Rupert/Kevin - The Kid

Friend: I try to keep up with Moran

Rupert Friend has said the cast of The Kid are having trouble keeping up with director Nick Moran.

The 27-year-old plays the lead in the forthcoming film, which is directed by the Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels actor, and said his energy was infectious.

He said: "He has just got an incredible energy you know, he is kind of tireless and that's infectious and it sort of spreads throughout the crew and certainly to all the cast - we all have a lot of energy and want to sort of catch up to his speed."

Asked what Nick was like behind the camera compared to in front, Rupert said: "He's just as mad but he's a fabulous director to work with, I am really enjoying it."

The film is based on Kevin Lewis' autobiography of the same name, and Rupert described it as "a beautiful, heartbreaking story".

Thanks for sharing.

Sorry.I am not good at English

It's difficualt to talk to you.

The widow's might

When her husband died suddenly from a heart attack last year, the actress Natascha McElhone could have been forgiven for falling to pieces. But self-pity has never been her style. Instead, she threw herself into work for the sake of the children -- her own and others. Sabine Durrant met her

When I arrive at the studio where I am to interview Natascha McElhone, she is dressed for the red carpet in high, strappy heels and a glamorous dress. Her hair, a caramel tumble, is artfully arranged to one side and her sea-blue/green eyes are positively Cleopatran. The photo-shoot is running late and, apologising, McElhone clasps my hand. She is very earnest and very concerned, and it is to my discredit that after several minutes I start to try to take my hand back. But she keeps on holding it and eventually I give in, and let it rest there, embarrassed.

It is a humbling experience interviewing McElhone. She has somehow quietly become one of Britain's most successful actresses, who has appeared, without fuss, opposite a series of impossibly starry leading men: Robert de Niro (Ronin), Jim Carrey (The Truman Show), Brad Pitt (The Devil's Own) and George Clooney (Solaris).

As versatile as she is beautiful, she has played characters as diverse as an artist's muse (Surviving Picasso), an Irish terrorist (Ronin) and a Tudor mistress (The Other Boleyn Girl), bringing to each role regality and poise. In America, she is increasingly known as David Duchovny's partner in the cult television show Californication. But if her profile is lower than might be, it may be because she has always put her life, and her privacy, before her career. "My choices have been limited by that," she says. "But that's all right. That's a price worth paying."

Last year her husband, Martin Kelly, a plastic surgeon, had a heart attack on the doorstep of their Fulham home while she was filming in Los Angeles, pregnant with their third child. In the days after his death, McElhone broke her customary restraint and published an article in a newspaper, which was as open as it was lacking in self-pity. "I can't believe I won't feel his skin anymore," she wrote. "How is that possible?" It was a heart-rending tribute to the love of her life, but it also meant the press subsequently left her, and her children, alone.

When the interview finally starts, when McElhone has kicked off the shoes and the dress and donned her own "togs" (faded jeans, a checked shirt and a pair of clogs), she is businesslike. She makes it clear -- a page of notes on her knee, full of facts and figures -- that she is here as an ambassador for Unicef and Pampers, as a figurehead for their campaign to eradicate maternal and newborn tetanus by 2012. They are paying her to do this (a representative in another room is worrying, for this reason, about running late) and the notes include "suggested soundbites" ("Not at all patronising," McElhone says, laughing). But a trip to Angola has also impressed upon her the urgency of the subject. "It just took my breath away how much stuff we take for granted. They have all lost a child. I didn't meet a woman who hadn't lost a child. I don't know. I just find that extraordinary ... that they are still standing and walking and operating."

She breaks off. Her enormous eyes are like pools. "It was inspiring. People were asking me at a press conference in Dublin yesterday, "How can you fit this into your life?" But I don't want anyone to think I've over-reached myself. This was presented to me on a platter. I've piggybacked on to it and it's wonderful and it's a privilege. The whole trip was just like a gift."

McElhone, who is 38, leads a life of contrasts, and you get the impression that she treads a careful path through them. She poses on the red carpet and is snapped at grand events such as the recent £15m opening party of the tycoon Sol Kerzner's new resort in Morocco, where every female guest was handed a rose by a trained monkey, but also talks a great deal about social responsibility. "From the age of 14, as soon as I started doing part-time jobs, baby-sitting and things, I got one of those World Vision childcare direct debits and I've never cancelled." She fundraises extensively for Facing the World, the charity she set up with her husband to help children with cranial-facial deformities.

"No one likes going round with a begging bowl, but you keep those children's faces at the front of your mind and you forget your ego. It's toe-curling, but you have to bloody do it." She may privately educate her sons (Theodore, nine, Otis, six, and Rex, one), but "that's good because it frees up a place in the state school for someone who can't afford the alternative". And even a reference to Neutrogena, for which she has been "the face" for the past year, is met by: "That's OK. Their stuff is really nice. Their practices are good. It's affordable. It doesn't feel like a compromise."

Her upbringing, she says, has a lot to do with this. She was born Natascha Taylor (McElhone is her mother's maiden name) and, after the separation of her parents, spent her early years in Brighton. (Her father now lives in Sweden with his second wife and McElhone's two younger half-brothers.) She claims that her childhood, which she spent with her stepfather, Roy Greenslade, the former editor of the Daily Mirror and "a very special soul", and her mother, Noreen Taylor, also a journalist, wasn't a privileged one -- "We lived in rented flats; they didn't get on the property ladder until I was 13 or 14" -- but it was a politicised one. "My parents' way of having a social conscience was to be politically active. They believed that the way to bring about change was to be involved -- they were obviously very left wing -- at the grass-roots level."

When McElhone was a teenager she moved with her parents and brother -- now a screenwriter living in Los Angeles -- to London, where McElhone went to "various schools", including Camden School for Girls. After attending the London Academy of Music and Drama she landed bit-parts on television, including Absolutely Fabulous and Bergerac, and on stage -- she toured extensively with the Leicester Haymarket's The Cherry Orchard. But her big film break came with Surviving Picasso with Anthony Hopkins in 1996 (the same year she and Kelly got together). The Truman Show followed swiftly after.

Though "grateful for the stuff that has come my way", she believes that her decision since then to dodge the limelight has altered the trajectory of her career. "The actor Billy Crudup said this thing recently: 'I don't see the point of interviews. Each exposition, each bit of myself that I reveal, means something taken away from my next part that I can't use.' He put it beautifully and I am paraphrasing horribly, but I thought, 'Yes, that's it.'"

She is pragmatic -- "more than that: I love working" -- but since the death of her husband she has taken jobs that fit around her family and that interest her. She talks about the smaller, more eccentric projects with most enthusiasm. Take the BBC film The Other Boleyn Girl: "It was improvised, hand-held. You knew what had to have happened by the end of the day, but you didn't know how you were going to get there." Or her more recent experience playing an abusive mother in Nick Moran's film The Kid.

"It was touch and go whether it was going to be made or not. And then at the last minute we were shooting. No rehearsals. No read-through. Nothing. You had no idea. I called Rupert Friend, who plays the grown-up 'kid', and said, 'What accent are you doing? Let's make sure we are on the same planet at least!' And then during filming I was sitting next to Con O'Neill, who is also in it, and he was doing a Liverpudlian accent, and I thought, 'Oh no, maybe they've changed it. Oh no, I'll stick with my Croydon.' It was just, 'Cut!' and move on. It was what I'd term guerrilla film-making."

She describes Californication as "a trip. It's a great set to be on. It's lively. It's interesting. It's sparky. It's rat-a-tat-tat. It's like an old newsdesk in Fleet Street. And even though it's a series in which masses of women rip off their clothes all the time, the women who work on it are fascinating, interesting, bright, so empowered." Duchovny, she says, is also a blast: "One of the few actors I know who can do comedy and serious drama and conflict. Great to work with."

The show is filmed three months of the year in Los Angeles, where McElhone is part of a new wave of British actors. "Yes, there is quite a swell. I don't know why. Maybe it's because there is less work here. But it's great. You bump into each other." Californication is cynical about the Los Angeles mindset, but McElhone will have none of it. "I am one of those people who goes to a place and sees the stuff that is bright and sparkly. Hollywood has been fantastic to me. I wouldn't be working as an actress if it wasn't for Hollywood." As for the culture of youth, the pressure for Botox and surgery, she bats the question away: "I've always looked old for my age. I've never been a girly girl. It must be hard if you are sort of the impy, cute, cheeky girlfriend type, but that has never been me. I've always played women."

Los Angeles is a long way away from her home in Fulham, which does cause difficulties. Last year she took the baby with her, leaving the older boys with her parents and the nanny. "We do homework and piano practice on Skype and it was a complete godsend. And then luckily it was the summer and they came out of school a bit early and joined me. Because they are missing lessons, I'm quite strict. I sit them down and they have to do a poem or a story every morning. It gets to the point where we are going to Disneyland and they are like, 'Do we have to write about it?' But, God, you know, what a crazy, privileged life! The kids going to the beach every day, becoming surfer dudes ... "

In the course of the interview, McElhone mentions her children a great deal. The older two adore the baby: "They're obsessed with him. He's their baby. He belongs to them." Their characters are completely different: "I think all same-sex siblings are." She keeps on top of homework because "as soon as they lose that thread, as soon as they drop the reins, their confidence drops. If they lose confidence at school, it permeates everything." When she has finished a script and comes downstairs, they say, "Are you all ours?" In her open letter, McElhone wrote: "I haven't been able to go off in a corner and be self-indulgent, because of the kids." That such strength has continued is self-evident.

In the interview she mentions her husband only twice -- once in relation to Facing the World and once when she refers to a previous visit to Africa. "My husband took me there for my honeymoon. Our honeymoon." The correction is heartbreaking -- a woman used now to doing things on her own. There is a moment of silence after this. I ask her if she is all right and put out my hand. But she doesn't take it.

She looks back at her Angola notes. "It is mad," she says, her back straightening. "Even something like Unicef, you have to do a photo-shoot. This is about these little kids, these wonderful mothers who are holding everything together. There is such a huge story here and yet ... [she shrugs] ... it comes down to a lovely dress and an actress."

© Telegraph

- sabine durrant

Sunday Independent

here they all are...*can't wait for HQs...* interesting hair Rup...

Two new projects for Ilan Eshker.

Ilan Eshkeri recently finished recording the scores for two new film projects. The Kid is a movie about central character Kevin Lewis, whose early life suffered from appalling parenting and bullying at school. The movie directed by Nick Moran stars Rupert Friend, Natascha McElhone and Ioan Gruffudd. Falcon Films will release the movie in the UK later this year. In addition to writing the original score, Eshkeri also co-produced the recordings of classical music references for the movie, including sections from Elgar’s cello concerto and Brahm’s third symphony. To find out more about the recording session with the London Metropolitan Orchestra.

Eshkeri also wrote the music for the Sky mini-series Strike Back. Strike Back follows the lives of two former soldiers, Major Hugh Collinson and discharged veteran John Porter, who meet for the first time during a Middle East hostage crisis. The six-part series will air on British TV later this year. The music was also recorded with the London Metropolitan Orchestra, who posted an entry about the recording sessions on their blog.

Ishkeri also has the comic book adaption Kick-Ass coming out next month, which he co-scored with Henry Jackman, Marius DeVries and John Murphy. Neil Marshall’s Centurion, which Eshkeri scored last year premiered at the Berlin Film Festival a few weeks ago is also about to come out in the UK next month and will bee released by Magnolia Pictures in the US later this year.

here's a youtube version* looks pretty good!