A Royal Air Force navigator steers us into the Top Gun sequel’s aviation mistakes

By John Nichol

I know that all of my pilot chums reading this over their toast and marmalade are already spluttering, why have they asked a former RAF Tornado navigator, a mere back-seat driver, to write about Top Gun? I guess it’s because we navigators clearly have better communication skills than the “stick-monkeys” I used to sit behind in a jet fighter and order around the skies.

Moreover, I’ve been lucky enough to have a blast — just once — around California in the star of the new film, the F/A-18 Hornet, flown by an actual US Navy pilot. Perhaps most importantly, READ ON

Top Gun: Maverick’s sole female pilot talks learning stunts from Tom Cruise

By Bridget Arsenault

Monica Barbaro was sitting in her childhood bedroom, in San Francisco, when she found out she had been cast in Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to the 1986 movie. Landing a role in the film felt so out of reach that she hadn’t even told her mother she was up for the part of Lieutenant Natasha “Phoenix” Trace.

The audition process for the film was private, too. Like the original film, which focused on daredevil pilots training at the Navy’s elite fighter weapons school (known as Top Gun), the big-budget, all-action sequel was to star Tom Cruise.“The film had a code name when it first came into my e-mail: ‘Island Plaza,’” says Barbaro. READ ON

The true story behind the HBO Max drama The Staircase takes yet another disturbing step

By Rosie Kinchen

When the French director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade set out to make a hit true-crime documentary, he had no idea that the story he chose — about the death of Kathleen Peterson in a big house in the American South and the trial of her husband, Michael, for murder — would still be fascinating people 20 years later.

His factual film, which first came out in 2004, has now been adapted into a hit drama of the same name, The Staircase, starring Toni Collette and Colin Firth. De Lestrade’s actions are the ones now under examination — and he feels betrayed. READ ON

The Bohemian Rhapsody and Politician actress plays a Cold War–era spy in her latest role

By Bridget Arsenault

Lucy Boynton, a shy and introspective 28-year-old, bears little resemblance to the characters she has played. She’s calm, unlike the frenzied drug addict she portrayed in the 2017 series Gypsy, and friendly, unlike her Gucci-clad ice queen in The Politician, Ryan Murphy’s Technicolor show about high school.

“It’s my favorite part of the job—getting to step outside of yourself and authentically step into someone else’s shoes,” says Boynton from Los Angeles. “A major influence is the first costume fitting, because that forces you to move away from all the instincts you have … and how you want to present to the world. It’s always the first access point to extracting yourself from the equation.” READ ON

The director and Putin critic Kirill Serebrennikov spent the last few years in detainment. Now he’s back at Cannes with a new film—and a lot more to say about his homeland

By Nicolas Rapold

There is no stopping Kirill Serebrennikov. This year alone, the internationally acclaimed Russian stage-and-film director will have premiered a new feature in Cannes, fundraised for another movie—this one starring Ben Whishaw as a punk poet—and directed operas in Amsterdam and Paris, not to mention a play in Hamburg. Serebrennikov’s blazing creativity persists despite a Russian government that has treated him like he has a target on his back, subjecting him to years of courtroom drama and detainment.

When the 52-year-old filmmaker arrived this week in Cannes to present Tchaikovsky’s Wife in the prestigious competition, following an interminable legal saga, he attended “as a free man” (in the courtly words of READ ON

For her first on-screen role, the Irish actress is cast in Conversations with Friends

By Bridget Arsenault

On the same day Alison Oliver was cast as Frances, the lead in Hulu’s Conversations with Friends—an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2017 debut novel of the same name—Oliver also learned that she’d been hired to flip burgers at a local vegan-burger shop.

“It was a great day,” the Irish actress says with a laugh.

The series, which premieres tomorrow, focuses on two college students in Dublin: Frances and her ex-girlfriend turned best friend, Bobbi (played by Sasha Lane). They start a complicated friendship and flirtation with an older married couple, the actor Nick (played by Joe Alwyn, boyfriend of Taylor Swift) and the author Melissa (Jemima Kirke, of READ ON

The team behind Normal People returns with Sally Rooney’s literary debut, Conversations with Friends

By James Marriott

The BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People was one of the biggest successes in the corporation’s modern history. Within a week of its release it had been streamed 21.8 million times. By the end of the year it had been streamed 62.7 million times. In the space of a few weeks the show’s male lead, Paul Mescal, who played Connell Waldron, went from being an anonymous fan of the singer Phoebe Bridgers to being her boyfriend.

At this point it doesn’t really matter whether critics like a show or not, although, for the record, they did and used the sorts of phrases directors mutter to themselves in their daydreams: “a triumph in every way”; “gorgeous and melancholy”. READ ON

With the arrival of the English version of Call My Agent!, a real one shares tales of what life is really like behind the screams

By Anonymous

I was in a staff meeting around the time Call My Agent! was becoming a hit when a colleague confessed they couldn’t bear to watch. “It makes me too anxious.” No matter how many rave reviews the French drama received, it felt too much like real life. Why would we subject ourselves to more of the quarrels, the toadying, the exasperation, the disappointment, the bumpy camaraderie and hair-raising treachery?

“The word ‘agent’,” Peggy Ramsay, the legendary literary agent declared to that arch-thespian Simon Callow, “is the most disgusting in the English language.” Yet, we do not sit behind large desks barking at assistants in the style of READ ON

The actress reprises Camille Cottin’s role in Ten Percent, the British remake of the hit French show Call My Agent!

By Bridget Arsenault

The British actress Lydia Leonard was born in France and lived in Paris until she was five, a detail she used to emphasize in interviews—until recently.

“My French, unfortunately, is appalling,” says Leonard, “but I always thought it sounded a bit boring saying I grew up in Hampshire,” a county on the south coast of England. “I thought it made me sound more interesting that I was born in Paris.”

But now the 40-year-old actress stars in Ten Percent, the British remake of the hit French show Call My Agent, about a team of scheming and skewering talent agents READ ON