𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐰 𝐌𝐜𝐐𝐮𝐢𝐧𝐧

Oh hey, some news! I have signed with @CPMagents for all the acting stuff (except for voice, look to @BeHeardVoices for that)! Looking forward to taking this chance to meet some lovely new industry people and get back in touch with some others I've not seen for a bit 😊

Project Hail Mary demonstrated what should be the new standard for how to karaoke. Do two verses then, when it gets repetitive say "That's all" and end the song. No need to stand up there for a minute long guitar solo. Especially at a venue where you usually pay by the hour.

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild. Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real. The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later. Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him. Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman. Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact. 95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

@RonFilipkowski Awful and embarrassing and yet somehow still unsurprising and totally in character

Holy shit. Even for Trump this is bad.

@29Punta @RonFilipkowski You think he's intimidating?

@RonFilipkowski What a man just love it . Amazing how people can't stand someone that tells it to your face , and the truth with it . People are so scarred of someone who is intimidating . Love it

@nyaraVT @ellorysmith Having visited repeatedly, briefly lived and worked there, i'm absolutely not visiting the country again until there's change. As an outsider I can't do anything to effect change other than deny my tiny amount of tourism money.

This is why you don’t have healthcare btw.. it’s not trans people it’s not undocumented migrants it’s not refugees this..

Rolling Stone names the moment the ‘Golden’ acceptance speech was cut off as one of the worst moments of this year’s Oscars: — "Last year, Adrien Brody spoke for an interminable five minutes and 40 seconds when he won Best Actor for The Brutalist. At no point was his mic turned off. But this year, when the KPop Demon Hunters song “Golden” won — the first K-pop song to be honored by the Academy — a member of the songwriting team, Yu Han Lee, didn’t get out more than a “thank you” before producers cut away and killed his mic… and didn’t bring it back, even after an audible negative reaction from the crowd as the orchestra swelled. It was a shockingly rude moment for a group of people who’d just made history, and whose earworm song had the audience singing along earlier in the night. They could have given that man 30 seconds to soak in the glory. And when Brody presented a few minutes later and mocked his long speech last year, the joke landed with a thud."

@rhysrmann @comaweng "Why aren't people involved in the arts anymore" gosh I wonder

Parents! Want to take your kids to see family favourite War Horse at the National Theatre? That’ll be £440, please!

Jessie Buckley closed the 2025 awards season with 42 awards for Best Actress for her performance in “Hamnet”.

@mattvanswol @SenSanders Matt. These two are not the same.

@SenSanders This you?

The war in Iran has already cost $22.8 billion. For $22.8 billion, we could: • Provide Medicaid to 6.8 million kids • Build 2.6 million public housing units • Fund Head Start for 1.3 million • Hire 240,000 teachers • Cancel $20,000 in student debt for 1 million borrowers

@ScottDMenzel Honestly I think eight months is enough time for people to kind of forget about. Just depends what he does in those eight months. He can afford to take a holiday...

I’m going to say something that might make people mad, but I really think Timothée Chalamet needs to take a year off. At this point, he’s been everywhere nonstop, and I think stepping back for a bit because I think people are feeling a certain level of Chalamet fatigue. Along those same lines, I think Dune: Messiah should move to summer 2027. This would allow some distance and hopefully improve its awards chances.

It's so nice to see Spider-Man swinging around NYC skyscrapers for the first time since 2014, but some tweets would have you believe this is the first time they've ever seen a Spidey flick. This was the visual standard for 14 years.

@DiscussingFilm ... why

David Zaslav will receive $887M as compensation for the Paramount/Warner Bros merger. Meanwhile, thousands of people are expected to lose their jobs in layoffs after the merger closes. (Source: Deadline)

Rubio: "We want the world to see that when you're a friend & ally of the US, it's a good thing. It's reciprocated" This administration has threatened literally every country on the planet and called most of our friends deadbeats & losers while trying to bully them

@atrupar Well good. That's the job. That's why advisors and ministers exist - to specialise and advise. That's... kind of the whole point

Trump: "The prime minster of UK told me 'I'm meeting with my team to make a determination.' I said, 'You don't need to meet with a team. You're the prime minster. You can make your own. Why do you need to meet with your team to find out if you're gonna send some mine sweepers or boats to us?' It's the same thing here."

@customerse48869 Aw thanks Anne but i'm speaking to the actual HMRC not "customerse48869"

@HMRCcustomers I applied for a tax repayment on 1st February. The site immediately said my request was received and it would take up to 4 weeks. 6 weeks later I've had no communication and have not received the money. I cannot track the progress. I called and was directed to...

@HMRCcustomers Hi Steve I'm unable to find any sort of tracking method. Screenshot below of the original response on 01/02/2026, and now logging back in if I follow the repayment options it leads me to requesting again with nothing to suggest I already have.

@MathewTweet Hi Matthew, If you sign in, does the repayment show marked as pending? Steve