The actor answers your questions on her preference for playing goodies or baddies, kissing Denzel Washington and sneaking a nap on set

Why didn’t you insist on a “must kiss Denzel” scene in your two Equalizer films? nivlek47
Well, if you go back to the first Equalizer, he comes to my character seeking permission to do his “equalizing”. I’d been his boss and trained him, so kissing him would be highly inappropriate. However, if somebody is looking to see me kiss Mr Washington, please whisper that into his ear.

I hear you’re a big fan of knitting. What’s been your greatest knitted creation? TopTramp
The knitting has been eclipsed by pottery the past three years. I go to a local pottery studio, do what I can on a wheel, and get my creativity out there. The knitting was a wonderful thing. I’d make simple squares without having to count stitches, then sew them all together. I must have made about a dozen blankets, most of which are still in a trunk upstairs. If I get another job in television – which I hope I do – that has you sitting around quite a bit, so knitting is a good mobile craft.

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© Photograph: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

© Photograph: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

© Photograph: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

From planes to trains, Idris Elba’s high-stress hostage thriller is back

© Apple TV

“You got to hand it to that auto worker for getting under Trump’s skin,” Stephen Colbert said after the president appeared to flip off a heckling worker at a Ford plant.

Martin Freeman does his best to lift this three-parter, but it feels like Enid Blyton – made for an international market that thinks Paddington Bear is holding the queen’s hand in heaven

‘Tis the season, just, for your annual Agatha Christie. In recent years, the adaptations have been infused with the grief and instability of the postwar backdrop against which they all exist, and been given rich, dark, adult inflections by Sarah Phelps for the BBC.

The latest, however, is for Netflix by Chris Chibnall and we are back in the world of period costume, clipped vowels and dialogue infused with nothing but plot, designed to get the puzzle pieces recited into the right position for the next bit then the next bit then the solving – this time at the end of three very hour-long episodes.

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© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

This hormone-fuelled tale of the training college for space voyagers is like Grange Hill, with phasers – and it has a female lead unlike any captain before

The original Star Trek TV series debuted in 1966, so trying to get your head round all the sequels, prequels and timeline-splitting spin-offs can often feel like homework. It was only a matter of time before the venerable sci-fi franchise used a school as a setting. But Starfleet Academy, the latest streaming series, is not some random cosmic polytechnic for aliens to study humanities or vice versa. This is the oft-referenced San Francisco space campus sited right next to the Golden Gate Bridge. With James T Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard on the alumni list, it is basically Hogwarts for wannabe starship captains.

Or at least it used to be. As this newest Trek opens we are in the 32nd century: as far into the future as the franchise has ever gone, boldly or otherwise. (The original 1966 five-year mission for Kirk and co took place in the 23rd century.) The universe is still recovering from the Burn, an all-encompassing cataclysm from 2020’s season three of Star Trek: Discovery that put the kibosh on faster-than-light warp travel. After an extended period of intergalactic isolationism, Starfleet Academy is about to receive its first new intake for over a century. Mega-fan Stephen Colbert is already on board as the school’s PA announcer. All it needs is a new chancellor.

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© Photograph: Brooke Palmer/Paramount

© Photograph: Brooke Palmer/Paramount

© Photograph: Brooke Palmer/Paramount

Exclusive: Artist reminisces about his life in film using interviews recorded in last four years of his life

Fifteen years ago, Sir Ian McKellen was among the leading arts figures who criticised the Tate for not showing its collection of paintings by LS Lowry in its London galleries and questioned whether the “matchstick men painter” had been sidelined as too northern and provincial.

Now, 50 years after Lowry’s death, McKellen is to star in a BBC documentary that will reveal a trove of previously unheard audio tapes recorded with Lowry in the 1970s during his final four years of life.

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© Photograph: Multitude Media

© Photograph: Multitude Media

© Photograph: Multitude Media

The small screen phenomenon, and its publicized use of intimacy coordinators, has arrived as established Hollywood names have started to criticize the role

If you could pinpoint a moment where things change for Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), the two professional hockey players secretly hooking up in the show Heated Rivalry – a moment when the relationship breaks through into fraught emotional territory, when the hazy, undefined thing has become a thing – it would be midway through episode four.

Ilya’s couch, mid-morning, post-breakfast. (The exponentially growing fandom of this six-episode show from Canadian streamer Crave, which premiered in North America in late November with virtually no promotion and has rapidly become one of the most organic TV phenomena in recent memory, knows exactly what I’m talking about.) Hollander overhears Rozanov’s distressing phone call from home and asks how his father is (he doesn’t know Russian, but agitation needs no language); Rozanov responds by wrapping a sculpted arm around his neck. The two then get intimate, in one of the show’s many near-wordless sex scenes, culminating in them each using the other’s first name for the first time.

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© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sabrina Lantos © 2025

© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sabrina Lantos © 2025

© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sabrina Lantos © 2025

Sam Levinson’s hit HBO drama series returns in April with Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi returning

The first trailer for the third season of Euphoria promises more sex, drugs and violence, teasing a troubled life after high school for the show’s characters.

Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer and Jacob Elordi are among those returning for episodes four years in the making. The new season will take place five years after the characters were last seen.

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© Photograph: HBO

© Photograph: HBO

© Photograph: HBO

A stretch of big news revealed growing pains for CBS’s new evening anchor and problems with its Bari Weiss-era philosophy.

© CBS Evening News

The eccentric, sharp-eyed sitcom was so loved that it was once the fastest-selling DVD ever. A quarter of a century on from its Channel 4 debut, why has it fallen so far off the radar?

There are few British comedy shows that were as popular, yet now completely extinct, as Phoenix Nights. The sitcom – which ran for just two series between 2001-2002 – is set in a fictional working men’s club in Bolton, and was a huge hit of the physical media era. Its second series was once the fastest ever selling UK TV show on DVD, shifting 160,000 copies in its first week of release. However, it is now 25 years since it was first broadcast on Channel 4, and it does not feature, nor has it ever, on any streaming service. Instead, it’s confined to dodgy fan uploads on YouTube and the secondhand DVD market. It is also almost entirely absent from all of the major publications’ best TV of the 21st century listicles.

Nevertheless, it remains a programme like few others. Distinctly northern and working class, it crucially uses neither as the butt of its jokes. In the same way that The Royle Family turned the everyday routine of watching TV, bickering, having a brew and asking each other what they had for tea into a relatably funny yet poignant shared living-room experience, Phoenix Nights invites people through its sparkling tinsel curtains into the familiar yet fading glory of clubland.

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© Photograph: CHANNEL 4 PICTURE PUBLICITY

© Photograph: CHANNEL 4 PICTURE PUBLICITY

© Photograph: CHANNEL 4 PICTURE PUBLICITY

Barrister turned novelist Harriet Tyce is playing a blinder in the fourth series of the show. As a thriller writer myself, I recognise the traits that make her such a formidable Faithful

This time last year a rumour swept through the close-knit British crime-writing community, not whispered in a quiet moment in the billiard room but shared on group chats and message boards. The producers of The Traitors were recruiting contestants for 2026, and wanted one of us to take part. Of course they did! The Traitors is a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of the golden age country house whodunnit, which is itself a controlled, lower-stakes, stylised version of real-life murder. It is crime writers’ job to examine the dark side of human behaviour. Betrayal of trust and manipulation are all in a day’s work. We often write from multiple perspectives, identifying with victim, perp and detective, giving us a unique kind of empathy. We spent the rest of the year wondering who it would be. (I didn’t get the call.)

Last November, in that howling no man’s land between the finale of Celebrity Traitors and the transmission of series four, I went along with 13 fellow crime novelists to the Traitors Live Experience in Covent Garden. Despite being professional pattern-finders with highly tuned powers of observation, none of us at the replica round table guessed that the Chosen One was among us, and had already completed her stint on the real thing.

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© Photograph: Cody Burridge/BBC/PA

© Photograph: Cody Burridge/BBC/PA

© Photograph: Cody Burridge/BBC/PA

It may feel like a redemption tour, but the star’s epic jolly across seven continents is consistently funny, moving and quite frankly breathtaking

Hollywood stars – they’re just like us! Except that when we want to go on a massive jolly/rehabilitative journey for ourselves and/or our careers, we have to pay for it. And we generally cannot go on a 100-day adventure across seven continents, with experts on hand to introduce us to their indigenous inhabitants, talk us through world-changing research being done in the most isolated regions on Earth, show us new and fascinating species that can be found there that may hold the cure to all known diseases, and guide us through the breathtaking landscapes that make you want to throw yourself to the ground and weep at the beauty laid out before humanity’s largely uncaring eyes.

Not so for Willard Carroll Smith II, the Academy award, Bafta and Grammy-winning actor and rapper who enjoyed an uninterruptedly stellar career from the late 80s until 2022, when he put a crimp in things by lamping the Oscars’ host Chris Rock for insulting Smith’s wife. This was followed by a tour violinist suing him for alleged predatory behaviour, unlawful termination and retaliation, which is working its way through the California legal system now. Smith has categorically denied all allegations. He is getting away from it all in the meantime by doing all the adventuring noted above – a septet of episodes of Pole to Pole With Will Smith (the name by which of course he is known to us) in honour of his late mentor Dr Allen Counter. Counter was a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, the inaugural director of the university’s Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations and – in his spare time, I guess? – a noted explorer. I cannot help but feel a biopic must be in the works, and I hope it comes soon.

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© Photograph: Freddie Claire/National Geographic

© Photograph: Freddie Claire/National Geographic

© Photograph: Freddie Claire/National Geographic

Sam Nelson is ready to beat some more bad guys – and this time he’s on the Berlin metro. Shenanigans will ensue!

Do you remember the lazy, hazy days of summer 2023, when Idris Elba got on a plane and it was hijacked? It was in a programme called Hijack. For seven effortlessly bingeable hours supposedly showing the adventure in real time, our man on the pressurised inside deduced complex situations from misplaced washbags, sent coded messages via fruit cartons and dying men’s phones, saved lives, averted disasters, and got Kingdom Flight 29 landed safely by Holly Aird so that he could return to his family, even though viewers agreed the scenes with them in between the plane bits were very boring indeed.

And he wasn’t even a policeman like Bruce Willis in Die Hard or a counter-terrorist federal agent like Kiefer Sutherland in 24! Or a pilot, which might also have been useful. He was Sam Nelson, a business negotiator. He had extreme business negotiating skills and he beat the bad guys. Who turned out not to be terrorists but a crime syndicate that wanted to short shares in the airline. Which was a bit weird, but never mind. And one of the bad guys escaped, but the point is Sam was a hero and Elba was the only man who could have played him and made it work. He was a mighty, implacable force. The rock on which this fragile, teetering edifice of nonsense was built.

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© Photograph: Apple TV

© Photograph: Apple TV

© Photograph: Apple TV

The explosive popularity of the gay hockey TV drama reveals women’s desire for sex and romance without violence or hierarchy

The first time gay hockey romance crossed Mary’s radar, she was warned off it. A 64-year-old non-profit executive from Toronto, Mary recalled mentioning the Canadian author Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series to her son, a twentysomething queer writer and fellow hockey obsessive, a few years ago.

“I said: ‘Have you heard of these books?’ and he said: ‘Yeah.’ I said: ‘Should I read these books?’ And he said: ‘No. They’re not for you.’”

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© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sky

© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sky

© Photograph: Sphere Abacus/Sky

Sometimes you want television that challenges you. Something that’s genre bending, envelope pushing, plot twisting. Something that’s the screen equivalent of an exercise routine. But other times, you want a show that carries adjectives you’d use for a sweater — cosy, comforting, familiar. Something built around a good yarn. Read More