London Film Festival had its closing night yesterday after a busy 10 days, with Michaela Coel, David Harewood, Paloma Faith and Bridgerton star Ruby Stokes venturing out over the weekend.
All the talk was the future of James Bond, after the departure of Daniel Craig. Actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson is hotly tipped to play 007. but the Londoner is more interested in rumours about about the director, and whether it could be Christopher Nolan, famous for work on the Batman films, as well as Dunkirk and Oppenheimer. Nolan this year said it would be an “amazing privilege” to do a Bond film.
He would be a good fit for the franchise: the director has similar sartorial sharpness to Bond, as he and others in his team wear sharp suits and waistcoats on set. Nolan attended former naval boarding school Haileybury, while Bond went to Eton and into the Navy.
Nolan was born in Westminster and went to UCL University, and has a history of working with iconic London actors such as Gary Oldman and Michael Caine. Caine says said he is now retired, but could Nolan tempt him back for one last cameo?
Mick and the Londoner’s Diary
He’s famous as a singer and songwriter. But Sir Mick Jagger is less well known as a hoarder. The Rolling Stones frontman revealed over the weekend that his pile of keepsakes includes copies of this very diary column from the period of his drugs bust in the Sixties, when he briefly went to jail and did this police mug shot.
“I was cleaning out my garage a couple of weeks ago — as you do; it was such a mess — when I came across an old Evening Standard from 1967,” he told The Times. “On the diary page, after a bit about a film premiere and who was spotted at the latest nightclub, was a column in which this guy said the sentence was completely unfair because normally what people got for these offences was a fine.” We’re glad to have been Sir Mick’s staunch defender.
Writers play it for laughs at Cheltenham
Novelist Zadie Smith joked at Cheltenham Literary Festival that she wrote her first play by accident. Smith had agreed to translate one page of Chaucer for a local magazine, but a press release mistakenly called it a “monologue”, which was reported in the press. Smith phoned her agent, saying “I can’t possibly write a play”. The agent replied: “I don’t know man, I think you might have to.”
Also at Cheltenham last night, writer Scarlett Curtis interviewed her dad Richard about his rom-coms, accusing him of making some of “the most heartfelt, soppy content in British history”. On her own booking as interviewer, Scarlett joked: “Nepotism is alive and well.”
