Interviews

Moshe Zonder, the head writer of the Israeli award-winning hit series Fauda, an espionage series centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, turns his gaze to Israel’s archenemy, Iran, in Apple TV’s eight-part series, Tehran. This edge-of-your-seat thriller follows a young Mossad operative, Tamar Rabinyan (Niv Sultan), an Iranian-born, Israeli-raised spy who goes undercover in Iran to disable a nuclear reactor that makes fuel for atomic weapons.

Jacob Elordi has big ambitions. He does not want to be just another heartthrob in rom-coms, he prefers digging his teeth into deep and complex characters that are not necessarily nice guys.

Awkwafina invented her nickname when she was 16 by combining the name of the water Aquafina with the adjective awkward. Her real name is Nora Lum and she was born in Queens, New York, to a Korean mother and a Chinese American father.

Carrie Coon has been surprising us with her acting chops for a long time – ever since she suddenly appeared in Gone Girl as the sister of Ben Affleck in 2014, and at the same time became a key part of the success of The Leftovers, in which she played a woman who had lost her whole family in a strange global event. She had been preparing for a long time in the theater for that big debut on the screen: she received a nomination for a Tony for her work on Broadway in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where she also met her husband, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts.

Promising Young Woman is British filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s feature directorial debut and is a unique mixture of comedy, revenge, and horror with a twist of rom-com too. It has Carey Mulligan in the leading role as Cassie, a medical school dropout – and a promising young woman – whose life has taken a drastic turn as something dramatic happens to her best friend.

Rupert Everett enjoyed quite the wild full circle moment last year, more than two decades after the famously handsome Brit had taken Hollywood, and much of the cinema-going world, by storm. It was 1997 when the British actor - out since the 1980s - almost stole My Best Friend’s Wedding from his equally attractive co-stars Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and Dermot Mulroney.

Wayne Wang is one of the pioneers of Asian-American cinema and had a huge hit with The Joy Luck Club, the film that showed Hollywood studios that audiences were not afraid of an Asian cast if the story was good. But he was just as good adapting Paul Auster's complex New York stories to the screen in the memorable Smoke (and its companion, piece Blue in the Face, co-directed with Auster).

Like many young people, Zach Sobiech had a dream. In the case of the Lakeland, Minnesota, native it was to write and play music that audiences would listen to.

In The Undoing, Nicole Kidman stars as Grace Fraser, a therapist with an affluent New York life style that almost seems too good to be true. With a doctor husband who adores her, a young son, who is thriving and doing well in his prestigious private school, and a job that satisfies her intellect, she has what one could consider the perfect life.

Anya Taylor-Joy plays fiercely independent characters in three movies this year: Emma Woodhouse in Emma directed by Autumn de Wilde from the 1815 novel by Jane Austen, Marie Curie’s daughter Irène in Radioactive by Marjane Satrapi with Rosamund Pike, and Marvel Comics' superhero Magik/Iliana Rasputina in The New Mutants.   She also plays teenage chess prodigy Beth Harmon in the limited series The Queen’s Gambit, created and directed by Golden Globe-nominated screenwriter Scott Frank from the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis.