of a world where men’s thoughts are manifested for all to see, is a letdown.
Based on “The Knife of Never Letting Go,” the first book of the Patrick Ness “Chaos Walking” trilogy, the story takes place in the year 2557 in a place called Prentisstown on the planet New World. Colonized by refugees from Earth, New World’s original inhabitants, the Spackle, fought back, slaughtering many of the male settlers and all the women. The surviving men contracted something called “The Noise.”
“It happened when we landed on the planet,” says Mayor Prentiss (Mads Mikkelsen). “Every thought in our heads is on display.”
Prentisstown residents, like Todd Hewitt (Holland), walk around with their thoughts exposed like wisps of multicolored cigarette smoke swirling around their heads.
When her spaceship crash lands on New World it leaves earth woman Viola (Ridley) stranded in this strange world. Todd, who has never seen a woman before, helps her navigate the dangers of her new home, as they both discover the deeply held secrets of New World.
“Chaos Walking” has ideas that feel ripe for satire, social commentary and drama but squanders them in favor of crafting a tepid young adult friendly dystopian story. Todd’s “Noise” reveals the kind of thoughts a teenager may have when first laying eyes on a girl, although in a g-rated fashion. His inner voice mumbles “Pretty” in Viola’s presence, but that’s about as deep into his psyche we get. It’s a shame because the “Noise” device could have been used to provide some much-needed humour into this earnest story. Or to more effectively drive the plot or the tension between the two characters. Instead, it is inert, a ploy to add some interest to a generic dystopian tale.
“Chaos Walking” was shot in 2017, deemed unreleasable, and has been fiddled with ever since. It hits PVOD as a film of unrealized potential, a minor footnote on the IMDB pages of its stars.
Although “The Midnight Sky,” a new apocalyptic thriller from George Clooney and now streaming on Netflix, was written and filmed before the pandemic, timely themes of isolation and the importance of human connection resonate loudly throughout.
Set in the near future, Clooney, who directed, produced and resembles q post “Late Show” David Letterman here, stars as Augustine, an astronomer battling cancer and loneliness at the Barbeau Observatory, a remote Arctic research station. Some sort of global nuclear catastrophe has devastated life on earth, leaving him isolated and alone until Iris, a wide-eyed, silent girl (Caoilinn Springall) mysteriously turns up at the station.
While tending to his new charge, Augustine is duty bound to contact and warn the Aether, a NASA space station returning home after a two-year mission exploring a newly discovered moon of Jupiter.
Led by husband-and-wife Adewole and Sully (David Oyelowo and Felicity Jones), the crew (Kyle Chandler, Demian Bichir, Tiffany Boone), hurtle toward the barren planet, unaware that life as they knew it on earth has ceased.
“Are you receiving this?” Augustine, says, fruitlessly trying to communicate with the Aether. “Is anyone out there?” To reach them Augustine and Iris take on a dangerous mission, a trek through kilometres of deadly ice, snow and 80-kilometre-per-hour winds. “There is antenna that’s stronger than ours,” he says. “If we can get to that antenna, they’ll hear us.”
“The Midnight Sky” is a multi-hyphenate, a dystopian-sci-fi-outer-space-thriller. While that’s accurate, that’s also six too many words to correctly describe what Clooney has created. All those elements exist in the film but the unwieldy list leaves out the film’s humanity. Sure, there’s some wild blue yonder action with people floating through space capsules and a barren planet, but this is a story of regret and redemption, handled with subtlety and grace.
The story has two distinct halves. Clooney says “half of it is “Gravity” and the other half of it is “The Revenant,” and sometimes they feel too distinct; disconnected. Augustine’s journey to redemption as he nears death is heavy-hearted and austere. The crew’s situation is different. Although they are cut loose in space, they represent the future of humankind, in whatever form that may take. The two halves sit side-by-side but don’t always fit together like puzzle pieces.
The thing that binds the story threads is a search for salvation. Augustine and Iris and Sully, who is expecting a child, are among the last of human life, and face an uncertain future. Each is doing what they can to determine whether mankind has a chance or not. And while the film offers hope and a chance of recovery, both personally for the characters and for the world as a whole, it does so without pandering to easy plot points.
Based on the 2016 Lily Brooks-Dalton novel “Good Morning, Midnight” with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith (screenwriter of “The Revenant”), “The Midnight Sky” is deliberately paced, humanistic sci fi that values ideas over action. It has epic scenes—particularly the snow storm trek—but feels more like an intimate drama than high action film. Clooney uses silence to speak loudly about the film’s most timely and important theme, the need for connection. It’s the lesson of the film and, these days, in real life.
“Come Away,” a new fantasy film for kids starring Angelina Jolie and David Oyelowo and now available as a Download to Own, weaves familiar themes and characters into its uneven story of loss and love.
Jolie and Oyelowo are Rose and Jack Littleton, a married couple with three children, David, Peter and Alice (Reece Yates, Jordan A. Nash and Keira Chansa). When we first meet them, it’s a contented family, with a carefree mother, a model ship building father and happy-go-lucky siblings.
Cracks begin to appear when prissy Aunt Eleanor (Anna Chancellor) swoops in, teaches Alice “how to be a lady” and sends David off to a private school.
Soon after tragedy strikes, leaving David dead, and the family in tatters. Peter and Alice, who we soon come to understand are actually Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland try to fix things by selling a family treasure but instead are swept into a dangerous adventure that features a menagerie of fabled characters come to life, the Hatter (Clarke Peters), the Red Queen and the White Rabbit.
Themes of alcoholism, gambling addiction and death make “Come Away” a movie unmoored from any sort of pigeonhole. It’s not exactly a children’s film, although it contains many elements of kid’s entertainment but it doesn’t quite seem geared for grown-ups either.
On the upside, there’s nothing formulaic about the storytelling. Ideas that reflect real life issues are bashed into one another, held together with ribbons and bows. Even when the film takes an imaginative twist it is generally grounded in some earthly and very grown up concerns. Tonally, it’s an uneasy match that gives the film a wonky tone.
“Come Away” is a very handsomely appointed movie, with beautiful imagery and fanciful set decoration. There are interesting performances, particularly from Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the adult Alice, but the remix of two classic tales, “Peter Pan” and “Alice in Wonderland,” never achieves lift off as a flight of fantasy.
We can all agree that serial killers, teenage suicide, alcoholism and unemployment are not laughing matters and yet films like Serial Mom, Heathers and Withnail & I mine those topics for giggles. They’re called dark comedies and unspool jokes about taboo subjects.
Slaughterhouse Five novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who knows a thing or two about finding the cheer in gloom, says dark comedy is about “small people being pushed this way and that way, enormous armies and plagues and so forth, and still hanging on in the face of hopelessness.”
To a certain extent his definition describes the plot of this weekend’s Gringo. David Oyelowo plays Harold, a hapless man who finds himself kidnapped, then on the run from everyone from drug lords to the DEA after a quick business trip to Mexico.
“I am somewhere in Mexico with a gun to my head!” Harold screams into the phone. “What a crybaby,” scoffs his hard-as-nails boss, played by Charlize Theron.
From slapstick to verbal humour, Gringo misses no opportunity to take a dire situation and wring out the laughs. It’s trickier than it seems. “Dark comedy is very difficult,” said Pierce Brosnan, who played up the gallows humour in the hitman farce The Matador. “You have to bring the audience in and push them away at the same time.”
You might imagine that audiences drawn to grim humour are very specific, that they’re angry or perhaps have negative attitudes — but a recent study from the Medical University of Vienna suggests otherwise. They found people who laughed at dark jokes scored highest on verbal and non-verbal IQ tests, were more educated, scored lower on aggression and had better moods.
If that sounds like you, here are some films that successfully navigate the light side of the dark side:
A Serious Man, involves two very bad weeks in the life of physics professor Larry Gopnick, played by Michael Stuhlbarg. In an escalating series of events, his life is turned upside down.
Though billed as a comedy, this may be the bleakest movie the Coen Brothers have ever made. And remember these are the guys who once stuffed someone in a wood chipper on film. The story of a man who thought he did everything right, only to be jabbed in the eye by the fickle finger of fate is a tragiomedy that shows how ruthless real life can be.
Delicatessen is a high-voltage variation on Sweeney Todd, set in post-apocalyptic France where there is very little food and no meat; when people will eat almost anything — or anyone. It’s a dark and moody world worthy of any serious science-fiction movie that stylistically owes more to music videos and animator Tex Avery’s feverishly wild Bugs Bunny cartoons than to other post apocalyptic films.
At the same time it’s filled with belly laughs — especially for vegetarians.
What could be funnier than world annihilation? Coming just a couple years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Stanley Kubrick’s comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’s story of an almost nuclear holocaust works so well because it is an exaggerated look at something that could actually happen. It’s a masterwork of dark comedy featuring one of the best lines in movie history: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
Everyone loves an underdog. From Rocky defying the odds to go from zero to hero to Billy Elliot chasing after his dream of being a dancer, tales of people beating the odds have been a Hollywood staple for years. “Gringo,” a new film starring Charlize Theron and David Oyelowo, features a character with the steepest climb to success that we’ll see this year.
Oyelowo, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing Martin Luther King in “Selma,” stars as the mild-mannered Harold Soyinka, a middle manager at a start up pharmaceutical company. Personally and professionally his life is a dumpster fire. In debt and on the verge of bankruptcy, his wife Bonnie (Thandie Newton) is having an affair with his boss Richard Rusk (Joel Edgerton), who plans on selling the company and firing Harold.
As his life swirls out of control Harold accompanies Richard and business partner Elaine Markinson (Charlize Theron) on a trip to their manufacturing facility in Mexico. Here things really start to unravel when it’s revealed that Richard and Elaine made a deal with a drug cartel to sell their product off the books for a quick infusion of cash. Now, trying to go completely legit, the devious pair wants out of that deal. Trouble is, the cartel isn’t ready to end the deal and poor old Harold is in the middle. “The world is upside down,” Harold moans. “It doesn’t play to pay by the rules.”
There is loads more like a kidnapping plot, a wide-eyed American (Amanda Seyfried), double-dealings, a mercenary with a heart-of-gold (Sharlto Copley) sent to find Harold and a deadly Beatles fan, but there will be no spoilers here.
It’s stuffed-to-the-gills with intrigue, which makes for a chaotic final third, but for all the huggermuggery, the big surprise here is Oyelowo’s light touch. Best known for his dramatic turns in movies like “A Most Violent Year” and “A United Kingdom,” here he finds a pleasing balance between Harold’s desperation and exasperation, mining the character’s situation for maximum humour. Most importantly for this underdog story, you want him to succeed.
Copley’s mercenary is fun but the same can’t be said for the rest of the generic characters populating the story. Theron is one note as a trash-talking executive who doesn’t hesitate to tell a man she just fired to “stop crying and go down to unemployment.” Edgerton, whose brother Nash directed the film, is all alpha-male bluster and not much else.
Aside from showcasing Oyelowo’s comedic side “Gringo” feels old fashioned, like it has been sitting around on a shelf somewhere, hidden from view since the 1990s. It was the heyday of indie crime dramas like “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag,” a time when writers looked to Tarantino for inspiration only to fall short. “Gringo” wears those fingerprints all over it. It’s a good but derivative effort that feels more like a Netflix film than a big screen experience.
“A United Kingdom” is a sweeping story all about love—a king’s love of country, love of people, love of his wife—set against seemingly impossible political obstacles. Featuring David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike as a true-life star crossed couple whose marriage causes an international incident, the movie tells a fascinating story in the most melodramatic way possible.
London, 1948. Seretse Khama (Oyelowo) and Ruth Williams (Pike) meet at a missionary dance and sparks fly. One whirlwind romance later Seretse reveals that when his education is done he must return to Africa to assume the throne as king of Bechuanaland (now Botswana). “I’ve been thinking about my responsibilities in Bechuanaland,” he says. “I know I will never achieve anything worthwhile if I leave my heart here.” Despite the objections of her traditional English parents—Mom thinks she will change her mind, Dad hisses, “You disgust me.”—they marry, triggering a chain reaction of events in England and Africa that threatens his crown, their relationship and the future of his country.
At the dawn of apartheid in southern Africa their marriage is seen as a slap in the face to the British government and a danger to diplomatic relations with other African nations. On a family note in Africa Ruth is not accepted by Seretse’s relations. “It is audacious to come here,” she is told, “married and present yourself as our queen.”
Question is, can their bond withstand the pressures, both personal and political?
“A United Kingdom” has its heart in the right place. It is an unadulterated romance between a man and a woman who must fight to have their love survive. They say things like, “He scares me a bit… the way he makes me feel,” and stare at each other with moon eyes.
It is also a love story of a man and his country, a king with a deep belief in equality and change. “Independence, democracy, a new Africa. It is time,” he says.
Fine, love is complicated, especially when international politics gets in the way but director Amma Asante paints the romance and the politics with the same melodramatic brush. A heightened love story is one thing, but when it comes to the inner workings of international affairs a little restraint might have made the story of ingrained systemic racism more powerful. Instead we are handed evil bureaucrats, secret dossiers and an almost slapstick villain in the form of the British government representative of Southern Africa, Sir Alastair Canning (Jack Davenport). The only things missing from the performance are the gleeful rubbing of hands and a moustache to twirl.
The couple’s dilemma is real and heartbreaking but the theatrical treatment of their plight feels more crowd pleasing than introspective or deeply felt.
“A United Kingdom” is a beautiful looking movie, with solid if histrionic performances that has trouble balancing the romantic and partisan aspects of this touching real life tale.
As the calendar turns the page to 2017 let’s have a look back at the great people I met, wrote about or chatted with in 2016. Warren Beatty gave me his home telephone number, I drank cranberry juice with Denzel Washington, had Elvis’s girlfriend and JFK’s mistress on my radio show and fulfilled childhood dreams by hanging out with Iggy Pop and Cheap Trick. On stages, studios, in hotel rooms, on phones and even in the back of taxis, they spoke and I listened. Here’s some of the best stuff I heard this year:
Casey Affleck on throwing himself into the role of a depressed man in Manchester by the Sea: “It’s what you have to do. You have to go there, show up on set and be prepared to play the scene with the right feelings, the way it is supposed to be. I’m just not good enough to show up in a great mood, say good morning to everybody, check in with the kids and read the paper and then walk into the scene and be believably gutted in the way he is supposed to be. He carries around all this guilt, he’s devastated and filled with self loathing so I have to start way back in preproduction and try to slip into these bad feelings and stay there for as long as I can. If you just showed up and tried to walk through it or do anything but give 100 percent you’d really look like a jackass.”
Warren Beatty talking about casting Lily Collins in Rules Don’t Apply: “I believe very much in what I call ‘the blink,’” says Beatty. “That is the superiority of the unconscious knowledge as compared to conscious knowledge. The knowledge that when we sit and we really give it some thought, the thought we feel it is due. That thought can be misleading when we could have trusted our initial instinct, the blink. I think the unconscious has a lot more intelligence in it than the conscious.
“It was a blink with Lily. I can only say I loved the way she looked. I loved the way she sounded. I loved the way she talked. There was an integrity about her I felt I could believe in this circumstance and at the same time she looked like someone to me who Hollywood would want to exploit.”
Director Uwe Boll on why he’s quitting filmmaking: “I’ve been using my money since 2005 and if I hadn’t made the stupid video game based movies I would never have amalgamated the capital so I could say, ‘Let’s make the Darfur movie.’ I don’t need a Ferrari, I don’t need a yacht. I invested in my own movies and I lost money.”
The Magnificent Seven director Antoine Fuqua on casting Denzel Washington: “I wanted to see Denzel Washington on a horse.” AND “My idea was, if Denzel walks into a room, the room stops. If Clint Eastwood walks into a room, the room stops. Is it because he’s a gunslinger or is it because of the colour of his skin? We’ll let the audience decide.”
Rebecca Hall on playing Christine Chubbuck in Christine: “I don’t think I have given [a role] like it before and I probably won’t again because it is one of those jobs that if you are incredibly lucky you get maybe three of them in a career. And that’s only if you are incredibly successful and lucky and often only if you were a man.”
Jonah Hill on how some people respond to his morally ambiguous characters: “A lot of times Wall Street bros will come up to me as if [Wolf of Wall Street] is their Goodfellas or Scarface. People see what they want to see. It is a little scary sometimes when people misinterpret.” And how he reacted after a crew of South African arms dealers approached Hill in a restaurant after seeing a trailer for War Dogs: “You don’t want to make it an overly uncomfortable environment while that is happening,” he says, “but you also don’t want to lie and be dishonest that you are agreeing with them. You don’t want to make them feel bad about their misinterpretation. It’s an unusual an awkward situation to be sure. In the end, we all want to be seen as heroes in our own story, I guess.”
Isabelle Huppert on the unique tone of her film Elle: “Sometimes you are in a Hitchcock thriller. Sometimes you are in a psychological study. Sometimes you are in a comedy and at the end of the day you are in none of those; you are in a Paul Verhoeven film.”
Riley Keough on what she learned while making American Honey: “I learned not to drink too much.”
Spike Lee on casting Jennifer Hudson as the mother of a slain child in Chi-Raq: “Do you know Jennifer Hudson’s history? It is known knowledge that Jennifer’s mother, brother and nephew were murdered in Chicago. I think that’s extra gravitas that you have with Jennifer Hudson in this film. This is not an act for her. She got hit directly by gun violence on the South Side of Chicago. I didn’t want her to think that I was exploiting her. I knew I wanted her for the part but there was some length of time before I got the courage to approach her. Also, when we did meet I was babbling. She said, ‘Spike, I know why you want me to do this film, so just stop. I’ll do it.’ I was trying to be sensitive and I turned out to just beat around the bush. I said, ‘I’ll just shut up and say thank you.’”
Stan Lee on naming his characters using alliteration —think Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Matt Murdoch and Reed Richards: “It’s because I have a bad memory. If I could remember one of the names like Spider-Man, if I could remember his first name was Peter then I knew his second name began with a P. That is really the only reason. I have a terrible memory for names and by making the first and second letter the same, if I thought of one name I had a clue as to what the other was.”
T.J. Miller, star of Office Christmas Party: “Let’s talk comedy in a time of tragedy. I have a political obstacle to my social mission statement,” he says. “The social statement was, tragedy permeates our everyday lives, people are lonely, they’re scared, they have death anxiety, they don’t know how to attribute meaning to their own existence, so through comedy we can provide an opiate or distraction that permeates our everyday lives. Through satire we can hopefully frame the world in a way that people can laugh at. Also I aim to help people, through my stand up, to release the death anxiety. I aim to help people not take themselves so seriously.”
Queen of Katwe star David Oyelowo on working with nonactors on the film: “I actually took a bunch of the kids to see Jurassic World while we were doing the film and Madina (Nalwanga), who plays Phiona, sat next to me and was clutching me the whole time, terrified by the movie. She turned to me and said, ‘Is this what we are doing?’ I asked her if she had ever seen a film before and she said no. We were halfway through shooting a film in which she is playing the lead.”
Snowden co-star Zachary Quinto on how says working on Snowden made him think differently about even simple Internet searches: “I had this experience the other night. I was shopping for a washer and dryer online. I was Googling the consumer ratings. I left that search and went to another website and immediately the pop up ads on this other website, which had nothing to do with consumer reports or shopping, were about washers and dryers. What we are willing to sacrifice in our privacy without even thinking about it for convenience sake, what we’re willing to give up in our own freedoms and interests just in sitting down at our computers is shocking. You can take precautions. You can take steps to enact two-step verifications and put tape over your laptop (camera) and strengthen your passwords but all you need to do is shop for appliances and you are exposing yourself to some kind of tracking, a collection of data.”
Arrival director Denis Villeneuve on filmmaking: “It is a privilege when you can take a camera and ask people to sit for two hours in a theatre,” says Villeneuve. “It is nice if you take that privilege to explore something out of our reality, to bring some poetry to it.”
Moon Zappa on how she grew up with a rock star dad: “I longed for structure. When I saw John Hughes films I was, ‘Wait! People sit at a dinner table? Wait! People say sorry?’ Even to this day when I see somebody with a sweater draped over their shoulders, or a loafer or an exposed ankle, I’m like, ‘That is so exotic.’ I think if I had grown up in the repression my father encountered I would also have put two rocket boosters on my back, but growing up like that was too much. It was like fastball pitches every single minute.”
Most of these interviews went well and were a pleasure to do… but not all. Below is the terrible tale of a day wasted waiting for Idris Elba’s phone call.
Can You Hear Me Now? Can You Hear Me Now? Waiting For Idris Elba.
Idris Elba is a busy man. He’s released seven movies this year and has several more on tap for 2017. He’s on track to join Dwayne Johnson, Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as one of the world’s highest earning actors after turns in the mega-grossing The Jungle Book, Finding Dory and Zootopia.
If you don’t know the name you haven’t been paying attention. Rev up Netflix and check out his work on TV shows like The Wire or Luther and movies like RocknRolla or Beasts of No Nation and become a fan. You should know he was once voted one of People magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful People in the World and more than one twitter friend of mine refers to him as a “pretend boyfriend.”
Not only busy but good looking as well! I was pleased to be granted a fifteen-minute phone interview to discuss his debut in the Star Trek franchise as Krall, a hostile alien who causes trouble for Kirk, Spock and company in Star Trek Beyond.
I don’t usually write questions but I thought I might ask him if he watched Star Trek as a child. Would he consider himself a Trekker? Did he have a favourite Star Trek character growing up? Did he wonder what Star Trek fans would think of the predatory new character? Are there parallels between the film—and his character—and our world today? Has he considered what being part of the legacy of the show means?
If there was time at the end I might even follow up on the rumours and ask if he even wants to play James Bond.
Then the first call came in. “Idris is running behind.” Cool. This happens all the time on press days. Then another call and another and another. My phone hasn’t gotten this kind of workout since a Nigerian Prince called over and over to solicit my assistance in moving his fortune to North America. Each time a publicist announced another delay with the assurance the interview would still happen. As the time wore on the actual length of my interview began to tumble downhill from fifteen minutes down to seven.
In all two hours passed from my scheduled start time until my phone rang for real.
“Hi Richard, I’ll connect you with Idris,” said the perky voice on the other end of the line.
Silence.
A minute passed before Elba’s familiar husky London accent filled my ear. Hallelujah! Better late than never. We talk over one another. “Hello… HELLO… Can you hear me?” It’s a bad cell phone connection. It sounds as if we’re talking through two tin cans connected by strings but I’ll take it.
I ask him about his childhood memories of Star Trek.
“It was a show me, my mum and my dad watched together,” he says. “They both liked it. It was a show that really took your imagination places. That’s my early memory of it. It was a really imaginative show that showed space travel in a way that was different, you know?”
It took him 23 seconds to speak the 50 words that told me his parents liked Star Trek. I mention this because as soon as he stopped talking and I started asking the next question I heard a strange beep beep sound followed by… nothing. The great void. No more husky voice. And like that, poof. He’s gone.
“Are you still there? I think we just lost him,” the eavesdropping publicist said. “Let me get him back for you. Just one second.”
I had visions of the actor walking around Fifth Avenue desperately yelling into his phone, “Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?” but in my heart I knew that wasn’t happening.
Minutes later she’s back. “I’m so sorry. We lost him. I know you only had a couple of minutes to speak with him…” actually it was twenty three seconds… “Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with him.”
My interview with Idris was over. Still born. Terminated before it even really began.
Was I mad? Not really. Frustrated? Yes. Not only had I wasted the afternoon waiting for Idris but now I didn’t have a story to file.
My friends on social media didn’t exactly see it my way. “What do you expect?” wrote one person. “He is the hottest man alive.” Another chose to look on the bright side. “That’s 45 seconds more Idris than the rest of us.” (I hadn’t yet timed the actual quote when hit facebook to vent.)
In the end it’s not a big deal. I’m choosing to look at the bright side. I didn’t get to chat with him but I do have a contender for the Guinness Book of World Records for Shortest (And Least Satisfying) Interview Ever.
