Former professional rugby player Jodie Ounsley, now best known as Fury on Gladiators, talks sports fuel, air fryers, and her mum’s ‘top-tier’ cooking

Being an athlete, my meals are so simple. They are just based on what I need for fuel. So I’ve never been like, “Oh, let me get my cookbook out and see what sauces I can have on this.” It’s just been, “Right, that’s a carb, that’s a protein, that’s the veg and vitamins I need in that, whack it together and eat it before training.” When I played rugby, it was particularly strict. [Fury, aka Jodie Ounsley, was a rugby union player for Exeter Chiefs women.] But now I’m a Gladiator, it’s not as full-on: I’m still always eating well, but it will be nice to expand what I eat.

I do love all cheesecake. And do you know Tony’s chocolate? They keep bringing weird ones out all the time. I swear I try one of them and then they’ll bring out a new one with pretzels or something. So those are my go-tos.

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© Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Observer

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© Photograph: Fabio De Paola/The Observer

The electropop star on her favourite quirky bookshop, Marmite and cheese pastries and the second series of Severance

Alison Goldfrapp was born in Enfield, north London, in 1966 and raised in Hampshire. She began making music at art school and contributed vocals to tracks by Orbital and Tricky. In 1999, she formed Goldfrapp with composer Will Gregory. The electropop duo made seven albums together, including 2005’s million-selling Supernature, before going on hiatus. In 2023 Goldfrapp, who lives in London, released her debut solo album, The Love Invention. Her single I Wanna Be Loved (Just a Little Better) is out now via AG Records and she will be supporting Scissor Sisters on their reunion tour in May.

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© Photograph: Mat Maitland

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© Photograph: Mat Maitland

The actor was eight when he landed his first movie, and spent his teens working with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Harrison Ford. Now he’s making his theatre debut, in a role that mirrors his own experiences of big time rejection

Interviewing actors usually involves asking them to remember things: lines spoken, expressions pulled, performances given weeks, months or even years ago that are only now seeing the light of day. But instead of fondly reminiscing about his latest project, Asa Butterfield is desperately trying to envisage it. The Sex Education star is about to appear in Second Best, a play about the boy who came agonisingly close to being cast as Harry Potter in the film franchise. It’s his first week of rehearsals, and Butterfield isn’t merely figuring out how to play the part, he’s also trying to predict how scared he’ll be while doing it: in an extremely bold move, this 90-minute one-hander will be the actor’s theatrical debut.

It is an especially ballsy choice when you consider that theatre “has always terrified” Butterfield. “Standing on stage in front of hundreds of people without being able to say, ‘Cut! Can we try again?’ is sort of ‘eurgh!’” he says, sitting in the middle of a spartan rehearsal space in north London. He tries to visualise himself in the wings before the first performance. “I’m going to have stomach-churning anxiety, undoubtedly.” Is he someone who tends to ruminate on that sort of thing? “Yes,” he sighs instantly, with the knowing weariness of a chronic overthinker.

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© Photograph: Pip

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© Photograph: Pip

As the show celebrates its 50th season, look back at some of its most fiery, shocking and groundbreaking performances.

A Y2K-era phenomenon most famous for his MTV prank show and surreal brand of comedy, Green pioneered ideas that thrive today.

© Chris Maggio for The New York Times

At points, this year’s show has been repetitive, ropey, even blood vessel burstingly annoying – but it pulled it out of the bag with those blazing final showdowns

If you’ve been following The Traitors, you will already be aware that it hasn’t exactly been a vintage series. What felt fresh and exciting last year has now become slightly rote; something not helped by an intake of contestants who seemed to have been chosen based on their innate annoyingness.

One problem is that they all kept saying ‘yourself’ instead of ‘you’, which is a harrowing thing to have to hear over and over again for a month. But the bigger problem is that everyone is wise to the game now. Almost every contestant rocked up to Andross Castle with a honking great sense of self-interested superiority. And maybe that would have been fine, if it hadn’t made them all atomically insufferable.

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© Photograph: Paul Chappells/BBC/Studio Lambert

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© Photograph: Paul Chappells/BBC/Studio Lambert

A popular TV host admitted trying to conceal a sexual assault complaint. This time, the reaction was swift and harsh, and aimed not only at him but also his employers.

© Jiji Press, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Rising antisemitism in the United States has spurred a deep-dive into the portrayal of Jews on television through a study, which warns against using tropes associating Jews with money and power, among its six recommendations. Read More

The comedian, who is based in Los Angeles, said that President Trump was visiting California on Friday “to blame us for the fires in person.”

After retiring from the N.F.L., Jason Kelce has built a career as a football analyst, a podcast personality and an omnipresent pitchman. This month, he’s a late-night host as well.

© Hannah Yoon for The New York Times

Katja Meier says she was told women over 50 were not seen as a ‘valid audience’, so decided to make the pilot herself

When Katja Meier got on to a leading scheme for female writers over the age of 40, she could not have been more delighted.

After finishing her script, production companies loved it – but had just one request: could she make the female protagonist 20 years younger?

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© Photograph: Paloma Fabiani/Zenka Films

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© Photograph: Paloma Fabiani/Zenka Films

This week, a Ukrainian fashion designer and dog swimming club owner take on the dragons

© Graeme Hunter/Caroline McDonald

When it gets going, the Netflix show is a pleasingly fraught watch about an Iranian mole, packed with risky missions and heroic acts. Breathtaking stuff

The Night Agent started life as a determined little underdog. Uncool, old-fashioned and on the wrong side of Netflix’s tendency to hype some shows while leaving others unloved, it had to fight its way into the streaming platform’s most-viewed section and critics’ best-of-2023 lists, which it did simply by being a sturdily constructed, twist-packed conspiracy thriller. Once viewers switched it on, they couldn’t switch it off.

It concerns Night Action, an awkwardly named arm of the American intelligence services that is so secret it doesn’t officially exist. When we met him, Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) was its most junior employee, answering the landline phone that rang in the White House basement when an agent needed assistance. By the end of the first season, Peter’s courage, hand-to-hand combat skills and, most of all, his unswerving, country-serving, square-jawed moral code had seen him single-handedly foil a presidential assassination plot.

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© Photograph: SIVIROON SRISUWAN/NETFLIX

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© Photograph: SIVIROON SRISUWAN/NETFLIX

Mystery, magic and mayhem reigned behind the scenes as well as on screen. Mädchen Amick, Joan Chen, Dana Ashbrook and others recall the making of the beloved TV series – and the genius of David Lynch

David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks arrived in a world largely unprepared for its mix of glossy Americana, surrealism and horror. Since it was first broadcast in 1990, it has become part of television’s DNA, and stands as one of the greatest achievements of the lauded film-maker, who died last week.

Mark Frost (co-creator): I first met David Lynch in 1985. I had seen Eraserhead in 1979 at a midnight showing in Minneapolis, and I walked out with the oddest feeling and said: “Someday I’m going to work with that guy.” Six years later, a mutual agent of ours thought the two of us would be good to collaborate on a project they were representing, and fostered an introduction. We hit it off from the very first moment. We were laughing within minutes. We loved all the same movies, we knew all the same directors. That project went away, but then another agent approached us and said: “What do you guys think about doing a television project together?” We had nothing to lose.

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© Photograph: Cinematic/Alamy

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© Photograph: Cinematic/Alamy

It’s Always Sunny’s Kaitlin Olson is incandescent as a police-department cleaner with an IQ of 160 whose crime-solving skills prove second to none. It’s such fun it should be showered with special awards

There is an episode of 30 Rock in which the star of the SNL-like show-within-the-show, Jenna Maroney, gets the lead role in a planned new police procedural: Goodlooking. She solves crimes by being really good at looking at things. Lo, and not for the first time where 30 Rock’s inventions are concerned, it has come to pass. And gloriously so. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … High Potential.

Kaitlin Olson (Hacks, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and no relation to the twins) plays Morgan, a feisty single mother of three, owner of many fantastic furry coats and a cleaner at the local police department. This includes the homicide offices, which is where she accidentally knocks a file to the ground and – as she gathers the spilled pages and photographs back together – solves the crime. She is a “good looker”, you see. I’m sorry, no. She is, we learn when the police tackle her about the untoward alterations made to their crime board by a civilian, a “high potential intellectual”. This is different from merely being clever. It means you also have great creativity, a photographic memory, obsessional tendencies and an ability to see further into brick walls than most – including grumpy police detectives.

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© Photograph: Pamela Littky/Disney

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© Photograph: Pamela Littky/Disney

Got something you’d love to ask the former Baywatch star about her life and new career directions? Now’s your chance

Director Gia Coppola had only one actor in mind to star in The Last Showgirl: Pamela Anderson. Having watched Ryan White’s Netflix documentary Pamela, A Love Story, Coppola knew she would be perfect as Shelly Gardner, an ageing Las Vegas dancer facing the closure of Le Razzle Dazzle, the classic revue she has starred in for three decades. The problem was, Anderson’s (now former) agent threw the script in the bin. Coppola did not take no for an answer. She got in touch with Anderson’s son Brandon Thomas Lee, who made sure the pitch reached his mum. Now trailing accolades, award nominations and an Oscar buzz, the film is bringing the 57-year-old icon something she struggled to find earlier in her career: respect.

Having risen to fame as a Playboy Playmate, Anderson became an international superstar in the 1990s in Baywatch, which cemented the sex-symbol image she struggled for years to shake off. Recently, however, her public persona has morphed into something much more multilayered, thanks not only to the Netflix doc but also to her thoughtful 2023 memoir Love, Pamela and her well-received Broadway debut the previous year as Roxie Hart in Chicago. As she said in a recent magazine interview: “The stars have aligned.”

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© Photograph: Aeon/GC Images

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© Photograph: Aeon/GC Images