74th Golden Globe Awards

Viola Davis, Fences. Reprising the role she played on Broadway opposite Denzel Washington, Viola Davis is a quiet storm of determination, anger and devotion as Rose, the wife of the hard-headed, short-tempered Troy (played again by Denzel Washington, who directed the film from a script by playwright August Wilson).

Who really is Ray Marcus, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character in director Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals? Beyond the fact that he pops up in the pages of a book that Susan/Amy Adams avidly reads during most of the film, the less we say about it the better. Taylor-Johnson, however, is very precise in his description: “It was a character that I didn't instantly relate to, you know?”, he told us.

As the grown-up Saroo, the Indian boy adopted by an Australian family in director  Garth Davis’ Lion, Dev Patel found himself on a journey very similar to his own. “This is probably the project that I had the biggest personal connection t”, Dev Patel told us.

What kind of preparation is needed to play a vocal coach to a tone-deaf would-be opera singer? Simon Helberg, who must face this very challenge as Meryl Streep’s long-suffering teacher in Florence Foster Jenkins, had a very specific kind of training, shared with the movie’s illustrious lead actress: “We both came together in New York, and had both been practicing, basically, shitting all over the great pieces of music in the canon of classical and opera”, Helberg shared with us. “She was in New York and I was in LA, and we had been working on this crazy thing, and we came together to see if it made sense in a studio in New York.

Hot on the trail of a series of peculiar bank robberies in dusty, half-dead towns in West Texas, Jeff Bridges’ sheriff Marcus Hamilton cuts a powerful profile – he’s at the same time a lawman from the halcyon days of the frontier and a dim shadow of those legendary times, fading with a land that seems abandoned by all. “The basic thing about a great script, this was one that really rung true.

When Juan, a feared drug dealer ruling over a mean corner in a tough Miami neighborhood, comes across a scared, trembling kid in the opening scenes from director Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, the audience does not expect the layers of care and tenderness that frame the encounter. The surprise is a credit to Mahershala Ali’s nuanced performance of a character based on the life experiences of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose stage play inspired the movie.

It is a beautiful summer day on the West coast of Denmark. Apart from the roar of the sea and the gulls’ screech there is an unnatural silence.

As an adoptive mother, Nicole Kidman felt a special connection with Sue Brierley, whom she plays in the Golden Globes nominated Lion, which tells the story of an Indian child, Saroo Brierley (played by Sunny Pawar), who gets lost in the country’s vast train system and is unable to return to his family. He ends up being adopted by an Australian couple, Sue and her husband, John Brierley (played by David Wenham).

Following a space detour on Mars in The Martian, a transcendental inter-galactic experience in Interstellar, and a detour in a fantasy world with The Huntsman 2, Jessica Chastain returns to Earth with the very political and ever so current Miss Sloane, directed by John Madden, which brings her fourth Golden Globe nomination (following her win for Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn Bigelow). In Miss Sloane, for which she is nominated as Best Actress, Drama, Chastain plays top Washington lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane, whose will power and drive to win don't stop for anything or anybody.

Jeff Bridges was introduced to acting as a child by his actor father Lloyd Bridges, as was his older brother Beau Bridges. “My dad was very enthusiastic about show business and wanted all his kids to go into it,” he told the HFPA.