Author Topic: London Spy: Ben Whishaw, dreamy lover/genius Ed Holcroft and sage Jim Broadbent  (Read 571577 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/04/fashion/ben-whishaw-crucible.html


FASHION & STYLE
Ben Whishaw
Makes Himself
at Home

in New York
By MATTHEW SCHNEIER MARCH 4, 2016


Left, Ben Whishaw in a Prada coat, $3,300, and chambray shirt, $650, at select Prada boutiques; L.L. Bean cotton mock turtleneck, $29.99,
at llbean.com; Raf Simons wool pants, $487, at rafsimons.com; and Church’s leather derbies, $820, at church-footwear.com. Right, in
clothes from Comme des Garçons Homme Plus: a wool jacket ($1,250), a cotton vest ($380) and a cotton shirt ($310). Available at the
Comme des Garçons store in Manhattan (520 West 22nd Street, 212-604-9200).
Credit Jody Rogac for The New York Times




In the last week of January, Ben Whishaw, the waifish and intense star of “London Spy” and the 2008 remake of “Brideshead Revisited,” arrived in New York from London for a six-month stay. Installed in the West Village, for weeks Mr. Whishaw has walked across Manhattan to a work space in the East Village, and for five hours a day rehearsed for his Broadway debut.

Mr. Whishaw, 35, is here for the Broadway revival of “The Crucible,” now in previews. He stars opposite the Oscar nominees Saoirse Ronan and Sophie Okonedo as John Proctor, the upright but errant linchpin of the play, who faces down, rather than buckles under, the accusations of witchcraft that roiled Salem, Mass., in 1692.

Despite being steeped in Arthur Miller’s grim, hysterical Puritan world, Mr. Whishaw recently tumbled into an East Village seafood restaurant merry and full of praise for New York.

“I love it here,” he said, settling into a corner table and ordering a glass of Chianti. “It’s a cliché, but it is true, and it’s quite stark when you come from somewhere else: It’s the positivity and optimism of this place. You won’t notice it, because you’re around it all the time, but it’s very ‘up,’ compared to England.”

He may naturally incline toward the English national character, he admitted with a giggle, but New York agrees with him. Here he, too, is up.

Despite a career that has taken him to tiny theaters and megabudget “Bond” films alike, he remains something of a cipher, a chameleon able to walk the streets of New York unrecognized and unbothered.

“He’s not an actor who pushes himself into the front,” said Ivo van Hove, the director of “The Crucible.” “Actually, the opposite is true. I have to push him to the front.”




Mr. Whishaw in Sandro acrylic T-shirt, $215; and polyester/wool
pants, $396, at sandro-paris.com.

Credit Jody Rogac for The New York Times




Mr. Whishaw grew up in Langford, England, a “pretty unremarkable” village in Bedfordshire an hour and a half north of London, with a twin brother and parents unconnected to the theater.

“They were always incredibly supportive of me wanting to do acting,” he said, “and never put it in my head that there has to be a more sensible option to fall back on.”

And so there never was. So far, there has been no need of one. Mr. Whishaw found success early, playing “Hamlet” in Trevor Nunn’s 2004 production just after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and has worked continually ever since.

He is one of the most celebrated stage actors of his generation and has turned up in a wide range of film and TV roles. He is the latest Q in the 007 films, a precocious, baby-genius variation on the usual theme; he is “Richard II” in a televised adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays, a performance that won him a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award in 2013; he is, whether you realize it or not, the voice of Paddington Bear. (“Endearing,” The New Yorker said.)

His calling card is a soulful fragility, all faunlike bearing and saucer eyes, with a teenager’s unruly mop mane. It is no accident that fashion has made him a favorite, and in 2013, he appeared in an ad campaign for Prada.

Many of his roles play up this quality: the doomed, lovelorn John Keats of Jane Campion’s biopic “Bright Star”; the preening, brittle Sebastian Flyte of “Brideshead Revisited”; and, more recently, the bereaved malcontent searching for answers after his lover’s murder in the critically lauded BBC mini-series “London Spy.”

The bushy beard that his part in “The Crucible” requires does little to dispel the tender aura he projects. John Proctor is typically played as a virtuous brute, a brawny man’s man of 17th century New England. (In the 2002 revival, the role went to the hulking Liam Neeson.)

Mr. van Hove said he thought that Mr. Whishaw could bring Proctor’s traditional robustness to the part but that “his fragility, his vulnerability is equally important.” “I think that’s what makes Ben into a great actor,” he said, “to reinvent this part for our times”

But Proctor, it is fair to say, is a departure, a headlong dive against type, and one undertaken with some trepidation.




Mr. Whishaw wears a Gucci cotton crepe jacket ($2,950 at Gucci, 725 Fifth Avenue, 212-826-2600) and a Saint Laurent distressed cotton-
blend sweater ($890 at mrporter.com).
Credit Jody Rogac for The New York Times




“I have a lot of fear,” Mr. Whishaw said. “All the time. But it’s important somehow to have fear and then to overcome it. I feel a bit like I’m always on an edge, where the fear might completely overwhelm me and I might not be able to do it. That’s not happened yet.”

As an actor, Mr. Whishaw rejects the idea of type altogether, which may in part account for the range of his résumé. He has a slippery way of inhabiting heroes and antiheroes alike, of seducing women and men onscreen and onstage with equal ease.

He is, in fact, one of the few openly gay actors to frequently play straight romance. He officially came out in 2013, to little controversy or fanfare, and confirmed his relationship with his partner, Mark Bradshaw, an Australian composer.

“I’ve never been anything other than myself,” Mr. Whishaw said, though earlier in his career he was vague about his sexuality and deflected questions about it, leading to occasional uncertainty in the press.

While promoting a play, “The Pride,” in which he and Hugh Dancy played lovers, Mr. Whishaw gave interviews to New York Magazine and to Out — one of which assumed that he was straight, the other, gay. (The Village Voice gleefully pointed out the inconsistency.)

“We must be watching gay actors play straight people all the time,” he said, “but we just don’t know about it, mustn’t we? It’s not even an issue. It doesn’t matter.”

He is equally uninterested in dissecting his acting approach or his methods. “When I was doing ‘London Spy,’ Jim Broadbent, who I adore, said, ‘You must never talk about acting,’” Mr. Whishaw said.

And on the whole, he does not. He called himself an “instinctive” actor. But he is staunch in his conviction that his work is not an expression of, nor is it limited to, his own experience.

“If I could only act the things I’ve experienced, then I’d be a very limited actor,” he said. “It’s a preposterous idea that that’s all that an actor can do. I’m not really like any of the characters that I’ve played. I don’t feel like they’re me. Anything’s possible. You can understand anybody, really, or try to.”

At the moment, he is working to understand John Proctor, in all his tortured uncertainties, as well as America, his temporary home, in all of its own.

“It’s really hard for me — for us,” he said. (Given the play’s long run, Mr. Bradshaw also moved with him to the West Village.) “It has its own set of ideas about stuff.”

He was full of questions about Donald J. Trump, the electoral system and America’s fraught relationship to gun ownership. (“The Crucible,” period piece though it is, has, in its evil-in-our-midst persecutions, plenty of application to the American present. “We see it every day around us,” Mr. van Hove said.)




Mr. Whishaw in a Raf Simons wool jacket, $1,430, at rafsimons.com. Grooming by Sabrina
Szinay for R & Co at the Wall Group. Stylist’s assistants: Kelly Harris and Jimin Seo.

Credit Jody Rogac for The New York Times




Mr. Whishaw has barely had time to be homesick. He has been lax, he said, about staying in touch with those in Britain, though he tunes in to BBC Radio, and over the course of a photo shoot on a frigid Sunday morning politely requested a “builder’s tea”: English slang for tea, of no particularly elevated type, served strong, sweet and milky. (He gratefully accepted a cup of PG tips, England’s unfussy mainstay.)

Back at the seafood restaurant in the declining light of the afternoon — he had just finished with rehearsal, which Mr. van Hove holds religiously from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., no later — Mr. Whishaw finished off his Chianti, then his companion’s, and waxed thoughtful about his life as an actor.

“I’d probably do it if I had to go and do it above a pub,” he said.

He probably will not have to.

“I’m a bit in awe of how brilliant he is, I really am,” said Ms. Ronan, his co-star, who plays Abigail Williams, John Proctor’s former mistress and the ringleader of the accusers. “That doesn’t happen to me very often.”
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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LONDONSPYFANARTSASHA_EVANS
                                                     http://pennyroyalsasha.tumblr.com
                                                     http://pennyroyalsasha.tumblr.com/post/140627767065
Well, THAT was fast!!
                                                                                          

Sasha Evans. Artist
MARCH 7, 2016
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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LONDONSPYFANWATCHBEARDO

19 second excerpt
https://vid.me/ZBM3/beardo



The New York Times Close Up 3/5/16
By NY1 News
Monday, March 7, 2016 at 01:59 PM EST


Full video 41:27 (BEN'S INTERVIEW IS AT 16:35 - 24:50)
http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/shows/2016/03/7/the-new-york-times-close-up-3-5-16.html

On the March 5, 2016 edition of The New York Times Close Up, Steve Phillips, author of "Brown is the New White: How The Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority," talks with host Sam Roberts about the changing political landscape.

Times Metro Reporter Kim Barker explains how and why she's portrayed by Tina Fey in the new film "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,"  based on Kim's memoir about her work as a war correspondent.


Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" returns to the stage at the Walter Kerr Theatre with a star-filled cast. Ben Whishaw, who stars as John Procter, took time out from rehearsal to be interviewed.

And the New York Times reporters roundtable convenes.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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More:
LONDONSPYFANARTIDOWHATIWANT!
                                                     http://vipadafai.tumblr.com/



http://vipadafai.tumblr.com/post/134325256274/i-dont-want-to-i-dont-need-to
1 Dec 2015  http://vipadafai.tumblr.com/image/134325256274


I don’t want to. I don’t need to.


« Last Edit: March 11, 2016, 06:55:23 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Time for more
LONDONSPYFANARTWILBERIA.TISTORY
                                                     http://wilberia.tistory.com/m/post?categoryId=662185
                                                     http://wilberia.tumblr.com/
How did I keep
missing this one?
Now it's posted
twice in the
thread.
« Last Edit: March 11, 2016, 06:54:02 am by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline CellarDweller

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  • A city boy's mentality, with a cowboy's soul.
and the fan art continues.  :)


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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and the fan art continues.  :)



Thank you so much, Chuck! I love London Spy Fan Art--and so does Tom Rob Smith, the writer/creator of the series--
he's been twittering up a storm re the Fan Art!!



TOMROBSMITH<3!LONDONSPYFANART@TWITTER!  





« Last Edit: March 11, 2016, 08:28:47 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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« Last Edit: March 11, 2016, 09:05:40 pm by Aloysius J. Gleek »
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"