“A production designer once told me, ‘never do a movie in a submarine or in space,'” Anna Kendrick recalls. She defied that warning, however, to make Stowaway, the galactic sci-fi thriller from director Joe Penna (Arctic) headed to Netflix on April 22. “It was so simple and so lean, but totally compelling,” Kendrick tells EW of her initial reaction to Penna and Ryan Morrison’s taut script, which inspired her to enter the cosmos despite that well-intentioned warning. The actress stars as Zoe, a medical researcher on a spaceship headed to Mars on a two-year mission. On board with her are the ship’s commander (Toni Collette) and a biologist (Daniel Dae Kim) — and an unexpected stowaway (Shamier Anderson), whom the crew find trapped inside the ship shortly into their mission. With the small craft outfitted only to support three passengers and some irreparable damage done to its life support systems, the crew faces an impossible problem, which only Zoe believes they can solve. “I had never really read anything like it,” adds Collette. “It is contained and the characters are confined but the questions posed, moral and otherwise, are vast and wide open.” While the concept of being trapped in a tiny space may resonate after a year in quarantine, “it’s ultimately about community, survival, and sacrifice,” Collette points out. “Who can’t relate to that at the moment?” For Kendrick, “the thing that feels really relevant is less the isolation of it and more that kind of problem-solving part of your brain that we were all engaging so vigorously in the first couple months of the pandemic,” she says. “Just that constant problem-solving of, ‘wait, okay, how do we fix this?’ And just when it seems like you’re onto something, there’s some very obvious fundamental problem.” The complete interview with Anna Kendrick and Toni Collette can be read over at Entertainment Weekly.

I’ve made good use of the Holidays to sort out magazine scans and articles that haven’t been posted to the site. My own collection has been updated as well with some fantastic additions from my friend Alvaro, so prepare yourself for a massive update – starting in 1992 with reviews on Toni’s theatre peformances with the Sydney Theatre Company to this year’s promotion for Netflix’ “I’m Thinking Of Ending Things”, and pretty much everything in between. For a complete liste of all added magazines, have a look at the previews below.

For today’s Netflix release of Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”, Backstage Magazine blesses us with a cover story on Toni Collete’s ever-fascinating career, accompanied by a fantastic new editorial: Let’s talk about Toni Collette’s face. Few actors working today have such exacting control over their varied expressions, nor such a distinct capability to reflect every emotion under the sun. But Collette has long proven that in matters of performance, she can often do what others can’t. Who else can claim, for instance, to have their visage embossed on enamel pins decorating film buffs’ backpacks, caps, and collars? (More than just a meme, her mama wolf–like snarl over the dinner table in “Hereditary” is a popular kitsch item in this writer’s Brooklyn neighborhood.) But beyond that horror flick’s wildfire of contorted grief and rage, Collette is a master at capturing all manner of emotions: frenetic shock and joy (her toothy smile and side-eyed tongue bite in “Muriel’s Wedding”), awe and heartbreak (her wide-eyed gasp and quivering chin in “The Sixth Sense”), no-bullshit world-weariness (her furrowed brow and hard-lined jaw on “Unbelievable”), airheaded self-righteousness (her pursed lips and unmoving brow in “Knives Out”), and now, in Charlie Kaufman’s new film “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” violent neuroticism and unsparing maternal attachment. That’s not to mention her uncanny embodiment of various split personalities on “United States of Tara,” a feat that earned her an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the series’ first season. The list truly goes on and on. You can read the complete article over at Backstage Magazine.

Over the past weeks I’ve worked extensively on Toni Collette’s press library, adding the most recent interviews to promote “Knives Out” and “Unbelievable” and also posting lots of older articles from the early 1990s and 2000s. Included are some fantastic vintage cover stories from around the world, which you can now all find in the improved press library, hosting over 200 articles. If you have any articles or cover stories in your collection that you would like to share, please drop me a line. Enjoy reading!

It’s a crisp, sunny autumn morning in Los Angeles, and Toni Collette is sitting in a dark corner of the Sunset Tower Hotel cafe, fretting over her croaky voice and fussing over a pot of camomile tea with lemon. She’s caught a cold on her whirlwind trip from Sydney to attend the Toronto Film Festival premiere of her new film, Knives Out, and she’s determined to recover in time for tonight’s 25th anniversary screening of Muriel’s Wedding, hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “It’s been a packed trip,” Toni acknowledges between sips. “I started in Sydney a week ago, flew to LA for a day to try and get over the jet lag and then I went to Toronto. After that, I flew to New York to do two days of press for [Netflix miniseries] Unbelievable, then had a day off to have a foot massage and do a bit of shopping before catching a cold and flying to LA. And now I’m here!” Cold or no cold, the 47-year-old Sydney native can’t be restrained from talking passionately about both Knives Out and the P.J. Hogan-directed Muriel’s Wedding. “If I’d known 25 years ago that the Academy – the most well-known organisation celebrating film and film achievement in the world – was going to screen Muriel’s Wedding and have a party celebrating it, well, that’s just amazing to me,” she says. “People often think famous people have been that way forever, but no, the contrast is huge and I’m still so grateful for Muriel’s Wedding. It gave me a life I could never have dreamed of.” At another anniversary screening in New York earlier this year, Toni says she watched the movie for the first time since its release and sobbed unabashedly from beginning to end. “It was incredibly overwhelming and joyous and I had the sense of something coming full circle,” she says, still sounding emotional. The former NIDA student was virtually unknown outside of the Sydney theatre scene when she shot to international fame at age 22 as an overweight, Abba-loving misfit who gets her revenge in the 1994 classic, also starring Rachel Griffiths. It was the beginning of a career full of physical and psychological transformations that constantly surprised audiences, who found it hard to believe she was the same actress. The complete article can be read over at The Sydney Morning Herald. This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale November 17.

Upon its Netflix premiere last week, “Unbelievable” has been featured in various magazines to promote its release. Scans from five magazines have been added to the photo gallery. Many thanks to Jess for the Entertainment Weekly scans.