Rhys Ifans and Laura Linney are starring in Parkinson's film Rhys Ifans, Onwards and Sideways, with the drama centering on two people whose lives are reshaped by the disease. The Norfolk-set film comes with a clear artistic gamble: it keeps the subject heavy, but the actors say the set itself stayed light enough to work.
Ifans said, "It’s odd," and added, "you learn so much about each other so quickly. I couldn’t tell you what kind of car Laura drives. What her home looks like. But we both know how we feel about death and dying." That line lands because the script, written by Paul Mayhew-Archer, pushes directly into illness, mortality and the private speed at which two strangers can become emotionally exposed.
Laura Linney in London and Brooklyn
Linney, 62, said she and Ifans did not take a standard chemistry read before production. Instead, they took dance classes, and she waltzed in London and near her home to understand recreational therapy for people living with Parkinson’s disease. She also spoke with David Leventhal for a long time and later learned that Juilliard has classes for this once a week.
Leventhal runs Dance for PD at the Mark Morris Dance Group in Brooklyn, and Linney called it "the mothership of this wonderful organisation that now has offshoots all over the world, including here." That gives the film a practical anchor beyond performance: it is not treating movement as a decorative extra, but as part of how people with Parkinson’s try to regain control and confidence in the body.
John Madden and Paul Mayhew-Archer
Mayhew-Archer wrote Onwards and Sideways while living with Parkinson’s disease, and the condition’s more than 40 symptoms include uncontrollable shaking, stiffness of gait and involuntary freezing in doorways and thresholds. That matters here because the film’s characters do not just talk about illness; their problems arise from it, and the drama is built to sit inside the disorder rather than observe it from a distance.
Rhys Ifans, 59, brings a career that stretches from Twin Town in 1997 to Spike in Notting Hill in 1999, Daniel Craig’s stalker in Enduring Love in 2004 and Howard Marks in Mr Nice in 2010. Linney’s credits in the project’s orbit include The Truman Show, Mystic River, Love Actually, Ozark and The Big C, which gives John Madden a pair of actors with enough range to handle the film’s abrupt swings between humor and suffering.
Death, terrors and bankruptcy
The film deals with death, night terrors and bankruptcy, yet both actors say the work was still immediately safe and full of laughter. Ifans’s character nearly throttles Linney’s character while in the grip of night terrors, and Linney’s character collapses in his arms in a weeping mess after bankrupting herself with a gambling addiction. Those scenes are the sharp edge of the film, and they also explain why the dance preparation sounds less like a publicity flourish than a working method.
Onwards and Sideways does not yet have a release or broadcast date, so the practical takeaway is simple: the film is built around Parkinson’s, not around a sentimental side plot, and the cast has already done the movement work to make that premise credible. For a viewer, the real draw is the pairing of Ifans and Linney inside a drama that treats arts-based therapy as part of the story’s engine, not just its backdrop.
