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    ‘Big Brother’ Expels Luke Valentine For Using Racial Slur

    “Well, I’m in trouble now,” Luke Valentine said after using a slur for Black people in a conversation on the reality show.“Big Brother,” CBS’s long-running reality competition, has kicked off a contestant for using a racial slur.The contestant, Luke Valentine, used a slur for Black people this week while chatting with other men in the compound where houseguests are filmed 24 hours a day as they compete for a large cash prize. Valentine is white, and one of the other men in the conversation is Black.The incident, broadcast during the show’s live online feed, was addressed on Thursday night’s episode, in which highlights from the feed are interspersed with contestants’ reflections on recent events in the house.“It’s been an emotional 24 hours in the ‘Big Brother’ house as the houseguests learned that one of their own broke the ‘Big Brother’ code of conduct and was removed from the game,” the show’s longtime host, Julie Chen Moonves, said during the episode.After Valentine, an illustrator from Florida, used the slur, he immediately apologized to the three other men in the room and tried to backtrack. Clearly shocked, two of the men quickly left. Jared Fields, who is Black, mostly stayed quiet but responded to Valentine by saying that the slur can make white people more uncomfortable than Black people.“Well, I’m in trouble now,” Valentine said to Fields.In an interview aired on Thursday’s episode, Fields said: “My nonreaction in the moment, being the only Black male in this house, I don’t know what to say. Anything I say or do can come across wrong or aggressive.”“I don’t associate ignorance with malice,” he later added.On an Instagram account that is followed by verified accounts of other “Big Brother” contestants, Valentine posted an apology to his story, along with a photo of himself and a prayer hands emoji. “Luke made a big mistake,” it read, “please forgive him.”Andy Herren, the show’s Season 15 winner, said CBS did the right thing by expelling Valentine. “YEARS of problematic behavior and language in the Big Brother house going unpunished led to fans and former houseguests speaking up,” Herren posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. He added, “This is huge and will change things moving forward!”“Big Brother,” now in its 25th season, has a history of racism among its contestants.In 2019, shortly before winning Season 21, Jackson Michie was asked on live television to answer for accusations that some of his behavior during the season had been racist and sexist. He defended himself in the moment but later apologized, admitting blame. Aaryn Gries, a Season 15 contestant, was questioned by Chen Moonves after being filmed making racist and homophobic remarks.Black contestants have also struggled to advance on “Big Brother,” often getting voted out early. The show’s first Black winner, Xavier Prather, was not crowned until Season 23. The next season featured the show’s first Black female winner, Taylor Hale.“It was something I was cognizant of,” Prather told The New York Times this year. “I am a 6-2, 200-pound athletic Black man — I can’t approach the game the same way that a slim, 5-10 white man can, because we’re perceived differently.”“To assume that I could approach the game the same way would be to assume that I could approach life the same way,” he continued. “‘Big Brother’ is literally a reflection of our society.”Calum Marsh More

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    ‘Billions’ Season 7 Premiere Recap: Axe Is Back

    A certain redheaded maniac returns to the scene for the series’s concluding season. Let the final showdowns begin.Season 7, Episode 1: ‘Tower of London’He’s back.Bobby Axelrod, the hard-charging, take-no-prisoners billionaire who served as the antagonist-cum-co-protagonist for the first five seasons of “Billions,” returns at the end of the show’s seventh and final season premiere. Like a demon out of an esoteric’s grimoire, Axe (Damian Lewis) been summoned by three of his closest associates — Wendy (Maggie Siff), Wags (David Costabile) and Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon) — to rise from legally mandated oblivion in order to defeat a devil far worse than the devil we know.That devil is Mike Prince (Corey Stoll), who served as the stand-in during the show’s sixth season for the role once played by Axelrod. A breed apart from his predecessor, he spent the bulk of Season 6 as something of a do-gooder … to an extent.Prince created a universal basic income program known as Mike Money — but the program was paid for by untaxed cryptocurrency, which believe it or not was once viewed as the wave of the financial future. He tried to bring the Olympics to New York City — though as any resident of a host city can tell you, that’s stretching the definition of “do-gooding” quite a bit, given the tax incentives and indigent sweeps typically preceding the Games.Most important of all, though? Mike Prince is running for President of the United States of America, sooner rather than later. (Perhaps because this is now the show’s final season, his timeline has been accelerated from 2028 to, gulp, 2024.) As he tells Wendy in the episode’s quietly chilling opening scene, he is doing so because he believes only he has the gimlet eye and the force of will required to save the dying nation from itself. If the people scream for mercy as he rescues them? Let them scream, he says. He knows best.In a maneuver that places Wendy at the center of the action in a way she hasn’t been in years, the premiere casts her as the Christopher Walken character in “The Dead Zone” — the person who sees most clearly that Prince is literally a Hitler-quoting clear and present danger to the republic and the world at large. Even as she strings him along, promising to performance-coach him all the way into the White House, she has decided to work toward his downfall.She’s hardly alone in that. In order to clear the decks for his coming campaign, Prince has stepped back from the day-to-day operations of Prince Capital. He’s got not one but two major-domos, Wags and Scooter (Daniel Breaker), to serve as his eyes, ears and voice. He has the absurdly intimidating and unflappable Kate (Dola Rashad) to serve as his legal mind. And as far as he’s concerned, he has his successors, the young(ish) brainiacs Taylor and Philip (Toney Goins) to run the place in his stead, ensuring that the money keeps rolling in.But Taylor and Philip don’t see this as a promotion. They see it as the deliberate dismantling of Taylor Mason Carbon, the independent in-house shop they had dedicated to E.S.G. (environmental, social, and governance) investments. You know, the kind of do-gooding Mike Prince was once interested in?For Prince, though, having a separate carve-out within his empire indicates that the empire itself doesn’t care about these issues, and he cannot allow himself to be seen as someone who doesn’t care. By sunsetting Taylor and Philip’s shingle and putting them, his smartest people, in charge of the whole operation, Prince hopes he can kill two birds with one stone.But all the while, Wendy — terrified of Prince’s dark potential after a chilling tête-à-tête in which the depths of his egomania are revealed — is mounting a counteroffensive. Though Axe’s best bud, Wags, and his merciless lawyer Orrin Bach (Glenn Fleshler) plead ignorance as to Bobby’s whereabouts, Wags nevertheless gets a message to his old master. Axe then relays his willingness to entertain their request for help via a trade pattern only an old associate like Taylor’s pal Mafee (Dan Soder) can spot. (With the help of the best legal weed New York money can buy, naturally.)So, in a meeting before the bright lights of the Tower of London, Wendy and Wags and Taylor — and we in the audience — are reunited with the redheaded stepchild of the series. Never one to let a 1970s New Hollywood Cinema movie reference go unstated, Bobby Axelrod compares the crew here assembled to Luke, Leia, and Chewbacca, leaving himself as both the Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon. Let the war against the emperor commence!But there’s a second front opening up in the war on Prince. Though he’s both down and disgraced, to the point where his adolescent children no longer want to be seen eating with him in public, Chuck Rhoades is by no means out. At the end of last season, he accepted exile from the legal community and extensive legal troubles of his own as the cost of helping his colleague, Attorney General Dave Mahar of New York (Sakina Jaffrey), take Prince down.But c’mon, this is Chuck we’re talking about here. You think he’s going to sit idly by as his reputation is dragged through the mud to the point where his own kids are embarrassed by him? With the help of the obnoxious journalist Lucien Porter (Matthew Lawler), he becomes the beneficiary of a P.R. campaign in the press that paints him to be a Robin Hood figure — the lone man willing to stand up to the billionaire class with deeds rather than mere words, and who paid for it by losing his government jobs not once but twice.The resulting turnaround in the public imagination might well be Chuck’s masterstroke to date. Suddenly this old-money Yalie’s fever dreams of being championed by the socialist likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez don’t seem so far-fetched. Sure, it irks Dave, who all but tells him their nonaggression pact is off by episode’s end. But to Chuck’s mind, she didn’t tell him what her full plan was, so why should he return the favor?All of a sudden “Billions” has a sense of urgency it hasn’t had since the really monomaniacal days of the Chuck/Axe conflict. Keep in mind that this episode begins with a five-months-later flash-forward in which an enraged, borderline psychotic Prince storms into his place of business, tracks down Wendy and shatters the glass walls of her office, demanding to know what it is that makes her so sure he shouldn’t be president. In that act, he answers his own question.Considering the time of its creation — pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, pre-Bernie and A.O.C., pre-Covid — “Billions” has been fairly adept at keeping pace with the times. The one-two punch of Clancy Brown’s good-old-boy attorney general Jock Jeffcoat and Danny Strong’s sleazeball treasury secretary Todd Krakow demonstrated the series’s deftness at reflecting its surroundings. But it’s inarguable that the political and economic reality of America and the wider world has gotten weirder, faster, than even Hollywood’s brightest minds could conceive.So kudos to the “Billions” team for drilling down on perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the past seven years: The mega-rich are freaks, and belong no closer to the levers of power than a chimpanzee to the controls of a Ferris wheel. Aligning virtually all the characters we like against the embodiment of all the cultural trends we don’t — from naked oligarchy to progressive lip service — is unbelievably shrewd. That this season is airing as the working writers and actors who make “Billions” possible man the picket lines against Hollywood’s ruling class makes it all the more pointed and poignant.Long one of the most purely entertaining shows on television, “Billions” has always preferred to let its message about the robber barons who rule our world play out amid the beats of a well-made financial thriller over the more direct and unmissable approach preferred by heavy-handed satires like “Succession” and “The White Lotus.” If what we’re seeing in this premiere holds true for the series’s remaining episodes, though, the show seems to have well and truly gotten religion at last. It will spend its final hours depicting our heroes, and many of our villains too, battling to prevent a dictatorial billionaire from becoming the leader of the free world.Loose changeWith his clipped American accent, crisp body language and twinkling eyes that radiate both mirth and malevolence in equal measure, Lewis’s Bobby Axelrod is legit one of the great character creations of the Peak TV era. I’m so glad to have him back.For that matter, Giamatti has always made Chuck’s contradictory blend of for-the-good-of-the-Republic earnestness and knife-in-the-back craftiness sing. And hey, let’s also give props to Siff’s investment of Wendy with hard-earned arrogance and Stoll’s portrayal of Prince as the kind of maniacally self-confident weirdo you only find in finance, tech, politics or an unholy amalgam of all three.My fave real-world cameos in this episode: the billionaire Mark Cuban and the former Obama/Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri. I’ve never been quite sure what to make of the show’s visits by the actual rich and powerful, given how I feel about their equivalents within the series, but it’s undeniable that they’re part of that old “Billions” charm.Another special shoutout must be reserved for Kelly AuCoin’s gleefully profane “Dollar Bill” Stearn. Though Taylor and Philip dislike Dollar Bill’s attitude (the feeling is mutual), they recognize that he’s the kind of earner they need to boost company profits, and thus keep Prince happy, while they secretly work to thwart their boss’s ambitions.The funniest bit about Dollar Bill’s return? The only guy who’s happy to see him is Victor (Louis Cancelmi), the only trader with even fewer scruples than Dollar Bill himself.“Billions” showrunners and music supervisors, hear my plea: It is not too late to score an epic scene with the appropriately named pre-“Dark Side of the Moon” Pink Floyd psych-rock juggernaut “Careful with That Axe, Eugene.” Granted, you might have to insert a character named Eugene to balance the “Axe” part, but I’ve come to trust in your ingenuity.As a fan of professional wrestling, or as I like to call it, “The Sport of Kings,” I found it very funny to hear Cuban refer to himself as “a Terry Funk guy.” The Funker, if you’re not aware, is the god of hardcore wrestling, the subgenre that involves barbed wire, razor blades, and gallons of very real blood. No wonder this dude helped run the Shark Tank.Male nerds of a certain vintage have long resigned themselves to the idea that there are two types of guys in the world: Luke Skywalkers (noble, incorruptible babyfaces) and Han Solos (roguish, unpredictable antiheroes). It’s revealing that even as he’s being called in to defeat the show’s Darth Vader equivalent, Axe refers to himself as Han rather than Luke.While we’re on the subject, this means Taylor is Luke (the chosen one gifted with special mind powers), Wendy is Leia (the steely commander who’s also a pale brunette knockout), and Wags is Chewie (the sidekick defined by his specific brand of hirsuteness). More

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    At the Edinburgh Festival, Wrestling With Identity

    In plays from Scotland, Korea and Switzerland, theater companies explored questions of belonging, with varying degrees of success.Questions of nationhood, identity and belonging loom large in three politically themed productions at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The tagline for this year’s edition is “community over chaos,” and there was plenty of both in “Thrown,” a National Theater of Scotland production running at the Traverse Theater through Aug. 27.Written by Nat McCleary and directed by Johnny McKnight, it’s a sentimental comedy about five women from Glasgow who travel to the Scottish countryside to compete in a backhold wrestling tournament. In this folk sport, indigenous to Scotland, competitors are initially locked into a clamp-like hug, before trying to wrestle each other to the ground. It dates back more than a thousand years, and the escapade is a kind of pilgrimage for the characters as they seek to connect with their national heritage. Along the way they playfully dissect what it means to be Scottish, reeling off some serviceable — if not terribly original — gags about haggis, kilts and “Braveheart.”Personality clashes emerge. Jo (Adiza Shardow), who is mixed race, and Chantelle (Chloe-Ann Taylor), who is white, are both working class and have been best pals since their school days, whereas Imogen (Efé Agwele), who is Black, was expensively educated and is new on the scene. When Imogen encourages Jo to take a greater interest in racial politics, this puts a strain on Jo and Chantelle’s friendship. Chantelle resents Imogen for boiling everything down to race and vents her frustration at being seen as privileged, simply because she is white. Imogen, in turn, points out that her affluent upbringing has not protected her from racism. They are both right, of course, and their circular squabbling brings home the absurdity of pitting different types of oppression against each other.Lesley Hart is boisterously engaging as the group’s intense coach, Pam, but the star of the show is Maureen Carr, who plays Helen, the most unlikely of the five wrestlers. Diminutive in stature and older than the rest of the gang, she is a fish out of water who Carr plays with winning geniality. Helen provides moral support to Pam when she reveals her struggles with her gender identity and delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Pam explains that the play’s title denotes the feeling helplessness in the split second when you realize you’re about to lose a wrestling match. The sport is a metaphor for personal struggle, and the team, of course, is a metaphor for the Scottish nation. It’s heartwarming stuff, but heavy-handedly allegorical.Maureen Carter, right, who plays Helen, is the standout actor of the show. She delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Julie Howden“Dusk,” a show that the Brazilian theater maker Christiane Jatahy developed with the Swiss company Comédie de Genève, is more intellectually ambitious, but similarly flawed. Its protagonist, a young undocumented migrant called Graça (Julia Bernat), takes a job with a French-speaking theater troupe that is working on a stage adaptation of the Lars Von Trier movie “Dogville.”Graça claims to have fled Brazil as a political refugee, and the troupe’s members believe they are doing a good turn by hiring her, but relations sour when troubling stories emerge about her history. The women in the group become nasty as they suspect Graça has designs on their partners, and one male colleague, a naturalized citizen, takes against her because she reminds him of his own past experience as a hated outsider. The dynamic tips into exploitation and abuse, both psychological and sexual.Jatahy is known for work that blends the conventions of theater and cinema. Here, the onstage action is recorded by a camcorder synced up to a large screen displaying close-up footage in real time. This is occasionally interspersed with prerecorded footage that differs jarringly from what’s happening on the stage. The intention is to discombobulate the audience, and it does. The trouble, however, is that the big screen ultimately overshadows the actors’ in-the-flesh presence, as the eye is continually drawn upward. One might as well be at the movies.In “Dusk,” directed by Christiane Jatahy, close-up footage of the actors is displayed in real time on a screen at the back of the stage.Magali DougadosRunning at the Royal Lyceum Theater through Aug. 27, “Dusk” is a provocative and pointedly bleak allegory of liberal hypocrisy. The central concept is strong, but the play is let down by overkill, especially in not one, but two, graphic depictions of sexual violence. When, after the second, the fictional troupe’s director (played by Matthieu Sampeur) earnestly agonizes over the ethics of storytelling, we detect a none-too-subtle attempt to pre-empt criticisms that “Dusk” trades too heavily on shock value. (Reader, it does.)The final 30 minutes of this 90-minute production are spent laboring the message of the first hour, culminating in a catastrophically unnecessary audience-facing lecture from Graça on xenophobia, gendered violence and the rise of the far right. The applause at the end of the show was damningly restrained.A refreshing antidote to that production’s audiovisual clutter came in an exquisite production of Euripides’ “Trojan Women,” by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea. (The final performance of its three-show run is Aug. 11.) Set in the immediate aftermath of the decade-long Trojan War, it portrays the women of Troy as they await their imminent subjugation by the Greeks, who, having killed the Trojan menfolk, intend to take the women as wives or slaves.The National Changgeuk Company of Korea production of “Trojan Women” directed by Ong Keng Sen.Jess ShurteThe director, Ong King Sen, and the playwright Bae Sam-sik, have done a fine job of reimagining this tale, which is mostly told through the medium of Pansori, a Korean genre of musical storytelling in which singing is accompanied by drumming. The propulsive pounding of the drum lends the songs a certain martial quality, which combines with the mournful tones of a zither and the singers’ plaintive laments to produce a powerful blend of sorrow and defiance. Kim Kum-mi delivers a vocal performance of remarkable intensity as the Trojan queen Hecuba, and Yi So-yeon is arresting as the fey clairvoyant Cassandra.The splendid set, by Cho Myung-hee is all the more imposing for its elegant simplicity. The Trojan women emerge, clad in white, from a strange, otherworldly tunnel flanked by two golden staircases; at various points, the structure is brought to life with elaborate lighting effects to evoke fire and sea.Euripides’s play dates from 415 B.C., but its enduring resonance is all too obvious as we look around the world today and reflect, for example, on the anniversary of the genocide by ISIS of the Yazidi people of Syria and Iraq — and the subsequent sexual enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women — which began nine years ago this month; or the mounting evidence of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.Hecuba’s howl of anguish — “Destiny is drunk, the gods are blind!” — is a lament for the ages, a visceral and succinct protest against the abject cruelty of war.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More

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    ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 2 Episode 9 Recap: Budding Expectations

    Lisa has big news. So does Carrie. OK, so do a bunch of characters.The first time Carrie started dating Aidan, back in Season 3 of “Sex and the City,” she found herself routinely waking up with a gasp in the middle of the night. Something felt off. Something felt wrong. But after scouring for whatever unchecked item on her to-do list was giving her this anxiety, she found that, in fact, she “hadn’t so much as missed a teeth cleaning.”It was Aidan who was messing with her head. Carrie couldn’t relax because, for the first time, she was in a relationship where no one was, well, messing with her head. Unlike Big, who was the king of, as Carrie named it, the “seductive withholding dance,” Aidan was a good man, and he was good to her.“It’s smooth sailing,” Carrie said of their relationship. “Nothing but calm seas, blue horizons as far as I can see.”Fast forward to the present, when Carrie and Aidan are once again coupled up after a two-decade hiatus. Just like before, it’s smooth sailing. Everything is working. They just fit.But this time around, while Carrie has never felt more certain that she is in the right relationship with the right man at the right time, it’s others who are having anxiety about it.It began with Miranda, who in last week’s episode asked Carrie if she should “take a beat.” Carrie and Aidan went from zero to cohabitating at warp speed, and Miranda couldn’t help but worry.Even though Carrie assures Miranda that the past isn’t repeating itself, you can still see the look of concern cross Miranda’s face, as well as Charlotte’s, when Carrie shows her friends the giant new apartment she is angling to buy in Gramercy Park. It has plenty of room for Aidan and his three sons, and most important, it is not her old place, in which Aidan won’t set foot. She tells her friends she is ready to sell it.“Are you really that sure, Carrie?” Charlotte asks with distress on her face. But once again, Carrie sings her song. She is sure. She is ready. She is happy.But the doubters keep on coming. Later, it is Aidan’s ex-wife, Kathy (Rosemarie DeWitt), who presents as a harbinger of heartbreak. “I know your history with Aidan,” Kathy says bluntly to Carrie. “You can’t hurt him again.”“Of course you’ll hurt me,” Aidan tells Carrie when he finds out about that conversation. And he will hurt her, and things will get messy, but they will work it out. Aidan is just as sure as Carrie. Everything seems to be going right.So, if the aim of this episode is to convince us, the audience, not to worry that Carrie and Aidan won’t make it work this time — and yet that our doubts are well-founded — well, it’s working.And I hope that the writers, executives and everyone else involved at Max understand that if Aidan and Carrie fall apart in the final two episodes of this season, after all this building of trust — between them, and between them and us — that some of us (me!) will sink into a hole and perish.Meanwhile, not everyone else is so self-assured in matters of the heart. For starters, Anthony has been having dinner, but not sex, with Giuseppe (Sebastiano Pigazzi), the young Italian poet who recently ended his brief stint as a Hot Fella.Maybe it’s his pending divorce from Stanford Blatch (Willie Garson), or maybe it’s just that he can’t figure out what would make a fox like Giuseppe want someone like him. But for whatever reason, Anthony just can’t seem to relax and embrace it. It isn’t until Anthony confronts Giuseppe about what he believes is an obvious scheme to get a green card that he finds out Giuseppe already has dual citizenship. He really does just want to shag. Within moments, they do.Nya, however, has absolutely no issue showing a younger man around her bedroom. She is reveling in hot, casual sex until a gut-punch of an Instagram post crosses her feed: a photo of her ex-husband, hugging a woman we can assume is the hat-wearing songwriter Nya caught him with before. And she is pregnant.Nya, who ultimately ended things with Andre over not wanting to have his child, immediately kicks out her beau — don’t worry, he’s cool with it — so that she can stew over this alone.It’s not the only unexpected pregnancy we get in this episode. Lisa, who has become borderline narcoleptic, falls asleep in her closet and nearly misses Herbert’s big campaign speech at his event at the Goldenblatts’. Lisa tells Herbert, just as he is about to make his remarks, that she is pregnant. It’s a plot twist that neither Herbert — nor, most likely, any of us — saw coming.Maybe the most surprising and delightful development in the episode, though, is the coupling of young Brady Hobbes and Lily Goldenblatt. Is it just a spring fling, or could this be the start of “Sex and the City: The Next Generation”? Mostly I hope not, but considering this franchise clearly has no intention of stopping, you never know.Things still taking up space in my brainAs infallible as Aidan is to me, personally, I have to ding him on this: He absolutely refuses to enter Carrie’s apartment, but when she tells him she is selling it, he tells her, “You don’t have to sell it for me.” Obviously she does?I’m calling it right now: Seema is going to be engaged by the end of this season. It has already been established that some part of her aches to have at least one great love. It should also be noted that she has written off her new beau, Ravi (Armin Amiri), as not being “marriage material.” That’s meant to throw us off the scent, I think. More

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    Can ’Candide,’ ‘Rent’ and ‘Spamalot’ Ever Be Truly Revived?

    “Candide” in an opera house. “Spamalot” and “Rent” cheek by jowl with Shakespeare. But treating them as classics may not be doing them justice.There comes a moment in the afterlife of even the most successful musical when it threatens to become a museum piece. One day, it’s the hot new thing, perhaps even defining its era; next, it’s “The Merry Widow.”On a theater trip through New York State and Ontario last month, I saw three musical revivals in various stages of that transformation: one — “Candide” — fully evolved into an opera house staple that’s rarely performed anywhere else; the other two — “Rent” and “Spamalot” — on uncertain trajectories toward classic status or the dustbin.The “Candide,” at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., opened with what seemed to be an acknowledgment of the situation. From a stageful of shadows at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Glimmerglass’s home on sparkling Otsego Lake, dim forms awakened as if from a long slumber, emerging from tarps and storage trunks. Eventually a sort of ghostly maitre d’ cued the orchestra, which sprang to life with the undying joy of Leonard Bernstein’s overture.It was an indication that the somewhat zombified story of “Candide” would always need resuscitating by the music. Rejiggered every which way since it was first produced on Broadway in 1956, the book has so many problems and variations that the options for reviving it resemble a game of 3-D chess. And the list of musical numbers Bernstein wrote to accommodate the changes — then discarded, rewrote, re-discarded, recombined and otherwise cycled into and out of the score — comes to nearly 100 titles.Glimmerglass’s version, originally produced there in 2015, is itself a revival, no more dramaturgically coherent in Francesca Zambello’s staging than any other. Though adapted from a Voltaire novella generally considered a masterpiece, its story — an innocent boy’s education in optimism is undone by the ever more absurd horrors of the actual world — becomes a case of diminishing returns when staged. Nora Ephron, noting that you get tired of the characters’ misadventures long before they do, called it a musical that always seems to be great “on the night you’re not seeing it.”True, yet it is at the same time glorious. Young singers with clarion voices — and a 42-piece opera orchestra, conducted with incisive good humor by Joseph Colaneri — bear you swiftly through the longueurs. In the process, a flop that tried too hard to be au courant, satirizing America’s postwar euphoria, is transformed into a timeless piece that, having found its niche, lives on and on. When Candide and his lover, separated by various disasters, sing the lovely and witty “You Were Dead, You Know,” they might be singing about the show itself.Brian Vu, center, as the title character in “Candide,” whose optimism is unraveled over the course of the musical by the horrors of the real world.Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass FestivalThere’s a similar moment in “Spamalot,” the deliberately ludicrous musical by Eric Idle and the composer John Du Prez. If you’re familiar with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 1975 movie on which it’s closely based, you’ll probably be laughing even before a chorus of medieval plague victims, being carted off in tumbrels, sing pathetically that they’re “not dead yet.” One of them insists he’s in fact feeling much better.I don’t know whether “Spamalot,” playing this year at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, can expect a similar recovery. A Broadway hit in 2005, it offered silly distraction and precision direction (by no less than Mike Nichols) in the ongoing dark after the Sept. 11 attacks. Not that it was designed to speak to its time, let alone all time; it was content just to fill time. Its ambitions seemed limited to rhyming “Lancelot” with “dance a lot” and trotting out a Python dream team including the French taunter, the knights who say “Ni” and a chorus line of self-flagellating monks bonking themselves on the upbeat.Like the movie, it was a blast, even if its satire, coming from all directions, seemed to have no target. (Much of what it pokes fun at are the conventions of musicals themselves.) Seeing it at Stratford, as part of a 12-show repertory that includes four Shakespeare productions as well as new plays and modern classics, is a disorienting experience. As comedies go, it’s no “Much Ado About Nothing.” The festival’s dignity and its ethos of highbrow good work do something weird to material so deliberately lowbrow and anti-establishment.In 2018 at Stratford, “The Rocky Horror Show” suffered from a similar problem — but recent Stratford productions of “Chicago,” “The Music Man” and “Guys and Dolls” (all directed and choreographed by Donna Feore) did not. The festival does sincerity, even the gimlet-eyed kind, very well. But as directed by Lezlie Wade and choreographed by Jesse Robb, “Spamalot” feels hasty and mechanical, relying on the prefab jokes to do most of the work. They don’t.Yet it’s not clear to me that even a fresher and more idiomatic take would solve much. (We’ll have a chance to find out with the arrival of a completely different “Spamalot” revival on Broadway this fall.) For many of us, the punchlines are so ingrained that they have become golden oldies, suitable for a kind of karaoke pleasure but unlikely to produce helpless guffaws. Maybe comedy needs to skip a few generations until minds that know nothing of migratory coconuts can test its enduring worth.But what about tragedy? For the sake of argument, let’s call “Rent” a tragedy even though it does everything in its considerable power to turn the nightmare of AIDS in the late 1980s, recalling parallel plagues in its 19th-century sources, into musical theater uplift. And time has further distorted it. In the manner of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in their time, the show’s big anthem, “Seasons of Love,” has now delaminated from its story entirely. Instead of a plea to treasure brief lives, it has become an all-purpose good-times chorale; my sons (today in their late 20s) sang it at their elementary school graduations.Nestor Lozano Jr., center, as the drag queen Angel in the 2023 Stratford Festival production of “Rent.”David HouAn author should be so lucky as to have that problem, but it nevertheless is a problem. So is the meta-tragedy surrounding “Rent,” whose author, Jonathan Larson, died at 35 in the hours just before the show’s scheduled premiere. The work has essentially been frozen as he left it that day in 1996. Thom Allison, who directed Stratford’s production, told me that permission for even the tiniest change in the script, to correct an acknowledged inconsistency, was denied by the estate’s representatives.That leaves new generations little wiggle room in which to experiment with refreshing “Rent” and finessing its headaches. As always, it struck me in the Stratford production that the work of the downtown artists the show means to valorize is actually terrible; that the central male character is utterly passive; that its credibility as history is all but shattered by the last-minute resurrection of a character we’ve just watched succumb to AIDS. Having seen “Spamalot” the night before, I was surprised she didn’t sing “I’m Not Dead Yet” as she awoke.Yet Allison’s staging at Stratford’s flagship Festival Theater, also home this season to “Much Ado About Nothing” and “King Lear,” made a pretty good case that, in its scale at least, “Rent” can hold its own in such company. Certainly the story of the drag queen Angel and her lover Tom Collins (traced in the songs “Today 4 U,” “I’ll Cover You” and “Santa Fe”) has a full arc and tragic grandeur, enhanced here by frankness. The sight of Angel, beneath her drag, covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions from neck to ankle (thanks to a cleverly made body suit) sent me reeling back to 1989.The question is whether “Rent” can be meaningful even for those unable to be reeled back that way. The Stratford production makes the case that it can, but however much the appearance of a new section of the AIDS quilt during the finale moved me, I wondered how many people under 40 even knew what it was. Some shows are so of their moment that they cannot be wholly of ours.CandideThrough Aug. 20 at the Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown, N.Y.; glimmerglass.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.SpamalotThrough Oct. 28 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.RentThrough Oct. 28 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes. More

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    For Disney, Streaming Losses and TV’s Decline Are a One-Two Punch

    The company experienced a sharp decline in its traditional TV business for the second straight quarter and will raise subscription prices for its streaming services.Robert A. Iger’s urgent need to overhaul Disney — to turn its streaming division into a profitable enterprise and pull back on its troubled traditional television business — came into sharp relief on Wednesday.Disney’s streaming operation lost $512 million in the most-recent quarter, the company said, bringing total streaming losses since 2019, when Disney+ was introduced, to more than $11 billion. Disney+ lost roughly 11.7 million subscribers worldwide in the three months that ended July 1, for a new total of 146.1 million.All the decline came from a low-priced version of Disney+ in India. Last year, Disney lost a bid to renew the expensive rights to Indian Premier League cricket matches. Excluding India, Disney+ gained 800,000 subscribers, primarily overseas.To make streaming profitable, Mr. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, has shifted the focus at Disney+ away from brisk subscriber growth, which requires expensive marketing campaigns. Instead, Disney has been trying to make more money from the Disney+ subscribers it already has. The monthly price for access to an ad-free version of Disney+ rose to $11 in December, from $8.Another hefty price increase is on the way. Starting on Oct. 12, the ad-free version will cost $14, Disney said. Hulu, which is also controlled by Disney, will begin charging $18 for ad-free access, up from $15. As an incentive, Disney will begin selling a new streaming package — ad-free access to both Disney+ and Hulu — for $20 a month starting on Sept. 6.The ad-supported options for both Disney+ and Hulu will remain the same, at $8. “We’re obviously trying with our pricing strategy to migrate more subs to the advertiser-supported tier,” Mr. Iger told analysts on a conference call. The pricing news, along with a vow by Mr. Iger to follow Netflix by cracking down on password sharing, sent Disney shares up roughly 2 percent in after-hours trading.Disney still relies on old-line channels like ESPN and ABC for roughly a third of its operating profits — and those outlets are being maimed by cord cutting, sports programming costs and advertiser pullback. Disney’s traditional channels had $1.9 billion in quarterly operating income, down 23 percent from a year earlier. Disney cited lower ad sales at ABC, partly because of viewership declines, and lower payments from ESPN subscribers, along with higher sports programming costs. (On a positive note, ESPN ad sales increased 10 percent.)It was the second consecutive quarter in which Disney’s traditional TV business recorded a sharp decline in operating income.Disney is exploring a once-unthinkable sale of a stake in ESPN. Bob Levey/Getty ImagesDisney is now exploring a once-unthinkable sale of a stake in ESPN. Not all of it, Mr. Iger has made clear. But he wants “strategic partners that could either help us with distribution or content,” he said during an interview with CNBC last month. Disney has held talks with the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball about taking a minority stake.Earlier this summer, Mr. Iger brought in two former senior Disney executives, Kevin Mayer and Thomas O. Staggs, to consult on ESPN strategy with James Pitaro, the channel’s president, and help put together any deal. Mr. Mayer and Mr. Staggs were both viewed as possible successors to Mr. Iger when they were at Disney, ultimately leaving when they were passed over to start their own media company, Candle Media, with the private equity firm Blackstone as the backer.Their return has sent the Hollywood and Wall Street gossip mills into overdrive. Are Mr. Mayer and Mr. Staggs now back in the running for Disney’s top job? Is Blackstone a potential investor in ESPN? Maybe the whole company is being prepped for a sale — with Apple as the buyer?The first two questions did not come up on Disney’s conference call, and Mr. Iger batted away the third. “I just am not going to speculate about the potential for Disney to be acquired by any company, whether it’s a technology company or not,” he said. “Obviously, anyone who wants to speculate about these things would have to immediately consider the global regulatory environment. I’ll say no more than that.”ESPN on Tuesday announced a 10-year deal with a casino company to create an online sports betting brand and push more aggressively into the lucrative world of online gambling. Notably, the $2 billion deal allows ESPN to rake in gambling money without — in keeping with Disney’s family-friendly brand — becoming a sports book itself.Mr. Iger is also contending with dual strikes in Hollywood. Unionized screenwriters have now been on strike for 100 days and actors for 27. They want higher pay from streaming services and guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence by studios.On the conference call, Mr. Iger addressed the strikes for the first time since mid-July, when he told CNBC — from an elite gathering of chief executives in Idaho — that union leaders were not being “realistic,” prompting an eruption of vitriol on picket lines. On Thursday, reading from a script, Mr. Iger said it was his “fervent hope that we quickly find solutions to the issues that have kept us apart these past few months.”“I am personally committed to working to achieve this result,” he added, saying that he had “deep respect and appreciation” for actors and writers.Disney’s quarter included some encouraging signs. The $512 million streaming loss was 32 percent less than analysts had predicted, for instance. In the fall, quarterly streaming losses reached $1.5 billion. In other words, Mr. Iger’s effort to drastically reduce losses is working. “In spite of a challenging environment in the near term, I’m overwhelmingly bullish about Disney’s future,” Mr. Iger said, noting that the company was on track to exceed a goal, announced in February, to cut $5.5 billion in costs.An 11 percent increase in profitability at Disney’s theme park division — despite weakness at Walt Disney World in Florida — allowed the company to salvage the quarter, to a degree. Companywide revenue totaled $22.3 billion, a 4 percent increase from a year earlier; analysts had expected slightly more. About $2.7 billion in one-time restructuring charges resulted in net loss of $460 million, compared with $1.4 billion in profit a year earlier.Excluding the charges, which were related to the removal of more than 30 underperforming shows and movies from Disney+ and Hulu, Disney reported earnings per share of $1.03. Analysts had expected 95 cents.Growth at Disney’s theme park division came largely from overseas. A year ago, the Shanghai Disney Resort was closed because of the Chinese government’s Covid-19 restrictions. The Shanghai property was open for all of the most-recent quarter. Hong Kong Disneyland also reported improved results. Disney’s five-ship cruise line has also been running at near capacity.Economists have long watched Disney’s domestic theme parks as informal barometers of consumer confidence. Historically, when budgets get tight, families cut back on expensive trips to Disney World. Whether for that reason or another, attendance at the Florida mega-resort declined. Attendance rose at Disneyland, in California.Other theme park operators in Florida have seen similar attendance declines. Some analysts have blamed ticket price increases. Others have said that tourist demand has shifted away from locations that reopened earlier in the pandemic — like Florida — and toward destinations that remained closed for a longer period. More

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    In ‘Operation Mincemeat,’ the Theater of War Is a Comedy

    How a theater collective transformed the too-weird-to-be-true story of a World War II counterintelligence scheme into a West End musical with heart.The inflatable tanks had to go.At one time, those tanks were a feature of “Operation Mincemeat,” a punchy, plucky, highly unlikely West End musical, which tells the even more unlikely story of an MI-5 escapade. It describes how, in 1942, British Intelligence outfitted an unclaimed corpse as a member of the Royal Marines and delivered the body to the shores of Spain, trusting that German sympathizers would study faked documents planted on the body. It worked. That was hardly the craziest part.“Part of the joy was that the crazy stuff was all true,” said Natasha Hodgson, a member of the theater collective SplitLip, which created the show.But there was so very much crazy stuff. And during early performances, the audience had doubts. They especially doubted the dummy Sherman tanks, which the Allies created to misdirect the Germans. So the tanks were cut. As were other details.“We had to take the truth out because it was too silly,” the composer Felix Hagan, another member of SplitLip said.This was on a recent morning in London. The show’s four creators — Hagan, Hodgson, David Cumming and Zoë Roberts — had gathered in the lobby bar of the Fortune Theater to discuss, excitedly, how a glam punk musician and three writer-performers previously known for bloodpack-heavy horror comedies had created the feel-good West End musical of the summer.The musical’s dozens of roles — secretaries, sailors, spies — are played by just five performers, including Roberts, Cumming and Hodgson.Matt CrockettCumming, Hodgson and Roberts met more than a decade ago, at the University of Warwick, bonding over a shared love of horror movies. With two other classmates, they created the devised company Kill the Beast, which specialized in unusually gruesome comedy, sometimes involving werewolves.The company had several successes at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. “But it was quite clear that we were going to stay niche,” Cumming said. Shows about tentacled beasts and children devoured by rats were never built for the mainstream.Music had always been an integral component of Kill the Beast shows, which made a full-scale musical an almost logical next step. As Hodgson and Hagan were in a band together, inviting him on as a composer made sense, too. With his addition, SplitLip was formed. What was missing? A story. Which Hodgson found on a family holiday when her brother encouraged her to listen to an episode of a podcast detailing the events of Operation Mincemeat.“I was just like, oh my God, this is the craziest, most amazing, hilarious, horrifying story I’ve ever heard,” Hodgson said. In other words: Perfect. She told her colleagues that they were going to have to write a musical about World War II. No tentacles necessary.There was brief dissension. (Cumming described a World War II story as “the least cool thing you can do.”) But on learning the details, everyone was persuaded. Because, as a character in the musical would later say of the Mincemeat plan, “It’s bizarre, it’s disgusting, it’s borderline psychopathic.”On the strength of a scene and two songs, the show was booked into a five-week run at London’s New Diorama Theater. Which gave the company a hectic and unglamorous nine months to write it. Some of that writing was done in an unheated studio space. The collaborators would take turns riding an exercise bike, just to keep warm.There were several discussions about musical style. Hagan had considered restricting himself to period forms, then rejected that restriction. The resulting score is eclectic, moving among pop, R&B, stride piano. The song that closes the first act transitions between sea chantey and electronic dance music, the EDM a play on a submarine’s pinging sonar.“We needed to make sure it didn’t feel old,” Cumming said.Cumming, Hodgson and Roberts knew that they would star, for financial reasons as much as creative ones. They auditioned for two more singers, a high tenor and a high soprano, then began to divvy up the dozens of roles — secretaries, sailors, a Russian spy, Ian Fleming — among the five performers, with men often playing women’s roles and women playing men’s, without camp or fanfare.“It’s a quietly queer show,” Cumming said. That queerness helped to complicate the story, chafing against its wealthy white male triumphalism by showing who was and wasn’t allowed to make decisions, who was and wasn’t given credit.In writing the script, they agreed to never change the story’s facts, even as they allowed themselves a playful approach to the characters. Yet the facts were often incredible. After an invited dress rehearsal, SplitLip read through feedback forms, some of which scolded the company for lying about history. (“The dads,” Roberts said, “can be very defensive about the war.”)They hadn’t lied, but they had jettisoned the tanks and other particulars: MI-5 employees cosplaying the fake marine, a near car crash on the way to the submarine, courtesy of a blind driver.Still, the show that debuted at the 80-seat New Diorama was a shambolic one (one song lasted about 25 minutes), with an unwieldy second act rewritten just days before opening. The company didn’t really know what they had.“I liken it to getting dressed in the road,” Hodgson said. “Our first performance just felt nude. Like, ‘Is this good?’”The audience thought so. Producers agreed. There were conversations about where the show might go from there.“That’s the first time anyone’s ever said that. Usually, they’re just like, Cool, what’s next?” Cumming said.“Funnily enough, at our werewolf comedy, tears did not flow,” Roberts said. “We were still taken aback by how passionately people cared about these characters and felt for them.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesThe show transferred to other London venues, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios. A half-hour was cut. (It now runs just over two hours.) That 25-minute song was drastically shortened. At the New Diorama, the show’s creators discovered that audiences connected with the story’s emotional beats and that they wanted more of them. This was a surprise.“Funnily enough, at our werewolf comedy, tears did not flow,” Roberts said. “We were still taken aback by how passionately people cared about these characters and felt for them.” Initially “Operation Mincemeat” had leaned away from emotional moments, undercutting them with jokes. Increasingly, the show leaned in.For the West End transfer, a director and a choreographer were hired. A “glitzy finale” was added. A larger cast was mooted, even a chorus, but the creators realized that the frenetic, quick-change, make-do-ness of the show was much of its appeal and a kind of slant rhyme with history. Then, a small group of officers had effected a piece of theater that made the Germans divert 100,000 troops. Now, a small troupe could transport hundreds of audience members into a new world every night.“The Operation Mincemeat story is about giving just enough evidence to the Nazis to make them believe something that isn’t actually there,” Cumming said. “That’s exactly the same game that we’re playing. Just five people onstage giving you enough clues here and there.”The reviews for the show have been ecstatic. And despite some characteristic British modesty, the creators think they understand why. Even as the show, through its casting and satire, is unsympathetic to the conservative structures of British intelligence, it is ultimately admiring of the very English ingenuity and eccentricity of the people, almost exclusively straight white men, who birthed and accomplished the plan.“We want to celebrate the things that they did while being incredibly aware that the opportunities that were given to do all this were because of a system that allowed them, and no one else, to have those opportunities,” Hodgson said.It’s a tricky balancing act, this patriotism and this skepticism. But a company of five that constantly swaps hats and jackets is accustomed to acrobatics. Sometimes those hats get dropped. (“Everything has gone wrong every possible which way,” Hodgson said. “There’s nothing that can really throw us.”) But the overwhelming impression is of hopefulness, expansiveness, possibility and joy.“Joy has always been our principle in everything,” Roberts said. “The darker the world gets, people need joy.” More

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    Taylor Kitsch Is No Longer a Leading Man. He’s OK With That.

    There are easier ways.If you are, let’s say, a rangy 5-feet-11-inches, with an athlete’s build, burnished skin and a heedless, sad-eyed charisma that makes audiences lean in so far they fall over, Hollywood offers smoother paths. If you look, just a little, like a god who overslept, then you don’t have to learn Shoshone or master “My Sharona” or lose weight or gain weight or have panic attacks. And if you have spent years helping a close family member survive an opioid addiction, you don’t have to take a role that asks you to portray a similar addiction, to immerse yourself in that pain and terror and need.But Taylor Kitsch does.In “Painkiller,” a six-episode series arriving on Netflix on Aug. 10, Kitsch plays Glen Kryger, the owner of a North Carolina auto repair shop. After Glen is prescribed OxyContin for a workplace injury, he descends into addiction. Slowly, at first, then in free fall.Kitsch wanted the role. It reunited him with his frequent collaborator, the producer and director Peter Berg. It felt meaningful. And Glen is the kind of part that has defined the latter half of Kitsch’s career, characters who look at first like leading men but slip from that groove because they’re too wounded, too vulnerable, too compromised. Still, he couldn’t read through even the first script without breaking down.“I’m like, Wait, there’s so much still that’s very raw,” he recalled thinking. “Then I was like, OK”Kitsch, 42, was speaking on a morning in late June, on the patio of a house in the mountains above Santa Fe, N.M. Pinyon pines squatted in the red dirt just beyond the patio’s edge. Hummingbirds whirred overhead. A heavy bag, off its chain, slumped in a corner. Kitsch had been here for months, shooting another Netflix show with Berg, “American Primeval,” a series set on the American frontier in the 1850s, due out next year. The 20 pounds he had lost for that role left him skinny in his skinny jeans, sun-roughened and bearded. Moccasins hid a broken toe, mostly healed. (This interview and others were completed before the SAG-AFTRA strike.)In “Painkiller,” Kitsch’s character runs an auto repair shop with his wife (Carolina Bartczak) until an OxyContin addiction upends his life.Keri Anderson/NetflixOffscreen, Kitsch’s persona is lighter, looser, more inclined to gesture and joke. But there’s a lonesomeness at the core of him that makes women want to save him and men want to buy him a beer. I am a mother of young children and the temptation to offer him a snack was sometimes overwhelming.The shoot was almost over (though the strike would halt it a week from completion), and Kitsch’s father, who had been absent for most of his life, had just died. He seemed stranded somewhere between character and self, more inclined to use the first-person when he talked about a role than when he spoke more personally. “You’re hungry,” he would say. “You’re about to melt down.”Kitsch grew up in British Columbia, mostly with his mother and older brothers. Later, two half sisters were born. Injuries ended a hockey career before it really began, and after a brief and mostly unsuccessful stint as a model, he began auditioning for film roles. In school, he had always liked acting, liked the attention it brought. (“I was the funny guy at school at all costs,” he said.) And he had done some background work as a teenager. He had no formal training, but his looks were enough to land him a few small roles.Then he auditioned for “Friday Night Lights,” the NBC series set in the world of Texas high school football, which premiered in 2006. Other young men had been shortlisted to play Tim Riggins, the team’s troubled fullback. But in a Hail Mary play, Kitsch’s manager drove him onto the NBC lot. Berg, who developed that series, remembers watching Kitsch step out of the car, the sunlight in his hair.“And I said, ‘Oh [expletive], this guy’s it,’” Berg recalled. Kitsch, he said, had a strength to him, an old-school stoicism, veined with vulnerability. “But what makes him special is that he contains these energies, he doesn’t lead with them,” Berg said. “He doesn’t work too hard.”Riggins, a cocky, fatherless athlete from a blue-collar family, mirrored Kitsch’s own background. Berg trusted him to write lines for the character, to suggest motives and moves. The show also gave him space to fail, to learn what would and wouldn’t work on camera. On set, Kitsch gravitated toward the older actors, taking their advice, studying their techniques.As the show wrapped its fifth and final season in 2011, Kitsch lined up back-to-back-to-back roles in two blockbusters (“John Carter,” “Battleship”) and a sexy thriller (“Savages”), a slate that announced his status as Hollywood’s next leading man. The films all underperformed. He chose smaller films after that and returned briefly to television, starring in the second season of the moody HBO procedural “True Detective.” Back then, in the mid 2010s, he couldn’t always get out of his own way. He sabotaged relationships, he said. He sabotaged himself.Kitsch was given leading-man parts after “Friday Night Lights,” but “I just wanted to be a character actor that buzzed into certain things and, hopefully, made you evoke something,” he said.Tag Christof for The New York TimesHollywood didn’t seem to know what to do with him at the time, and Kitsch, who moved first to Texas and then to Montana, didn’t know what to do with Hollywood either. He kept sliding out from under leading man parts. As a kid, he had wanted attention. Now, in his 30s, he found that he wanted to disappear.“Whatever it is that motivates other people — fame, money, celebrity, more followers, I don’t [expletive] know — it was never like that,” Kitsch said. “I just wanted to be a character actor that buzzed into certain things and, hopefully, made you evoke something.”In these years, he also found himself caring for one of his younger sisters, Shelby Kitsch-Best, who was struggling with addiction to opioids and other drugs. He took time off, coaxing her into detox and sober living facilities, taking her to the hospital when she relapsed.“He literally put his life on hold to help me,” Kitsch-Best, now seven years sober, said in a recent interview. “I don’t even know how to put it in words.”For his next major project, he signed on to play the cult leader David Koresh in “Waco,” a 2018 Paramount limited series. He lost weight, learned guitar, took voice lessons, practiced one of Koresh’s sermons “a thousand-plus” times, he said. Though he gave himself his first panic attack, a month ahead of filming, the preparation worked: Kitsch is unrecognizable in the role.I asked him if he could perhaps have done less. He didn’t think so. Because he has no training to fall back on, no technique, he feels the need to bring himself as close to a character — physically, psychically — as possible.“The only thing that eliminates self-doubt for me is prep,” he said. He never wants to look back and think that he could have done more.Betty Gilpin, who also stars in “American Primeval,” bet that Kitsch, who learned some Shoshone and worked with a medicine man to prepare for his role as a white man raised by a Native tribe, had done more research than anyone else on set. “The purpose of it seems to be so he can be lost in the work and to have freedom in the work,” she said in a recent interview.Kitsch asked his sister Shelby Kitsch-Best, a former addict, to help him accurately portray his character’s experiences.Keri Anderson/Netflix“Painkiller” — based on the Barry Meier book “Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic” and the Patrick Radden Keefe article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” in The New Yorker — is the second prestige series, after “Dopesick,” to limn the opioid epidemic. This project demanded a particular kind of preparation, much of it emotional. Glen is a composite character, a stand-in for the many, many Americans who became addicted to OxyContin after their doctors prescribed it. He is there to illustrate that addiction doesn’t discriminate — it doesn’t care how good you are, how principled, how strong.“Taylor was the perfect guy to take us on that trip,” said Eric Newman, an executive producer of “Painkiller.” “If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone.”Kitsch knew this. It had happened to his sister. Years before, he had written her a letter, telling her that he wished he could take her pain from her. He couldn’t. But in playing Glen, he could honor it, at least. He asked her to accompany him on set, as an adviser, as long as she felt comfortable.“I was like: ‘Are you sure? You’re not going to relapse if you see me faking using Oxy,’” Kitsch recalled. “She was like, ‘I think I’m good.’”Glen, a hard worker and a family man, should be the hero of this story. Instead, he’s one of the victims. And Kitsch, who gained 25 pounds for the role (“this guy is a beer and sandwich kind of guy,” he said), forgoes vanity in scenes in which Glen spills urine on himself or struggles to lift a tire or overdoses in a pancake house. Kitsch understood Glen, up to a point. He knows what it is to be in pain — emotional, physical — and to want that pain to go away.But he asked Kitsch-Best to help him with the particulars, like how someone might look and feel if they were using or in withdrawal. “He really wanted very specific details about what’s going on in someone’s mind and how that would manifest in their body,” she said. “Those things are difficult to watch because it’s so real. But it’s good how real it is.”With Berg’s blessing, Kitsch-Best filmed a brief cameo as a nurse at a methadone clinic and helped to choreograph a detox scene. “She’d be like, ‘Go bigger, you’d be sweating more,’” Kitsch said. “Bringing her was incredibly cathartic and obviously full circle. I was the emotional mess, and she was just killing it.”Kitsch works less than he used to. “If I can’t be all in and really be in service of something and be scared and be uncomfortable, then I don’t want to do that,” he said.Tag Christof for The New York TimesWhen Berg first sent Kitsch the “Painkiller” script, he did so knowing his family history. And Berg could tell that the shoot was sometimes hard for him. “But that’s where the gold is, when you’ve got an actor who’s that emotionally connected to something,” Berg said. “I knew he wasn’t going to walk away or break down. It wasn’t going to beat him. He would take that emotion and funnel it into Glen. It was a really a beautiful thing to bear witness to.”Kitsch doesn’t break down much these days, and he enjoys his time outside of work, which wasn’t always a given. Between shoots, he hikes, he fly fishes, he tracks and photographs the wolves that live near his home. (Everyone I spoke to asked if he had told me about the wolves. Boy, had he.) “I’ve started to live a little more,” he said. He also bought 22 acres in Montana that he plans to make available as a sober retreat, with simple A-frame houses, maybe a sweat lodge.Kitsch works less than he used to. After taking time off to help his sister, he never returned at quite the same pace. “I pride myself on being picky, because it is so much energy and sacrifice,” he said. “If I can’t be all in and really be in service of something and be scared and be uncomfortable, then I don’t want to do that.”This isn’t necessarily the life that his early career promised or that his looks ordained, but it works for him. Toward the end of our conversation, I told him that when I first entered his name into a search bar, the first question Google suggested was, “What happened to Taylor Kitsch?”So what did happen? Kitsch gave me one of his unhurried smiles. “What happened?” he said. “I was doing character stuff.”Though he started out as a pretty boy, he has made himself into an actor, which has meant a narrower path and likely a more arduous one “The people that really know me, or that follow the career will understand it,” he added. “Because I’m not so famous.”He seemed to like that fine. More