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Some tidbits from Rob Wilkins at The Ineffable Con 6. 🤍🖤

"Nothing can top the kiss...apart from...I can't talk about Season 3 can I". ROB WILKINS

Rob saying there's no reason for there not to be more Crowley and Aziraphale, that they have their lives to live together going forward? Oh my heart. I am begging please. #TIC6

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Look at his face and try not to swoon.☺️

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Alright, probably not going to die... but the police wants to know how I ended up in David Tennant's bedroom and is generally puzzled by how I entered the UK 😅

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From Another Planet and Looking For a Guide

The Fourteenth Doctor’s ongoing adventures in love.

This week… the boys need to choose a lamp for Christopher’s new bedside table at the Doctor’s house, so a trip to (a small) IKEA is in order. The Doctor is, predictably, excited by everything, making the visit… challenging for his boyfriend. The Time Lord also gets very attached to a fluffy rug, and is determined to have meatballs.

Back at his place, they test out the comfort of the new rug…

Chapter is called ‘The Nightmare at IKEA’ and it’s up to you whether the nightmare is the Doctor 😉

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TV APPRECIATION WEEK 2025 | Day 7: Newfound Favourite Character ⤷ Una Chin-Riley from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (S03E02)

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David Tennant speaking to Esquire Magazine about his Fourteenth Doctor costume - during the promotion for Rivals

"It was a real joy to get to go back to something that had meant so much and that was so life-changing." - David Tennant

Esquire Video Source [ X ] Other posts in this series:  Discussing kilts Discussing his EE BAFTA 2024 red carpet look

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Lovely, they are so adorable 😁

Not certain whether advertising my own work in a repost is against an online social conventions (let me know if it is) but I recently published a fanfic (RPF, explicit) about them bickering all the time during roleplay (attempts): It's here (ao3-user only).

PRO level teasing...

(Love Michael's reaction here 😂)

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Similar posts (😏) (💙)

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Simon Pegg and Martin Quinn via insta. A little Scotty action for your viewing pleasure.

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The professionals of the Enterprise would like to remind you to critically read and evaluate your sources

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Introducing Detective Disaster Inspector Hardy

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From Another Planet and Looking For a Guide

The Doctor is… feeling things for his boyfriend, Christopher. Intense things. And he has no idea what any of it means.

Confused, he asks Donna for advice and learns… well, that he might need to do some more thinking. After musing on the nature of love and discussing his experiences, he decides that an algorithm might help him understand, and heads home to do some programming.

Is it… love? ❤️

Chapter 30: The Love Algorithm is on AO3 now.

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Actor Michael Sheen: ‘You have to make something happen’

“If you see a gap and you think it’s worth filling, you have to just do it,” says Michael Sheen, beaming broadly. “Life’s short, you know? You just have to make something happen.” The ebullient 56-year-old Welsh actor seems to make a lot of things happen, throwing himself wholeheartedly into one project after another. Known to many for his uncanny screen portrayals of public figures — Tony Blair, Brian Clough, David Frost and Prince Andrew among them — this is also the man who staged a vast three-day community play across the streets of his hometown, who spent £100,000 of his own money wiping out debt for 900 people in south Wales and who is still paying off the bill for mounting the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff. Latest on his to-do list is the fledgling Welsh National Theatre — founded and largely funded by him — which kicks off next year with two epic pieces of drama. That he’s sitting still long enough to eat lunch seems rather remarkable. Indeed, his first thought for our meeting was egg and chips in his beloved Port Talbot (“Remo’s is my favourite”) but playing Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan nightly in the National Theatre’s Nye put paid to that. So he’s plumped for Rules, the venerable old restaurant nestled in the heart of London’s theatreland, famous for its impressive literary pedigree. Charles Dickens, Henry Irving and Laurence Olivier (founding director of the National) dined here: Sheen is hoping to absorb some Olivier lustre by osmosis. “It’s quite something isn’t it?” he says, casting his eye around the gilded mirrors, crimson upholstery and crisp white tablecloths. “As the young people say these days, it’s a vibe.” So how does he generally fuel up, I ask, as we study a menu rich in steak and oysters (Rules is so steeped in history that the vegan revolution doesn’t seem to have quite broached the threshold). Does he usually lunch like this?

“Good Lord, no!” he exclaims. “I usually have whatever the kids are having.” (Sheen has two tiny children with partner Anna Lundberg as well as 26-year-old daughter, Lily, with former partner Kate Beckinsale). “Or, if I’m driving up and down the M4, it’s a sandwich at the Leigh Delamere service station.” An impeccably clad waiter glides up to our table. Casting aside the cocktail menu — an attractive but impractical option before a near three-hour show — Sheen goes for steamed fillet of wild halibut with a heritage tomato salad, while I live more dangerously with a chicken, leek and mushroom pie. “I’m glad I’ll be able to watch you eat a pie,” he says, genially, adding that timing meals is tricky when performing live — pastry for lunch might not be ideal. The night before we meet, I watch him in action, holding that enormous Olivier Theatre as the Welsh miner’s son who launched the National Health Service. It’s an intensely charismatic and moving performance, with Sheen never off stage. You have to “wrangle” that space, he says. “It’s like a workout.” Does he get nervous? “Oh God, yes,” he says. “Before every single performance.” Nye is a project close to his heart: “It’s the story of what politics can be: of a man who was in the mines when he was a kid and became the minister for health and housing and changed all our lives. Bevan in this play represents something quite radical and authentic, with integrity and compassion. The idea that we can remake our society. It’s our choice. And I think we’re missing that.”

Even when still, Sheen buzzes with a sort of condensed energy. He’s friendly and frank, talking passionately about the inspirational risk-takers he’s both played and met. His first job out of drama school was with Vanessa Redgrave (When She Danced, 1991), an artist famously unafraid of experimentation. “That was a massive lesson,” he says, sipping the coffee that is the nearest he has come to a starter. “I’ve learnt that it’s by taking big swings and committing to something risky that you make the biggest discoveries. Ultimately, you can’t be afraid of failing. You can’t.” He singles out a pivotal moment in Nye when Bevan, tired of arguing the toss, simply announces that the NHS will launch on a specific day. “He put the flag in the ground and said, ‘This is when it’s going to happen.’ And it took that audacity, that courage, that vision to wrangle everyone. I sort of learnt from that.” In founding the Welsh National Theatre, he says, he thought, “OK, I’m not entirely sure I can afford to do this, I’m not entirely sure how it’s going to look. But I’ve got a strong sense of what I want it to be, and I put my flag in the ground and go, right, we’re doing it. And now we’ll make it work.”

There are plenty of headwinds. The company’s predecessor — National Theatre Wales — had faced some criticism latterly over the number of productions it staged and the number of non-Welsh artists being used. It closed down in 2024 after Arts Council Wales (ACW) withdrew its funding, citing “difficult decisions”. It’s also a tough economic time for theatres generally. But last year’s sellout run of Nye at the near 1,900-seat Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff (where it returns later this month) convinced Sheen that there is an appetite for meaty, epic work from Welsh writers and artists. The WNT will focus on staging ambitious Welsh drama and building audiences. The company launches next January with Thornton Wilder’s classic celebration of everyday life, Our Town, seen through a Welsh lens. “It reconnects you to what’s important in life,” says Sheen simply. “Every time I see it, I come out of it going, ‘I must see my children. I must tell my mother I love her.’” And then it’s on to Owain & Henry, a stirring new historical drama by Gary Owen, with Sheen in the lead, which promises to be altogether more combustible. Tracing the story of the 15th-century Welsh prince Owain Glyndŵr, who raised a rebellion against Henry IV and English rule over Wales, it presents a very different picture to that drawn by Shakespeare in his history plays. “This is the other side of the story,” says Sheen. “It’s big, it’s ambitious, it’s a foundational Welsh story about our greatest hero. It’s very controversial. It’s really challenging.” Why controversial? “Well,” he replies, with a bit of gleam in his eye. “As they say, history is written by the victors. Wales didn’t win. This is the story from the Welsh point of view. It ain’t Henry IV. The subtitle of the play is ‘The End of England’. . .” Sheen can be an electrifying presence on stage — and anyone who saw his rousing speech to the Welsh football team before the 2022 World Cup could attest to his formidable ability to galvanise a crowd. His Owain Glyndŵr should be something to see.

There’s a sudden flurry of activity as our food arrives. Sheen’s halibut reclines, like some elegant Victorian diva, on a bed of charred stem broccoli and buttered leeks, encircled by a chorus of mussels. My pie is a handsome affair topped by crisp pastry, which breaks with a little sigh of steam to reveal hunks of chicken in a soothing sauce. I’m already wondering how many coffees I’ll need to stay focused this afternoon. Both opening shows are co-productions with other theatres and, as artistic director, Sheen has already commissioned four further plays. While he sees his celebrity as useful for kick-starting things, he is keenly aware of drawing too much of the spotlight — “It’s about collaboration.” But so far, apart from £200,000 transitional money from ACW and some investment from TV production company Bad Wolf, he’s put up most of the funding. Surely that can’t continue? “No. And that would be a failure. We hope we will be able to get Arts Council funding, philanthropic funding, corporate sponsorship — a range of revenue — and to make money from the productions. But that’s the investment, that’s the commitment. It’s a risk, it’s a gamble. But what’s the point of doing it otherwise?” Programming a national theatre also instantly pitches you into a hail of opinions and questions about national and cultural identity. In Wales that’s complicated by language (Wales already has a national Welsh-language company, Theatr Cymru, and there are plans for the two to work together on bilingual projects). For Sheen, a national company can offer a platform to explore such questions. “Who are we, how did we get here and where are we going? That’s the national conversation, isn’t it, no matter what the nation is? You have to be addressing national issues, creating a canon of work. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do in Wales. We don’t have a canon really. How do you do work of scale and ambition about your country, but also how do you develop that in a long-term sustainable way, developing writers, directors, theatre makers?” He points to his own route into the profession, through drama at school, into the ambitious West Glamorgan Youth Theatre and then on, via the National Youth Theatre of Wales and a grant, to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada). That path is just not available to many young people now, he says. Neither does everyone come from a family and a community keyed up for drama. Sheen’s parents, Irene and Meyrick, were keen on amateur operatics, and Port Talbot, where he grew up, had already produced acting royalty in the shape of Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. “It’s got much tougher. I feel that there is a responsibility for a national theatre to look at that — to make sure the talent out there can be supported and fostered, to develop pathways for people.”

In 2011, Sheen’s life took a radical turn. Living in Los Angeles, a highly successful stage and screen actor, he went back to Port Talbot to mount The Passion (an early hit for National Theatre Wales). A spectacular, inspiring response to the Easter story, involving more than 1,000 volunteers, it spooled out across the industrial town’s streets, shopping centres and car parks for three days. “It was life-changing,” he says. “Everyone sort of looked to me and went, ‘You do know what you’re doing, right? Because someone needs to know.’ So I had to be that person. That gave me the confidence to do it again. But more than anything it opened my eyes to what was going on in my community — the work on the frontline with the most marginalised and vulnerable people. The people doing the most valuable work were the most underfunded and having more and more cut.

“I tried to address that through a piece of art. But I couldn’t just leave it at that. The Passion made me think about how I could address those things in a better, more effective way. That started to change what I did with my time, my focus and my money.” He’s described himself as a “not-for-profit actor”. “What I mean is that I try to use the money I earn to develop and support the things that I believe in, using the social enterprise model to do that.” The projects he’s supported are legion. In 2019, after Cardiff’s funding to host the annual Homeless World Cup tournament fell through, Sheen sold his houses in both LA and Wales to ensure it went ahead. He bought up and cancelled £1mn of debt, the process documented in Michael Sheen’s Secret Million Pound Giveaway (Channel 4, 2025) to highlight the scourge of high-cost credit. He’s invested £250,000 in Mab Gwalia (translating to “Son of Wales”), a fund supporting community projects in Wales, and his and Jess Webb’s children’s picture book about homelessness, A Home for Spark the Dragon, raises money for homelessness charity Shelter. “Increasingly now I do feel like there’s a ticking clock,” he says. “As long as money’s coming in, I can put money into other stuff. Well, that’s not going to last for ever. And having the energy and opportunity isn’t either. So even though I’m getting more tired, I’m also aware that there’s an urgency.” He waves away any suggestion of going into politics — he’s more use deploying his profile to get stuff done, he suggests. But he does think it’s time for some fundamental reassessments of what matters. “I feel like we are in a period where a lot of old systems and models are breaking down, but the new isn’t here yet. The future can’t just be scary. It can’t just be ‘AI is going to take our jobs and fascism is on the rise’ — we have to offer a positive view of the future.”

A diner on the neighbouring table leans in and starts talking to Sheen. The conversation roves around football, touching on his mesmerising portrayal of the outspoken manager Brian Clough in The Damned United. As we tackle a dessert — strawberry and vanilla ice cream for him, cherry sorbet for me — I ask him about his exceptional skill at finding his way under the skin of public figures. It’s different, he explains, to doing an impression. “With an impression you are making the focus the external — ‘I just want you to enjoy how much I look or sound like the person.’ But that can’t sustain a storyline because it’s not the internal life. With Brian Clough, how he sounded was not just a product of where he came from but of something psychological going on as well. The external reflects the internal.” Perhaps the most intriguing real character he has played is himself. In the BBC’s lockdown treat Staged, he was “Michael Sheen” to David Tennant’s “David Tennant”. So how true to the original was that? “It’s not really me at all,” he says, laughing. “We played different fake versions of ourselves in each series. So many people still ask me, ‘How is your neighbour?’ There is no neighbour. She’s made up.” Staged playfully explored the overlaps between art and life. But that interplay can run much deeper. Since losing his father earlier this year, he has sometimes found himself overwhelmed with grief mid-performance in Nye. He talks pensively about how strange it can be to draw on your own emotional life on stage. “There’s something not entirely comfortable about that process.” Our neighbours have now melted away. As a waiter expertly smooths out a new tablecloth, I ask Sheen whether he thinks that is why live theatre can express loss so powerfully, offering a point of connection with an audience. “Exactly,” he replies. “I’m sharing the experience of losing my father as expressed through Nye losing his. People in the audience are sharing their experience of losing people as expressed through the quality of attention they give to this piece. And we meet. That’s part of the mystery. There’s a moment of connection that does something profound to us. “That’s the thing that Our Town does, for me,” he adds. “It says, ‘Grab it, make the most of it now, don’t let the noise get in the way of what’s really important here.’ And often it’s the little things that are the most important.”

From Financial Times

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Only one bed 😌

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New position to sit on a chair uncovered...

New pictures of David as Ian Ventham in Thursday Murder Club.

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A protective Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble

for Tennant Tuesday (or whatever day this post finds you)

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GOD DAVID TENNANT WAS SO HOT IN MACBETH!!!😍😳🤭🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿👑