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Post by rueful on Jan 6, 2012 14:34:48 GMT
Zen finally showing on Belgian TV ...FINALLY!! That is great news! Please let us know how it is received by the viewers!
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Post by vmaciv on Jan 6, 2012 17:51:00 GMT
They are replaying it in US as well. Love it
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Post by kissmekate on Jan 7, 2012 11:00:19 GMT
veerke, great news! Enjoy!
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Post by kygal on Jan 7, 2012 13:00:56 GMT
When will it be on in the US again? Have it on dvd and dvr but still...
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Post by GreenEyesToo on Jan 7, 2012 14:40:44 GMT
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Post by vmaciv on Jan 7, 2012 14:54:22 GMT
Yes I think it is called why we were stupid enough to cancel it in the 1st place. And how can we bring it back without looking like baffoons ] I think they are working on the baffoons part!!!!![/i]
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Post by peach on Jan 8, 2012 1:07:05 GMT
I've been reading about 90% of these posts, anyone catch the inside "joke" from the episode of "Ratking"? Morreti says to Zen, that the women in the squad room have a crush on him....that he reminds them of Joaquin Phoenix and he gives her that look......I read an interview of his about 2 years ago. He was on board a plane not too long after the film "Gladiator" was released. A flight attendant came to his seat and said to him the captain would like to see you...he followed her to the cockpit and the captain asked him for his autograph he of course signed it Rufus Sewell, the captain upon looking at said autograph was disappointed he said to him "you're not Joaquin Phoenix" when I heard that line in Zen i nearly fell off the chair. I'm about 100% sure that he might have had a hand in injecting that bit of esoteric trivia about himself. Kind of like an homage to his adoring Ruphiles. I got a chuckle out of that. If anyone has the DVD look for this scene. My local PBS station is re-broadcasting this series. Still too bad that it's only 3 eps long tho.
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Post by kissmekate on Jan 8, 2012 11:03:48 GMT
I'm about 100% sure that he might have had a hand in injecting that bit of esoteric trivia about himself. Kind of like an homage to his adoring Ruphiles. Yes, looks like he did get to sneak in some little jokes. There's also a "courtesan" reference in "Cabal" (the scene with Arianna putting on the dresses).
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Post by kygal on Jan 8, 2012 13:33:52 GMT
I hope there is an agenda somewhere.
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Post by peach on Jan 8, 2012 18:57:14 GMT
KMK, yes I do remember that scene as well.( chuckle). Quite alot of nice touches in this series, the attention to detail and the use of locales was such a treat. Loved this series very much and makes me hopeful that the powers that be try to find a way to make more. It received excellent reviews in the NY Times, People and local newspapers as well.
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Post by cricketgirl on Jan 8, 2012 21:21:21 GMT
Zen and the Art of Well-Groomed Policingby Jane Clifton in the Dominion Post (New Zealand) www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/television/6210940/Zen-and-the-art-of-well-groomed-policingOne of these days, television's trick of tarting up the ceaseless flow of crime-fighter heroes with ever more desperate novelty quirks - alcoholism, autism, psychology degrees, rudeness, Scandinavian-ness and so on will stop working. But meanwhile, the latest "novelty" item, Zen, UKTV, Sunday 8.30pm, is a quite genuinely quirky and entertaining addition to the repertoire. One of the reasons is that TV didn't add the novelty factor, but the best-selling author, the late Michael Dibden, came up with it, long before exotically located detective stories were fashionable. Aurelio Zen is a Venetian policeman, working in Rome, and that's not even his novelty. It's that he's determinedly honest won't even accept a free espresso from his local bar. He also lives with his mama, wears sensationally good suits and is ridiculously sexy. But even so, it's his by-the-book approach that remains the freshest aspect of this character. Viewers familiar with the Dibden books will be familiar with the peculiarities of the Italian justice system, of which the presence of the Mafia is just the beginning. Zen's rigorous honesty is viewed as verging on the anti-social, and certainly as showing off, in a police firmament where political considerations sometimes demand conclusions of convenience rather than a strictly evidence-based approach. Italy's pervasive inter-regional prejudice is a handy alibi for such behaviour. "He's Venetian," bemused colleagues shrug to one another with an air of resignation. Where we join Zen played by Rufus Sewell, whose chiselled bone structure and mischievous gaze make him ideal for the role is in one such quandary. A rich playboy type who, in a drug-induced fugue copped to a nasty murder, has now retracted his confession. With their fingers firmly crossed behind their backs and their eyes winking furiously, the powers-that-be have asked Zen to reinvestigate. Plainly they wish him to vindicate the original police work, but, equally plainly, he wants to be tiresome and find out the truth. What he doesn't realise is that a dying Mafioso assassin is stalking everyone responsible for putting him inside for a murder he didn't commit Zen among them. The moral contrariness of killing several people to avenge the fact that he did not kill someone else doesn't bear close examination but that's vendetta for you. You certainly don't regard the ledger as balanced if you have also killed several other people and not got caught for it. That's different. Also stalking Zen is Tania, an ostentatiously sultry new secretary at the Questura, who has tired of her husband and is understandably drawn to the enigmatic detective. The show is punctuated with their steamy cat-and-mouse encounters, in which she is most definitely the feline. There is a further novelty here: Zen falls into muddy underground tunnels, swims through flooded caves, scrambles through bushes, climbs up things, jumps off other things, gets thumped and hares around on a teeny Italian motor scooter, yet manages to stay supernaturally well-groomed. That's Italian suits for you. The overall tone of Zen is playful, without straying into knockabout comedy. The plot, which in this first episode included a locked-room murder mystery and a wild child living in the woods, is absolutely ridiculous like a low-tech James Bond yarn, only one in which all concerned take themselves less seriously. It's such a relief to find a modern crime show which places more weight on espresso and the correct shirt-cuff length than on DNA and blood-splatter patterns. Despite the crowded nature of the TV crime-fighter firmament, this show easily floats to the top end, and is an especial beacon of fun in the typically drossy silly-season fare. UKTV is showing the other two episodes for the next two Sundays, and word from Britain is that while the BBC sadly isn't making any more, another channel may pick up the franchise. Fingers crossed.
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Post by peach on Jan 8, 2012 21:36:33 GMT
cricketgirl, have my fingers and toes crossed for a re-emergence of this exceptional series. Yes he did fill out those suits quite well too I have to admit. Lovely article too thanks for posting.
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Post by peach on Jan 8, 2012 21:47:00 GMT
Rufus Sewell interview The rakish Rufus Sewell, stalking Rome’s mean streets in 'Zen', the detective drama of the year, talks fame and family, and explains why an empty diary isn't necessarily a bad thing
Rufus Sewell plays Roman detective and 'bloke' Aurelio Zen in BBC One's 'Zen' Photo: BBC/Left Bank Pictures/Franco Bellomo By Craig McLean12:00PM GMT 03 Jan 2011Comment A big Sunday night BBC detective drama for the new year, brought to you by the award-winning team behind Wallander? A chance to beam straight into the nation’s collective living room after years slogging away just beyond the limelight? Rufus Sewell, an actor often cheerfully unemployed and regularly underwhelmed by the job offers that come his way, still wasn’t sure. He had some questions. First of all, would Aurelio Zen, a policeman treading the mean streets of Rome, be a smoker? 'In the books Zen tries to give up,’ the actor says of the series of novels, by the late Irish author Michael Dibdin, upon which the three 90-minute dramas are based. 'And I don’t want to lose that detail – someone struggling with addiction. It’s fun,’ the 43 year-old adds with his customary roguish twinkle. After his own roaring twenties and thirties, the Englishman – now teetotal and nicotine-free – knows a thing or two about addiction. 'Cigarettes still look good to me,’ he sighs. 'That’s why it’s lovely playing Zen – I can live vicariously through myself! They’re herbal fags – and I specified very early on that I wanted honey-rose. I did want him to smoke, very much.’ Sewell was also fine with having to spend three months filming in Rome. He describes himself as not really having a home – he rents a flat in Los Angeles, where he lives with his girlfriend, but his son, Billy, eight, from his second marriage (both were short-lived), lives in London, so he’s used to shuttling back and forth. In any case, he’s no stranger to working abroad. At the time of our initial meeting, in August last year, he’d just finished the Hungarian shoot for Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth, broadcast on Channel 4 in November, in which he played a stonemason called, brilliantly, Tom Builder. RELATED ARTICLES Lark Rise to Candleford, review 10 Jan 2011 100 reasons to be excited about culture in 2011 03 Jan 2011 Sewell didn’t want Zen to be just another television cop. 'He should be kind of different. Not cheesy. From the first moment the producer mentioned the role to me, I just said: “as long as it’s funny. And as long as he’s not one of those corridor-striding w---ers”.’ What the actor means is he didn’t want to play a forceful, argy-bargy copper with a brusque manner and stains on his suit lapels. 'There are certain kinds of patterns that writers slip into and television producers slip into. The assumptions that are made unnecessarily just because people are used to it. Troubled past, blah blah blah, unconventional methods, blah blah blah. 'For me, I just wanted him to be completely believable as a bloke. You know? Not a man. A bloke,’ he says, sitting on a wall outside a villa on the outskirts of Rome, squinting into his lunchtime pasta in the August sunshine. 'And what I like about him in the books – not that I’ve read all of them – but also in the scripts, is that he gets it wrong a lot… His relationships are off and on and often in the sh--. And I think he’s more fun when he’s slightly behind the game, as opposed to ahead of it.’ The detective is a Venetian based in Rome. This makes him a perennial outsider, as does his scrupulous honesty. Dibdin, a long-time resident of Italy, wrote with scholarly knowledge of, and love for, the country. But his Italy is riddled with corruption; there are always shadows in the sunshine. Zen is forever weaving his way through political intrigue, police sleaze and general societal murk. Published in 1988, Dibdin’s first outing for Aurelio Zen – in which Zen investigates the kidnapping of a powerful industrialist – is being made into one of the Zen dramas by Left Bank Pictures, the producers responsible for English-language adaptations of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander novels, starring Kenneth Branagh in the Bafta-winning lead. How did Sewell go about creating the Roman version of a 'bloke’? 'I don’t worry about what that is, to tell you the truth. For me, I hope a certain Italian-ness just kind of seeps into me by osmosis. But the idea of trying to slip in Italian hand gestures would only really serve to make me look like an awkward English t--t.’ London-born Sewell insists, with no hint of a shadow on his darkly handsome features, that he has no thoughts about potentially becoming a household name in his mid-forties. All he cares about is being offered good roles. He admits to frustration at not being offered the parts he thinks he deserves, or could be good at. A comedy, say, or a decent drama that doesn’t pigeonhole him as the baddy – he’s done enough of those, in films such as A Knight’s Tale, The Legend of Zorro and The Holiday. 'I’m very, very happy with my recognition/lack of recognition in England in terms of my life. In terms of household name-age,’ he shrugs. 'The public’s memory is very short, luckily.’ He doubts that any success Zen has – and securing a prime-time slot on BBC One on the first Sunday of the new year is already something of a coup – will give him any leverage or clout. But what about the other recent television sleuth hit, Sherlock Holmes? That’s done wonders for the career of Benedict Cumberbatch. 'I think I have a kind of boost-proof career in that respect! And I’m happy with that. Do I expect things? No. If it was about proving a point, I’ve done that before,’ he says, mentioning his pleasure at his well-received, very funny turn as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew in 2005’s Shakespeare Retold television series, and also his acclaimed appearances in London’s West End and on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll. 'And I don’t feel undervalued, I just feel underused slightly.’ How’s his diary for the rest of the year looking? 'Empty,’ says Sewell, merrily forking into his pasta. We meet again in late November at the Bafta theatre in central London.Thanks to his role as The Englishman in the Johnny Depp/Angelina Jolie thriller The Tourist, Sewell’s diary in the intervening months hadn’t been quite as free as he’d hoped. Today he has flown in from LA – the third of three transatlantic trips he’s making in as many weeks. He’s here for a screening of the first Zen drama, Vendetta, and to take part, alongside his glamorous Zen co-star Caterina Murino (she was a Bond girl in Casino Royale) in a Q&A session for film and television industry professionals. In Zen, Vendetta, we meet a cool, stylish copper who manages to remain thus even though he lives with his mother. His uniform is a dark, well-cut suit and sunglasses; breakfast is always a cappuccino and a cigarette. Zen is busy playing office footsie with a colleague’s glamorous secretary (Murino) while reinvestigating the murder of a government contractor. Meanwhile, a vengeful parolee is busy gunning down all those who had a hand in sending him to jail. This opening drama is enormous fun. It’s shot in a lovely, honeyed light – Rome looks fantastic – and the tone is fast, skippy and, in places, pithy. Sewell’s Zen is moral, upright and diligent. But also, well, a bit of a dude. In the bar beforehand, Sewell, a man with a flair for accents and no stranger to comic stagy flamboyance, works the room merrily. He sticks to the soft drinks. 'People ask me if I miss it,’ he says of alcohol. 'If I was unhappier not drinking, if I missed it that much, I’d drink! I’m completely teetotal; it’s the only way I can do it.’ Back in LA, he prefers to stay home with his girlfriend – as to her identity, he’s never been one for divulging details about his partners (he had a long relationship with actress Helen McCrory in the early Nineties, and dated Alice Eve, who appeared alongside him in Rock’n’Roll). But he says that after relocating to LA to film a short-lived American television drama, The Eleventh Hour, 'the job faded but I kind of had connections then, privately’. Together they live a quiet life in LA. 'I don’t really go out.’ He says he was never a huge fan of red carpet events, 'but I was always into free drinks and knocking around, which can make you vulnerable to that kind of thing’. After graduating from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, Sewell worked on the London stage, with his breakthrough television role coming in the BBC’s 1994 production of Middlemarch. He also established a reputation as something of a roué. He’s chirpily self-deprecating and brightly alert to his own foibles: 'I’m a fussy beggar,’ he notes of his approach to scripts, which is one reason he doesn’t get as many jobs as he might. 'I don’t have any shame about the way I conducted my professional life,’ he says, reflecting on his twenties and thirties. 'I mean, personal life, Christ, everyone makes mistakes. There’s always gonna be regrets that you have professionally, but I’ve always tried to behave well. I mean, maybe I was… ’ He stops. 'I always found it hard to get out of bed, that was the problem! I'm better now. But I’ve always believed very, very strongly that the way you treat people is more important than anything, professionally or otherwise.’ Why did he give up drinking and smoking? 'Um, I was drinking and smoking from very, very, very young, and I tend to do things to excess. And I felt I was endangering my health – very much with smoking. My dad died, I think, from smoking. He died young – he was a big smoker, big drinker, then he popped’ – he snaps his fingers – 'just like that, and I always had a sense of that. 'And that can propel you to do it [smoke and drink] at a young age, just as much as it can stop you. Probably more than it stops you. And I found myself in a position where I was getting in my own way.’ Were his habits compromising his professional capabilities? 'It was compromising everything,’ he says quietly. 'Everything.’ Sewell’s father, Bill Sewell, was an Australian animator who came to Britain, and he always told people to follow the trail of his hero, the poet Dylan Thomas. He had a studio in Soho and worked on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Both Rufus and his son Billy have inherited Bill’s flair for art. Bill split from Rufus’s mother Jo when he was five, and died when Rufus was 10. In his teens Rufus ran a little wild – he was a boozy lad with orange hair who drummed in school punk bands with names like Tum Te Tum, Another Green World and Realistic Kamra – but today says that his 'Eighties t--t’ behaviour was nothing out of the ordinary for the era. 'The eyeliner wasn’t that unusual!’ he grins. 'For anyone who was at school with me circa 1984, it was pretty standard.’ With his smoking jacket, ever-present packet of Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes and love of David Bowie, 'I was the bloke who hung around the punks who wasn’t a punk.’ When we’d met in Italy he’d described himself as being brought up as a 'survivor’ – was he referring to his early familial trauma and tragedy? He furrows his brow and thinks. 'There’s a danger to saying stuff like this – trying to paint yourself as some struggling waif. But we were relatively poor. An interesting mix of being well-spoken but poor. Or, rather, poor but with a piano! And an ostensibly posh name. But the fact is, I was on free school dinners, we ended up in council-assisted accommodation, my mum was on benefits. But my mum’s well-spoken, and me and my brother speak the same way – well-spoken London. 'And she brought us up on her own. My dad was useless with money so before he died, definitely she was really fending for herself. She had a vegetable round and we would live on what was left. And we were on hand-me-down clothes. House was falling apart. And we were pretty well looked after.’ He’s inherited his mother’s abilities to make do and mend. 'As a cook, for example, I always flourish with fewer, cheaper ingredients.’ In his student days: 'I was famous for Sewell’s Gruel! A tin of beans, a stock cube, blah blah, and I could make food for eight people!’ he says proudly. He says he applied similar methodology at drama school. If he didn’t get the part he wanted and was instead confined to playing 'the butler’ or 'the old man’, he wouldn’t sulk. 'You’re not gonna prove to anyone that you should be cast in better parts if the butler looks p---ed off. 'So for me at drama school, it was making the most of an opportunity, being a bit of a scavenger. And it was kind of the way I saw my mum – really managing brilliantly and knowing how to not make any waste.’ Sewell says he has Billy 'every couple of weeks. It just takes a little bit of arranging. Most of my finances and energy goes into keeping all that working.’ Does he fly economy? 'Absolutely!’ he says with no hint of shame. 'If I start getting into needing a certain class of travel I just can’t afford to keep doing it. 'I’ve discovered that I’ve never had much respect for money, and that has meant that money has ended up ruling me a little bit more than it should have. So I’m trying to learn – at this late stage in life! – to actually control that. 'It’s a matter of just living relatively simply. I don’t want to find myself cornered and being offered something second-rate and wanting to do it for the wrong reasons. I’ve never done that before.’ And his diary for 2011? Empty. 'Certainly, it’s unemployment,’ Sewell smiles, quite happily.
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Post by veerke on Jan 10, 2012 9:45:45 GMT
IGood news that Belgium is finally showing it. (and that Veerke's back! Thanks GE2. I loved Zen. Halfway through Hubby suddenly said: "He really is a good actor" . I'm predicting a lot of rental movies the coming weeks ;D I was surprised to see that most reactions to the show were (on the site of the TV-channel). Oh well, les goûts et les couleurs ...
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Post by kissmekate on Jan 10, 2012 10:13:53 GMT
I loved Zen. Halfway through Hubby suddenly said: "He really is a good actor" . Oh, that's a lovely man you've got there! There were also lots of positive reviews of Zen at the time - I think we have many of them quoted somewhere around here.
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