What to Expect When We Are Expecting “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light” *UPDATED*

“Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings.”

Henry repeats the phrase as if cherishing it: the mirror and the light. (Excerpt from The Mirror and The Light)

It is 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead. King Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour, who gets pregnant soon but sadly dies days after giving Henry the male heir he has been expecting for a long time. Since one heir is not enough to secure the throne, finding a new bride for Henry is critical. And this is only one item on Thomas Cromwell’s to-do list in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light!

Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son from Putney and a newly created baron who continues his meteoric rise in the court of Henry VIII, needs to succeed at all costs to keep his power, wealth, and privileges. Imperial Ambassador Chapuys tells him: Continue reading “What to Expect When We Are Expecting “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and The Light” *UPDATED*”

10 Years Ago Today: Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory at Cheltenham Literature Festival

source: gloucestershireecho.co.uk

10 years?!?! Whaaaat? It feels like yesterday.

I was very lucky to be there in the room when Damian and Helen read love poems to each other from The Love Book, a brilliant collection of classic and contemporary love poems that vary from Shakespeare to E.E. Cummings to Maya Angelou coming together in a book as well as in an app. It was a moving and intimate hour with a powerhouse husband and wife team reading poems, teasing each other, and sharing their dynamic chemistry with the audience.

It turns out that when the festival inquired about a possible video recording of the reading in 2014, Helen and Damian said no. Damian tells The Sunday Times:

Continue reading “10 Years Ago Today: Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory at Cheltenham Literature Festival”

The Radleys Review: Love, Addiction and Choices

“The comedic premise of the film is that this family is living this dull, suburban life, and they’ve got a big secret, and no one knows what it is until this event happens in the film. And then the shit hits the fan, all hell breaks loose.” – Damian Lewis.

I finally met The Radleys last Friday at Cinema Village in NYC. And I met them in style, too… with my fangs on! Continue reading “The Radleys Review: Love, Addiction and Choices”

Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Noël Coward’s London Calling! – A Centenary Celebration

Damian Lewis is returning to theater stage for a one-night-only charity gala performance in “A Marvellous Party” on November 17 at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. The gala performance is to celebrate the legacy of British playwright and composer Noël Coward and support three charities; namely, The Queen’s Reading Room, the Noël Coward Foundation and Acting For Others, all united in Noël Coward’s belief that the arts belong to everyone.

The Noel Coward Foundation launched Coward 125, a two-year long celebrations of the life and work of Noël Coward, will now culminate in the star-studded “A Marvellous Party” in 2024, Coward’s 125th birth year. Tickets are selling fast!

And for today’s Throwback Thursday, I would like to revisit a Noël Coward celebration that I was very lucky to see in London last fall. Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Noël Coward’s London Calling! – A Centenary Celebration”

Happy Birthday, Homeland (Or How Brody Turned My Life Upside Down)

At a recent dinner party, we played a game where everyone had to talk about three things they thought changed their lives. I had two moments from my early life: one being the Live Aid concert back in July 1985 (I was 13!) that got me thrilled that the whole world, all of us, were watching it together, and the other was a political assassination of a journalist in Turkey in January 1992 (I was 20!) that taught me that a state can get rid of citizens that insist on looking for the truth. And the third moment I mentioned was Homeland. Because I was a regular academic attending to my own thing until a certain “pesky Brit” disguised as an American POW showed up and turned everything upside down! Homeland made me a Damian Lewis fan for life and I launched a blog in his name almost a decade ago. Go, figure!

Homeland, the show that started it all, premiered on Showtime on October 2, 2011, exactly thirteen years ago today. Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Homeland (Or How Brody Turned My Life Upside Down)”