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She’s played the manipulative Amy in Gone Girl, has portrayed real people including the war journalist Marie Colvin, and was nominated for a Golden Globe just last year for her performance in black comedy thriller I Care A Lot.

But the new adaptation of The Wheel Of Time sees Rosamund Pike in a fantasy role, leading the cast of a series based on the bestselling novels by Robert Jordan.

She told Sky News’ Backstage podcast it’s nice to be doing something unexpected.

“I do like to surprise people, but I don’t go for the element of surprise at the expense of choices I believe in,” Pike said.

Subscribe to the Backstage podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker

“So it just seemed like this character came into my life for a reason, it sounds a bit sort of like mumbo jumbo, but I’d had a fairly tough ride with some of the big lives that I’ve played in recent years, like Marie Colvin and Marie Curie, and I thought this world that’s striving for balance in Wheel Of Time with this woman, who is kind of connected to the universe in quite a profound way and can channel elements, I thought, ‘this is going to be a role that I grow differently with and acquire some new skills through’.”

With any adaptation comes a weight of expectation from fans – but despite Jordan selling more than 90 million copies of the Wheel Of Time books, Pike isn’t just unphased by that expectation – she thrives off it.

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She said: “I do like the responsibility of taking a much-loved character and fleshing them out and because I’m quite dedicated, I think as an actor, I do delve deeply and I think deeply and I like the responsibility.

“And I think there’s a risk involved because obviously you know that you won’t please everybody, and I think that little bit of danger of the fact that you could so easily fail, I think that also appeals to me.”

Pike’s co-star Daniel Henney admits he did wonder how fans would react to the cast.

Rosamund Pike in The Wheel Of Time. Pic: Amazon Studios
Image:
Daniel Henney and Rosamund Pike in The Wheel Of Time. Pic: Amazon Studios

“In the beginning, there was some trepidation because of how many books have been sold and how beloved they are,” he told Backstage.

“But I was pleasantly surprised once we started and once we got to know The Wheel Of Time fans and the fan base, and how lovely they are, and how supportive they’ve been.

“I think that we’re just so lucky because it feels like they’re just an extension of us, a team, and they’ve been more of a support system than anything, which is not what I sort of anticipated in the beginning when you sign on to something that’s so beloved and there’s a lot of pressure, but it’s turned out to be a real asset for us, to be honest.”

Rosamund Pike in The Wheel Of Time. Pic: Amazon Studios
Image:
Rosamund Pike in The Wheel Of Time. Pic: Amazon Studios

Pike and Henney’s characters are extremely close – but the relationship is purely platonic.

The actress said that meant developing “a kind-of shorthand” between the pair to show how well they know one another.

“They hardly have to make a tiny meeting of the eye to know what one another’s thinking, and it’s important that when they’re fighting together they don’t have to be in one another’s eyeline to know what the other one is doing,” Pike explained.

“So things like that, which is perhaps not immediately obvious, but often we are back-to-back, but we’re completely aware of one another in space and anticipating the other person’s move.

“It’s a lovely thing Robert Jordan wrote in the development of this bond, it’s a really cool thing to play with, and one I think the audiences will really, really enjoy.”

Henney said it meant straying from the norm when it came to filming certain scenes, saying: “I remember the stunt guys when they choreographed the sequences initially, they’d done a great job, but there were some moments where they included moments for me to look directly at her and to sort of make those moments stand out.

“And I said, I didn’t want that, I wanted it to be much more sort of on an unspoken level, that we don’t have to look at each other, we could feel each other.”

Rosamund Pike in The Wheel Of Time. Pic: Amazon Studios
Image:
Rosamund Pike in The Wheel Of Time. Pic: Amazon Studios

Pike’s character can use magic, harnessing light in order to cast spells, and she told Sky News she drew from the practices of Tai Chi and Qigong in order to make the performance feel authentic.

“I want to feel that when she’s pulling these threads, there’s something that she’s actually getting hold of… And I wanted to just avoid at all costs something that doesn’t feel connected, the kind of relying totally on visual effects to make me look cool,” Pike said.

“I just thought ‘I’ve got to believe because surely the most interesting part of this character is the cost to her of channelling – what is the physical toll of these massive elemental forces coming through your body?’ That’s what’s surely interesting about the one power.

“Robert Jordan stresses that if you’re not trained in it, it’s so intoxicating to use it that you draw more and more until finally, it burns you through and through, like an incredibly strong narcotic.”

The Wheel Of Time is out on Amazon Prime Video – hear our review in the latest episode of Backstage – the film and TV podcast from Sky News.

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‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

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'Music is back' as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

UK music sales hit a 20-year high of £2.4bn in 2024, helped by pop megastar Taylor Swift’s latest album, and driven by streaming and the vinyl revival, figures show.

Revenues from recorded music reached an all-time high, more even than at the peak of the CD era, according to annual figures from the digital entertainment and retail association ERA.

Total consumer spending on recorded music – both subscriptions and purchases – topped the previous record of £2.2bn in 2001, ERA said.

Noah Kahan performs during Soundside Music Festival on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024, in Bridgeport, Conn. (Photo by Scott Roth/Invision/AP)
Image:
Noah Kahan performing during the Soundside Music Festival in September. Pic: AP

Takings from streaming services including Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon rose by 7.8% to a little over £2bn.

Almost £200m was spent on vinyl albums, an annual uplift of 10.5%, while CD album revenues were flat at just over £126m.

Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was the biggest-selling album of the year, aided by her record-smashing worldwide Eras tour.

More than 783,000 copies were bought, nearly 112,000 of them on vinyl – making it 2024’s biggest-selling vinyl album.

More on Taylor Swift

The biggest single of the year was Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, generating the equivalent of 1.99 million sales.

ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said 2024 was “a banner year for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high records in both value and volume.

Ms Bayley called it the “stunning culmination of music’s comeback which has seen sales more than double since their low point in 2013. We can now say definitively – music is back.”

Despite the increasingly strong performance by the British music industry, artists are said to be receiving less money.

Experts have said the musicians make less than people would think because of the role of streaming – platforms do not normally pay artists directly and divide any owed payments among the rights holders of songs.

Music revenues grew by 7.4% in 2024, while video rose by 6.9%, and games fell by 4.4%, according to preliminary figures.

Subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV grew by 8.3% to £4.5bn – almost 90% of the sector’s revenues.

Deadpool & Wolverine was the biggest-selling title of the year, with sales of 561,917 – more than 80% of them sold digitally.

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Despite the games sector’s 4.4% decline last year, it remains nearly twice as large as the recorded music business.

Full game sales saw a drop-off with PC download-to-own down 5%, digital console games down 15% and boxed physical games down 35%, in favour of subscription models which grew by 12%.

EA Sports FC 25 – formerly known as Fifa was once again the biggest-selling game of the year, generating 2.9 million unit sales, 80% of them as digital formats.

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Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: ‘I’d automatically get defensive’

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Kieran Culkin on receiving notes from Jesse Eisenberg on A Real Pain: 'I'd automatically get defensive'

Kieran Culkin says he doesn’t care if his projects get badly reviewed as long as he enjoyed himself doing them.

The 42-year-old recently won best supporting actor in a motion picture at the Golden Globes for his performance in A Real Pain.

He tells Sky News he isn’t dependent on positive feedback, but it is “cool” when people find a connection to his work.

“I’m doing this [acting] around 36 years. I’ve been sort of trained or whatever, conditioned, to just not care what an audience response is to something,” he says.

“I’ve been in plays that I think ‘this is bad, but I’m enjoying it’. I don’t really care or if it gets poorly reviewed, I don’t really care. So I still sort of have that mentality but it’s actually quite nice that people are connecting with [A Real Pain]. To hear people that have seen it say, I know a guy like Benji or talk about him, it’s like that’s what this feeling is”.

The Succession actor stars alongside Jesse Eisenberg in the film about cousins who take a trip to Poland to see the country their grandmother left.

Culkin says taking notes from a co-star, who also wrote and directed the film, was a new and challenging experience.

“That’s tough; it just is,” he says.

“[Jesse] would give me a note, my chest would puff up and I would automatically get really defensive, like, I’m gonna hit this guy.”

Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain. Pic: Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures 2024
Image:
Culkin and Eisenberg. Pic: Searchlight Pictures

‘The biggest taboo on a movie’

Eisenberg says playing the role and being the filmmaker made him “nervous” because he sees actors giving notes to be the “biggest taboo on a movie”.

“You don’t give an actor notes – never do that. You can commit arson on a movie set before you can give an actor notes,” he says.

Will Sharpe and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain. Pic: Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures 2024
Image:
Will Sharpe and Eisenberg. Pic: Searchlight Pictures

A Real Pain is set in Poland and is inspired by a real-life trip Eisenberg took with his now wife Anna Strout more than 20 years ago to retrace his family’s roots.

“Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” he says – and so looking at Poland and its history became a huge inspiration to him.

The Now You See Me actor first wrote a play, The Revisionist, which debuted off-Broadway in 2013, and spent the decade redeveloping it to become the “buddy road trip” A Real Pain.

(From L-R): Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Gray, Jesse Eisenberg, Kurt Egyiawan, David Oreskes and Will Sharpe in A Real Pain. Pic: Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures 2024
Image:
Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey, Jesse Eisenberg, Kurt Egyiawan, Daniel Oreskes and Will Sharpe (L-R). Pic: Searchlight Pictures

‘It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country’

The film weaves through the story of cousins reconnecting on their journey to visit, for the first time, their grandmother’s home before she was displaced during the Holocaust.

Eisenberg is currently in the process of gaining Polish citizenship and says his relationship with the country has changed over the years.

He says: “With Polish heritage, you grow up hearing that it was the site of the murder of all of your family and you hear that it’s bleak and especially if you’re a kid of the 80s and 90s like I am, you hear about bread lines from the Soviet era. And so going there was just unbelievably the polar opposite of what I had heard growing up.

“It’s this beautiful, warm, welcoming country and not only beautiful, warm and welcoming, but like what they did for me and allowed me to do, to tell my family’s story, to be able to shoot at a concentration camp, to be able to shoot on this very hallowed grounds of the various locations we were on was just amazing. I’m in such debt to them.”

Read more:
‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales
Zendaya and Tom Holland engagement rumours swirl

‘I grew up knowing performance was normal’

A Real Pain looks at how a person’s family history can shape who they become.

Eisenberg says growing up with a mother who worked as a birthday party clown helped him see acting as an attainable career.

He says: “Every morning I saw this woman get dressed up in a ridiculous outfit and put on crazy face makeup and tune her guitar to the piano. So, I grew up knowing that performance was normal.

“I didn’t grow up thinking that people who perform are weird and actors are weird and why do they? You know, I grew up thinking to behave in this silly way can be a professional job.

“So it just stayed in me. And now what we do is kind of ridiculous, but we take it seriously.”

A Real Pain is in cinemas now.

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‘Music is back’ as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

Published

on

By

'Music is back' as Taylor Swift helps drive record UK sales

UK music sales hit a 20-year high of £2.4bn in 2024, helped by pop megastar Taylor Swift’s latest album, and driven by streaming and the vinyl revival, figures show.

Revenues from recorded music reached an all-time high, more even than at the peak of the CD era, according to annual figures from the digital entertainment and retail association ERA.

Total consumer spending on recorded music – both subscriptions and purchases – topped the previous record of £2.2bn in 2001, ERA said.

Noah Kahan performs during Soundside Music Festival on Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024, in Bridgeport, Conn. (Photo by Scott Roth/Invision/AP)
Image:
Noah Kahan performing during the Soundside Music Festival in September. Pic: AP

Takings from streaming services including Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon rose by 7.8% to a little over £2bn.

Almost £200m was spent on vinyl albums, an annual uplift of 10.5%, while CD album revenues were flat at just over £126m.

Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was the biggest-selling album of the year, aided by her record-smashing worldwide Eras tour.

More than 783,000 copies were bought, nearly 112,000 of them on vinyl – making it 2024’s biggest-selling vinyl album.

More on Taylor Swift

The biggest single of the year was Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, generating the equivalent of 1.99 million sales.

ERA chief executive Kim Bayley said 2024 was “a banner year for music, with streaming and vinyl taking the sector to all-time-high records in both value and volume.

Ms Bayley called it the “stunning culmination of music’s comeback which has seen sales more than double since their low point in 2013. We can now say definitively – music is back.”

Music revenues grew by 7.4% in 2024, while video rose by 6.9%, and games fell by 4.4%, according to preliminary figures.

Subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV grew by 8.3% to £4.5bn – almost 90% of the sector’s revenues.

Deadpool & Wolverine was the biggest-selling title of the year, with sales of 561,917 – more than 80% of them sold digitally.

Read more:
Zendaya and Tom Holland engagement rumours swirl
J-Lo and Ben Affleck divorce settled
Aubrey Plaza on death of filmmaker husband
‘Nepo babies have never faced so much hate’

Despite the games sector’s 4.4% decline last year, it remains nearly twice as large as the recorded music business.

Full game sales saw a drop-off with PC download-to-own down 5%, digital console games down 15% and boxed physical games down 35%, in favour of subscription models which grew by 12%.

EA Sports FC 25 – formerly known as Fifa was once again the biggest-selling game of the year, generating 2.9 million unit sales, 80% of them as digital formats.

Continue Reading

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