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‘We’re told to be polite and small and dainty. But that’s not me!’: Megan Stalter on starring in Lena Dunham’s new romcom, Too Much

6 juillet 2025 à 11:00

Her kooky online skits brought her viral fame and a breakout role in HBO’s Hacks. Then Lena Dunham came calling with the job of a lifetime. Is the actor ready to take centre stage?

When Lena Dunham messaged, Megan Stalter lost it. “Like d’uhh,” Stalter is explaining – delighting, really. “Who wouldn’t? I was at home: this really bad apartment in Laurel Canyon [in the Hollywood Hills]. The area is haunted, and it was actually a really scary building, and nothing ever got fixed because apparently in the lease I signed they didn’t have to repair anything! I don’t actually live there now …” Stalter, 34, has a tendency to wander off on tangents. So Dunham?

“OK yes, so we were just about to start filming Hacks again.” The wildly popular, 48-times-Emmy-nominated HBO comedy in which Stalter plays nepo-baby Kayla, a chaotic and kind-hearted talent agent, her total-commitment-to-the-bit characterisation making her a breakout star. “And there Lena was in my DMs.” Stalter opened the message, which said: “I have a project I want to talk to you about.” “That’s when I lost my mind,” she adds. “Panic set in.”

‘I was living in Doodle Land and didn’t know how to get back’: the million-dollar artist who drew himself crazy

The Guardian

Par :Michael Segalov

28 juin 2025 à 12:45

As Mr Doodle, Sam Cox found a global audience and made a fortune with his signature scrawls covering furniture, clothes – and eventually an entire house. But behind the scenes, he was unravelling into psychosis

From the road, it’s barely visible; glimpsed, maybe, if peered at with cheeks pressed against the property’s imposing iron gates. There is otherwise little out of the ordinary in this quiet Kent corner of London’s affluent commuter belt – St Michael’s has a village hall, a country club, a farm shop. But at the end of a snaking, hedge-lined driveway is an incongruous home: a sprawling, six-bedroom neo-Georgian mansion, almost every inch, inside and out, covered in the trademark black-on-white line drawings of its owner, Mr Doodle, the 31-year-old artist Sam Cox.

A car honks twice behind me. A woman in her 80s steps out. “It’s mindblowing, isn’t it?” Sam’s grandmother Sue says, eyebrows aloft. “And terribly … different.” The gates ahead buzz open. “Take it slowly,” she offers, by way of warning. “You’ll want to give your eyes a few minutes to adjust.”