Esquire
Olivia Ovenden
Senior staff writer, British Esquire
United Kingdom
United Kingdom
Esquire
And just like that, penises started exploding all over television. Not literally - not yet, anyway - but the recent proliferation of penises in pop culture has been hard to avert your eyes from.
"Don't be offended, but I'm having a cupcake for breakfast," Arian Moayed says when he joins our Zoom call. The cake in question - chocolate, white icing - has not been swiped from a bakery, licked and then returned to the counter, as Moayed's character did with a doughnut in one early episode of Succession, but more wholesomely is a remnant of his daughter's eleventh birthday party.
For Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director behind cult fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth, as well as multi-Oscar winner The Shape of Water, the noir movie is America's Greek tragedy. No other genre better captures the hubris which precedes a downfall, nor the desperate depths and consuming paranoia that come next.
I hear him before I see him, Paul Bettany's disembodied voice filling the room before his face appears on my screen. It feels like an appropriate entrance, given that this is the voice - commanding and yet supremely relaxed - familiar to millions as J.A.R.V.I.S., Iron Man's A.I.
Are the kids alright? Possibly not the ones in attendance at Euphoria High. Two episodes into season two and we have witnessed an accidental overdose from a relapsed teen drug addict, a sociopathic athlete drinking to excess behind the wheel, someone's face being pulverised at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, and so many shots of Sydney Sweeney's bare breasts that at this point it's hard not to feel intimately acquainted with the pair of them.
The actor has built a career portraying both troubled young men and national treasures. He talks to Esquire about playing junior doctor Adam Kay in the BBC's adaptation of 'This is Going to Hurt', why he is drawn to disturbed characters, and not standing still for too long
There is a scene in the first episode of Netflix's Kanye West documentary - or is it Kanye West's Netflix documentary? - jeen-yuhs, where we get a ringside seat to one of the earlier feuds of the musician's career.
In 2015, when director Janicza Bravo began reading The Story - a 148-tweet thread about a road trip gone wrong, which begins: 'Y'all wanna hear a story about why me and this bitch fell out?! It's kinda long but full of suspense?'- she knew this was the material for her next film.
In 2019, Colson Whitehead, the author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, decided to realise a long-held ambition and write a crime caper. Harlem Shuffle, which comes out this autumn, follows furniture salesman Ray Carney through three decades and three crimes, as his crooked side-hustle as a fence for stolen goods takes over his life.
When he was a teenager, Denis Villeneuve fantasised about turning Dune into a film worthy of the book, but as a boy living in a village on a stretch of river between Montreal and Quebec City, the fantasy was as out of reach as the constellation of planets in Frank Herbert's seminal 1965 novel.