As a teenager, the actor landed her first ever job in the blockbuster film series. The experience was fun – but also led to horrendous online abuse. Now she’s back, playing a tough and surprising matriarch in the Regency smash hit

Some actors might have been a little put out to audition for the role of the beautiful young romantic lead, and instead be cast as her mother, but not Katie Leung. “Absolutely not,” she says with a laugh. “I look young for my age – as most people in the west think Asians do – but I felt really seen to finally get to play the role of a mother.” She is a mother, she points out, and anyway, the role of Lady Araminta Gun, the steely aristo who is about to rock the new series of Netflix’s Regency behemoth Bridgerton, is so delicious, who could be insulted?

Araminta, widowed, has seen off two husbands, and now she’s trying to marry off her two teenage daughters, ideally to a Bridgerton, while keeping her stepdaughter, Sophie, in her place – as a Cinderella-style servant for the family. “The showrunners reassured me that it wasn’t going to be the archetypal evil stepmother role,” says Leung. “They wanted to find the humanity in Araminta. They wanted to ensure I knew her background, her struggles, why she makes these decisions, and why she’s so formidable.”

Engaging in creativity can reduce depression, improve immunity and delay ageing – all while you’re having fun

For some reason, we have collectively agreed that new year is the time to reinvent ourselves. The problem, for many people, is that we’ve tried all the usual health kicks – running, yoga, meditation, the latest diets – even if we haven’t really enjoyed them, in a bid to improve our minds and bodies. But have any of us given as much thought to creativity? Allow me to suggest that this year be a time to embrace the arts.

Ever since our Paleolithic ancestors began painting caves, carving figurines, dancing and singing, engaging in the arts has been interwoven with health and healing. Look through the early writings of every major medical tradition around the world and you find the arts. What is much newer – and rapidly accelerating over the past two decades – is a blossoming scientific evidence-base identifying and quantifying exactly what the health benefits of the arts are.

Chalamet’s nogoodnik ping-pong hustler character is the latest in cinema’s rich history of protagonists with shabby morals. So why the backlash?

In the new hit movie Marty Supreme, the story is pushed forward by how lead character Marty Mauser keeps making messes then, rather than cleaning them up, manages to expand their scope beyond reason. Marty is attempting to prove himself as the world’s greatest table-tennis champion, to escape his meagre mid-century New York City circumstances and achieve a dream he’s locked on to, seemingly more out of desire to achieve it than a particular love for the sport.

And just as he’s presumably blown up some natural athleticism into a monomaniacal quest, all of Marty’s misdeeds across the film escalate. He cajoles, then lies. He quickly turns a pushy request to borrow money into petty theft, which then becomes armed robbery. At one point, a little ping-pong hustle at a New Jersey bowling alley literally blows up into a gas-station fire. Marty will not accept anything less than ultimate victory, which means he will especially not accept responsibility for his actions. And we, in the audience, are invited to like him anyway, at least in part because he is played by Timothée Chalamet.

A brilliant hundred against an elite attack on a wearing pitch shows this England team can survive and evolve

Et in dystopia ego. In the midst of death, we are in life. On a throbbingly hot deep blue afternoon in Sydney, as this ghost ship of an England Ashes tour creaked towards its final dock, the fourth day of the fifth Test produced an unexpected late plot twist. Something good happened.

Jacob Bethell batted for six hours from mid-morning to close of play and scored a hundred of rare beauty at the SCG. It was an easy, crisp kind of beauty too, all classical lines and symmetry, an innings of layers and gears, of comforting rhythms, shot through with moments of balletic power.

Behind its lavish ‘nun-core’ aesthetic, the Spanish star’s hit album pushes us to think beyond good and evil – to see that we contain multitudes

I went into Lux primed not to like it. Not because I doubt Rosalía’s virtuosic talents or her intense intellectual curiosity, but because the album’s promotional campaign had already done too much work on my nerves. The rollout was relentless: thirsty reels teasing the album on social media, fashion-forward mysticism, even bringing Madrid’s city centre to a halt – everything about it felt designed to send the message that this is less a set of songs than a global event demanding reverence.

Over the past decade, Rosalía has become Spain’s biggest pop export, and Lux appears to inaugurate her imperial phase. The album debuted at No 1 in five countries, was voted the Guardian’s album of the year, broke streaming records on Spotify, and reached No 4 in the US and UK charts, where non-anglophone pop rarely thrives. Multilingual and stylistically expansive, Lux is saturated with Catholic iconography, with lyrics in no fewer than 13 languages, and circling themes of transcendence, suffering and grace.

Maga media used to hate US foreign intervention – now some are cheering it on

“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Donald Trump said after declaring victory on 6 November 2024. It wasn’t his first pledge to disengage the US from foreign conflicts, and Trump’s top allies in conservative media and the “Make America Great Again” (Maga) movement have all rallied to his pledge to “put America first”.

Now that the US president seems to have broken his pledge by launching an invasion of Venezuela, not to mention threatening future actions against Cuba and Colombia and potentially Greenland, some have reasonably wondered whether Trump’s supporters in Maga media would hammer him for that inconsistency.

French, German and Polish foreign ministers to meet amid escalating threats to seize part of Danish kingdom

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France has said it is working with allies on how to react if the US were to invade Greenland, amid mounting tension over Donald Trump’s escalating threats to take over the Arctic territory.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said the subject would be discussed at a meeting with the German and Polish foreign ministers on Wednesday.

Deal would give US president power to sell up to $3bn-worth of crude stranded in tankers and storage facilities

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Global oil prices have fallen by more than 1% after Donald Trump said Venezuela would hand over 30m to 50m barrels of the country’s blockaded crude to the US.

The deal would give the US president the power to sell up to $3bn (£2.2bn) worth of Venezuelan crude stranded in tankers and storage facilities into an already oversupplied global market.

Starmer said UK willing to put peace-keeping troops on the ground in Ukraine, but Kemi Badenoch says PM’s plans lack detail

Farage is now talking about London, where council elections are taking place.

He says that Sadiq Khan has said he will run for a fourth term as mayor.

Schools closed and travel disrupted with Storm Goretti forecast to bring as much as 20cm of snow

About 400 homes in the north of Scotland are without power as the region struggles with Arctic weather conditions that have disrupted travel and closed schools across the UK over the past three days.

After Aberdeenshire council declared a major incident on Tuesday, and a local MP called for the military to be brought in to help with relief efforts, the first minister, John Swinney, said he would be happy to forward a request to the UK government should regional partners demand it.