#stephen spies

[childhoodgrave]

i cant sleep my love song is speaking in tongues / i wanted to sabotage everything i had

[splep]

Joey pointing out my costume at the evening show !!!

this was WILD since this was a last minute closet cosplay and i only stood up because the people i was with were basically pushing me out my seat /pos

this was an incredible moment that genuinely healed 14 year old me who had eyes on prize on loop for days :))

[cursemewithyourkiss]

Extremely niche post for the me community. I've connected the dots!

[kairithemang0]

Whenever I think of Curtwen slow dancing this is the song I think about specifically the beginning idk it tickles my brain and I need them to dance

[stelly38]

I thought Cambridge Spies was *the* most British thing I’d ever seen, until I watched Maurice shortly after. I’m still on my Toby Stephens kick, which explains Cambridge Spies, and lord, is he pretty in it. But I also wanted to ogle the very young, stunningly beautiful Hugh Grant in Maurice, so I watched both.

I nursed a bit of a crush on Grant back in his Four Weddings days, around the same time as Maurice, but I’d honestly forgotten how incredibly, ethereally gorgeous he was, like some androgynous nymph out of a Waterhouse painting, smooth and luscious, too perfect to be real. For the record, I do love today's older, rougher Hugh, who has managed, over time, to turn ass-hole-ish curmudgeonliness into a charming brand all his own.

My overall impression of Merchant Ivory flicks is that they are much like paintings: pretty to look at, and if you stare long enough, something in your field of view eventually moves, but it takes, like, days. Days. I don’t know if my attention span has been worn down over the decades like everyone else’s, or if these movies need some tighter editing, but good lord, at two hours and twenty minutes, not much happens in Maurice. Or is it EM Forster?  Maurice is a Forster adaptation; and similarly, so is A Room with a View, which also flows like molasses. I’ll never know if it’s the writing or the editing, because I’ve never read anything of Forster’s except for Room, which I attempted when I was a teenager and quit halfway through, because what in the fuck was he going onnnnn about? And I even had a better attention span back then, in the nineties. I said to my husband after Maurice ended, perhaps he and I needed a course on Forster to truly appreciate the literature and the movie adaptations. It’s unlikely to happen, but there it is.

Maurice follows the lead character, played by James Wilby, as he discovers and wrestles with his latent homosexuality. Hugh Grant plays Clive Durham, Maurice’s good school friend and first (unconsummated) love. The two men pal around London and the countryside as they age well into their twenties, spending time together and apart, both grappling with their sexual identities in different ways. The movie also casts a very cute Rupert Graves as Maurice’s first lover, and Ben Kingsley (with hair and a weird American accent—what a hoot) appears in a cameo as a shrink who attempts to hypnotize Maurice into heterosexuality.

My bitching isn’t a condemnation of Forster or Merchant Ivory; the film was a rather pretty little trifle to look at. I thought the story was good, and I love that a major film studio was tackling the horrors of being gay in Edwardian England so long ago (1987, when AIDS was still considered “the gay cancer.” —Hats off to them.) And I’m always game to watch pretty boys cavorting about. There was a good deal of that, one scene with full frontal nudity (gasp!)

Speaking of pretty boys, several feature in Cambridge Spies, which takes place about thirty years after Maurice, shortly before WWII. The prettiest of them is Toby Stephens, who is just dashing dressed in wide leg trousers, fedoras, and the well-tailored suits of the era. He plays Kim Philby, one of the notorious Soviet spies that comprised the group known in real life as the Cambridge Five. Rupert Penry Jones plays Donald Maclean; Samuel West is Anthony Blunt, and Tom Hollander is Guy Burgess. Since American public-school curriculum doesn’t teach any history but its own, (much of which is white-washed lies, but that’s a kvetch for another day), I never knew about the British turncoats until I watched this, which was last week. Yay for me.

Spies is a four-part miniseries, the last two episodes of which are far, far more entertaining and engaging than the first two. It’s good they decided to balance the episodes thusly, as I was ready to throw in the towel after the second one. The only reason I continued on was because I’d already invested time in watching the first 50 percent—in for a penny, in for a pound. I think the writers wanted the first two episodes for back-story and character development, but there is little that reveals the principals’ various motivations for spying other than that they were all friends at Cambridge, and they shared a deep hatred of fascism. Weird that that was all it took, right? I dunno, maybe I missed something—these were the two most boring episodes.

The entire series really belongs to Tom Hollander. He steals every scene he’s in; he has the best lines, the most cuttingly funny remarks, and he’s the craziest and loosest cannon of the bunch, hence, the most entertaining. Previously, I’d only known his work from 2005’s Pride and Prejudice (the boiled potatoes), and from his creepily-repressed turn as art critic John Ruskin in Desperate Romantics. He’s great and memorable in those, but he is phenomenal in Spies.

Hollander’s Burgess, as well as West’s Anthony Blunt, are gay men, compelling because they'd opted into an overwhelmingly straight-male power structure: espionage. Spies doesn’t really speak to this much, rather than to have Hollander portray Burgess as an out and proud gay man, I suppose as much as one could be on the brink of WWII in England. But it is striking to see the difference just three decades made in how gays were perceived by English society (or not) when you compare the attitudes on display in Maurice to those in Spies. Homosexuality was the worst sin one could commit in the world of Maurice; but by the time we get to Spies, it’s barely an issue. I suspect that homosexuality was still offensive to many in England at the time, as that country’s decriminalization law only took effect in 1967, but for some reason unknown to me, the writers and producers of Spies made it mostly a non-issue.

Overall, Spies was a good series, educational for me, at least, and I got to stare at Toby Stephens for four hours, including a couple safe-for-granny sex scenes. Would I write home about the show? —probably not, but it was not wasted time.

Tom Hollander’s best scene (and they’re all good) is a tantrum he throws during a trip to the States, where he drives across suburban lawns, destroying several white picket fences, then stands atop his car screaming “God Bless America” (in a good American accent), and decries this country’s never-acknowledged social and political hypocrisy.

Brilliant. And funny.

[johnsilvers]

finding hidden gems while going through toby stephens' filmography

[thisbluespirit]

Films watched (2000s): Glorious 39 (Momentum, 2009); written & dir. Stephen Poliakoff. Starring Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Eddie Redmayne, Julie Christie, Charlie Cox, Jeremy Northam, David Tennant & Christopher Lee.

"Anne, listen."

[0ur-diabolikal-rapture]

I’m watching cambridge spies and I’m so

[sasa-chan]

Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker (2006)

[splep]

[cursemewithyourkiss]

Have been battling the thought of rewatching Cambridge Spies for weeks now. Girl don't do it, most mediocre series ever!!!

[kairithemang0]

Rest in peace Curt and Owen you would’ve loved the album Angel Face by Stephen Sanchez

[tobys-walrus-crew]

A guide through Toby Stephens’ filmography for Percy Jackson fans.

If you’ve only just discovered Toby as Poseidon and want more than 10 minutes of that face, here’s where to start!

If you’d be into Poseidon trying to make up for his absence and trying to win Sally and Percy back while fighting to survive in outer space, look no further! Watch Lost In Space on Netflix! It’s full of adventure, family, a but of angst and lots of DAD!

If you’d be more into Poseidon going full Odysseus on Zeus for taking everything from him and then calling him a monster while Medusa takes revenge, do yourself a favor and watch Black Sails! Peak TV. Queer af. Made by Jon Steinberg. [Trigger warnings]

If Sally and Poseidon pining is your thing and you love your Charlotte Brontë, watch the 2006 Jane Eyre with #RuthWilson and #TobyStephens! So much romance, angst and mutual eyefucking… warning: You WILL fall in love with a douchebag! Sorry for that!

Shakespeare Poseidon anyone? A very young and extremely pretty Toby Stephens as Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night. Lots of pining, genderfluidity, confusion and sparks. SPARKS! And a bathtub that will rewire your brain. Something something LGBT will definitely happen to you!

Finally if you love something face paced and modern with great teenage heroes, give Alex Rider on Prime a watch! Toby Stephens is a brilliant villain in S2 with loads of Elon Musk vibes. Poseidon the media mogul asshole? Maybe.

Other highly recommended things from Toby Stephens’ backlist: Cambridge Spies, Photographing Fairies, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Mangal Pandey and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.