Laura Donnelly (The Nevers) has been cast alongside Gael Garcia Bernal in a Marvel Studio’s Halloween special set to air on Disney+. The as yet…

The thing about this opportunity was I didn’t have to sign on for five or seven years, which is the usual shape of things. I’ve never wanted to be away for that long.

This was one season and they said. ‘Here’s some money, the scripts are great, here’s Alison Tolman. Oh, and by the way, your family can come over and your other family too.’ So we all got together and had a conversation, and the kids’ mums essentially said, we should absolutely do this.

James Norton’s latest film, Nowhere Special, has a premise so tragic it should be completely unfillable. He plays John, a 35-year-old single father who is given a few months to live, and has to find a new family for his three-year-old son. Even before you factor in the incredible performance by Daniel Lamont, who was only four when the film was shot, it sounds too obviously a tear-jerker, especially from Uberto Pasolini, a director known for Still Life, a very finely drawn, understated film in 2013, which comes at death from a much more oblique angle.

HBO’s Joss Whedon-created fantasy series “The Nevers” concluded the first half of its first season Sunday with an episode that quenched fans’ thirst for knowledge about Amalia True (Laura Donnelly), her best friend Penance Adair (Ann Skelly), and the Galanthi, the mysterious being that bestowed powers upon them and thousands of other people in Victorian England.

One of those people is Augustus “Augie” Bidlow (played by Tom Riley), who spent the first six episodes of “The Nevers” coming to terms with the fact he has a “turn” at all – and a rather special one at that.

A mainstay of the British theatre scene, Olivia Williams spent her early career turning in celebrated stage work at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National before being snapped up by Hollywood, starring in Rushmore and The Sixth Sense, among other successful movies. Now, she features in the new sci-fi series The Nevers, a fantastical retelling of 19th-century London in which a group of women with superpowers – know as the ‘Touched’ – find themselves ostracised by society. Wiliams is also set to appear alongside Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman in the Oscar-winning drama The Father (out next month), a heartbreaking and illuminating first-person exploration of dementia. She talks to Bazaar about Victorian superheroes, her tomboyish childhood and the power of fiction.

Modern storytellers always want to liberate Victoria women; to release them from their social constraints, their historical servitude, and most especially, their outer clothing. Only then will these ladies be free to express their true, butt-kicking nature. It also helps that Victorian men are ready-made villains. According to this lively-corset-buster from Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the patriarchy at its most mutton-chopped become anxious when women suddenly start acquiring superpowers. It can only be a matter of time, the bewhiskered denizens of clubland opine, before “the immigrant and the deviant” also rise in revolt, and the Empire topples.

The HBO sci-fi/adventure series The Nevers is set in 1890s Victorian London after a supernatural event has mysteriously given certain people, most of whom happen to be women, various unusual abilities. As its core is the friendship between Amalia True (Laura Donnelly), a resourceful widow who has never shies away from a fight, and Penance Adair (Ann Skelly), a brilliant inventor whose creations are often far ahead of their time, as the two women attempt to find and protect the gifted from those who wish to annihilate them.

“That’s where I would like to see the storyline go in the future, just to understand the magnitude and the depth of what she was subjected to,” HBO star tells The Wrap.

Are you obsessed with The Nevers yet? I can”t speak for everyone, but one of my faves is definitely Tom Riley – aka Augustus “Augie” Bidlow. So I hopped on Zoom with Tom to chat about what it was ike filming The Nevers, his favorite Easter eggs, and why my mom likes James Norton so much.

Northern Irish actor Laura Donnelly plays the role of Amalia True, a mysterious, quick-fisted widow. Hailing from Belfast, Laura’s first on-screen role was in Channel 4’s ‘Sugar Rush’ from the mid-2000s, and she has since gone on to star in ‘The Fall’, ‘Beowolf’, ‘Outlander’, and the movie ‘Tolkien’.

Ann Skelly joins Laura as Penance Adair, who is a brilliant young inventor, able to think up new and unique creations which manage to get the pair out of sticky situations. The Dublin actor had a leading role in Virgin Media’s ‘Red Rock’ as Rachel, and also popped up in ‘Vikings’ a number of times as Lady Ethelfled.