Nominations 2017

Dev Patel, 26, a British actor raised in London by immigrant Indian parents born in Kenya, was a regular in the TV series Skins (2006-2007) co-starring Nicholas Hoult, when he was cast by director Danny Boyle in Slumdog Millionaire (2008) at age 17, as a poor boy from Mumbai who wins a game show and the love of a girl (played by newcomer Freida Pinto). He started acting as a child, as a way to channel his energy, “I was a naughty kid”, he told the HFPA also saying he practiced karate and Tae Kwon Do, because the “discipline helped me.

Annette Bening, 20th Century Women “I was 19 at the time this story takes place in Southern California, so (…) when I read the script was the first time I had read something that was placed where I was from, first of all. ”, Annette Bening shared with us, talking about the road that took her to Dorothea, mater familias of a very peculiar kind of improvised family, in 1979 Santa Barbara, CA in writer-director Mike Mills’ film.

Ryan Reynolds loved the Deadpool character so much that, very early on, he decided to come on board as a producer – “to protect Deadpool, to protect the origin story of Deadpool and to protect the canon of Deadpool”, he shared with us. It took him eleven years to realize his goal, and leaving him plenty of time to perfect his fighting skills, especially with his weapon of choice, the katana swords.

The road to War Dogs began for Jonah Hill some years ago, when he read the Rolling Stone article “Arms and Dudes” and, he told us, immediately saw himself in the role of Efraim Diveroli, the head of a flu-by-night gun running operation out of Miami that becomes a supplier of the US military (at least for a while…) “When you're an actor and  you read a story that's interesting that could be a movie you're like wow, okay, I should pay attention to this. I tried to option the article but  (writer-director) Todd (Phillips) had already beat me to the punch…” By the time Phillips had developed the script and offered Hill the part, The Wolf of Wall Street had just come out, and his first reaction was to say “no.

Hugh Grant approached his character in Florence Foster Jenkins – Florence’s conflicted, supportive husband St. Clair Bayfield- from a place of fear.

Ryan Gosling’s involvement with La La Land started with a night of drinks and movie talk with writer-director Damien Chazelle, whom, he met through a common friend, producer Marc Platt. “we talked a lot about film in general, and Damien has a very infectious love of movies”, he told us in Toronto When Chazelle emailed Gosling the theme song for La La Land, the deal was closed.

Working with writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos  to build the sad-sack bachelor David, the protagonist of the dystopian love story The Lobster, Colin Farrell was given a mantra of sorts: “(Lanthimos) mentioned the word soft and I just got softer and softer and softer”, he told us in Cannes. “Until he texted me one night and said ‘stop eating now!’” Round, contained to the point of apathy and, yes, very soft, Farrell infuses David with a sort of militant sadness that cuts across Lanthimos’ tale of a society where being single is a crime punishable by a sort of death – becoming an animal.

Casey Affleck, Manchester By The Sea. Hand-picked first by Matt Damon – who was originally going to direct the movie – and later by writer-director Kenneth Lonergan to play Lee Chandler, the prodigal son of Manchester –By-Sea, self-exiled to Boston after a life-changing event, Casey Affleck relied on his passion for the material to compose his complex performance.

Our 2017 Cecil B. deMille recipient is an accomplished singer, besides, of course, being an extraordinary actress.

Emma Stone has been a fan of the musicals – on stage and on screen – since she was, by her own reckoning, “very young. ” “My mom was a huge Les Mis fan and she played it in the house and explained what that was all about”, she told us at the Toronto Film Festival.