TobyStephens Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The Brontes are all the rage for adaptation right now. It's undoubtedly due to Edward and Bella bestowing their favor on Wuthering Heights, and had they chosen Great Expectations, perhaps we'd see Dickens adaptations flinging themselves to the big screen. I love corsets and cravats, so I'm not going to complain, and I'm certainly not going to whine if Cary Fukunaga gets this cast for Jane Eyre. Variety is reporting that Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska are in talks to play Jane and Rochester for Fukunaga, and oh, how torrid it would be!

This is actually the second time Fassbender has circled a Bronte adaptation. Last May, he was said to be in talks for Wuthering Heights, but Ed Westwick stepped into that particular waistcoat. It's a shame. I think Fassbender would have made an excellent Heathcliff, and may have been the first one to actually snarl, bang his head against a tree, and slap people convincingly. But he will make a very simmering Rochester, and is the only actor who could top Toby Stephens' wonderful turn in 2006.

Wasikowska is still a bit of a dark horse. She's becoming one of those much-discussed names, but most of us have yet to really meet her until Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland hits theaters. She's very pretty, but is just "ordinary" (if that doesn't sound too terrible) enough to fit the part of plain Jane, and as an Aussie, she'll be able to turn on an English accent better than Ellen Page. If this is the Jane Eyre that makes it to the screen, I'll be happy. Let the eerie screams, mysterious fires, and lingering looks commence.

"The plot and the structure of it and what the meaning is and what the events are representational of. I found that to be confusing. -- Thora Birch, in a recent interview about her latest film, Dark Corners. Oh, good. So it's not just me. Something of a cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street and Drew Barrymore's Doppelganger, Dark Corners, which is being released on DVD today, asks us to follow two parallel story threads, each of which stars a Birch character. In one of the stories, we get a character that I'll call Heaven Thora, who has honey-blonde hair and a handsome husband and leaves an upscale suburban home every day to go to a comfortably boring office job, where no one presumably bothers her with questions about what she's been up to since Ghost World. In the other story, we have Hell Thora, a big-haired, sluttily-dressed mortician's assistant who is inhabiting a nightmare world with a bunch of possessed demon-people who paw at windows and swipe at you with sharp instruments if you get too close.

Each Thora exists as a recurring dream for the other Thora, and this is a big problem for Heaven Thora, because she's currently battling through a high-class problem: she is subjecting herself to IVF treatments in order to conceive a child, and a recurring nightmare in which she's a member of Vixen is not in keeping with the doctor's orders to relax. To nip this problem in the bud, Heaven Thora visits a psychotherapist, played by British actor Toby Stephens. In an awkwardly written scene, he sits her down in front of a spinning crystal, putting her to sleep so that he can hypnotically suggest that she rid herself of the "dream me." Planting this suggestion causes Hell Thora to be set upon by the demon people, who stab her to death. The hypno-therapist then happily announces that Heaven Thora is now rid of her doppelganger, to which she quips: "I thought you guys always dragged this kind of thing out, to make extra money." I'm re-hashing all of this because it's more or less the last scene I can explain.