Aurelia Butler

“I walk into a show and everybody’s kind of a little afraid. Then I hear, ‘Oh, but you’re so nice,’” the actress said of her Hollywood baggage.Manhattan has dressing rooms dingier than the one in the basement of the Actors Temple Theater. But not many. Sean Young, curled into a folding chair atop peeling linoleum tiles with a smudged mirror behind her, claimed not to mind.“I don’t have the disease of snobbery,” she said on a late October morning. “I have an incredibly high tolerance for dirty dressing rooms, you know what I mean? I like slumming it.”Young was in rehearsal blacks — leggings, a muscle tee, sneakers — her hair half up. She was two weeks out from the first preview of “Ode to the Wasp Woman,” which is scheduled to open Nov. 9 and run through Jan. 31. Written and directed by Rider McDowell, the play details the lurid, untimely deaths of four Hollywood has-beens and barely-weres. Young, in her New York stage debut, plays Susan Cabot, a B-movie actress whose titles include “The Wasp Woman.” Cabot was beaten to death in 1986 by her 22-year-old son.Young has had her own tragedies. “But here’s the good part of the story,” she cheerfully said. “I didn’t end up damaged.”A movie star in the 1980s (“Dune,” “Blade Runner,” “No Way Out”), Young saw her career derailed by the mid-1990s. She refused to play certain Hollywood games. In past interviews, she has claimed that after rejecting the advances of colleagues, including the actor and director Warren Beatty, she was dropped from projects. (A representative for Beatty denied this.) She played other games too enthusiastically, as when she showed up on the Warner Bros. set dressed as Catwoman, angling for a role, or tried to crash an Oscars party.James Woods, who starred with Young in the 1988 film “The Boost,” filed a $2 million civil suit accusing her of stalking behavior. Though that suit was eventually settled out of court, with Woods required to pay all of Young’s legal fees, Hollywood had already branded her as volatile, difficult, even crazy. Which explains a slide toward TV movies and guest spots. She also appeared on “Celebrity Rehab” for alcohol abuse.McDowell, the “Ode to the Wasp Woman” playwright and director, knew about what he referred to in a recent phone interview as Young’s “past antics,” but he had wanted a well-known actress of Cabot’s age. Young fit that bill. He had found rehearsing with her pleasant.“She’s very lighthearted,” he said. “There’s no Hollywood behavior.”In that grim dressing room, her voice was throatier, her features no longer those of an ingénue. But at 63, Young still has the fidgety electricity and easy glamour that made her indelible in those early screen roles. On a break from rehearsal, she discussed her current role and her early career. (She refers to films, series and plays indiscriminately as “shows.”) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Young and her castmates during rehearsals at the Actors Temple Theater in Manhattan. She plays a B-movie actress whose son beat her to death.Ye Fan for The New York TimesWhat was the first decade of your career like?I look at the first 10 years of my career as somewhat tragic, actually, because my mother — who has passed away, so I can say whatever I want — inserted herself into my career. What she really wanted was to collect 10 percent and not have to work too hard. By 28, I basically divorced her. I said, “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m sorry.” Those first years were messed up, in terms of career strategy. If I’d had a better manager, I would have had more of a running start. I don’t feel like the rest of my career was as great.What happened? It began so well and then it fell off a cliff.Part of that cliff was when James Woods accused me of stalking him. Then I moved to Sedona. And I said you can all go [expletive] yourselves. So I created part of that cliff.That generated a rumor, for a while, that you were crazy.Oh, that still floats! I walk into a show and everybody’s kind of a little afraid. Then I hear, “Oh, but you’re so nice.” Believe me, that was a pain in my ass. I did not like having to prove myself over and over and over again. This is what I’ve taught my sons: Mommy was right, but it didn’t do me any good. Being right is not actually your best play. Your self-preservation is actually more important than being right. Do you remember when I got fired by Warren Beatty?From “Dick Tracy”? Yes.I worked a week on that show. At the end of one day, he’s dropping me off at the Sheraton. He walks around the car. Mr. Gentleman opens the door. I’m getting out and he grabs my ears, trying to pull me into a kiss. I go, “What the [expletive] are you doing?” I mean, I yell at him. And he goes, “Well, I was just testing you.” I lean into him and I say, “Well, OK, are you clear now? That I’m not here to [expletive] you? I’m just here to do this part. Do you need to test me anymore?” Several days after that, I get fired. They put out in the papers “artistic differences.” Like I was the problem. That really was the definitive cliff. My joke now is I should have just said, “I’d love to [expletive]. I’m just busy right now.”Was there a culture of abuse in 1980s Hollywood?I don’t think there’s ever been a time in Hollywood where there wasn’t abuse. But a feature of the ’80s is that we were really overpaid. There was also a cocaine habit that pervaded, and that could lead to some very dramatic circumstances.Have things improved?I’m not so sure. I don’t think there’s any less egotism or narcissism. It’s funny. You see leading men or sometimes leading women, they turn. They lose their humility. They lose their sense of humor. They lose their gratitude. Those were things I was very lucky to hang on to.I’ve read that you’re a Trump supporter. He’s someone who has been accused of abuse. How do you square that?Until you’ve actually been red-pilled, until you’ve actually gotten some proof or done enough research or really taken a look at what modern life is, then you’re still eating the propaganda. I believe that the reason Trump has gotten the treatment he’s gotten is because he’s a direct threat to permanent Washington, D.C. I don’t care what kind of a person he is. What I care about is that he put a border on the southern part of our country. That’s the priority I feel.Young said her character in the play has “some damage to deal with. But it is also an opportunity to purge whatever’s there of your own.” Ye Fan for The New York TimesSo it matters less to you who he is than what he might be able to achieve?We have no way to really verify it. If you’re going on the assumption that [abuse] actually happened, you also have to ask yourself why this woman’s [expletive] was right there to be grabbed.But so many women have come forward.That’s why it’s done that way. Because that makes it much more believable. Even going on the assumption that maybe it is true, and I feel very bad that that could be the case, it’s still Trump coming in and being a very humongous threat to a part of the Washington, D.C., culture that actually, in my view, needs to be completely wiped out. That’s the priority I feel.What drew you to this play?I know this sounds silly, but actors just like to work. I can do anything. So when something comes my way now it’s like, thank you very much.Had you heard of Susan Cabot before this?I had heard of “The Wasp Woman,” although I never had seen it. For this, I watched it all the way through. It’s pretty cheesy, but I wanted to make sure I knew who she was. She had a great face.Do you think Susan Cabot is a tragic figure?Well, her son murdered her. That’s tragic. That’s at the top of the list. But her dad left her before her first birthday, and her mother was placed in an insane asylum. Show business might have been the thing that offered her any self-confidence. That was the one thing that had meaning for her. Maybe her career was the one moment where she might have felt like, I’m somebody. There’s a line in the script: “I came from nothing. From less than nothing where people laughed at my dreams.” So she’s pretty messed up.She didn’t have the career she wanted.There’s more than just her in this business who can say that. The way in for me, with every part, is I say: What am I going to learn by doing this? And is there anything about the role that I wouldn’t want to deal with? There was a feeling with Susan that there was going to be some damage to deal with. But it is also an opportunity to purge whatever’s there of your own. And when you purge something, it doesn’t haunt you anymore. You cry yourself out, and you really don’t need to cry anymore. You’ve gone to that place of discomfort and it didn’t kill you. I’m still alive. More

Raven Jackson’s film offers a rich portrait of growing up in rural Mississippi and heralds a fresh, poetic talent.The opening of Raven Jackson’s debut feature, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” announces the arrival of a filmmaker grounded in the lyrical beauty of her characters and the loamy grace of the place they so deeply inhabit. In this case, rural Mississippi.Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson), our protagonist, strokes a fish’s opalescent scales. Frogs call and cicadae whir. Mack’s father (Chris Chalk) guides her fishing as her sister, Josie (Jayah Henry), watches doubtful. This scene offers the first close-up of hands. There will be many more: hands grasping river silt, long fingers against the weave of a blanket swaddling a newborn, hands clasped in youthful want.While several performers portray Mack at different stages of her life, Charleen McClure depicts her as an observant teenager and as a pensive woman. The film sidesteps being a coming-of-age tale, instead looping from Mack’s past to her present, again and again, because that’s how memory unfolds.So, the film isn’t chiefly about what happens, however understatedly: the death of a young mother (the mesmerizing Sheila Atim), the tentativeness of first love, the relinquishment of a child. It is about the where of these events and how they really feel.The movie is steeped in the sensual (like a Toni Morrison novel or a Mary Oliver poem). Exquisite use of close-ups, fluid editing and a deeply observant sound design renders Mack’s story tactile but also poetic, making plain that the salt here is the stuff of tears, the stuff of sorrows and of joys.All Dirt Roads Taste of SaltRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

This film, directed by Madeleine Gavin, documents the experiences of defectors from North Korea.“Beyond Utopia,” a documentary on defectors from North Korea, begins by pre-empting the inevitable questions about how it was made. “The film contains no recreations,” the opening titles explain. The footage, we are told, was shot by the filmmakers, the subjects and operatives in the underground network that helped those subjects escape.That access alone gives the movie an intense interest. Directed by the longtime editor Madeleine Gavin, “Beyond Utopia” pivots around Seungeun Kim, a pastor in South Korea who has spent more than two decades assisting North Koreans who want to escape the totalitarian regime. The precarious course to safety generally runs through multiple countries.There are two main rescue missions chronicled in the film. One involves Soyeon Lee, a past defector who lives in South Korea and is trying to retrieve her son from the North. At the time this documentary was shot, the boy was 17, and she had not seen him in 10 years. Does he want to defect? The mother believes so, although communication is difficult, and there is no choice but to trust middlemen.The other mission involves the Ro family — a mother, father, two children and a grandmother who have, at the time Pastor Kim gets word of them, successfully crossed the heavily guarded Yalu River, which separates North Korea from China. But they need the pastor’s network to shuttle them through Southeast Asia. Until they reach Thailand, they will be at constant risk of being returned. Some of the people who cross, Pastor Kim says, wind up being sold for sex trafficking or organ harvesting.The family’s journey forms the backbone of the film, and not only because “Beyond Utopia” has some footage of them navigating the jungle by night. (Who could even keep a camera going under those circumstances?) There is also a chance to see them adapt to an unfamiliar — and, to them, practically unbelievable — environment, and to see their reactions as they realize what they learned in North Korea was wrong. “I feel like our country must become more developed,” says the grandmother, once they have reached Vietnam. “I mean I know how intelligent our Marshal Kim Jong-un is, so are our people just not smart?”“Beyond Utopia” fills out these stories with the history of North Korea, a country that Sue Mi Terry, a former C.I.A. analyst and a producer on the film, describes as “the only communist Confucian hereditary dynasty in the world.” Defectors like the activist Hyeonseo Lee fill in the picture on what life is like there, and how propaganda could convince the North Korean populace that they are living in a utopia.The engrossing, often tense proceedings are slightly marred by a pushy score. All the same, being able to experience the escape alongside these subjects greatly distinguishes this documentary.Beyond UtopiaRated PG-13. Descriptions of torture and brutality. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed play confused lonely-hearts torn between science and emotion in this adorable near-future romance.Heartache and horror walk hand in hand in “Fingernails,” a disarmingly sweet science-fiction romance from the Greek director Christos Nikou. Opening with a brief explanation of the title — the first sign of heart disease is often noticed in the fingernails — and closing on a note of indescribable yearning, this gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.Set in an indeterminate near future (the production design has a warm, slightly worn familiarity), the story follows an unemployed schoolteacher named Anna (Jessie Buckley, glowing beneath one of the most unflattering hairdos since Cameron Diaz’s scary perm in 1999’s “Being John Malkovich”). Though comfortably settled with her longtime boyfriend, Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), Anna feels strangely lost: Ryan is sweet but dull, their interaction as predictable as the job interviews she disinterestedly pursues.“Have you tested?” a friend inquires one evening. Responding to a crisis of dwindling romantic partnerships, scientists have developed a test that can determine whether you and your significant other are truly in love. Years earlier, Anna and Ryan had passed the test with flying colors; so why was she feeling so restless, and so attracted to Amir (Riz Ahmed), her handsome new work colleague?And it’s here, in the sly, dry wit of the movie’s middle section, that Nikou jabs cheekily at the wearying clichés of the rom-com, from its de rigueur tropes (wordless eye-gazing, rain-soaked encounters) to its too-easily-forecast finales. As Anna and Amir work with couples at the Love Institute, preparing them to take the test under the benign guidance of a true believer (perfectly played by Luke Wilson), the cinematographer, Marcell Rév, washes scenes in a comforting antique glaze that grounds their ludicrousness. Like eager children, loving couples perfect their romance skills — like memorizing their partner’s scent and, of course, inhaling Hugh Grant movies — before surrendering to the test. Few are thrilled to learn that this will require one of their fingernails, a pair of pliers and a clanking contraption that looks like a vintage oven.Offsetting its outlandish premise with performances of touching credibility, “Fingernails” chooses restraint over passion and silent longing over emotional declaration. The result may feel too cool for some; but Buckley and Ahmed are so naturally expressive that their scenes together have a haunting, wistful quality that’s more moving than any number of florid speeches. And watching White, currently burning hot off “The Bear,” play an unadventurous dullard is its own twisted pleasure.Like Nikou’s first feature, “Apples” (2022), “Fingernails” is absurd and more than a little dystopian. Both movies are carefully paced and mildly melancholic, their characters alienated from the common herd. This time, though, Nikou is more clearly linking belonging with pain, underscoring the foolishness of believing we can love without risk — and questioning why we would want to.Unlike too many conventional rom-coms, “Fingernails” sees love as ineffable, its ebb and flow impervious to scientific measurement or behavioral tinkering. Maybe, in the words of the unimpeachable Iris DeMent, we should just let the mystery be.FingernailsRated R for bloodied fingers and bruised feelings. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

The experimental documentary is punctuated by Giovanni’s poetry, read both by her and the actress Taraji P. Henson. But the film offers only what the poet is willing to give.Nikki Giovanni wants to die in zero gravity.“We don’t have any poets in space,” she says in a speech featured in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” a documentary about the elusive artist, directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson.Giovanni would like to travel to the space station to record what she sees, adding that, when it’s time for her to go, she can simply be released into the ether. This desire — part jest, part genuine — drives the biographical project, in which the directors try to capture Giovanni’s legacy and her Afrofuturist vision for Black women.“Going to Mars” combines archival footage of Giovanni and moments in Black history, images of space and present-day interviews and speeches to paint an expansive picture of the poet’s evolution from young firebrand to elder. Giovanni posits that viewers should turn to Black women to learn about surviving in space because of our ability to survive all the hardships thrown at us on Earth. Throughout, the scenes are punctuated by her poetry, read by both Giovanni herself and the actress Taraji P. Henson.The documentary offers only what the poet is willing to give. And Giovanni is a challenging subject: She has firm boundaries, and there are questions she refuses to answer. “You want me to go to someplace that I’m not going to go, because it will make me unhappy,” she says in response to a question about her childhood. “I refuse to be unhappy about something I can do nothing about.”Yet other times Giovanni’s work speaks for itself. She won’t discuss how she felt after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, for instance, but what follows is a powerful rendering of her poem “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” in which she expresses anger over the injustice. Here, and in general, viewers must fill in their own blanks.Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni ProjectNot rated. Running time: 1 hours 42 minutes. In theaters. More