When Elvis star Austin Butler arrived at this year’s BAFTA Awards, it wasn’t his model girlfriend Kaia Gerber who accompanied the actor as his plus-one.
Instead, Butler attended the ceremony with Polly Bennett, the movement coach who spent months working with the star to help him transform into The King.
When the camera panned to his seat after his name was called out as the winner of this year’s best actor award, it was Bennett he was hugging; on stage, she was his first thank you very much: “I could not have done this without you and I love you so much.”
Image: Pic: Warner Bros
Bennett, a British movement director and choreographer who is based in London, is the go-to woman for transformations when actors need to portray very famous real-life people.
After working on the London 2012 Olympics and later as an assistant choreographer for Steve Coogan and John C Reilly for 2018’s Stan & Ollie, she landed the job as the chief movement coach behind Rami Malek‘s Oscar-winning portrayal of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. Taking on the royals for The Crown soon followed, and this year she completed her “musical icon trilogy” with British actress Naomi Ackie’s metamorphosis into Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance With Somebody.
With millions watching their every move, actors are used to being scrutinised, critiqued and criticised. But playing an icon, knowing your performance is going to be compared with the much-worshipped real thing, is perhaps one of the hardest jobs in the business.
“I think it’s a massive task because people have such an affiliation for Elvis,” Bennett tells Sky News. “People know him, people know the performances, so it didn’t slide past either of us that it was quite a big deal.”
‘Imagine you’ve got a mosquito on the back of your knee…’
Image: Pic: Ruby Bell
Bennett’s planned six months working with Butler for the Baz Luhrmann production, which was filmed in Australia, ended up turning into a year-and-a-half, on and off, in part due to breaks during the pandemic. They worked together for several hours every day.
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The Butler she met before their rehearsals started was “a really musical guy” already; he played the piano, had played guitar to a certain level, “and was a sort of closet singer”. The groundwork was there. They practised swing and tap dancing to get the feel of Presley, and recited his lyrics as poetry.
We have met at a dance studio in central London, and Bennett demonstrates her methods for conveying movements to make them real. It’s not simply “shake your hand”, but “reach out to show off your wedding ring” and shake “as if you’re taking off a glove”. For the Elvis leg shake: “I’d like you to imagine you’ve got a little mosquito on the back of your kneecap. So it’s not coming from your hip, it’s coming from your knee.”
This is where it all comes from, she says. “There’s so many ‘isms’ that people think [Elvis] does, and it’s all based in a truth, it’s all based in an understanding of something. But actually, the more footage I watched, the more research I did, the more books I read, the more interviews I saw… actually, it’s not really his hips that are the first thing that move, it’s his feet, it’s his knees.”
No copying allowed
Image: (L-R) Rami Malek, Bennett and Butler at the BAFTAs. Pic: Greg Williams
Luhrmann’s Elvis charts the singer from his teenage years until his death at the age of 42, so Butler, now 31, had to learn different Presleys as he aged. “We had to keep him flexible in that sense because the filming schedule was out of sequence. He’d be in the ’50s one day and then the next day he would be in a jumpsuit [in the early ’70s] on stage.”
Bennett also used Presley’s heritage to teach Butler. “His mum used to tap dance and do the shuffles and the bops in their house. That’s what Elvis grew up around – a mum who was quite effervescent, and moved. So rather than just looking at one piece of footage and going, that’s how he moves now, it’s trying to rewind and go, where did he get this from? That’s so much more helpful for an actor than just copying.
“We’re trying to understand the difference between imitation and embodying. And obviously Austin, as much as he tried, isn’t an exact replica of Elvis; his arms are different lengths, his body is a different shape. So you have to try and find the essence of a person rather than try and do everything exact, because everything exact actually doesn’t sit right in Austin’s body.”
‘I made Rami walk up and down Oxford Street with his mic’
Image: Malek as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, and Naomi Ackie (below) as Whitney Houston in I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Pics: 20th Century Fox/Sony Pictures
Working with Butler was different to Malek, who was not such a natural mover. “We had to do a lot of work of just understanding music, hearing beats in music, hearing accents, being able to hear the half counts… at that point he wasn’t a performer that had ever been on stage himself. So I made Rami walk up and down Oxford Street with his microphone above his head, while he was training, to get him used to the idea of people looking at him, and wanting people to look at him.”
Mercury boxed as a child, she says, which is reflected in the way he performed. “[I said to Rami], what do you see in his stage performances that feels similar to that? And Rami was like, ‘he does the fist raises’. He’s not just doing it because it feels good, he’s doing it because it’s something that he’s worked on his whole life.”
Ackie’s transformation into Houston was just as impressive, says Bennett, despite the film falling a little under the radar in comparison with the other two. They worked on her background as a gospel singer and also the fact she was a tomboy growing up, very different to the glamorous superstar people came to know.
“When she was a kid, she didn’t wear dresses, she was wearing dungarees and hanging out with her brothers, and she was exposed to drugs very early. We spoke a lot about a boy in a dress, as Whitney. So the idea that she was a little boy, and she’d put a dress on, so she’s sort of acting feminine, rather than inherently being what we understand as feminine.”
Will Butler win the Oscar?
Image: Pic: Warner Bros
With a BAFTA and a Golden Globe already under his rhinestone belt, Butler could well find himself following in Malek’s footsteps and making a winner’s speech on Oscars night, too (it appears to be a two-horse race between him and The Whale actor Brendan Fraser).
Win or lose, Bennett says she is proud of what they have achieved. “I mean, the fact that there’s nobody going, ‘he doesn’t look like Elvis’ or ‘he doesn’t sound like Elvis,” she laughs. “It’s quite nice that we’ve achieved that for the fans, for the family, and for the people involved in telling the story.”
For an actor playing a real person, those behind-the-scenes roles – the hair and make-up artists and vocal trainers, as well as movement coaches – play a huge part in winning those awards.
Bennett agrees and laughs. “I’m not trying to go, look at me, look at all the amazing things I’ve done. But I do love the idea of people being recognised for the work they do, because it’s not just people out there on their own, watching YouTube late at night, thinking about how to play Elvis Presley.
“It was amazing to go with [Butler] as his guest to the BAFTAs because that’s also him acknowledging that people in my position – choreographers, movement directors – we don’t have awards, we’re not part of that circuit.” She pauses and gives a wry smile. “Which is a shame.”
You can watch the Academy Awards on Sunday 12 March from 11pm exclusively on Sky News and Sky Showcase.And for everything you need to know ahead of the ceremony, don’t miss our special Backstage podcast available on Friday morning, plus a winners special episode from Monday morning
One of Harper Lee’s surviving relatives says it’s possible there could be major unpublished works by the author still to be discovered, following the release of eight of her previously unseen short stories.
Describing the mystery around a manuscript titled The Long Goodbye, which Lee wrote before To Kill A Mockingbird, Lee’s nephew, Dr Edwin Conner, told Sky News: “Even the family doesn’t know everything that remains in her papers. So, it could be there waiting to be published.”
Dr Conner says Lee submitted a 111-page manuscript, titled The Long Goodbye, after writing Go Set A Watchman in 1957.
The retired English professor explains: “It’s not clear to me or to others in the family, to what extent [The Long Goodbye] might have been integrated into To Kill a Mockingbird, which she wrote immediately after, or to what extent it was a freestanding manuscript that is altogether different and that might stand to be published in the future.”
Image: Lee researched Reverend Maxwell’s death, but no book was ever published. Pic: AP
A second mystery exists in the form of a true crime novel, The Reverend, which Lee was known to have begun researching in the late 1970s, about Alabama preacher Reverend Willie Maxwell who was accused of five murders before being murdered himself.
Dr Conner said: “The manuscript of a nonfiction piece, that according to some people doesn’t exist, according to others who claim to have seen it, does [is also a mystery]. We don’t know where it is, or whether it is, really.
“That could be a surprise that has yet to be revealed if we discover it and it’s published, which is a real possibility.”
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He believes much of the manuscript was written in his family home and says his mother, Louise, who was Lee’s older sister, saw a “finished version of it” on the dining room table.
Dr Conner says there are “others who just as fiercely say no, it was never completed”.
Image: A C Lee (L) – the inspiration for Atticus Finch with his grandchildren, including Edwin Conner (C), in 1953
‘She did want to publish these stories’
There has long been debate over why Lee published just two books in her lifetime.
To Kill a Mockingbird came out in 1960. Selling more than 46 million copies worldwide, translated into more than 40 languages and winning a Pulitzer Prize, it’s arguably the most influential American book of the 20th century.
Fifty-five years later, Lee published a sequel, Go Set A Watchman, written ahead of Mockingbird, but set at a later date.
Then aged 88, and with failing health, there were questions over how much influence Lee had over the decision to publish.
Asked how happy she’d be to see some of her earliest work, containing early outlines for Mockingbird’s narrator Jean Louise Finch and the story’s hero Atticus Finch, now hitting the shelves, Dr Conner says: “I think she’d be delighted.”
Image: A previously unseen image of one of Lee’s short story transcripts. Pic: Harper Lee Estate
He says Lee had presented them to her first agent, Maurice Crane, at their first meeting in 1956, “precisely because she did want to publish these stories”.
And while dubbing them “apprentice stories,” which he admits “don’t represent her at her best as a writer,” he says they show “literary genius of a kind”.
Notoriously private, he says the stories – which were discovered neatly typed out in one of Lee’s New York apartments after her death – offer “deeply enthralling new glimpses into her as a person”.
Never marrying or having children, he says Lee maintained a degree of privacy even with her family: “You never saw her complete personality… We thought we knew her, we thought we’d seen everything, but no, we hadn’t.”
Image: George W Bush awards Lee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. Pic: Reuters
‘That’s it, I’m not giving any more interviews’
While describing her as a “complicated woman,” he insists Lee was far from the recluse she’s frequently painted as.
He says: “In company, she was most of the time delightful. She was a lively personality, she was funny, witty, and you would think she was very outgoing.”
But Lee was known to have struggled with her success.
Dr Conner explains: “She never ever wanted fame or celebrity because she suspected, or knew, that would involve the kind of uncomfortable situations in public situations that she found just no satisfaction or pleasure in”.
He says while in the early years of Mockingbird Lee gave interviews, the wild success of the book soon rendered such promotion unnecessary, leading her to decide: “That’s it, I’m not giving any more interviews”.
While he admits she was subsequently much happier, he goes on: “Not that she was a recluse, as some people thought. She wasn’t at all a recluse, but she didn’t enjoy public appearances and interviews particularly. She wanted the work to speak for itself.”
Image: Truman Capote and Harper Lee in April 1963. Pic: AP/The Broadmoor Historic Collection
‘Deeply hurt’ by Truman Capote
Famously close to Truman Capote, one of the pieces in Lee’s newly released collection is a profile of her fellow author.
Dr Conner says that piece – a love-letter of sorts, describing Capote’s literary achievements – is all the more remarkable because at the point Lee wrote it in 1966, when she and Capote “were not even on speaking terms”.
He says Lee “probably knew [Capote] better than any other person alive when that was written”, adding, “she did love him as a friend very much, even when he was not speaking to her”.
Friends since childhood – and the prototype for the character of Dill in Mockingbird – Capote later hired Lee to help him research his 1965 true crime novel In Cold Blood.
Despite his book’s relative success, Dr Conner believes Capote was “bitter” over the fact Mockingbird far eclipsed it in accolades and recognition.
“He had been writing for much longer. He felt that he was at least as good as she was, and he was very envious of her success”.
Dr Conner says Lee was “deeply hurt” at Capote’s rejection of her, never speaking about him in later life.
Recalling his own meeting with Capote many years later, Dr Conner says he “got a personal sense of how [Capote] could charm the socks off of anybody, male or female”.
He says it was noteworthy that while Capote asked about his mother, who he had been fond of, he “never once mentioned” Harper.
Sky News has contacted Lee’s lawyer and the executor of her estate, Tonya Carter, for comment.
The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays, by Harper Lee is on sale from Tuesday
In the space of just a few hours, we witnessed a gangland killing, a jewellery heist and stepped onboard a private jet.
We observed a billionaire CEO at work, a dramatic family showdown in a hospital and a drunken karaoke party.
It was all part of a tour around a massive Chinese facility producing what are known as vertical micro-dramas. To describe the experience as somewhat dizzying is an understatement.
If you haven’t heard of them, micro-dramas are a new cultural sensation sweeping not just China but the world, a remarkable example of China’s booming soft power.
They are essentially serialised productions split into episodes of roughly a minute, shot in vertical and viewed solely on smartphones.
Think soap operas for the TikTok generation.
‘Secret surrogate to the Mafia King’
The story lines are sensational and melodramatic with titles that border the ridiculous; ‘Ex-Convict nanny and Billionaire single dad’, ‘Pregnant by my Tough Daddy CEO’ and ‘Secret Surrogate to the Mafia King’, just some examples.
Image: Micro dramas are designed to be watched on smartphones only
The action is fast and the characters simplistic, while autoplay and multiple mini cliff hangers are designed to provide an addictive dopamine hit.
It’s a format which has sprung to life in just the last few years, developed initially in China in the wake of the pandemic, and its success has been extraordinary.
Some of the most-watched titles have hundreds of millions of views and downloads of short drama apps were over six times higher in the first quarter of 2025 than that same period last year, according to data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm.
The Chinese government recently revealed that over 50% of all internet users in China have watched a micro-drama, more than have ordered food online or used a ride-hailing service.
‘You can easily binge five or six episodes on the subway commute’
Image: One of the many set designs in the production factory
“People’s lives are so stressful and packed these days,” explains Ji Jingdong, a producer of micro-dramas who made the switch from traditional film around three years ago.
“When you watch vertical-screen content, you can easily binge five or six episodes on the subway commute, right? And let’s face it, you’re barely halfway through an ordinary TV episode before you reach your stop.
“Scrolling through vertical screens at a fast pace is actually pretty stress-relieving. Especially those so-called ‘mindless dramas’ – they’re incredibly relaxing to watch.”
That mass appeal, paired with extremely fast turnaround times and no-frills production is translating into massive revenues.
Last year, the industry revenue was an astonishing $6.9bn, for the first time exceeding the value of the Chinese box office.
Its figure is almost 14 times as high as in 2021, just three years ago.
But with this huge reach and revenues comes both challenge and opportunity for a system like China where everything including cultural products is strictly controlled.
Image: An actor is filmed for the latest micro-drama
1,200 series taken down
Indeed in February of this year over 1,200 series were taken down, deemed too “vulgar” or inappropriate, while a wave of new regulations now require projects over a certain value to have government approval.
In addition there are initiatives to encourage production houses to make dramas that promote certain values such as ‘Learn the law with Micro-Short Dramas’ and ‘Explore intangible cultural heritage through micro short dramas’.
It’s a framework they are aware of at the Meigao Micro Drama Super Factory, in the southeastern city of Quzhou.
This 67,000 square metre facility was initially constructed as a COVID quarantine hotel, but it now houses around 200 different sets where multiple crews can shoot their dramas simultaneously.
There is almost any indoor environment you could imagine – from a bank, courthouse and subway to a ballroom, office and multiple home environments.
The CEO Dai Wenxue explains with pride how they made 500 micro-dramas last year.
But there is also a clear acknowledgement that the transformation of this venue was achieved with local government support, and that this massive Chinese success story also serves a political purpose.
Image: The industry revenue was $6.9bn last year
Aligning with ‘the nation’s overarching strategic vision’
“The early phase emphasised growth, with the government taking a relatively relaxed but not lax approach,” he explains. “Now, the focus has shifted toward premium production, cultural exports and telling compelling Chinese stories.
“This aligns with the nation’s overarching strategic vision. That’s the current landscape.”
Indeed, while the majority of productions are fun and frivolous, for its critics, the industry is a perfect propaganda tool.
This autumn, in fact, saw a huge boom in government-encouraged patriotic war productions to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two and a huge accompanying military parade in Beijing.
All this mattered because the format is now being aggressively exported abroad.
Image: The Meigao Micro Drama Super Factory in Quzhou
Almost all production houses worth their salt are leaning into English language productions. Meigao is in fact building an entire second location with American-style scenes.
And it’s no wonder when you look at the numbers. According to analysis undertaken by Sensor Tower, in the first quarter of 2025, downloads in the US had gone up 54% compared to the same period in 2024. In Latin America it was 69% and in India a remarkable 113%.
‘A huge uptick’
“So in the past 10 months, right after the Chinese New Year, there was definitely a huge uptick,” says Max Olsen, an American actor living in Beijing. For him and other Western actors there has been a hugely noticeable boom in work .
“A bunch of productions decided that they were going to shoot, you know, they’re going to produce one a week.
“Obviously, with money, with eyeballs, with attention, comes a degree of power.”
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Three things you may have missed from China this week
There are of course questions about how this type of soft power translates and what China could or would do with it. But it is just one of a number of cultural exports playing into a trend of China positioning itself as accessible and relatable, even ‘cool’.
Indeed for such a new format there is clearly still results yet to be seen.
“I don’t think the double-digit growth will continue forever,” says Olsen.
“But I suspect in five years’ time, we’ll have a very established industry.”
“It’s a cliché,” says Bruce Springsteen, “but he is a rock star – and you can’t fake that.”
The Boss is talking about Jeremy Allen White, star of The Bear, who is now playing him in the upcoming film Deliver Me From Nowhere.
It comes after a flurry of biopics on musical greats in recent years, from Bohemian Rhapsody and Elvis to A Complete Unknown and Back To Black, but rather than an all-encompassing look at his epic career, this one focuses on a very specific period of its subject’s life; a raw portrayal of the young Springsteen, on the cusp of even greater success following the release of The River album, but struggling with inner demons and childhood trauma while writing the stark follow-up Nebraska, released in 1982.
Image: Bruce Springsteen on stage in LA in 1985. Pic: AP/ Lennox McLendon
Speaking at a Q&A held at Spotify’s London headquarters ahead of the film’s release, Springsteen, 76, said he had watched The Bear and “knew that was the kind of actor” needed – someone who could convey his inner turmoil, as well as play a convincing rock star.
“You either got that or you don’t have it, and he just had the swagger.”
Directed and co-written by Scott Cooper, the film is based on the book of the same name by Warren Zanes, and is the first time Springsteen’s life has been depicted on the big screen.
The star was on board straight away. “I figured, I’m 76 years old, I don’t really care what the f*** I do anymore. As you get older, certainly at my age, you take more risks in your work and in life in general.”
Image: Jeremy Allen White stars as Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere. Pic: Disney/ 20th Century Studios
He and White first met at one of his gigs at Wembley Stadium, where Springsteen prepared himself for lots of questions. “I figured this guy is going to be tremendously interested in me.” But White had done his homework, arriving “so prepared that he really asked me very few questions”.
Springsteen was on set regularly, “which I always apologise to [White] for because… it’s gotta be really weird playing the guy with the guy’s stupid ass sitting there.”
Learning five Bruce songs
And White also had to take on the music. When told he would need to sing and play guitar, his jokey response was: “I don’t do those things. Are you sure?” He had about six months and learned on a 1955 Gibson J-200, sent to him by Springsteen, as the closest model to his Nebraska guitar.
“I was getting together with [teacher JD Simo] on Zoom, four or five, six times a week to prepare. And the first time we hopped on, I said, ‘hey, I’m so excited to learn how to play guitar with you’. And he said, ‘we don’t have time to learn how to play the guitar, we have time to learn these five Bruce songs’. So I learned the guitar in a very strange way.”
Springsteen says it “took me a moment” to get used to seeing his story being dramatised, to White playing him. But he was happy.
“I always go, damn, when did I get that good looking?” he jokes. But he says White’s performance was impressive, that he was able to sing songs “that are hard for me to sing, some of them”.
Keeping the sweat going
Mastering the big hits, Born To Run, Born In The USA, was tough, says White. Thinking he would need to keep his heart rate high for his performance scenes, White says he took a weighted rope on set, to skip and “keep my sweat going”. Turns out, it wasn’t necessary. “When you perform Born To Run or Born In The USA, that sweat comes naturally… I did not need to use that rope.”
Part of the film goes back to Springsteen’s childhood, to the house he grew up in. “They did a very, very good job of putting that house back together,” he says. It is the home he visits “in my dreams to this day, at least a couple of times year… so being able to physically walk into what felt like that living space, my grandmother’s house, my grandfather’s house with my parents, we all lived there together. It was quite a miracle and quite wonderful”.
Image: Springsteen with White and Stephen Graham at the Deliver Me From Nowhere London Film Festival premiere. Pic: Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP
British actor and recent Emmy winner Stephen Graham plays Springsteen’s late father, and the drama delves into their difficult relationship.
Remembering the family struggles
Reliving those experiences was “powerful”, the star says. He watched an early screening with his younger sister, who held his hand throughout. “And at the end she says, isn’t it wonderful that we have this… it honours our family, it honours the memory of the struggles that we went through… To have it on film in the way that it was portrayed, meant a great deal to my sister and myself.”
Springsteen says he hopes people will connect with the film, with this part of his story, the same as the crowds in front of him do every time he walks on stage.
“The E Street Band will be good every night because that’s what we do,” he says. “But how great we’re going to be is up to you… Hopefully there’s an element of transcendence… and hopefully it stays with [the audience] for as long as they need.”