The former manchild’s performance as an industry suit in new series The Studio shows how far he has come in Hollywood

In Seth Rogen’s new satirical series, The Studio , Rogen plays the newly appointed head of a major Hollywood production company – and there was a time when that alone would have been the joke.

The goofy, schlubby, pre-eminent manchild of mainstream comedy, handed the role of a powerful industry suit – the fish-out-of-water jokes would have written themselves. But Matt Remick, Rogen’s character in The Studio , isn’t a manchild but a man: a pretty regular middle-aged one, trying to do good, honest work in a sour, cynical business.

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The institution is hardly known for being radical but its refusal to accept Arts Council subsidies is a revolutionary move

The news that Wigmore Hall in London is to turn its back on an annual subsidy of £345,000 from Arts Council England (ACE), after a successful campaign to raise £10m from individuals and the private sector, is almost as beautiful to my ears as the last thing I heard there, which was the Dunedin Consort playing Henry Purcell.

Its director, John Gilhooly, is surely right to free his institution from the Let’s Create strategy, which informs all ACE’s funding decisions, linking subsidies to onerous outreach work rather than to excellence in performance. Such organisations shouldn’t have to do what is properly the work of the government, and perhaps the Wigmore’s decision is the start of resistance to this. I certainly hope so.

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The author and podcast host on a favourite restaurant, adventures in scholastic research for his PhD and the second series of Squid Game

Born George Mpanga in north-west London in 1991, George the Poet is a spoken-word artist, author and podcast host. He studied politics, psychology and sociology at King’s College, Cambridge and is now doing a PhD at UCL about the economic and cultural potential of black music. Aged 22 he signed with Island Records and released an EP before stepping away from the music industry. His award-winning podcast, Have You Heard George’s Podcast? , launched in 2018. Last year he published Track Record: Me, Music and the War on Blackness . He will perform in RISE at the Royal Festival Hall on 25 April, as part of the Southbank Centre’s new arts festival, Multitudes.

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(Matador)
Consummate chronicler of 21st-century sensuality Mike Hadreas returns to his indie roots on a convivial seventh album stalked by death and desire

Death stalks the seventh studio album by feted US singer-songwriter Perfume Genius, nom de plume of Mike Hadreas – but stealthily, not so you’d recognise its presence at first. Here are 11 tracks that sound very much alive – songs that hum with universal emotion and queer carnality, everyday anxieties and high drama, from an artist whose struggles have formed the basis of a compelling body of work. Glory adds heft to it.

Vivid with guitars, the album’s twin opening tracks bring the peripatetic Hadreas crashing back to indie rock after long spells in art pop, and orchestral and electronic environs. His last album, the dub-inflected Ugly Season (2022), originally accompanied a 2019 dance piece .

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The opera singer, 59, on his love of Wales, performing for the King, and where he goes to let his hair down

I had an angelic childhood. I was brought up on a sheep farm in Pant Glas, north Wales, with my older brother Ian. My father was a farmer, my mum worked in a school for children with disabilities, and they and my grandparents were in different choirs. There was always singing in the household, pieces of music on the kitchen cupboards.

I’d stand on a table and sing an Elvis song at the drop of a hat. I wasn’t a boy soprano, but I entered into competitions in the Welsh festival, Eisteddfod. That allowed me to think of singing as a career. Any given weekend, you can compete either singing, reciting or playing an instrument.

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Letter signed by 700 members offers support to Hamdan Ballal after initial statement had failed to name director

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has apologised after criticism for its failure to support the detained Palestinian Oscar winner Hamdan Ballal.

Almost 700 voting members, including multiple A-list actors, signed a letter apologising for not directly acknowledgingBallal and the film by name.

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The actor on being thrown out of school, serving snakebites, and a lucky break

Born in Bath in 1973, Kris Marshall landed his first major screen role in 2000, as layabout Nick Harper in the sitcom My Family. He went on to play Colin Frissell in romcom Love Actually and joined the cast of the cosy crime drama Death in Paradise as DI Humphrey Goodman in 2013. Marshall left the show in 2017 but later reprised the role in the BBC spin-off Beyond Paradise, which returned for a third series this month.

This photo was taken on Easter day and is one of my first ever memories. I was standing in the dining room of my grandparents’ house near Newark, Nottinghamshire. My dad spent 30 minutes trying to get me to sit still so he could take this picture. The moment I stopped fidgeting, my grandfather popped up behind him with a camera and said: “Click! Got it!”

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She’s newly divorced and facing an empty nest, but the standup and creator of The Change insists she’s having the time of her life

Is it a pigeon-hole, Bridget Christie asked to be photographed in, or is it a box? Either way, it’s some pretty trenchant visual messaging: whatever society wants to do with middle-aged women, Christie is done with it.

It was also a chance for the 53-year-old to dress up as Kate Bush, recreating her 1978 shoot by Gered Mankowitz. And Christie loves dressing up. She did a whole show dressed as Charles II. The actor, writer and comedian is playful: she has way more than the usual number of funny facial expressions; her chat is peppered with silly, surreal ­diversions. Making people laugh is her thing, she says. “It motivates me, it helps me navigate the world, it’s like a drug.”

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In new film Mr Burton, the Industry star plays a young Richard Burton, with Jones as the mentor who helped him find his acting chops. The duo discuss trying to understand a cultural icon – and how to nail that voice

Sandringham Road lies in the east of Cardiff; a quiet run of Edwardian terrace houses overlooking Roath Mill Gardens. On a late July day, when the air is warm and the park spills out over its railings, Toby Jones and Harry Lawtey sit on the pavement, wearing matching striped pyjamas. The pair are some way into the filming of Mr Burton, an account of the early life of Richard Burton. Lawtey plays the actor in his younger years, when he was known as Richard Jenkins, and Jones is Philip Burton, the teacher who fostered his young student’s talent. So close would their bond grow that Jenkins would become Burton’s legal ward and take his surname. “Without Philip Burton there would never have been a Richard Burton,” Elizabeth Taylor once wrote. “That great rolling voice that cracked like wild Atlantic waves would never have been heard outside the valley.”

Having starred in three series of the HBO drama Industry as an Oxford graduate from a working-class Welsh background – much as Burton himself had been – Lawtey makes a smart casting. He is, too, a young star in ascendance, diligent and eager to learn, in touch with the thrill of his own potential.

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