The actor and director on struggling with Dostoevsky, her love of Maggie Smith and flossing in her car

Born in Auckland, New Zealand, Lucy Lawless, 57, studied drama in Canada. In the 1990s she starred on television in Xena: Warrior Princess. She went on to appear in Battlestar Galactica, Spartacus, Parks and Recreation, Agents of SHIELD and Salem. Her films include Spider-Man, EuroTrip, Boogeyman, Bedtime Stories and Minions: The Rise of Gru. In 2024 she made her directorial debut with Never Look Away. She plays Alexa Crowe in the crime series My Life Is Murder; all four series are now available on DVD and digital. She is married for the second time, has three children and lives in New Zealand.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Laziness.

Venice film festival
A postman’s forgotten poetry collection finds new admirers in a tale of how the mystique of the past filters to the present

Ed Saxberger is an amiable, unassuming New Yorker on the cusp of old age who works at the post office and wears a pen behind one ear. In his youth, he published an anthology of poetry called Way Past Go, which caused barely a ripple and quickly slipped out of print. Then one day he is accosted outside his apartment by an NYU student, who explains that he stumbled across Way Past Go at a secondhand bookstore and was transported, blown away and could scarcely believe what he’d found. “You’re a man of letters,” the student tells Saxberger, which is undeniably true given that he spends his days sorting them.

Hitchcock once said that nine-tenths of a film’s success is in the casting, by which measure Late Fame already qualifies as a hit. Saxberger is portrayed with a loose, warm-leather ease by Willem Dafoe, who makes the man look bemused but never once makes him foolish. It’s a performance so natural it barely looks like acting at all and it keeps the film honest when the plot shows its hand and the gears start to creak. When the postal worker is introduced to his band of new disciples, the students crowd around as if inspecting a piece of living history. “Of course that’s how you’d look,” purrs Gloria (Greta Lee), the group’s flamboyant queen bee. Gloria speaks for her friends but she speaks for the rest of us, too.

The comedian and actor on what she has learned at clown school, showing her Austin costar Michael Theo around London and the weirdest thing she has done for love

What do people approach you about most: Smack the Pony, Bridget Jones, Alan Partridge or shoving cake into Alex Horne’s armpits?

I profile them as they come up. If it’s a man about my age, it would normally be Alan Partridge. If it’s a man in his 30s, it might be Taskmaster or Veep. If it’s a woman, it’s harder to tell. Smack the Pony seems to be having a revival among women in their 20s but it could easily be Bridget Jones and Miranda. It’s starting to happen with Austin, too, which seems to be something that families watch together.

Film-maker Beau Miles set himself the challenge of planting 1,440 trees and shrubs in one day. Four years later the result is ‘totally worth it’

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On a patch of paddock in West Gippsland stands a small forest, which wasn’t there before.

Flowering gums and she-oaks reach up nine metres tall, birds nest in their branches, while a giant tiger snake slides through the grass below.

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Venice film festival
Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi star as the freethinking anatomist and his creature as Mary Shelley’s story is reimagined with bombast in the director’s unmistakable visual style

Guillermo del Toro has created a movie about a grotesquely unnatural attempt to make a human being shocking in his physical strangeness … but that’s enough about his film version of Pinocchio. Now Del Toro has written and directed a bombastic but watchable new version of Mary Shelley’s great novel and makes of it a stately melodrama, starring Oscar Isaac as the anatomist and passionate freethinker Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his creature: no passé neck-bolts or big fringey forehead, of course, and if you compare him with portrayals by other actors – Boris Karloff, Peter Boyle, Robert De Niro – he is, for all the picturesque prosthetic scars, the nearest this iconic figure has come to being a bit of a hottie.

It’s an epic bromance between scientist and monster, both of whom speak with plummy British accents, the monster’s one having a touch of John Hurt in The Elephant Man. The visual style of the movie is utterly distinctive and unmistakably that of Del Toro: a series of lovely, intricate images, filigreed with infinitesimally exact cod-period detail; deep focus but also strangely depthless, like hi-tech stained glass or illustrated plates in a Victorian tome; pictures whose luxurious beauty underscores the film’s reverence for the source material and for itself, but which for me impedes the energy of horror. For all the guignol, this movie is not going to risk actual bad taste, unlike the brilliant and far more interesting film on the Frankensteinian theme: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things.

The movement towards simple, Christian living can be a yearning for order in a chaotic age. It’s also alarmingly retrograde

A cool evening air was descending on the 25-acre farmstead, blowing across the pond, around the barn, through the apple orchard and into the windows of Mike and Jenny Thomas’s two-century-old red-brick farmhouse.

The dinner hour had come. Edith, five, and George, three, enthusiastically rang a bell hanging near the kitchen door, sending metallic peals back into the early dusk.

Eleanor Lyons will interview women who say they have been trafficked into sex work and advertised online

The independent anti-slavery commissioner has launched an investigation into so-called pimping websites amid concern at the level of exploitation of trafficked and vulnerable women on those platforms.

Eleanor Lyons will interview women who say they have been trafficked into sex work and advertised on adult services websites such as Vivastreet that allow users to browse images and videos of women selling sex in their local area.

Two anti-asylum groups marched to Crowne Plaza before attempting to enter building at rear, Met police say

Five people have been arrested at a protest in London where a group of masked men attempted to enter a hotel housing asylum seekers on Saturday.

At about noon, two anti-asylum groups marched to the Crowne Plaza in Stockley Road, west London, and a group of men in masks attempted to enter the building through the rear entrance and damaged security fences, the Metropolitan police said.

South Australian law on single-use plastic packaging coming into force on 1 September will ban polyethylene containers known as shoyu-tai in Japan

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They have been a familiar sight at takeaway sushi shops around the world for decades but it could be the beginning of the end for fish-shaped soy sauce dispensers.

South Australia will be the first place in the world to ban them under a wider ban on single-use plastics that comes into force on 1 September.

Peer who appeared on I’m a Celebrity denies charges of rape and sexual assault at Westminster magistrates court

A celebrity peer and former reality TV show contestant has appeared in court after being charged with rape and sexual assault by penetration, police said.

Lord Charles Brocket, 73, a contestant on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, appeared at Westminster magistrates court on Saturday.