‘Little Birds (Series)’ premieres tomorrow! As preparation for this big event, we’ve released an exclusive, very detailed package:
- the press pack made for journalists about the series (many thanks to @EastieOaks at Twitter)
- an interview, made by The Guardian
- two new promo photos
Check them out here:
Press pack (warning, contains spoilers!)
Television > (2020) Little Birds > Promotional Images
And the interview comes after the “More” tag!
Eight new promotional images has been uploaded to the ‘Little Birds (the series)’ Gallery:
Television > (2020) Little Birds > Promotional Images
Only 2 more days until the premiere!
A small snippet from a long, but not very informative article:
(Juno Temple) stars in the Sky Atlantic drama which is inspired by Anaïs Nin’s posthumously published 1979 collection of erotic short stories. The show is set in 1955 in Tangier and combines stories of love and desire with personal drama and political intrigue.
The heady mix had a lasting effect on Juno, who told The Sun’s TV Mag: “The stories awoke a sort of sexual fire in me I didn’t know I had, so to have something come into your life that was a pretty monumental read at 17 was pretty cool. I made a lot of notes in the script where I wanted actual direct quotes from Little Birds and I got a couple of them in there which was really exciting. Little Birds was a very poignant book for me at 17. I thought it was very cool to be a part of a woman exploring erotica in a way that was very brave and new for the time. I think that it’s quite rare to have such a collection of inspirational and complex and difficult roles and characters within a show.”
This a long and interesting interview, I suggest reading it! (I’ve added my own thoughts in brackets, using Italics.)
Juno Temple is speaking from her boyfriend’s house in LA, during lockdown. (Who could that be?) She’s sleep-deprived, having just moved house and is struggling to stay awake. You really wouldn’t know. The BAFTA-winning actress (you’ll recognise her from projects like ‘Atonement’, ‘Maleficent’ and ‘Dirty John’ – How come nobody ever talks about the movies where she’s the lead?) is upbeat and animated, having just put the finishing touches to a set of necklaces handcrafted for her girlfriends in lockdown (she wanted to study fashion before Hollywood beckoned). “It focuses my brain on something because I’ve got a brain that can be quite hard to manage” she explains of the jewellery-making. Her latest project, ‘Little Birds’ (out next month) sees her play American debutante Lucy Savage. Here, she explains what drew her to it…
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Here’s the second interview about ‘Little Birds (the series)’, this time from TheNews.com:
Juno Temple was 17 when she read Little Birds, a collection of erotic short stories by Anais Nin.
“They really affected me, and woke a sexual sort of fire that I didn’t know I had”,” notes the London-born star, who grew up in Somerset, and has been acting since she was a young teenager. Now, 14 years later, the quirky actress is playing the lead role – New York heiress Lucy Savage – in Sky Atlantic’s adaptation of Nin’s book.“I made a lot of notes of little things that I wanted to add into the script, trying to get actual one-liner direct quotes from Little Birds, and I got a couple of them in there, which was really exciting. That was cool that everyone was open to me doing that.”
Set in Tangier International Zone in 1955, the contemporary and daring tale follows Lucy as she heads to exotic climes for love and marriage.When her husband Hugo does not greet her in the way she expected, she finds herself on a journey to freedom and independence. We see Lucy discovering the surprising, diverse and degenerate world of Tangier, in Morocco, a country quivering on the cusp of independence. Along the way, she meets a myriad of characters including a scandalous dominatrix, Cherifa Lamor (Yumna Marwan) who particularly captures Lucy’s imagination.
(…)
The show was shot in Tarifa in Spain, as well in Manchester.While on location, did the cast have any particularly memorable cast nights out after filming had finished for the day?
“When wasn’t there one?!” Temple quickly replies, grinning.“Lots of dinners, lots of conversations, lots of laughter, lots of tears, lots of screaming, lots of hugging. It was great. It was also just an incredible learning experience. Which makes it extra cruel we have to be doing press for this via Zoom, because of a pandemic!” cries Temple. “It really would be nice to be together to do this for real.”
We’ve asked you if you want to read the many interviews collected about the upcoming Juno-series ‘Little Birds (Series)’. Despite the fact that most of these contain major spoilers, you were interested, so today they will be published one by one. First is an excerpt from The Daily Mail, with all the spoilers removed:
‘Little Birds’ is a period drama like no other (…) it focuses on a female beginning to understand her sexuality. (…) Loosely based on a collection of short stories by Anaïs Nin, the six-part series follows troubled American heiress Lucy Savage, who arrives in the febrile, bohemian Moroccan port of Tangier in 1955.
“In the grand scheme of Little Birds, she is the eyes, the ears, the nose and the tongue” says Juno Temple, the English actress who plays Lucy. “In episode one she arrives fresh off the boat to marry a young, handsome lord and hopefully start her own story. Tangier is this incredible mystery land for Lucy. Everything’s new and exciting to her. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole, and she has to try to be contained in a world in which it would be very easy to explode.”
‘There’s an Anaïs Nin quote we kept going back to – it was on the opening page of our scripts and it works for each character: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Everyone does blossom but their journeys are not always easy, and none of the characters blossom as you think they might. The show is about people learning to exist with who they are and free themselves from whatever kind of entrapment society has put them in.’
The character of Lucy is an amalgamation of several characters in Nin’s Little Birds collection (…).
“I first read Little Birds when I was 17 on a plane journey’ recalls Juno. ‘It was my introduction to this world. It really opened my eyes to a new way of writing and what real eroticism is. In a funny way, I think Lucy is on that same journey of discovery in this show. She has so many things going on inside her. It’s like a bubble bath where the bubbles keep coming up but she can’t let any of them out. She falls head first into this wondrous universe when she sees Cherifa (Yumna Marwan’s character) get up on a stage in a nightclub and act like she’s stronger than all the men in the room. It’s something Lucy learns from her.”
“Lucy starts off as this little bird of paradise who’s there to be looked at. By the end she has escaped her cage. The show is really about people getting to know themselves and be OK with it, even if they’re not who they necessarily thought they were or who they wanted to be.”
