
The star of Widow’s Bay is that rarest of talents – someone who can do whatever he wants and make it utterly believable. No wonder he just made TV history
On Monday night, Matthew Rhys made history. He is now officially the first actor ever to win Emmy awards for lead roles in all three categories: drama, comedy and limited series. To make things even more extraordinary, he won two of those awards in a single night.
In the comedy category, Rhys won best lead for Widow’s Bay, the superlative Apple comedy horror where he stars as an indecisive mayor whose island suddenly plays host to a supernatural haunting. He also won best lead actor in a limited series or anthology for The Beast in Me, the Netflix drama about a property developer who may (or may not, no spoilers) have murdered his wife. Add this to his 2018 win for The Americans and the trifecta is complete. In other words, the entire world belongs to Matthew Rhys, and we’re all just living in it.
Continue reading...Today it’s a silly sports betting ad, but I can’t see anything she’s done that’s worth this ire. She’s in her 20s: she does dumb things. Enjoy!
Would it be insanely unfashionable to defend Sydney Sweeney? You may or may not have heard that the Euphoria star has done an ad for a sports betting site. Sorry, I think we still have to call them “sports prediction markets” in the United States, which only recently popped its legalised sports betting cherry, and is behaving like a complete teenage boy about the whole thing. Anyway, among other poses, the ad features a naked Sydney holding a couple of American footballs over her breasts, which are – and I feel she would want us to acknowledge this – seriously among the very best in Hollywood. Maybe THE best. Listen, it is what it is. Life would be very boring if we couldn’t say so with a twinkle.
Forgive me. Life is, in fact, very, very boring, because yet another Sydney Sweeney-advertising-centred firestorm has been ignited by this ad. (Last year, some lunatic genuinely suggested her “good jeans” American Eagle ad was something to do with white supremacy and eugenics.) Her latest product endorsement has drawn the ire of a cascade of female athletes, who have described it variously as demeaning women’s sport, sexualised representation of athletes, and “a kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft, [and] every woman who enjoys sports for what it really is – teamwork, friendship, dedication, excellence, unity”.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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Continue reading...Capacity has been overwhelmed by heatwaves that have pushed white goods to breaking point
“In Oxfordshire, recycling centres are filling almost three articulated lorries with discarded fridges every week,” says Simon Perry of W&S Waste Management, which runs a recycling centre in Ardley.
Together, those fridges would cover an area just under half the size of a football pitch. But the space to store them – in Oxfordshire and beyond – has become a growing problem after the Local Government Association (LGA) warned that a mountain of broken fridges was rising in waste centres across England and Wales, as this year’s heatwaves push more white goods to breaking point, and a trend for second/backup refrigeration products keeps growing.
Continue reading...This idea has suddenly gained huge popularity online. But is it just a way to sell us more products – and could it potentially damage our skin?
Gone are the days of the speedy shower; a quick lather with a squirt of shower gel will, apparently, no longer cut it. Double cleansing – once the remit of facial skincare and shampoo routines – has steadily trickled into body-care, too. But should you simply stock up on twice as much shower gel? Is it any more hygienic? And how clean do we really need to be?
As always, TikTok – or rather, #ShowerTok – has a huge number of devotees to this new trend. “Double cleansing will change your life,” says self-care advocate Xara Beqele (@xarabeq) in a video that has almost 10,000 likes. “I think double cleansing is the most effective thing I have added for my shower. I just smell better, feel clean.” Likewise, digital creator Terree Ann (@terreetaughtme) calls double cleansing the body a “hygiene must”. “If you are only washing your body with a hydrating body wash, that’s like washing your body with lotion,” she says in a video that has been shared more than 6,000 times. “If you’re only going in with a scented body wash on top of unclean skin, that’s like spraying Febreze to try to mask the funk instead of properly removing it.” Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that recent research found gen Zs take longer showers than any other age group – despite being most anxious about the climate crisis.
Continue reading...Toronto film festival: riotous lead performance holds together third movie from actor turned film-maker, about a housewife who joins a local musical
Jesse Eisenberg’s last two directorial efforts – the prickly comedy When You Finish Saving the World and the slightly softer A Real Pain – are small films rooted in the real world. They have their little idiosyncrasies, their bits of cinematic flair, but they keep their feet grounded in the here and now. For his third film, Eisenberg has said goodbye to all that (or most of that) and run headlong at the surreal and the absurd, borrowing from Charlie Kaufman and other oddballs to tell a small story in a big way.
The Debut is about a repressed housewife, Mona (Julianne Moore), who decides to audition for a role in a community theater production of a musical called Nosy Neighbors, one of those gassy Manhattan trifles that were so ubiquitous on Broadway a half century ago. Mona’s kids are about to fly the nest, and her husband barely seems to notice her when she’s standing right next to him. So why not have a little creative adventure?
Continue reading...As a teenager, Edmonds had a three-year residency at the Royal Opera House. Her eclectic career – creating NFTs, adverts and films as well as for the stage – reveals a precarious industry moving in new directions
At the age of 18, Charlotte Edmonds was such a promising choreographer (“astonishing”, in the words of the Observer) that the Royal Ballet invented a whole new job for her. As the company’s “young choreographer”, she spent three years learning everything she could at one of the world’s biggest dance institutions. “It’s mad to think that happened,” she says, a decade on.
With that kind of start, you’d expect Edmonds’ career to have followed a predictable narrative, choreographing for the big ballet brands, maybe setting up her own company. But that’s not exactly how it’s gone. Her eclectic portfolio reflects how the dance industry has changed and become ever more precarious, but also expanded in uncharted directions. She has indeed made short works for a number of European ballet companies, but she’s spent more time recently making films, music videos and adverts for the likes of Budweiser and Nike, as well as advocating for artists with dyslexia and launching her own video series, Cameo, in which she interviews female and non-binary choreographers to counter a lack of representation.
Continue reading...Lady Justice Thirlwall condemns ‘complete failure’ to protect babies on neonatal unit at Countess of Chester hospital
Three babies might have survived and seven others could have been protected if hospital bosses and doctors had taken action over concerns about the nurse Lucy Letby, an official inquiry into the deaths has concluded.
A public inquiry led by Lady Justice Thirlwall found a “complete failure” to protect babies on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England.
Continue reading...Dan Thomas, a former Tory councillor, was elected to Senedd as leader of the opposition in May
The leader of Reform UK in Wales is standing down after he was arrested and bailed on suspicion of assault.
Dan Thomas, a former Tory councillor, had only been announced as Reform UK’s Welsh leader by Nigel Farage in February.
Continue reading...Average wages rose by 3.9% in three months to July, signalling pensioners will receive uplift of same percentage in 2027 under triple lock
The government has promised retirees they will be excluded from paying tax on the full new state pension after official figures paved the way for an inflation-beating increase above the tax-free personal allowance.
Figures published on Tuesday showed that average UK wages rose by 3.9% in the three months to July, signalling that pensioners will receive an uplift of the same percentage next year under the triple lock.
Continue reading...Experts air concern over AI lingo redolent of James Joyce’s prose that is creating headaches for monitoring and oversight
AI models have begun communicating in a strange new version of English that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and tech bro jargon, new research has found.
Autonomous AI agents are rapidly creating novel dialects allowing them to converse in an often barely comprehensible language, which risks making it harder for humans to monitor their behaviour.
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