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.

Merrit Wever and Toni Collette are interviewed by Oprah Magazine: If you watch Unbelievable, the Netflix limited series starring Kaitlyn Dever, Toni Collette, and Merritt Wever, and find yourself dream-casting Collette and Wever’s characters in True Detective season 4, you’re not alone. “Oh my God, everybody keeps saying that!” Collette tells OprahMag.com. “Given the darkness of this show, maybe that’s why they’re enjoying Merritt and I so much. They’re kind of an odd couple, and it’s entertaining.” Collette and Wever play Grace Rasmussen and Karen Duvall, detectives from two Colorado towns who merge investigations upon realizing they’re looking for the same rape suspect. Inspired by true events, Unbelievable is both a gripping narrative and an incisive look at the way American rape survivors are treated—and, too often, mistreated. Any viewer who cares to self-examine will be left considering the myth that false claims of rape are a pervasive problem: In reality, only about 2 percent of rape and sexual assault claims are found to be false, per FBI statistics. Meanwhile, RAINN estimates that only 1 in 4 rapes are reported, with fear of retaliation and belief that the police can’t or won’t help them cited as reasons many survivors say they didn’t. But what happens to Marie (played by Dever) is proof that long-held cultural biases leave little room for facts. The show interweaves Marie’s story in 2008 with the 2011 search for a serial rapist in Colorado, mirroring the structure of the Pulitzer Prize-winning article that inspired it, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.” Journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong’s storytelling choice is even more effective onscreen; just as Marie faces yet another infuriating setback from one of the many people who failed her in the wake of her rape, the action shifts to the forward momentum of Detectives Rasmussen and Duvall’s investigation (thus saving the viewer from sinking into the depths alongside Marie).

It seemed like a recipe for a disaster. An out of work and virtually broke director, who couldn’t keep a job, decided to make a film based (loosely) on the true story of his sister stealing money from their father. There was no real romance, no pat, happy ending and everybody who read the script thought the main fictionalised character not very likeable. Muriel Heslop was dowdy, listened to daggy music, betrayed a friend and married for revenge. The story was “denounced” by Film Australia which refused to fund it. But when it finally premiered in September 1994, 25 years ago this year, Muriel’s Wedding was on its way to becoming a huge, but unlikely, hit. The story of how this small, independent film made it to the screen could be a film in itself. The enduring tale was later turned into a stage musical, which also became a hit, and is being revived in a new production returning to the Sydney stage on July 4 at the Sydney Lyric Theatre. The director, Paul John “P.J.” Hogan and his wife, screenwriter and director Jocelyn Moorehouse, said that before Muriel he was “broke” and since graduating from film school in 1984 had found only “consistent unemployment”. “We wanted to make feature films, but could only get TV jobs. I got less work than Jocelyn did, because she’s a much nicer person,” Hogan tells The Saturday Telegraph. In 1991 Moorehouse directed the critically acclaimed film Proof starring Hugo Weaving, with Hogan as an assistant director. But after that, work was hard to find and in the late 1980s and early ’90s Hogan began to think seriously about whether he should be “thinking of another career”. Then inspiration came from an unlikely source – his family. The complete article can be read in the press library.