All epic journeys begin somewhere. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort,” is how one of the classics, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, starts.  

As for Kate Beckinsale? Hers begins, “I’m covered in lube, I’m sorry if I touched you.”

The actor took audiences on a real journey during a Monday night appearance with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, for which she donned a latex outfit complete with full-length gauntlets (hence the lube, so she didn’t get herself stuck to her own body), ostensibly to promote her new movie Fool’s Paradise, but mostly talking about how the different ways she thought American breakfast cereals would affect her stool (none of them positive) and detailing why Succession star Brian Cox is her phone’s wallpaper. 

The infamously brash Cox has “sort of vaguely been in my life since I was a child,” Beckinsale explained, describing him as best friends with her godfather, actor David Bradley. And when she finds herself in times of trouble, Cox comes to her, speaking words of wisdom, she said.

“He’s got this strange kind of testicular pull that when I’m in a low moment, he feels a call in a fatherly way and calls me up and pulls me out of trouble,” she explained. “That came out wrong. I was in a testicle-y frame of mind.”

Even when she’s not actually speaking with Cox, his photo as her phone wallpaper is a soothing presence: “He’s lovely and I find it very comforting every 30 seconds when my phone relaxes and there he is.”

The two have also shared the screen, most recently in 2022’s The Prisoner’s Daughter. “I’m his daughter, and he’s the prisoner,” she said. 

In an Instagram post from the Toronto Film Festival, where the movie premiered, alongside a carousel of herself horsing around with Cox (in more latex sleeves, no mention of lube) she wrote, “There are about fifteen people I’d say are my favourite people in the world and @coxusa is so mighty he’s at least two of them.” 

As she told People last year, "What I like is that he doesn't like bullshit, and I fucking hate bullshit as well. And so he's not going toe a party line. He's just going to say what he thinks."

So, apparently, does Beckinsale, sparing no breakfast cereal from her wrath during a taste test ("I don't smoke any weed," she said to explain her lack of cereal knowledge) with Fallon. “I’m gonna get IBS from this,” she said, spitting a mouthful of Cinnamon Toast Crunch into a tasteful pewter bucket. 

And so goes Beckinsale, or, There and Back Again.