So happy to be nominated for best feature writer at this year’s BSME awards. Mostly so I can share some features from the past year… like turning ChatGPT into my life coach for a month (4,000 words of me getting very sad) and a piece on horror’s apparent renaissance (4,000 words of me getting a little scared). Thank you as ever to @teovandenbroeke and @mcollface , and the (also nominated!) art team @laura5heppard and @geridempsey for making the words always look so nice.
For our April digital cover, I profiled Regé-Jean Page on a very rainy Sunday evening in Croydon. We had a diverting chat about: life post-Bridgerton, rom-coms, and LA sunsets.
“I hadn’t known quite what to expect from Page. I thought, like many a leading man thrust into the Hollywood glare, he might be a little self-serious. But he’s good humoured, willing to go high (he mentions ‘Brechtian alienation’ in the first six minutes of our conversation) and low (he namechecks the Mulan song, ‘A Girl Worth Fighting For’, as a clarifying call-to-action).”
Editor-in-chief @teovandenbroeke
Photographer @ch.ebenezer_
Stylist @crystallecox
Art Director @grenadinedempsey
Senior Designer @laura5heppard
Style Director @zakmaoui
Entertainment Editor (Special Projects) @olivia__blair@nicolafahey
Picture Production Editor @gemmalucia_shootproducer
Picture Editor @_abiihollister
Culture Editor @hennnners
Barber @chris7_okonta
Grooming @carlosferraz_
Manicurist @sabrinagayle__
Set Designer @lottienot
Stylist assistant @ashleyjhubbard
Tailor @frankieblesss
I interviewed many great people this year but I loved speaking to Chantal Joffe — whose excellent show is on now until January at @victoriamirogallery — about Venice, family photo albums, and the faultiness of memory. Good reflections for Christmas Eve. Full piece in the new issue.
“When my daughter left home, I remembered me leaving home. And these are all pretty obvious things, but you really live them, and that’s the hard thing about life,” Joffe says, in a tone that is both accepting and more than a little wistful. “You have to live all the things, like that Joni Mitchell song ‘Both Sides Now, and that’s really strange. And then I want to say to my mum, ‘Oh I see how hard that was, but she’s not here to say that to.”
Very happy to say I’m now culture editor at Esquire. I’ll be overseeing all our cultural coverage and editing a new section in the magazine, which is called Life. (Also please tell me where I can buy a new cap.)
