Mark Brown at the Guardian scores a few minutes with Thomas Sangster, soon to be better known as Tintin. A seventeen-year-old native of London, Sangster will star in the projected Steven Spielberg-Peter Jackson "photo-realistic" movie based on the canonical comic-strip adventure series created by Georges Prosper Remi, the great Belgian cartoonist popularly known as "Herge'". (Stop-motion god Andy Serkis, Peter Jackson's one-man repertory company, is penciled in to co-star as Tintin's bearded, apoplectic sidekick, Captain Haddock.) To prepare for his role, Sangster reports that he recently sucked it up and started actually reading some of the Tintin comics. He was familiar with the character from watching TV cartoons based on the real stuff, but "I never saw the books because I was never that big on reading." Well, it's not as if he's likely to be called upon to perform brain surgery during the shoot.

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