Category: Entertainment

Victor Miller, the screenwriter behind Friday the 13th, has died. He was 86.

Miller died Monday, his son, Ian, announced in a post on Instagram. No cause of death was made immediately available.

“Yesterday my father, Victor Miller, went to his final reward. He was almost always the smartest, funniest person in whatever room he was in. He inspired in me, and many others, a love of photography, music, and storytelling,” he wrote. “He had a helluva run and will be missed dearly.”

Miller’s son added that a celebration of life will be held in November, “on Friday the 13th, of course.”

He penned the script for Sean S. Cunningham’s beloved 1980 horror classic alongside Ron Kurz. The first film paved the way for a number of sequels, though Miller only served as the screenwriter for the original. He also worked with Cunningham again on 1982’s A Stranger Is Watching, and lent his talents to a myriad of television shows.

Some of the TV projects Miller wrote for include One Life to Live, Another World, Guiding Light, General Hospital and All My Children.

“Visionary screenwriter Victor Miller unequivocally etched his name in the classic horror film genre pantheon by penning the original script for the first Friday the 13th film,” Professor Rel Dowdell, director of film studies at Hampton University, said in a statement shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “The screenplay, along with the film’s taut direction and production, launched one of the most famed and enduring franchises in history for over four decades.”

Miller is survived by his wife, two sons and his grandson.

As she finishes transcribing what will become one of her husband’s most enduring masterpieces, Anna Dostoevskaya (Aimee Lou Wood) cannot contain her excitement: “This is our best novel yet!” She quickly corrects herself, of course — “I mean, your best novel” — but by then, we understand she had it right the first time.

Sure, those might be Fyodor’s words on the page, and his name on the cover. But as Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert’s shrewd, playful The Idiot(s) reminds us, not even singular geniuses really do it all alone. If the film ultimately overstays its welcome, it’s hard to fault it for wanting to let this unsung companion luxuriate, for once, in the spotlight.

As Anna, Wood projects both unpolished brightness and an impressive force of will; it’s a mesmerizing combination that keeps the character from ever feeling like a mere victim of her circumstances, even as her life takes the harsh turns of, well, a Russian novel. If anything, the character’s initial introduction calls to mind Wood’s earlier breakout role on The White Lotus. Here as there, she’s the sweetly enthusiastic romantic partner to a grumpy older dude who seems determined to hate the new country they’re visiting from the moment he sets foot on it.

It’s just that in this case, her S.O. is not some revenge-driven man of mystery but a writer drowning in debt and stymied by writer’s block. But The Idiot(s) makes clear right away that it isn’t interested in the usual serious biopic clichés about serious men doing serious things. This Fyodor, played by Johnny Flynn as a comically exasperating combination of buffoonish confidence, abject self-pity and childish petulance, is first seen glowering at a woman peeling hard-boiled eggs on the train, a fantastically overwrought classical soundtrack underlining the unreasonable intensity of his moods.

He says things like “Tolstoy’s gonna shit himself” (of the novel he, Fyodor, is definitely for sure gonna start writing any day now) and “Kick me in the face” (to Anna, as part of a kinky foot-fetish debasement ritual). It’s not that the filmmakers doubt his talent as an author — the caption to that aforementioned opener, “9 a.m., the last days of November, during the thaw,” is the first of multiple affectionate nods to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot — so much as they recognize that reverence for a person’s work need not necessarily translate to admiration for his personality.

The couple have arrived in Germany ostensibly so Fyodor can work on his next project. The creatively tortured, easily distracted Fyodor, quicky sets about doing anything but. When he’s not out partying with the very upper-crust literati he claims to disdain, including rival scribe Ivan Turgenev (Christian Friedel) and his coquettish girlfriend (Vicky Krieps, alluring but underused), he’s blowing all his money at the roulette table. When he is at home, he oscillates between drunken glee and utter despair. Whenever Anna sneaks a peek at his notebooks, she finds either blank pages or doodles of naked women, not a word of The Idiot in sight.

It would all be very depressing for poor Anna, were it not for the fact that The Idiot(s) does its best to keep the phrase “poor Anna” from entering your mind for as long as it can. For one thing, the film is too busy having fun to let itself stew in misery. It’s stuffed with mischievous anachronisms like a 19th-century performance of “Take On Me,” the A-Ha hit whose pleading lyrics could double Fyodor’s entreaty to a fed-up Anna. And it delights in outrageous rococo details, like a restaurant dessert that’s essentially chocolate mousse being squeezed out the anus of a porcelain dog.

More crucially, the screenplay, by Szumowska, Englert, Kasper Bajon and Brid Arnstein, paints Anna not as some passive observer to Fyodor’s bad behavior but an active (albeit only fitfully successful) guardrail against it. As her husband gives himself over to his worst impulses, it’s Anna who nudges him to work, who tries to get the bills paid, who even, as things get dire, secretly writes and submits pages on his behalf to mollify his angry publisher. While Anna may not always be in control of her own fate, there’s never any doubt she’s in possession of her own agency.

True, she’s making the choices she does in part because she has few others: Living in a foreign land without even enough cash for a train ticket home, Anna would have a tough time leaving Fyodor even if she’d wanted to. But, The Idiot(s) makes it clear, she doesn’t especially want to.

Anna loves Fyodor truly and stubbornly, and he loves her back in his own inconsistent and imperfect way. Key to the film’s portrait of their marriage is the frisky chemistry that courses between them when they’re holding hands in bed or engaging in silly dirty talk about hard-boiled eggs. For all the relationship’s intolerable flaws and harrowing lows, it’s not without true affection.

Anna’s indulgence for his antics is another thing, however. As the situation deteriorates to the point that Anna’s pawning off her chamber pots and eating scraps off the streets, it becomes harder and harder for us as viewers to forgive his sins. Perhaps that’s why The Idiot(s) gives over large chunks of its bleaker second half to absurd dream sequences.

But arriving as they do in the umpteenth iteration of the same repetitive cycle (Fyodor losing his money, begging Anna for more, losing it all again and then some), these sequences land not only as unnecessary drags on an already puffy run time but as an uncharacteristic failure of confidence. We don’t require a clip of Fyodor fleeing from a boulder-sized roulette ball to tell us he’s being crushed by his gambling addiction when we’ve already seen that he is; we don’t need to see him plead against charges of chauvinism before a guillotine when we know exactly how poorly he treats Anna.

Then again, if the clunky pacing of the film’s latter chapters remind us of anything, it’s how long Anna toiled to help bring The Idiot into the world. Compared to all those long years, what’s a few extra minutes of sitting and watching her struggles on a screen? “Every Russian writer should have a wife like you,” Ivan marvels at one point, moved by Anna’s strenuous efforts to help her ungrateful and oblivious husband. What The Idiot(s) impishly suggests, by demonstrating all the invisible but essential labor Anna’s poured into his books, is that a lot of them probably already did.

The late British stage and screen actor Ian Charleson, who died of AIDS-related causes in 1990 at age 40, is mostly remembered for his role in the 1981 Oscar winner Chariots of Fire. That inescapable attachment haunts Charleson, played with raw determination, grace and an almost overwhelming depth of feeling by Andrew Scott in Elsinore, a tremendously moving account of the final year in the Scottish actor’s life. When his agent reminds him that he starred in one of the most celebrated films of all time, Charleson shoots back: “And all anybody can remember about it is the theme music.” 

Scott’s searing dual performance — as Charleson and as Hamlet in a National Theatre production that became both the ultimate challenge and fulfillment of his professional career — makes Simon Stone’s film an emotional powerhouse even if it doesn’t avoid inspirational cliché. But it’s a vivid picture of London at the height of the AIDS crisis and a stirring gesture of gratitude to art, specifically theater, as a lifeline even when death looms large.

While Charleson’s heroic run of 24 performances in the title role of Hamlet is as much a part of London theater lore as the abrupt exit from Richard Eyre’s 1989 production of Daniel Day-Lewis, it will be less familiar to audiences farther afield.

The script by Stephen Beresford (Pride) lives and breathes the stage community and its cozy familial camaraderie, from actors and directors to wardrobe, makeup and tech personnel. The bustle of theater luvvies all fondly addressing one another as “darling” will be especially amusing for audiences with any exposure to that world.

As a film about a painful chapter in queer history, it mines considerable humor from the extent to which gay slang seeps into the entire milieu, regardless of sexuality.

One hilarious example is Monica Dolan, marvelous as Linda Tolhurst, the National’s stage door supervisor for 50 years and counting. Charleson was already chummy with the building’s fixtures after playing Sky Masterson in the company’s smash 1982 Guys and Dolls revival; when he arrives for the first table read after being cast to replace Day-Lewis as Hamlet, Linda greets him dryly with, “’Ere she is, Takeover Tina!”

While Charleson initially established himself as a stage actor, his primary international recognition came from back-to-back best picture Oscar winners Chariots of Fire and Gandhi. But despite working steadily, he struggled to keep the momentum of a screen career going. Growing tired of all the waiting around on film shoots for mostly unrewarding projects, Charleson became anxious to get back to the theater, especially given the ticking clock of his HIV+ diagnosis.

Stone’s film shows the confusion of backstage workers and fellow cast when Day-Lewis collapses and then walks offstage during the Act I scene on the castle ramparts in which Hamlet encounters his father’s ghost. While the screenplay doesn’t go into the then-rising star’s reasons for abandoning the production, it’s no secret that Day-Lewis was unsettled by a connection to his own father’s absence, even if his exit was widely attributed to exhaustion. 

That footnote in London theater history creates an opportunity for Charleson, who previously played Hamlet though believed he was neither famous nor posh enough ever to land the role at the National. When he is approached by Eyre — identified only as Richard (Johnny Flynn) — who had directed him in Guys and Dolls, Ian feels duty-bound to inform him of his medical condition. 

The first appearance of a lesion on his forehead — after inspecting every inch of his body with a hand mirror each day — marked Ian’s progression to full-blown AIDS. Richard automatically assumes he will be unable to take on the demanding role, but Ian’s passion and drive convince him, with both men agreeing to keep his illness quiet. 

A lovely scene on cruisy Hampstead Heath takes creative license with the formation of the London chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, drag nuns advocating for AIDS awareness and safer sex practices. (In reality, that group didn’t appear in the British capital until the early ‘90s.) Ian asks Sister Frigidity of the Nocturnal Emission (Kadiff Kirwan) how long he has left, prompting the veiled activist to summon a young man from elsewhere in the park, still alive two years after his first lesion appeared. 

Instantly recognizing the mark on Charleson’s face for what it is, the National’s wardrobe master (Paul Chahidi) sends him to see Dr. Margaret Johnson (Olivia Colman), a U.K. pioneer of HIV and AIDS treatment. Colman is in blazing form, her clipped manner contrasting with the medic’s self-evident compassion. Instructing Ian to start coming for daily clinic checkups, she makes no effort to hide her anger that the actor is increasing his risk of decline by placing himself in a high-pressure situation. Developments with the terse character later in the film are profoundly affecting.

Scenes at the clinic, where gay men constantly encounter friends and ex-lovers receiving treatment at various stages of the illness, are a sharp evocation of a time when the proliferation of men looking suddenly gaunt and weak sparked terror in the entire queer community.

Charleson’s vibrantly drawn inner circle of friends is led by his bestie, casting director Patsy Pollock (Billie Piper), her daughter Alice (Sadie Soverall) and his constant companion Sean (Matthew Beard). The latter is identified, like Eyre, only by his first name, but the character is based on Sean Mathias, who directed Charleson that year in an all-star benefit performance of Martin Sherman’s play Bent, about pink-triangle persecution in Nazi Germany.

One of the most fascinating insights into queer history comes with the appearances of iconoclastic director Derek Jarman (David Dawson), a friend for whom Charleson had played a punk angel in 1978’s Jubilee. As his own illness progresses, Derek urges Ian to go public about his health, to help destigmatize AIDS and hammer home the reality of the plague for Brits outside of LGBTQ circles. 

This brings up the conflicts for gay actors at the time who felt the need to keep their sexuality hidden for fear of career damage. “You have a responsibility to the dead, to the dying,” Derek tells him. Reflecting on his choice to stay silent (until after his death) Ian says, “Of course, in the theater no one gives a fuck.” But there was more at stake back then — and still to some extent now — for actors seeking on-camera work.

For anyone who recalls Jarman’s seismic influence on queer cinema with uncompromising films like Sebastiane, The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio and Edward II, hearing the director say “Ian, remember me” with the knowledge that any encounter could be their last cuts deep. The same goes for Charleson visiting him at the fisherman’s cottage in coastal Dungeness where he lived at the time, when Jarman tells him that he’s going blind. His loss of vision shaped his experimental swan-song feature, 1993’s Blue.

If all this makes Elsinore sound like a film primarily for a niche audience of queer historians, that’s not the case. As Charleson digs into Hamlet rehearsals, insisting on working late even when he’s physically diminished, Scott conveys the actor’s dedication to his craft with both self-sacrifice and hubris. As Richard says of the play: “It’s about being alive and becoming dead.” 

While Stone is not always the most subtle of directors and Beresford’s dialogue often doesn’t tread lightly, a scene in which Ian gathers the entire cast to give an honest account of his condition — after being forced into a hiatus when he is hospitalized during previews — is as heartwarming as it is wrenching. But it’s in the performance scenes that Scott truly elevates the material, drawing on intersections between the Shakespearean role and Ian’s own thoughts of mortality.

Many audiences will be wrecked by pretty much the entire second half of the movie, the final scenes in particular, in which editor Valerio Bonelli crosscuts between the stage performance and Ian’s bedroom at home, where he is fading fast, comforted by Patsy. When Laertes tells the wounded prince at the end of the Act 5 sword fight, “Hamlet, thou art slain,” I was a mess.

While the fire at the core of the film is all Scott, in a physical, psychological and emotional performance that leaves nothing on the table, there’s gorgeous work throughout the ensemble. Colman superbly nails the seeming contradiction between professional medical detachment and humaneness. Piper — whom Stone directed on stage to huge acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic in his adaptation of Lorca’s Yerma — embodies the cherished female friend who is a sustaining force in the lives of so many gay men. And an unrecognizable Flynn makes Eyre a shining example of the director as nurturer and protector. 

There are standout moments for Luke Thompson as Georgie, a composite character representing Ian’s past relationships; Juliet Stevenson as Sylvia Sims, portrayed as a grand dame of British thespianism while playing Gertrude in the National production; Beard as a friend whose selfless devotion to Ian’s care is on par with Patsy’s; and Heartstopper’s Joe Locke as an admiring young actor hungry for mentorship, befriended by Ian at the clinic. 

The most devastating scenes for many will be those with Ian’s parents, Jean (Georgie Glen) and Jack (Peter Mullan), working-class Scots confronted with the double whammy that their son is not only gay but dying, a confessional ordeal common to many AIDS patients at the time. Both actors are wonderful, with Jean’s anguish immediately apparent and Jack’s sputtering to the surface in a delayed reaction in the hospital car park.

It’s a nice touch that one of Charleson’s surviving Chariots of Fire castmates, Nigel Havers, pops up as an AIDS clinic donor, alongside Ian’s close friend and University of Edinburgh classmate, fellow actor Hilton McRae. The latter is the longtime husband of Lindsay Duncan, Charleson’s co-star in a landmark 1988 National Theatre production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There’s a nice “friends and family” aspect to these and other connections.

Whatever weaknesses there are in the direction and script, the film makes enormous gains in intimacy and authenticity by eliminating any of the barriers of outsider observation. The full-throated investment in the parallel queer, theatrical, medical and outpatient communities is unquestionably personal. 

Stone relies more than necessary on Stefan Gregory’s lush orchestral score to push emotional buttons. But the strategic use in one joyously tender scene of The Ethel Merman Disco Album — once a cringey embarrassment, now a beloved bit of queer pop cultural kitsch — will spark fun associations for many gay men over a certain age. The Merm belting out “There’s No Business Like Show Business” to a disco backbeat might be a million brassy miles from Shakespeare, but Elsinore lovingly folds those two extremes together.

[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from season two of The Gentlemen.]

When The Gentlemen first introduced Eddie Horniman (Theo James), he was a reluctant aristocrat who unexpectedly inherited his late father’s dukedom, only to discover that his old man had been involved in a vast weed empire for years. Back then, the dutiful former Army captain was just trying to extricate his family from the criminal enterprise and protect the Halstead country estate. But by the time the dust settles at the end of the newly released second season, Eddie has transformed into a ruthless mob boss in the vein of Michael Corleone.

In the sophomore season of the Guy Ritchie-created action dramedy series, which launched Thursday on Netflix, Eddie and his business partner Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) — on the instructions of Susie’s imprisoned crime boss father Bobby (Ray Winstone) — expand their weed operations beyond the U.K. into Italy. The moves puts Eddie and Susie in direct conflict with the elegant but lethal Italian Mafia boss Marco Moretti (Sergio Castellitto) and an ego-driven local fixer named Cico Maldini (Michele Morrone), whose slippery nature ultimately leads to his demise at the hands of Marco’s pet tiger. Yikes!

Wanting to seek more independence, Eddie quietly distances himself from Susie and Bobby to work directly with Marco, even going as far as to carry out a hit on an innocent accountant as a demonstration of his loyalty to their partnership. During that time, Eddie quickly becomes enamored with and marries Marco’s goddaughter, Countess Isabella “Bella” Soranza de Parme (Benedetta Porcaroli) — another aristocrat who understands the dangerous criminal underworld because of her familial connections, but is not personally interested in that lifestyle.

However, Eddie and Bella’s marital bliss is cut short. Following their wedding at Lake Maggiore in episode six, the couple sets off on their honeymoon, with Bella piloting a scenic seaplane alone while Eddie drives along the road below. Tragically, a hidden bomb detonates on the aircraft mid-flight, killing Bella instantly and plunging a devastated Eddie into a quest for vengeance. Although Eddie initially suspects Bobby or other criminal rivals for the attack, the finale reveals that the ultimate betrayal came from within Eddie’s own family.

While staying at a religious rehab center, Eddie’s mercurial older brother, Freddy (Daniel Ings), falls under the spiritual and toxic influence of Gospel John (Pearce Quigley) — the fantastical crime lord who sought revenge on Freddy in season one for killing his brother. Feeding into Freddy’s deep-seated resentment over losing the Halstead inheritance to Eddie, Gospel John convinces Freddy to help orchestrate an armed assault on the Halstead estate, an attack that results in an attempted kidnapping of Eddie and Freddy’s younger sister Charly’s (Jasmine Blackborow) newborn baby in episode seven.

After uncovering Freddy’s complicity, Eddie enlists Susie to help capture Gospel John and wipe out the rest of his syndicate. Eddie then goes to confront Freddy himself — beating him up and even holding a gun to his head. But instead of executing his own flesh and blood, Eddie orders his traumatized brother into the back of a black van, where Gospel John is tied up and another man is holding a chainsaw. “Someone’s gotta die, Freddy,” Eddie tells him. To save his own life, Freddy is forced to behead Gospel John. The season concludes with a blood-soaked Freddy holding the severed head, while Eddie lights a cigar and coldly calls his brother a “good boy.”

Eddie’s descent into an unhinged crime lord was particularly appealing to James, who has long been interested in examining the corruptibility of power among the most privileged. “It often happens with kings or leaders of religious cults,” James tells The Hollywood Reporter in the conversation below. “They kind of start off in a version of trying to help, but by the end, power degrades their sense of self so much that they become poisoned by it and become numb to violence and everything that happens around them.”

Calling in from London earlier this week, star and co-executive producer James opened up to THR about collaborating with Ritchie on a thematically deeper and darker second season (and how that shocking ending sets up the already renewed season three), why he thinks an Eddie-Susie romance may never be in the cards — and, yes, the rumored casting of the real-life Duchess of Sussex.

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What kinds of creative conversations did you have with Guy Ritchie to figure out how you all wanted to evolve the story in season two?

After season one, and honestly while I was doing it, I felt we had a great conceit, a really good story and some great actors, but there were perhaps depths that we hadn’t yet plumbed. With] season one, there’s a world where [the story’s] kind of wrapped up. So if you’re going to go back for a second bite of the apple, the reason is to try and make it better and more complex, take bigger swings and learn from the things that worked from season one and evolve as much as possible.

The methodology with Guy and [executive producer] Matthew [Read] and I is a pretty complex one, but good in the sense that there are a lot of conversations. We start with a sitdown in London, and we have a four-hour conversation that ranges from everything from the existential to the minutiae. But we start with an initial big-picture chat. We don’t solve everything in that single chat, but we start thinking about the larger themes.

But the ability to understand Eddie a bit more, to have him be challenged, to have him have more emotional depth, to have him fall in love, to have him broken both spiritually and physically, and then have him completely betrayed — those were the touch points we started with and then carried on developing. It’s a unique process — one I have never done in another job — in that we are tinkering in the trailer in the morning and during the scene, so it’s an ever-evolving process.

You have spoken in the past about how Eddie was very much on the back foot in the first season. He was not exactly a fish out of water, but he was still trying to get his bearings in this criminal enterprise that his father was involved in. This season, he seems to really embrace and almost become seduced by the promises and trappings of wealth that he was born into — and he is left to wrestle with the cost of his actions. How do you think his moral compass bends over the course of the season? Do you think he believes the end justifies the means?

I think he believes that the end ultimately justifies the means. What I was interested in exploring is a story of ascension — like some of the great stories and the classic stories, from biblical to Walter White — and what cost that incurs on a person. In season one, in many ways, he’s a moral man. He’s a civilian adapting to scenarios on the back foot and being thrown into a world he doesn’t understand with a bunch of characters who are larger than life. His job is to navigate through it and come out the other end with an ability to save his family from the clutches of poverty and villainy. [But] what happens is, he realizes he’s fairly adept at it.

What I wanted to do in season two is to take a man filled with privilege because of multiple centuries of landed gentry — and what that [familial background] gives him is ego and entitlement. There’s an ascension story where he thinks [rising to a higher state of power] should be granted to him because he thinks it’s his kind of right. That’s a kind of ego story, and also a kingship story. That’s a story that Guy’s interested, in too.

In terms of playing with morality, episode two is the moment he steps over the edge and commits a crime to ostensibly an innocent man for his own means. He justifies it as the end justifies the means for him, but ultimately it has corroded some of his moral purity. He’s a good person and now he’s far from it, and that is going to weigh on his conscience for the rest of the season.

But what I also like playing with — and this is all within the caveat of entertaining in a slightly heightened world, so not to be too portentous about it, but [I’m interested in] privilege, power and the idea that there’s an apathy and an erosion of empathy that comes with that. It often happens with kings or leaders of religious cults. They kind of start off in a version of trying to help, but by the end, power degrades their sense of self so much that they become poisoned by it and become numb to violence and everything that happens around them. We’re going to do another season, and in that season I want to continue exploring that: How far has he lost himself, and how much has he corroded his soul?

One of the people who remarks just how much Eddie has changed is Susie. Multiple characters start to question the nature of Eddie and Susie’s relationship — whether their connection is purely platonic and professional, or something more. How consciously have you, Kaya and the rest of the creative team tried to play up the will-they-won’t-they of that relationship?

Our touching point in the beginning was always Moonlighting — Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis — and the idea of two people who kind of are in love, but never quite get together. That’s a baseline. But in season two, we like the idea that they’re connected, but their distance is one of mistrust. On one hand, they’re the other’s greatest ally. But they are also heading to a path where one of them has to usurp the other because we’re talking about a kind of ascension story and how that’s going to happen, and who’s going to fail and who’s going to win.

Then beyond that, I think the realities of an indentured Duke and then peer of the realm getting with a gangster’s daughter who runs a criminal empire is pretty unlikely. (Laughs.) There’s a sadness [to the relationship] because maybe they would, but ultimately they probably never can.

Eddie’s relationship with Susie briefly takes a back seat to his unexpected romance with an Italian countess named Bella. Eddie and Bella quickly get married, which helps strengthen Eddie’s standing in his expanding international operations, but she is killed instantly when a bomb explodes on the seaplane that she was piloting on her way to her and Eddie’s honeymoon. How did you think about playing Eddie’s reaction to her death?

I like that storyline. It touches on what’s happened for centuries in European aristocracy and nobility. People marry strategically — they marry for alliance, they marry for land mass, for power. This [show] has got a modern touch on that. Is he marrying to consolidate his power? Yes. But is he marrying for love? Of course. He’s also from landed gentry, from aristocracy, so he’s seen that world of being presented a marriage for reasons beyond love, for one’s strategy. I think ultimately he does kind of fall in love with her, but perhaps he doesn’t expect to.

In terms of the ending [of episode six], we actually shot a bunch of [versions]. Eddie sees what’s happened, and there’s an aftermath. Guy wanted a bit more mystery, so we don’t understand where he is or what’s happening to him until the end of episode seven — and then he starts this story of ultimate revenge fueled by anger.

That’s the fun as well of being able to do a third season. He’s betrayed by his brother [who was involved in Bella’s killing]. He loses his wife on his wedding day, but he also ascends to a higher place of power, so he’s going to be more ruthless and deadly. And at what point is the barrier between a vaguely good person or a complete monster? Kaya’s character says that she thinks he’s evolving into something else, and I think that’s fun territory to be in.

The ending of the season feels particularly shocking.

That was something we had talked about with Guy and Matthew for a long time. He can’t murder his brother straight up and straight out because then he loses his family, but he has to have some semblance of revenge. So that [ending] came from trying to figure out: How do you do both in one? How do you punish him without killing him? [We settled on] forcing [Freddy] to do the most atrocious crime and also removing the head of his God in a way. He looks up to this man as a man of faith and then he has to fucking chainsaw his head off. (Laughs.)

Earlier in the finale, Eddie’s own mother, Sabrina (Joely Richardson), remarks that he has become almost unrecognizable to her. What does that tell you about where he’s going — and where the story will go — in season three?

From an audience perspective, I think he’s beginning to wander into territory of rich and problematic darkness and moral quandary. But in terms of the reality of his family, he’s just about saved himself because he hasn’t had to murder his own brother, and he’ll be able to still remain a semblance of himself.

Ultimately, he’s on a path to surpass Bobby [as a drug lord], but also get complete vengeance from his brother. How that enacts itself is still in the process [of being determined]. But on top of that, I think we’re going to expand the world further. We’ll be touching on lots of different countries and new countries. I won’t spoil it because it’s a big part of the storyline, but we’ll be in a very different cinematic planet, shall we say.

The Gentlemen was officially renewed for season three last week, but you and your creative team had reportedly known about the renewal for a while. Do you know when you will begin production for the next season? Are you going to be filming later this year or early next year?

Yeah, pretty soon. It’s very soon to the point where I’m like, “Fuck, we need to really get this shit together before we start filming.” (Laughs.) So, yes, it’s happening very soon because I think we’re also cognizant of the fact that nowadays you don’t want massive lulls. There was a large break between season one and two, and I think we don’t want to be in that position again. That happened because people were available and then they weren’t. Then I did a film, then Guy would do a film, and [schedules didn’t align]. But I think we’re all aligned with the fact that if we want to keep momentum and also just tell the story and finish the story, then we should leave less of a gap between the seasons.

The show has obviously made headlines in the last couple of weeks because of the potential casting of a certain real-life duchess, Meghan Markle, in season three. As both a star and a producer, how privy are you to those kinds of casting conversations, and what do you know about her involvement at this point?

I think that’s mostly hot air. To me, it’s fascinating how [those reports] exploded that much, and how intrigued people are, and how much kind of cultural significance [Meghan and Harry] have. I guess it’s inevitable in some way. We talk about casting all the time, but, I mean, the practicalities of that are also complex for a show like ours. Can you imagine the amount of attention, paparazzi, and so forth you’d have? So I would say it’s pretty unlikely.

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The first two seasons of The Gentlemen are now streaming on Netflix.

A drama dotted with laughs (or a comedy blotted with pain?) in which everyday problems are confronted, and avoided, over steaming cuppas and brimming glasses of white wine, Tender Loving Care explores friendship, family dynamics and England’s fraying social safety net. In other words, it’s a Mike Leigh film, and a lovely one at that.

If it ends up being his last, as the 83-year-old writer-director has indicated, it’s a fitting and stealthily powerful way to go out — a low-key mic drop of sorts. The movie is warm and inviting, filled with giggles and gossip and gentle gallows humor; it’s also wrenching, with a topical urgency simmering just beneath the jovial surface. While Leigh’s left-wing politics inform the story, the filmmaker, unlike his contemporary Ken Loach, mostly avoids playing ventriloquist; the chit-chatting, chortling, sobbing, seething souls who populate his work tend to be too complicated, too insistently human to serve as mere spokespeople for their creator’s ideas.

In Tender Loving Care, those ideas concern compassion, solidarity and support — what it means to look out for one another at this (angry, angering) point in history, specifically in a country whose public services have been eroded by an ethos of self-reliance codified by Thatcher and further cemented, or perverted, by Brexit. As is often the case in Leigh’s films, the thematic framework is conspicuous; characters, on occasion, turn subtext into text, delivering mini-disquisitions on the failures of the state and the isolation of urban life today.

Those statements might register as distractingly didactic if they didn’t sound wholly believable coming out of these particular people’s mouths; two of the four central figures, childhood BFFs Amy (Kate O’Flynn, Widow’s Bay scene-stealer) and Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), are overextended, underappreciated social workers — and seasoned compartmentalizers, lest the despondency they witness daily on the job pull them under.

Amy and Rosie, as well as Amy’s kindly parents Birdie (Marion Bailey, Leigh’s longtime partner) and Geoff (Paul Jesson), arrive onscreen fully formed, alive with personal and relational histories we can intuit beyond what’s in the frame. If it feels like we’ve known these folks forever — from Amy and Rosie’s mutual hype sessions to Birdie and Geoff’s puttering and banter — that’s a credit to Leigh’s legendary rehearsal process, during which he and his actors build the characters from scratch through weeks of improvisation and discussion.

Nothing and everything happens over the course of Tender Loving Care. Unceremoniously dumped by a boyfriend who’s gone back to his wife and child, Amy moves in with single-and-mingling Rosie. Birdie frets about Amy’s romantic and reproductive prospects, though she and Geoff console themselves with their certainty that she’s better off sans her ex. Amy and Rosie endure stressful days on the job (Amy works mainly with children, Rosie with the elderly), retreating to their flat in the evenings to swap horror stories or decompress over girl talk, dance-offs and other bursts of booze-infused silliness. Geoff’s health takes a sudden turn for the worse.

The tone here is mellower, the pitch less heightened than in Leigh’s more volatile domestic tragicomedies, like Secrets & Lies and Life Is Sweet, to say nothing of the bludgeoning All or Nothing. That’s in large part a reflection of the new film’s main quartet, who sit at the opposite end of the temperamental spectrum from Pansy, the ferocious protagonist of Leigh’s previous effort, 2024’s Hard Truths. Amy, Rosie, Birdie and Geoff are indeed among the most amiable characters Leigh has ever created, their darker feelings — loneliness, jealousy, rage, dread — tucked safely beneath chipper smiles and cheerful pleasantries.

But Leigh has never been one to flinch at life’s cruelties. The simplicity of Tender Loving Care’s narrative, the sweetness of the people it portrays, and the ticklish good vibes they generate belie a toughmindedness about both the private disappointments and the larger societal injustices that shake our respective worlds. When moments of anguish arrive — a neighbor’s tormented account of her husband’s funeral; a tirade by a paranoia-gripped hoarder Rosie is assigned to visit; a hard-drinking mother’s fury at the foster care system for which Amy is assessing her — they have a rawness and force that slice right through the movie’s congeniality.

The film is in direct conversation with Hard Truths, as well as Leigh standouts Another Year and Happy-Go-Lucky, in its consideration of what determines happiness — the degrees to which choice, disposition, luck and broader structural or socioeconomic forces play a part. Like so much of Leigh’s work, Tender Loving Care ponders how people of different circumstances and constitutions coexist: how we make each other feel and act, how our perception of each other’s lives shapes our perception of our own.

It’s also about how we proceed with the business of living amid hardships both mundane and momentous. Like Ozu, a clear influence, Leigh is one of the medium’s great observers of human behavior, from the small talk that drowns out the terror of our worst anxieties to the self-delusions that sustain us during our most vulnerable moments to the way we accept or refuse help — the latter sometimes misguidedly. “I can’t put it on them,” Amy tells Rosie, explaining her reluctance to let her parents know of her break-up. Like all the film’s principals, Amy is an expert practitioner of Britain’s famed stiff upper lip, but here she’s sparing Birdie and Geoff a burden they’re more than ready to share.

O’Flynn is an expressive marvel, her kooky lightheartedness periodically clouding over with a melancholy that cuts to the bone. The swirl of conflicting emotions that play out across Amy’s face as she gulps champagne while listening to her mother reminisce about her courtship with Geoff is astonishing — a piercing pantomime of the oft-cited notion that millennials are the first generation to have fewer opportunities than their parents.

Bailey Johnson, a casual charisma bomb, makes Rosie so radiant and grounded and fun that you may realize only late in the film — when she reveals she no longer speaks to her own mom and dad — that her generosity toward the other characters is more symbiotic than selfless. Rosie is the very definition of a ride-or-die, but she needs Amy and her family as much as they need her.

The beautifully synced Bailey and Jesson, meanwhile, offer a duet of endearments, confidences, worries and innocuous shit-talk, conjuring the ineffable mix of intimacy and distance that makes a long-term marriage. When the rhythm of their relationship is disrupted in the film’s second half, the effect is devastating.

Visually, Tender Loving Care is characterized by Leigh’s typical unfussiness, with Lucy Bristow taking over DP duties from frequent Leigh collaborator Dick Pope, who died in 2024. As usual, there’s mastery in how the filmmaker uses facial close-ups to add notes of tension, encouraging the viewer to locate truths undisclosed by the dialogue. Ditto in how he deploys a single overhead shot — serene but conspicuous — to foreshadow an unlucky swerve in the story.  

A touching penultimate scene feels like a natural conclusion to this portrait of people devotedly closing ranks when crisis strikes. But Leigh doesn’t stop there, instead punctuating his film with a final image of uncommon bluntness and despair. At first impression, it seems an incongruously — if not unjustifiably — hopeless way to go out. Yet given the dogged humanism that is the throughline of Leigh’s extraordinary filmography, perhaps a less pessimistic reading is due: Leigh is ending his movie, possibly his career, with a plea for individuals to lift up those they know and love, of course, but also to fight for a society that lifts up those they don’t.