‘It feels deeply human’: Andor’s Genevieve O’Reilly on turning a tiny Star Wars role into one of its biggest

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In 2005, O’Reilly joined the Star Wars galaxy as the younger version of Rebel leader Mon Mothma. Now in Andor, the Irish-Australian actor gets her turn in the spotlight “I swear I got the job because I was the palest person in Sydney,” Genevieve O’Reilly says of the fateful day, more than 20 years ago, when she took a meeting with a casting agent for Star Wars. At the turn of the millennium, the newly opened Fox Studios was luring major productions to Australia; from Moulin Rouge to the Matrix trilogy, it wasn’t unusual to see a recent Nida graduate or sun-kissed soap star filling out a scene behind a Hollywood A-lister. O’Reilly, who was born in Dublin, but grew up in Adelaide then moved to Sydney to study acting, was one among many. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/C9IYcDr via IFTTT
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‘It’s like Game of Thrones!’ The return of India’s ancient superhero fantasy epic

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In the 1980s, Peter Brook’s adaptation of The Mahabharata enchanted audiences on stage and screen. As Brook’s son presents a restored print at the Venice film festival, he and his team discuss the work’s extraordinary journey

When Antonin Stahly was nine years old, his mother took him to the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris to see a production of the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata, which translates loosely as “the great story of mankind”. More than 20 actors from 16 countries performed on a stage steeped in red earth and scarred by a water-filled trench; fire also played a leading role. Directed by Peter Brook, whom the RSC founder Peter Hall called “the greatest innovator of his generation”, and adapted by Luis Buñuel’s former co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière, this spectacular Mahabharata weighed in at nine hours, plus intervals. Even at that length, it represented a massive compression of its source text, which runs to 1.8m words. Brook and Carrière’s version has been likened to summarising the Bible in 40 minutes.

Audiences could devour The Mahabharata in three parts over successive evenings or as an all-day weekend marathon; in some outdoor venues, such as the limestone quarry in Avignon where the production premiered in 1985, it began at dusk and climaxed just as the dawn sun lit up the sky. Stahly saw it in a single noon-to-midnight sitting. “It was like a superhero fantasy,” he says, still sounding awestruck. “It had Bhima, the strongest man on Earth, and Bhishma, who has the power to live for ever. Arjuna was the best warrior. And then there were all the gods. It was amazing for me, because I’m half Indian, but I wasn’t brought up in an Indian context.”

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