Spider-Man 4 uses no Scottish crew during Glasgow filming
Despite Scotland being chosen as the preferred filming location by Hollywood, with actors Tom Holland and Zendaya featuring in the film, the head of one of the largest talent agencies in the country has claimed that Scottish workers have been shut out from working on the production.
Iain Wilkie, owner of BBB Talent Agency, which represents more than 10,500 actors, extras and stunt specialists, has claimed that a London-based talent firm has been chosen to provide talent and that no Scottish crew is working on the film.
READ MORE: James McAvoy does the most Scottish thing in London – and Martin Compston loves it
Wilkie, who is a veteran actor and body double for Sam Heughan in Outlander, told The National that very few Scottish facilities had also been chosen while the film is shot in Glasgow.
He also claimed that it was the same story with the last four Hollywood blockbusters, which were filmed in the country, claiming that despite the film industry looking like it is thriving on the surface, nobody in Scotland is benefiting from them.
'You see these Hollywood red carpets, and it's all glitz and pure glamor, and you see these ordinary-looking actors with supermodels. Well, that's Scotland right now,' he explained.
'We're turning up at these events and hiring a supermodel. It looks glamorous but there's just no substance to it.
'On the surface, we look absolutely amazing. We look like we're booming with these major Hollywood productions all over Scotland, but there's no benefit to us.
'There's absolutely no benefit. Nobody in Scotland benefited from this.
'When these production companies are coming to Scotland, they are wiping their feet on their way out.'
(Image: Supplied)
Wilkie (middle) has claimed that the London-based firm Entertainment Partners was chosen to provide talent for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
He also claimed that Scottish firms weren't even given the opportunity to speak with either Sony or Marvel, who are the main forces behind the film, about working on it.
'The state of Scotland's Creative Industries is that unless you have a London-based agent, you're not going to get it if you're an actor,' he said.
'Unless you've got a London-based agent, you're not going to get any work in Scotland.'
Wilkie said he has decided to speak out about Scottish firms being overlooked by film projects, as he said after eight years of the 'biggest talent platform' in the country, he has seen his opportunities, along with his colleagues from other agencies, become fewer.
He said: 'We never moaned. We just got on. But now we were not even given the opportunity.'
Wilkie has now called on Screen Scotland, a national body set up to support Scotland's film and TV industry, to do more to champion the industry.
Screen Scotland says its purpose is to drive development of all aspects of Scotland's film and tv industry, through funding and strategic support, which includes improving employment opportunities in the sector.
However, Wilkie argues that the government agency has lost sight of one of its core commitments to help improve employment opportunities for Scots in favour of over-focusing on promoting the country to the world.
He said: 'Their function, they believe, is to promote Scotland. And I'll tell you what, I'll give them ten out of ten for it, because they are seriously promoting Scotland.
'There's some great productions coming to Scotland, but there's nobody in Scotland benefiting from that.'
Wilkie added: 'They are bringing work to Scotland, but for who?'
The agency boss said he would like Screen Scotland to understand what it's like working in the industry and how it is 'impossible' for Scots to reach all the 'amazing productions' that are coming to the country to film.
He added: 'I would love there to be a facility in Scotland for people that work in TV and film in Scotland to access these productions.
'Right now, it's a closed shop, and Screen Scotland are helping keep it closed'
Wilkie said that Screen Scotland is good at supporting Scots if they 'tick the right boxes' but there is no follow-up.
He said that young first-time writers or directors who are given some money to make the content they want are left with no support or help from the government agency.
He added that Screen Scotland should be trying to get Scots practical experience on the big productions that are coming to Scotland in a bid to help cultivate the country's own talent pool and has called for them to create a branch to develop the industry's opportunities.
(Image: Supplied)
'The key to Screen Scotland is to get back to basics. Remember why they're here,' Wilkie (above) said.
'They've done a phenomenal job of promoting Scotland. If they were to put the same energy into the people in Scotland working within TV and film, that's where the success will lie.
'What they need to do is create a branch within creative Scotland that is only there to promote us.'
Wilkie said along with establishing a branch in Screen Scotland to promote Scottish workers, there should also be a legislative change in how production companies can recruit.
He said that there should be an introduction of some form of quota of Scottish people to work on productions shot in Scotland, or that people with Scottish postcodes should take priority over those outside the country.
'I'm not saying every job should be filled with people from Scotland on average,' Wilkie said.
'I'm just saying I think we should be scooping up the talent in Scotland first and then when that talent runs out, look to the bigger pools that are in England.'
Wilkie also said the Scottish Government should take note of how Wales and Northern Ireland prioritise homegrown talent and incentivise productions to hire from inside the country instead of looking to London.
One example is the Foot in the Door initiative by Ffilm Cymru, which aims to connect people with opportunities in the creative sector, regardless of their background.
Wilkie added: 'There's just no support for us out here. There's just no support from Screen Scotland at all.'
Earlier this week, John Swinney said more needs to be done to increase the number of Scots benefitting from Scotland's screen industry.
The First Minister said that the [[Scottish Government]] needs to 'make sure' that there is better access to screen infrastructure for Scots, adding that there needs to be more recognition of the 'economic benefits' the sector brings.
A Screen Scotland spokesperson said: 'Screen Scotland is committed to supporting Scotland-based film and TV talent as well as maximising the benefits that filming creates across the wider Scottish economy. We encourage incoming productions to utilise local crews and services.
'That said, the majority of our production funding remains focused on films and [[TV]] programmes from Scotland, which regularly hire local crew and facilities. Recent projects from Scotland developed and produced with Screen Scotland's support include Only Child, Mayflies and Dinosaur for BBC Scotland, An t Eilean (The Island) for BBC Alba, Summerwater for Channel 4, The Rig for Amazon Prime, and the feature films The Outrun, Aftersun, My Old School, Janey, On Falling, California Schemin' and Tornado.'
Entertainment Partners and Sony have been approached for comment.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BreakingNews.ie
13 minutes ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Oasis ‘shocked and saddened' after fan falls to his death at Wembley show
Oasis said they were 'shocked and saddened' after a fan fell to his death during their sell-out Wembley show this weekend. The man was pronounced dead at the scene after attending the concert on Saturday night. Advertisement Witnesses described the 'horrendous' scenes after the man reportedly fell from a balcony during the band's long-anticipated reunion tour. Oasis said in a statement: 'We are shocked and saddened to hear of the tragic death of a fan at the show last night. 'Oasis would like to extend our sincere condolences to the family and friends of the person involved.' The Metropolitan Police have said that the man was aged in his 40s. Advertisement Despite the tragic events on Saturday, organisers said the band's performance on Sunday would still go ahead. In a statement the Metropolitan Police said: 'A man – aged in his 40s – was found with injuries consistent with a fall. 'He was sadly pronounced dead at the scene. 'The stadium was busy and we believe it is likely a number of people witnessed the incident, or may knowingly or unknowingly have caught it on mobile phone video footage. Advertisement 'If you have any information that could help us to confirm what happened, please call 101.' A witness told the Daily Mail: 'It was horrendous. 'The guy fell from a balcony. Paramedics came rushing over. There was a lot of screaming and shouting. Liam Gallagher of Oasis on stage. Photo: Jordan Pettitt/PA. 'It was a big fall. God knows how it happened. It was so tragic. I don't know how on Earth it happened. Advertisement 'It was heartbreaking. He was only young.' The fall happened during the latest in a run of stadium shows for the band's sell-out Live '25 reunion tour – their first since splitting in 2009. A spokesperson for Wembley Stadium said: 'Last night, Wembley Stadium medics, the London Ambulance Service and the police attended to a concert-goer who was found with injuries consistent with a fall. 'Despite their efforts, the fan very sadly died. Our thoughts go out to his family, who have been informed and are being supported by specially trained police officers. Advertisement 'The police have asked anyone who witnessed the incident to contact them. 'Tonight's Oasis concert will go ahead as planned.'
The Guardian
13 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘We can hear their saliva': why are so many actors suddenly using microphones?
Wig, robes and moves like Jagger. Rosamund Pike's star turn as a crown court judge, at the National Theatre in London, has proved that there's just one prop you need to turn even the most serious of subjects into a punk performance – a microphone. And Inter Alia is only the latest in a number of major openings to star the humble handheld: from Greek tragedy to Chekhov, the device seems to be increasingly common in West End productions. Microphones were integral to Thomas Ostermeier's meta-theatrical production of The Seagull at the Barbican, and Jamie Lloyd – having used handhelds to transform James McAvoy into a rapping Cyrano de Bergerac three years ago – has deployed them in both Shakespeare (Much Ado) and Lloyd Webber (Evita). And no production used them more controversially than Daniel Fish's Elektra, whose lead, Brie Larson, spoke her entire part into an on-stage amp, distorting her own voice with a range of effects pedals. Microphones have been a source of contention in the theatre ever since Trevor Nunn introduced radio mics to the National in 1999. But a handheld isn't something a director is trying to hide, unlike the miniature, hands-free microphones that audiences are now used to seeing actors wear. 'Personally I think those things that sit on the top of people's foreheads, like a bug, look silly,' says Fish. 'But here the microphone becomes an instrument, right? It's something that the actor can play with so it becomes a very dynamic thing.' While it might not have been in use in Sophocles' time, Fish found it a fascinating proposition in the rehearsal room. 'Elektra is about a woman who refuses to be quiet, so the idea of amplifying and centring her voice felt important,' he says. 'This is a person for whom the only power that she has, the only chance of justice, is through the noise she makes.' One of the memorable elements of Larson's sonic performance was the way she sang, rather than spoke, the word 'no' – highlighting just how many times it appears in the play, although the punk sensibility did divide the critics. Or, as Fish puts it, 'the show pissed a lot of people off'. Ostermeier enjoys the 'attitude' that handheld mics can bring to a performance (put one in a rehearsal room, and every actor wants to be the one holding it). 'Of course, it's about who has the power to talk and who is excluded, about status and power,' says the German director, 'but it's also about pop culture.' Ostermeier enjoys placing theatre within the context of the entertainment industry it belongs to: his Seagull kicked off with an actor performing some Billy Bragg, then asking the audience if they were ready for 'a little bit of Chekhov'. In that deliberately meta production, on-stage microphones were employed throughout to help indicate when characters were speaking to each other or 'performing' for a wider audience. Cate Blanchett found it transformative for the part of Irina Arkadina, a famous actor and hopeless showoff: 'They helped the story we wanted to tell,' says Ostermeier, 'which is that Arkadina is completely lost in it. She doesn't have a real relationship with other human beings any more without some form of media in between.' There is nothing new about handheld mics on stage, as all these directors are keen to point out: pioneers from the Wooster Group to Pina Bausch to Marina Abramović were using them in the 1970s. 'It's a technique that's been around for a long time,' says Katie Mitchell, whose wordless, sonically driven work Cow | Deer arrives at the Royal Court in September. 'I've always been interested in how you can amplify the spoken voice without having to distort your body or your voice to make it sound louder,' says Mitchell, who has been working with microphones for decades now (in her own version of The Seagull in 2006, Hattie Morahan's Nina whispered her lines into one). It's a paradox of the microphone that while it presents as performative and even political, it can also bring us closer to the character's subjective experience. 'We're being invited into a more intimate relationship – we can hear their saliva, their breathing,' says Mitchell. That requires technicians as sensitive and responsive as the performers themselves, such as Laura Hammond, the sound engineer who live-mixed the scenes in Elektra. 'A lot of times everything just goes into the computer, everything is set,' says Fish, 'and that makes me want to pull my hair out.' For some theatre lovers, the current vogue for on-stage amplification is less welcome. One veteran actor in Ostermeier's own company, who like so many stage actors has trained his voice to fill large spaces, refuses to use microphones. 'He's annoyed because it's a theatrical fashion,' says the director, 'and he doesn't want to be part of this fashion any more.' Mitchell acknowledges the challenge microphones represent to the proud tradition of voice work in theatre: 'There's a sense if you're not allowing actors to use all their skill for vocal projection and you're just mediating it with technology, this undermines that tradition. But I'm always of the position that a healthy society should have a wide spectrum of performance modes.' As ever, there's a danger that a popular technique becomes a fad, used without a sense or purpose. 'It moves from innovation to convention to cliche awfully quickly,' admits Fish. But right now, Mitchell believes the age of the microphone is something to be enjoyed. 'All these practitioners have got good political or intellectual underpinnings – let's celebrate it, and not police each other. Let's just chill.'
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
In a crowded field, Stuart Broad has emerged as Sky Cricket's new all-rounder
An excellent day's cricket that could and maybe should have been a stone-cold classic, superbly covered on Sky Sports, and it fell to the channel's emerging star man Stuart Broad to ask the question that fans were all thinking on Sunday evening when he wondered: 'Still 20 minutes away from possible start time, everyone has their sunglasses on at the train station. Felt the supporters deserved to see a finish to that Test Match today. Felt a lazy decision to call it off at 6pm in my opinion. I wonder who makes it?' Broad was right to query whether the umpires and ground staff could have done more, nailing the key moment of the evening's narrative, and with an eye for the provocative as well: further evidence that he is shaping up to be the complete all-rounder in his media career in a way he once, briefly and thrillingly, threatened to be on the field of play. As long as Varun Aaron doesn't reinvent himself as a TV critic, there seems to be no stopping Broad's frictionless glide towards cricket media world domination. It is to the credit of Sky Cricket head honcho Bryan Henderson and the team that, even in the strongest talent line-up in British sports broadcasting, Broad is already a standout. They had identified Broad while he was still playing, they blooded him during some lower-profile matches with an arm-around-the-shoulder approach and have developed him. It is clear Broad himself has the brains, ego and work ethic to want to get seriously good on the TV. He is also adept at the social media and not shy of putting himself about a bit, be it doing a book called, natch, Broadly Speaking (interested), running upmarket pubs (sure, why not) and flogging his own-label South African rosé (perhaps not). He is already holding his own against quality technical analysts like Ricky Ponting, Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton, and is also charismatic and telegenic enough to do the more knockabout features as well. There was a fun segment on Sunday lunchtime where Hussain and Broad went around the home dressing room at the Oval, with Broad offering countless little nuggets about which players sit where, who are the biggest bat-chuckers and so on. He pointed out a poster the players attach to the wall to make sure they always feel they are the owners of the space, the home side. 'We take this poster around everywhere… I say we. The team,' said Broad, and then caught himself again when he began to say: 'We have to make – England have to make…' "Stokesy is the messiest by a country mile, Rooty is the tidiest" 😅 Stuart Broad and Nasser Hussain show us round the England dressing room at The Oval! — Sky Sports Cricket (@SkyCricket) August 2, 2025 That said, he doesn't strike you as one of these former players who remains stuck, unable to move onto the next stage of his life, hanging around the dressing room literally or metaphorically like a sad-case sports Fonzie. He is still clearly personally and sportingly close to the current men in the arena but shrewd enough, outwardly anyway, not to seem like he's pining too much for his era, the in-my-day trap that has ensnared many a former great and made them a commentary box bore. Based on what he has said during this series, the telly role has been the ideal soft landing: 'I have walked into a new changing room,' he said of the Sky Studio. 'I am getting into a new groove, improving. I don't miss being in there [the England camp] but I wish everyone the best of luck.' This superb Test match has had a bittersweet flavour because of the celebration and memorial for Graham Thorpe and while his suicide, as all are, sounds like it was multifactorial and complex, cricket lovers might have found themselves ruminating about the huge and distressing changes that these former playing greats have to go through when they are ejected from the only life they have known: being a person, sadly, turning out to be even harder than being a Test cricketer. Sky, as it has done with issues of racism in cricket, leaned into the Thorpe moment with compassion, finesse and heart. Its cricket coverage remains the gold standard and, for this viewer at least, a more enticing proposition for a day's watching than the £185 ticket price for the Saturday at Lord's. A 39th Test match for Joe Root 🙌✨ 🎙️ "A truly magnificent cricketer in the form of his life" — Sky Sports Cricket (@SkyCricket) August 3, 2025 We will no doubt be seeing a lot more of Broad. And, as Atherton reported from the Oval, not just UK viewers: 'A piece of news from Australia that seems to have gone down like a bucket of sick with the locals', that Broad has signed up to commentate for that country's Channel Seven during the Ashes. Atherton reminded Broad that the Brisbane Courier Mail
