Latest news with #Bloodaxe
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Prime Video's ‘Bloodaxe' Adds Six To Cast
Prime Video's Viking drama Bloodaxe has added five as series regulars: Karlis Arnolds Avots (January), Rod Hallett (Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes), Alina Tomnikov (Donna), Sisse Marie (Rebel Moon), and Rune Temte (Eddie the Eagle). Additionally, Jesper Christensen (Spectre) has boarded as recurring. Avots plays Egil, a poet, farmer, murderer, sorcerer, ladies' man, and a bit of a psychopath, who is seeking revenge on Erik Bloodaxe (Molyneux) for the exile of his family to Iceland by Erik's father, King Harald Fairhair. More from Deadline 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' Season 2 Recap: What To Remember Ahead Of Season 3 'Upload' Sets Release Date For Fourth & Final Season At Prime Video All The Taylor Swift Songs In 'The Summer I Turned Pretty' So Far ... & Our Predictions On Season 3's Needle Drops Hallett plays Athelstan, the shrewd and powerful King of Wessex, who is also a formidable warrior. Years ago, he formed a strategic alliance with King Fairhair concerning his young son Haakon, and has been grooming him for future leadership, and to ensure his influence extends beyond Wessex. Tomnikov portrays the dual roles of Greta and The Seer. Greta is an esteemed shield maiden and close member of Bloodaxe's trusted group of warriors. However, it's revealed that she has the ability to transform into the form of an ancient woman, known as The Seer, who possesses an all-seeing power, and the ability to divine the future as ordained by the gods themselves. Marie is Thyra, the Queen of Denmark, wife of Gorm, and mother to Gunnhild. She is an admired figure, cunning and steadfast, and will do whatever she can to ensure the longevity of her and Gorm's power and rule. Temte plays Gorm, the King of Denmark, husband to Thyra, and father to Gunnhild. Sharp and devious, Gorm lacks the brash, hot-headedness prized in many Norsemen, but his calculating, diplomatic, and occasionally brutal approach to rule has made him one of the most formidable powers in Scandinavia. Christensen portrays King Harald Fairhair. The First King of all Norway who conquered his many powerful rivals, nearing the end of his legendary reign. Fairhair relies on the love and support of his son, Bloodaxe, and begins to fear that many of his sons are now plotting against him. As previously announced, Jessica Madsen and Levi Miller will also star, playing the respective roles of Bloodaxe's wife Gunnhild, aka the Mother of Kings, and his younger half-brother Haakon the Good. Created, written, and exec produced by Vikings creator Michael Hirst and his son, Horatio Hirst, Bloodaxe follows Erik Bloodaxe, one of history's most famous Norse raiders, and his formidable wife, Gunnhild as they fight for the throne of Norway. In the process, the land is torn apart by fierce rivals, shifting loyalties, and bloody betrayals. With war looming and chaos consuming the kingdom, drawing in the ruthless Kings of other Scandinavian countries, and even a powerful English ruler, the stage is set for a thundering, cataclysmic, compelling and utterly magical new Norse Saga. Officially ordered in March, the show will be produced by MGM Television, a division of Amazon MGM Studios, with production beginning in Ireland and Iceland later this summer. Michael and Horatio Hirst will showrun and write, exec producing alongside Morgan O'Sullivan under his O'Sullivan Productions label, Steve Stark under his Toluca Pictures label, Arturo Interian, John Weber, Sheila Hockin, and Fred Toye. Avots and Tomnikov are repped by Lisa Richards Agency and Subtitle Talent; Hallett by United Agents, Luber Roklin Entertainment, and Jackoway Austen Tyerman; Marie by Panorama Agency, Authentic Talent and Literary Management, and Felker Toczek Suddleson; Temte by Actors in Scandinavia and Jackoway Austen Tyerman; and Christensen by Tavistock Wood Management and Spielkind. Best of Deadline 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More Men of Steel: Every Actor Who Has Played Superman - Photo Gallery 'Michael' Cast: Who's Who In The Michael Jackson Biopic
Geek Tyrant
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
BRIDGERTON Actress Jessica Madsen Cast as Gunnhild in Prime Video's Viking Drama BLOODAXE — GeekTyrant
Jessica Madsen, best known for her role as the sharp-tongued Cressida Cowper in Bridgerton , is stepping into entirely different territory, as she has been tapped to play the fierce and powerful Gunnhild, wife to the legendary Norse raider Erik Bloodaxe, in Prime Video's upcoming series Bloodaxe . She will star opposite Xavier Molyneux, whose casting as Erik was confirmed earlier this week. Bloodaxe is the latest historical epic from Vikings creator Michael Hirst, this time teaming up with his son Horatio Hirst. The duo will co-write, showrun, and executive produce the series, which they describe as a high-stakes, emotionally charged saga set during a brutal time in Norse history. The story follows Erik and Gunnhild as they fight to claim the throne of Norway, all while the kingdom is fractured by rival warlords, unstable alliances, and looming war. 'The land is torn apart by fierce rivals, shifting loyalties, and bloody betrayals. With war looming and chaos consuming the kingdom, drawing in the ruthless Kings of other Scandinavian countries, and even a powerful English ruler, the stage is set for a thundering, cataclysmic, compelling and utterly magical new Norse Saga.' Production kicks off this summer in Ireland and Iceland, and the series is being produced by MGM Television, now under Amazon MGM Studios. While comparisons to Vikings and Vikings: Valhalla are inevitable, especially with the same studio backing the project, Bloodaxe is carving out its own narrative. It takes place decades after the events of the original Vikings and decades before Valhalla , making it a standalone saga rather than a direct continuation. I'm excited to see what this series delivers! Source: Deadline
Metro
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
TV star lands huge new role after beloved Amazon Prime series is axed
Neighbours star Xavier Molyneux is set to lead a major new TV series – with an intriguing connection to the beloved Australian soap. The 27-year old actor is best known for playing Byron Stone in the axed serial drama, taking over the role from originator Joe Klocek when new episodes landed on Amazon Prime Video in September 2023. Metro understands that Xavier signed on the dotted line for the original two year commission, but filmed his final scenes in February. Fans were quick to pick up on his cast mates attending a farewell party. He will depart in the coming weeks – though the show will continue until December, after a last minute extension was awarded. Unfortunately, it seems that this really is the end of the road for Ramsay Street, having now been pulled from our screens for the third time in 40 years. A training ground for some of Australia's elite, Neighbours has projected the likes of Margot Robbie and Kylie Minogue to superstardom during that time. And now, former Big Brother contestant Xavier looks set to follow in their footsteps as he plays Viking warrior Erik Bloodaxe in upcoming drama Bloodaxe. Clearly the bosses at Prime Video have had their eye on him, as its produced by Amazon MGM Studios. The series will follow Erik and his wife, Gunnhild, during their fight for the throne of Norway. During their journey, they'll face rivals, 'shifting loyalties and bloody betrayals'. While it may sound like a fantasy series, Bloodaxe really was a 10th-century Norse king who also served as King of Northumbria on two occasions. A statement on social media said: 'Amazon MGM Studios casts Xavier Molyneux in the lead role of Erik Bloodaxe in the new original series Bloodaxe.' Want to be the first to hear shocking EastEnders spoilers? Who's leaving Coronation Street? The latest gossip from Emmerdale? Join 10,000 soaps fans on Metro's WhatsApp Soaps community and get access to spoiler galleries, must-watch videos, and exclusive interviews. Simply click on this link, select 'Join Chat' and you're in! Don't forget to turn on notifications so you can see when we've just dropped the latest spoilers! During his time on Neighbours, Xavier's Byron has worked as an escort, having a fling with high profile Lassiters investor Reece Sinclair (Mischa Barton) and reunited with his estranged dad Vic (Craig Hall). More Trending The character is also the son of show legend Plain Jane Superbrain (Annie Jones). More recently, Byron grappled with the death of grandmother Amanda Harris (Briony Behets) and had an explosive fallout with his girlfriend Sadie Rodwell (Emerald Chan), who was left everything in Amanda's will. But how will he leave Erinsborough? View More » Neighbours streams – for free – Monday to Thursday, from 7am on Amazon Prime Video. If you've got a soap or TV story, video or pictures get in touch by emailing us soaps@ – we'd love to hear from you. Join the community by leaving a comment below and stay updated on all things soaps on our homepage. MORE: Clarkson's Farm sparks shock upset after beating The Traitors for major award MORE: Amazon Prime fans rush to binge 'pure genius' crime drama that launched 11 years ago MORE: One of the 'greatest sci-fi series of all time' premiered 10 years ago today
Irish Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Bodily takeover: New poetry from Gwyneth Lewis, Jennifer Horgan, Dedalus Introductions and Peter McDonald
From a Welsh poet well used to crossing borders comes a sixth collection of ardour and courage. Gwyneth Lewis's First Rain in Paradise (Bloodaxe, £12) confronts past trauma and debility through the language of invasion and bodily takeover. In the first sequence of eight poems, a spider lays eggs in the speaker's brain: as the sequence develops, the subject of maternal child abuse comes sharp and clear. These are poems of darkness and danger – probing, unsettling, appalling. Snare, for example, seems to ask how one is to live in a mind damaged by abuse: 'It's easy to leave, what stops you?', others ask, baffled. It's the snare in the brain, spring-loaded for suicide ... 'Don't you love a good fact, how it saves you / from feeling', asks Relic, but this collection is spared nothing, not the trauma of abuse, rendered in imagery as powerful as it is fearsome; not the descent into aftermath (… and I'm coming / undone/ at the / seams – Any Eight Legs Will Do); and, ultimately, not the process of recovery, that climb back up towards a capacity to endure ('don't ask me how, I'm still feeling, pulling' – Spidering) or to resist, as at the conclusion of Expulsion: 'An owl / descends – clutching stars and dismay / in her talons. Stubborn as ever, I choose to stay.' That survival impulse is facilitated by an insistence on hard-won joy. Three Ways into Water describes: READ MORE I've thrust my head through sky's skin, can see how my brain is dazzled by stars' wheels and zigzags, spelling delight, which is the opposite of pain. Difficult material rendered in unflinchingly challenging imagery, but these poems are also delightful, finding humour and pleasure where they can, as in Late Blackberries, where the final sugar-rush is relished, even if the crop's first sweetness has been sacrificed. Gwyneth Lewis: Difficult material rendered in unflinchingly challenging imagery In the tradition of Faber's Poetry Introduction or Carcanet's New Poetries series, Beginnings Over and Over (Dedalus, €12.50), edited by Leeanne Quinn, features a selection of emerging Irish poets whose work has been published in poetry journals or performed in other ways, but who have yet to publish a first collection. In this case, four poets – Mai Ishikawa, Róisín Leggett Bohan, Emer Lyons and Cal O'Reilly – are represented by a generous selection of about a dozen poems each, enough for a taster but not so many as to compromise any collections likely to follow. Such introductory anthologies are usually a good way to sample the poetry zeitgeist (if there is one), and this volume indicates that perennial themes of grief, bodies, dreams and cats still abide, while room is made for more contemporary concerns of gender transition, Kintsugi and films such as Top Gun and God's Own Country. A capacious volume with a range of sparky, beguiling poem titles (And I had bought new underwear from Penneys; The Migration of Theta Waves; I Photocopy Vaginas), the four highlighted poets demonstrate energy and engagement, although the 'stylistic innovation' promised by the brief introduction seems an overclaim. Standout moments include Leggett Bohan's The Cryptographer, which opens: 'We carried the summer / in our mouths'); Ishikawa's wonderful Faceless, and Lyons's Mouse/Mice. Perhaps the most assured poet is O'Reilly, whose poems declare a formal maturity and confidence in strikingly bold but graceful imagery. A couple of list poems here nicely handle momentum and detail, and metaphor (that trickiest of poetic strategies) is managed elegantly, as in the final phrases of Naming: … the first time you say my name / a feeling / fills my chest / like a room I can stand in /so bright / I don't need to look past it The first lines of the opening poem of Jennifer Horgan's Care (Doire Press, €16), declare its uncompromising approach. It's Just a Dream I Had begins: 'She's slumped in a bath. I'm drawn to the grey hair inside / her thighs, the dough-layered stomach, belonging to mothers'. The theme of Women's Bodies, often constrained and compromised by social context, though always observed with care and fidelity, is to the forefront. From the small boxes to which people (especially women and the marginalised) are confined, these poems declare their resistance, rebuke and avowal. 'Don't see the faces of those / who suffered hope' may refer specifically to a lorry of dead, trafficked migrants in the poem For the 39, but this is work that does see, and sees hard. Poems of urgent intention, driven by moral imperative, sometimes brush a little too closely against Keats's warning about readers hating poems with 'palpable designs' on them. If, in this collection, poems for the Tuam Babies and the Magdalene Laundries might seem somewhat familiar (if no less sincere) in their response to contemporary Ireland, other poems probing more personal experience are vivid and arresting. There seems little need for the somewhat workshop-ish poems that lean into the authority of established figures – those poems written 'after' Heaney, Plath, Atwood and Joyce. The book's strongest poems amply declare their own credentials: a curious eye, a kind heart and an eye-catching turn of phrase, as in the lovely Sound of Cars Beyond Our Garden, or Your House Fell to Pieces, a poem written in middle age about a childhood home, which finishes: Knowing all the effort you made, makes life majestic and terrifying. Like the Cliffs of Moher are outside my front door, waiting for it to open. Peter McDonald, whose latest collection is One Little Room With both the title and the Gwen John cover painting seeming to promise a kind of gauzy, dusky domesticity, the language of Peter McDonald's One Litte Room (Carcanet, £11.99) comes as a surprise. This collection's various backward glances are elegiac but also deceptively down-to-earth. In the end of Travels, for example, the heartbreaking pathos of dementia is rendered with gentle restraint, as a son visits his mother: … Did I ever have a house? Her questions were scared and delirious: Was I good? And did I have a husband? I looked at her with his face, and I said Yes. A theme of containment runs throughout, with matchboxes, storage boxes, coffins and even Harry Houdini featuring. Seventeen four-line poems punctuate the collection, the best of which are small boxes of concision and elusiveness, as what's described opens and closes on the past, as in The Pillow: I turn and talk to you before I sleep, talk to you in my head, for you're not here; but you listen, and you smile, until you slip from the pillow into all that came before. A poem is also a kind of intricately carved box, and the poems here seem to relish the play of confinement and release. McDonald is a loyal formalist: in Incident, the poem's exploded sonnet form, with disrupted rhyme scheme and disguised 14 lines, is scarcely noticeable but is there nonetheless, subtly supporting and amplifying subject matter. If this, McDonald's eighth collection, shows a vulnerability in mining the past and registering losses, his familiar, public-facing side is also in evidence. Centenary 1921-2021 draws one man's life against a backdrop of political and social change in Northern Ireland, ('you and the new country are of an age'), climbing out of strident partisan allegiance to observe: ' ... everything comes and goes / where people live; and that is history'.
The Independent
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Book of a lifetime: Collected Poems 1937-1966 by Martin Bell
The only book Martin Bell published in his lifetime was his Collected Poems, a hardback between mustard-coloured paper covers with a wood engraving showing a contemplative puritan poet. There was nothing else until 10 years after his death when, in 1988, Bloodaxe published the Complete Poems, edited by Peter Porter. It is unusual to publish nothing but your Collected Poems. Your productive life appears to be over the moment it begins: the rest is, by implication, a kind of coda. So it was in some ways, but not all. I met Bell in 1969, two years after his annus mirabilis, as a first-year art student at Leeds where he ran a weekly poetry group that I attended. He had been a Gregory Fellow at the university, awarded in 1967. He would have left London just as his book was appearing to vanish into his hated North. 'A shilling life will give you all the facts,' wrote WH Auden in his poem 'Who's Who'. Bell has never had a shilling life but the poems remain original and full of energy. Al Alvarez said he wrote 'a rather bitter, tensely colloquial verse based, it seems, on a radical dislike for both himself and pretty much everything else', but that does him no justice at all. The poems glitter with laughter and desire. His 'Ode to Groucho' begins with an invocation whose first two lines are, 'Pindarick, a great gorblimey Ode/ Soaring on buzzard wings, ornate' and continues in the same high spirits, through 'a back-cloth rattled by oom-pah' into a celebration of the anarchic. There is, it is true, self-hatred and self-mockery but they are part of a comedy that comprises terrors left over from the war and mischief aimed at the controllers of life: headmasters, mayors, all the snobbishly high-minded. Italian opera was his love. The great tragic aria combined with the buffoonery of below stairs was his natural métier. That strange unwritten shilling life should tell how he is represented in Philip Larkin's The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse by a single poem, a translation, the only translation in the book. It is 'Winter Coming On', subtitled 'A caricature from Laforgue'. It is a magnificent poem in which Bell turns Jules Laforgue into a heartbreakingly yearning opera buffa. Together with Larkin's own 'The Whitsun Weddings' it is one of the two great poems of post-war England, not written from Larkin's train but by a demob from the platform, the B&B and the park bench. I always return to him. To him and Eliot. There hasn't been anyone like Bell since.
