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    ‘House of the Dragon’ Guide: Key Characters Ahead of Season 2 Finale

    A lot has happened since we published a who’s who list before Season 2 began. Heading into the finale, here’s at look at where the characters stand now.This roundup has been updated to reflect events through Episode 7 of Season 2 of HBO’s “House of the Dragon.”Before Season 2 of “House of the Dragon” began in mid-June, HBO hadn’t released a new episode for about two years; so with the premiere days away, we published a guide to the show’s sprawling cast.Seven episodes later, much has changed. Westeros is divided by a civil war between the Blacks, who support Rhaenyra Targaryen’s claim to the throne, and the Greens, who support her half brother Aegon’s. Characters have died, been maimed or disappeared. Meanwhile, the common people — known in the show’s parlance as smallfolk — have played an increasingly large role, adding several new faces to the show. It seemed like time for an update.Whether you’ve picked sides or simply want to catch up in time for the Sunday season finale, here is a look at the major players now.Team BlackQueen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy)STATUS: Stacked with dragons. Long the only child of the late King Viserys Targaryen, Rhaenyra was proclaimed heir by the king in defiance of centuries of tradition that held that only males could rule. But traditions die hard, and her younger half brother Aegon was crowned king by his supporters in Rhaenyra’s absence from the capital of King’s Landing.Throughout the season, Rhaenyra has worked to keep violence to a minimum, even though her son Lucerys was one of the war’s first casualties. At the encouragement of her common-born adviser — and romantic interest — Mysaria, Rhaenyra has repeatedly relied on Westeros’s everyday people. By turning the public against Aegon through deft propaganda, and by recruiting descendants of House Targaryen born out of wedlock to become dragon riders, she hopes to tip the balance of power in her favor. Heading into the finale, she is looking pretty stacked on the dragon front again, having lost three from her team (Arrax and Meleys are dead; Caraxes is AWOL) but then effectively gained three back (Seasmoke, Silverwing and Vermithor all have Team Black riders now). She herself rides a bright yellow dragon called Syrax.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Punkie Johnson Announces She Is Leaving ‘Saturday Night Live’

    Johnson told a stand-up audience she was leaving “Saturday Night Live” before confirming her departure in an Instagram video the next day.Punkie Johnson, a performer on the NBC sketch comedy series “Saturday Night Live” since 2020, announced on Thursday that she will not return this fall for the show’s 50th season.Johnson, who played characters on “S.N.L.” including Vice President Kamala Harris and the women’s basketball star Angel Reese, first said she was leaving during a stand-up comedy set on Wednesday at Union Hall in Brooklyn.She posted a video on her Instagram account the next day, confirming her decision to leave the show. She said that she was not leaving on bad terms, however, as some audience members had understood some of her onstage comments to imply.Johnson had told the Union Hall audience that “S.N.L.” staff wanted her to change her hair and to stop working out so much and looking “buff.” She had also mentioned a heated argument with a talent producer, adding that being on the show had been stressing her out and that she was happier since having decided to leave.An NBC employee confirmed that Johnson was leaving the show but did not respond to questions about Johnson’s onstage comments about the circumstances of her departure.In her Instagram video, Johnson said she had woken up to text messages and phone calls about the comments.“I’m like, it was a comedy show!” she said. “I was just having fun! It’s no bad blood; it’s no bridges burnt; it’s no hard feelings.”Born and raised in New Orleans, Johnson, 39, moved to Los Angeles to start her comedy career and worked as a server at the Comedy Store before she was made a paid regular onstage. Johnson joined “S.N.L.” for the show’s 46th season as a featured player and was promoted to the regular cast in 2022.Johnson was also the first openly lesbian Black cast member of “S.N.L.” (An earlier Black lesbian cast member, Danitra Vance, was not publicly out while on the show in the 1980s.)Johnson’s other screen roles have included the HBO series “Love Life” and “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” the Netflix series “Space Force” and the fight-club buddy comedy movie “Bottoms.”She is so far the only “S.N.L” cast member who has announced a departure ahead of the new season, which begins on Sept. 28.Genevieve Ko More

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    Adam Driver Is to Star Off Broadway as a Country-Western Singer

    The actor will return to the stage this fall in a revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Hold On to Me Darling.”Adam Driver, a Broadway alumnus and prolific film and television actor best known for “Girls” and “Star Wars,” will return to the stage this fall to portray a narcissistic country-western singer in a limited-run Off Broadway comedy.The play, “Hold On to Me Darling,” was written by Kenneth Lonergan, an accomplished playwright (“The Waverly Gallery”), screenwriter and film director. (He won an Oscar for the “Manchester by the Sea” screenplay.)In “Hold On to Me Darling,” the main character decides to move home to Tennessee after his mother dies. The collision of a big star and a small town fuel the comedy of the play, which was first staged in 2016 at Atlantic Theater Company, an Off Broadway nonprofit.The new production, a commercial endeavor, is to begin previews Sept. 24 and open Oct. 16 at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. The run is scheduled to last just 13 weeks, although sometimes limited-run plays are extended.The production will be directed by Neil Pepe, who also directed the 2016 version. Pepe is the Atlantic’s artistic director.The producers of this fall’s run are Seaview, Sue Wagner, and John Johnson, who were among the producers of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” which starred Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott and had a run at the Lortel that began last fall. That show’s success helped draw the attention of producers to commercial Off Broadway, a sector of the theater business that had atrophied over time, but is now attracting more interest because the producing costs are far lower than on Broadway.Driver, 40, is no stranger to the stage. A graduate of Juilliard’s acting program, he has appeared on Broadway three times, most recently starring in a 2019 revival of “Burn This,” and he has also performed in several previous Off Broadway productions.Ben Brantley, then the Times’s chief theater critic, named “Hold On to Me Darling” among the best shows of 2016, and praised the play as “a tragicomic commentary on a culture ruled by the religion of fame.” More

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    ‘Cowboy Cartel’ Tells a Galloping Story

    With a made-for-TV plot, this documentary series explores a ploy by Mexican drug cartels to launder money through the world of horseracing.One of many recreation scenes in the documentary “Cowboy Cartel.”Apple TV+“Cowboy Cartel,” a four-part documentary arriving Friday, on Apple TV+, traces the wild saga of a Mexican drug cartel’s money-laundering scheme through the racehorse market and the F.B.I. agents and journalists who unraveled it. The plot feels ready-made for a TV show, and “Cowboy” sometimes rises to the occasion.The story has all the makings: a determined rookie F.B.I. agent, a jazzy I.R.S. dude, a starchy state attorney, well-sourced reporters, mountains of money, wise horsefolk and a ruthless, blood-soaked cartel. “Cowboy” is admirably lucid about the ins and outs of money laundering, and it nimbly anticipates all the “is everything a criminal does a crime?” arguments a skeptical viewer or defense lawyer may have.Muddy technique adulterates this appealing clarity of thought. B-roll of Texan highways does not illuminate anything, and more egregious is the use of hazy re-enactments. Those are tedious in any true-crime documentary, but here it isn’t (just) banality that irks. It’s that the show is repressing itself, as if in its heart of hearts it wanted to be a spinoff of “Narcos” but had to be a lower-budget documentary instead. It’s the businessperson whose dreams of the stage were denied and who now finds an awful lot of opportunities to turn presentations into song-and-dance numbers. Me? Sing? I couldn’t possib —— well, maybe just this once.The blending of self-aware nonfiction with imprecise, borderline goofy recreations here makes true things feel faker. I can see with my own eyes that the guy in the recreation looks nothing like the guy he’s portraying; am I meant to believe the inanity written on his white board was on a real white board? Flabby scripted dialogue offers so little, especially when the colorful, actual anecdotes offer so much.“Cowboy Cartel” and the talking-heads featured in it know they are in conversation not only with the cultural mythologies of the glamours of crime but also with crime fiction in general. Our wholesome F.B.I. agent solemnly describes one of the captured and convicted cartel bosses as “my Hannibal Lecter,” and other people lament the public’s lack of understanding about the true depravity of cartels. The real goings-on here — the real losses, the genuine conflict, the poignant asides — are enough. More

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    Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter to Star in ‘Waiting for Godot’ on Broadway

    They played slacker buddies in three “Bill & Ted” films, and next year they plan to reunite for Beckett’s classic tragicomedy.Call it Bill and Ted’s Existentialist Adventure.Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, the actors who incarnated a pair of slacker musicians for three “Bill & Ted” films, are planning to reunite for a Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot.”The production, planned for the fall of 2025, will be directed by Jamie Lloyd, one of the hottest directors of the moment, whose work is characterized by a spare aesthetic and an emphasis on psychological intensity.Lloyd said that the project was Reeves’s idea, but that as soon as the actor approached him, “it was a no-brainer that this needed to be done.”“Their instant chemistry and their shorthand and their friendship is going to be so valuable,” Lloyd said of Reeves and Winter in an interview. “This is a very deeply complex play, as we all know, but it’s also a very funny play, and they’re very witty people and their shared sense of humor in those movies and in real life is going to be very beneficial to the production.”In “Godot,” Reeves will play Estragon and Winter will play Vladimir, who banter and bicker while waiting for a mysterious figure who never arrives. “Those characters take solace in their companionship as they stumble toward the void,” Lloyd said, adding, “that’s going to be the central thesis of the production, with Keanu and Alex’s own friendship.”“Waiting for Godot,” by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, was first staged in French in 1953 and then in English in 1955. The play was first performed on Broadway in 1956, and has been revived there three times since, most recently in 2013 with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.Reeves, the prolific film star of the “Matrix” and “John Wick” series, will be making his Broadway debut with “Godot.” He likes a challenge: In 1995, he played Hamlet in Winnipeg, Manitoba.Winter, who writes and directs in addition to acting, appeared on Broadway twice in the 1970s, when he was a teenager, in musical revivals of “The King and I” and “Peter Pan.”The two first worked together in 1989 in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” A second film, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” arrived in 1991, and a third, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” in 2020.Lloyd, based in London, has become a regular presence in New York. Last year he directed a revival of “A Doll’s House” starring Jessica Chastain, and this fall he will direct a revival of “Sunset Boulevard” starring Nicole Scherzinger.The “Waiting for Godot” revival is being produced by Lloyd’s production company, as well as ATG Productions, Bad Robot Live (J.J. Abrams’s company) and Gavin Kalin Productions. ATG is a British theater company that has a long relationship with Lloyd and operates seven Broadway theaters; the production said that “Godot” would be staged in one of those ATG theaters. More

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    Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Next Project: A ‘Warriors’ Album With Eisa Davis

    The recording, inspired by Walter Hill’s 1979 film about a gang making a perilous trek through New York City, will be available on Oct. 18.In the nine years since “Hamilton” opened on Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda has acted (in the film “Mary Poppins Returns” and the HBO series “His Dark Materials,” among others), composed (songs for “Encanto” and “Moana,” for example) and even tried his hand at movie directing (“Tick, Tick … Boom!”).Now he’s returning to his roots, sort of. Miranda, who rose to fame as a musical theater savant, has been working with the playwright Eisa Davis on a concept album inspired by a cult 1979 action film, “The Warriors.” And on Thursday, Miranda and Davis announced that Atlantic Records will release the album on Oct. 18.The album’s executive producer is the rapper Nas; the producer is Mike Elizondo. The album will have 26 songs; the names of the singers have not yet been announced.The album has been in the works for three years. It is unclear if it will lead to a stage production, but “Hamilton” was initially conceived as a concept album, and there is a history of concept albums evolving into stage productions, from “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “Hadestown.”“The Warriors,” based on a 1965 novel that in turn was based on an ancient Greek work, tells the story of a street gang facing a variety of challenges as it retreats from the Bronx to its home base on Coney Island. The novel, also called “The Warriors,” was written by Sol Yurick, and the ancient Greek text, “Anabasis,” by Xenophon; the film was directed by Walter Hill.Miranda, 44, is one of the few musical theater composers to become a celebrity based on his stage work. But “Hamilton,” about the nation’s first Treasury secretary, was a rare accomplishment, winning the Pulitzer Prize as well as 11 Tony Awards, including for best musical and Miranda’s book and score.His other best-known musical is “In the Heights,” for which he wrote the score and Quiara Alegría Hudes wrote the book. Since “Hamilton,” he contributed lyrics to the short-lived musical “New York, New York,” but has not written a new stage production.Davis, 53, is a longtime friend of Miranda and has worked as an actress, a playwright, a singer and a screenwriter. She performed on Broadway in “Passing Strange,” and has numerous credits as a performer Off Broadway and on television and film. Among her plays is “Bulrusher.” More

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    Arrest Warrant Issued for ‘Power Rangers’ Actor Hector David Rivera

    Mr. Rivera, whose stage name is Hector David Jr., was charged with battery in Idaho after a video showed him pushing an older man who used a walker, the police said.An arrest warrant was issued on Wednesday for an actor who appeared for years as the Green Ranger in “Power Rangers” films and television shows, after a video showed him pushing a man in his 60s who used a walker, the police in Idaho said.The actor, Hector David Rivera, 35, was charged with misdemeanor battery in Idaho after video surfaced on Friday showing him in a dispute with the older man, said Carmen Boeger, a spokeswoman for the Nampa Police Department. Nampa is a city west of Boise with over 100,000 people.The video, captured on Friday on a bystander’s dashboard camera, begins with a dispute over a parking spot between a man wearing a New England Patriots jersey and another who is using a walker. It ends with the first man shoving the other one to the ground before climbing into a black truck. He later drove away, the department said.The 14-second video has no audio and does not show the full interaction. But the truck appears to be parked in a space for people with disabilities, and Ms. Boeger said that the dispute began over a parking spot.Video released by the Nampa Police Department in Nampa, Idaho, showed Hector David Rivera, an actor in the “Power Rangers” franchise, pushing an older man to the ground in a parking lot.Nampa Police DepartmentThe Nampa police identified Mr. Rivera by posting the video on the department’s social media pages and asking the public for assistance, Ms. Boeger said. An arrest warrant was issued on Wednesday, and the victim’s name was not released.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Colin Jost Will Host the New ‘Jeopardy!’ Pop Culture Spinoff

    “Pop Culture Jeopardy!” is expected to begin production in August and will stream only on Amazon Prime Video.If you have enjoyed Colin Jost’s dispatches from Tahiti for the Olympics surfing events and are hoping to see more of him, you’re in luck: On Wednesday, Sony Pictures Television announced that he will be host of the new game show “Pop Culture Jeopardy!”Jost, 42, is a veteran writer for “Saturday Night Live” and has anchored its Weekend Update segment since 2014 alongside Michael Che. “Pop Culture Jeopardy!” — a spinoff of the juggernaut “Jeopardy!,” which has run for decades on broadcast TV and in syndication — will stream only on Amazon Prime Video.Jost was selected for his “sharp wit and intelligence,” Suzanne Prete, president for game shows at Sony Pictures Television, which produces the show, said in a news release. “He’s smart and quick, like our contestants, and we know he’ll be able to keep up with them while making this new series his own.”“What is: I’m excited,” Jost said in the statement, riffing on the “Jeopardy!” answer format.In the pop culture version of the show, contestants will play in teams of three in tournament-style events, racing to answer questions in a variety of categories like alternative rock, the Avengers and Broadway. Production of the show is expected to begin in August.The spinoff is part of a yearslong expansion of the “Jeopardy!”-verse, as the show’s producers have called it, which will also include special tournaments. The flagship show also has seen plenty of change since Alex Trebek, who had hosted “Jeopardy!” for 37 years, died in 2020. A lengthy, revolving host audition resulted in Mike Richards, then the show’s executive producer, being chosen to host, only to be pushed aside after revelations that he had made offensive comments on a podcast. Then the role was shared between the actor Mayim Bialik and the former “Jeopardy!” champion Ken Jennings until last year, when Bialik announced that she had been removed from the show. Jennings has since settled in as the sole host. More