British actor Daniel Radcliffe has charted an ambitious course ever further from his Harry Potter days, taking on very different roles in no less than three films premiered at the Toronto film festival this week.
The former boy wizard flexed his acting chops in Michael Dowse’s romantic comedy The F Word, Alexandre Aja’s fantastical murder mystery Horns and as Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings.
“I’m excited that people will finally get a chance to see me do different stuff,” he said.
He chose these far more mature roles, based on scripts about murder and homosexuality, that he loved and responded to, he said.
“It certainly wasn’t a strategy that they’d all be at TIFF [the Toronto International Film Festival],” he said.
In Horns, based on Joe Hill’s dark novel of the same name, Radcliffe plays a young man who grows horns after being accused of killing his girlfriend and embarks to solve her murder, while as Ginsberg he is thrown into New York’s wild jazz scene and parties.
The latter includes a steamy sex scene with Radcliffe and another man.
Meanwhile, The F Word pairs Radcliffe as hopeless romantic Wallace with Chantry, played by Zoe Kazan, and takes them into a complicated world of modern relationships.
The Dallas Buyers Club premiered on Saturday night, giving the moviegoing world its first glimpse of Matthew McConaughey’s highly anticipated performance as a Texas man diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s.
Based on the true story of Ron Woodroof, the film follows his frustration with the US Food and Drug Administration and his enterprising smuggling of more promising drugs.
For the role, McConaughey lost nearly 22.kg, and appears startlingly gaunt throughout the film. After the film, though, McConaughey told the audience his weight loss was not the hard part.
“That was the easy decision,” he said. “I would have been embarrassed standing here looking like I do now playing the guy. That really wouldn’t have worked.”
McConaughey’s performance as a hard-drinking, homophobic rodeo cowboy whose illness changes him in many ways for the better was immediately hailed as a sure bet for a best actor Oscar nomination.
The Nelson Mandela biopic Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom premiered at the festival with a heavy dose of reverence for its subject, and a few extra kilograms of muscle, too.
Idris Elba stars as the South African leader in the film, which the Weinstein Co will release in late November.
The film, directed by Justin Chadwick, takes a classical, inspirational biopic approach to telling the epic tale of Mandela’s life story. While the brawny Elba has a much larger frame than Mandela, Chadwick said he was “the brave choice” for the role.”
“We’re not going for a looky-likey, soundy-likey version of Mandela,” Chadwick told reporters on Sunday, after a Saturday evening premiere that drew a standing ovation, but mixed reviews. “We’re trying to catch the spirit.”
Producer Anant Singh long ago secured Mandela’s approval.
The 95-year-old Mandela has been ailing, so he was not involved in the production or able to meet with Elba.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
‘THE RED LINE’: Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised a thorough probe into the attack on the senator, who had announced his presidential bid in March Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a possible candidate in the country’s presidential election next year, was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Bogota on Saturday, authorities said. His conservative Democratic Center party released a statement calling it “an unacceptable act of violence.” The attack took place in a park in the Fontibon neighborhood when armed assailants shot him from behind, said the right-wing Democratic Center, which was the party of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The men are not related. Images circulating on social media showed Uribe Turbay, 39, covered in blood being held by several people. The Santa Fe Foundation
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