the times | Tuesday December 21 2021 2GM 19
News
The actress Claire Foy has said that
filming sex scenes makes her feel
“exploited”, describing them as “the
grimmest thing you can do”.
Foy’s latest role is in A Very British
Scandal about the Duchess of Argyll’s
divorce in 1963, which featured explicit
photographs and regularly made the
front pages of newspapers.
The 37-year-old actress plays Marga-
ret Campbell, the duchess, whose
divorce proceedings brought to light
accusations of forgery, theft, violence,
drug-taking, secret recording, bribery
and an explicit Polaroid picture.
Foy, who played the Queen in The
Crown series on Netflix, told Radio 4’s
Woman’s Hour: “Basically you do feel
exploited when you are a woman and
you are having to perform fake sex on
screen.” She added: “You can’t help but
feel exploited. It’s grim — it’s the grim-
mest thing you can do. You feel
exposed. Everyone can make you try to
not feel that way but it’s unfortunately
the reality.
“My thing was that I felt very strongly
that it had to be in it but I wanted it to
be female. I did not want it to be that
sort of awful climactic sexual experi-
ence you often see on the cinema
screen.”
Responding to the suggestion that
the duchess was the first woman to be
publicly “slut-shamed” by the media,
Foy dismissed the term. She said: “IKuenssberg to leave top
BBC politics job at Easter
Jake KanterThe BBC has announced that Laura
Kuenssberg will step down as political
editor at Easter to take up a “senior pre-
senting and reporting role”.
She leaves one of the most
coveted jobs on British television
after seven years. The BBC said she
would take on projects across TV,
radio and online.
The journalist has made col-
leagues aware of her ambition to
present Radio 4’s Toda y pro-
gramme, and she is also heavily
fancied to replace Andrew Marr,
who presented his final Sunday
morning show last weekend.
Kuenssberg, 45, replaced Nick
Robinson in 2015, becoming theBBC’s first female political editor. She
said she would miss the “daily drama” of
Westminster.
Replacements from within the BBC
could include Vicki Young, 50, the dep-
uty political editor; Jon Sopel, 62, the
former North America editor;
Faisal Islam, 44, economics editor;
Amol Rajan, 38, the Toda y pro-
gramme presenter and BBC
media editor; and Nick Watt,
the Newsnight political edi-
tor. External candidates
could include Beth Rigby,
45, the Sky News political
editor; and Robert Peston,
61, ITV’s political editor.Kuenssberg has set her
sights on Radio 4’s Todayyet to land in China, the biggest market
in the world for cinema-goers. Bond
was released in China in late October.
On US ticket sales alone, Spider-Man:
No Way Home could become the
highest-grossing film in the character’s
universe, needing a further $143 million
to eclipse 2002’s Spider-Man, which
starred Tobey Maguire.
No Time to Die has some way to go if
it’s going to trouble Skyfall, the
best-performing Bond film in Amer-
ican cinema history. The film, released
in 2012, featured a theme tune by Adele,
and had Javier Bardem, the Spanish
actor who also starred in No Country
For Old Men, as the antagonist Raoul
Silva. In the US it took $304 million at
the box office.
Spectre, Quantum of Solace and
Casino Royale also feature in the top
five, meaning that Craig has been aSpider-Man is on course to surpass
James Bond in the battle for global box
office supremacy after the superhero
franchise had a huge opening weekend
of cinema takings.
Spider-Man: No Way Home, starring
the British actor Tom Holland, 25,
opened in cinemas last week and has
generated global ticket sales of
$587.2 million, according to industry
figures.
This means that it should
comfortably overtake No Time To Die,
Daniel Craig’s final outing in the role of
James Bond, as the biggest
English-language film of the year.
The latest Bond film opened in the
UK at the end of September
and has had worldwide ticket
sales of $774 million after it
opened in the UK, so
Spider-Man has to close a gap
of $187 million in takings.
Some predict that
Bond could lose
his crown this
weekend.
Spider-Man: No
Way Home has
already over-
taken No Time
To Die as the
top film in
America. It
has grossed
$260.6 million
in the US,
while Bond,
has banked
$161 million
over a number of weeks.
The premiere of
Spider-Man: No Way Home,
which is co-produced by Sony,
ranks it as the third-biggest
debut in cinema history, as
audiences set aside fears
about Omicron to
watch films.
The top two opening
weekends also belong
to Marvel films —
Avengers: Endgame and Avengers:
Infinity War grossed $1.2 billion
and $640 million respectively. Un-
like these two blockbusters, how-
ever, Spider-Man: No Way Home is
Biggest hits
Spider-Man’s killing Bond at the till
Film fans put fears of
coronavirus to one side
in their rush to see the
latest Marvel movie,
Jake Kanter writes
Ed Potton
CommentProof we love
a tear-jerking
blockbuster
ALAMYTom Holland and Zendaya, in Spider-Man: No Way Home, are likely to bring in even more cash than Daniel Craig’s BondHighest grossing English-language
films of the year
1 No Time To Die, $774 million
2 F9: The Fast Saga, $726 million
3 Spider-Man: No Way Home,
$587 million
4 Venom: Let There Be Carnage,
$498 million
5 Godzilla vs Kong, $468 million
6 Shang-Chi and the Legend of the
Ten Rings, $432 million
7 Eternals, $400 million
8 Dune, $393 million
9 Black Widow, $380 million
10 Free Guy, $331 million
Source: Box Office Mojolucrative figurehead for the franchise.
The latest Spider-Man film is Holland’s
third outing in a solo Spider-Man story,
although he has also appeared as
the character in many other Marvel
blockbusters.
In the latest movie, Spider-Man’s real
identity as Peter Parker is known to the
world and in an effort to restore his
secret he unleashes some powerful
adversaries from his past, including
Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus.
Sony said that Spider-Man’s
performance underlined the power of
cinema. Tom Rothman, Sony Motion
Picture Group’s chairman and chief
executive, said: “This weekend’s
historic results, from all over the world
and in the face of many challenges,
reaffirm the unmatched cultural
impact that exclusive theatrical
films can have.”T
he super-sized opening
weekend for Spider-Man:
No Way Home is proof that
it’s not spectacle on its own
that breaks box-office
records; it’s spectacle plus emotion.
The only films to have had bigger
opening weekends are the last two
Avengers movies: Infinity War and
Endgame. They had CGI-powered
wow factor but also emotional
oomph — the deaths of important
characters and the resolution of
long and involving story arcs.
Like those films, the new Spider-
Man movie has heart as well as
thrills. No Time to Die, which it is
about to overtake as the biggest film
of the year, is another tear-jerking
blockbuster that was regarded as the
most moving Bond film yet.
Weepies have always been
popular, hence the continued
presence of Titanic and Gone with
the Wind in the inflation-adjusted
list of biggest-grossing films.
Yet the rise of Omicron, which
itself sounds like a Marvel villain,
has stoked the demand for cathartic
crying. Many people flocked to No
Way Home for the same reason that
11 million viewers spent Saturday
night with something in their eye as
Rose Ayling-Ellis won the final of
Strictly Come Dancing.
There are other factors behind the
film’s success. Older viewers have
enjoyed the way it references
previous Spider-Man incarnations
and younger ones are fascinated by
the real-life romance between Tom
Holland, who plays the title role, and
Zendaya, his girlfriend MJ.
Cinemas may have benefited from
some stage theatres closing and the
fact that, unlike at restaurants and
pubs, film-goers often wear masks
and don’t sit facing each other. Why,
though, did so many pick Spider-
Man over other films? Part of it is
down to the clout of Marvel but it’s
also because we love a good sob.hate the phrase slut-shaming, I abso-
lutely hate it. But I think that women
have basically been slut-shamed for
ever. Eve was probably slut-shamed.
“There is something about it that I
just hate, the rephrasing of the owner-
ship of that title and it being used in a
way that justifies it even more. Just the
word ‘slut’, probably shouldn’t exist.”
The three-part series will be
screened on BBC1 over three consecu-
tive nights, starting on Boxing Day. The
drama was created by Sarah Phelps,
who wrote adaptations of the Agatha
Christie novels And Then There Were
None and The Pale Horse.
It is directed by Anne Sewitsky, the
Norwegian film-maker.
The programme comes from the
team behind the BBC’s A Very English
Scandal, which starred Hugh Grant and
Ben Whishaw as the politician Jeremy
Thorpe and his lover Norman Scott.Nadeem Badshah Claire Foy’s latest
role is as the
Duchess of Argyll,
who was involved
in a sex scandal
Sex scenes are simply grim, says Foy