There is no rest for the wicked, and Hugh proves that by popping up at Los Angeles premiere of The Jane Austen Book Club, looking pretty swank in all black and greys. A real gentleman among the women! Pictures from the red carpet and inside are up at the gallery. Feel free to peruse and ogle as you see fit.

I’ve also included scan (care of kenneth in the (212)) of Hugh in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of VMAN magazine as one of VMAN’s 15 Most Wanted. He’s looking mighty fine if you ask me, but then again, I am biased. I can transcribe the part of the article on the page with the picture, but I think it continues onto another page, so if anyone can provide the rest of it (or more high-quality scans), we would really appreciate it! He is number 2, after all! (In case you were wondering, Hugh seems to use the word “gosh” without any hint of irony and hadn’t slept for weeks, mostly in part to his watching old DVDs of HBO’s “The Wire.”)

Also, Hugh and JABC director Robin Swicord were on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC New York Public Radio to talk about The Jane Austen Book Club, open in limited release right NOW! It’s a very nice interview, and you can listen to it and download it on the show’s site here. It’ll be available here on HDi for download… as soon as I figure out what I’m doing wrong!

• 25 x The Jane Austen Book Club Los Angeles Premiere
• 01 x VMAN Fall/Winter 2007 : 15 Most Wanted

Posted on September 21, 2007 by Ann
Filed In Gallery Updates • Public Appearances • The Jane Austen Book Club
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Five years ago Hugh Dancy was being touted as the new Hugh Grant: same floppy fringe, same self-deprecating Englishness and ability to charm the ladies. With acclaimed performances in costume dramas, Daniel Deronda, David Copperfield and Madame Bovary, he was never out of a frock coat. He even modelled for a Burberry “country house” campaign shot by Mario Testino.

Critics predicted that he’d end up as the new Hollywood romantic hero. But, Dancy, 32, has done something rather more interesting with his career. By choosing to play a series of left-field roles, he has proved that he can do characters as well as the more showy leads.

True, he has the requisite film-star girlfriend (Claire Danes, whom he met on the set of his latest film, Evening). And he has just shot a Hollywood rom-com, The Jane Austen Book Club, which is destined to be a huge hit when it opens here in November. But he has actively courted a different type of role.”I like escapism as much as the next person, and I pay good money for it quite often,” he tells me, “but the real heroes of cinema are basically all anti-heroes.”

Dancy is interested in ambiguous characters who don’t necessarily command your full sympathy. Last year his role as a fresh-faced English teacher in the Rwandan-genocide film, Shooting Dogs, was a revelation. And now he has two more left-field roles, first as an alcoholic in Evening, and then as a geeky computer expert in The Jane Austen Book Club.

“Obviously they’re wildly different characters but they both share weakness in a sense,” he acknowledges. “There are so many scripts where they don’t allow the male lead any kind of flaw, which renders it very boring.”

We meet in the library of a London boutique hotel. Slender, athletic, with that fashionable tousled look, Dancy has exquisite manners. He’s bright with a subversive wit. At times you feel this could be an Oxford tutorial rather than a film junket.

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Posted on September 20, 2007 by Anna
Filed In Evening • Movies • News • The Jane Austen Book Club
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For someone who looks so great in any kind of period gear — from the Broadway production of Journey’s End to HBO’s Emmy Award-winning Elizabeth I — Hugh Dancy manages to look equally dishy in the very ordinary outfits he sports as Grigg, an outgoing, if inept, Sci-Fi-loving computer geek in Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club, which opens in New York on Friday, September 21.

Grigg, the only male reader in an otherwise all-female book club, is a decided change from his other recent roles — most particularly, Buddy, the charming, gay alcoholic he portrayed in his last film, Evening (on which he met his new lady love, Pygmalion star Claire Danes). “Robin’s script was so rich and smart and it made me laugh, so I knew I had to play Grigg,” says Dancy with his trademark boyish grin. “Buddy and Grigg are such polar opposites. Buddy is ill at ease and doesn’t really know himself, while Grigg is silly, romantic, and not at all cool. But he’s quite happy with who he is.”

Swicord’s masterful screen adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, which was written as separate but integrated stories, focuses on five women and one man, each of whom leads a book club session on one of Austen’s six novels. In doing so, the sextet finds that the novelist’s work is totally relevant to their lives. “What would Jane do?” is what they keep asking themselves. In addition to Dancy, the film boasts a large cast of recognizable names, including Kathy Baker, Maria Bello, Emily Blunt, Amy Brenneman, Maggie Grace, Jimmy Smits, and Lynn Redgrave (in another of her memorable film cameos). “I was absolutely delighted to be surrounded by all those wonderful strong women,” says Dancy.

Because of her working methods, Dancy’s stage experience was a prerequisite for first-time director Swicord, whose own theatrical background dates back to Off-Broadway in the 1970s (and who is the mother of rising Off-Broadway star Zoe Kazan). “We had six full-on rehearsal days as if we were doing a play,” she explains. “Shooting 10 pages at a clip for 30 days in 37 locations around Los Angeles, we’d run scenes from top to bottom using three cameras on six people with overlapping dialogue and no single coverage, so staying in character was mandatory. Those rehearsal days also helped us form the kind of ‘family’ that the book club actually becomes. In fact, actors were bringing in props from their homes.”

Source: Theatre Mania

Posted on September 20, 2007 by Anna
Filed In Movies • News • The Jane Austen Book Club
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Women are the focus of Robin Swicord’s film, but that doesn’t mean the men in it can’t be persuasive.

The men of the romantic comedy “The Jane Austen Book Club,” which opens Friday, felt a different vibe on the set during production.

And for good reason. The majority of the cast was women, as was the writer-director.

“I was around women most of the time when we were on set and during rehearsals,” recalls actor Kevin Zegers. “I was not disappointed, needless to say! It was definitely the most laid-back movie I have ever done.”

Based on Karen Joy Fowler’s bestseller, “The Jane Austen Book Club” revolves around six members of a book club, each of whom is assigned to lead a discussion of a book by the beloved British novelist.

Spanning six months — they discuss one book a month — the five female and one male club members find that their lives begin to parallel Austen’s own plots of pride, prejudice, sense, sensibility and love.

The primary focus of the film is on the five women in the group: Bernadette (Kathy Baker), a six-time married free spirit; Jocelyn (Maria Bello), a confirmed bachelorette who raises Rhodesian Ridgebacks; Sylvia (Amy Brenneman), Jocelyn’s friend who is going through a painful divorce; Allegra (Maggie Grace), Sylvia’s lesbian daughter; and Prudie (Emily Blunt), an unhappily married high school French teacher. But the four male characters aren’t given short shrift.

“It’s definitely a chick flick,” says Zegers, who plays Trey, a high school student to whom Prudie finds herself drawn. “But the men have to be equally as strong or else the balance of the film would have been thrown out.”

“The men are every bit as dimensional as the women,” echoes writer-director Robin Swicord, attributing that fact to Austen herself. “She has types in her novels — the good parson, the relentless cad and the quiet man. She has her own kind of iconographic men, but equally they are very fleshed out in her books, easily as fleshed out as the women.”

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Posted on September 19, 2007 by Anna
Filed In Movies • News • The Jane Austen Book Club
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Somewhere between “I’m catching cold because I was covering Emmy night” and “There hasn’t been an original movie since ‘Memento,’” the flow of dramatic possibility inside the Beverly Wilshire Hotel shifts, almost imperceptibly, in a new direction. Somewhere between discussing the merits of “3:10 to Yuma” and complaining about an upcoming “Polo event,” at the crossroads of sleek Voss water bottles and goblets of juice, the thread is lost.

Celebrity culture is easily seen, in these air-conditioned rooms clicking with idle chatter and a multitude of BlackBerrys, to be less the fault of the celebrities than the journalists that cover them.

This is journalism as spa treatment.

But if the frame of reference for the scribes huddled around the table of Suite 709 is the frame of a paparazzo’s lens instead of a Picasso painting - a frame in which certain publications prize gossip and blurb over real answers to real questions - the minds behind “The Jane Austen Book Club,” which opens Friday, are refreshingly cerebral.

“One of the watchword phrases for me in this film was ‘continuous partial attention,’ which is from a Thomas Friedman column,” said Robin Swicord, the writer and director. “We’re focused on everything a little bit, and we sort of live in this fractured state, which makes the focus necessary to read -and the focus necessary to really know one another and to create community - hard to come by.”

Jane Austen and Thomas Friedman, for those who’ve never been to a Hollywood press junket, are not exactly perennial topics of discussion.

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Posted on September 19, 2007 by Anna
Filed In Movies • News • The Jane Austen Book Club
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