Baddie Ben - and living up to Jake

It was bound to be the role for him, but now Variety has confirmed that Ben Kingsley is to play the part of the evil Vizier 'Nizam, who plots to kill his brother King Shahrman and blame it on Prince Dastan so he can take the throne.' One trusts that Nizam's dastardly plot comes to a sticky end, but not until Prince Dastan has proven his credentials as a scimitar-wielding, princess-wooing, minaret-leaping hero with sky-blue eyes and an unwaxed chest.


Meanwhile, it looks like Nailed is ploughing on. According to posters on IMDb, today there is filming going on at the State House in Columbia, while yesterday there was film action at the 'corner of Ott and Duncan.'


Jake was better

We've been talking about the progression of Jake Gyllenhaal's career until now, when he is in a position where younger actors are beginning to view him as a role model. Jake is (has been and will be), of course, major competition for actors of his age, such as Kieran Culkin, who was another of the actors with promise who took to the London stage with This Is Our Youth. His experience was not the same as Jake's.


'Culkin, for his part, wanted to be told where he was going wrong. He was desperate to be directed, corrected and affirmed. When he came to London as part of the third imported cast in Kenneth Lonergan's hit play, This Is Our Youth, he was completely thrown when the director went back to New York when it opened and left them alone.'


'Lonergan was going to come, but couldn't. There was nobody to talk him through it. He was convinced they were no good until the last couple of weeks, and absolutely sure he was never as good as Jake Gyllenhaal, who played the same part in the first cast, because he would ask people who had seen both versions and they'd say it straight out: yep, Jake was better. "They didn't feel they needed to lie," he says. "But I would ask, so I had it coming."'


'He also found the process of performance so exhausting that by the time they were a few weeks into the run, he would get out of bed when he needed to go to the theatre and go home to bed as soon as he was finished. He was sleeping incredible hours. "And when I got home, he says, "I slept for, like, a week."'


'Perhaps because of This Is Our Youth, he and Jake Gyllenhaal are often lumped together in magazine articles that dub them the new Holden Caulfields, the current incarnations of that hardy perennial, the disaffected boy at large in a skewed world. Steers has acknowledged Salinger's anti-hero as an inspiration for Igby, so this is probably inevitable. It also seemed pretty cool at first, Culkin says. But now that he's read the same argument about 20 times, it really doesn't seem cool at all. "The whole Holden Caulfield thing is totally overdone," he says wearily.'


Includes pictures from IHJ and Jakegyllenhaal.org.