Latest news with #ShaunoftheDead
Glasgow Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
Glasgow transformed for filming of new Ghostwriter film
The Glasgow Times understands that this is for the new JJ Abrams film Ghostwriter, which will see Samuel L. Jackson join an all-star cast. Glen Powell, Jenna Ortega and Emma Mackey are all rumoured to be involved in the movie. (Image: Gordon Terris) READ MORE: Samuel L. Jackson film set to take over Glasgow this week Production crews have descended on the city to prepare for scenes that will be shot in and around Glasgow City Chambers, with parts of the surrounding area being redecorated to reflect a 1980s look. New images show streets reimagined for the film's retro-fantasy theme with period signage and faux brick walls appearing across key filming locations. Film trucks have also been pictured lined up across closed streets to support the production. (Image: Gordon Terris) The film is rumoured to follow a fantasy author who reveals that the mythical world he created is real, blending retro sci-fi, mystery, and fantasy. Some roads have been closed since Sunday, June 9, as they prepare to start filming, and some will be closed until June 23. The closures are being implemented by Glasgow City Council to ensure the safety of pedestrians and road users during filming. READ MORE: Hundreds gather for vigil held in memory of Cole Cooper (Image: Gordon Terris) It is understood that Abrams was in Glasgow a few months ago to scout potential locations for the movie. Reports suggest it will be a fantasy film inspired by the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter, a space opera about a video game player recruited to fight an interstellar war against aliens. Glen Powell was in Glasgow last year filming for The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright, who's known for films including Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs the World.
The Herald Scotland
5 days ago
- Sport
- The Herald Scotland
Infantino's latest vanity project is ridiculous
This season feels never ending. Every time you think the campaign has finally croaked its last it springs back to life, eyes wide open like a zombie from Shaun of the Dead. When Portugal won the Nations League final it felt like a natural full stop. Now here we are in the middle of June watching Bayern Munich smacking amateur teams from New Zealand around the chops as part of a farcical month-long, 32-team tournament no one asked for. Football is turning into a year-long test of endurance, with no respite. FIFPRO, the global players' union, have raised concerns over the health and welfare of players being pushed and stretched to breaking point by Gianni Infantino's vaulting, self-serving campaign to be crowned King of Soccer. The FIFA president has some powerful friends in his corner. Granted a VIP pass to Trump's Oval Office and his golf hideaway at Mar-A-Lago, the head of world football now counts the POTUS as one of his besties. In March he sat like the unelected chief of a banana republic roaring in laughter as The Donald compared him to a child who had just woken up on Christmas morning and found a giant pile of toys under the tree. For once, Trump was on the money. It's hard to put a finger on when – or how – Infantino became this all-powerful figure, capable of snapping his fingers and expanding the World Cup finals to a gruesome, bloated 48-team monstrosity offering free admission to the likes of Jordan and Uzbekistan. Or how he managed to persuade anyone that a contrived club tournament featuring 63 games played across 11 cities in half-empty grounds was worth the time or effort. The great American public seem unconvinced. While Trump's election proved that they're no strangers to a convincing scam, they're hardly forming an orderly queue down Orlando's International Drive to snap up cut-price tickets for Ulsan HD versus Mamelodi Sundowns. The baffling part of all this is that Infantino used to be nothing more than a smiling, inoffensive man in a suit who served as master of ceremonies at the Champions League draw in Nyon. Celtic or some other team would pop out the bowl and, as a hapless ex-pro fiddled with the little ball, the bold Gianni would fill the dead air by parroting the fact that the champions of Scotland were one-time winners in 1967. There was no hint, then, of a FIFA president in waiting. No hint of a man poised to capitalise on the collapse of Sepp Blatter's corruption-plagued regime with all the ravenous, rapacious hunger of a dog demolishing sausages. Read more: The national-team ticking time-bomb the SFA must do more to address Does Dumbarton fate prove Scottish football needs an independent regulator? Infantino now flies around the world in his Qatari private jet rubbing shoulders with heads of state and taking the beautiful game to all corners of the globe, portraying himself as an international ambassador. Or, as he likes to put it, 'an official provider of happiness to humanity'. The God complex obscures the obscure back story of a bureaucrat who rose without trace; a power-mad plonker driving football to the point of physical and mental exhaustion in his quest for global influence. Nothing sums up his tenure more aptly than European delegates staging a walk-out at FIFA's Congress in Paraguay after he jetted in two hours late from meetings in Saudi Arabia and Qatar with Trump. Infantino's world is one where Europe knows its place. America matters as much as Austria. India holds as much sway as Italy. Saudi Arabia's influence is greater than Spain's. That's what the good politician does, of course. He draws the unheard and the disenfranchised into his orbit and gives them a voice. Last year he turned up at a game between St Mirren and Aberdeen in Paisley before an IFAB gathering at Loch Lomond. Senior figures on Hampden's sixth floor describe him as a charismatic, charming schmoozer with enough warmth to power an arctic outpost and, while European nations voted against his re-election in 2023, he seems to rub along just fine with the SFA. Ultimately Infantino represents a world of FIFA soft power, where votes are courted by kissing a few frogs and flattering nations in unlikely – or unsavoury – corners of the planet. That might explain why Spain and Portugal will share the hosting rights to the 2030 World Cup finals with the North African state of Morocco. Why the one after that will be played in Saudi Arabia, a nation which put up the $1 billion prize fund for the Club World Cup and, in an entirely unrelated coincidence, was subsequently handed the World Cup finals. Next summer's finals will be shared by America, Canada and Mexico and if Scotland are one of the nations who take advantage of a bloated 48-team format, Infantino will portray himself as the inclusive friend of the little people who made it all possible. If Steve Clarke's team crash and burn in the qualifiers, he'll go back to being the power-crazed despot ripping the heart from football's soul. A speech in Qatar's National Convention Centre in Doha on the eve of the 2022 World Cup should have stopped the Infantino Express in its tracks. In a 57-minute diatribe, journalists listened to FIFA's main man lecturing western nations for their own sins over the past 3000 years. Suggesting that his own experience as a red-haired, freckled son of Italian immigrants in Switzerland had given him a taste of what migrant workers and minorities in Qatar were going through, it was clear, then, that he had become hopelessly detached from the real world. They said, then, that enough was enough. Yet all those columns, all those lectures, on One Love armbands and the scandal of Qatar sport-washing their reputation went for nothing in the end. What Infantino wants, Infantino gets and what Infantino wants most is to be football's answer to Louis XIV, the vainglorious Sun King. Laughably, he insists on his name appearing twice on the Club World Cup trophy. Where Panini albums used to be reserved for images of the managers and players, meanwhile, Gianni has somehow managed to insert his very own gold sticker at the front. In hindsight Trump should have taken him to one side in the Oval Office and told him precisely where he could stick his Club World Cup.
Perth Now
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Nick Frost takes his own cutlery on holiday with him
Nick Frost takes his own cutlery on vacation. The 53-year-old actor is a keen cook and so he takes a trusty knife and other personal items he may need when he stays at an Airbnb or another location for when he is making meals for his family in the kitchen. During an appearance on the Dish by Waitrose podcast - hosted by Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett - he said: "I mean, I try not to. But sometimes it's better to have one [a knife] and not use it than to need one and not have it. 'If when we're going to an Airbnb, I'll definitely bring my kit over 'cause it's always the worst thing about turning up at an Airbnb and discovering that the [plastic bread knife]." As well as plastic cutlery, Nick also loathes glass chopping boards. He said: 'Or the other thing that makes me really cross are glass chopping boards. Like round glass chopping boards. It's just nuts. It feels nuts. 'Also, I think with a nice wood chopping board, it evolves over time too. It gets a little divot in it. It feels nice to touch.' Keen amateur chef Nick declared cooking can turn people into "slight" show-offs, and he thinks that may benefit him. The How to Train Your Dragon star explained: "I think people expect actors to be big show-offs. "I've never been that at all, I'm just the opposite ... but I feel like cooking sometimes is a way of showing off slightly. "Maybe that's a release I need in terms of, that took eight hours to prep. And now I hope you really love it, you know? "But it's a lot of effort to show you care, you know.' Nick worked in kitchens when he left school, but he did not become a professional chef because the job proved too tricky for him. The Shaun of the Dead actor said: "I worked in kitchens when I left school. When I was like 19, 20, I started to work in kitchens and stuff. "But it was really hard. I was still working in the kitchen until I was 28, 29, not knowing what I was going to do." Nick did not find cooking for a living "fun", but he fell in love with it again when he could serve up dishes to his friends and family. The star - who has a son called Mac with his wife Christina Frost - said: "When you do it for a living it becomes less fun. "And then I started to be an actor, and then I didn't have to get in for 6am and leave at 1am anymore. I got to do it for my friends and family, and I just fell in love with it again. "I can now give something back, and it's not like, having to cook food for horrible people, you know?'
Otago Daily Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Ready for the apocalypse
Actor Nick Frost is ready for the end of days, he tells Tim Lewis. Nick Frost isn't messing around. "Could I have two double espressos," he says, when we meet on the dot of 10am. "So, like, four espressos." We are in a cafe, the Pheasantry, in Bushy Park, southwest London. The park, across the way from Hampton Court Palace, has been a hunting ground for kings, the spot where General Dwight Eisenhower plotted the D-Day landings from a tent and, latterly, the birthplace of Parkrun. But Frost, the 53-year-old British actor, sees other potential for this bucolic parkland now abundant with deer and protected anthills. "When me and Simon" — that's Pegg, actor and frequent Frost collaborator — "used to live together, we always had places we'd go should the zombie apocalypse actually happen", he says, necking the first of the espressos. "We had lots of rules and plans, and the Pheasantry falls into that because there's a fence all the way around. A really good fence. And you could easily cultivate the land that's here and live in this structure." With stern-faced suspicion, Frost scans the light-filled room, mainly filled with tired-looking new mums and retirees nursing a midweek cappuccino. "So this is a great zombie fallback." There are maaaaany possible follow-up questions, but I go with: where else have you identified as a decent apocalypse refuge? "Another place is Twickenham stadium because, again, it's completely fenced in," he says, the second double espresso bolted. "And you could turn the pitch — not that I've over-thought this — into quarters: one would be for grazing livestock; I'd have an orchard in another; wheat or corn, etc, in the third; then I'd leave one fallow for each season. Then just rotate. And I'd live in, like, Vodafone's executive box." Overthinking is one of Frost's defining traits, and makes him a highly entertaining, unpredictable person to spend an hour or so with. It is also very on-brand for him to spend his downtime obsessing over what would happen if the human race were faced with imminent, violent extinction. Frost has one of the great, accidental origin stories in acting. For most of his 20s he worked in Chiquito's, a Mexican chain on London's North Circular, first as a waiter and later as a line cook. A random meeting with Pegg, whose girlfriend worked in the restaurant, led first to a flat-share and then the cult TV series Spaced , written by Pegg and Jessica Hynes, and then Shaun of the Dead , a comedy about friends who have to problem-solve their way out of — yep — a zombie apocalypse, both of which Frost, laconically, starred in. "Even when I was 28, 29, when we were just starting to do Spaced , I had no plan at all," recalls Frost. "Like, I just did a thing. Another thing turned up, and I did that. I went back to waitering after Spaced." Frost's involvement, with Pegg and the director Edgar Wright, in the Cornetto trilogy — Shaun of the Dead , Hot Fuzz and The World's End — is enough to guarantee him life membership in the British film pantheon. But he's clearly a grafter: alongside his prolific work in movies and TV, he's written a pair of screenplays and a couple of books. The first, Truth, Half Truths and Little White Lies , was a memoir, telling his chaotic life story until he landed Spaced ; the second, A Slice of Fried Gold , was nominally a cookbook, interspersed with haphazard reflections from his life and career, but much more unhinged and poignant than that sounds. Frost also makes and sells paintings. "People think, because you made Shaun of the Dead , you're a billionaire," he says. "The money you get paid for a film is ... it's not forever. I work because a) I like it, but b) I have to, like everyone." Every three months or so, Frost will receive a royalty cheque from his acting work. He makes a great ceremony of gathering the family — his partner Hayley, their son and daughter, aged 6 and 4, and his teenage son from a previous relationship — for the reveal. "Everyone crowds around to see me opening it," he says. "And I always pretend: 'We've done it! We've done it!' And it's £35." Still, playing the long game seems to be paying off. Frost recently landed two of the starriest roles of his career: first up, he is Gobber the Belch, the wise-cracking blacksmith, in the live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon , the Cressida Cowell series that became an acclaimed animated trilogy. Then — even bigger — he is about to start shooting HBO's TV adaptation of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, with each of the seven books luxuriating in its own eight-episode season. Frost was recently unveiled as Rubeus Hagrid, the Hogwarts groundskeeper originally played in the films by Robbie Coltrane. The news still seems to be sinking in. "Both projects are in genres that I have loved my whole life, in terms of fantasy and wizards and witchcraft," he says. "Especially Harry Potter. It's like ... I'm f...... Hagrid!" We'll come back to all that, but first there's the tumultuous past few years to process — what Frost calls "the big bang" of his life. The cafe has been descended on by a throng of runners and dog-walkers, so we decide to stretch our legs in the garden. It's an idyllic morning: rows of goslings waddle in front of us. But his survival instincts never leave high alert. "See, you're fenced in, so you're safe," he says, surveying the Pheasantry's lush lawns, "lots of rabbits as well". Frost, who today wears a velour Sergio Tacchini top, blue cords and Asics running shoes, looks great, and that's part of the story. "Six years ago I stopped taking any kind of drink or mind-bending substance," he says. That went OK, but he started to find that he was swapping those dependencies for over-indulging in food, and his weight crept up to 35 stone. "Food had been my first addiction when I was 10," Frost says. This was the year his 18-year-old sister died of an asthma attack. "And I realised that it's fine to stop all that sh.. [drink and drugs]. But then going in the car and parking down by the river when it was nighttime and eating a tier of a wedding cake, that's going to f...... kill you, as well." Frost accepted he needed a more drastic overhaul. "Just a realisation that I would die," he says, matter-of-factly. "And a realisation that I had very young children, and this is how I am, and they're going to be left without a dad. It was like, 'What the f... are you doing, you nutter?'." Some of the changes are physical — Frost had his knee replaced last year and now regularly cycles loops of Bushy Park — and others are mental. When he was 47, about the time he was giving up drink and drugs, he was diagnosed with ADHD, OCD, PTSD, dyslexia and anxiety disorders. That knowledge has been helpful to Frost and those close to him for explaining some of his more esoteric behaviours: say, rewatching old episodes of chef Rick Stein's TV shows. "I read a thing about manifesting," Frost says, referring to the time he was waiting to hear about Harry Potter. "And I thought, 'Let's write the word Hagrid down as many times I can'. And I wrote it down 5000 times. But rereading it back, my dyslexia took over at some point, and I didn't realise that for 2000 of them, I'd been writing 'Hadridge', I was spelling it completely wrong. So I'm still waiting to get the call to say, 'Nick, you're Hadridge, you've got it'."' The Hagrid announcement in April was, in some ways, bittersweet for Frost. He had to disable comments on his triumphant Instagram post after criticism came from trans-rights supporters that he would collaborate with Rowling, an executive producer on the new show and vocal gender-critical campaigner. "She's allowed her opinion and I'm allowed mine, they just don't align in any way, shape or form," Frost says. Does he worry that the debate might overshadow the series? "I don't know," he replies. "But maybe it shouldn't blow over? We shouldn't just hope it will go away, because it makes it easier. Maybe we should educate ourselves." We're back at Frost's car — surprisingly tidy for someone with young children — and he offers me a ride to the station. We talk about his tattoos, which he started getting compulsively after his father died, when Frost was 39. "The San Quentin sketchbook," he says, smiling, "the sh....., the better". One tattoo comes up repeatedly in our conversation: wobbly, ink-black writing on his forearm reads "Poor Old Me", a reminder to Frost to count his blessings, of which, he acknowledges, there are a multitude right now. As the car pulls into the station, Frost says, "I hate the word 'legacy', but there's always a part of me that wants to be remembered when I die. That's why I want to be buried, so I've got a little headstone somewhere. I write in the cookbook that the only thing I've got of my mum's was a f...... spoon. That's it. And I think, 'I'd want to be more than a spoon'." — The Observer
The Herald Scotland
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Danny Boyle & eating brains: 10 zombie movies worth resurrecting
There was a time there when you couldn't turn around without stumbling over zombies. Maybe they'd be fighting cockneys or Jane Austen heroines (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; it's possible I am the only person in the world who quite liked it) or Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Pegg and Frost aside, the result wasn't always appetising. It's fair to say that most zombie movies are hardly worth consuming. But what are the ones worth making a feast of? Here are 10 worth revisiting. The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live with Danai Gurira and Andrew Lincoln (Image: AMC) I Walked With a Zombie Jacques Tourneur, 1943 Producer Val Lewton's 1940s low-budget films - often made in conjunction with the director Jacques Tourneur - are a high point in horror cinema - literate, beautifully crafted nightmare movies that both shock and seduce. Despite the come-on of the title this one is a seduction; a dreamy, eerie reinvention of Jane Eyre that weaves voodoo lore into the story. It may be the most beautiful zombie movie; admittedly there isn't a lot of competition. Night of the Living Dead George Romero, 1968 The first zombie movie is generally regarded to be White Zombie, Victor Halperin's 1932 horror film starring Bela Lugosi as a zombie master and often read as an allegory for slavery. But it was George Romero's black and white shocker that really kickstarted the zombie genre as we know it today. Stark, brutal and shockingly nihilistic, it's a take on racial politics in 1960s America - with a black hero at its heart - that opened up the idea of the nightmare movie as a form of social commentary, as subsequently pursued by David Cronenberg, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper. Romero's movie - and its two increasingly bleak sequels - is the foundation for all that followed. Shaun of the Dead (Image: free) Shaun of the Dead Edgar Wright, 2004 So dangerously overfamiliar now, it might be hard to recall just how fresh and funny this felt at the time. It posits the notion that we wouldn't notice the arrival of a zombie apocalypse because no one watches the news anymore. Presumably it would be all over Twitter now. And we'd assume it was fake news. Zombie Flesh Eaters Lucio Fulci, 1979 Inspired by George Romero, Italian exploitation cinema became rather taken with zombies during the 1970s and 1990s, usually with much, much more blood and gore (our cover star Rupert Everett even appeared in one, Cemetery Man). The apotheosis - or maybe its opposite - came with this gruesome film which was banned as a video nasty in the UK. It is often deeply unpleasant and yet there are moments of surrealist grandeur, most notably when Fulci has one of his zombies fight a shark. The result is one of the stupidest yet most memorable moments in the history of scary movies. Return of the Living Dead from 1984 (Image: free) Return of the Living Dead Dan O'Bannon, 1984 A kind of sequel to Romero's Night of the Living Dead, but played for gory laughs to a punk soundtrack. Combine a cemetery, a zombie-inducing gas, the brain-hungry undead and cartoon punks and the result is the apocalypse replayed as a cartoon. According to my TIme Out Film Guide (fifth edition, 1997), 'matters conclude, anti-dramatically, with the death of civilised life as we know it.' Snicker, snicker. One Cut of the Dead Shin'ichiro Ueda, 2019 This is a low-budget, high-idea Japanese zombie comedy. And the less you know about it going in the better. Let's just say it contains a 37-minute continuous shot and it's all very meta in the very best way. Who said zombie movies can't be smart? Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later (Image: unknown) 28 Days Later Danny Boyle, 2002 The first in the trilogy that continues with the release of 28 Years Later this month, 28 Days Later popularised the idea of the fast-moving zombie (they had already been seen in 1980 in Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City, although there might be some dispute as to whether the affected hordes were actually zombies in that movie). But, really, what lingers in the memory is not the zombie sequences which are effective but not overwhelming. No, it's the early sequences in which CIllian Murphy, newly awakened from a coma, wanders around a deserted, demolished London; a vision straight out of a John Wyndham sci-fi novel. 28 Years Later is in cinemas on Thursday Read more The Girl With All the Gifts Colm McCarthy, 2016 Why did this not launch its Scottish director Colm McCarthy into the world of big budget movies? This fantastically staged film captures the gruesomeness and the world-building imagination to be found in M R Carey's original novel. (Like 28 Days Later, its reimagination of a post-apocalyptic London is rich and strange). Is there anything, the film asks, still human about its central character, the zombie child Melanie? It is a question zombie movies have seemed to grow bored of over the years (it's easier to just treat them as targets in video game-style films such as The Rezort). But it's the only one that matters. Train to Busan (Image: unknown) Train to Busan Yeon Sang-Ho, 2016 Easy pitch, this. Zombies on a train. This South Korean thriller is a Big Dipper of a movie, one that eschews the portentiousness of World War Z but isn't afraid of some cutting social satire on Korean society. But it works because it never forgets to scare and to thrill. Probably the most edge-of-the-seat movie in this list. Anna and the Apocalypse John McPhail, 2017 I can't be the only person who likes this, can I? Yes, it's a weird Scottish-set movie in which hardly any of the cast is Scottish. Yes, there's a big role for Paul (Dennis Pennis) Kaye. And he even gets to sing in it. (Oh, did I not mention it's a Christmas zombie comedy musical? No? Well, I have now.) But, even so, it's a lot of fun. The performances are always enthusiastic, even when they're not subtle, the choreography is neatly done and the songs - by Tommy Reilly and Roddy Hart - are well up to the mark. The result is High School Musical meets Zombieland. But, you know, filmed in Port Glasgow.
