The Oscar winner answers your questions about playing everyone from Peter Sellers to the Marquis de Sade, his home town of Toowoomba and new care-home horror The Rule of Jenny Pen

The Rule of Jenny Pen looks terrifying! Does the prospect of sudden ageing frighten you? BenderRodriguez
It’s not sudden. I was in [King] Lear when I was 64 and said: “I need a wig that’s grey because he’s supposed to be 80.” Now I’m 73 and I still think inside I’m a brunette. This is the 54th year of my career. The last decade has just galloped past. I waited for something like this – a project that I latched on to. There’s been a lot of stuff that I turned down. I’m now being very pernickety about what I commit three or four months of my life to.

No doubt there was also a lot of work behind it, but w as playing Hector Barbossa in the Pirates of the Caribbean films as much fun as it looked? Have you ever reinhabited the character for a brief moment, to amuse yourself or others? Liam01
Yeah, it was fun. [Director] Gore Verbinski had a kind of pop cultural sense of anarchy. Anyone who liked the Pirates films should also check out Rango, which has his cinematic fingerprints all over it. I’ve reinhabited the character for brief moments, for the Disney ride in Anaheim, and I think Shanghai, and maybe in Florida. I remember having to go and voice some lines after a day on another film, and rolling my eyes going: “Oh my God, will this never go away?” It’s the vanity of being a moment of cinema folklore. It’s fun.

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Royal Court, Liverpool
A cast of more than 50 delivers an inspiring adaptation of David Peace’s epic novel about a manager who prized socialism

In 2016, an adaptation of David Peace’s The Damned United was staged in Leeds and Derby where its pugnacious subject, Brian Clough, is still viewed as villain and hero respectively. Peace’s next football novel was Red or Dead , a 700-page opus about Liverpool FC’s eternally beloved manager Bill Shankly. It is similarly adapted on home turf: the Royal Court has laid out the red carpet, serving Shanks pies and Shanks pints, honouring the man who transformed the club.

The Damned United had a cast of 11 and was bulked out with human-size Subbuteo-style mannequins. Red or Dead assembles a whopping 52-strong ensemble who almost continuously fill the stage, adapter and director Phillip Breen evidently taking his cue from the anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone. In the lead role is film and TV star Peter Mullan, finally returning to the stage in a casting coup that gains resonance from a career as entwined with socialism as Shankly’s.

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The first fiction the author has written since he was attacked in 2022 comprises three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England and the US

Salman Rushdie will publish a new collection of stories later this year, the first work of fiction he has written since he was attacked in 2022.

The Eleventh Hour comprises three novellas and two shorter works set across India, England and the US, all places Rushdie has lived.

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Other winners include Francesca Amewudah-Rivers for Romeo & Juliet, Danny Sapani as King Lear and Giant playwright Mark Rosenblatt

A modern-day version of Oedipus , which turned Sophocles’ tragic leader into a politician awaiting election results, has won three prizes at the Critics’ Circle theatre awards. Robert Icke won best director for the production (which he adapted), with Mark Strong named best actor and Lesley Manville best actress. All three are up for Olivier awards next month.

Receiving ecstatic reviews, Oedipus became a hot ticket at Wyndham’s theatre after previous runs using actors from Internationaal Theater Amsterdam at the Edinburgh festival and in the Netherlands .

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From Wolf Hall to Say Nothing, Alma’s Not Normal to Mr Bates vs the Post Office, here is every single nominee up for the year’s biggest British TV awards

• Stalking saga Baby Reindeer leads 2025 TV Bafta nominations

Blue Lights (BBC One)
Sherwood (BBC One)
Supacell (Netflix)
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light (BBC One)

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The developers of Thank Goodness You’re Here!, Frog Detective and Consume Me discuss burnout, ‘second-album syndrome’, erotic fan art, and the other highs and lows of having a breakout success

It is now more or less impossible to put a precise figure on the number of video games released each year. According to data published by the digital store Steam, almost 19,000 titles were released in 2024 – and that’s just on one platform. Hundreds more arrived on consoles and smartphones. In some ways this is the positive sign of a vibrant industry, but how on earth does a new project get noticed? When Triple A titles with multimillion dollar marketing budgets are finding it hard to gain attention (disappointing sales have been reported for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the Final Fantasy VII remakes and EA Sports FC), what chance is there for a small team to break out?

And yet it does happen. Last year’s surprise hit Balatro has shifted more than 5m copies. Complex medieval strategy title Manor Lords sold 1m copies during its launch weekend. But what awaits a small developer after they achieve success? And what does success even mean in a continuously evolving industry?

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Richard Gadd’s semi-autobiographical stalker thriller has eight nominations, with Mr Bates Vs the Post Office and the raunchy bonkbuster Rivals on six apiece

Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd’s groundbreaking semi-autobiographical saga about his years of abuse and being stalked, has been nominated for the most 2025 TV Bafta awards.

The Netflix drama – which claimed to be a true story, prompting the woman who allegedly inspired the stalker character to sue for defamation – leads the pack with eight nominations, including a leading actor nod for Gadd as the traumatised comic Donny Dunn. Jessica Gunning, who plays the stalker lawyer Martha, goes head to head with Nava Mau, who plays Donny’s partner, Teri, for the supporting actress gong.

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(Geffen/Polydor)
The Virginia songwriter gets lost in understatement on a loved-up album about her relationship with bandmate Julien Baker, shrouding sharp lyrics in shy melodies

Last February, the American “indie rock supergroup” Boygenius – AKA Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus – announced an indefinite hiatus . The announcement came a couple of weeks before their solitary album, The Record , won three of the seven Grammys for which it had been nominated. This was a suitably triumphant ending to a project that had been garlanded with acclaim, both for their music – “at the vanguard of keeping rock alive,” as one US magazine editor put it – and their willingness to indulge in attention-grabbing gestures, frequently designed to prick at the male domination of rock history.

Their debut EP came in a sleeve that referenced that of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s eponymous 1969 album. They dressed as the Beatles for an appearance on Saturday Night Live and as Nirvana on the cover of Rolling Stone. Onstage, they snogged each other, ripped open their shirts and discussed free-bleeding menstruation. They appeared at a Tennessee festival dressed as drag queens , complete with names – including the impossibly winning Queef Urban – to protest against the state banning public drag performances. The memes piled high. By the time the project drew to a close, all three members were substantially more famous than they had been at its inception; Dacus was even namedropped in the title track of Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department.

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Samuel Bottomley, 23, to tutor on courses at West Yorkshire Workshop, aimed at working-class actors in north of England

A Bafta-nominated actor from Bradford has launched his own drama school to help working-class northern English talent access the TV and film industry.

The West Yorkshire Workshop in Bradford was opened this week by 23-year-old Samuel Bottomley, who received a Bafta nod for his role in Channel 4’s Somewhere Boy in 2023.

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