Latest news with #TomBuchanan
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Stephen Fry Knows He's Become a Middle-Aged Cliché
By email, the actor and prolific writer (three memoirs!) apologized, sort of, for outgrowing D.H. Lawrence. SCOTT HELLER Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Jo, the crossing sweeper in 'Bleak House,' is the character who has the most powerful effect on me whenever I return to that peerless book. (Incidentally, Miriam Margolyes's reading of the audiobook is one of the wonders of the age.) Jo is a minor character really, not a hero, but he literally sweeps across the different worlds of the novel. And Dickens's authorial voice denouncing the society that let him die is a masterpiece of fury and despair. Your favorite antihero or villain? Tom Buchanan in 'The Great Gatsby' stands out. There are so many Tom Buchanans in the world now. Running it. Or — to change a letter — ruining it. In 2021, the Times described you as an 'avuncular public intellectual.' How do you feel about that label? Oh my lordy lord. Avuncular gives me great pleasure. But I disavow 'intellectual,' just as I disavow 'artist' (not that quite so many call me that). I am, I think, an entertainer, impure and simple. But I love the company of real intellectuals. When were you first exposed to Greek mythology? At prep school, which in Britain means aged 7 to 13. I instantly fell in love with the juice, energy and fierce delight of them. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
South China Morning Post
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Another great Gatsby, Jay's sister Greta, has a murder to solve in The Gatsby Gambit
If you polled 100 people about who is the most awful among the awful people in The Great Gatsby, I bet 99 of them would answer 'that louse Tom Buchanan'. In the new book The Gatsby Gambit, Buchanan finally gets what's coming to him. Advertisement Daisy Buchanan's loathsome husband is murdered early on in Claire Anderson-Wheeler's mystery novel that is timed to capitalise on the centenary of The Great Gatsby, which fell on April 10, 2025. North Dakotan-turned-dreamy-poor-little-rich-boy Jay Gatsby is around in The Gatsby Gambit, but the new book's protagonist is his hitherto unknown sister, Greta. Her name, you'll note, is an anagram of 'Great' and, between her wit and her insightful suspicion of her brother's dissolute pals, the character is indeed another great Gatsby. With F. Scott Fitzgerald's timeless characters now in the public domain, we are getting lots of fresh takes on them, including several graphic novel versions, a book called Nick that puts The Great Gatsby's narrator Nick Carraway at its centre, and a comic book that pits Jay Gatsby against Godzilla in Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre. Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan and Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker in a still from The Great Gatsby (2013). Photo: Warner Bros Anderson-Wheeler isn't the stylist that Fitzgerald was – not many are – but she understands his characters. That understanding informs The Gatsby Gambit, which smartly recognises that star-crossed lovers Jay and Daisy were never meant to be, even with Tom conveniently out of the picture. Advertisement Anderson-Wheeler also knows that happiness may never be on the cards for any of these characters, despite their wealth and beauty.
