Entertainment
How far will Philomena Cunk go to get a laugh? 'If he breaks my nose, it'll heal'
Some kids aspire to be doctors, astronauts, teachers or firefighters. Growing up in Bolton, a former mill town in the north of England, Diane Morgan was interested in one thing: comedy. She watched a lot of it, mostly British. Peter Sellers, “Fawlty Towers,” Monty Python.
When she landed in drama school, she told the head of the program, “‘Look, I’m not here for the Shakespeare’ — so they gave me Lady Macbeth, all the big roles,” she recalled in a video chat from her London home. “All these lovely, beautiful girls who wanted to play the ingenues — they hated me because they were like, ‘Why is she getting these parts? She wants to be the stupid maid.’”
Several decades later, Morgan’s commitment to playing the fool has paid off. Since 2013, she has starred as Philomena Cunk, a know-nothing TV pundit, in a series of mockumentaries about history, philosophy, art and science (including “Cunk on Earth”). As she strides through picturesque locations, dressed in tweed, and sits down with distinguished experts from the world of academia, she looks every bit the part of a BBC presenter. Then she does things like ask an Oxford professor, “What was more culturally significant, Beyoncé’s hit ‘Single Ladies’ or the Renaissance period?” and the illusion of gravitas is (hilariously) ruptured.
The latest volume in the “Cunk” canon, “Cunk on Life,” premieres Thursday on Netflix. Cunk remains as deadpan and ill-informed as ever, asking great philosophers and physicists “some of the most significant questions you can ask with a mouth.” In one particularly absurd scene, she tells a renowned British surgeon that only 40% of people have skeletons. Everyone else, she says, is “solid meat.”
Morgan has a remarkable ability to maintain a straight face throughout these interviews. It’s all about the pressure, she says. “I know that as soon as I laugh, it’s not funny.” She admits she does “corpse” — or crack up — on occasion, particularly with certain experts, like Douglas Hedley, a professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University who has become a recurring talking head in the “Cunk” universe. “He talks very slowly, but he’s brilliant. I think the straighter and more serious they are, the more it tickles me,” she says.
Ricky Gervais and Diane Morgan in “After Life.”
(Natalie Seery)
The academics who appear in “Cunk” may be aware that Morgan is doing a bit for a comedy program, but they still react to her character’s idiotic questions with genuine shock and exasperation. In the early days, before Cunk became well-known, there was more confusion.
“We had some real eggheads, and famously, they don’t watch comedy. Then you trample all over their favorite topic” and things can get tense, she says. One expert grew so irritated they had to pause filming while he calmed down. “I said, ‘Don’t stop if that happens again.’ I was willing for him to punch me, because I thought it would make great TV. If he breaks my nose, it’ll heal.”
“I think they genuinely feel a bit defensive of their subject matter,” says “Cunk on Life” creator Charlie Brooker, who is also the force behind the techno-dystopian anthology series “Black Mirror.” He is usually not physically present when Morgan is filming the interviews because, he says, “I find it too cringe. I would die.”
Brooker says Morgan “doesn’t mind an awkward silence, which comes in really handy when she’s doing the interviews, because sometimes they will last an hour, 70% of which is awkward silence.”
The experts, some of whom have become recurring favorites, “seem to really enjoy the fact that they’re there,” Brooker says. “The sad thing is, experts don’t get interviewed on mainstream TV very often anymore.”
Over time, Cunk has grown more antagonistic toward the talking heads she interrogates, and more willing to counter their arguments with dubious anecdotal evidence. (“My mate Paul” is one of her most frequently cited sources.)
“That feels like a modern-day thing,” Brooker says. “People are less shy these days about saying to an expert, ‘Yeah, whatever, you may have studied this subject for 25 years, but I just watched a video on YouTube which tells me your life’s work is bulls—. I’ll tell you why we didn’t land on the moon, or vaccines don’t work. There’s an arrogant swagger to a lot of the alternative truth crowd.
“There’s something funny about watching her attack their professions, things they care passionately about, from her position of slightly bored detachment,” he adds.
Diane Morgan in the Max comedy “Frayed.”
(Lisa Tomasetti / HBO Max)
Morgan’s Bolton accent somehow adds to the character’s dry comedic affect. When Morgan was studying at the East 15 Acting School, she was told the way she spoke would be an obstacle to getting work.
“It’s madness, because every part I’ve had since then, it’s the accent that’s got it,” she says. “In drama school, they always want to stamp out the interesting bits about you and build you back up into an actor that they think people want. But actually, people want weirdness. They want individuality, don’t they? They want humps and lumps and weird eyes.”
Morgan spent nearly 10 years performing stand-up in London, an experience that was at least as valuable as drama school. “You learn a lot very quickly about how not to bore people,” she says.
During those lean years, she made ends meet by working a string of miserable jobs. There was a stint as a telemarketer, cold-calling people to ask if they needed a new accountant, and a particularly grim gig packing worming tablets for dogs for 10 hours a day, with no talking or sitting allowed. “It was the worst experience, but it made me think, ‘I’ve really got to make this work. I’ve really got to pull my socks up and do something with my life, because I don’t want to end up here,’” Morgan says.
She had landed a few small parts in TV when she got the audition for Philomena Cunk, which originated as a character on the satirical news show “Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe.” Comedian Al Campbell played a dim-witted commentator with the ludicrous name Barry Shitpeas. The show was looking for his female counterpart, someone they originally envisioned as “a yummy mummy cupcake blogger who’s vacuous and drives a Range Rover,” Brooker says.
To complete the stereotype, the character was supposed to sound more posh. But Morgan insisted on asking for additional time in her audition to play Cunk in her own voice. “I’d never had the balls to do that,” she says. “It was just funnier, because my own accent is quite flat, and it lends a sort of misery to everything.”
Brooker was “absolutely floored” by the audition. Morgan brings “an odd comic unknowability” to Cunk, he says. “There’s something very curious about the character, where she is sort of alien and otherworldly but simultaneously vapid in a cosmic way,”
“Everyone was quite nervous about it — would this new character work or not?” Morgan recalls. “If it hadn’t, I’d have been axed immediately and taken off and shot around the corner. But it worked.”
Morgan, right, with Paul Ready in “Motherland.”
(Sundance Now / BBC Pictures)
Cunk became a breakout character, appearing in recurring segments and then anchoring standalone specials, including “Cunk on Britain” and — yes — “Cunk on Shakespeare.” (Standout quote: “School in Shakespeare’s day and age was vastly different to our own. In fact, it was far easier because he didn’t have to study Shakespeare.”)
Meanwhile, Morgan became a reliable scene stealer in acerbic British comedies, often playing bluntly profane characters with little regard for social niceties. In the Ricky Gervais vehicle “After Life,” she starred as a newspaper employee obsessed with Kevin Hart’s oeuvre. In “Motherland,” a sitcom co-created by Sharon Horgan, she played a foul-mouthed single mom who chafes at the bourgeois parenting standards of her middle-class social orbit. (She lets her son pee in the street and makes sandwiches by hacking cheese from a hunk in her freezer, severing a finger in the process.)
“It’s nice to have someone like that, who just doesn’t give a toss,” she says of her “Motherland” role. “I used to get moms running up to me in the street every day: ‘Thank God for this. I thought I was the only one.’”
She also wrote, directed and starred in the defiantly weird comedy “Mandy,” which follows an unemployable woman as she skips from one odd job to the next.
Morgan occasionally thinks it would be nice to do something a bit grittier and more dramatic. “But I’ve still got no interest in Shakespeare.”
Sam Raimi‘s Evil Dead films and TV series are a fine example of creativity within constraints, playfulness, self-awareness and outright slapstick comedy. The Evil Dead series after Raimi is very, very different. Starting with 2013’s Evil Dead by Fede Álvarez, followed by Evil Dead Rise by Lee Cronin, the new series takes itself more seriously and emphasises pure horror, violence and gore. Some have considered this praiseworthy as it avoids being a mere retread of the old films, but the reception has been mixed.
In Sébastien Vanicek’s Evil Dead Burn, Alice (Souheila Yacoub) loses her abusive husband (George Pullar) to a motor accident. When she goes home to stay with his family, the consequences of the work of their dead grandfather researching the Necronomicon and the Deadites manifest in terrible ways. One by one, the family are turned into the Evil Dead.
Horror is a genre that depends on you relating to the protagonists so you care what happens to them. In the case of Evil Dead Burn, Yacoub does a decent job with the character she’s given, but the gonzo horror elements manifest so early in the film that she may as well be collateral damage in the onslaught, especially as the film’s early point of view is that of her brother-in-law (Hunter Doohan).
Fans of gory violence will get their money’s worth here, but there’s not a lot going on besides that. The film is a descent into madness and carnage that is so resolutely unpleasant that, after some of the early kills, it becomes numbing. It’s hard to gather what the tone is supposed to be, with lots of callbacks to the early films’ style by setting up inevitable kills with Chekhov’s weed trimmer, Chekhov’s fork and every other potentially dangerous prop the camera lingers on. The family are all deeply unpleasant at some level and so their deaths register as meaningless. Yes, the film has the obligatory something to say about how our tendency to ignore domestic abuse creates demons that destroy families, but then absolutely panders to bloodlust by absolutely revelling in some of the most extreme violence imaginable between family members (and a pet). To say this is not a film for the sensitive is to understate things considerably. This is a film that absolutely earns its content guidance warnings.
Is there any comedy? Some, but it feels out of place given the absolute brutality inflicted on the cast. While most of the other films were self-aware about setting up a ludicrously grisly end for a villain as a payoff, in Evil Dead Burn,the kills have very little flair. It’s also hard to know what the rules for getting rid of a Deadite are, as some of them are still upright and chatty after losing most of the contents of their skull and some are dispatched by the repeated application of a blunt object to the head. Towards the end, a McGuffin is added to make the kills final, but before that, who knows?
Should you watch Evil Dead Burn,? It certainly gets vocal reactions from audiences in a cinema, and if you’re a gorehound you’ll be in for a ride. If you’re a horror fan, it’s certainly a horror film, but violent instead of scary. If you’re just a fan of cinema who likes good films whether or not they’re horror films, then this will be an alienating watch. In Evil Dead Rise the decay of the family was more than background noise and factored into the circumstances of the individual deaths, but not here. It has slight pretences of being a film with Themes and Ideas, but in the end it just feels like an excuse to serve up limbs being mutilated, skulls being crushed and any number of stabbings, slicings and gougings rendered with psychopathic visual fidelity. If that’s what you’re after, that’s what it’s got.
Entertainment
‘Children of Blood and Bone’ author won’t see film after feud with star Amandla Stenberg
Tomi Adeyemi, the author of the bestselling fantasy “Children of Blood and Bone,” isn’t planning to see the forthcoming film adaptation — even though she co-wrote it.
Over the weekend, the Nigerian American author posted a video on TikTok addressing fans who have been asking her the same question, “Why don’t you post about the adaptation of your first film adaptation anymore?”
“There is a reason I will not post anything about the adaptation of my work,” the author wrote in what appear to be screenshots of a group chat. “I have not seen the film, and I will not watch it.”
The adaptation of the first installment of Adeyemi’s “Legacy of Orïsha” fantasy trilogy is slated to hit theaters in January 2027. Gina Prince-Bythewood — who wrote and directed “Love & Basketball” and helmed “The Woman King” — is directing. The film stars Amandla Stenberg, Thuso Mbedu, Tosin Cole, Damson Idris, Cynthia Erivo, Lashana Lynch, Regina King, Idris Elba, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Viola Davis.
Alongside the screenshots of her comments in the group chat, she shared a February 2025 exchange with Stenberg that shows the author severing ties with the actor.
Adeyemi shared only her final message to Stenberg, which reads, “Do not ever use my name in an interview or video again. Do not text me. Do not call me.” That exchange is followed by a notification that she blocked Stenberg, who plays Princess Amari in the upcoming fantasy flick.
The message from Stenberg that preceded Adeyemi’s reply is not shown in full.
Stenberg, who played Rue in “Hunger Games,” Starr Carter in “The Hate U Give” and, recently, Verosha “Osha” Aniseya and Mae-ho “Mae” Aniseya in Disney’s “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” had been getting flack from readers of the series, who claimed colorism was an issue while casting the movie.
In February 2025, Stenberg posted a since-deleted nine-minute TikTok addressing the controversy and told followers that Adeyemi had given the actor her blessing when cast as the series’ princess.
“I am four months into training for ‘Children of Blood and Bone’ and I am getting my ass whooped,” Stenberg joked in the video, per BET.
“This year was mostly defined for me, honestly, by contending with what it felt like to receive racist death threats just for existing in the ‘Star Wars’ universe, and that was a really difficult thing for me to move through,” she continued. “But honestly, it feels so much more painful for me to feel like I’m at odds with my own community.”
Stenberg said that she considers her skin tone when navigating her career choices and would “never go after a role” she didn’t feel well suited for. “I know that colorism is an insidious system that relentlessly impacts every facet of entertainment.”
The actor continued that it was actually a meeting with the “Children of Blood and Bone” author that gave her the confidence to pursue the role.
“I had the opportunity to meet Tomi, the novelist, for the first time. … And she goes, ‘Amandla, I want you to know that when you were a little girl and you were cast as Rue in “The Hunger Games,” and people said that Rue’s death wouldn’t be as sad because you’re a Black girl — that inspired me to write this series so that Black girls like you and Black girls of all shades could have a story written about them,’” Stenberg said in the video. “We started crying, and I said to myself, ‘God wants me here.’”
Representatives for Stenberg, Adeyemi and Prince-Bythewood did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
Movie Reviews
‘Night Nurse’ Review: A Caretaker Explores Her Kink for Elder Abuse in the Year’s Strangest Erotic Thriller
There are any number of erotic thrillers in which rich old men are robbed blind and/or left for dead, but Georgia Bernstein’s admirably bizarre “Night Nurse” might be the first movie of its kind where elder abuse is the source — and possible subject— of its erotic thrills. If there are others, I’m not sure I want to know.
But this woozy debut feature doesn’t rely on its audience being turned on by the relationship between a nubile caretaker and her dementia-addled patient. Their psychosexual bond, meanwhile, hinges on cold-calling vulnerable old people under the guise of a grandchild in financial distress. (“I’m in trouble, nana, send me $10,000 or I’ll be left to rot in jail!” That sort of thing). With its slim wisp of a premise stretched into a Strickland-esque dreamscape that substitutes kink for conflict, the film itself hardly seems convinced by its own wrinkled lust — all desperate kisses and non-touching poses of subservience. More important to Bernstein is what that lust reveals about her characters’ deepest needs, specifically how their need to care and be cared for can be as easily perverted as any other form of desire.
As moody and weightless as the noir-accented score that blows through the movie like a curlicue gust of wind in an old cartoon (credit to musicians Sam Clapp and Steven Jackson), “Night Nurse” lacks the pulse required for its stray feelings to come alive. Still, the film ambiently taps into the latent eroticism of teasing out the distance between how you see yourself and who you really are. Bernstein plays with that distance like a telephone cord wrapped around her fingers, and Eleni — played by the excellent newcomer Cemre Paksoy, powerfully helpless — only frays even more as the receiver is brought near the hook. “Everything I did before today wasn’t me,” the nurse tells co-worker Mona (Eleonore Hendricks) after starting a new job at an Illinois retirement home. “It was somebody else.”
What she did before today remains unexplored (specifically, what she did to get herself fired from her last gig), but I’m guessing she’s probably changed less than she thought. There’s a faraway flicker in her eyes the moment she catches the vibe between Mona and Douglas (a ribald and elusive Bruce McKenzie), a white-haired seventysomething who shows early signs of dementia but still commands an undiminished sexual energy. “I’m not an invalid,” he coos as Mona bathes him in the tub, to which she replies, “yes, you are,” in a supplicant tone that hints at a rich history of power games between them.
Later that same night, Douglas will force Eleni to call a stranger, pretend that she’s their granddaughter, and ask for money — he’ll wrap the phone cord around the nurse’s body as she talks and shove her against the wall as they kiss. She’s into it. So into it that he has to clarify the terms of his whole deal: “If you’re looking for a pogo stick, I’m really not your guy.” But Eleni isn’t looking for anything to bounce on. She just wants to be needed, and maybe to need someone in return. Someone who will see her for who she really is and allow her the fantasy of pretending she isn’t being herself when she cons vulnerable strangers out of their money — when she exploits how enthralled those strangers are by the care they have for their loved ones.
“Night Nurse” doesn’t belabor the psychology, as Bernstein prefers to express her story through heavy-lidded suggestion. Somnambulating from the moment it starts, the film moves through a series of beautifully arranged poses that stretch their latent meaning thin across the surface (Lidia Nikonova’s cinematography lacquers every shot with a seductive dreaminess). We see Douglas smoking in a lawn chair with Mona and Eleni curled around his feet. Eleni riding in the backseat of a convertible as the wind blows through her curls. The full staff of nurses — all of them under Douglas’ sway — stumbling around his condo in a state of zonked out bliss as they roll on the prescription drugs they’ve stolen from the residents.
Once you’ve seen one shot of this movie, you’ve practically seen them all, at least until things escalate during a rushed and unsatisfying third act that forces Eleni into an honest confrontation with herself. People will do just about anything to feel needed — they’ll give whatever degree of care allows them to receive it in return. “Night Nurse” understands that desire, but remains far too numb to treat it.
Grade: C+
The Independent Film Company will relase “Night Nurse” in theaters on Friday, July 10.
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