International
Three sign on for ‘Pillars of the Earth’
MUMBAI: A new TV maxi-series is trying to buck the trend and bring back appointment viewing for fictional sagas, a la The Thorn Birds or, more recently and modestly, Angels in America or Broken Trail. Most of the big Euro stations have lined up to air The Pillars of the Earth, but so far there are no broadcast takers in the U.S. or the U.K.
A Germany-Canada co-production spearheaded by Munich-based Tandem Communications and Montreal-based Muse Entertainment, the eight-hour saga, based on Ken Follett‘s best-seller, will be directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, who has helmed episodes of Heroes and Saving Grace and was Steven Spielberg‘s first assistant director on Saving Private Ryan and Schindler‘s List.
Pillars starts shooting on June 22 in Hungary and Austria. The premiere is set for the second half of 2010.
Ian McShane, who starred on HBO‘s Deadwood, will play Waleran; Donald Sutherland takes the role as Bartholomew; and Rufus Sewell, who recently headlined Eleventh Hour, plays Tom Builder. Others who have signed on for the shoot include Matthew Macfadyen (Frost/Nixon) as Prior Philip, Sarah Parish (The Holiday) as Regan Hamleigh, Hayley Atwell (Brideshead Revisited) as Aliena, Eddie Redmayne (The Other Boleyn Girl) as Jack and Gordon Pinsent (Away from Her) as the Archbishop.
“It‘s a new world order,” Scott Free TV president David Zucker said in describing the strategy of putting together financing abroad and then backing into a broadcast deal stateside. “Yes, there is more risk at the top, but there‘s more latitude on the creative side. It‘s not dissimilar to the indie film biz in this respect. Given how difficult the economy became here, we decided to plow ahead and get funding and casting done before trying to do a licensing deal in the States.”
Zucker said there was “a lot of interest” among yank broadcasters, cablers and pay cablers but did not specify how close to a deal the producers were.
The novel has been adapted by John Pielmeier, who will also play the role of Cuthbert in the saga. His credits include The Memory Keeper‘s Daughter and Hitler: The Rise of Evil. The historical novel set in 12th century England involves war, religious strife and power struggles as well as two interwoven love stories.
LOS ANGELES: Acting has never been an easy profession, but in recent years, it has acquired a new existential anxiety. Artificial intelligence can now mimic faces, clone voices and, in theory at least, speak any language it is fed. The fear that actors may soon be replaced by algorithms no longer belongs exclusively to science fiction. And yet, despite the rise of digital inauthenticity, some performers remain stubbornly resistant to replacement. The reason is not celebrity, nor even talent. It is language.
On paper, this should not be a problem. AI can translate. It can imitate accents. It can string together grammatically correct sentences in dozens of languages. But acting, inconveniently, is not about grammatical correctness. It is about meaning, and meaning is where AI still falters.
Machine translation offers a cautionary tale. Google Translate, now powered by neural AI, has improved markedly since its debut in 2006. It can manage menus, emails and airport signage with impressive efficiency. What it struggles with, however, are the moments that matter most: idioms, metaphors, irony, and cultural shorthand. Ask it to translate a joke, a threat disguised as politeness, or a line heavy with emotional subtext, and it begins to unravel. Acting lives precisely in those gaps.
This matters because film language is rarely literal. Scripts, particularly in independent cinema, rely on figurative speech and symbolism to convey what characters cannot say outright. Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is a useful example. The film’s recurring use of red operates on multiple levels: grief, desire, repression, liberation, and memory. These meanings are inseparable from the Spanish cultural context and emotional cadence. A translation may convey the words, but not the weight they carry. An AI-generated performance might replicate the sound, but not the sense.
This is where multilingual actors gain their edge. Performers such as Penélope Cruz and SofÃa Vergara do not simply switch between languages; they move between cultural logics. Their fluency allows them to inhabit characters without flattening them for international consumption. Language, for them, is not an accessory but a structuring force.
Beyond European cinema, this becomes even more pronounced. Languages such as Hindi, Arabic and Mandarin are spoken by hundreds of millions of people and underpin vast cinematic traditions. As global audiences grow more interconnected, the demand for authenticity increases rather than diminishes. Viewers can tell when a performance has been filtered through approximation. Subtle errors, misplaced emphasis, and an unnatural rhythm break the illusion.
There is also a practical dimension. Multilingualism expands opportunity. SofÃa Vergara has spoken openly about how learning English enabled her to work beyond Colombia and access Hollywood roles. But this movement is not a one-way export of talent into English-speaking cinema. Multilingual actors carry stories, styles and sensibilities back with them, enriching multiple industries at once.
Cinema has always thrived on such hybridity. Denzel Washington’s performances, for instance, draw on the cultural realities of growing up African American in the United States, while also reflecting stylistic influences from classic Hollywood and Westerns. His work demonstrates how identity and influence intersect on screen. Multilingual actors extend this intersection further, embodying multiple cultural frameworks simultaneously.
At times, linguistic authenticity is not merely artistic but ethical. Films that confront historical trauma, such as Schindler’s List, rely on language to anchor their moral seriousness. When Jewish actors perform in German, the choice is not incidental. Language becomes a site of memory and confrontation. It is difficult to imagine an automated voice carrying that responsibility without hollowing it out.
This is why claims that AI heralds the death of language miss the point. Language is not just a delivery system for information. It is a repository of history, humour, power and pain. Fluency is not only about knowing what to say, but when to hesitate, when to understate, and when to let silence do the work. These are not technical problems waiting to be solved; they are human instincts shaped by lived experience.
AI may one day improve its grasp of metaphor and nuance. It may even learn to sound convincing. But acting is not about sounding convincing; it is about being convincing. Until algorithms can acquire memory, cultural inheritance and emotional intuition, multilingual actors will remain irreplaceable. AI may learn to speak. But it cannot yet learn to mean.
In an industry increasingly tempted by shortcuts, language remains stubbornly resistant to automation. And for actors who can move between worlds, linguistic, cultural, and emotional, that resistance is not a weakness, but a quiet, enduring advantage.
