One last bow for an acting legend

• Published date: 06 November 2021
• Publication title: Mix, The

The hallucinatory horror-thriller Last Night in Soho will plunge audiences into a dazzling re-creation of mid-’60s London. And while Edgar Wright’s film is led by rising stars Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy, it’s the pivotal supporting turns from Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham and the late Dame Diana Rigg — in what would turn out to be her last role — that draw more direct connections to the era.

Directed by Wright, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, the film stars Jojo Rabbit’s McKenzie as Eloise, who leaves the rural quietude of life with her grandmother (Tushingham) for fashion school in contemporary London.

Obsessed with a past she never knew, Eloise rents a small room from the kindly Miss Collins (Rigg), and soon begins to enter a nighttime dreamworld in which she follows Sandy (The Queen’s Gambit star Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer in the mid-’60s, on an increasingly twisted journey. The two worlds begin to collide as Eloise grapples with questions of reality and long-buried secrets, and a dapper man-about-town (Stamp) may have the answers she needs.

Working with costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux, production designer Marcus Rowland and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, Wright brings the ’60s sequences to vivid life. And the director says that casting Rigg (The Avengers, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), Stamp (Teorema, Modesty Blaise) and Tushingham (A Taste of Honey, The Knack and How to Get It) was about more than just utilising their status as well-known figures of the era.

‘‘It wasn’t only about the amazing opportunity of casting some of the most iconic actors of the [’60s], but also about the weight and power they bring to modern London too,’’ said Wright. ‘‘They have this connection to the past, but they are still working actors I was lucky enough to work with. I can’t say enough great things about working with all three of them.’’

Wright had previously cast his 2007 film Hot Fuzz with an older generation of well-known figures of British cinema including Timothy Dalton, Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw. Yet, the strategy this time out had its own unique logic.

‘‘The film is very different from Hot Fuzz, but the premise behind the casting remains somewhat the same: ‘If you love an actor from your youth, write a good part for them!’,’’ said Wright. ‘‘My life is forever enriched by having had the chance to work with Terence...