Rant: “TV Choice” / “Little Birds”

Although my appreciation for Juno Temple’s talent has never waned, in the past couple years she’s tended to gravitate towards projects that are of far less interest to me personally… and in my (faulty) mind I’ve come to associate her with small-scale American indie dramas (despite her supporting role in the Maleficent movies, which are the exact opposite of that), which is why I was surprised to pick up my regular TV guide magazine from the supermarket shelf this week, and see her on the cover alongside mainstream British soap-opera/sitcom actors. Apparently she’s bagged the starring role in Little Birds, a new mini-series based on Anaïs Nin’s posthumously-published collection of erotic short-stories… not to be confused with the 2011 film of the same name, starring Temple and Kay Panabaker! To quote the blurb: “Little Birds is set in Tangier in 1955, in the famous ‘international zone’ – one of the last outposts of colonial decadence, and a culture shock in more ways than one for troubled American debutante ‘Lucy Savage’ (Temple). Lucy desires an unconventional life free from the societal cage she’s been kept in and, along with Tangier itself, finds herself on the cusp of achieving a painful yet necessary independence.” Sadly it doesn’t appear to be set in the Cronenberg cinematic universe…*

Besides the cover, there’s also a couple more photos and a half-page interview with Temple inside (she’s described simply as “the Atonement actress”, which is kinda outdated, no?), where she enthuses about the series, the setting, her character, and the original stories, which she claims made her “sweat in places you shouldn’t in public”, so… yeah… if that doesn’t get people tuning in, I don’t know what will!

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* That was a reference to his film Naked Lunch (1991), which was also set in Tangier around the same period, in case I’m being too obscure…