Category: cinema

Here is a fairly watchable thriller about a fine arts and philosophy graduate called Laurie (Isabelle Fuhrman), who is turning 25 and facing a quarter-life crisis. She’s going nowhere fast in a job managing a storage facility in the middle of nowhere, with few customers and fewer uses for that liberal arts degree. Her boyfriend is ticked off by her refusal to spread her wings and join him in Nashville, but she’s got family issues tying her to the place, issues that are about to pale in comparison with the problems she will face courtesy of some tough types rocking up to make her life a living hell.

As the resourceful Laurie, Fuhrman makes for an appealing lead, and a good example of how your breakout role can subtly define the course of your career. At the age of 11 she delivered one of the great child performances in the slickly made 2009 horror Orphan, which set the tone for the kind of work she has found since. Among other things, Unit 234 is a reminder of how great she is, with a toughness and conviction that you itch to see made use of in a wider range of roles.

Not that she’s not having fun in genre films. Also having fun, we find Miami Vice’s Don Johnson as a tough-guy property developer who wants to get his hands on what is inside the lock-up at any cost, and Jack Huston (Boardwalk Empire) as a mysterious man who turns out to have been stashed in said lock-up. Laurie teams up with him against the property developer and his goons, making for an underdogs v baddies showdown with some decent twists up its sleeves, about which it would be uncharitable to say too much. It’s not an all-time classic, but it’ll keep you guessing.

Tarsem Singh’s indulgent epic, produced by Spike Jonze and David Fincher, was little seen on its original release in 2006, and now gets a rerelease in a 4K restoration on the Mubi streaming platform. It’s certainly worth noticing, with its Gilliamesque surrealism, and its setting in Rajasthan, north-western India, offers wonderful landscapes. Its beguiling set pieces feature Justine Waddell playing some deadpan comedy as a gloriously costumed princess – although I have to admit that in general the film’s rather placid, stately, fantasy style can be exasperatingly inert.

The scene is Los Angeles in the early years of silent pictures; Lee Pace plays Roy, a stuntman who is now seriously, perhaps permanently, injured. He is laid up in hospital and deeply depressed after a dangerous fall filming a movie whose lead actress was once his girlfriend, but has now left him for the vapid male star. Roy is befriended by a little Romanian girl from the neighbouring children’s ward; this is Alexandria (played by Catinca Untaru, whose English dialogue is sometimes a little indistinct). Kindly, Roy offers to tell the wide-eyed Alexandria an epic story of adventure featuring five heroes battling a hateful governor, and the story comes to life before our eyes with Roy and Alexandria appearing in it and some whimsical muddling up of Indians and Native Americans.

But Roy has an ulterior motive with this Scheherazade-type storytelling; he wants to take Alexandria into his confidence so that she will steal a bottle of morphine for him, perhaps so that he can take his own life. Waddell plays a nurse who appears to be having an affair with a doctor, and she appears in the story as the princess who is engaged to be married to the warriors’ enemy, but falls for Roy. There are some startling images and the film has a distinct, odd flavour of its own.

France has quite a few grandes dames of cinema, with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Adjani all very much in the game. But none can hold much of a candle to Isabelle Huppert, who is firing on all cylinders as she enters her 70s, in her sixth decade of headline acting performances. Tightly wound and fiery, while simultaneously self-contained and tough as nails, Huppert’s acting persona has been instrumental to a string of masterpieces – and even if the film around her isn’t that great, she’s always magnificent to watch.

With so many amazing credits, stretching back to the 1970s, it’s hard to pick out a few, but we’ll have a go: early attention-grabbers like The Lacemaker and The Judge and the Assassin that graduated to fully-fledged lead performances in Loulou and Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary. Then the really extraordinary ones: La Cérémonie, Ruth Rendell’s scary domestic thriller; the traumatic and traumatising The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke; Claire Denis’ steely White Material; and, of course, Paul Verhoeven’s transgressive rape thriller Elle, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Huppert also likes a collaboration: she’s made numerous films with Chabrol, Haneke, Bertrand Blier – and François Ozon, the director of her new one, The Crime Is Mine, a period thriller in which she plays a washed-up silent film star. (Back in 2002 she appeared in Ozon’s cosy-crime musical 8 Women.)

So what would you like to ask Huppert as she drops in for the Guardian reader interview? Maybe something about Heaven’s Gate, not her first English-language film but the one that brought down the American auteur era? Or what it was like working with Jean-Luc Godard? Whatever is on your mind, please leave a question in the comments by 4pm on Tuesday.

Elizabeth Taylor’s life has traditionally been portrayed as a torrid soap opera. A tale of sex and scandal: eight marriages while dripping in diamonds and battling addiction. But a new documentary tells a different story – and Kim Kardashian is helping rewrite the script.

Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar, a three-part series that airs on BBC2 from Friday, reframes its subject not just as a double Oscar-winner but as a business mogul and trailblazing activist who rewrote the rules of fame.

Among the key contributors is her granddaughter Naomi Wilding, who believes a reappraisal is long overdue.

“I was hesitant to take part but the series tells my grandmother’s story from a more human angle,” said Wilding. “We’re going through a reckoning. Events of the last few years mean we’re ready to look at celebrity from a different perspective. They might have money and power but they’re still fallible people with feelings.

“We can use my grandmother’s life as a cautionary tale. An opportunity to think about how we portray women in the media.”

She thinks “rebel superstar” is an appropriate title. “I hope this series will change perceptions. She was bloody-minded about following her own path and making her own decisions. I’d love a new generation to appreciate that because her story is still so relevant today.”

Wilding believes Taylor was a forerunner of today’s reality stars and influencers: “She was the first celebrity to live her life entirely in public. It wasn’t her choice, initially at least. But eventually she made sense of it and used it as a force for good.

“She was decades ahead of her time in how her private life intertwined with her career. She and Richard [Burton] were the original power ­couple. The ‘Liz and Dick show’ spawned the paparazzi culture we know today, so she consciously took control of the narrative, hiring her own personal photographer [Gianni Bozzacchi, who appears in the docuseries].”

The documentary is executive-produced by Kardashian, who calls herself a protege of Taylor’s and conducted the last interview with her before she died in 2011, aged 79.

“She was unapologetically herself,” Kardashian said. “She was a fighter. Living proof that you can keep evol­ving and changing and have different chapters in your life. She paved the way for all of us who came after her. She’s the blueprint.”

“Kim was inspired by my grandmother, for sure,” said Wilding. “She became a mentor to younger women, taking them under her wing because she understood the trade-off of living in the public eye.”

Kardashian speaks from experience when she says of Taylor: “Opening yourself up to that scrutiny is hard on your soul.”

Taylor rose to fame during different times. “Her life played out in headlines which were often miso­gynistic through today’s lens,” said Wilding.

“She was originally a product of the studio system, sure, but she was treated as a commodity for decades afterwards. Her first marriage was basically arranged by MGM. Aged 16, she was kissing middle-aged men on screen. I thought about her a lot when #MeToo happened, wondering what stories she would share.”

The documentary features previously unheard audio recordings of an unguarded Taylor reflecting on her life and first-hand testimony from her inner circle including goddaughter Paris Jackson, daughter of Michael.

Together with her siblings and cousins, Wilding is an ambassador for The Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation.

“Realising she could make a difference in the Aids and HIV community is where she finally made sense of fame and truly became an influencer. It’s important work – and it’s extra important to us because it was important to her.”

It all started – or stop-started, perhaps – with some tiny pterodactyls. As 1924 drew to a close, Marcel Delgado was putting the finishing touches to 50 model dinosaurs. For months, the sculptor had been meticulously constructing a range of Tyrannosaurus rexes, brontosauruses and pterodactyls. Now he was getting ready to pass them on to pioneering animator Willis O’Brien, who would painstakingly move each creature an almost imperceptible amount, shoot another frame, and then repeat the process.

A year later, The Lost World – the first ever feature film using what was termed “stop-motion” – was released, transforming Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name into an action-packed spectacle. Audiences were astounded, even dumbfounded by its seemingly supernatural special effects.

To modern eyes, the film itself is a bit of a dinosaur. Its technology is prehistoric, its colonialist themes outdated and its animated sequences clunky. But the meteoric impact of these miniature dinosaurs is still felt; a century later, stop-motion cinema is very much alive and flicking.

“Stop-motion animation is often overlooked. But it’s a really important part of cinema history,” says Justin Johnson, lead programmer of a BFI season on the art form, Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen.

Aptly, the genre’s own timeline is a stuttering one. After The Lost World, a golden age emerged; O’Brien became a famed animator, working with Delgado on 1933’s King Kong. Then, in 1940, animator George Pal pioneered the technique of “replacement animation” – designing multiple wooden heads for puppets to facilitate an array of facial expressions. Visual effects auteur Ray Harryhausen took things further with “dynamation” which sandwiched models between live-action footage of a background and foreground. For the first time, it allowed animated characters and real-life actors to interact; in 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, for example, the titular heroes are attacked by a skeleton crew of, well, skeletons.

Stop-motion also took over the small screen, with playful children’s TV series such as Trumpton and Clangers winning over kids and adults alike. Clay animation, too, became popular, thanks in part to the shapeshifting plasticine man Morph. The beloved terracotta character was the brainchild of Aardman Animations, founded in 1972 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. It would go on to craft a string of beloved characters all cast in the same eccentric mould, including Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Rocky Rhodes, Chicken Run’s plucky rooster.

An early hit for the studio came in 1986, when Aardman animated the visuals for Peter Gabriel’s smash hit Sledgehammer. The video was an MTV mainstay in the late 80s and went on to bag a record nine trophies at the network’s VMAs.

But as stop-motion techniques rapidly improved, so did a less laborious new alternative: CGI. Ironically, it was yet another dinosaur film – 1993’s Jurassic Park – that almost killed stop-motion. Steven Spielberg had originally hired animator Phil Tippett to work on the dinosaur effects. But Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s special effects studio, instead proposed a new CGI approach. “I’ve just become extinct,” Tippett quipped.

Tippett was only half right. While CGI has become the go-to way for film-makers to ape reality, 1993 also brought two gamechangers that would demonstrate the technology’s creative possibilities. The first was The Nightmare Before Christmas, Tim Burton’s macabre festive triumph. Directed by animator Henry Selick, the film’s 109,440 frames saw Jack Skellington and the ghoulish residents of Halloween Town come to life in phantasmagoric detail.

Then, on Boxing Day, Aardman’s short film Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers was released in the UK. A commercial smash, it would go on to win the Oscar for best animated short. Among those it inspired was Will Becher, whose fanmail to the studio later landed him a role making plasticine wings for Chicken Run. Now, he is a lead director who helmed the acclaimed A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon. “Aardman’s stories come from a place of character and comedy. They’re very British,” he says. “It’s bold and poppy, all about goofy, googly eyes and brows and big mouth shapes.”

In the 21st century, it’s notable that many of the greatest stop-motion successes have been in children’s horror, with plasticine faces falling in just the right part of the uncanny valley to be both cute and creepy. In 2009, Selick’s Coraline became the third highest-grossing stop-motion film ever, bagging awards for its otherworldly tale of a young girl opening a door to a sublimely strange and unsettling world.

The film was created by Laika Studios, founded in 2005 in Portland by Travis Knight, son of Nike founder Phil. The studio has followed up the success of Coraline ($172m at the global box office) with films including ParaNorman, Missing Link and The Boxtrolls. Laika is at the cutting edge of the art form: in order to make its fantasies a reality, the studio uses 3D printing and some CGI, a tightrope act between tradition and technology. Laika has transported five of its miniature sets over to the UK for the BFI season. Each display represents a reconstruction of a single keyframe from a different Laika film, lasting just one 24th of a second on screen.

For all their irreverence, painstaking, tortuous work goes on behind the scenes of these productions. The art requires extreme dedication and delayed gratification. Every single move is minute; and it takes hours, or often days, to create seconds. It’s why many films end up banished to development hell. “But if you fall in love with the process, you can lose yourself in time,” Becher says.

Having survived two dinosaur attacks, stop-motion animation is now under siege from the robots: AI threatens to leave more time-consuming techniques in the dust. But stop-motion, when used for cinematic effect rather than special effects, is still going strong; more experimental directors have taken matters into their own hands over the last few decades. Wes Anderson, for example, has embraced the form for Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs; Charlie Kaufman used it to explore loneliness and ennui in Anomalisa; and Guillermo del Toro won an Oscar for 2022’s whimsical Pinocchio.

As well as providing the ultimate challenge, these auteurs are using it for the complete control it gives you over set, character and story. “Stop-motion allows you to have a blank canvas and go anywhere your mind takes you to,” Johnson thinks.

Sometimes, that can be somewhere sinister. Last year, Robert Morgan continued his journey into the darker side of the genre with Stopmotion, a horror that sees an animator’s models turn into demonic forms. And with the gift of a new Wallace and Gromit film, Vengeance Most Fowl, this Christmas, Laika’s dark fantasy Wildwood slated for next year and Del Toro’s The Buried Giant on the way for Netflix, stop-motion isn’t slowing down. Even Pixar has shone a spotlight on the art form for the first time ever this year with its new short Self, a fable about a wooden doll wishing upon a star.

According to Becher, the form’s ongoing appeal to audiences is simple – people appreciate the craft. “There is some sort of understanding that what they’re seeing is a bit magic, something inanimate that’s moving by itself,” Becher explains.

But it’s also because the techniques have been eclipsed by new tech that they retain a certain authenticity. “It’s about celebrating imperfection. It’s fine if you have a thumbprint on a plasticine model. It actually enhances it,” Johnson says. “The animators are channelling themselves into the figure. It can’t be replicated with CGI, it just isn’t possible.”

Stop Motion: Celebrating Handmade Animation on the Big Screen is at BFI Southbank, London, to 9 October.

French cinema has recently given us some sensationally good courtroom dramas, such as Alice Diop’s Saint Omer and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, both of which put ideas as well as individuals on trial; race, gender and class. Now, Cédric Kahn has reconstructed – with some fictional licence – the 1976 trial of revolutionary leftist Pierre Goldman, who had previously been convicted of killing two pharmacists in the course of an armed robbery. After publishing his polemical autobiography Obscure Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France while in prison – which made him a cause célèbre among the fashionable Parisian classes – Goldman secured a retrial on the basis that the investigation was flawed and he had an alibi for the date and time of the killings, though he admitted to earlier robberies.

And it is this chaotic, clamorous and engrossing second trial that Kahn puts on screen, a trial that brings in antisemitism and French history. Arthur Harari plays Goldman’s patient and longsuffering advocate Georges Kiejman, who, like his excitable client, is of Polish-Jewish background; Stéphan Guérin-Tillié is the court president; and Arieh Worthalter is Goldman, voluble, charismatic and contemptuous of almost every aspect of the proceedings, though not refusing to recognise its authority.

Repeatedly, Goldman dismisses all testimony on the subject of his sincerity and good character as irrelevant and inadmissible on the simple grounds that he is innocent of murder, full stop. He’s not innocent because he’s a nice guy; he concedes he isn’t. But he wasn’t there at the time. Perhaps that’s a convenient thing to argue, that he happened to be absent from the one robbery at which people were killed. Murder was a capital crime in France at this stage, though the prosecution was here calling for life imprisonment.

Those used to British or American court proceedings on screen and in real life may be bemused at the uproar that is here permitted without the president demanding silence or threatening contempt proceedings. Repeatedly, Goldman interjects and mocks; court onlookers jump to their feet and demand to be heard; jurors ask questions of the defendant and Goldman’s supporters in the public gallery chant like a football crowd; all this without the president demanding for the court to be cleared.

Doggedly, Kiejman undermines all the witness testimony and police procedure, particularly an ID parade in which Goldman was made to look dishevelled and unshaven, as opposed to the smartly dressed off-duty officers who lined up either side of him. There is an extraordinary moment in which Kiejman actually stages a reconstruction of this lineup in court, with a full-length photo of Goldman, to show the jury how misleading it would have looked. Was such a theatrical gesture really permitted in a French court? Were there no discovery rules to notify the prosecution in advance?

The point of The Goldman Case is not, as with Anatomy of a Fall, to keep you guessing after the verdict. We are not invited to wonder if Goldman really did do it after all. But the painful, acrimonious uproar is there to show how the idea of the (allegedly) guilty Jew was a trigger in French public life, at a time when the Vichy collaboration and even the Dreyfus affair were still live issues – and especially as these two Jewish men, the defendant and his attorney, were attacking racism in the police. Kahn orchestrates the angry energy with an expert hand.

If you’ve watched enough action movies over the last decade or so, you’ve probably noticed what feels like a bit of … an escalation. In the original John Wick, Keanu Reeves shoots, stabs and car-crashes his way through 77 mostly-unnamed mooks; by John Wick 4, he’s up to 140. Bullet Train, right at the whimsical-comedy end of the ballistic-ballet spectrum, features 152 individual onscreen deaths; Extraction 2, very much on the laugh-free side, has 108. (Commando, by far Arnie’s most violent film, has a mere 81).

Rebel Ridge, which scored 31.2m views over its first six days on Netflix, feels like an almost-deliberate antidote to all this carnage. Yes, it’s a classic bit of dad-coded competence porn: a tall, muscular stranger rolls into a small town run by corrupt cops, and proves to be almost supernaturally good at everything he needs to do to unseat them. Yes, there are deadpan monologues and one-liners galore (“I put too much sauce on that?” asks soon-to-be-household-name leading man Aaron Pierre after delivering one memorable bon mot). But it’s more than just a riff on Reacher, and the lack of fatalities is just one reason why.

For starters, the plot centres on a civil forfeiture, a legal process that pretty much every US citizen may be genuinely concerned about. The trouble starts with a couple of cops effectively stealing $36,000 from ex-marine Terry Richmond via a process that allows law enforcement to seize property from ordinary citizens without any proof of criminal activity (“I thought it’d make a great premise for a movie because of how unifying it is,” says director Jeremy Saulnier in the film’s promotional material. “It pisses everyone off”). There’s a decent chunk of legalese woven into the drum-tight dialogue, with the worst excesses of the process laid infuriatingly bare; in a detail pulled straight from the headlines, it turns out the cops have bought themselves a margarita machine with confiscated money.

But just as importantly – and this is a bit of a spoiler – in the ensuing revenge rampage, Richmond doesn’t kill anyone. Faces get punched, bodies get slammed, and one arm gets gruesomely snapped – but as far as I can see, there isn’t a single on-screen death in the entire film. Richmond, you see, is an unarmed combat instructor who’s also well-versed in non-lethal alternatives to the usual shotguns and pistols (“We have to call ’em ‘less-lethal.’ Liability purposes.” says the police chief in one early confrontation). And so for most of the running time, he disarms and de-escalates, firing off tasers and flashbangs without ever starting a bodycount.

This is partly interesting because Saulnier’s other films are so good at portraying bits of the old ultraviolence: his debut Murder Party is absurd and exaggerated, subversive revenge thriller Blue Ruin is raw and awkward, and siege-horror Green Room is visceral, shocking, and very real. Rebel Ridge has plenty of the slickly choreographed Brazilian jiu-jitsu that’s a trademark of the revenge-thriller genre, but here it’s a way to incapacitate and immobilise, rather than a prelude to something more horrible. (In Green Room, for example, an ineffective chokehold leads to one of the film’s most gruesome moments.) Pierre’s size and real-life martial arts experience make all of this extremely convincing; the armlocks and throws are effortlessly fluid, and in one take that was apparently done without wires, he hauls another six-foot man halfway across a car park.

But it’s also interesting because the setting of Rebel Ridge almost demands this de-escalation, as more than one character points out throughout the two-hour runtime. The cops aren’t ever explicitly racist – they initially run Richmond off his bike for apparently no reason, before shaking him down for his cash – but there’s a feeling throughout the film that things could go horribly wrong at any moment. In Rambo, from 1982, another film with a police-harassment setup, the title character manages to machine-gun a sheriff’s office and (non-fatally) shoot the sheriff without suffering too much in the way of consequences. In 2024, it seems even less plausible that Richmond could shoot a cop and stand any chance of survival than that he could tear the wall off a police station. Ultimately, maybe that’s why Rebel Ridge feels like a breath of fresh mountain air, compared to the dozens of corpse-riddled action movies currently being produced by every streaming service. It might be a wish-fulfilment revenge fantasy, but suspension of disbelief only goes so far.

Giancarlo Esposito is used to frightening people. After all, he’s built a career out of it. Once, while on a flight, a woman waiting for the toilet saw him coming up the aisle and was so scared that she begged him to go before her. Bemused, he did: “I came out and said, ‘Have a nice piss!’” Even the tallest, most muscular men who approach him admit they feel intimidated in his presence. “My talents are facial expressions and intensity,” he says. “A guy last weekend said, ‘Wow, you’re not a big man, but you’re so frightening!’ It’s all about energy; that’s all we are as human beings, we’re energy.”

He may frighten people, but it’s all an act: one he has played to perfection. Over the last decade he’s become Hollywood’s go-to baddie since his turn as Gus Fring, the menacing meth kingpin in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He’s played an aristocratic drug lord in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen; the war criminal Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian, hunting for baby Yoda across space; ruthless Stan Edgar in The Boys, wrangling a squad of spoilt superheroes; and corrupt Mayor Cicero in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Next year, he will be Marvel’s newest big bad in Captain America: Brave New World. When we speak, he is in Toronto filming something he can’t tell me anything about, which leaves me racking my brains for a megafranchise he hasn’t been in yet.

When he’s just being himself, Esposito is warm and effusive, prone to flapping his hands in a way that reveals his Italian heritage. At 66, he is blessed with a face that seems to get more handsome as time adds lines. He’s “Papa” to four daughters, who he loves talking about. He also brings up energy and love and the universe a lot; more engaged with the metaphysical than I anticipated for a guy who specialises in playing cold, ruthless men. He likes surprising people with his warmth, because he sees himself as an entertainer. “And if I’m just playing myself over and over and over again, without any salt or pepper, is it still entertainment?” he asks.

At a recent convention – he “really loves” fan conventions – he overheard some people laughing at a woman who was so overwhelmed by his presence that she couldn’t look him in the eye. “I could tell she was really an intense human being, and it was a big moment in her life to meet me,” he says. “She didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to force her. I didn’t do the … ”

His face and posture snap into the blank mask of Gus Fring: shark-eyes, deep monotone. “‘Look at me. Woman, look at me,’” he says, quietly, coldly, then blink, Gus is gone and Papa is back.

“She was just really shy and needed a hug,” he says, holding his chest. “So I gave her one! And she put her head right in my chest and she was on the verge of tears. She just needed some love.”

Esposito is having the time of his life. He doesn’t mind when people want him to do a bit of Fring, or when they stop him to show their tattoos of his face, or to pose for a photo – often with him holding something threateningly to their neck, re-creating an iconic Breaking Bad scene involving a box cutter (fans must make do with safer objects, like bananas). He’s happy to do it all, because this level of fame still feels exciting. He describes his career as having three rises to stardom: first on Broadway, then in film, now on television. But with rises come falls.

He was born in Copenhagen, to an Italian stagehand father and a Black American opera singer from Alabama; his parents met in Italy while his mother was touring Europe in a production of Porgy and Bess. (His surname is pronounced “eh-POZZI-toh”, though he accepts that people default to “es-POH-sito”, thinking he is Latino.)

The Espositos moved from Rome to Manhattan when he was five, where his parents separated. He was raised first Baptist, then Catholic; he became an altar boy and considered the priesthood. He and his older brother were sent away to a Catholic military school; he considered joining the military. Religion and service offered discipline and a sense of belonging, both of which he craved.

But he came from a family of performers and, by 10, he was a musical star, making his Broadway debut in Maggie Flynn. As he got older he moved from theatre and into film: his breakout role was in Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze. Over the following four years, Lee and Esposito (who are still great friends) worked together three more times, on Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues and Malcolm X. It was an exhilarating time for Esposito, even if his white father didn’t understand it; when he saw Do the Right Thing, his father criticised it for having “too much cursing”. “That was when I realised, he didn’t know what it was like being in my skin,” Esposito recalls.

He had a uniquely varied career on screen: he was Big Bird’s camp counsellor on Sesame Street, an FBI agent in The Usual Suspects, a cadet in Taps. But by the late 90s, work began to dry up. “It was a really difficult time. I chased breadcrumbs,” he says. By the late 90s, he was bankrupt. The bank took his house. He got divorced. “I was getting work as a guest star, but I was living over my head – I had too many kids, too fast,” he says. He said yes to small roles in every procedural going: Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, CSI, Bones.

Things were so bad that he began to consider the unthinkable: hiring someone to kill him, so his family could get the insurance payout.

“I was in a really desperate position,” he says. “My former wife’s family were all in insurance, so her father had a big life insurance policy on me. I started asking these very pointed questions, like: can you collect life insurance if you die from misadventure? Can you collect life insurance if you kill yourself? I was going down the list to figure out what options I had. I eventually realised none of those would work – but, if someone killed me, that might be different, and it might be worth the price of the ticket to have my family be OK.”

“It was a horrible thought. But eventually I realised, the sacrifice is you would never experience them being OK. You’d never have the opportunity to experience all the love they have for you and you for them. But I did really consider it.”

Did he ever consider quitting acting? “Become Mr Mom and stay at home to take care of my kids? I probably would have,” he says. “But my instinct was always to go out and bring the world home. And when I act, I tune the world out. Everything is gone. All the voices in my head go away. All my worries about my children, the bills, it goes away, because I’m in flight.”

When he joined Breaking Bad in 2009, creator Vince Gilligan couldn’t believe they could get him, completely unaware of what dire straits he’d been in. Esposito throws himself into every character: to play Gus Fring, he did yoga to gain better control over his breath, which helped with his frightening stillness: “It allowed me to give you a chance to see my emotion before I even spoke. Now that’s scary.” To play Moff Gideon, he practised lightsaber fighting with a broom at home: “I did! I picked up a few different sticks because I needed to figure out how to wield it.” Never mind that he was going to get training on set – this is not the Esposito way.

For him, no baddie is just a baddie. He convinced Gilligan to make Fring a generous employer – if anything, making him capable of kindness just made him scarier – and on The Mandalorian, he talked showrunner Jon Favreau into making Gideon desperate to wield the force, a desire that made him more interesting. He’s never afraid of talking directors into making changes. “Intention is everything. Intention can be seen and felt, but it can also be stated. I like to encourage people to ask for what they want,” he says, then smiles. “My family has a list of Giancarlo-isms, and that’s one of them: ‘Ask for what you want.’ Say it to the world!”

Tell me some others, I say. “Never leave a man behind!” he shouts. “One of my daughters is always wandering off – now it may be my military-school training, but you just don’t leave a man behind! And ‘Head on a swivel’! I’m hyper-vigilant because people recognise me all the time, so I always tell the girls this because they are always walking around like this,” he says, tapping away at an imaginary phone. “Head on a swivel!”

Someone once told him that acting can heal actors, which he still believes deeply. “Playing very intense characters has helped me to realise how intense I am, and made it OK,” he says. “The opportunity to play so many different kinds of characters with foibles – evil, mean, liars, cheaters, killers – has allowed me to tap into an energy, to look at who I am when I’m in that character’s skin. How angry am I? How mean can I be? How happy can I be? How funny can I be? It allows me to look at all the dark and light spaces within myself. And that has helped me all my life.”

One Sunday night in September 1984, between championship darts and the news with Jan Leeming, the BBC broadcast one of its bravest, most devastating commissions. This was Threads, a two-hour documentary-style drama exploring a hypothetical event deeply feared at the time and also somehow unthinkable: what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped on a British city.

Made by British director Mick Jackson with Kes author Barry Hines, and set in Sheffield, it begins with a young couple, working-class Jimmy and middle-class Ruth, dealing with her unexpected pregnancy in familiar kitchen-sink drama surroundings. International tensions build slowly in the background as the minutes tick by, bursting in through newspaper headlines, radio and TV news, and the ominous words of narrator Paul Vaughan, known then as a presenter of BBC science series Horizon.

Then come CND protests; council officers being summoned to an emergency bunker; and animated films on TV instructing people how to survive. Forty-seven minutes in, a nuclear bomb drops. The film ends more than a decade later with Jimmy and Ruth’s baby, Jane, now an adolescent, giving birth in a world devastated by nuclear winter.

Bringing horror into the homes, shops and streets of a very ordinary world, Threads is a brilliant, terrifying film, and for anyone who has seen it (I watched it in 1999 on a dusty VHS), its effects will have been long-lasting. To mark the film’s 40th anniversary, I have examined its creation and legacy for a forthcoming radio documentary, Archive on 4: Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On, digging into the BBC vaults to show how the film has influenced writers, politicians and fans (including Jim Jupp of the brilliant Ghost Box record label, who has created an exclusive soundtrack for the programme).

The BBC has shown Threads only three times to date: in 1984; in August of the following year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and as part of a cold war special on BBC Four in 2003. Another – timely – showing is planned for October. When I watched the film at the end of the 20th century, Threads felt like a piece of history. Today, in a world of conflict in Russia, China and the Middle East, and expanding nuclear capabilities, it no longer does.

In a light-dazzled sunroom in Santa Monica, California, Mick Jackson, director of LA Story and The Bodyguard, is remembering the film of which he’s most proud. “You know that on the Internet Movie Database, at the end of each entry for a film, there’s a space for people to write their own comments? I’ve checked that page for Threads practically every year. It varies with the state of tension in the world, but regularly there are [new] entries there saying: ‘I saw this as a kid sitting around the door when I was supposed to be in bed’, or ‘I came to this because people had talked about it and it’s the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’.” The latest reviewer, jotchy-14285, posted in June, saying: “Just watch it people, judge for yourselves and hope that the ones with their fingers on the buttons have seen it as well...”

A science documentary-maker in his early career, Jackson joined the BBC in 1966, soon after the corporation decided to ban another film it had commissioned about the effects of a nuclear bomb: Peter Watkins’s The War Game. Blending documentary, newsy vox pops and a cast of amateur actors and extras, it was dropped from the schedules following advice from the Home Office, but later won the 1967 best documentary Oscar after a cinema release. “So I entered a corporation where everybody felt a great deal of shame, that the BBC has somehow betrayed them,” Jackson says.

By the early 1980s, the atmosphere was more confident. A 1980 Panorama episode, If the Bomb Drops…, presented by a young Jeremy Paxman, leaked a series of government films, Protect and Survive, made in secret in the mid-1970s for broadcast if the worst happened. Producer David Darlow convinced a local government commissioner to show them to him, despite their status as state secrets, and editor Roger Bolton took the gamble to include them.

The films became instantly – and chillingly – notorious for how hopelessly ineffective their advice was. Using simple, childlike illustrations, they instruct the public how to make shelters out of mattresses and bury family members outside in the event of a nuclear attack. One of these films plays in Threads on Jimmy and Ruth’s TV as they try to decorate their new flat, the first in a swathe of government responses that are simply not enough.

Inspired by this Panorama, Jackson buried himself in textbooks, papers and conferences, finding out in rigorous scientific detail what could happen in the advent of nuclear war at a time when cold war tensions were ramping up. In 1982 – the year a tactical missile wing was opened at RAF Greenham Common – he made a successful documentary on the subject, A Guide to Armageddon, for the BBC science show QED – but knew that drama would help propel messages to the public more effectively.

Jackson recruited Barry Hines to write the screenplay. My radio producer, Leonie Thomas, found archive footage of Hines talking on Pebble Mill at One about his first meeting with Jackson. “I considered it very seriously,” he says, in his soft South Yorkshire accent. “[And] because I write about contemporary social issues, I thought I ought to have a go at this because it’s the most important of them all.”

Hines, who died in 2016, grew up in Hoyland, near Sheffield, which appealed to Jackson for a location. Why? “Because it was an industrial centre, a Nato base,” says Jackson, “and, excuse the phrase, bang in the middle of Britain.” It helped that the leftwing city council, then run by David Blunkett, was amenable to the BBC’s crew. The area was also a hotbed of CND activism and had local people more than willing to be extras.

Threads was made in only 17 days in early 1984 with a budget of £250,000. By setting it in Sheffield, Jackson provided viewers with a familiar, relatable backdrop. When I saw it, by which time it had the status of a cult film, it reminded me of my home town, Swansea – similarly rebuilt after the second world war. I recognised the people drinking in dimly lit pubs, panic-buying in familiar corner shops, running amok outside Debenhams and Woolworths as sirens wailed their four-minute warning.

This scene takes place in Sheffield’s the Moor, still a shopping district, and still largely unchanged. I recently visited that spot, standing where an image of a mushroom cloud appears in the city centre sky. The same mid-century concrete buildings and church in the distance frame that view. Threads continues to haunt Sheffield and it still haunts me.

In 2018, Charlie Brooker talked to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs about watching Jackson’s QED film and Threads as an adolescent. “I remember watching these things and not being able to process what that meant – not understanding how society kept going; why people bothered going to work and feeding ducks and getting on buses and weren’t just weeping and screaming.”

The morning after Threads was broadcast, Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour party, wrote to Jackson and Hines to praise them – a letter he reads again for Archive on 4 from a chair in his living room 40 years later, and that Jackson has framed on his Santa Monica sunroom wall.

It ends: “This story must be told time and time again… Don’t, by the way, be troubled by the possibility that some people might be inured to the real thing by seeing horrifying films. The dangers of complacency are much greater than any risks of knowledge.” I ask Kinnock how it feels to read it now. “I’d stick by every word, I think,” he says. “The dangers of complacency are lethal.”

He watched Threads with wife, Glenys, son, Stephen, then 14, now a Labour MP, and daughter, Rachel, 12, now an ITN producer (“It did affect them,” Kinnock admits). He rewatched the film before our interview, and was struck by “how brave and truthful it was”. But did it change government conversations at the time? “None,” he said, bluntly. “It didn’t shift policy at all.”

But films such as Threads can still have an impact, he says – he cites Mr Bates vs the Post Office as another production that directly challenged people in power. “A film can shift opinion by enhancing understanding, and when a democracy becomes conscious of injustice, that makes an important contribution to public comprehension.”

For Jackson, the message of Threads comes down to something very simple: trusting people with the truth. “That’s what I wanted to get across,” he says. “That there’s no going back, that this happens. You can’t go back and press replay.”

But with a film you can. This month, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov hinted at his country’s intention to change its stance on the use of nuclear weapons “connected with the escalation course of our western adversaries”. The UK and the US recently enhanced their nuclear cooperation pact. Threads airs on BBC Four next month. Be brave for two hours, and then continue the conversation.

I first catch sight of Demi Moore crouching on the floor in a hotel corridor, coal-black hair fanned across her back. She’s talking in a peeping high voice, which is confusing: Moore’s husky pitch is her trademark. What I can’t see until I’m close are the tiny dogs she’s playing with. When I say tiny, Moore’s chihuahua, Pilaf, is a thing unimaginable until you see her. Thimble small. How-is-that-even-a- dog small. Moore is overseeing an introduction to Bruno, a puppy belonging to one of the comms team I’d met earlier and who was, until Pilaf, the smallest dog I’d seen. Bruno now looks like the Hulk. The dogs’ characters are compared, their habits, their fur; they snuffle each other, squeak and squelch (their version of barking). Finally, Moore scoops Pilaf from the floor – bye Bruno – and the little angel joins us for our interview. First on her lap, then on the PR’s lap, then investigating the sofa and my bag (don’t wee there, Pilaf).

Pilaf’s teensiness initially distracts me from noticing how Moore herself is fine-boned and delicate; poised like a Modigliani in her chair and so toned I can see taut bands of muscle sweeping from her clavicle. Her dark hair forms two straight varnished curtains that hang to her waist. She wears a structured brown dress and killer-red nail varnish and uses hand gestures so voluminous that if you witnessed our conversation with the sound off, you’d think she was describing a series of explosions.

Why am I focusing on the way she looks? Because we are here to discuss her film The Substance, which is at once a body horror and a funny, furious satire of our obsession with youth and appearance.

Moore, 61, plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a lonely has-been celebrity who is axed from her aerobics show on her 50th birthday by TV executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Over lunch Harvey reminds her, as all women must be reminded, that a woman’s value lasts only as long as her fertility. That same day the offer of an injectable cell-reproducing serum that will cause the body to generate a shiny young version of itself, with some small-print caveats, seems timely and all too tempting. It’s a Dorian Gray plot, less absurd, perhaps, with the current hysteria around semaglutide (the weightloss drug sold as Ozempic and now thought to slow ageing). The film is hyper-real, the sound sharp, the overall effect queasy.

Moore – who has spent her adult life having her anatomy scrutinised for signs of plastic surgery – did not mind that French writer/director Coralie Fargeat thought she was “perfect” for the role. She did not mind that she would be required to strip down for full-frontal nude scenes. Or even that her regenerated self “Sue” would be played by Margaret Qualley and that she’d therefore be compared with the 29-year-old in some hyper-sexualised, male-gaze satirising bum and boob shots. “Fully intrigued,” she sat down and read the script. “I thought, ‘OK, this could either be really amazing or an absolute disaster.’”

Although she’d watched Fargeat’s 2017 debut Revenge – “so I understood her sensibility” – Moore was unfamiliar with body horror and at times she found it “head spinning”. One person suggested she think of it as “phantasmagoric”. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ Someone else said, ‘Well, The Fly is considered body horror.’” Early in The Substance, the subject of that film is neatly referenced, floating in a glass of wine. Actually it draws from across the comic-horror-fantasy board, not least Carrie (1976), Freaky Friday (1976), Death Becomes Her (1992) and in subtler ways, Moore feels, All About Eve (1950).

The thing that really grabbed Moore – “obviously” – was “the circumstances of a woman in the entertainment industry who’s facing rejection and deep despair. Everything in her life that seemed meaningful is being ripped out.” And beyond, “What really struck me was the harsh violence against oneself. It’s not what’s being done to you, it’s what we do to ourselves.” Traditional horror, she says, merely terrifies, “whereas there’s a depth to the exploration of our psyches, our inner dialogue, that body horror seems to amplify”.

Even after filming she had no idea if it would appeal to audiences. When she settled into the 2,000-seat theatre at Cannes to watch the final cut in May, she was looking round thinking, “Is it going to resonate? Is it going to connect? Are all the grotesque parts going to translate? Or be like, too off-putting?” The crowd, according to reports, “went wild”.

How does she feel now? She smiles. “I’m still in shock.”

The Substance has been described as Moore’s “comeback”, which she finds baffling as, “it’s not like I’ve really left to come back”. It is true that before this film she had been wondering if the acting side of her life had – she stalls – “not ended, but like, was it ‘complete’?” She does a lot of this linguistic repackaging, as though gently guiding herself away from the cliff edge. “I’ll leave others to, like, identify or label it however they need to.” She adds: “As Michelle Yeoh said, ‘You were just on pause!’”

A reminder: Demi Moore was the dangerous beauty of 80s and 90s cinema, the wild and surly rebel of the original Brat Pack movie St Elmo’s Fire (1985) and star of Ghost (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992). It’s hard to imagine today the almighty fuss over her nude and pregnant cover of Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz in 1991. It was called “pornography”; newsstands refused to stock it. In an era where the gender pay gap is front of mind, it’s also maddening to remember that she was dubbed Gimme Moore for negotiating $12m for Striptease (1996), when her then husband Bruce Willis was merrily cashing nearly double that for Die Hard 3 (1995).

For much of the 2000s, Moore was dogged by tabloid gossip about her marriage to Ashton Kutcher, whom she met when he was 25 and she 40. The age gap inflamed the savage obsession with her appearance – whole articles were devoted to how much surgery she’d supposedly had, including a guessed-at “knee lift” because, well, doctors with newspaper columns zoomed in on her image and decided she didn’t have enough “kninkles”.

Meanwhile, Moore and Kutcher holidayed in the Caribbean, in Mexico, spent endless days in bed. Kutcher dotted the house with Post-its telling her how magical she was, how much he loved her, until he didn’t. There were rumours of meltdowns, exclusives on his one-night stands – one such report in 2011 appeared on her phone as a Google alert while she was having her hair and makeup done for the premiere of Five. For seven years she kept a relatively low profile, until in 2019 she “shared” as she puts it, Inside Out, her dynamite memoir ghosted by the writer Ariel Levy. It was an instant New York Times bestseller.

In it, Moore described her turbulent peripatetic childhood with a suicidal bipolar mother and cheating, violent father – later revealed not to be her biological parent after all. She recounted being raped at 15 by a family friend who asked her afterwards how it felt “to be whored by your mother for $500”. She left home at 16, married at 17, made her first film at 19. She told of her issues with alcohol and cocaine, which she had for breakfast – “I nearly burned a hole through my nostrils” – and which was supplied by, among others, her dentist.

She got clean in 1984, but eating issues followed, fuelled by executives telling her she needed to lose weight. She was on the frontline of relentless Hollywood sexism. One producer couldn’t understand why Moore’s character didn’t have sex with Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. “If Tom and Demi aren’t going to sleep together, why is Demi a woman?”

Pretty much all her partners – including fellow Brat Packer Emilio Estevez – were allegedly unfaithful. Kutcher blamed his flings on the “blurred lines” of their marriage (the couple had threesomes, experiences that Moore writes filled her with shame). After nearly two decades of sobriety, he also reintroduced her to alcohol saying, as he enjoyed a glass of red one romantic evening, “I don’t know if alcoholism is a real thing – I think it’s all about moderation.” Moore wished she’d thought, “This is a kid in his 20s who has no idea what he’s talking about.”

In January 2012, just shy of 50, Moore was at an all-time low. Kutcher had left, post-marriage cordiality with Willis had soured, her daughters barely spoke to her, her career seemed to be over. She found herself in the midst of an existential reckoning. If this is life, she thought, “I’m done.” Her memoir opens with a scene at home in Los Angeles: friends are partying around her and she listlessly joins in taking hits of nitrous oxide and smoking synthetic pot, known as Spice. Next, she was having a seizure and someone was screaming, “Call 911!”

It was gripping to Fargeat, all of it, but the director was particularly caught by Moore’s relationship with her body. In the 90s and noughties, women were not attractive or desirable unless they were thin, Moore tells me. Thinness was the vital component, explicitly and implicitly in film, fashion and the media. But what Fargeat kept coming back to was the decades of abject torture Moore put herself through with frenzied starving and exercising to achieve this ideal. “What I did to myself,” is the way Moore explains it. “What I made it mean about me. Really looking at that violence, how violent we can be towards ourselves, how just brutal.”

As an aside she says this idea is 100% relatable to men, too. “Self-judgment, chasing perfection, trying to rid ourselves of ‘flaws’, also feeling rejected and despair, none of this is exclusive to women.” She references a scene where Elizabeth is asked on a date but keeps finding fault with herself in the mirror. “We’ve all had moments where you go back and you’re trying to fix something, and you’re just making it worse to the point where you’re incapacitated. We’re seeing these small things nobody else is looking at, but we’re so hyper-focused on all that we’re not.” She takes the idea further. “All of us, if we start to think our value is only with how we look then ultimately we’re going to be crushed.”

In 2021, there was uproar over her appearance when Moore walked the runway for Fendi. Perhaps it was overenthusiastic makeup contouring, or perhaps she was caught by unflattering spotlights, or perhaps she’d had “work”; for whatever reason, her cheekbones appeared unnaturally severe. “Yes,” she says, acknowledging that this happened. She speaks carefully, deliberately. “Look, we are living at a time of great judgment. People can anonymously judge one another really in cruel ways. I feel [this kind of judgment] is a reflection of someone’s own unhappiness and/or a way to boost their own sense of self. When those things happen, I have learned to just let it roll.” Ultimately, she adds, “It’s what I make it mean about me. If I give it a lot of weight and value and power, it will have it. If I don’t, it won’t.” In other words: mind your own business.

Besides, the frantic scramble to find a miracle to transform each of us into “a better, younger” version is felt by everyone, she says. “We’re all exposed, we see stuff every day – ‘Oh, this vitamin, this thing, this thing’ – there’s stuff everywhere.” But in the film, what does Elizabeth do with this shiny new opportunity? She simply retraces the steps of her own life. Yes, her young “self” goes back to the TV exec, she goes back to the aerobic show. Moore loves this about the script, that it’s shoving into our faces what we apparently don’t know: that given the same chances all over again, we will seek the same crappy validation and make the same dumb choices. “Because, if you think about it – and obviously it would have been a different movie – she could have said, ‘You know what, I’m going to produce my own show. I’m going do X, Y and Z differently.’ But no. The need to have that same validation is there until we break our patterns.” She sighs. It’s a sigh for all of us.

Moore has searched everywhere for answers: she turned to Kabbalah with Madonna and Guy Ritchie, consulted tarot cards, psychics and had endless therapy. She even keeps an open mind about reincarnation (we spend five minutes discussing Surviving Death, a Netflix series investigating the afterlife). But one of the most powerful things said to her, she says, was when she was complaining to a tarot card reader that she never felt good enough. The woman told her flatly, “‘Oh, well, you’ll never be good enough.’ I was so shocked, like that was such a harsh truth. She said, ‘But you can know the value of your worth. You just have to put down the measuring stick.’” She says she thinks about this “gem of wisdom” when she is tempted to “compare and despair” while, say, scrolling social media.

“And while I can intellectually comprehend it, like many things, it’s a constant effort to work on it. You catch yourself when you’re being in a state of like …” Her hands mime her despair. “And you’re like, ‘No, I need to focus on being the best me.’ I remember my daughter saying, ‘I want to quit wasting time focused on all the things that I see as not good or not how I want, because it’s taking away from celebrating all the things that I am.’”

So then, did it change her, making the film? “Definitely. It was a very hard film, very raw; very vulnerable to make. But at the same time liberating. I had less pressure than Margaret, because she had the added pressure to look amazing. I degrade throughout and I knew going in that I wasn’t going to be shot in the most glamorous way, or with the edges softened. In fact, the opposite. But there was something freeing about that.”

In the film, the younger and older self must share one life, alternating every seven days. Inevitably they disapprove of what the other is doing with their time. The split becomes war, older versus younger, with all the implicit mother/daughter dynamics therein. Unlike the fairytale trope, the older self is not the evil witch. It’s the younger self who is the self-obsessed wicked little monster. Moore concedes with a knowing smile, that our younger “selves” are, indeed, “a little bit more narcissistic, a little more, ‘everything is about me’”.

That said, she is heartened greatly by the “beautiful shift” in the way young women navigate their lives. She loved watching Qualley on set, for instance. “I learned from her. Learned and appreciated the confidence she had in asking for what she wanted, without being apologetic, in ways that made me go, ‘Wow.’ Back in the day, a woman being strong was often seen as a bitch. Difficult. So how great is it that at such a young age she can be in that place and not need more years to get there?”

Moore’s daughters (she has three with Bruce Willis – Rumer, 36, Scout, 33, and Tallulah, 30) have only seen the trailer, having decided to wait and watch it all together at the Los Angeles premiere on 17 September (Rumer told her, “Oh my God, I’m terrified”). Pilaf, currently barking at my coat, will probably go, too, as she is the only one of Moore’s nine dogs she takes almost everywhere.

I ask what her life looks like now her children have grown up, and she says it’s interesting living alone, admiring the landscape of life in her 60s. She still lives at the ranch in Hailey, Idaho, where she and Willis raised their children (Willis, 69, has a place nearby with his wife and two more daughters; the family is coping with his diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia). She says there’s a joy in waking up every morning and thinking, “What do I want to do?” That she doesn’t have to orbit anyone else’s schedule, that if she liked she could get on a plane and spend the weekend somewhere of her own choosing, and that she didn’t have to feel uncomfortable or guilty or anything about it. “That was a real learning curve for me, an awakening.” She found herself expanding horizons in other ways, asking not just what she wanted to do, but who she wanted to be. “Like, who am I as a woman? Not as a mother, or wife, or actor. As just a person?”

She realised she’d been conditioned to believe that when you grow up your life dulls and, to some extent, she’d bought into that. “A lot of people believe – as the film says – that a woman’s value goes when her fertility ends, and that when your desirability ends, your passion in life ends, too. For so long that was a truth not spoken overtly, but silently. And I’m realising that, actually, that’s not true.”

Now she sees a completely different future, one that she gets to define, one that will include more acting, including a St Elmo’s Fire reunion with the original cast; more producing (among her previous credits are all three Austin Powers movies); maybe another memoir, “when I’ve lived a little bit more”. And not just because she likes her life and all the possibilities it presents, but because she wants to reflect a positive attitude to ageing back to her daughters; to show them all that is available to them, too.

“So, if I want to open that door for them, I need to be willing to step out,” she uses her hands to gesture the movement. “I’ve never been at this exact point in my life before, so I don’t know what it is or where it’s going. But I know that I want to continue to keep growing as a person. I want to keep learning. I want to keep challenging myself, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, which isn’t something any of us love, but I always know that I am better for it when I get to the other side.”

“Do I date?” Moore repeats my question, looking briefly to the ceiling. “I don’t know. It’s not really been where my focus is, I’ll say that. Particularly in the past four, five years, my focus has been to lean into my work.” She adds that she wanted to give her craft more attention, to refine and finesse the part of her that fell by the wayside when she “chose not to work for a long time”.

She says she doesn’t need a relationship to complete her. “It’s not about not being interested in dating. It’s more about realising that I’m now in a place that’s much more about choice as opposed to feeling that there’s any kind of lack.” She thinks there is truth to the idea that men need women more as they age and women need men less, because women are “in many respects hardier; stronger. But I also think that we are often – not to generalise – but we are often caretakers. So, I think as we get to that place of greater independence and freedom in our later years, I don’t know if we …” – she is careful again with her phrasing – “seek to take on the responsibility of others. We have, for the first time, real room to move without the weight of others.” Yes she enjoys her time alone, “But I also enjoy being with others … I have full faith, because I think we’re a communal species.”

I ask whether she still has her 2,000-strong doll collection (it was reported that Kutcher found them creepy). “I do. I haven’t added to the collection in a long time, but most of them are one of a kind, what are considered ‘art dolls’.” She had intended to create a museum because some are extraordinary works of art, including by the French artist Anne Mitrani. But dolls are not all she collects. “I have a collection of both oversized items and miniatures. My particular penchant is for oversized things that are real, meaning that they’re exactly how they might be made in real scale, but oversized. And so I have a 6ft butcher’s knife, like a kitchen knife, that an artist did, and it’s literally a real knife.”

What are the mini things, aside from Pilaf? “There’s a variety. I have a pair of 3ft scissors and then I have miniatures. I have oversized boxing gloves. I have an oversized clipboard. The idea of scale is interesting because we get very accustomed to, like, ‘this is the size,’” she picks up a cup, “and that’s normal. But what is normal? And so, when you see things in a different scale, it affects you differently, and the oversized items in truth just make me laugh.”

Is she a real life Alice in Wonderland? “Oh, that is truly like what I step into. I have a very childlike quality. I think it’s important. What was that quote – ‘Play like a child?’” She can’t remember it. “It’s important not to lose that sense of innocent joy. I look at my granddaughter” – Louetta, 17 months – “and I see the awe in such small little things. And it’s that beautiful reminder of not taking things for granted.”

A strong theme in her personal philosophy is to avoid reproach and recrimination. “So often there’s this idea that we want to blame the outside. We tend to see ourselves as the victim. We can be like, ‘But this is happening to me.’ I am a big believer in the idea that everything in life is happening for me, not to me. And applying that lens to my personal life, I find, is really a game changer. That doesn’t mean things aren’t difficult, painful, disappointing – all of that can still exist when it’s happening for you. It is just looking at it through the lens that is saying, ‘What is this trying to give me?’ so that I don’t miss that opportunity.”

In that vein, she doesn’t want to blame her terrible parents. Or her succession of cheating partners. Or the way that the press or Hollywood have treated her. Perhaps she doesn’t feel that she can change anything, ultimately. Except with acting, which she allows to speak for itself.

Oh wait, there is one exception to Moore’s ethos of personal responsibility: Pilaf. When the dog gets disruptive again and starts making her little Ewok grumbling noises, Moore is baffled by her behaviour. “She normally doesn’t bark. I don’t know what she’s barking at.” And then it dawns on her, and for one dizzying second, I fear she’s going to say it’s me, that Pilaf hates me. “No, no,” whispers Moore. So who is to blame? “I think it’s him, the other little dog: it’s Bruno.”

Sir Ian McKellen dropped a stinker on the British talkshow This Morning earlier in the week so putrid that even Gollum himself might steer clear of it. The 85-year-old star of the Lord of the Rings movies was being asked about a return to Middle-earth in The Hunt for Gollum, which will see Peter Jackson (this time as producer) and Andy Serkis (director, and Gollum) heading back to JRR Tolkien’s high fantasy classic more than two decades after the former completed 2003’s Oscar-winning The Return of the King.

“There’ll be a script arriving sometime in the new year, and I’ll judge whether I want to go back,” laughed McKellen. “I would. I would love to go back to New Zealand, number one. And also, I don’t like the idea of anyone else playing Gandalf.”

But then he added: “I’m told it’s two films. I probably shouldn’t be saying that. But I haven’t read the script. So, I don’t know if it is.”

Is McKellen winding us up? For those who haven’t been keeping a close eye on The Hunt for Gollum, which was announced in May, it’s possible this doesn’t sound all that weird. After all, Jackson made trilogies out of both The Lord of the Rings (1,000 pages +) and the far more breezy, 300-page Hobbit.

These movies kept the entire Kiwi film industry rolling for more than a decade. People ate, good times were had and McKellen was on screen longer than Gollum himself has spent gnawing on questionable fish. There were even quite a few bits of The Lord of the Rings that Jackson didn’t manage to reimagine for the multiplex, such as the scouring of the Shire or the bit featuring Tom Bombadil, though with The Hobbit he was forced to parachute in various Orc mini-bosses from Tolkien’s more obscure scribblings, as well as a highly dubious elf-dwarf romance, just to pad things out.

And here lies the problem with The Hunt for Gollum, and in particular the prospect of it being stretched to two movies. It’s not a book at all, in fact it’s barely a few hundred words of high-end Gandalf-speak at the Council of Elrond, in Rivendell, before the quest to destroy the ring begins a-proper (though there are some background details in the Lord of the Rings’ appendices and Tolkien’s posthumously assembled Unfinished Tales). Yes, we’re told that Aragorn’s search for the wretched former ring-bearer, at the behest of the grey wizard, took many years. But while the future King of Gondor’s adventures in the period are well-documented in Tolkien’s writings, he definitely did not spend all this time trudging through murky pools in search of Middle-earth’s equivalent of the guy in the park who’s always talking to pigeons.

Fair enough, Gollum is essentially Middle-earth’s hide-and-seek champion, a creature with the ability to vanish into a rock crevice like a feral cat who owes you rent money. Tracking him would be like trying to follow lembas breadcrumbs through a hurricane on the peaks of the Misty Mountains, or chasing a hyperactive squirrel hopped up on pipeweed through Fangorn Forest. But two (probably two-hour plus) movies? Perhaps we’ll get 20 minutes of Aragorn thoughtfully stroking his chin while staring at some vague footprints, or a 45-minute subplot where Gandalf takes a quick detour to the Prancing Pony for a not-so-swift half or eight. Or maybe there will be huge detours away from the dead marshes in which Strider gets involved in something else entirely, just for a bit of a break from the tedium.

Amazon’s The Rings of Power has shown it is possible to draw completely disparate threads of Tolkien’s legendarium (some of which took place thousands of years apart in the books) together into a coherent whole with the help of totally made-up additional characters and a side-order of irritating homunculi. Throw us a glimpse of someone who might be one of the lost “blue” Istari and the odd mention of “Rhûn” (RHÛN!) into the mix and those of us who lap this stuff up will soon find ourselves purring like a juvenile warg on the lap of Sauron who’s just been told it’s hobbit for dinner.

It turns out there really are plenty more stories of Middle-earth to tell, and this is indeed a world ripe for fleshing out. But that does not explain why Jackson is returning to a LOTR subplot that takes up as much space in Tolkien’s texts as Tom Bombadil’s haircare routine.

We’re also told, by the way, that Orlando Bloom will be back as Legolas, which makes a certain amount of sense. When Aragorn does eventually capture the wretched beast in the books, he takes him into the heart of Mirkwood, to the realm of the elf king Thranduil, who just happens to be Legolas’s dad.

The only issue here, of course, is that Bloom will be approaching 50 when this thing eventually gets made, but will be appearing as a younger version of the character he played 20-plus years ago. But don’t panic, the film-makers are reportedly planning to overcome such issues – elves are supposed to be immortal, but they do not age backwards – via the magic of artificial intelligence. “I did speak to Andy [Serkis] and he did say they were thinking about how to do things,” Bloom told Variety. “I was like, ‘How would that even work?’ And he was like, ‘Well, AI!’”

No doubt 65-year-old Viggo Mortensen will also be pricking up his ears at this news. And perhaps Serkis and Jackson can use the same AI tools to flesh out The Hunt for Gollum to epic length, like children who are handed a single Lego brick and somehow end up building a perfect replica of Minas Tirith complete with working trebuchets and a tiny Aragorn giving motivational speeches. Stranger things have already happened in the brave new world of Tolkien adaptations, and some of them are actually pretty cool.

But given we’ve now seen the wonders of Númenor, and even the mysterious Bombadil himself in Rings of Power, couldn’t Serkis and Jackson have given us Beren and Lúthien’s quest to retrieve a silmaril from the crown of Morgoth, the first dark lord of Middle-earth? Or perhaps even a film focused on the War of Wrath, the final battle to defeat the latter that saw elves, men and valar (gods) battling against dragons, balrogs and other dark creatures?

Frankly, they may as well give us Lord of the Rings Zombies (Aragorn and Faramir are duped into purchasing some dodgy jewellery and end up as proto-ringwraiths!) or Boromir: Origins, a six-part prequel series in which Sean Bean gets to die repeatedly in new and horrifically inventive ways each episode. It couldn’t be worse than the prospect of spending the best part of four or five hours crisscrossing the dead marshes as an increasingly desperate Gollum tries to convince Strider to partake of the icky local pond life.