Is Marina Wrong About Hollywood A-Listers?

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1:06Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment, questions and answers edition. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm very, very well. Some lovely questions this week. I'm going to start with some any other business. Jen O 'Byrne has written in. Do you remember last week we talked about what would be the best entertainment job in the world? And it was suggested that being an unfamous member of Coldplay would be the best job in the world because you get all the money, all the adrenaline, but you can walk down the street. And Jen says, I can confirm that being an unfamous member of Coldplay is the best job in the world.

1:37I once looked after the whole team for an event. I went to collect one of the band who had arrived by Tube. I asked him why he didn't get dropped off by car like the others. He said, this is faster and no one knows me or cares. When our set is done, I'm going to sit in the regular seats of my family, watch the rest of the show and no one will recognise me. I said, that sounds effing great if I'm honest. And he said, it is. It's the best. There you go. It's actually been declared the best by an anonymous member of Coldplay. Talking of shows at Wembley, Matthew Bethel has written in and said, sorry if I'm going out of my mind, but did I see Marina twice on the big screen at the Oasis concert on Wembley on Sunday night in a bucket hat?

2:13You know what? You didn't. No, I was not on the Jumbotron at Coldplay because I didn't go. I would have liked to have gone. Sorry, not Coldplay, Oasis. I would have liked to have gone, but I didn't go. I'm told like literally every single journalist in the whole of London had a free ticket to it. But no, I didn't go and it wasn't me in the bucket hat. People seem to have loved it, don't they? People have gone crazy for that whole thing. And again, that lovely thing of just everyone going out and seeing something real, real people in a real place. Yes. Do you know what? I assumed that was you. Otherwise, I wouldn't have asked the question.

2:43That was a really disappointing answer. No, I'm sorry. Sorry, Matthew. I'm very sorry it wasn't me. Oh, OK, here we go. This question's from Robert Berry. Who would be on your director, Mount Rushmore? For me, it would be Wes Anderson, Tim Burton, Ari Aster and Brad Bird. It's a hell of a question, this. I took it to mean, in the same way that it's the four sort of great early presidents are on there, or, you know, the people who've done remarkable things, I thought it had to be four massive names. I didn't just choose, Robert, my four favourite directors. I didn't think that was appropriate. It's one of the few things where, you know, if you're asked who's on the writers, Mount Rushmore or actors Mount Rushmore.

3:23The director's one is very, very hard not to pick four men. It's almost impossible, in fact, if you're looking at the whole history of Hollywood and not pick four men. And I think it's one of the few remaining industries where that's the case. So Hollywood, we'll think about that. I have got four names. I'm going to go for Alfred Hitchcock. You sort of have to, right? Billy Wilder. I was going to put him. I've gone for. I was thinking of him. Okay. I've gone for Spielberg. You have to. Sort of Spielberg or Scorsese, but I just think, and I love Scorsese, but Spielberg just because of what he means to people and what he's given to our culture.

3:58And my fourth one is Rob Reiner, only because I think he had the greatest run of movies that anyone's ever made with Spinal Tap and When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men and Stand By Me and Misery. You think, come on. Unbelievable. Rob Reiner is unbelievable. And I think he is the one name on there that wouldn't ordinarily be put on that Mount Rushmore. But I think we need to have a little rethink about Rob Reiner and his career because he does comedies. I think sometimes people slightly, I mean, I know Billy Wilder did as well. I mean, it's all white men. And, you know, I haven't gone outside Hollywood.

4:27I haven't gone for Kurosawa or something like that. I just, I felt I had, I just thought in the spirit of the original Mount Rushmore, I would go with just four behemoths. I'm aware you have not had any time to think about this at all. But if you were to have the four great directors. I would have had Hitchcock. I would have had Billy Wilder. I would have had Spielberg. And I would have had to have had Scorsese. That's a hell of a snub to Rob Reiner. I know, but I know. It is interesting. Because if you did like the four, if you had like literature, Jane Austen would be there, Agatha Christie would be there.

5:01I mean, you know, acting. But directing is so male and white. And it still is. Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? It remains that way completely. Which is why the acting categories remain split at the Oscars, as we've discussed before. because if they weren't, it would all be men nominated. I'm sorry to say. But I have to say... No matter how much they try and diversify the Academy, people would cleave to male nominations if it was just in the sort of humankind sense rather than... Actual in the humankind sense. Well, you know what I mean, in the word that describes both men and women in the acting profession.

5:33Yes, I understand. But, Robert, I have to say I love the format of the question, the director of Mount Rushmore, and if anyone wants to get a question on this show, Mount Rushmore of various other entertainment things... I've been to Mount Rushmore. Have you? Yeah. How was it? The sculptor, a guy called Borglum, the whole story of how he did it is really interesting. And it's something like 17 miles away from one of the other great, enormous landscape sculptures, which is still unfinished, which is Crazy Horse. They're about 17 miles from each other in South Dakota and it's absolutely amazing.

6:02And Crazy Horse is still being built and is the most enormous thing. Is it just a tourist attraction? The Native American chief came to a sculptor and said, I would like the white man to see, I think he said the red man has heroes too. This sculpt is so enormous. It's a crazy horse pointing forward. I think you could put about 400 people on the arm. It's still being built and the children have taken it over and then the grandchildren have taken it over. Because we spent too long at crazy horse, I was thinking, oh, we've missed sunset at Mount Rushmore. This is so annoying. But actually what happened was that we went and sat in this auditorium and they have this incredibly moving ceremony where they say, are there any veterans in the audience?

6:39Once the sun set they retire the flag every night all of these veterans from different conflicts came down the steps the whole thing was really amazing and so just those 17 miles apart these two very very different parts of american cultural history anyway i really recommend if you're in south dakota you have to do both those things we have to remember we're rest as entertainment sorry but it's like we can add a little bit of value but anyway i love the question robert thank you i'm happy to do more mount rushmore's of marina i have a question uh for you from alan who has who's not provided us a surname or has not provided us with a first name, one or the other.

7:13Alan says, thank you so much for the podcast. I can't tell you how much I look forward to you joining me for my breakfast every Tuesday and Thursday. Thank you, Alan. I have a question I'd love to hear your answer to, although I'm slightly trepidatious as to Marina's response. Okay. What do you think of the rise of Dungeons & Dragons as an entertainment product? The podcasts about the game are enormous and critical role is something of a cultural behemoth. Oh, I've said behemoth quite a lot in this episode. Would it finally break into the mainstream? I don't know why you're worried about my answer because Dungeons & Dragons is amazing.

7:40It's owned by Hasbro, which is more than 100 years old as a toy or games company, but it's got a subdivision which are called Wizards of the Coast. The rest of Hasbro is not doing as well. Wizards of the Coast, revenues grew 70 % last year. I think they made almost 1.5 billion. They look after Dungeons & Dragons. They also have Magic the Gathering and things like that. There's lots of reasons it has a kind of cultural relevance. I always think when things get a cultural relevance, it can't just be because a niche fandom, however engaged, and however many millions are playing it. Things like The Stranger Things, and that in itself is derivative of, at the start of E.T., of which the whole look and those early Spielberg films, the whole look and the whole kind of vibe of Stranger Things is very much inspired by those.

8:23But Critical Role, who are, as you say, they are huge. They're like a group of friends and professional voice actors. They play a live stream game of it. It's enormous. When they were going to do a live version of the game, they sold out Wembley and Madison Square Gardens in something like six minutes. Amazon has begun animating old episodes and they're in four seasons in. Critical Role actually have their own game, which is called Daggerheart. But that in itself indicates the sort of health of all of this because Daggerheart is becoming huge and therefore, you know, it's not just like a space that's really, really big, but it's basically Dungeons and Dragons.

8:56Lots of people who worked at Wizards of the Coast now have helped develop this for Critical Role. Live streaming, Twitch, all of those things have obviously helped. I mean, obviously in the 80s, it was kind of hamstrung by that whole moral panic thing, which if audiences don't know, there was a big panic about Dungeons & Dragons that it was satanic in the 80s. And it started, I think, in 79. It was a very sad story about a student who was a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons who vanished from their university dorm. And then actually they were later found sort of hiding in a tunnel. It was some kind of awful self-harm episode.

9:26And then I'm afraid this person eventually ended up taking their own life and another suicide. The mother thought it had something to do with Dungeons & Dragons. and it became this weird rumour that if your character died, you know, then you had to kill yourself, which was not the case at all. And it was one of those bizarre moral panics that basically dissolved because it was complete nonsense and nothing happened. I mean, when you think of the things you've got to worry about nowadays, this was a very tame thing. And Dungeons & Dragons is very sort of, I don't know, it's inclusive. It's a huge, huge thing.

9:55I don't know, it's the biggest game in the world, I guess, tabletop game, as it were. And you can make anything of it. You know, if you've ever played it, and I have played it many times, you can... Have you? Yes. But you're creating worlds yourself. So it's a... I mean, it's... Yeah, it's an incredible game. And if people don't know it, there are sort of various, you know, there are runes and laws. But, you know, you roll dice and, you know, huge amounts of luck involved. And it's a story, but the story can go off into lots of different places. You can take it where you want to. You can take it where you want to.

10:26And again, we talk about it a lot. it is a reaction against the speed of our culture these are my sons in a dungeons and dragons game that goes on for like two years or something it's it's like a it's like a saga but it's a group of people all hanging out with each other all chatting you don't know what's going to happen you know if you love the mythology and all that sort of you know there's there's there's lots to hang on to there's lots of kind of at heart it's a just a bunch of people hanging out with each other doing something absolutely nuts that the movie um whatever it's called honor amongst thieves Yeah, I enjoyed the movie.

10:59Yeah, but it didn't do anything. It didn't do very well at all. And it's interesting because Hasbro obviously have tried to monetize lots and lots of their properties into kind of cinematic worlds. And it's interesting that the things that have taken off are stuff like Critical Role and the live streams and all of those things. It's just that's the right. They don't have ownership of that, though. That's the trouble for them is that they can't own that. Whereas obviously you can own and license your rights to have movies made. You really couldn't have explained this to someone, honestly, even 15 years ago, that you could sell out Wembley to watch people play a live version of it.

11:33None of these things could be explained. I mean, obviously, you know, podcasters selling out shows could also not have been explained. But it's interesting. I mean, I'm a big fan of Dungeons and Dragons and I love what's happened to it. I think it's a wonderful game and I think it has a wonderful place in our culture. I think it speaks to where we're going as well, which is human connection in entertainment. Shall we go to some adverts? Yes, let's do that.

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12:45Fulham may not be up for best performance in a leading role, but I'll prepare an acceptance speech, you know, just in case. Upgrade today to take the best seat in the house. All the highs, lows and controversial in-betweens unfolding live chapter by chaotic chapter. Search Sky Sports Premier League or go to sky.com. Terms apply. This episode includes a segment from our sponsor, TUI, the holiday experts who understand that sometimes your next big trip starts with your latest watch list. Yes, this is the location effect where we look at how film and TV locations don't just set the scene, they can set your holiday itinerary too.

13:21Sometimes what starts as set design ends up as a travel plan. Give me some examples, Richard, of dream locations. England and I are terrible. Anything we watch, if it's somewhere beautiful, say let's go there on holiday. If someone has a nice house, we just go, should we live there? And if anyone's a nice one holiday, we're immediately online looking it up. I think the absolute perfect example of it is the White Lotus. So the White Lotus, firstly, they go to amazing resorts, Sicily or Thailand, wherever they might be. And people are being murdered. Terrible stuff is happening. But you spend the whole time just going, we have to go there on holiday.

13:57Oh, my God, this looks amazing. You know, in between sort of gunfire and all sorts of terrible things happening, you're like, wow, this place. The best ever depiction of Italy. is Ripley, the amazing Netflix series. And it's shot so beautifully. And, you know, always sort of walking up sort of cliffside walkways and under arches and things like that. It's impossible to watch those shows and not immediately think we have to book a holiday. It's like, if you think about the money that is spent on videos for holiday companies, and suddenly you've got this movie, which has been 40, 50 million dollars, making somewhere look absolutely incredible.

14:37It'd be weird not to watch these things and not immediately think I have to go on a holiday there. But Ripley as well, just the Amalfi Coast and Rome, when you watch Ripley, just absolutely make you salivate for a holiday. However, Richard, let's be a bit more prosaic because sometimes it is a tax break. So there are the great tax break countries. Morocco actually offers up to 30 % back in production rebates, which is why it will very gladly play anywhere for you that's where the coliseum was built uh for gladiator 2 um in the desert town of wazazate speaking of desert towns i think you and i have both been to the same place which is the place where the spaghetti westerns were shot which was not actually in the wild west when they became really popular things like the fistful of dollars for a few dollars more good bad and ugly it's actually in spain it's near almeria and have you We've just discovered that you and I have both been to that same town.

15:38Absolutely loved it. And that's literally going to the set of a movie because they've got all the old sets there. You can take amazing photographs. And yeah, it's in Almeria. So that is literally a movie set. That's not just the backdrop of, oh my God, look at these majestic mountains. That is the taverns, the bars, the shops of a Wild West town. And you can go there. I absolutely loved it. It's the greatest photo shoot location of all time. It's hilarious. I took only 937 pictures of Kieran in the Wild West there when we went. It was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Don't forget, with TUI, you don't just have to admire the wide shot.

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16:42welcome back everybody oh now richard you recommended murder by phone that great documentary about encro chat last week yeah and also so many people have come up to me in the street this week and said thank you for recommending it we loved it yes okay tessa o 'hanlon says my partner and i are loving murder by phone the anchor chat documentary that richard recommended we've been trying to cast people for the inevitable netflix series that will be on our screens mike pope could only be statham but we noticed that some detectives were blurred and others weren't surely the ncaa agents speaking openly are at high risk of being targeted even after five years yes i spoke to simon ford who's the exec producer of this show and again if you haven't said i'm not i won't give away spoilers on this but what he said was interesting about That's exactly the question you're asking, Tessa.

17:28So this show took them, yeah, years and years and years to make. The level of access they had to make the show was absolutely unprecedented. They're right in the heart of the National Crime Agency, which is a very, very secretive place. And, you know, the legal hoops they must have had to jump through, if you've watched it, the stuff they must have had to clear, you know, every single message, all that stuff, the legal hoops must have been almost unimaginable. So, yeah, a lot of the people speaking at this work at the NCA and various other agencies that are not, as you would say, public-facing.

17:57So they're not people who really should be showing their face. And the programme maker said, well, look, we gave them an absolute full gamut of how they were allowed to appear on screen, which is what you've seen, Tessa. So you can run from what they call full ID, which is just you, it's your name, it's what you look like, to full non-ID, which would be the complete blurring. And in between, and you'll have seen this one particular one, there are name changes and obscuring identities by disguises and makeup there's one great nca officer who essentially like wears glasses like a like a big wig and they're like these big side and you're like maybe that's what he looks like if by the way you are listening and it is what you look like then forgive me because it's a strong look i'll say that but certainly if you were looking to disguise yourself then he had every single version of a disguise you could possibly have and constant chatting to those people in advance of transmission as to you know do they want to change how they're shown you know has something operationally happened that means they have to be taken out of the documentary or obscured in a different way so right up to the sort of day of transmission making sure that every contributor to the program was um kept informed and but simon says look it's took a long time to make this thing it's a very very small team very very secretive team as it has to be because you know there are people whose identities can't be given away in this you know if you look at the people that they're locking up especially um but obviously some directors on the show did have to move on because you can't stay on this show for five years it's you know because it was in deep freeze for a long time because so many of the criminals involved in this documentary had so much money and spent so much money trying to stop the documentary going out trying to make the messages inadmissible in court which of course mean that In a Miscible on TV as well.

19:43And without those messages, you don't have a series. So it's one of those ones where Simon and his team and the whole channel absolutely held their nerve till the last possible moment. But yeah, every single person involved was kept informed all the way up to the last minute. And Mick Pope, who was the guy I spoke about last week, who's wonderful. Yes, Simon says he was an absolute joy. Rare to find such a compelling storyteller, even when he is telling you what he had for breakfast to check the mics, he said. And Mick Pope actually got in touch with us to say thank you for his mention. And he said, I did worry that my language might be a bit fruity, but I hope people would understand it in the context of the job that I do.

20:21He's a hard-bitten cop, Richard. Do you know what I'm not? Listen, you've got to see it. He doesn't come across as hard-bitten Mick Pope. I can see the Statham thing. I'm starting this tonight. I think you'll love it. But yeah, Statham as Pope and Mick Pope, not the Pope. No. thank you so much to Simon Ford for answering Tessa's question as well and thank you for making that great show and for holding your nerve for such a long time Adam Levy has a question for you Marina he said I've really enjoyed your quickfire A-lister segments although I do think that Marina is a bit too generous to some of the legacy A-listers who is the biggest A-lister of all time if we compare people when they were at their absolute peak of fame who is the absolute goat of the A-listers okay the idea that I'm too generous to legacy A-listers is something I've also been thinking about really but but i think it matters because what i do think about all the time is even though i might think someone like harris sickinson is amazing and he's probably going to become like maybe he'll be james bond maybe whatever go down a high street in the uk or main street usa to use this a generic term and say it shows people the pictures say do you know who this is and the answer is no and it's very interesting the reason i call them a legacy a list is because people actually know who they are and you could show people pictures all across America, all across the UK.

21:38But I have been preoccupied with this because I've also noticed this tendency in myself. So I found some... My answer's real. This is a real... It's interesting. Yeah, well, I'm going to come to the answer to the actual question in a minute. But more about you. No, so I had a look at some YouGov polling that they poll every quarter, really. The most recent polling for Q2 for 2025 is the most sort of famous actors, the most recognisable... Oh, do they do that? Yeah. That's fun. Okay, number one, Keanu Reeves, 98 % recognition amongst all adults in the UK. Have you started this list at number one?

22:13Yeah. No, I have. Okay. But it's interesting where it goes down to. Okay. Okay. So two, Morgan Freeman, three, Nicolas Cage. I mean, these are interesting, you see. Like more than Tom Cruise. Yeah. Well, Tom Cruise is at seven. Four, Johnny Depp. Five, Will Smith. Six, Leonardo DiCaprio. Eight, Marilyn Monroe. Interesting. We're going to come to all this. Nine, Brad Pitt. Ten, Jim Carrey. You see, I think this is interesting. There's something about that. When's the last Jim Carrey movie you saw? There's something about Legacy A-List that is a thing. But in terms of your actual question, I, by the way, think he was talking about Catherine Hepburn in terms of biggest movie stars, maybe.

22:49She's won the most Oscars, Catherine Hepburn. So there's lots of... She's the only person to win an Oscar and another actress got an Oscar for playing her. Yes, that's correct. Yeah, yeah, okay. You know, is it like Chaplin where just the most people in the world were watching their movies at any one time almost because it was such a... Catherine Hepburn, the most Oscars. Marilyn Monroe, maybe the most iconic. I think it's so interesting that she's still at number eight. That's crazy. Also, by the way, the only woman in the top 10. Yeah, Angelina Jolie is actually the other woman in the top 20 in that list.

23:19I didn't go all the way through them. For me, in some ways, it's a kind of platonic ideal of a movie star, Cary Grant. Yeah, sort of defined what movie star meant. Yeah, what movie star meant. So there are all these different metrics that I could use. Brando, maybe, Marlon Brando, maybe the most influential. you'll find most movie stars saying you know the most actor of all the actors yeah john wayne that kind of iconic americana thing right when america was the absolute center of the world for everything tom hanks who takes those very big sort of huge american roles that and samuel l jackson you know the movies that he has been in have grossed the most but he's just lots of that's because of wasn't she just overtaken by scarlett johansson yes because jurassic um rebirth has tipped her over De Niro for me in so many ways such an iconic actor but actually what I have to say is that I have to come back to Tom Cruise because and I thought about this really hard he's basically spent 40 years as a leading man and show me anybody else in the whole of movie history who did that and maybe that's part of our anti-aging techniques that we have nowadays or whatever we have but he spent 40 years as a leading man and I just don't think that is replicated anywhere in cinematic history.

24:30And for that reason, probably I would say that, although it feels odd because to a large extent, he comes in not exactly that line in the first episode of The Sopranos. Lately, I've been thinking I came in at the end of something, but he does to some extent. He is maybe the last movie star as well as perhaps being the biggest. Yeah, and seems to care about the industry and seems to have a view on it. So he's not just turning up for work. He's trying to add to the canon. Oh, and so self-conscious though, and thinking about the craft and thinking about what it means and thinking about theatrical and all those sorts of things.

25:01But as I say, there are many different ways we could talk about it. So I hope I talked through all of those little bits about who I think is why. You're going cruise. Yeah, I think that's not a bad call. Simply because of staying as a leading man for 40 years. Yeah, that's me. Okay, speaking of the iconic, Madame Tussauds, Ewan Davison says, I've just taken my son to Madame Tussauds for the first time and couldn't help but think about the behind the scenes of it all. How do they make the figures? And what happens to the figures if the celebrity gets cancelled? But I'm so obsessed with that of the people who were famous and are no longer famous and knowing the kind of the melting point.