Will Poulter on challenging stereotypes in new opioid drama: ‘Shame on us for stigmatizing people’

The British actor delivers his strongest performance to date in indie film Union County as a person struggling with substance abuse trying to turn his life around Every week, Annette Deao, a drug dependency counselor, sits in the county jail and offers incarcerated people in rural Ohio a chance at recovery. One bright day she meets Cody, a young man who shuffles towards the lectern and quietly says that he’s ready to give it a shot. “His self-respect is in the basement,” said Will Poulter , the British actor who plays the character. “He doesn’t like or accept himself enough to embark on helping himself.” Directed by Adam Meeks, an Ohio native, Union County is a bruising yet poetic depiction of a real life drug recovery court in Bellefontaine, Ohio, where individuals join long-term treatment programs with daily sobriety testing. Though the film is led by Poulter and Noah Centineo as foster brothers taking steps to get clean, much of the supporting cast is made up of first-time actors wh...

‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

He was tipped to be the next Richard Burton – but ended up as crossdressing Gunner Gloria in the now controversial sitcom. As his breakthrough classic returns to the screen, Hayes looks back

One day in 1957, Melvyn Hayes was on the set of a film called Woman in a Dressing Gown when a man sat down next to him. “I was getting paid £5 a day and I’d been on location for three days,” the actor recalls. “All I had to do was walk up to a house and put a newspaper through a letterbox. That was my part. Finished. I said to this bloke, ‘I can’t believe the waste of money on this film. Take me. You could have got a newspaper boy on £1 a day to do what I’m doing.’ Then I said, ‘What do you do then, you lazy bugger?’ And he said, ‘I’m the producer.’”

Hayes, now 89, giggles at the memory of the cheek of himself at 23. Back then, £5 a day was a decent whack. His first job in showbiz, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to The Great Masoni, a magician who tasked Hayes with “disappearing twice daily for £4”. His chief film role so far had been in the 1955 drama documentary The Unloved, in which he played a boy in a home for delinquent kids.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/MxYi01P
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton

Malaika Arora scolds 16-year-old dancer for inappropriate gestures: “He is winking, giving flying kisses”