joannanora

[joannanora]

Good news has arrived for Jane Austen fans. The author’s classic novel, Sense and Sensibility, is returning to the big screen. (The book was previously made into the Oscar-winning 1995 film starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet.) Here’s everything we know about the remake.

Sense and Sensibility follows the three Dashwood sisters and their mother, now a widow, in 18th-century England. The family is forced to leave their lavish Sussex family estate and move in with a distant relative who lives in a quaint cottage. There, the two eldest sisters, Elinor and Marianne, begin contrasting journeys of love and loss.

ELLE’s April 2025 cover star Daisy Edgar-Jones is set to lead the film. She’ll play Elinor Dashwood, the eldest sister of the three siblings.

In her cover story, Edgar-Jones spoke about the importance of playing layered characters. “It’s great that more and more stories are being made with women front and center,” she said. “It’s also an interesting thing, being a woman in your 20s, wanting to find characters who are not always ingenues. You want to find characters with agency. I want every character I play to be complicated and deep and have layers to them, because that’s what it is to be human. I feel lucky that a lot of the characters I’ve played have had that. They aren’t defined by their actions or their experiences, or by the men in their life.”

Edgar-Jones celebrated the Sense and Sensibility news on Instagram in a photo posted today that shows her holding the book. She wrote a simple caption, “👀.”

On July 11, Deadline reported that Esmé Creed-Miles has been cast as Marianne Dashwood, Elinor’s emotional and impulsive sister. Miles shared an Instagram post celebrating the big news with shots of the book and her script side-by-side with Edgar Jones’s.

Today the rest of the cast is announced:

welcome Caitríona Balfe as Mrs. Dashwood, Frank Dillane as John Willoughby, George MacKay as Edward Ferrars, Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon, Bodhi Rae Breathnach as Margaret Dashwood, and Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings to the cast of Sense and Sensibility, directed by Georgia Oakley. (from focus features instagram)

The Sense and Sensibility remake will be brought to you by Focus Features and Working Title Films. Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) will direct, and the bestselling author Diana Reid (Love & Virtue) will write the screenplay.

According to Reid, filming begins next month.

Not yet, though according to Focus Features, “it’s coming soon.”

[joannanora]

New role for Caitriona! (one of my favorite books!) Yeeeesssssss!

[joannanora]

I think the fat lady just sang!

credit caittony IG 20 July 2025

[joannanora]

Edit:

[joannanora]

Instagram outlander_starz

Turn your sound all the way up!

Professional magic-makers @bearmccreary and vocalist @juliefowlis have gifted us with a goosebump-inducing #BloodOfMyBlood title song (which we will have on repeat until further notice)!

Learn more about how the titles came to be on Variety.

Posted 17 July 2025

[joannanora]

Lol 😜

Let's see how many screenshots of the wedding video will be flying around looking for the dancer next to Sam. 🤣

No doubts who's dancing with who here

but let me help a bit

[joannanora]

Sammie 💍 Richard

[joannanora]

He has a face that seems drawn by hand, with visible wrinkles and marked features. It is a face that tells a story. Perhaps that’s why London actor Tobias Menzies, 51, usually plays tough guys, antiheroes, complicated men. Among some of his best-known roles are his sarcastic Duke of Edinburgh in The Crown, Brutus in Rome and the violent Jack Randall in Outlander; off-screen, there’s no trace of those characters. Although he maintains the actors’ instinctive suspicion of the press, Menzies is all about humility and politeness. Dressed in a floral shirt, he meets us in a café in his neighborhood on a rare sunny morning in the British capital.

“The weather is too good to go to the theater,” he says when asked if he has seen anything interesting lately. On days like this, he prefers to spend time swimming in the pools on Hampstead Heath near his home, a kind of wild urban park in north London.

The truth is that he is on a break, having just finished an intense season of filming in London and New York. And he has just released F1, in which he stars alongside Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt. Directed by Joseph Kosinski who did Top Gun: Maverick, the film has been shot on real circuits during Grand Prix intervals. “We filmed in the pits, the tracks and in restricted access areas such as the paddock, but we had a very small window and we had to move right away because the races were starting,” he explains.

As for working with Brad Pitt with so many people around, he explains, “We experienced real reactions over which we did not have much control,” he says with a smile that implies that there is a story behind it. “I didn’t know anything about F1 and everything that surrounds that circus seemed incredible to me, very strange. Obviously, there is a lot of money at stake. That atmosphere has a very particular energy, which this film tries to capture.”

In his 25-year-long career, Menzies has worked in television, film and theater, in major productions such as Casino Royale and Game of Thrones as well as in smaller projects such as a contemporary version of the Greek tragedy Antigone. But it was The Crown that pushed him into the limelight. The actor, who confesses to being anti-monarchy, has experienced a professional boost thanks to this portrait of the British royal family. “Doors have probably opened for me, but it hasn’t been exactly crazy either. What it amounts to is that I do fewer castings and have more job offers. I try not to think about it too much.”

The fact is that Menzies can still have a coffee in his neighborhood without anyone disturbing him. “When I do television, viewers see me while they are at home, with their laptop in bed, so they associate my face with their own lives. I think that’s why I am often asked if we know each other from work. I’d like to say, ‘See you on Monday!’ but I have to give a more boring answer and admit that I’m an actor. Then they get either embarrassed or angry.”

Menzies’ trajectory is curious given that he grew up without a TV. “At the age of six I was obsessed, I was practically an addict, and my mother decided to get rid of it. I don’t share the cultural references of the children’s programs of that era. Instead, I grew up climbing trees and riding bicycles.”

As a child he moved with his mother, a drama and literature teacher, from London to the county of Kent, where he and his brother lived a hippie childhood in the countryside, attending an alternative school. He also lived for a time in India with his mother, in the ashram of the sinister Osho Bhagwan Rajneesh – his mother was a fan.

A keen tennis player, he was not interested in being an actor until he left school. “I admired physical theatre groups like Complicité and I wanted to train at Jacques Lecoq’s mime school in Paris, but I couldn’t afford it. There was no money in my family. I got a scholarship for RADA and accepted it with the intention of creating my own company. But when I got there, I discovered that I enjoyed acting.” He is still preparing productions with friends: “Dance videos, installations... I’m always doing things,” he says.

Much has been written about Menzies’ face and how he uses it as a work tool. A clear example is the episode of The Crown in which his Duke of Edinburgh experiences an existential crisis while American astronauts set foot on the Moon for the first time. After seeing Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin, Menzies’ Duke of Edinburgh goes from contained emotion to disappointment in a subtle but devastating way. For that episode alone he deserved his Emmy. It is a sample of the level of acting that is common among British actors and which begs the question of why so many of them are so good.

As someone who knows Shakespeare well, has worked with Olivia Colman and Judi Dench and shared an apartment with Helena Bonham-Carter, Menzies may know the answer. “Well, Bardem is a brilliant actor, and he is Spanish,” he says. “I think the secret of a good performance is not to reveal everything, that there are things that stay inside. That’s how most people live and that builds a good drama. A character attracts you because you receive something, but not everything. Perhaps that reserve is something that comes more naturally to the British,” he says.

“On the other hand, there is the fact that you study in school and that the language is an advantage in the industry,” he adds. “You have to be realistic, look at it from a Marxist perspective, and follow the money trail. There are many European actors who do not speak English as their mother tongue and that limits their opportunities in American blockbusters.”

Despite his age, Menzies still has a promising future ahead of him. He has just returned from Budapest from filming the new production with Keanu Reeves by Ruben Östlund who made The Triangle of Sadness. “It’s another crazy movie. It’s been very exciting. It will premiere at Cannes next year. Apart from that, I’ll have to start looking for work here,” he says. He doesn’t seem too concerned.

Production: David Bradshaw

Makeup and hair: Chad Maxwell (A Frame)

Posted 16th July 2025

The filming that Tobias mentions in Budapest, is a Swedish film "Entertainment System is Down" by Ruben Östlund. It's a feature film about a long-haul flight where the entertainment system fails, forcing passengers to confront their boredom. The film is a Swedish-German-French co-production and stars Kirsten Dunst, Daniel Brühl, and Keanu Reeves.

#TobiasMenzies

[joannanora]

[joannanora]

Video 📹 from Instagram

Instagram

Pre-order At What Point here: CaitlinO’Ryan.com

Remember… a devastatingly heartfelt, intelligent, witty and turbulent ode to female friendship, fears, hopes and dreams. The book I wish I'd had in my twenties but so glad to have now in my forties, where I still swim in the uncertainties of this beautiful and confounding life. — Caitríona Balfe

[joannanora]

One more video of Cammy Barnes, the bagpiper playing RHCP posted by thee_tank

in case you missed it

Now you can write countless words about a tie that wasn't there in the other pic, and have a thousand poor excuses for where his hand is and that he's moving the hand in the next frames! But perhaps you shouldn't post pics talking about hands and where they at all then, and just to show how childish immature, and pathetic it is, let me show you the same

Of course, attack the man, attack me and everyone over here just enjoying the wedding! Yes we do, I didn't see one post on any shippers page congratulating the happy couple! You know things are about a bride and a groom, but we know how private events like this is bluntly abused by shippers, as they did it before completely ignoring facts that are still out there for them to check at the very source. (Mexico, mezcalgirl, check her highlights posted at 6am CEST on 11 August and do the math (CEST is 8 hours ahead of Mexico)) And yes this is a private event as well, as there are family and friends, and amongst these friends are the OL and BoB cast as they hang out together a lot, as friends! It's a wedding, a real one, not a fake one for a series or to use to hide some relationship that doesn't exist

I know you will never give in, but cut out the crap and the hate against a person that just lives and is there living his real life. Cut the childish postings about bloggers as if they are dummies just because they're realistic and don't need a wet dream of a couple that only exists in a series. All your hate, cursing, calling people names is not gonna change that.

Oh and don't forget to enjoy the music, Cammie Barnes, IG handle iamcammybarnes. Love the music! 🎶 ❤️ 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[joannanora]

Instagram starz

Join us at San Diego Comic-Con for panels with the stars of Outlander, Blood of my Blood, and Spartacus: House of Ashur. We'll see you there!💥

Posted 11 July 2025

[joannanora]

There used to be this thing called slap a shipper Friday. I never did that, I found it a bit... well ... but I can't help myself doing it now, after all the terrible horrible things that have been written these past months, maybe even more than a year now about Tony and Cait. So forgive me, but have to do this

Happy Slap A Shipper Friday!

[joannanora]

The wedding guests or... the family! ❤️

Wedding Rik & Sammie 10July 2025

IGS Lauren Lyle, Joey Phillips, Caitly O'Ryan

[joannanora]

[joannanora]

[joannanora]

Tobias Menzies: 'The royals live a lifetime like they're on reality TV'

INTERVIEW As he stars with Brad Pitt in F1, the British actor talks about his role in The Crown, his hippy childhood – and why he has just the right face to play baddies

“Like theatre on steroids” is how Tobias Menzies describes shooting his first scene with Brad Pitt on the grid at Silverstone for this summer’s blockbuster movie, F1. “We did it before a real race, because there would be no other way to capture that atmosphere of adrenalin and chaos… the rev and squeal of tension… the roaring depth of 50,000 spectators.”

The 50-year-old British actor – best known for playing Prince Philip in The Crown (2019-2020) and Frank/Jonathan “Black Jack” Randall in historical time travel drama Outlander (2014-19) – says the race organisers could only give the film crew seven minutes to nail the moment when his character (smarmy Formula One team board director Peter Banning) meets Pitt’s reckless old rock star of a driver (Sonny Hayes) before the latter steps into his car to screech through one of the film’s many high-speed track sequences.

Tobias Menzies, right, as Peter Banning, a tech bro-style racing executive, with Javier Bardem as Ruben Cervantes (Photo: Warner Bros/Apple TV+)

Directed by Joseph Kosinski – who also brought us Top Gun: Maverick – F1: The Movie is an unabashed bro-fantasy in which a man old enough to be his rivals’ grandfather uses his superior experience and timeless reflexes to beat the boys at their high-tech games. And like Top Gun: Maverick, it relies heavily on the daredevil charisma of an A-List star to pull viewers along for the ride. But catch it in a big multiplex and it’s impossible not to find yourself sinking low into your seat, throwing your body into the chicanes and clutching your popcorn like a steering wheel. 

“I don’t own a car myself,” says the gentle, watchful Menzies, “and I still don’t find myself taken with the sport. But I found the whole, dramatic world of F1 really interesting. I was surprised how small – like children – many of the drivers are. Obviously that makes sense because they’re like jockeys and every pound counts. I got interested in the strategies they use, both on the track and off of it.”

Menzies found playing Prince Phillip in ‘The Crown’ gave him a deeper compassion for the royals as humans (Photo: Sophie Mutevelian/Netflix)

He trained a beady eye on the money men in the corporate boxes and noticed they were “very expensively dressed in soft leisure wear in soft colours”. So although Peter Banning “was written as a wily British gentleman, all suited and booted”, he approached the filmmakers to suggest the character might be “more of a tech bro, because that culture has crossed the Atlantic”.

Over coffee in a North London cafe, he explains that “I thought Banning would be one of those guys who talks about ‘wellness’ in a really weird way… A man who sees a weird conjunction between ‘wellness’ and massive corporate power in a way that I find quite repulsive.” Hence those hippy bracelets? “Yes! I’m glad you noticed the bracelets.”

There’s an interesting power struggle between Banning’s money and Hayes’s physical prowess that pries open tensions seething within the patriarchy. Does Menzies think the wealthy geeks still feel they need to prove something to the jocks? Like when Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight? “Yes. That was so strange. I don’t really understand it. But I guess there are old wired ideas about power and masculinity that they fall for…” he laughs and the distinctive long lines that bracket his mouth bend, briefly.

Menzies suspects his “strange face grooves… or the world’s longest dimples” may be the reason he’s so often cast as baddies: from Brutus in HBO’s Rome (2005-07) to the powder-keg patriarch in Alexander Zeldin’s reimagining of Antigone at the National Theatre last year. These lines – which he said “appeared on my cheeks in my mid-teens, maybe as part of a growth spurt because nobody else in my family has them” – can be usefully twisted into the service of a character’s cunning or cruelty. 

Menzies and Brad Pitt at the European premiere of ‘F1: The Movie’ at NoMad London this week (Photo: Dave Benett/Getty for Apple TV+)

“One of the reasons I’m an actor,” he says, “is to access an arena in which you can turn the dark and difficult stuff into something interesting, a conversation, an art. I find the process of representing dark or troubling or uncomfortable material cathartic.”

Back in 2022, Outlander star Sam Heughan said he felt “betrayed” by the creative team who asked him to film a nude scene in which his character was raped by Menzies’s character. The scene was cut from the episode when Heughan argued that his full frontal nudity “sexualised a horrific experience”. Today, Menzies says he’s glad Heughan was heard. He’s sympathetic to “the pressures on Sam, early in his career”. The consent of actors in such scenes is “essential”, he says.

But he’s also not keen on viewers being “shielded from darkness: drama without darkness is anodyne.” He points out that “we use fairy stories as a way of introducing kids to the fact that the world is a complicated and scary place sometimes. It isn’t all happiness.”

Menzies’s own childhood sounds pretty cool, though. Born in London, he’s the elder son of a drama-teacher mother and BBC Radio producer father. “They were 70s hippies,” he says, so he spent his early years in their Victorian flat watching vinyl spin on the record player at the end of the hall. He smiles gently, recalling the album sleeves. “The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. Kraftwerk’s Man Machine.”

They divorced when he was six and his mother moved with Menzies and his younger brother Luke (now a solicitor) to Kent, where the boys attended a Steiner school – a type of independent school with a holistic educational style and an emphasis on creativity. “I got a lot from that,” he says. Although he was more interested in tennis than acting as a boy, he says he was always an enthusiastic student – “a hand-up kinda kid”. He adds that “at Steiner schools you get used to standing up and reciting poems with the class. It normalises performance.” His mother took him to see lots of experimental, physical theatre and dance, which led him to audition for Rada barefoot. “I liked getting my shoes and socks off,” he says.

As ‘Black Jack’ Randall in historical time travel drama ‘Outlander’ (Photo: Aimee Spinks/Sony Pictures/Channel 4)

“I’ve always been the kind of actor who has ideas about how I need to do things. So when I did Rome – my first big TV series – I was knocking on the show runner’s door and suggesting Brutus needed to be more agitated and fearful after killing Caesar. That scene was originally written quite sedately, and I think one of the problems with TV can be that you’re often asked to come into scenes and deliver info without the apparent need for it. If you can weave more character into that plot then it starts to spark.”

Did he have any input into how he portrayed Prince Philip in The Crown? “That was different because he was a real person,” says Menzies. “But yes, I brought some thoughts to the moon landing episode. I felt the scene where Philip met the astronauts needed more ups and downs – first he had the hope that these men would meet a part of him that was lost, then he had the heartbreak of realising that they’re just kids who’ve been trained to go into space.” He sighs and tugs on his baseball cap.

As a “small ‘r’ republican”, Menzies thinks “it would be more grown-up of us as a country not to have all that [monarchy] sat on top of our country”. But he found filming the series gave him a “deeper compassion” for the royals as humans. “Do I agree with Prince Philip’s politics, many of his views? No. But I think he was a really thoughtful, smart guy. If he hadn’t married the Queen he would have had a very successful career in the navy. He put all that misplaced reforming energy into an institution which did not welcome it.”

Menzies also shudders at the way the royals live “a lifetime like they’re on reality TV”. He’s had his own brushes with celebrity gossip after he was reported to be dating Kristin Scott Thomas in 2005. He hasn’t ever discussed his private life in print and wince-nods a little when I ask if he gets recognised more on the streets since The Crown. “But I can still get around,” he shrugs, gesturing to cafe life flowing obliviously around us.

Unlike Brad Pitt? “Yeah,” nods Menzies, polishing off his drink. “The rest of us could go out for a bite to eat,” he says. “But Brad – who, despite being every bit as charismatic as you’d expect, seemed to be a lovely guy, quite un-statusy and a very easy-going scene partner – was just stuck in the hotel.” Menzies shakes his head. “I don’t know how he copes with that at all.”