John du Pont, the character Steve Carell portrays in Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, was a convicted murderer. But Carell says that when he took on the role, he was intent on digging deeper into the man’s being.   “I didn’t necessarily approach him as a dark character,” says Carell, whose ... More

Timothy Spall’s portrayal of the controversial 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner in Mr. Turner was a long time in the making.  In 2006, he explains, “I was walking in London near where Mike Leigh has an office, and I bumped into him and he said to me, ‘I’m making a film ... More

To play English mathematician Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, it was important for Benedict Cumberbatch to walk the line between fact and fiction.  “It’s tricky to get the balance right between storytelling and authenticity,” Cumberbatch says. “Being true to the character and being honest to him, and at the ... More

When it came to playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne faced something of a learning curve.  “I gave up science when I was about 14,” he says, “but I started reading A Brief History of Time knowing that I had to for this job. I got ... More

Some actors-turned-directors prefer not to wear both hats in a single film, but Tommy Lee Jones says he doesn’t mind the extra work. “They’re two different jobs,” he says plainly. “I don’t have much trouble doing both of them at the same time.” He certainly didn’t seem strained in The ... More

When Ralph Fiennes first considered a part in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, he knew the role of the eccentric concierge M. Gustave was for him. “Wes said, ‘Tell me which part you’d like to play,’” Fiennes recalls, “which was quite funny because there’s really only one great part.” Gustave ... More

The role of Maziar Bahari in Rosewater was appealing to Gael García Bernal for a number of reasons: One was that Bahari’s story—he’s an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was jailed in Tehran while covering the 2009 presidential elections—made for a compelling, inspiring tale. Another was that the film marks ... More

Each week on How To Get Away With Murder, ABC’s Thursday night legal-thriller juggernaut, audiences learn a bit more about a heinous crime that’s been committed and a whole lot more about the show’s intriguing, alluring cast of characters. A standout among these newcomers—all of whom play lawyers or law students working for Viola ... More

When it came time to film their debut directorial effort, Bad Turn Worse, brothers Zeke and Simon Hawkins didn’t just conjure up a South Texas landscape, they actually moved there. The movie, which is based on a story by Dutch Southern and Justin Duprie, takes place in a Texas town where three ... More

Some of the U.S. government’s most closely guarded secrets will never be known by civilians. Others end up on network TV. On NBC’s new series State of Affairs, a cast lead by Katherine Heigl portrays a crack group of CIA analysts whose job is to brief the president on the ... More