#ross red dark parables

[mb-blue-roses]

That reminds me rhat I wanted to post my fic - I don't feel like posting the Ao3 link, so I'll drop the fic under the cut!

Reunion of Fire and Ice

1.5k words

Summary: After the Fairytale Detective insists he goes and sits down with his sister like the adults they both are, Ross Red finally makes his way to the kingdom of Snowfall to reunite with Snow White.

Ross Red makes his way through the kingdom of Snowfall, a flame-red jacket pulled around his shoulders. Dark red fur rests around his shoulders, and he gazes at the city around him. Well, his sister's kingdom is certainly thriving. He can't help but be proud of his sister, seeing the people that mill about and chatter regarding anything and everything. A cool morning breeze blows through the town. Ross holds a bag of freshly-baked breads and other breakfast foods, recently purchased from a vendor in the city. He figures it isn't a good idea to show up to an impromptu family reunion without something on hand to make it smoother.

He raps on the castle's front door.

No answer.

He raps on the castle's front door again.

No answer.

He raises his hand to pound harder on the front door, trying to draw someone to open it. Then it creaks open.

"Who's knocking at this time of the morn-" the figure in the doorway snaps, before stuttering out- "R-ross?"

Snow White, the sister he hasn't spoken to in over a thousand years, is standing in the doorway. He can't help but flinch a bit under her cold stare. There's something unreadable in her eyes. Unable to find the words, he holds up the bag of fresh breakfast. Snow gapes at him for a moment, then turns around with a snap and jerks her head in a gesture to follow her. So he does.

His shoes squeak on the tile as he follows his sister through the elegant halls. Eventually, they end in a comfortable and less ornate dining room.

"What. Are. You. Doing. Here?" Snow asks sharply. Ross slams the food on the table defensively, hissing, "What? Can't I just try to see my sister?"

"It's been over a thousand years, Ross!"

"I know you want this reunion just as much as I do, Snow!"

Surprisingly enough, Snow is the one that backs down first. She hesitantly sighs, "You're right..."

Ross busies himself with spreading out the assorted foods, so that he doesn't have to look his sister in the eyes. He can't bring himself to look her in the eyes, as much as he wants to see her response. She remarks, "Let me guess. This was the detective's idea."

Involuntarily, Ross snorts.

"So that's a yes," she states in reply.

The room settles into an awkward silence. Snow's foot taps on the ground, and Ross shuffles thing around the table. He glances up, and looks out the window. The sunlight reflects off a little bit of snow, and the flourishing kingdom makes him smile at his sister's competence.

"Your kingdom seems to be flourishing," he remarks, "That's good."

Snow coughs, clearly trying to disguise a laugh, before she tells him, "I'm not the queen of Snowfall, Ross." "You... aren't?" he asks, startled. He would've expected her to be the ruler of this kingdom. He couldn't think of anyone else, there was no way their father was still in power.

"Who is, then? Surely not Dad?" Snow chuckles again, and then a voice rings out from the doorway.

"...Prince Ross? What are you doing here?"

Ross whirls around. Gerda, now a young woman, stands there. Her hair is loose, and she's wearing a night gown with a blanket around her shoulders. She rocks back and forth on her heels, watching Ross with a confused expression.

"What... what are you doing here, Gerda?" he asks in return. He can hear Snow snort in amusement before Gerda raises an eyebrow at him and says, "I... live here?"

He gapes at her for a moment, his jaw open as he tries to process. Gerda lives here? In the castle? Fascinating. He parses through his thoughts, attempting to form a response. He's saved from that by Gerda asking, "Anyways, how are Rapunzel and Belladonna doing?"

"They're doing well," he answers, "Belladonna has finally stopped insulting me when we are alone in the same room."

Gerda's face scrunches up in amusement. Ross offers her a hesitant smile. Then he asks, "Well, how are you doing then, Gerda?"

Gerda opens her mouth to reply, but then there's a rapping on the wall behind her. A young man, around Gerda's age, steps up to stand next to her. His hair is a soft blonde color, his eyes an icy blue. He presses a kiss to Gerda's cheek, and she blushes. The man asks, "May I ask how you know my wife, sir?"

By this point, Snow is doing nothing to stifle her laughter. The blonde man rolls his eyes, clearly amused by her reaction. Gerda's giggling as well, though it appears she doesn't have as much context for the situation as Snow does. Snow beckons the two of them further into the room, and they both move further in. The man leans on the counter, slotting himself easily in the corner of the small counter. Gerda, meanwhile, pulls out a stool and sits next to him. When both kids (they're adults, he knows this, but in his mind they're kids) are settled, Snow claps her hands. Ross can't help but stare. Gerda's married? He never knew her all that well, considering how little time they spent together and the fact that he was more focused on Rapunzel at that time, but it still surprises him. Nudging him to get his attention, Snow starts, "Ross, this is my son, Gwyn."

Ross is left speechless yet again, his head spinning. Based on Snow's movement, she's likely telling Gwyn that Ross is his uncle. He has a nephew?! He missed so much while was estranged. Likely, he was the king. Blinking away his thoughts he asks, "How long have you had a son?!"

"My entire life," Gwyn replies with a shit-eating grin. Gerda snorts loudly, before blushing and covering her face with her hand. Gwyn smiles and leans into her. Wait a minute...

"Does that make Gerda my niece-in-law?" he asks.

Gerda nods, taking Gwyn's hand.

"You also have a nephew-in-law. I'm married to them both, and them to each other," Gwyn says, at the same time Gerda mumbles, "Where is he? He's usually the first one up..."

Before Ross has a chance to process any of that, and almost as if mentioning him summoned him, another young man comes into the kitchen. The cane in his hand taps against the wooden floor as he sleepily enters, rubbing at his eyes. He approaches the table, saying, "G'morning everyone. Where'd this come from?"

"The uncle I just learned that I had," Gwyn answers, jerking his thumb to point at Ross. The man's head snaps up, and he looks at Ross with a startled expression. After staring blankly at Ross for a moment, he seems to make some sort of mental connection. He says, "Oh, you're the one who took Gerda to Floralia a few years ago. My name is Kai."

Kai offers Ross a handshake, which he respectfully accepts. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Kai, my name is Ro- Wait, how do you know about that?"

Kai chuckles awkwardly, his free hand finding its way to the back of his neck. He answers, "Well, Gerda's been my best friend for most of my life. When I saw you leaving the village with her, I wanted to make sure she was safe. So, I followed you. I... didn't get very far, and the detective saved me. She was at our wedding, actually."

So everything comes back to the detective, and an improbably tangled web of connections. Huh.

After a moment of awkward silence, Gerda hops off her stool. She strides over to the table, kissing her other husband on the cheek. Gwyn follows suit, and Kai turns bright red. Seeing the display of affection brings an uncharacteristically fond smile, unbidden, to his face. It reminds him of how he and Rapunzel were, in the early years. A small, but loud, part of him misses that. It also reminds him of how that frog prince (James, was his name?) and Snow acted before Ross left his family behind over it.

As the happy trio talks and serves themselves from the dishes Ross spread out on the table earlier, Ross himself turns to his sister. When she turns to him, he twists his head to look at Gwyn. The king is laughing, his face scrunched up in delight as his husband kisses some butter off his nose and his wife sneaks a sausage off his plate. Then he turns back to his sister and asks, "Was he with..."

"Yes. It didn't work out, and he's dead now. We were divorced for a few hundred years before that."

There's a lot of unanswered questions there, but she doesn't seem inclined to answer them. He can respect that. After all, he did show up at her house at eight in the morning after over a thousand years of no contact.

"We should join the kids," Snow says, and so they do. Questions can wait.

[caisjunlis]

ross red

that's it that's the post

[actualwizardbillykaplan]

Epix took over from blue tea for the dark parables games and just forgot Pinocchio and Ross Red were in relationships in previous games, didn't they?

[barbiestuffps]

Dark Parables: Ballad of Rapunzel, 2014

[paranormal-potatoes]

What is Dark Parables? I saw you mention it in a post you made and wanted to know what that was.

it's a hidden object game series! each game is based on a different fairytale or fable. there's been Briar Rose, Frog Prince, Snow White + Snow Queen, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, Little Mermaid, Sandman, Goldilocks, Swan Princess, Salt Princess, and Little Match Girl.

the characters are connected in interesting ways too, but it can get a little goofy. example: the Godmother from Cinderella is Pinocchio's mom. Rapunzel is engaged to Snow White's twin brother, Ross Red. Snow White was married to the Frog Prince who was also married to (all at different points in time) Ivy Green (Briar Rose's sister), a Cinderella, a Swan Princess, and a Little Mermaid.

there's 16 games but for some reason the 13th one isn't available to buy anymore?? the art can be a little wonky in cutscenes, the writing can be a little cheesy but I like it. the first two games are decent but I think 3 is where they started figuring things out re: gameplay. the characters can be a little dumb but that's kind of normal for hidden object games, at least the ones I've played

they were originally created by Blue Tea Games but games 7 through 16 were made by EIPIX. the last game came out in 2019 and there hasn't been any news on more games so the series is probably dead, unfortunately.

this is kind of disjointed but I have a soft spot for the series and recommend it to people who like i-spy and cheesy stories.

[lesserknownhusbands]

[ship-personalities]

[ava-candide]

Poldark’s Aidan Turner on playing Leonardo da Vinci

The newly married heart-throb actor learnt to paint left-handed for his new role, and he’s still daubing now, he tells Ed Potton

Aidan Turner takes on the role of Renaissance polymath Leonardo

I’m trying to work out where Aidan Turner is Zooming from. Is it London, where he moved to in 2017 after his Ross Poldark became the drooled-over king of Sunday-night television? Dublin, where he grew up, trained as an actor and returned to spend the first lockdown with his parents? Or Rome, where he shot his new series, Leonardo, in which he plays a young Leonardo da Vinci?

“None of the above!” Turner says. “I’m in Toronto.” The enigmatic charm, feline eyes and gleaming locks that he deployed so mercilessly in Poldark, The Hobbit films and Being Human are all there. “My missus is working here,” he explains, and so is he. That’s the American actress Caitlin FitzGerald, his partner of three years, whom he met when they starred in the 2018 film The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot. At first I assume the “missus” is laddish affectation but it turns out that it’s official: Turner and FitzGerald, both 37, got married in secret in Italy in August after filming finished on Leonardo. You can almost hear the sighs of disappointment ripple around the world.

Turner won’t say any more — he is famously guarded about his personal life — but he looks insanely happy in the couple’s rented apartment. FitzGerald — whose grandfather Desmond was a CIA agent and organised several plots to assassinate Fidel Castro — is shooting a series, Station Eleven, in Toronto while her husband works on another project that he’s not allowed to talk about. In their downtime they’ve been watching I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, an HBO documentary series about the Golden State Killer, and, on a lighter note, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles. They share the apartment with Charlie, an ebullient Norfolk terrier that Turner has to eject from the room halfway through our interview when he starts yapping. “I’m surprised he behaved for so long,” he says

Eight-part series Leonardo has been criticised for warping history

Like many of his fellow thesps, Turner has been doing a great deal of lockdown painting. “We have a roof garden here and the light has been really good,” he says. “I probably shouldn’t be saying this because I don’t know if the landlord knows. It’s not messy work anyway!” Unlike some of his peers — I’m looking at you, Pierce Brosnan — he has yet to unleash his daubings on the world. How would he describe his style? “I struggle to say abstract, but I haven’t quite figured out what it is yet.” Did it help with playing Leonardo? “I don’t know. If you saw my paintings, you’d assume very much not,” Turner says. He has a studied line in self-effacement, honed after years of “sexiest man on TV” questions.

Leonardo premiered in Italy last month and was watched by seven million, many of them doubtless keen to see Turner brooding in a succession of smocks. The eight-part series has been criticised for warping history, having the artist accused of murder and featuring an apparently fictional muse, Caterina da Cremona, played by Matilda De Angelis from The Undoing. Luca Bernabei, the chief executive of Lux Vide who produced the series, defended it stoutly. “Matilda De Angelis’s character did exist. She was a model Leonardo asked to paint,” he said. “We have been really careful in our research. But this is not a documentary, we are not historians and this is not a university history lecture.”

And if the history pedants are spluttering, the art pedants should be happier — the series goes to considerable lengths to make the painting look authentic. Each episode is themed around a different masterpiece, from the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci to The Last Supper to the Mona Lisa, and the candlelit cinematography is often sumptuous. Turner’s research included a private view of a Leonardo exhibition. “I spent some time alone with the actual paintings, which was brilliant,” he says. “They’re just like high-definition photographs. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that a human had done this.”

Aidan Turner attended an artist’s boot camp before filming started

The series opens in Florence in the 1460s, with Leonardo a pupil of Verrocchio, played by the veteran Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini. Before the shoot Turner and his co-stars went on an artists’ boot camp (brush camp?) supervised by professionals. He says the hardest part was learning to paint, as Leonardo did, with his left hand. He compares it to learning to ride a horse for Poldark, which he pretended he knew how to do before going on a crash course when he got the part.

Brushwork was the same, he says. “I realised I had to get good quite quickly and look like I knew what I was doing with my left hand, which is more difficult than you would think. It’s keeping it steady — you find it just moves around a lot. Leonardo was very slow and precise — I think I got it down. After a few weeks you start picking up the brush with your left hand, it becomes natural.”

Leonardo was a vegetarian, Turner tells me, “and apparently later in life opened some sort of vegetarian restaurant”. He was also gay, something that, despite reports, the series does not shy away from. Was this Turner’s first time kissing a man on screen? He laughs. “Of all the things I was expecting you to ask next, that wasn’t one of them! In a lot of ways it was just another love scene. The fact that the gender was different — that was never a thing. No, it felt right. It didn’t feel any different at all. But yeah, to answer your question, that was the first time, which I’d never really thought of until now.”

What did feel weird, he says, were the Covid protocols. “Suddenly people are wearing masks and shields and hazmat suits. We had a big sanitisation machine as we walked in that would spray us. You take off the mask when you shoot the scene and it’s a bit strange for a second. Then you realise it’s the first time you’ve seen your co-star’s face that day. It’s not conducive to a very creative environment, for sure. But we made it work and nobody got sick.”

Turner spends a chunk of the first episode painting De Angelis, and both actors know what it’s like to be ogled. She has been asked endlessly about her naked locker-room sequence in The Undoing, just as he has been reminded of his shirtless scything scene in Poldark. Before that there was his lusted-after vampire in Being Human and his sexy dwarf in The Hobbit — branded a “dwilf” in some quarters — although that “definitely wasn’t the intention”, he says. “I think I just had less prosthetics on my face. My make-up call was 20 minutes and everyone else was sitting in the chair in the morning for three and a half hours. It wasn’t good to be around the other dwarfs in the mornings, that’s for sure.

“I get why people are interested,” he says of the ogling. “It’s just when it keeps coming up.”

We move on. According to a recent survey Cornwall has overtaken London as the most desirable place to live in Britain. Does he think Poldark played a part in that? He laughs. “Maybe we nudged a few people in the right direction. I think people forgot how beautiful that side of the world is. One of the first reviews of Poldark we read was like: ‘We can’t believe that this is our country, it looks like the south of France.’”

Could Poldark return, and would Turner be in it? If they stuck to the chronology of Winston Graham’s books they would have to leap ahead a few years. Maybe he could play an aged-up Ross Poldark in latex and fake paunch? “I don’t know if I’d be keen on the ageing-up thing,” he says. “It never really works. I don’t know whether they need to be too strict with that gap anyway. There’s the possibility someday, maybe. I enjoyed working with everybody on Poldark, from the writers right down to all the cast and crew. It really is like a family. So I’d be open to chat about it. But not for a while.”

Before that he will appear as the apostle Andrew in The Last Planet, the forthcoming biblical epic from Terrence Malick, revered creator of The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life. Well, he doesn’t know for sure if he will appear. Actors of the calibre of Rachel Weisz, Mickey Rourke and Jessica Chastain have seen their performances in Malick films vanish during editing.

“You want what’s best for the film. And if you don’t fit into it, you don’t fit into it,” Turner says in the tone of hair-shirt devotion that actors tend to use when talking about Malick. With a cast including Ben Kingsley and Mark Rylance as Satan, the movie is meant to tell the story of Jesus through a series of parables. Turner doesn’t really have a clue, though.

“You don’t necessarily know what you’re signing up to. You’re signing up to Terrence Malick,” he says. The director has “a great way of working. Everything is around ‘where is the sun’ at this particular time. That’s our natural light and it’s all we use. So things happen fast. There’s no trailers, hair, make-up, we’re just all together. You don’t know from day to day what you’ll be doing. It’s quite renegade stuff. That’s the way I always wanted to work.”

It’s closer to the immediacy of the theatre, which is where Turner started out. The son of an electrician, Pearse, and an accountant, Eileen, he represented Ireland at ballroom dancing before falling into acting. After studying at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin he acted in plays for five years and in 2018 he returned to the stage to rave reviews in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore in the West End. Rave being the operative word — his performance was bracingly unhinged. “I can’t wait to get back to the theatre,” he says. “That’s what we’re looking at probably next.”

Turner’s character in The Lieutenant of Inishmore was an Irish freedom fighter, but he is reluctant to talk about the prospect of Irish reunification (“So I don’t get shot when I get home,” he told one interviewer). Culture is safer ground, and his native country is going through a purple patch with Sally Rooney in literature, Fontaines DC in music and the likes of McDonagh, Jessie Buckley and Denise Gough in drama. “It tends to happen in waves,” Turner says. “Coming out of drama school, Colin Farrell was such a big thing. When these actors really make it you can feel some of their light begin to shine on the industry back home.”

Like Farrell, Turner is an international star, although it has mainly been in period roles: Poldark, Leonardo, Andrew and his breakout turn as the 19th-century poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 2009 series Desperate Romantics. It must be something about the hair.

That could be about to change, though. Toronto often stands in for New York, which suggests that his current mystery project has a contemporary setting. Does he yearn to act in jeans? “Yeah, you’re right,” he says with a laugh. “After Leonardo, I think tights and knee-length boots are out for a while.” Many would beg him to reconsider.

[captain-ross-poldark]

Poldark’s Aidan Turner on playing Leonardo da Vinci

Ed Potton

Friday 2 April 2021

Aidan Turner takes on the role of Renaissance polymath LeonardoJUSTIN SUTCLIFFE/EYEVIN

I’m trying to work out where Aidan Turner is Zooming from. Is it London, where he moved to in 2017 after his Ross Poldark became the drooled-over king of Sunday-night television? Dublin, where he grew up, trained as an actor and returned to spend the first lockdown with his parents? Or Rome, where he shot his new series, Leonardo, in which he plays a young Leonardo da Vinci?

“None of the above!” Turner says. “I’m in Toronto.” The enigmatic charm, feline eyes and gleaming locks that he deployed so mercilessly in Poldark, The Hobbit films and Being Human are all there. “My missus is working here,” he explains, and so is he. That’s the American actress Caitlin FitzGerald, his partner of three years, whom he met when they starred in the 2018 film The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot. At first I assume the “missus” is laddish affectation but it turns out that it’s official: Turner and FitzGerald, both 37, got married in secret in Italy in August after filming finished on Leonardo. You can almost hear the sighs of disappointment ripple around the world.

Turner won’t say any more — he is famously guarded about his personal life — but he looks insanely happy in the couple’s rented apartment. FitzGerald — whose grandfather Desmond was a CIA agent and organised several plots to assassinate Fidel Castro — is shooting a series, Station Eleven, in Toronto while her husband works on another project that he’s not allowed to talk about. In their downtime they’ve been watching I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, an HBO documentary series about the Golden State Killer, and, on a lighter note, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles. They share the apartment with Charlie, an ebullient Norfolk terrier that Turner has to eject from the room halfway through our interview when he starts yapping. “I’m surprised he behaved for so long,” he says.

Eight-part series Leonardo has been criticised for warping historyPA

Like many of his fellow thesps, Turner has been doing a great deal of lockdown painting. “We have a roof garden here and the light has been really good,” he says. “I probably shouldn’t be saying this because I don’t know if the landlord knows. It’s not messy work anyway!” Unlike some of his peers — I’m looking at you, Pierce Brosnan — he has yet to unleash his daubings on the world. How would he describe his style? “I struggle to say abstract, but I haven’t quite figured out what it is yet.” Did it help with playing Leonardo? “I don’t know. If you saw my paintings, you’d assume very much not,” Turner says. He has a studied line in self-effacement, honed after years of “sexiest man on TV” questions.

Leonardo premiered in Italy last month and was watched by seven million, many of them doubtless keen to see Turner brooding in a succession of smocks. The eight-part series has been criticised for warping history, having the artist accused of murder and featuring an apparently fictional muse, Caterina da Cremona, played by Matilda De Angelis from The Undoing. Luca Bernabei, the chief executive of Lux Vide who produced the series, defended it stoutly. “Matilda De Angelis’s character did exist. She was a model Leonardo asked to paint,” he said. “We have been really careful in our research. But this is not a documentary, we are not historians and this is not a university history lecture.”

And if the history pedants are spluttering, the art pedants should be happier — the series goes to considerable lengths to make the painting look authentic. Each episode is themed around a different masterpiece, from the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci to The Last Supper to the Mona Lisa, and the candlelit cinematography is often sumptuous. Turner’s research included a private view of a Leonardo exhibition. “I spent some time alone with the actual paintings, which was brilliant,” he says. “They’re just like high-definition photographs. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that a human had done this.”

Aidan Turner attended an artist’s boot camp before filming startedVITTORIA FENATI MORACE

The series opens in Florence in the 1460s, with Leonardo a pupil of Verrocchio, played by the veteran Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini. Before the shoot Turner and his co-stars went on an artists’ boot camp (brush camp?) supervised by professionals. He says the hardest part was learning to paint, as Leonardo did, with his left hand. He compares it to learning to ride a horse for Poldark, which he pretended he knew how to do before going on a crash course when he got the part.

Brushwork was the same, he says. “I realised I had to get good quite quickly and look like I knew what I was doing with my left hand, which is more difficult than you would think. It’s keeping it steady — you find it just moves around a lot. Leonardo was very slow and precise — I think I got it down. After a few weeks you start picking up the brush with your left hand, it becomes natural.”

Leonardo was a vegetarian, Turner tells me, “and apparently later in life opened some sort of vegetarian restaurant”. He was also gay, something that, despite reports, the series does not shy away from. Was this Turner’s first time kissing a man on screen? He laughs. “Of all the things I was expecting you to ask next, that wasn’t one of them! In a lot of ways it was just another love scene. The fact that the gender was different — that was never a thing. No, it felt right. It didn’t feel any different at all. But yeah, to answer your question, that was the first time, which I’d never really thought of until now.”

What did feel weird, he says, were the Covid protocols. “Suddenly people are wearing masks and shields and hazmat suits. We had a big sanitisation machine as we walked in that would spray us. You take off the mask when you shoot the scene and it’s a bit strange for a second. Then you realise it’s the first time you’ve seen your co-star’s face that day. It’s not conducive to a very creative environment, for sure. But we made it work and nobody got sick.”

With his wife, the American actress Caitlin FitzGeraldREX FEATURES

Turner spends a chunk of the first episode painting De Angelis, and both actors know what it’s like to be ogled. She has been asked endlessly about her naked locker-room sequence in The Undoing, just as he has been reminded of his shirtless scything scene in Poldark. Before that there was his lusted-after vampire in Being Human and his sexy dwarf in The Hobbit — branded a “dwilf” in some quarters — although that “definitely wasn’t the intention”, he says. “I think I just had less prosthetics on my face. My make-up call was 20 minutes and everyone else was sitting in the chair in the morning for three and a half hours. It wasn’t good to be around the other dwarfs in the mornings, that’s for sure.

“I get why people are interested,” he says of the ogling. “It’s just when it keeps coming up.”

We move on. According to a recent survey Cornwall has overtaken London as the most desirable place to live in Britain. Does he think Poldark played a part in that? He laughs. “Maybe we nudged a few people in the right direction. I think people forgot how beautiful that side of the world is. One of the first reviews of Poldark we read was like: ‘We can’t believe that this is our country, it looks like the south of France.’”

Could Poldark return, and would Turner be in it? If they stuck to the chronology of Winston Graham’s books they would have to leap ahead a few years. Maybe he could play an aged-up Ross Poldark in latex and fake paunch? “I don’t know if I’d be keen on the ageing-up thing,” he says. “It never really works. I don’t know whether they need to be too strict with that gap anyway. There’s the possibility someday, maybe. I enjoyed working with everybody on Poldark, from the writers right down to all the cast and crew. It really is like a family. So I’d be open to chat about it. But not for a while.”

Turner with Eleanor Tomlinson in PoldarkMIKE HOGAN

Before that he will appear as the apostle Andrew in The Last Planet, the forthcoming biblical epic from Terrence Malick, revered creator ofThe Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life. Well, he doesn’t know for sure if he will appear. Actors of the calibre of Rachel Weisz, Mickey Rourke and Jessica Chastain have seen their performances in Malick films vanish during editing.

“You want what’s best for the film. And if you don’t fit into it, you don’t fit into it,” Turner says in the tone of hair-shirt devotion that actors tend to use when talking about Malick. With a cast including Ben Kingsley and Mark Rylance as Satan, the movie is meant to tell the story of Jesus through a series of parables. Turner doesn’t really have a clue, though.

“You don’t necessarily know what you’re signing up to. You’re signing up to Terrence Malick,” he says. The director has “a great way of working. Everything is around ‘where is the sun’ at this particular time. That’s our natural light and it’s all we use. So things happen fast. There’s no trailers, hair, make-up, we’re just all together. You don’t know from day to day what you’ll be doing. It’s quite renegade stuff. That’s the way I always wanted to work.”

It’s closer to the immediacy of the theatre, which is where Turner started out. The son of an electrician, Pearse, and an accountant, Eileen, he represented Ireland at ballroom dancing before falling into acting. After studying at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin he acted in plays for five years and in 2018 he returned to the stage to rave reviews in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore in the West End. Rave being the operative word — his performance was bracingly unhinged. “I can’t wait to get back to the theatre,” he says. “That’s what we’re looking at probably next.”

Turner’s character in The Lieutenant of Inishmore was an Irish freedom fighter, but he is reluctant to talk about the prospect of Irish reunification (“So I don’t get shot when I get home,” he told one interviewer). Culture is safer ground, and his native country is going through a purple patch with Sally Rooney in literature, Fontaines DC in music and the likes of McDonagh, Jessie Buckley and Denise Gough in drama. “It tends to happen in waves,” Turner says. “Coming out of drama school, Colin Farrell was such a big thing. When these actors really make it you can feel some of their light begin to shine on the industry back home.”

Like Farrell, Turner is an international star, although it has mainly been in period roles: Poldark, Leonardo, Andrew and his breakout turn as the 19th-century poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 2009 series Desperate Romantics. It must be something about the hair.

That could be about to change, though. Toronto often stands in for New York, which suggests that his current mystery project has a contemporary setting. Does he yearn to act in jeans? “Yeah, you’re right,” he says with a laugh. “After Leonardo, I think tights and knee-length boots are out for a while.” Many would beg him to reconsider.

All episodes of Leonardo will be on Amazon from April 16

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/poldarks-aidan-turner-on-playing-leonardo-da-vinci-wnmqhxqxr

[darkpuck]

Dark Parables

loading and menu screens

[chaosscroissant]

A genderbent and racebent AU in which Rosamund (Ross) Poldark, the biracial cousin of the well-off Poldarks of Trenwith, comes back to Nampara from America-- betrayed, bereft, and determined to survive. 

Tags include: Racebending, Genderbending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, extremely mild but period-typical racism, Period-Typical Racism, Romance

Excerpt from Chapter 1

The wind swept straight down Bodmin moor, smelling of the sea, and of gorse and heather. Rosamund breathed in deep. It was the same as it ever was; it had been three years since she’d last breathed it. The sky above was the same, dark gray billowing cloud, and the sea was unchanged, still strange, still moody. It had borne her a long way, from Nampara to Boston and back, and still everything was the same. Everything, it seemed, but her.

The carriage she’d just climbed down from lumbered off as the driver cracked his whip. Rosamund picked up her bag and stepped out of the road and into the brush of the moor, and made her way toward Trenwith.

She was sure her father would like to see her soon, but the sun still shone, and it had been so long since she’d seen her Elliot. Tall, dark-haired, proud Elliot, handsome Elliot. Her father would surely forgive her if she made a slight detour to see him.

At least, she hoped he’d be there. He had been so often at the house three years ago, whenever she visited her cousin Fanny. Even as she and Fanny were meant to be conversing by the fire, reading collections of sermons and parables, playing the pianoforte, taking a turn in the garden, Elliot was never far away, exchanging a stolen glance across the table, a touch of the hand in the corridor, a near-kiss amongst the wildflowers far from prying eyes, whispered promises among the dunes at Hendrawna. As Rosamund walked through those very same wildflowers, she fingered the chain of the necklace that she kept tucked into her bodice from which hung a miniature bearing his likeness, set in copper mined from under the very ground on which she stood.

Her breath caught in her throat as the gabled roofs of Trenwith became visible above the trees. Yes, a slight detour to Trenwith to call on family on her return from America, as much as it set the butterflies in her stomach to fluttering, could not be a mistake. She would say hello to her uncle and great aunt, her cousins Fanny and Virgil, and if she was lucky, Elliot would be present. She could not help but hope with every vibrating nerve in her being that his feelings had not changed. Hers certainly had not.

Light shone in the tall mullioned windows. She did not even bother knocking. They were neighbors after all, and family, and the looks on their faces would be worth the slight lapse in decorum. The sound of utensils on china, and of glass clinking and voices speaking told her they were at supper. She grinned to herself, her heart in her throat as she threw wide the door--

There was a sudden hush as she entered the room. Her uncle Charles sat at the head of the table, as portly as ever in a bright waistcoat, and beside him Rosamund’s elderly great-aunt Agatha. Across from her sat Fanny, her fair hair curled into lagging ringlets, her blue eyes watery, though bright. She was no longer the stringy youth Rosamund remembered, for she’d become a woman. Beside Agatha sat cousin Virgil, his dark hair swept back, and his features arranged in an awkward, solemn demeanor. And across from him, sitting beside his mother, and exuding more light than the candelabra on the table, was Elliot Chynoweth.

“Surprised to see me?” Rosamund asked cheekily in the dead silence before shocked looks became gasps of delight, slack jaws became laughter, and the sound of chairs scraping filled the room as Fanny, Virgil, and Uncle Charles stood and made their way to Rosamund, who flicked her cloak to the side. She kissed their faces genially, though she noted still the gazes that flicked askance over her countenance. They always did. For everyone felt, ever since she’d been a little girl, that she did not truly belong to the family, not in the same way Fanny or Virgil did. She simply did not fit in. She did not look the part of the Poldark and never would. Well, Rosamund couldn’t help that. So she stood up straight and cleared her throat.

“Is this a party for me, celebrating my return?” she joked, and the laughter turned ever so slightly in their mouths, like butter souring in the sun. Elliot stood, suddenly, his mouth open as if to say something. Rosamund felt her whole body turn in his direction.

“Elliot,” said Mrs. Chynoweth. “Would you be a dear and fetch my fan, it’s upstairs.”

“Mother, I--” Elliot began. Mrs. Chynoweth cut him off.

“Now, Elliot, dear.”

Elliot stepped away from the table and, with a glance at Rosamund, walked through the drawing room doors and climbed the stairs. Uncle Charles motioned to the table.

“Come, Rosamund, sit. You must join us in our celebration. Virgil, bring Rosamund a chair, would you.”

“Certainly,” said Virgil. As he passed Rosamund on his way to the drawing room, he gave her a genuine smile. “Glad you’re back,” he said. Rosamund grinned his way.

She looked around at the fine clothing, Fanny’s new dress of blue silk, the champagne on the table, fresh beeswax tapers, and the arrangement of vivid spring flowers.

“What is it you are celebrating, again,” she asked, bemused, as Virgil returned with a chair that he placed at the table. She took a seat as Mrs. Chynoweth looked up brightly at Rosamund.

“Why, we’re celebrating Fanny’s betrothal--”

Rosamund beamed at Fanny, who looked sheepishly down into her flute of champagne.

“--to Elliot. They’ll be married in a fortnight’s time. After all, it is only natural such ancient and distinguished families should be joined...”

Rosamund felt the breath leave her lungs. Mrs. Chynoweth sounded very far away, muffled by the sound of Rosamund’s own beating heart, so perhaps she’d been mistaken. It was only when she’d turned around to see Elliot on the bottom stair, clutching his mother’s fan apologetically, his face flushed and his red lips agape in a look of suppressed horror, that Rosamund realized she’d heard quite correctly. She took a deep, steadying breath as her senses returned to her. She cleared her throat as her uncle, blissfully ignorant of the torrid exchange of embarrassed looks that crossed his dining room, poured her a glass of champagne. Rosamund took it automatically.

She watched its bubbles rise for a moment before she let her face split into a gaudy smile.

“To the happy couple,” she said. She felt a slightly sadistic pleasure in toasting Fanny and Elliot as they looked on in utter mortification. Rosamund tipped the glass to her lips and drained it in a few gulps. Coarse, she knew, but her actions did not feel her own. The champagne went straight to her head, mercifully dulling the sharpness of her own heartbreak.

“Well, I mustn’t keep you from your festivities,” she said flatly, standing to adjust her cloak. “I must go home to greet my father.”

She was sure of it now, the look that went round the table at the sound of her words was too uncomfortable to ignore. Elliot sat down slowly. The only person who didn’t look like they’d seen a ghost was Mrs. Chynoweth. Rather, she smiled mischievously.

“You haven’t heard?” she said in a voice as light as fresh milk.

“Mother--” Elliot chastened quietly.

“Why, we thought you must have received word in Boston when Mr. Poldark died last year.”

Rosamund felt the air leave her body once more. Her head swam. She looked down at the floor-- still it was under her feet, so the world had not ended. She tried to reconcile this fact with how she felt.

“My father is dead,” she said quietly, trying the words in her mouth. They did not seem real.

“Rosamund,” said Virgil quietly, laying a gentle hand on her arm before she pulled away.

Rosamund straightened her posture in an attempt at composure. She made a decision quickly. “I must borrow your horse, uncle,” she said quickly to Uncle Charles. He nodded, his jowls quivering, his brow furrowed.

“But you must stay,” he spluttered in a half-hearted attempt at hospitality. Rosamund glanced around at the party she’d ruined, the faces of every guest aghast at the intrusion. She thought she ought to be used to it by now.

“Good night,” she said, and she turned on her heel and walked quickly out to the front path where a servant was stepping forward with a black mare. How fitting, she thought bitterly.

She did not look back once as she mounted the saddle and set off at a full gallop. As she quickly put distance between her and Trenwith, between her and Elliot, she felt she could finally let the tears fly freely in the wind that came off the sea and rushed down the moor. She was riding away from everything, and riding directly toward nothing, but she knew not what else to do. Nothing was all she had.

[ask-the-flora-guardians]

Hey Rapunzel! :) How's your relationship going with Ross? ;)

Rapunzel: We’re going to be married soon! After what happened to him in the Dire Island, he still needs some time for rest, but he’ll be fine.

[ladynorbert]

Top 10 OTPs!!

Oh gosh, how to choose? Well, in no particular order, and not including any pairings that involve a character played by myself...

Roy Mustang/Riza Hawkeye, Fullmetal Alchemist (this is not a ship, this is a star destroyer of feels)

Beetlejuice/Lydia Deetz, Beetlejuice (but only under certain circumstances, this is a provisional ship)

Shiro/Allura, Voltron: Legendary Defender (I love their dynamic, what can I say?)

Varric Tethras/Bethany Hawke, Dragon Age (you may have this one when you can take it from my cold dead hands)

Solid Snake/Samus Aran, Super Smash Bros. Brawl (I will not explain this, lol)

Link/Zelda, The Legend of Zelda (first otp still endures)

Prince Ross Red/Princess Rapunzel, Dark Parables (that series has many ships I enjoy but theirs just causes me so much delicious angst)

Ron Weasley/Hermione Granger, Harry Potter (shipped it from the first book, felt very vindicated by the end)

George Knightley/Emma Woodhouse, Emma (okay, so P&P is my favorite book, yes, but I just adore Mr. Knightley)

Am I allowed to say myself/Lord Norbert? That will always be my biggest otp, of course. ;)

[oltnews]

Jennifer Lawrence plays the role of 'Katniss Everdeen' in THE HUNGER GAMES. Lionsgate Lionsgate announced a film version of Suzanne Collins Hunger Games prequel, The songbirds and snakes ballad. Fresh out of the press, Lionsgate has announced plans to shoot Suzanne Collins' To come up Hunger Games prequel, The songbirds and snakes ballad, in the next Hunger Games movie. Director Francis Lawrence, who succeeded Gary Ross after the premiere Hunger Games and directed the next three installments (Catch fire in 2013, Mockingjay part I in 2014 and Mockingjay part II in 2015), is back in the director's chair, with Michael Arndt who writes the screenplay and Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson who produce. No, I have no idea when it will be released, but keep an eye out for available locations before Thanksgiving. The book, slated for May 19, is said to be a story of origin for the villain Coriolanus Snow, starring the possible tyrant at the age of 18 before becoming the genocidal president of Panem. Yes, there have been online discussions about the potential "problematic" notion of highlighting a handsome white guy who ends up becoming the bad guy, and it's no secret that I think the Hunger Games the property must vacate as long as it is early. At the very least, I would say that people presented themselves for the brand character (Katniss Everdeen by Jennifer Lawrence) as much as for the source material, just as they presented themselves for Harry potter and for dusk especially because of Bella and Edward. This is one of the main reasons why Harry potter and dusk turned into cinematic sensations everything (among others) The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, Mortal Engines, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones and The donor no. People introduced themselves to renowned characters more than the IP or the plot, although an easily explained plot ("children forced to kill other children for television entertainment", "a vampire and a teenage girl fall in love with each other "young boy goes to boarding school for wizards") translates better than convoluted plots of Divergent and the Maze Runner sequelae. In addition, they wanted to see Katniss kick ass and save the proverbial day, to the point where audiences declined when the films moved away from the "hunger games" and started to really dig into politics and entertainment criticism. / media simply implicit in the first two films. Mockingjay Part I ($ 337 million in Canada and $ 767 million globally) and Mockingjay Part II ($ 282 million / $ 648 million) suffered comparative decreases from the first two films as the films moved further away from the "pretty cute girls and boys" gadget that looks stylish and then kills each other for TV sports ". Many moviegoers obviously didn't care about politics or the thematic context and just wanted to watch the hot guys indulge in the very kind of distraction from the bread and circuses that the movies were trying to criticize. This theatrical decline of Hunger Games (408 million national dollars and 654 million global dollars) and Catch fire ($ 424 million / $ 865 million), as well as the presidential election of a budding dictator, seem to imply that the audience did not understand the point (or took the big turn of the fourth film as a parable "Hillary Clinton is evil") or don't don't care about the surface thrills, which is part of the reason why few of us really talk much about the property. However, the source material is not necessarily responsible for the reaction of the consumer, and The hunger Games remains the latest “new to cinema” franchise to shoot leading blockbuster numbers. As I feared in 2015, anything that scored in the range of $ 750 billion to $ 1 billion (or more) was either animated, or a redesign / pursuit of a previously successful property or (in the case of MCU and DC Films). You can say that Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle (a 22-year-old sequel to a movie that earned $ 365 million and reached $ 962 million worldwide) is the closest exception to the rule we've had, and it's possible that John Wick: Chapter 4 could go supernova abroad when the time comes and save alongside Impossible mission and Fast furious, but it is completely speculative. Everything else that has climbed endlessly and beyond since late March 2012, just six weeks before The Avengers changed everything, was either "new" comic book movies (Black panther, Aquaman, etc.) of established cinematographic universes and redesigns or suites (Jurassic World, Star Wars, The Hobbit, Fast & Furious, Fantastic Beasts, etc.) previously successful cinematographic properties. And since then, Lionsgate has had nothing like this except the fifth and final dusk film ($ 819 million) in late 2012 that they distributed after purchasing Summit Entertainment. the Now you see me movies grossed $ 350 million and $ 334 million in 2013 and 2016, while John Wick: Chapter 3 soared to $ 322 million last year and the original, without deductible La La Land danced to $ 441 million in 2016/2017. There is certainly nothing at the $ 650- $ 865 million scale of the four Hunger Games movies. This is not a criticism, as Lionsgate is generally not known for mega-blockbuster tent poles, and it is not a standard to which they should be held regularly. The hunger Games arrived at exactly the right time, with Jennifer Lawrence at the peak of fame, the media all worshiping the "strong, fierce" Katniss Everdeen as a counterpoint to dusk"Will, passive, beholden to a boy" Bella Swan. None of these descriptions is correct and the Hunger Games the films were fascinating as portraits of Katniss struggling with her mythological version created by the media, just as Lawrence was dealing with balancing her true self with the character "cool girl" created by the media. Katniss was not the greatest American hero just because she occasionally fought and shot arrows here and there, and Lawrence was not the ideal "cool girl" simply because she ate burgers and stumbled in stairs. The fourth and last Hunger Games The film showed the cruel fabrication of what it really was, which is why I was disappointed to see it play (only compared to its predecessors) relatively poorly. Of course, this was previewed by my audience's reactions to the first film (cheering when kidnapped children murdered other kidnapped children) and the horribly ironic festivities from the red carpet premiere for the second film (and probably the others ) that looked like high-profile propaganda broadcasts from the Capitol. Like, relatively speaking, the reaction of fans (vocal minority) to Iron man 3 and The Last Jedi, the relative rejection of the most political and deconstructionist Hunger Games the movies (and it's not like the first two were subtle in terms of politics) brought out an audience that really just wanted bread and circuses and / or comforting fantasy tropes. So I can't help but wonder, even assuming the book is solid and powerful reading, how does a new Hunger Games will be received. To be fair, there is a difference between "Here's a new Hunger Games prequel "and" Here's a new Hunger Games frankness, "as I imagine curiosity will do for at least the" first "film. After all, fantastic beasts and where to find them earned $ 817 million worldwide before Grindelwald's crimes dropped to (still solid, poor domestic total and audience buzz aside) $ 659 million worldwide two years later. I am sure we will have more information once people have read the books. And just because I hate to consider the real thematic heritage of the four originals Hunger Games movies don't mean that the movies themselves were bad or that their intentions were immoral. Sometimes you do Fight Club and people come out thinking Tyler Durden is a hero and "Project Mayhem" sounds like a good idea. As for the humanization of the villain, this can prove to be less "problematic" and more "culturally irrelevant". As we've seen in the past four years, the bad guys are sometimes closer to the Cobra Commander than to Anakin Skywalker. https://oltnews.com/will-the-public-still-care-about-hunger-games-without-jennifer-lawrences-katniss-everdeen-forbes?_unique_id=5e9f32c8386a1