Numéro Netherlands

full look MCQUEEN We also talked about moving to the countryside — but the city somehow keeps us there. Do you think if you did move, your art would suffer from not being in the city? My friend was talking about DAVID BOWIE, who said the countryside inspired his heavier music, while the city pushed him towards calmer, more introspective sounds. The city is already chaotic, so nature and calmness become an antidote, allowing you to explore different parts of yourself.

Someone will tell you Lunchmeat has a “no-headliner attitude”. But the truth is every artist is the headliner at Lunchmeat. Every performance carries that weight, that sense of something unrepeatable. And the festival's production makes sure of it: the sound, the light, the spatial design all conspire to give each artist the conditions to fully land. Case in point, Saturday's opening set at 20:00 was The Bug. The Concert Hall was almost at full capacity. Is that what we imagine an opening slot to be?

photography by GABRIELE DI MARTINO September feels like a significant moment for you, with American Hostage and Line of Fire arriving almost back-to-back. Does it feel like you’re entering a new chapter in your career?

full look SAINT LAURENT bracelet and ring DRIES CRIEL Both Emmanuel and co-star VALENTIN CAMPAGNE bring an extraordinary intensity to their performances, and together they create such a powerful dynamic. What happened when you first put them together that made you realise the relationship between Pierre and Valentin’s character FRANCIS was going to work?

Dance can demand extraordinary discipline and control, while motherhood often requires surrendering control entirely. What has your son taught you about yourself that your career never could? Patience. Absolute patience. You can’t reason with a baby or a toddler, so patience is huge. Also, presence. Since becoming a mother, I feel like time goes by so fast. My past self was always looking ahead and wishing that time would go faster. Now, I'm always praying that time will slow down.

You’re more than a decade into Flatland Cavalry now. When you look at the band that formed in 2014 versus the band you are today, what feels like the biggest transformation? We’ve all grown as musicians, songwriters, and performers, but what feels like the biggest transformation of the band we are today versus the one we were ten years ago is obtaining a knowledge that anything is possible.

You first built an audience by posting covers online. What did making those early videos teach you about your voice and the kind of artist you wanted to become? I love looking back on those videos. I was so inspired by the artists I would cover and still am. Learning their songs and studying their writing definitely shaped my own artistic journey. You now have hundreds of thousands of people following your journey across social media.

There’s a sense of a much longer, more complicated history between Cecilia and Ramon than what we actually see on screen. How did you find that shared history, and what did you feel needed to exist between the two of you even when it was left unspoken? Luis Gerardo Méndez: I think it’s because we’re both nerds. We are nerds about acting, and we had a lot of questions and long conversations about it. Somehow, we had also met years before in Mexico.

WYD Now? changed your life very quickly. Looking back, what do you think that 19-year-old version of yourself would make of where you are today? My 19-year-old self was very overwhelmed by the sudden success of that song. So, I think maybe she would be so excited to know that things calmed down and that it gets so much less scary. I was a really nervous 19-year-old, and now I feel so much more confident on stage, and in the studio, and just in life in general.

When you play a police officer, how much research do you do into the realities of the job, and was there anything you learned making Winter that surprised you? For this, I did a fair bit. Myself and Anabel Scholey had some research calls on Zoom with a retired police detective. It was so useful to understand the role and more importantly the world we were diving into. You’re also appearing alongside Michelle Keegan and Douglas Booth in ITV’s The Blame.