11 of the top Shortlist celebrity interviews of 2024

We try to bring you as many exclusive interviews with interesting people as we can. Whether it’s authors, film directors, the stars of movies and music or those involved in video games — we’ll be there with microphone attached.

2024 was a pretty good year for Shortlist’s deep dives into the lives and works of the big names. We talked to the makers of some of the year’s biggest films. We chatted with at least a couple of national treasures, and some of the most exciting names in music.

We’ve dug through the 2024 archives to bring you 11 of the interviews from 2024 you may have missed. Let's get started.

1. Mads Mikkelsen on Mufasa: The Lion King

In December we talked to acting legend Mads Mikkelsen about his role as Kiros in Barry Jenkins’s The Lion King. He talked about playing villains, his own history and — the bit that might get the hairs standing up on the back of your neck — what it was like having to film musical numbers while not really being a singer:

“I walked in circles, biting my nails and waiting for the day to come. That was a little nerve wracking, because I don't sing… We just agreed that it was, ‘We don't want to hear you sing Mads, we just want to hear the character’. So we went through the character and made it our own.”

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2. Michael Rosen on writing in the era of AI

Some of you may know Michael Rosen best from memes, in which he is saying something or other is great or a bit rubbish. But he’s also an amazing writer of kids’ books and was Children’s Laureate back in the late 2000s. We talked to him back in November about writing, and about what he thinks the AI future looks like for authors:

“There's a whole other issue around writing poems, songs, stories, university, essays. I mean, that's a whole other area. Presumably you could get AI to look at a whole pile of books and say, “write me a book like that”. And it would, yeah, and you could send that in… The interesting thing will be how writers come up with stuff that couldn't have been written by AI, and people realise that that’s really clever, original writing.”

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3. James May on making gin… with interesting flavours

Also in November, we chatted to former Top Gear presenter James May about his new gin. And some of the stuff on that topic was just as interesting as the questions you might want to ask him about cars. Like how he had some strange ideas on what his signature gin should taste or smell like:

“I had this idea, and I'm still quite wedded to it, of a gin that smelled of freshly pumped petrol — but not the taste of it, because if you’ve ever syphoned the tank and got it in your mouth you’ll know petrol tastes disgusting.”

4. Naomi Scott on playing a horror movie’s pop star

In October we sat down with Naomi Scott, who stars in the brilliant and gory Smile 2. She talked about the making of the movie, and what it was like playing a singing star while actually being one in real life — if not quite to the Taylor Swift-style level depicted in the film.

“It’s the idea of being perceived but not known. I think everyone understands feeling misunderstood - but without people really knowing who you are. With Skye, that's just it, but ramped up to 100.”

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5. David Leitch and Kelly McCormick on a lifetime of movie stunts

In December we talked to directing-producing power couple David Leitch and Kelly McCormick about their history in stunt work, around the launch of their doc series about that part of the industry, Action. Leitch has migrated behind the camera, after years as a stunt man and, famously, as Brad Pitt’s stunt double.

You do get pretty close with an actor. The stunt performer is usually doing the rehearsals and working through the safety protocols… I was a fight choreographer as well, and that means you’re designing scenes with their character in mind and have a lot of discussions with them about that. So the stunt double and the stunt performer can definitely become very close, yeah.”

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6. Ezra Collective on the jazz albums you need to hear

Ezra Collective have been around for the better part of a decade, but have had an incredible last couple of years. They won the 2023 Mercury Music prize, the 2024 MOBO Award for Best Jazz Act, and were listed among Barack Obama’s top songs of the year, this year. They need to be on your listen list. But they schooled us up further on Jazz albums we all should be listening to when we talked to the group in November.

“We study everyone, whether it be Fela Kuti, J Dilla, Max Roach, Clifford Brown or Erykah Badu. We use all these different genres, different styles, and different great musicians, and create our own sounds with it.”

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7. Nick Frost on starring in Star Wars as a super-fan

In early December we chatted to Shaun of the Dead star and British national treasure Nick Frost about what it was like getting a part in a Star Wars show, having been a fan of the series his entire life. He plays SM-33 in Skeleton Crew, a robot with a rat living in his space pirate brain.

“When we started doing this three years ago, he sounded completely different. He wasn't as much a pirate. He was like a cranky old man. Then you try something, and people say, this is actually pretty good, this is.”

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8. Jodie Foster on her amazing career in cinema

Back in February we talked to Jodie Foster about her role in True Detective and, well, bits and bobs from her entire career. We even chatted about Bugsy Malone, the 1976 musical in which she played Tallulah while being just a child herself.

“What’s extraordinary is that nobody knows it in the United States. It’s a British film. There's only four American actors in the film and everybody else was English or they were from American army bases here.We shot it all in the UK, it’s a fully British movie and the whole phenomenon of Bugsy Malone is entirely British. Americans don't know anything about it.”

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9. George Miller on shooting the iconic Mad Max films

Ahead of the release of Furiosa we sat down with Mad Max director George Miller to hear stories from his years of directing. And how the now-iconic Fury Road became a nightmare shoot after heavy rain turned the movie’s desert set into a lush paradise.

We built all our vehicles out in Broken Hill and then it rained in a way that it hadn't done for 15 years, and the water tables underneath a desert filled with water. And pretty soon, with the seeds waiting underneath to flourish, we suddenly had a garden about shoulder high — a beautiful garden.

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10. Lazlow Jones on making those iconic GTA radio stations

Many of us have vivid memories of playing the Grand Theft Auto games, cruising around and listening to the radio stations while racking up wanted stars. Lazlow Jones was voice of those stations, and back in June we chatted to him about the stories from those days, ahead of the release of this new venture, audio drama A Better Paradise Part One.

“I would just go and grab my neighbour and say “can you do a few lines for me?” And all the kids on my street did voices. Looking back, you'd say to a neighbour, “can your child come over to my weird dark recording studio?” But all those kids became minor celebrities. And they weren't allowed to play the games, obviously. But they became quite famous. None of us had any idea that game was going to resonate like it did.”

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11. Jeff Nichols on making motorbike movies

The Bikeriders was released in June 2024, and we talked to its director Jeff Nichols around its release. We covered a lot of topics, but the eye-opener is the bikes they used are genuine oldies, some many decades old. And the actors had to learn how to drive these relics in a motorbike bootcamp.

“Even the guys that came to us with riding experience had to be trained on these bikes. They're [the bikes] 60, 70, 80 years old. The fact they are running is a miracle, but they're all set up. I think it was the early '70s in the US that they actually mandated how a bike is set up, so that the clutch and the throttle and everything and the brakes are always in the same spot. But before that, it's kind of whatever you want.”

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