I think that’s how he attracts the best of all the different worlds, be it production, make-up, costume, SFX or CGI… I remember seeing a cast of my own feet. He’s a great writer, a great director, but I think his biggest skill is how good he is at collaborating. Even though I’d read it, I’d been involved in making it, even though we had a million conversations about it, I watched the film and I said: “Wow, that’s the inside of your brain?” That’s one of the things that I got from watching that film. This is what I mean: Alex’s brain is different. There are things that subsequently happen that, to discuss them even abstractly, would be plot-spoilers, not to mention lunch-spoilers…. Maybe that translated to what you saw on screen. It was a very hot day in a very hot flat in Tower Bridge. The scenes with Jessie in the flat, we shot all of them in one day. We all spent a lot of time talking, getting to know each other, talking about what we wanted to achieve and how far we wanted to go with it. So, your character in Men is a damaged, flailing, briefly violent character who’s in considerable emotional turmoil. He’s very frank and unconcerned with moral purity as it were. “The way he talks about those relationships, the way he talks about violence, is unlike anyone I’ve ever. “He’s just got a fascinating brain,” continues this East Londoner of Ghanaian heritage, who turns 32 next month. As Essiedu explains when we talk over video call (he’s currently running about London, filming something top secret), “any time you spend with Alex Garland, you expect the conversation to go in a certain direction and it ends up going in the opposite one – up, down, left, right, south and west. Men is a body-horror, a creepy fairy-tale, a visceral allegory for toxic masculinity and a good bit more besides. Same goes for Men, too, the new A24 horror flick from high-concept maestro Alex Garland – in a former life, author of The Beach much more recently, the writer and director of Ex-Machina, Annihilation and Devs.Īgain, plot-wise, it is on the surface a big ask: woman ( Jessie Buckley), reeling from catastrophic split from man (Essiedu), seeks solace in a Cotswolds country retreat, where various men (all played by Rory Kinnear) combine to mess with her head. Same goes for everything he does, from old drama school pal Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You to Welsh martial arts auteur Gareth Evans’ rollicking thriller series Gangs of London, in which he went toe-to-acting-toe with the awesome Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù. Luckily Essiedu – a time-served theatre actor who joined the Royal Shakespeare Company pretty much straight out of drama school – is brilliant, credible and compelling in the role. George “only” has to help save the world, week after week, in the eight-part series. Then, he’s tapped up by a shadowy, gun-toting, bomb-throwing outfit who do that kind of stuff for a living, all in the service of averting global disaster? Rrrright.Ĭreated by Joe Barton, who also wrote the excellent 2019 BBC Anglo-Japanese crime thriller Giri/Haji, once you know that the previous title of The Lazarus Project was Extinction, you’ll have a sense of the high-stakes here. In new Sky thriller The Lazarus Project, the actor plays George, a mild-mannered app-developer in London whose dreams of making a tech fortune from his start-up are rudely interrupted by the discovery that he can – wait, what’s that? Turn back time when life gets a bit too difficult? Yep. On your big screen and your small screen, Paapa Essiedu is having quite a time of it this coming month.
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