Actors have been saying unscripted things again. Riz Ahmed is the star of a new film version of Hamlet directed by Aneil Karia and set among the South Asian community in contemporary London. He told the BBC at the weekend that the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy is not actually about contemplating suicide at all, but about ‘resistance’. He adds that Hamlet has been ‘deradicalised’ in ‘recent years’.

We expect performers who have superb performing skills to be intelligent and insightful. But this is a mistake

Elsewhere, Olivia Colman has been promoting her role in another new film Jimpa, the everyday story of introducing her ‘non-binary’ daughter to gay grandad Jimpa, telling Them magazine, ‘I’ve never felt massively feminine in my being female. I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man’. As Julie Burchill observed here yesterday, this was both rambling and exquisitely daft.

Not to be outdone, the actress who plays her daughter in Jimpa, a silly ‘non-binary’ nepo-nobody called Aud Mason-Hyde (whose mum and dad just happen to have edited the film) has dropped a more-in-sorrow response to John Lithgow, the actor who plays Jimpa, for the mortal sin of taking the role of Dumbledore in HBO’s big new Harry Potter TV adaptation. J.K. Rowling – the most successful, popular and beloved author in the world – happens to get up the noses of the delusional by standing up for women’s rights. Very bad form.

‘I consistently felt that he was a very loving and a very guiding........

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