The actor was eight when he landed his first movie, and spent his teens working with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Harrison Ford. Now he’s making his theatre debut, in a role that mirrors his own experiences of big time rejection

Interviewing actors usually involves asking them to remember things: lines spoken, expressions pulled, performances given weeks, months or even years ago that are only now seeing the light of day. But instead of fondly reminiscing about his latest project, Asa Butterfield is desperately trying to envisage it. The Sex Education star is about to appear in Second Best, a play about the boy who came agonisingly close to being cast as Harry Potter in the film franchise. It’s his first week of rehearsals, and Butterfield isn’t merely figuring out how to play the part, he’s also trying to predict how scared he’ll be while doing it: in an extremely bold move, this 90-minute one-hander will be the actor’s theatrical debut.

It is an especially ballsy choice when you consider that theatre “has always terrified” Butterfield. “Standing on stage in front of hundreds of people without being able to say, ‘Cut! Can we try again?’ is sort of ‘eurgh!’” he says, sitting in the middle of a spartan rehearsal space in north London. He tries to visualise himself in the wings before the first performance. “I’m going to have stomach-churning anxiety, undoubtedly.” Is he someone who tends to ruminate on that sort of thing? “Yes,” he sighs instantly, with the knowing weariness of a chronic overthinker.

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Work has always been central to the novelist’s existence. So what happened when she found herself caring for her elderly mother and two children – and suddenly unable to write?

The Portuguese artist Paula Rego once said: “Work is the most important thing in life.” I agree with her. Work defines who we are in the world. It gives us purpose and direction. It is how we manifest ourselves in the sphere of public functionality. Without it, we might come to feel like less effective citizens, taking up physical space with less power to define the shape of our exteriority. I think that what Rego was implying was not that family or the other elements of our lives are not important, but that those things cannot exist in balance without the fact of work. Every day she would go to her studio and immerse herself in her paintings and prints, the nucleus of her existence. When it was finished, she would come out fulfilled, capable of full relaxation and communication with others. I am describing here something akin to my own optimum experience of work and transposing it on to Rego, because the satisfaction of and need for creative industriousness in the artist’s life is presumably common across disciplines. There is no bliss quite like the end of a successful writing day, when I have achieved a good word count, when I have travelled through the words arriving on the page and lost myself in it. Achievement, according to psychologists, is an essential human need, next to food and shelter. Writing regularly and often is crucial to my mental health and, especially while writing a novel, I like to work as consistently as possible – days off make me nervous.

I realise that there are parents out there who savour school holidays, who see them as a time of relief, a break from routine, a chance to spend quality time with the children. But it has to be said that the school holidays go on for an inordinate amount of time. Families do not need to spend that much time together. They need their dispersings and distances in order to come back to one another ventilated of small irritations and tetchy dynamics.

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Former Beatles member says government should protect creative workers as consultation on copyright continues

Sir Paul McCartney has warned artificial intelligence could “rip off” artists if a proposed overhaul of copyright law goes ahead.

The proposals could remove the incentive for writers and artists and result in a “loss of creativity”, he told the BBC.

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The photographer captures the moment his three-year-old son found him napping and decided to join him

Dotun Ajao had been juggling a typical Saturday of errands, chores and caring for his three-year-old son, Ireyao. The tired dad had snuck off for a nap when Ireyao found him, and, instead of asking for a snack or to play as he usually would, the toddler quietly climbed into bed and used his father’s head as a pillow.

“I was overwhelmed by the sweetness of it,” says the Lagos-born photographer, who now lives in Norfolk. “I picked up my phone to check the time but then I thought, what if we captured this?”

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The singer on being unmasked on TV, her problem with loyalty, and the trouble with phone cameras

Born in London, Skin, 57, worked as an interior designer before becoming lead singer of Skunk Anansie in 1994. The band had hit singles with songs including Weak and Hedonism; in 1999, Skin became the first black woman to headline Glastonbury. After a hiatus in the early 2000s, the band reformed in 2009. Their new single is An Artist Is An Artist and a UK and European tour begins on 28 February. Skin lives in New York and London with her partner LadyFag and their three-year-old daughter.

When were you happiest?
The first few years of touring with my band, especially in America. We were stupid kids with so much energy – it was wild.

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His short story The Feminist went viral. Now the writer is back with more satirical snapshots of Gen Y. Over a bottle of bourbon in his Brooklyn apartment, he talks about dating, politics and rejection

In 2019 Tony Tulathimutte published The Feminist , a short story that went about as viral as any short story could, becoming the most read fiction piece in the literary magazine n+1’s 20-year history, and sending certain corners of Twitter into a frenzy. The eponymous protagonist describes himself on his online dating profile as “unshakably serious about consent”. He doesn’t understand why, despite his impeccable feminist credentials, he keeps getting friend-zoned while men much uglier and less evolved than him get laid. In middle age, he joins online forums such as Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds, where he rages that his chronic sexlessness represents “a mass abrogation of the social contract by legions of treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets”. Finally validated, his resentment becomes murderous.

Like all of Tulathimutte’s recent fiction, the story is extremely dark, mordantly, laugh-out-loud funny, and somewhat morally and politically ambiguous. He received many private messages from readers seeking a “gold bullion guarantee” that their reading of the story was correct – are you supposed to sympathise with the feminist? But Tulathimutte doesn’t like to answer such questions. “I want to be able to complicate any sort of reading that would reduce my work to something banal or ideological,” he tells me.

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The Greek tragedies ask unpalatable questions. That is why they’re enjoying a revival in 2025

West End theatre is in a weird and unsettling place. It feels as though something that might once have been good and exciting is coming to an end. Many of the big shows, the ones that might have posters on the tube, are TV or film adaptations, like The Devil Wears Prada. Or familiar staples, like Mamma Mia!. Or ones with star casting, like the much-derided The Tempest with Sigourney Weaver. Which is not to say all of these shows are bad, just that there is a kind of stasis. Nervous producers are chasing post-Covid, theatre-shy audiences at a time when the pipeline of new material flowing in from the increasingly impoverished subsidised theatre world is running dry.

In this mix, though, there is something surprising: a lot of Sophocles. One version of his play Oedipus the King, starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, has just finished. Another has just opened at the Old Vic, starring Rami Malek and Indira Varma. At the same time, Sophocles’ much less often performed Elektra is showing in the West End, starring Brie Larson (known to many as Captain Marvel in the movie franchise).

Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer

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Ridley Scott’s Paul Mescal-starring sequel, now streaming, joins cinema’s legion of Roman empire love-ins, from Ben-Hur to Conan the Barbarian

If men, according to the internet, simply cannot stop thinking about the Roman empire, then Hollywood remains a largely male-brained enterprise. Storytelling trends come and go, but the Roman epic has been a recurring fixture of blockbuster cinema for more than a century. Twenty-five years ago, Ridley Scott’s beefy, lavishly appointed action film Gladiator marked a resurgence in the genre after some time off, winning a best picture Oscar and spawning a new wave of sweeping, grunting imitators.

Now, Gladiator II is among them. Scott’s surprisingly belated follow-up substitutes Paul Mescal’s brooding glower for Russell Crowe’s brawny roar, but otherwise follows the template of its predecessor in a way that renders it as much remake as sequel. Playing the son (thanks to some blatant narrative revisionism) of Crowe’s Roman general turned gladiator Maximus, Mescal’s Lucius follows the same trajectory through capture, imprisonment and revenge via some grisly theatrics in the Colosseum. The film is missing the hungry intensity of Crowe’s star presence, while its aesthetic is muddier than the blood-and-gold spectacle of the original, but it’s enjoyable just the same. Piling on the gore and the absurdity (sharks in a Roman arena? Why not?), Scott directs it like a sword-and-sandal B-movie with an A-movie budget.

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