If that’s what annoys you the most while out, jog on
WHEN SHE’S NOT RIDING VINTAGE MOTORBIKES, ROSAMUND PIKE IS STUDYING MANDARIN, CZECH AND CELLO. THE TITLE OF HER NEW FILM I CARE A LOT COULDN’T BE MORE APT, SAYS LARUSHKA IVAN-ZADEH
Is there anything more annoying than pavement joggers, asks Olga? (MetroTalk, Mon). Yes, there are many things more annoying – pavement cyclists, pavement scooters, pavement dog poo, pavement smokers and pavement pedestrians walking more than two abreast! Loraine, Southwark
Oh dear, Olga, forgive us runners and joggers for emitting a ‘trail of germs’ as we pass you on the street instead of keeping it to the park, as you suggest. Some of us actually do run in parks and green spaces but will almost certainly have to traverse some pavements before we get there. Try not to be so arrogant and selfish.
Mike Morfey, Streatham
How does Olga think we get to the park? We run, not jog, there. We run around the park and then run home as most parks are far too small to get a decent run, unless you do countless circuits.
However, while running in a park, I was attacked by a dog and when I complained the owner commented that it was my fault for running in a park when I should be using the pavement.
But pavements aren’t safe for runners either because of all the cyclists riding on them. And it’s really unpleasant running past smokers and getting a lungful of their second-hand nicotine. And then there’s the car fumes too.
FLOGGING’S too good for this thief – who’d probably enjoy it.
The raider was caught on CCTV stealing £600 of sex toys including a spanking paddle, nipple clamps and a vegan bondage bed restraint.
He also made off with vibrators and an inflatable doll from Taboo in Brighton, which featured in Channel 4 documentary A Very British Sex Shop.
The packaged items had been left in a pick-up zone at the store, which is running a contact-free click-and-collect service during lockdown. Staff were upstairs when the thief came in carrying a camouflaged rucksack.
Taboo owner Tim Richardson, who runs the shop with his family, said: ‘This man has made off with hours of
Taboo in Brighton has been running a click-andcollect lockdown service SWNS
pleasure so we are looking for a man with a big smile on his face.’
However, the only punishment the thief may receive is from his haul. Mr Richardson is not pressing charges as the police ‘have their hands full’.
WHEN Rosamund Pike received a Golden Globe nomination (her third) earlier this month her response was nothing – radio silence. Had she grown blasé now the ‘list of awards and nominations received by Rosamund Pike’ is so long it has its very own Wikipedia page?
‘I was locked in a sound-proof booth!’ Pike protests warmly. Deep in a recording session, it wasn’t until the lunch break that she switched her phone on ‘and it sort of blew up’. ‘News outlets couldn’t believe I hadn’t responded to the nomination for six hours,’ she adds. ‘They thought I was playing it very cool – glacial.’
It’s a mistake often made about the Oxfordeducated actress who first broke through as Miranda Frost, the Bond Girl of Die Another Day.
And she’s certainly working the ice-cold chic today in an elaborately folded white Markoo dress that Pike thinks looks like ‘snow drifts’ and I think makes her look like a very fashionable ball of paper.
‘It’s an inappropriate dress for Zoom because it’s PVC, which is an absolute no-no for audio. Look!’ She stands up and wiggles, making the PVC crunch and squeak. ‘But it’s a dress I got before lockdown that I never got the chance to wear and I thought, “What the hell?”’
Going all guns for what she really wants has characterised Pike’s work ever since an Academy Award nomination in 2014. As Amy in Gone Girl she deployed that unreadable, doll-like beauty to her advantage. And that Oscar recognition meant that as she neared 40 – once the Hollywood death knell for actresses – she had done her best and bravest work, racking up the accolades playing driven, unapologetically unlikeable heroines such as war correspondent Marie Colvin in A Private War and Marie Curie in Radioactive. Her latest, awardattracting ‘M’ is Marla Grayson, the psychopathic lesbian anti-hero of I Care A Lot, who scams senile old folk for oodles of cash.
‘Marla is one of those characters that I love to play who can sort of co-opt the traditional notions of femininity: trustworthiness, nurturing, kindness, concern,’ she says. ‘She does a very good impression of all of those things – none of which she has.’
I Care A Lot is a deliciously dark comedy that the Emmy-winning State Of The Union star relished.
‘It’s a relief not to have to feel anything right now and Marla is not asking you to care about her,’ she says. ‘She doesn’t break down halfway through the film to give you her sob story and ask for your sympathy. She asks you to take her as she takes life, which is that she depersonalises everybody. She has no empathy. She’s an observer.’
That couldn’t be further from Pike, one of the most fully engaged, curious people on the planet. A Londoner at heart, she’s currently uprooted her family on a ‘very exciting adventure’ to live in Prague, where she’s shooting The Wheel Of Time. As if playing lead in an Amazon Studios series about a powerful, all-woman organisation of channellers wasn’t enough, the 42-year-old mum imported a Russian World War II motorbike to take her kids (Solo, aged eight, and Atom, aged six) to school, is
teaching herself Mandarin (her children are bilingual) and Czech, and is even relearning the cello. All this while going into pre-production on a Chinese sci-fi trilogy for Netflix called Three-Body Problem that she and her Mandarin-speaking mathematician husband, Robie Uniacke, are producing with their own company, Primitive Streak.
It’s no wonder awards are not high on her agenda. She certainly isn’t missing the lack of a red carpet this year.
‘It is an unbelievable amount of time saved,’ she grins – though you can’t believe it takes much work to get her red carpet ready. If I was wearing that white PVC dress, I’d sound like a hippo rolling around in a bathful of crisps. Pike’s never utters a single squeak.
I Care A Lot is available on Amazon Prime Video
RYAN PHILLIPPE in a steamy love triangle, shirtless scene obligatory, involving his exwife and his ex-wife’s best mate. So far, so the stuff of matinee idoldom, where Philippe, still smokin’ hot at 46, cut his teeth.
But Big Sky, the show which teases that opening scenario, is playing to a different beat. The story of a trio of detectives on the hunt for a suspected serial killer who has been abducting teenage girls in the wilds of Montana is from David E Kelly, the TV maestro who kept the twists coming in The Undoing. He’s a man who knows how to bend the rules.
It was that twist factor that tempted Phillippe to play maverick sleuther Cody, a heartbreaker who finds himself on the receiving end of one of Big Sky’s biggest shocks early on. But Phillippe, who shot to heart-throb fame in the late 1990s in Cruel Intentions and I Know What You Did Last Summer, is all about confounding expectations now.
‘You can’t play the young hot guy forever,’ he jokes when talking about his role in Big Sky on the phone from LA, having explained that he took a bit of flak when it became clear Cody was not his stockin-trade. ‘I would say my fans were a little mad, yes. And I had to give my mum the heads-up. But it takes a lot to shock people these days – and why wouldn’t you want to be in a show that does that?
‘So much of what we watch today is predictable and we feel like we’ve seen it all. I think the first episode of Big Sky sets the precedent for the type of show it ultimately sets out to be.’
The kind of show Big Sky aims at is certainly a departure for David E
Kelley, a name most associated with metropolitan courtrooms and upscale city slickers. Big Sky, which launches the Star platform on Disney+, making a home for a more adult brand of content, borrows shades of Fargo, Twin Peaks and even American Horror Story as it prowls the backroads of an America that feels almost beyond the law.
‘As much as it’s a thriller and a mystery, there are moments of quirkiness and dark humour,’ notes Philippe. ‘It’s full of characters who are a bit off and who you can’t quite read, and what’s interesting about that is to see Kelley work within that territory.
‘I’d always wanted to work with him and I really dig that he’s anchored this show to two really well-developed, multi-dimensional female characters. Katheryn [Winnick] and Kylie
Positive roles: Kylie Bunbury and Katheryn Winnick in Big Sky Bunbury really carry this thing, and I like supporting that, I like supporting a show that is so pro-woman.’
What Philippe wasn’t quite so smitten by were the constraints placed on filming Big Sky by the pandemic. It’s one of the first shows to reference the crisis in real time – and behind the scenes, the filming experience was very different.
‘The social element to making a show was gone,’ he says sadly. ‘Everyone was in designated zones that couldn’t inter-mix so it was a very solitary experience. You ended up looking extra forward to being on set because that was the only time you got to spend with other people.’
He doesn’t want to be too downbeat, though.
‘Listen, we had seven or eight months’ lay-off where nobody could do anything,’ he says. ‘So you were willing to do whatever it took to make sure that we could get back to work.’
‘It takes a lot to shock people these days – and why wouldn’t you want to be in a show like that?’
Big Sky is on Star via Disney+ now