Marianne Jean-Baptiste: ‘I’d work for Mike Leigh again in a heartbeat – in fact, I’ll pay him!’

The actor moved to LA 22 years ago. Now she’s back in the UK to star alongside Bryan Cranston in All My Sons. She talks about the frightening rehearsal schedule, how she’d work again with Mike Leigh in a heartbeat, and why she’s taking up boot-making Marianne Jean-Baptiste arrives at the rehearsal space in  Southwark, south London, and immediately announces that she’s exhausted. It wouldn’t be surprising if nerves were getting the better of her; she’s seven days into a three-week rehearsal period for a new production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, which is brutally short by anyone’s standards. Peeling off unnecessary layers of clothes – it’s not a cold morning – she says jet lag has been messing with her circadian rhythms since she flew in from Los Angeles 10 days ago. “I woke up at 3.17am and was like: fucking hell, it’s early. I lay there for a while, running lines from the play in my head. Then I thought: ‘Just get up and marinate the chicken.’ I made some ginge...

The Surfer review – beach bum Nic Cage surfs a high tide of toxic masculinity

An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser

Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.

The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.

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