Adolescence, Harry Potter & Doctor Who: 2025 BEST OF

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This episode is presented by E.E. Marina.
Are you hosting or guesting for Christmas this year?

Normally, every other year, I am a very grateful guest, but I'm now a slightly trepidatious host. Yes, it is me in the apron having a meltdown over all the cooking.

No, I don't think I'll have a meltdown.

It's a lot, isn't it?

But you have to just keep saying to yourself, it's just a big chicken. Just a big chicken.
Just a really big chicken. It's just a really enormous chicken.
We are also hosting this year.

Looking forward to it very much. If you are hosting, then EE has the best broadband technology.
If you are guesting, then EE has the best mobile technology.

And my goodness, you need it at Christmas, right? Yes, the third babysitter, the distractor. Just when the family walk into the house, it's hello, grandma, hello, granddad.
What's the Wi-Fi password?

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Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Wrestlers Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osmond.
It is the 25th of December. We are live in central London.

Of course, we're not live. We recorded this months ago.
It is currently June the 17th.

It's actually quite near to Christmas when we're recording this, but of course we are not recording on Christmas Day. Sorry, happy Christmas, I think you were trying to say.

I think I said happy Christmas on the 23rd. Oh, oh, you've done it now, haven't you?

No, but people are not going to, people are going to listen to this on the 26th, and we'll be going to be saying happy Christmas. They go, you're always

going to know exactly when things are going to happen. Just say happy Christmas and cover yourself at this time of year.
Happy Boxing Day, everybody.

The bit between Christmas and New Year, which is when people are most likely to listen to this. Oh, where do you stand on people saying things like Twixmas? The Merry Neum,

I believe it's called.

Merry Christmas, everybody. No, I don't think people, if you are listening on Christmas Day, then that's grand.

It's a Q ⁇ A episode because quite apart from being Christmas Day, it is, of course, a Thursday, which means Q ⁇ A episode. So this is like...

If you're listening on Christmas Day, I will be cooking. And just a shout out to anyone who's listening to this.
I worry if you're listening to it to keep you sane while you're cooking.

But if you are, I'm with you. I understand.
And I'm doing the same thing as you right now.

Don't forget the pigs and blankets, but maybe you're listening for a little bit of peace and quiet as well, which is a nice thing to get at Christmas, whether you have family round or whether you don't.

Just some highlights of our Q ⁇ A's from across the year, some questions that we loved answering. Do keep your questions coming in, by the way, next year as well.

But yes, whether you're listening on the 25th, the 26th, 27th, 28th, then merry whatever day it is. But please accept my Merry Christmas from our episode on Tuesday as my Merry Christmas.

I didn't, I really, really didn't want to be remiss. I'll say it as many times as you like.
Merry Christmas, everybody.

Irina, are you ready? I'm as ready as I will ever be. Excellent.

Lene Beck, a couple of weeks ago, her and her husband argue about what's a list or not. We had a little chat about it, but I said I'm going to set you a challenge.

You said you could tell me if anyone was A-list or not.

I wish I had a gavel. I've just realised, but never mind.
Everyone at home, see if you agree or disagree with Marina's options. So I'm going to give you a list of actors.

I'm going to say A-list or not A-list. I'm going to say what strikes me in the moment.

This is like one of those things where you're trying, you know, where you just have to react to pictures or whatever it is. Are the following actors? A-list, B-list, or C list.
Let's go.

Your first actor is Idris Elba. B.

Killian Murphy. Oh, B, come on.
Florence Pugh.

B. And that's, yeah, B.
No, she's B. Yeah.
I hope this is not just Marina saying B the whole time. Okay, no, no, carry on.
I get that from a Chris Packham podcast. Zendaya.
A, can open a movie.

Don't worry, carry on. Jennifer Lawrence.
A.

Actually, falling, but she's had two very big franchises, A. Pedro Pascal.
B. TV style mainly.
Barry

Fantastic Fall Could change it. Oh, Barry Kyogen.
No, B, come on. I.O.
Adebari.

No, B, if that.

Also be an interesting one. Vin Diesel.
A. Sorry.
It's a massive franchise. You don't make the rules, right? And if I did anyway, I'd put him in.
Come on. What are we talking about? Rachel Zegler.

Oh, no. I mean, B and Falling, I'm afraid.
Death Patel. What? No.
I mean,

I love, very nice, but B, C.

Here we go. Friend of the podcast, Glenn Powell.
B rising, strongly rising. Still B, though.
Still B. Yeah, come on.

A couple of years' time, they'll be going, can't remember when Glenn Powell was B list. But it won't be through Wand of Trying if they aren't, let's put it that way.

Talking of Glenn Powell, Sidney Sweeney. Again, B Rising.
Both of them, you know, but they haven't yet got those kind of open movie roles.

We have to see if they can do it. On the cusp.
Cusp B.

Tom Hardy. B.
Al Pacino. Oh, come on.
Okay. A, but heritage.
I mean, he's not opening a movie now, is he? I mean, yeah. Heritage A.
A heritage. It's a special category.

If you hadn't said A at that one, well, that's A star. Come on, it's particularly A Heritage.
Yeah. Yeah.
Don Cheadle. No.

We're not even giving him a letter.

He's getting a B. Dustin Hoffman.
A heritage. Come on.
Okay. Sausia Ronan.
I love her, but B, I mean, you know, yes, I mean, it's art house, isn't it? Natalie Portman. Used to be A, now B.

Okay, Viola Davis. A, maybe.
A, maybe.

B. Yeah, A.
This guy's got a clue in his name, Michael B. Jordan.
R.A. Michael A.
Jordan. You're saying, wow.
Michael A. Jordan.
So, yeah, definitely. Olivia Coleman.
Sorry. I mean, amazing, but B.

Amazing, but B. Well, because, you know,

she's not...

Of course, she should win all the awards and the Oscars and whatever, but I don't think of her as a sort of A-lister in that sense. So you think she's many things, but she's not Sylvester Stallone.

Yeah, and I think she probably loves that. Yeah.
Sylvester Stallone. Oh, A Heritage.
Amy Lee Wood. What? No, I mean, doesn't rate.

Sorry, I know she's had a terrible week, so I don't want to mean to add to it, but no, I mean, she's a part in an ensemble on a television programme. Okay.
The end. Robert De Niro.
Heritage.

See Namalto Knights. Andrew Garfield.
I love him, but B. And we're going to end with this one.
Interesting one. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds.
Both A. Both A.
Yeah.

But would they be A without the other?

Does a rising tide raise all ships in that relationship?

That's difficult, isn't it? I don't know. Yes, they're sort of somehow have been greater than the sum of their parts, I think.
It's a double A. I think they're both overrated.

No, listen, it's good. I don't think he's a good guy at all, actually.
But yeah, I don't think he's, I don't get a good vibe off him. Okay, I don't mean that kind of artist.

Just like a celebrity monster, you know, when you become very, very famous, I think that's the problem with those two, but yeah, they're very, very famous. You did that very quickly.

I got through the entire list of people. That's very, very impressive.
I mean, some of those, I honestly think, in retrospect, because I didn't know who was coming next.

I was trying to sort of always calibrate against the ones before. So I never knew who was coming next.
You know, I could have definitely had a couple of C's and D's in there.

But that doesn't mean that, you know, I don't love them as an actor, but we have to be honest about what type of star they are. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock.

Oh, I mean, well, Sandra Bullock, I mean, I love her, but yeah, I mean, she's heritage A now. Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks are still A.
Aniston. Well, I mean, Aniston.
Aniston's A.

I should think she could open movies still. Yeah.
She just likes doing, you know, brands now, as far as I can work out, fitness brands and things like that. Listen, it's easier than acting, isn't it?

Yeah, I think so. Leonie, thank you so much for a question from two weeks ago.
And Marina, congratulations. That was very, very good.

We've got a question now, which was from my interview with the wonderful Chris Columbus, one of my men of 2025, who I loved working with and loved speaking to as well.

So you had to cut down the first two Harry Potter books into shorter films.

When you look at people making these big HBO series who can sort of cover every piece of dialogue on every page, are you jealous of that or do you think that's less fun? Oh, I've not no jealous.

No, I'm sort of like, I'm so beyond it. I did it.
My feeling is, okay, I've done that. It's time to move on.
I've always had issues with the idea of franchise.

Franchise, when we did gremlins and goonies and those films, people were all, that's why I never did the second gremlins film. I said, my attitude then was, I've done it.

It's time to move on and do something different. Same with Potter.
I feel like I've done it. I'm really proud of those films, the first three that I was involved with, and I'm moving on.

So now it's interesting, as of yesterday, I think I looked

online and there were photographs of Nick Frost as Hagrid, along with the new Harry Potter.

Now, that's not Nick Frost. That presumably is still Martin.
I don't remember his last name, a rugby player who played.

Martin Bayfield. Yes, who played Hagrid with a giant sort of fake rubber Hagrid head that

we sometimes replaced with CGI. So I'm seeing these photographs of now it looks like Martin, I could be wrong, wearing a Nick Frost head walking down the streets of London.

And I'm thinking, and he's wearing the exact same costume that we designed for Hagrid. Part of me was like, what's the point? Part of me is like, okay, great.

You're doing, I thought it was going to be, I thought the costumes were good. I thought everything was going to be different,

but it's more of the same. It's going to be the same.
Which is interesting. It's very flattering for me because I'm like, that's exactly the Hagrid Pa costume that we designed.

So part of it is really exciting. So I'm excited to see what they're going to do with it.
Part of it is sort of deja vu all over again. So

Marina, a question for you from Harriet Bateson. Harriet says, I'm obsessed with Stranger Things.
I was wondering what happens to the money child actors get paid. Do their parents get the money?

Who are the best paid child actors? Oh, right. Well, I mean, yeah,

we know from entertainment history is that sometimes their parents take the money whether they should do or not.

The Stranger Things children, the sort of quartet of the boys, Finn Wolfhard, Gaton Matarazzo, Noah Schnapp and Caleb McLaughlin, they for seasons one and two, which, you know, you do your deal for seasons one and two, they got $25,000 per episode.

By season three, this is a real entertainment story, by the way, always, if you get to season three, everyone's contracts go nuts in American television.

And they then were earning about $250,000 an episode. So it was 10 times as much.
That is a lot of panini stickers.

It's not clear how much exactly Millie Bobby Brown gets, but I think she was on a million an episode. She's got to some sort of overall deal with Netflix.

So it's not entirely clear how the money works. And they're very, very secretive about what they pay her, but she's a huge star for Netflix.

But then, you know, there are all those stories where Drew Barrymore got a million for E.T.

and by the time she was about 14, she was earning millions. That little boy in Young Sheldon, he got $30,000 per episode for season one.
but by the end of season five, I think he was on

much more than a million per season. But there are laws to deal, which by the way, are not at all always observed in the US for dealing with child actor fees.

Children have to get a minimum of 50% of all adult minimum fees and payments rather than saying, yeah, we're going to give Winona Ride of this.

She's in it a lot less than you, but sorry, boys and Stranger Things. Here's some pocket money and an ice cream and some, you know, panini stickers.

So I think that it's 15% or something has to be put into something called a Coogan account. Oh, yeah.

I would never put any money into a Coogan account because I'd never know what it would get spent on. You have no idea what it could be spent on.

But anyway, that's a special trust account and it's supposed to be held till the child turns 18. Yeah, does that come from Jackie Coogan? He played alongside Charlie Chaplin.

And I think even in those days, he had earned $4 million and it was all spent. by his mother and stepfather and he had absolutely nothing left.

There are all sorts of rules, by the way, governing child actors and they have to have chaperones and they have to have certain breaks built in that you wouldn't necessarily have to have without art actors.

And if your school attendance is affected by work,

then they've got to put a tutor in place.

By the way, another reason we should be talking about this anyway, because it's really interesting, is that they've got their three children for the HBO Harry Potter.

They've announced the casting of... Harry, Ron and Hermione.
Now, that production, everything I'm hearing about it is absolutely crazy.

They're building effectively pretty much a school because there's so many children on set for something like that.

And as I always say, you can expand Levesden seemingly infinitely every time I ever go and work on a new thing there. It's a former airfield and they just like double it in size.

So I guess, yeah, they're going to have a school. So that's interesting.
Anyway, but the first Harry, Ron, and Hermione, I think they got a million dollars each for the first Harry Potter movies.

But obviously, it does go wrong. And people's parents rip them off like Jackie Coogan's parents did.
Macaulay Culkin took his parent from Home Alone.

He took his parents' name off his trust and found an executor. And then everyone said he's divorced his parents, which I think he felt was not technically what had happened.

Many of these children end up absolutely hating their parents. Aaron Carson, I think he'd made something like $200 million

before he was 18, but he owed a huge amount of taxes. He was declared bankrupt.
His parents didn't put the required amount of money in his Coogan account. There's so many dreadful stories.

I don't know if you've ever seen this thing. My daughter's watched this a load of time.
She was in iCarly.

Yes, I remember iCarly very well from my children's upbringing. Well, Jeanette McCurdy, who was one of the people in that, her book is called I'm Glad My Mum Died.

There's a picture of her on the front of it. She's holding an urn and it's like confetti's coming out of it.

Anyway, she said it was absolutely dreadful that her mother just forced her to work the entire time.

She didn't want to do it. She had terrible eating disorders.
She made a show about it. So there is terrible resentment among some people.
Will Wheaton, do you remember Will Wheaton?

He's in Stand By Me, Star Trek, Big Bang Theory. But he said, I remember telling my mother every day that I just wanted to be a kid.

And her would, she'd dismiss it and come up with these ways of saying, but actually, you love doing this.

It really reminded me actually when I was watching that documentary about Piper Roquell, the young YouTube star. I mean, you know, we're seeing it now and you can see it happening almost.

I mean, you can see it in these family YouTube things all the time, that the children are the most kind of winsome aspect of it, but the parents are the ones who really want the money.

They should be putting that YouTube money nowadays in a Cougan account, whether or not they do, as we've seen lots of people, it doesn't always happen. But there are supposed to be laws governing it.

But the thing about something like YouTube, which sorry, I've gone all around the houses now, but that is so unregulated and it's just not really watched over.

The actual sort of legacy entertainment industry is pretty well regulated, but you can never legislate for the fact that these parents want to put their children on the stage when they probably ought not to be and they want to do it for their own financial benefit.

But the basic principle is they will get roughly half what an adult actor will get and that that's

good money and obviously the second something is actually a hit and you are a star in it then actually you're just you're treated like an adult you'll get you know whatever money you can get and to bring it back to stranger things the show is all about the kids without them it's absolutely nothing and they're remunerated accordingly and no matter how quickly they how how much they grow up because there's three years between series i mean they'll be about 30 when we see the next season but if you look on the sunday times rich list and you see now what Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint are worth,

you can work out what they were getting paid by

the final Harry Potter movies. Yeah.
It was good money. Deservedly so.
And their parents didn't rip them off, which is great. Yeah, absolutely.
That's what we like.

Okay, today my 13-year-old son, Rex, amazing name, Rex Reynolds, told me that by the time the much-delayed GTA 6 is released next year, it will have cost more to make than the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai.

Surely not, says Richard. No one is spending billions on creating a video game, are they? He asks leadingly.
Oh, Richard. Hello, Rex, by the way.
Of course, Rex is right.

Richard, of course, you know your son is right. He's absolutely right.
I mean, there have been very, very expensive video games before. I think Spider-Man, that was like...
about 400 million.

Cyberpunk 2077 was 400 million. But yeah, this is costing around about 2 billion.
And the Burj Khalifa itself cost between 1.4 and 1.5 billion US dollars.

So Grand Theft Auto 6 is more expensive than the Boche Khalifa, but I tell you. Is it built by slaves? I'm kidding.
I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Of course, I am. I always kid.
What, Grand Theft Auto 6?

They call it crunch culture. Crunch culture? What's crunch culture? When they, in the gaming industry, where they work, like make them work absolutely round the clock

and they're just trying on at everything and people are just like not sleeping at all.

It's got very dark very quickly. Yeah, it did.
But it seems, I think, worth spending. So it's currently coming out.
We've got a definitive release date, which any gamer will know is 26th of May, 2026.

I saw a recent thing saying they reckon in the first 60 days, this is going to gross over $7 billion.

Grand Theft Auto. It's one of the great works of art of our time.
That's more than 70% of the entire Hollywood box. Well, you said before Hollywood needs to break about $9 billion a year.

To kind of stagger on in its current form. Yeah.
And this itself in 60 days will make $7 billion.

Isn't that incredible? Rex, because you won, you're allowed to call your dad Ryan for the rest of the week. So yeah, Ryan, I'm ever so sorry.
Rex is absolutely correct there.

It costs more than the Bursh Khalifa, but it is going to make an awful lot more than the Burj Khalifa as well. Although, actually,

I don't have the receipts for how much money Bursch Khalifa makes, presumably, with high occurrences. Developers don't either.
Yeah, presumably.

Yeah,

it's something of a wild west out there. And even, I mean, TV's got very expensive.
Certain bits of TV that the streamers have, I mean, the Lord of the Rings, that was so expensive.

That was something like 58 million rings of power per episode.

Stranger Things just got very, very expensive. That's about 30 million per episode.
I mean, lots of Taylor Sheridan things are sort of 22 million an episode, which is becoming quite expensive.

The most expensive movie that we know of, but remember, there's all these accounting fiddles, is Jurassic World Dominion, which costs 453.6 million.

But actually, I think one of those late-stage Avengers won a huge amount. I think maybe Age of Ultron cost a lot more than they ever said.

And I think it was sort of terrifying that they couldn't actually say it out loud.

But in these years where we're obsessed with the budgets for movies and the take of movies, the idea that a video game of all things

has a $2 billion budget and it's going to make $7 billion. And we still don't really know how to talk about them, which I find so interesting.

We don't have proper criticism of them isn't given anything in a tenth of the high status as movie criticism. We don't really understand that.

how to talk about things that don't have stars necessarily. Traditional forms of media have just completely lost this medium.

A different form of criticism or not, which is watching some people you like play it on YouTube or on Twitch or whatever it is.

By the way, if I was Rockstar Games and I was listening and I still had time,

I'd get a character called Rex Reynolds in there.

It's just quite every Rockstar Games name. Yeah, because it could sort of be anything, right? I mean, listen, a roman, but you know, it could be any sort of roman.

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Shall I ask you a question? Please do. And it's a question, we've had lots of versions of this question, but uh Rob McGough, you are first out of the trap, so I'm gonna do your version of it.

Rob asks: Disney have ended their much-criticized co-production deal with the BBC to make Doctor Who. Will Disney consider the whole ordeal a mistake? Okay,

clearly Disney have ended the deal, so they certainly consider it something they want to get out of. It's strange because it sort of happened quite late.

It happened almost after the era of what we remember now as the lovely co-production money era where basically streamers were trying to and were trying to sort of build scale and get a hold on various markets.

And so

lots of things were co-production and lots of very expensive things and lots of, you know, this was the peak TV era, but people were, you know, losing money, huge amounts of money, but they wanted to build scale.

So someone like Netflix was just spending enormous, unsustainable amounts of money trying to do these things. So we had all these shows.
This actually came later than that.

They didn't even put out a statement, Disney, saying that, you know,

the statement came from the BBC saying that this was a, they had been a great partner and so on. I mean, clearly they're disappointed.
I don't think they've been a great partner. No.

Listen, I'm sure they've been, you know, they know David Harbour, but I don't know if they've been great. Obviously, they put it on on Disney Plus, and what they, it's quite tricky.

We know what it is because it's very sort of idiosyncratically British. It's a sort of tea time family drama thing that sci-fi as well.
To them, it might have been like, well, is it YA?

Is it like, or is it, you know, is it like Percy Jackson, which has done a show that's in that kind of space

that's done

much better for them and, you know, is on a second season and all of that. Certainly, I'm never sure they quite understood it.

They certainly didn't promote it in lots of ways like their native shows, as it were. And also, by the way, because Russell T.

Davis was such a big part of that deal and is such a big part of Doctor Who, he was, he, I think they accepted that he was going to have creative control of what it looked like.

So Disney executives were not able to say, I wonder if we can make this a bit more Disney, which of course was the thing everyone was terrified of.

And a bit more categorisable for them in their, you know, much more set categories. And he is idiosyncratic and a maverick and all those sort of things.

He's obviously brilliant and amazing and we love him. And so, I think, in some ways,

I mean,

as I say, what they want is they want there to be awards and nominations, and it didn't have those apart from, you know, they might have been a technical award or something.

But I've seen different estimates on the episode cost, and I think there's kind of north end of them where people were saying that it's £10 million an episode. Russell T.

Davis was like, oh my God, I would literally be talking to you from my moon base if that was the case. Having said that, it massively and by multiples increased what the budget was before on the BBC.

Whether you need that or not, you know, there'll always be people saying, oh, we like cardboard sets and just great stories.

I personally, and this is nothing from anyone on the show, but I think they had a problem with the casting of the lead character. I think Shuti Gatwa, I am told he didn't particularly love doing it.

And it's not for everyone that role. And you are so much more than the lead in a particular drama.
When it came back, and under Russell T.

Davis, there was Christopher Eccles and he did it for one season, and then it clearly wasn't for him either. David Tennant revolution, you know, brought up, he grew up.

It's fair to say it was for him. Yeah, it was for him, but

he was a Doctor Who obsessive. So was Peter Capaldi, who came next, but one.
And they fully understood what the nature of that role is. You're not just the lead in that thing.
You are an ambassador.

You do all sorts of other things and all feeds back. But it's a really, you know, it sort of occupies a role in the life of the nation to some degree.

Matt Smith, who was so young, who is absolutely one of the most amazing Doctor Who's of all time. I think he's incredible, sorry, one of the most amazing doctors of all time.

I think he's incredible, and it's extraordinary that he played it with such sensitivity, and he was both old and young at the same time.

He did it amazingly, but he also understood that you're a form of ambassador. I didn't get that at all from Shu Tigawa at all.
I think he had other projects. He wasn't that committed to that thing.

I definitely think that the Americans thought that he wasn't necessarily 100% available there to be a kind of...

He's definitely in demand for obvious reasons. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah and he's done lots of different things and he's done theater he's done you know two plays and whatever in the time of all of that he said i you know i'm getting old i'm 33.

okay

i as i say it's a failure to call someone who fully understood the full implications and weight and responsibilities of the role and also actually i think if you are the lead in a big american tv show and this for this purposes is both there are certain things that you might be expected of your time um and perhaps that didn't occur

And it's absolutely a deal that made sense for the BBC and made sense for Disney.

You do all sorts of collaborations in this business, and a lot of the times they don't come off for lots and lots of reasons. But you have to look back and go, was this a mistake?

I don't think it was. I think that Russell T.
Davis felt that he would have the same creative control he would have elsewhere, but with more money.

And I think Disney were thinking, we've got this piece of IP, this franchise, that if we can just get a bit of traction on this, this can serve us for the next 10 years because we can have lots and lots of spin-offs.

We can build a whole universe around Doctor Who, this thing that we feel has been undervalued and there are lots of places. And they were already starting to do that.

There's the spin-off, the war between the land and the sea and things like that. So they are coming.
Yeah, but so absolutely made sense for both sides.

Yet sometimes for whatever reason, it just doesn't work. And sometimes personnel change in organizations and sometimes...
And cultural change, I have to say.

I'm afraid in contemporary America and contemporary Disney where they're thinking, oh, we corrected too closely towards what, I mean, for want of a better phrase, a woke agenda.

They're now moving away from that and

back to some form of what they consider to be returning to some form of mainstream. Again, I don't, you know, I can tell you what those sort of thoughts are.
And Russell T.

Davis is an enemy of all of that, and he'll do whatever he wants. He's not going to.

compromise but the reason that disney signed up is the same reason that lots of other people will sign up as well because it does feel like it's an underutilized piece of IP.

So if I can just talk about the magic of show businesses for a moment,

you know, it feels like you could really create a huge world out of this.

And there are plenty of big media companies with very deep pockets at the moment, content companies at least, that, you know, somebody else, it would be worth their while to put some money into this.

And BBC are very good now at doing deals with other people, you know, whether it's an all-encompassing umbrella like Disney, which comes with certain expectations, as you say, and where there has to be that suddenly there is a corporate thing that is bigger than, you know, Disney is one of the few corporate things that is bigger than the BBC.

But it's such a great franchise and you could see a way through this that Doctor Who lives forever on a different streamer. So yeah, I think, you know what, wrong place, wrong time, right idea.

Ah, now this is from our adolescent special with its amazing director, Philip Barantini, and director of photography, Matt Lewis. First question we put to them was from Charlotte Greene.

How on earth did you find Owen Cooper, who was the star of this thing, the young kid who's extraordinary? How did you find him? What was that process? And also, how did he learn all of those lines?

How did he get everything done, given the whole thing was shot in one take? Yeah, well, I had received, you know, hundreds and hundreds of tapes through Shaheen Beg, our wonderful casting director.

One of the first things I asked for was just an improvised moment of two sort of ideas. One of them was

you've been brought into your head teacher's office and you're guilty of something.

And then the other scenario was that you were innocent of this thing, right? And I just wanted to see what, you know, how they played it. Owen was someone who just was so real and so natural.

And, you know, it's quite rare to see that in an actor, especially in auditions.

And I think he just didn't really have any preconceptions about what acting was he'd done some acting classes and you know he was doing it for fun really we got him in and we put him through his paces really we do he had like five auditions uh and a couple of those were with stephen um towards the end of the of the uh

of the of the process and it just every time he came in he just absolutely nailed it and i sort of you know i would i would give him more and more things to do and you know matt even came in on one of the on on one of the screen tests with with stephen and filmed it.

And

we were all just like, as he left, we were just like, oh, yeah, this kid is like different level, different level, you know. So it was really special.
Yeah.

He didn't know the full scope of what he'd had he would have to learn.

You know, along along the way, I was saying to them, you know,

this is going to be all shot in one take. And I don't think he understood, he didn't quite grasp what that meant because he'd never worked before, you know.

And when he finally got the script, you know, we sort of worked with him quite a lot and you know we we sort of we got a um

a wonderful uh uh sort of acting coach in to come and help him to sort of learn his lines not to not to to to coach him in the acting side of it but but to help him to sort of get these lines in his head and and you know just to be able to get off the page but you know what he was a he was an absolute natural the first day we came on to set we shot episode three first

um due to stephen's schedule the first day he came on set we all sat around a table

and we sort of just were gonna go through the script and read the get get the script off the page, read it.

We all had our scripts in our hand, Aaron had a script in our hand, all the other actors had their scripts in their hand, and Owen just came in and he had a script, he put it on the table, and he just he just went, he just did it.

It was mind-blowing. He does what most actors train for most of their lives, which is to be real, be natural, be

you know in the moment and just and listen.

It's so important to just listen as an actor and listen and respond naturally in the moment and he just does that instinctively like you know to to the to the point where you know I give him notes and I wouldn't think that he was taking these notes in I was like I don't know whether he's actually taking all that in and then he'd go and smash out to take and you'd be like whoa what did I'm just like yeah it was it was mind-blowing

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