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    ‘House of the Dragon’ Will Revisit Westeros, Not Reinvent It

    Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, the showrunners of the “Game of Thrones” prequel, discuss its fealty to the original and the new politics of brothel scenes.A few years ago, Miguel Sapochnik thought he was done with “Game of Thrones.”“I’m unfortunately caught on tape on the very last day of shooting,” he recalled recently, “surrounded by burning Westeros and hundreds of people covered in blood, saying, ‘This was great; I hope I never come back again.’”And yet, here we are and here he is. On Sunday, the franchise returns to HBO with “House of the Dragon,” a prequel series set nearly 200 years before the original. Westeros isn’t burning, but there is plenty of blood, among other clear reminders that viewers are back in the deeply TV-MA world of HBO’s biggest-ever hit.So is Sapochnik. A director of many of the most spectacular “Thrones” installments, he is a showrunner on “Dragon” and directed several episodes, including Sunday’s series premiere. The other showrunner is Ryan Condal (“Colony”), who created the series with George R.R. Martin, the literary mastermind of the “Thrones” universe.Of the various proposals for “Thrones” spinoffs discussed and developed, “Dragon,” based on Martin’s prequel novel, “Fire & Blood,” was in many ways the safest choice, with obvious parallels with the original. (A pilot was shot for an earlier spinoff that was ultimately spiked by HBO and WarnerMedia, then the network’s corporate owner.)The series involves an earlier war for the Iron Throne waged largely among members of the ruling Targaryen dynasty, the ancestors of the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen, played by Emilia Clarke in “Thrones.” The core cast includes Paddy Considine as King Viserys, the ruler of Westeros; Matt Smith as his tempestuous brother; Emma D’Arcy as the king’s headstrong daughter; and Olivia Cooke as a courtier at the center of things.The stakes are undeniable: As a test of viewers’ appetite for more Westeros stories, “Dragon” will perhaps determine whether “Thrones” can emerge as another lucrative pop-culture universe à la Marvel. (Several other “Thrones” shows are in development.)A few weeks ago, in a video interview shortly before the series’s world premiere in Los Angeles, Condal and Sapochnik broke down the new series, brothel scenes and domesticated dragons. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why was this part of the “Game of Thrones” history the best basis for the first follow-up series?MIGUEL SAPOCHNIK The decision was kind of made for us: George really wanted to tell this story. Of all the stories that were kind of bandied around, it’s the closest one to the original show in tone. It deals with the Targaryens and their dynasty, so it’s accessible in that respect. It has more dragons in it. People will say they don’t like dragons and they’re not watching it for the dragons, but they do like the dragons, they help.RYAN CONDAL This one had the most resonance with the original series, when we see Daenerys after the fall of the empire. She’s running around the East relying on the kindness of strangers, or perhaps the greed of strangers who want to put her on the throne to enrich themselves. Her memory, the stories that she’s been told of the Targaryen height, the shining city on the hill — that’s this story.Matt Smith plays Prince Daemon, one of several Targaryens with their eyes on the Iron Throne.Ollie Upton/HBO creditIn what specific ways did you want to reflect the original series?SAPOCHNIK We wanted to replicate its success. That was first.Smart.SAPOCHNIK No, I mean, we need to be so lucky. We specifically set out to start the show as “Game of Thrones” and not to try and deviate. It seems very important that if you’re going to evolve beyond “Game of Thrones,” first you have to pay respect to it. Also it worked, so why try to reinvent it? But to just replicate the original show would be a big disservice to the story because we have what is effectively a soap-opera kind of quality to it. The perspective is the thing that’s different, in that it’s a female perspective.CONDAL There’s 172 years of history that happened between these two series. Much had to be the same because it’s still “Game of Thrones,” it’s still the same universe. But things also have to be different to communicate this massive passage of time. So those were the opposing forces that we were always weighing.What were some of the things that you didn’t want to replicate?SAPOCHNIK It’s a radically different world from what it was 10 years ago. Certainly our industry has changed and shifted substantially: The #MeToo movement came in, and then there was cancel culture, there was Black Lives Matter. Then Covid just slapped everything down.We have to reflect the changes in the world before us — not because somebody told us to, but because we actually feel like there’s a point. We’ve done that in front of and behind the camera. It’s actually really hard. Like, trying to find experienced female B camera operators — it’s a very specific thing you’re looking for, and they don’t get the opportunity, so they don’t get the experience. So you have to take on less-experienced people. Because otherwise we’re never going to break through this glass ceiling that we have.What about onscreen? For example, there’s a big brothel scene in the premiere, which is synonymous with “Thrones,” but that show also received plenty of criticism for its handling and overuse of sex and nudity. Was that a tricky balance to strike?SAPOCHNIK The problem in doing a brothel scene like they used to in “Game of Thrones” is what we would do is hire adult entertainment actors. Because that was the best way of getting people who understood what they were doing and there was no issue surrounding nudity and intimacy with other people, and then you would pair them up and film it. With the advent of intimacy coordinators and Covid, that’s no longer possible. So suddenly that simple brothel scene is far more complicated, and as a result, at some point you start going, “Well, why are we doing this?”Why did you decide to do it?CONDAL I mean, that scene is right out of the book. I don’t think we ever got that granular about the original show. It was more caring for the tone, the voice, the look and feel. We took the approach of this is a much more decadent period in time — it’s after a long period of peace, so people are wearing their wealth, they’re dressing in their house colors. That was more of the spirit we brought.This series is more immediately fantastical, with soaring dragons from the earliest moments. Do you worry about alienating the fantasy-ambivalent people who watched “Thrones” for its grittier aspects?SAPOCHNIK I would argue that we are standing on the shoulders of the previous show, which got people to see dragons as being part of this world. We had White Walkers, direwolves, giants, ice spiders, all that stuff. As this show progresses, the only bit of fantasy are the dragons and prophecy — and the dragons are kind of domesticated, they’ve got saddles. If anything, it’s probably more grounded.CONDAL If you can accept the dragons.SAPOCHNIK Yeah, exactly. Making those dragons feel real, especially in those opening scenes, is paramount. If you can’t crack that then you’re in trouble, because what you want people to do is say, “Oh, cool, they can do dragons,” and then move on.Are you nervous about the shadow that the conflicted reception to the end of “Thrones” will cast over your show?SAPOCHNIK Why would we be?CONDAL I don’t think so. It was such a generational event — people had a lot of expectation for where that series was going to end and what it was going to be. I think it was a grieving process for a lot of fans who had spent a decade with that particular story line. I think a lot of them struggled with having to say goodbye, and the response indicated how wide and strong that fan base is.Frankly, I think that grieving process probably led them to want to re-enter Westeros, even if they’re coming in sort of unsure: “Am I going to fall in love again only to get hurt when everybody’s dead and has to go away?” But we have an extraordinary gift because we have a pre-existing fan base, which did not exist when the show originally launched in 2011. That is certainly a responsibility, but I’d rather have it than not have it.SAPOCHNIK I went back and rewatched the whole show from start to finish, and you can see the setup for Dany’s turn early on. So that wasn’t surprising. I found it quite hard, when we were making it, that we had this weird epilogue happy ending.It wasn’t just the fans that were struggling with ending it. The people making it were struggling. It was their livelihood for a long time, and then suddenly they were coming to an end. Everyone hates endings. More

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    In Two London Plays, Being Black Means Looking From the Outside In

    Black characters in “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child” endure microaggressions and aspersions. The familiar scenarios hit home for our critic.LONDON — It was my second time here, and I kept trying to remember if I had felt as conspicuous during my first visit. I could count the number of other Black women I spotted during my five days here: the hotel receptionist with the French braid, whom I spoke with when I stopped in to ask to use the bathroom, the long-haired woman at my own hotel’s front desk, the woman talking rapidly into her cellphone outside a Starbucks, the two women (clearly tourists) with matching backpacks near the British Museum, and the young woman with the short, relaxed hair, who was clutching a shopping bag as she walked briskly down the street. That list isn’t comprehensive. But it’s not far off.So when the eyes of a white person linger on me, as they did numerous times during this trip, my imagination tricks me into thinking every glance is a rebuke — whether because of my obvious Americanness; or because of my race, my tattoos or my pink hair. I don’t know how to sit with my discomfort in these moments, and I inevitably ask myself: How much of an outsider am I?Such thoughts often cross my mind when I go to the theater — whether in New York, London or elsewhere — and sit among the predominantly white audience, watching the mostly white actors onstage. In choosing which London shows to squeeze into my short work trip, I gravitated to two brand-new family dramas, “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child,” with big-name stars and stories about white families.As these weren’t the domains of Tina Turner or Sister Deloris Van Cartier or Noma Dumezweni’s Nora Helmer, I didn’t expect to see any Black women on either stage. But I was wrong; in both “Mad House” and “The Southbury Child,” a Black woman — the lone Black person in each show — is not only a part of the play, but she also serves as an outsider who witnesses and comments on the chaos, enduring microaggressions and outright aspersions before making her escape.In “Mad House,” written by Theresa Rebeck (“Bernhardt/Hamlet”) and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, David Harbour (“Stranger Things”) plays a man named Michael who is watching over his dying father, Daniel (played by Bill Pullman) in rural Pennsylvania. But the father’s illness isn’t enough to stop the man’s unending stream of vitriol and abuse.It’s just the two of them now, since Michael’s beloved mother died, because of — according to his father — Michael’s yearlong stay at a mental hospital, which broke her heart. Rounding out the living members of this broken nuclear family are Michael’s brother, Nedward, a Manhattan stockbroker who pops up after a prolonged absence to take charge of Daniel’s assets, and his sister, Pam, a vicious manipulator who shows up halfway through the play to exacerbate the situation.Into all this mess enters Lillian, a Caribbean hospice nurse hired to help make Daniel comfortable during his final days. She maintains her professionalism despite Daniel’s crass come-ons, objectifying of her body, offensive comments about trans people (she’s so muscular she might be a man, he declares) and racist attitude (he repeatedly insists that he paid for her, like a slave). She’s spoken down to and bossed around by Ned and especially by Pam, who insists Lillian is unqualified. After Lillian shares a letter with Michael that she’s discovered among Daniel’s papers, the extent of his family’s lies come to light.Because I’ve seen so many plays in which the entrance of a Black character signals the beginning of a string of awful clichés and tropes, I am now leery when I see a lone Black person appear among a cast of white characters. When Akiya Henry, the actress playing Lillian, initially appeared in the first act, walking into Daniel and Michael’s kitchen, I felt this same foreboding.Originally from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, as the family members announce several times, Lillian is an outsider, and she’s a helper — quite literally, of course, since she’s a nurse. Armed with sharp retorts and a sassy, well-timed sucking of her teeth, Lillian punctuates the absurdity of the circumstances and brings the outside world into the confines of this unstable family home so the audience doesn’t get too claustrophobic. She is also the main inciting force that moves the story forward and cracks open the family dynamic. She’s not so transparent an archetype that her tale is left to the imagination, though: She gets a tragic, grief-filled back story, but only so the play can relate Michael’s emotional baggage through Lillian. She’s the mirror held up to Michael’s inner life.Racheal Ofori as the adopted daughter of a white family in Stephen Beresford’s “The Southbury Child” at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanIn one of the other West End plays I saw, Stephen Beresford’s “The Southbury Child,” directed by Nicholas Hytner, the token Black woman is even more aware of her status as an interloper, and the script struggles to give the character dimension.Here, Alex Jennings (“The Crown”) plays a philandering vicar and alcoholic who becomes the town pariah after refusing to allow balloons at a young girl’s funeral. The Black actress Racheal Ofori plays his adult daughter Naomi, who materializes like the prodigal adopted daughter. Appearing in fitted tops and mini skirts after nightlong partying, Naomi is, well, the black sheep in more ways than the most obvious racial one. Unlike her religious father, she is what she calls a “militant atheist”; she lacks the same underlying bitterness of her mother and outshines her hardworking but overlooked elder sister.Naomi plays no role in the odd central drama about balloons but saunters onto the stage every once in a while, in her club clothes or pajamas, taking in the drama and mocking and jesting at her family and her status as the sole person of color. Like Lillian in “Mad House,” Naomi serves as the wise fool.Hers is one of several side stories in this intriguing yet overpacked play: Feeling alienated as a Black woman in a white family, she seeks out her birth mother in the hope that doing so will help her find her true self. In the meantime, her character is the snarky observer who then complains about being tokenized by her community. In one instance, she sneers as she describes the self-congratulatory white moms who proudly set up play dates between their daughters and the town’s Black girl.The similarities in the way the characters’ arcs end in each play are intriguing: For both Naomi and Lillian, the departures are abrupt. It’s as if neither stage has a place for these Black women beyond their roles as outside observers and truth-tellers. Once they’ve played their parts, they are seemingly given an out; finally spared from having to see the mess through to the end. But the exits of these Black women also seem like a validation that they don’t actually belong there. That they are exceptional.And, in a sense, they are — both Henry and Ofori make their characters compelling, so much so that sometimes they steal the spotlight. Not for long, though — never for long. Despite the strong Black female leads you can catch on some stages, too many productions still embrace a very narrow role for their Black women, who can nurture, drop snide remarks and reveal truths the other characters fail to see — so long as they know their place as visitors in the narrative. More

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    Michael K. Williams’s Unfinished Business in Brooklyn

    Three months before he died, the actor Michael K. Williams spent all day at a block party in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. In some ways it had the vibe of any block party — a D.J. making people move, kids riding bikes in the street, smoke billowing out of an oil-drum grill. But this wasn’t just another summer day in Brownsville. Mr. Williams and a group of community activists had persuaded seven of the politicians hoping to be New York’s next mayor to show up, granting them a forum to explain why they deserved the support of a Black community that was used to being ignored.One by one, the candidates took turns sitting at a folding table in the middle of the block and fielded tough questions from a panel of young people who lived there. Some of those young people belonged to a gang. Many had lost friends and family members to gun violence, and few had faith in the government’s ability to protect them. Mr. Williams sat at the table, too, listening intently.When Eric Adams arrived, wearing a tight orange T-shirt with the slogan “We Can End Gun Violence,” Mr. Williams expressed concern over his use of the term “law and order” at a recent debate. He chose his words with care, the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed together in concentration.“Do you think putting more police on the streets is the way to deal with the violence in our community right now?” Mr. Williams asked.Mr. Adams assured him that he didn’t. “We don’t need an overproliferation of cops,” Mr. Adams said. “People commit crimes,” he added, because “a lack of resources came from the city.”Mr. Williams had an intimate understanding of the kind of violence that results from a lack of resources. Before the world knew him as Omar, the gay stickup artist with a strict moral code from the TV series “The Wire,” he was just a kid from the Vanderveer Estates, a complex of 59 buildings spanning 30 acres of East Flatbush, a largely Caribbean neighborhood deep in Brooklyn. In his memoir, “Scenes From My Life,” which will be published this month, he recalls “The Veer” as a vibrant place where block parties had “the air of family cookouts,” but also as a setting of deprivation and pain. During the so-called crack epidemic, police officers called a local intersection “the front page” because of all the murders that drew reporters to those corners. When Mr. Williams was a teenager, he watched a friend die of a bullet wound right in front of him.Mr. Williams at an event at the Howard Houses in Brownsville in October 2020. Toward the end of his life, he devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer.Sue KwonToward the end of his life, Mr. Williams devoted himself to making Brooklyn’s Black communities safer. He pursued this mission, in part, by helping build a model for organizing that he hoped would eventually inspire a national movement. Through this initiative, called We Build the Block, he and the other organizers held “block activations” throughout Brooklyn, culminating in the mayoral summit in Brownsville. Teenage activists would engage their neighbors in conversations about the political process and register them to vote. The group deliberately chose blocks that the police regarded as gang strongholds, while persuading the police, remarkably, to stay out of the way. “It was a way to say we can take care of our own,” Mr. Williams wrote in his memoir. None of these events, as he noted, were ever disrupted by violence.Last summer, We Build the Block took on an ambitious new challenge. With the help of a Black police captain who was interested in unconventional approaches to crime reduction, they began planning to pay a group of young people touched by gang violence to take part in “healing circles” — weekly conversations led by a therapist. In August, one of Mr. Williams’s collaborators, Dana Rachlin, a white woman in her 30s from Staten Island, texted Mr. Williams that one of their requests for funding was out “in the universe.” Mr. Williams replied, “Damn right it is!”That was the last time she ever heard from him. One week later, on Sept. 6, Mr. Williams was found dead of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in his apartment in Williamsburg. He was 54.Dana Rachlin, who helped found We Build the Block with Mr. Williams.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesThe healing circles began the next month. At the first session, a facilitator used singing bowls in an attempt to get the kids to meditate. It didn’t go well. As the kids horsed around and mocked the activity, Ms. Rachlin thought about Mr. Williams. If he’d been there, she thought, the kids would have followed his lead. Lying on a yoga mat, she began to cry. And then she thought about ‌one of the reasons Mr. Williams had been so good at connecting with people: his sensitivity to the pain of others. These boys, she knew, had lost friends too.Mr. Williams’s interest in community organizing can be traced to his mother. He describes her in the memoir as an energetic, caring woman who taught Sunday school, opened a day-care center in their building, and cultivated a network of relationships with community leaders. He loved and admired her. He also feared her. After his father left, when he was 11, his mother tried to protect him from the violence that surrounded them by forbidding him from fighting, a rule that she enforced, as he pointed out, by inflicting violence on him herself. Frustrated by his defiance, she would sometimes tell him that he was unworthy of God’s love.Remembering Michael K. WilliamsThe actor, who starred in the pioneering HBO series “The Wire,” was found dead on Sept. 6, 2021, in his home in Brooklyn. He was 54. Obituary: Williams brought a hard-edge charisma to his portrayal of Omar Little in David Simon’s five-season epic. Tributes: Following news of his death, co-stars, musicians and authors shared their thoughts on the beloved actor. Best TV Performances: Throughout his career, Williams explored provocative intersections of race, crime, sexuality and masculinity. A Legacy Interrupted: To complete the new season of Williams’s series “Black Market,” the producers enlisted the help of some famous friends.He grew to be sensitive and insecure — “the softest kid,” he writes, “in the projects.” After two older men molested him, he “fell into a dark, empty state.” His willingness to venture back into that state, to conjure up his most painful memories for the sake of an acting role, was the quality that would most clearly define him as an artist. The scar across his face, sustained in a razor attack outside a bar on his 25th birthday, seemed to tell of deeper wounds. “We are all broken,” he notes in the book. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the community-organizing campaign, in Brownsville at a We Build the Block event in June 2021.Sue KwonMr. Williams at a graduation ceremony at L&B Spumoni Gardens in Brooklyn.Sue KwonHe was 35 when he landed his most iconic role. A fan of “The Wire” might have assumed that the guy playing Omar shared the show’s political outlook, its outrage at the drug war, but he still knew “close to zero” about politics when the fifth and final season aired. That began to change when an African-American senator from Chicago, running for president that year, declared Omar Little to be his favorite character on his favorite show.Around the same time, Mr. Williams was arrested on drunken-driving charges twice in six months. He had struggled with an addiction to alcohol and cocaine, crack and powder, since he was a teenager. Ordered to do community service, he offered to talk about addiction to high-school kids. What began as an obligation became a passion. While Barack Obama’s praise sparked an interest in the political forces affecting his community, the school visits awakened him to the possibility that he could “redeem” himself by working with young people. But it would still be years before this would become the guiding insight of his life.In 2016, he appeared in “The Night Of,” an HBO drama about the moral rot of New York’s criminal-justice system. Playing a charismatic former boxer confined on Rikers Island, he often thought about his nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. Serving 25 years to life in prison, Mr. Dupont started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Mr. Williams’s nephew, Dominic Dupont, who was convicted at 19 of second-degree murder. He started a mentorship program and, in 2017, received clemency from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York Times“The Night Of” told a less redeeming tale, and the performance took Mr. Williams to a dark place. “He was willing to sacrifice himself for some roles,” Mr. Dupont told me. “And those happened to be the characters that people loved the most.” After years of sobriety, Mr. Williams began using drugs on the set, which was an actual prison in upstate New York. It got so bad, his memoir revealed, that the shoot had to be shut down for a day.While promoting the series, Mr. Williams realized he wanted to learn more about the mass incarceration of young people from neighborhoods like his. This led him to make “Raised in the System,” a documentarythat captures the vulnerability and neglect of incarcerated children. Ms. Rachlin, who met him as he was finishing the film, helped him organize a series of screenings for police officers, correction officers, prosecutors and judges. “We wanted the power holders to bring compassion and empathy to the youth before them, their families and communities,” she said.Ms. Rachlin was in some ways an unlikely ally. She had grown up in a conservative Staten Island household. As a teenager, she made campaign calls for George W. Bush. She recalls assuming that people who committed crimes were “bad.” But after college, while working as an advocate for crime victims in the Staten Island courthouse, she found herself, for the first time, spending time around young people who had been arrested and jailed. It was eye-opening. She soon began working with adolescents who had been getting into trouble, eventually starting a nonprofit.As Mr. Williams became an increasingly prominent advocate for criminal-justice reform, Ms. Rachlin continued working closely with him, connecting him with nonprofit groups in the field, teaching him about the inner-workings of government, prepping him for meetings with elected officials. Mr. Williams, for his part, used his fame to attract attention to her work, and served as a personal mentor — “Uncle Mike” — to kids in her organization.Capt. Derby St. Fort with Mr. Williams at a We Build the Block event in Crown Heights in 2020. Captain St. Fort would collaborate with the organization on healing circles.Sue KwonThen, in the summer of 2020, as protests over police violence surged through New York and the rest of the country, Mr. Williams began talking to Ms. Rachlin about how to bolster the role that Black New Yorkers played in shaping the city’s public-safety policies. With the radio host Shani Kulture and five high school students from Brooklyn, they started We Build the Block, the community-organizing campaign.Royal Hyness Allah, one of the young people who helped start the initiative, recalled how down-to-earth Mr. Williams always seemed at their block activations. “He was outside at every event,” he said, “no security, no nothing, talking with the old people and the people rolling dice and smoking weed, getting to know where their head’s at, spreading the word about how to make the community safer.”“He was unique,” Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s reform-minded district attorney, said. “A lot of people with his celebrity, they do social media or they donate money to causes, but he kept it on the ground.”Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.”Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New York TimesIn 2019, Ms. Rachlin introduced Mr. Williams to Derby St. Fort, the police captain who would collaborate with them on the healing circles. Captain St. Fort felt a deep kinship with Mr. Williams. “With all his success, he didn’t feel deserving,” he said. “I felt the same way at times.” When he told Mr. Williams about a group of young men who were causing harm in his precinct, Mr. Williams said he could imagine how they felt — unworthy of love, incapable of change. “He looked at the pain of those who caused pain,” Captain St. Fort said. Arresting them wouldn’t change their perspectives. So the three of them developed a strategy that they hoped would.This was how the healing circles came about. Despite skepticism inside the police department, Captain St. Fort fully embraced the idea and even participated in the circles himself. He found it hard to imagine that the kids would ever trust him, but he was open with them, acknowledging that he had made mistakes in his life. Slowly, he said, the teenagers began to open up too. “A lot of times they felt they had done so much harm in their lives that they weren’t deserving of support,” Captain St. Fort said. “We had to challenge that. I told them, ‘You deserve it.’”Two of the participants, Dorian Garrett, 18, and Kareem Holder, 20, now volunteer as community organizers. One recent afternoon, they met with Captain St. Fort and Ms. Rachlin, along with representatives of the Public Advocate’s Office, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other groups in the basement of a public library, where they were leading an effort to plan a back-to-school event for younger kids in their neighborhood. They’d both gotten steady jobs through the program, and neither had been arrested since the sessions began.They’d never met Mr. Williams, but Ms. Rachlin and Captain St. Fort had told them all about the guy with the scar they’d seen on TV — how he made people feel like they mattered, like somebody cared. “That’s something that I definitely want to do,” Mr. Garrett said, “because the stuff that I experienced, I don’t want that for the younger generation.” He wanted those kids to know something. “I’m here, and they are loved.”Mr. Williams at a voter registration in Brooklyn in 2020. “We are all broken,” he wrote in his memoir. “And people find it astonishing to see the inside made so visible.”Sue Kwon More

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    Himesh Patel on the Pandemic, Fatherhood and ‘Station Eleven’

    Voting is underway for the 74th Primetime Emmys, and this week we’re talking to several acting nominees. The awards will be presented on Sept. 12 on NBC.“I’m a little bit of a nerd,” Himesh Patel warned.That was on a recent Tuesday evening, on a video call from a red-walled room in his London home. Dressed in a black Adidas T-shirt, with a pair of white stripes snaking down each shoulder, he looked less like a nerd than someone ready to take the field.That is, until he began breaking down strategies for hay and brick trade deals in the board game “Settlers of Catan.”“You’re all sort of trying to trick each other into trading the wrong thing,” said Patel, 31, in a British accent that would be shocking to anyone who had seen only his performance in the post-apocalyptic HBO Max drama “Station Eleven.” The role earned him his first Emmy nomination, for best lead actor in a limited series. His Chicago accent was flawless.Hay and brick trades … Sounds … riveting?“I know,” he said. “It sounds lame, but it’s really fun and there’s lots of strategy involved.”Patel played a different kind of settler on the HBO Max series “Station Eleven,” based on the book by Emily St. John Mandel, which follows the survivors of a devastating pandemic in their efforts to rebuild society — with art and community more than bricks and hay. When Patel’s character, a freelance writer named Jeevan, decides to take in an orphaned young actress, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), he must also navigate the challenges of becoming a de facto parent.Like Jeevan, Patel was an understated presence on the show, and his nomination — the show’s sole acting nod among the seven it earned overall, including for writing, direction and score — came as a surprise to many, himself included. (He found out on a train ride to visit his parents in London).“I like it that way,” said Patel, who, like Jeevan speaks softly and slowly, weighing every word. “I’m not very good at being on the red carpet.”Patel grew up in Cambridgeshire in eastern England, the child of Indian parents who were both born in Africa. (“I was a child of two worlds,” said Patel, who grew up speaking Gujarati.) He characterized his cultural upbringing as a cross between Bollywood films and fantasy blockbusters like “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings.” (If he had not become an actor, he said, he likely would have been a computer modeler.)After spending his teenage years doing plays with a local youth theater, he got his first big break when he was cast in “EastEnders,” the long-running British soap opera, when he was 16. He dropped out of school, then spent nine years playing the role of Tamwar Masood from 2007 to 2016.More on the 74th Emmy AwardsThe 2022 edition of the Emmys, which celebrate excellence in television, will take place on Sept. 12 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.‘The White Lotus’: Natasha Rothwell’s nomination for her portrayal of an underappreciated spa manager on the show is a pivotal moment for the actress, whose career began on the improv stage.‘Severance’: Christopher Walken and John Turturro, both nominated for best supporting actor in a drama, drew upon their years of friendship in the Apple TV+ techno-thriller.‘Dopesick’: Kaitlyn Dever is up for her first Emmy for her role as a young woman with an opioid addiction in the mini-series. As she prepared for the part, she sought to approach the role with the utmost sensitivity.Although “EastEnders” made him a star across the pond, American audiences began to notice him more when he landed the lead role in Danny Boyle’s 2019 musical romantic comedy “Yesterday,” in which he plays a struggling musician who suddenly becomes one of the few people in the world who remember the Beatles. Then he scored a role as the fixer Mahir in “Tenet” (2020), Christopher Nolan’s time-bending spy thriller.Even more recognize him now because of “Station Eleven” and his most recent film role: Playing the journalist love interest of Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) in Adam McKay’s star-studded 2021 disaster comedy “Don’t Look Up.”“If I’d told my 11-year-old self that, I think he would’ve been like, ‘Shut up, stop taking the piss out of me,’” he said, laughing.“Station Eleven” episodes did not begin airing until late last year, but Patel began work on the series in 2019, when the cast filmed the last shots of Episode 1, in which Jeevan and Kirsten leave the apartment and walk through the snow toward the lake, in Toronto, standing in for Lake Michigan, in Chicago. Then the pandemic sent them into lockdown. (They passed the time by playing board games over Zoom, with “Settlers of Catan” featuring heavily in the rotation.)“We didn’t change the story to try to make it feel more relevant,” Patel said. “But you could feel the influence of the pandemic creeping in.”Himesh Patel with Matilda Lawler in a scene from “Station Eleven.” Patel plays a freelance journalist who takes in an orphaned young girl as a pandemic rages.Parrish Lewis/HBO MaxThe show’s creator, Patrick Somerville, based the screen version of Jeevan on the character in Mandel’s novel, though he said he tailored the character to Patel’s acting style.“He has a stillness about him that was vital to the show actually working,” Somerville said in a video interview from outside the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, as Lake Michigan waves lapped in the background.“I’m the loudmouth of the group,” he added. But with Patel, he said, he learned that “one line — or no line — could carry the weight emotionally of a scene.”One particular scene in Episode 9, which wasn’t in the book, resonated deeply with Patel: A scene in a makeshift birth center, in which Jeevan becomes a birthing partner to a handful of women. The episode was filmed less than three months after Patel had watched his own wife give birth to their daughter.“I was in the early months of being a father and not knowing the ins and outs of how to do it when we shot that,” he said. “It was so easily accessible because I was going through it.”Lawler, who plays young Kirsten, said she saw a change in Patel after his daughter was born. “He had more of a fatherly presence” in their relationship, she said. (She had advice for him, too, she said: Learn how to braid hair, stat.)In a video interview from sleepaway camp in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, Lawler, who, as in the series, comes across as much older than her 13 years, said the bond between her and Patel was immediate and effortless — a chemistry that was reflected onscreen.“It’s a strange bond — we just naturally understood each other,” she said.She offered some other insights on Patel: He’s a great dancer. He’s fantastic at Ping-Pong. He’s “taller than I thought” and “absolutely not intimidating as a person.”“It’s disarming how inclusive he is,” she said. “He always made everyone feel really comfortable.”He is also, she confirmed, “kind of nerdy.”Hiro Murai, who was nominated for two directing Emmys this year — for the pilot of “Station Eleven” and for an episode of “Atlanta” — said he and Patel had a number of conversations about how to balance Jeevan’s emotional intimacy and the comedy, particularly in Jeevan’s relationship with Kirsten.“There’s something very funny about a guy who’s kind of a stunted adolescent trying to take care of this little girl who’s much older than him in spirit,” he said. “The humanity was the most important part, and the comedy had to come out of the character rather than leaning into situational jokes.”In the future, Patel, who recently wrapped shooting in Southport, N.C., on “Providence,” an indie murder-mystery comedy in which he stars alongside Lily James and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, would like to do more producing and potentially writing work, he said; one idea is for a series about the lives of the more than one million Indian soldiers who fought for the British Empire during World War I.“Those were a tumultuous few years in Britain in terms of identity and people understanding their cultural history,” he said, “There are lots of stories to help fill in.“What excites me,” he added, “is the opportunity to have so many brown actors in front of and behind the camera.” More

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    Mohammed Amer Is a Salad Bowl

    Melting pot? The Houston comedian prefers a different analogy for himself. His new Netflix series, “Mo,” cocreated by Ramy Youssef, should help clarify.ALIEF, Texas — Mohammed Amer started up his black Mercedes and pointed to a corner across from Alief Middle School. The location was laden with meaning.“That’s where I learned to play the dozens,” he said as he turned out of the school parking lot, referring to the age-old game in which combatants insult each other’s mothers.“At first, I took it so personally,” said Amer, who emigrated from Kuwait when he was 9 years old: “‘How could you guys be talking like this to each other? What’s going on in America?’ Then I realized it was just a big bonding experience. And that’s what introduced me to comedy.”It’s a good time to be Amer, who goes by Mo, a Palestinian American comedian who grew up in this diverse, working-class Houston suburb. His new scripted series, “Mo,” premieres on Netflix on Aug. 24. He has a role in the upcoming action-fantasy movie “Black Adam,” starring Dwayne Johnson, who taped a spirited introduction to Amer’s most recent Netflix standup comedy special. A youthful 41, he is starting to reap the benefits of years spent busting his tail in the comedy world.But Alief will always be home, even if he currently lives a few miles away, in downtown Houston. It’s where he discovered how it felt to live in a community defined by its diversity — Black, Mexican, Vietnamese, you name it. To drive through Alief is to see tightly packed strip malls filled with the business equivalent of the United Nations: a Vietnamese restaurant next to a Mexican grocery store next to a Parisian bakery.Born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, Amer was scared when he first got to the United States after his family fled Kuwait during the first Gulf War. But he quickly found friends from all over the world, and he never really left.He speaks English, Arabic and Spanish, as does his character on the new show, also named Mo. And he finds humor in the tensions that demarcate his various identities. On “Mo,” his girlfriend, Maria (Teresa Ruiz), is a Mexican American woman who runs a garage. (We drove by the inspiration for the shop, which is, indeed, owned by a Mexican American woman.) But he’s scared to commit, partially because of his low self-esteem but also because he knows his mother (played by the Palestinian Jordanian actress Farah Bsieso) won’t approve.Teresa Ruiz plays Mo’s girlfriend, Maria, a Mexican American woman who runs a garage. Rebecca Brenneman/NetflixWhen Maria takes him to confess at a Catholic church, he explains to the priest (played by the local hip-hop legend Bun B) that he is Muslim and the crucifixion iconography really freaks him out. Then he breaks down crying.“In many ways, Mo is the melting pot,” said Ramy Youssef, the Egyptian American star and creator of the Hulu comedy “Ramy,” who created “Mo” with Amer. Yousef also cast Amer in a supporting role on “Ramy,” as the owner of a diner.“Not to use a tired word, but he is very literally multicultural,” Youssef continued. Told of his friend’s analogy, Amer offered a correction: “I like salad bowl better than melting pot. Everybody loses their own identity in the melting pot. In a salad bowl, everything retains its original flavor.”Alief also has an above-average crime rate for the Houston area, a reality that finds its way into “Mo.” One moment, Mo is decrying the existence of chocolate hummus in a grocery store (“That’s a war crime”). The next, he is catching a stray bullet that grazes his arm. Uninsured, he goes to a sort of chop-shop doctor who stitches him up and gives him some lean, a potentially lethal mix of codeine cough syrup and soda, long popular in Houston’s hip-hop scene. (It was a factor in the overdose deaths of the Houston hip-hop favorite DJ Screw, as well as Pimp C, from nearby Port Arthur.) Mo battles a lean addiction throughout the first season.Amer wants to make one thing very clear: “I do not have a codeine addiction. I do not sip lean.” But, like his character, he did used to sell knockoff luxury goods from the trunk of his car, including fake Rolex watches.“There were a lot of drug dealers in the neighborhood that loved flashy stuff but didn’t want to necessarily spend 10 grand,” he said. “Everybody in Alief had a side hustle.” That included the woman in his old apartment building who sold frozen Kool-Aid pops for a quarter.To watch “Mo” and meet Amer is to wonder where the artist and his creation diverge. Many of the important details of the series are true to life. Amer was a child when he arrived in Alief with his family from Kuwait. His father, a telecom engineer, died of a heart attack soon after. And it took Amer 20 years to get asylum and U.S. citizenship, a process dramatized in the series, often humorously. Unhappy with his unreliable Palestinian lawyer, Mo switches to an American Jewish woman, Lizzie Horowitz (the Austin comedian and actor Lee Eddy), which mortifies his mom.From left, Lee Eddy, Farah Bsieso, Omar Elba, Cherien Dabis and Amer in a scene inspired by Amer’s experience waiting 20 years to get asylum and U.S. citizenship.NetflixAmer exudes a sense of authenticity, a quality that endears him to his cast. “He is so honest and genuine,” Bsieso said in a video call. “He doesn’t try to fake anything. He reaches the heart and soul of anybody who listens to him or watches him or works with him.”In his standup work and on “Mo,” Amer’s comedy is shot through with a sense of anxiety, sometimes playful, other times more serious. In his comedy specials, including last year’s “Mo Amer: Mohammed in Texas,” his voice rises in concern and even confusion whenever he addresses a sticky subject (Covid-19, his recent divorce). Mo is often flustered as he navigates his life in the series. Vulnerability is an essential part of his work.“Most of my life has been anxiety, and I think comedy is the way I’ve been able to channel it,” he said. “Standup has been a lifesaving thing for me. Standup allows the space for me to emote how I feel at any moment in time. With standup you spend most of your life getting better at it, but also trying to top yourself. Imagine a brick wall. Every time you go onstage, you chip away at the wall until eventually there’s nothing in front of you except the crowd.”Youssef sees the Mo of the series as a sort of alternative universe Amer.“I think a lot of the antics that happen in the show are daydreams of what would have happened if Mo hadn’t found comedy,” he said. “What if that wasn’t his path and that wasn’t what he was doing? Life is this fork, and you turn left or right. The fun thing about making a show is asking, ‘What if I went left?’ And then we get to write that.”Amer at his alma mater Alief Middle School, where he filmed scenes for “Mo,” near Houston.Eli Durst for The New York TimesAmer turned his car toward his old high school, Hastings, a stone’s throw from another high school, Elsik. The R&B star Lizzo went to Elsik. Beyoncé did, too, and she shot the video for her song “Blow” right down the street, at the indoor amusement park and roller rink Houston Funplex, where Mo has a lean-induced breakdown on the show.Another Elsik alum, the rapper Tobe Nwigwe, plays Mo’s best friend, Nick, on the show. “Mo” is very much a neighborhood affair, shot where it’s set. It stands apart in that regard from many movies and series set in Texas, which often shoot in nearby states — New Mexico, Louisiana — to take advantage of more generous tax incentives. Amer is fiercely proud of his home base; it’s practically a character in the series. He wasn’t about to shoot in Albuquerque.The most compelling conflict in “Mo” pits modernity against tradition. Mo loves hip-hop, and the soundtrack is laden with Houston artists, including DJ Screw, Big Moe and Paul Wall, who also has a funny cameo as a courthouse security guard. He loves his assimilated girlfriend. But he is also a practicing Muslim, committed to his faith and family.“He is modern but also deeply connected with his roots, and we all know that’s a really difficult thing to balance, especially in his position where he is essentially penniless and just trying to maintain his dignity and juggle all these emotions,” Amer said. “He’s definitely modern with the mind-set of the old as well.”He’s the salad bowl. Welcome to the party. Just don’t bring the chocolate hummus. More

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    Trevor Noah on Trump’s Jailbird Friends

    “Look, if we had more time we could talk about how Trump pretends to be the candidate of law and order. Meanwhile, his friends can fill up an entire prison wing,” Noah joked.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.With Friends Like TheseThe longtime chief financial officer of the former president’s business, Alan Weisselberg, reached a deal to plead guilty to 15 felonies on Thursday, admitting to his participation in a tax scheme at Donald Trump’s family business.“Can we take a moment to appreciate how many associated with Trump have ended up in prison?” Trevor Noah said on Thursday. “His lawyer, his campaign manager, his deputy campaign chairman, now the chief financial officer of his organization? Usually you’ve got to run a drug cartel to have this many friends doing this kind of time, so at this point it’s basically El Chapo and Donald Trump — that’s it.”“They need to send all these Trump felons to school assemblies to scare kids away from Trump. It’d be like, ‘You think hanging out with the 45th president is cool? That’s what I thought. Now I’m drinking wine out of a toilet. That’s my state of the union, kid!’” — TREVOR NOAH“Now, I know what you’re thinking right now. You’re wondering to yourself, ‘Surely, if Trump’s second-in-command was committing financial crimes with Trump’s company, then Trump must also be involved in these crimes.’ Well, actually, no. Because, apparently, the story is that he had no idea what was happening in his organization at all levels for decades. He had no clue. And that, my friends, is the kind of leadership that makes him fit to be the next president of the United States.” — TREVOR NOAH“Now look, if we had more time we could talk about how Trump pretends to be the candidate of law and order. Meanwhile, his friends can fill up an entire prison wing, but we just don’t have the time for that.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Cheap Netflix and Chill Edition)“I saw that when Netflix rolls out their cheaper plan with ads, users won’t be able to download shows to watch offline. Yes, it’s going to be very different. With the cheaper plan, you get commercial breaks, no downloads, when you try to hit ‘Skip intro,’ it says, ‘Nah.’ ‘Stranger Things’ is just the Jonathan scenes. Each month, they send you a cheese sandwich from the Fyre Festival documentary. When you’re with your parents, it automatically plays the show ‘How to Build a Sex Room.’ And finally, it automatically shares your password with all your exes.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon and Martin Short walked into a bar on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutAubrey Plaza in “Emily the Criminal.”Roadside Attractions/Vertical EntertainmentBest known for her deadpan comic role on “Parks and Recreation,” Aubrey Plaza has reinvented herself for her dramatic role in the thriller “Emily the Criminal.” More

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    Daryl McCormack Has More Than Luck on His Side

    The Irish actor’s performance as a sympathetic sex worker in “Good Luck, Leo Grande” this summer “has definitely opened up doors for me,” he said. Next up is the Apple TV+ series “Bad Sisters.”Early last year, Daryl McCormack’s East London neighbors seemed determined to do some matchmaking: “Oh, you should meet Sharon,” they said. “My friend is writing a show; I’ll make sure to say that I know you.”“People do that all the time,” the Irish actor explained in a recent video interview from Melbourne, Australia, his arresting green eyes making it hard not to stare. “They’re like, ‘Let me tell my friend,’ and nothing comes of it.”Sharon — as in the writer and actor Horgan, who has lacerated motherhood and marriage in “Catastrophe” and “Divorce” — had been getting an earful, too.“He lived above my friend’s jewelry shop just around the corner from where I live, and most of the female-owned stores along the street were pretty excited about him,” she said, laughing. “I told them I was making this Irish thing and I was looking for a youngish leading man. And they were like, ‘Well, what about Daryl?’”That Irish thing was “Bad Sisters,” a darkly comic thriller debuting Friday on Apple TV+, about the five inseparable Garvey women, one of whom is married to a man so misogynistic and nefarious that the other four would do almost anything to boot him from their lives.The youngish leading man was needed to play a handsome, heartbroken insurance agent who gets dragged into a convoluted policy investigation when the Garveys’ loathsome brother-in-law turns up dead.Lo and behold, McCormack’s name was already on the casting director’s list of contenders.“I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s the guy that all the women in Hackney fancy,’” Horgan said.McCormack stars as a heartbroken insurance agent in “Bad Sisters.” (With Eve Hewson.)Liam Daniel/Apple TV+McCormack, who eventually got the job, of course, has been the object of a great deal of fancying since the June release of the British dramedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which stars Emma Thompson as Nancy, a widow in her 60s, and McCormack as Leo, a sex worker she hires to guide her through an erotic awakening.Critics praised the film for its sexual positivity, authenticity and zing, as well as Thompson’s daring performance. But just as remarkable was the relatively inexperienced McCormack’s ability to match the virtuosic Thompson quip for quip. “McCormack moves between wit, compassion and vulnerability with grace,” The New York Times wrote in its review of the film.Given the abundant physical and emotional nakedness Thompson’s role required, she held considerable sway in the casting of her co-star. She had seen McCormack’s audition tape, but before making a final decision, she asked him to take a walk with her.“Knowing where these two characters go and how vulnerable the film can get, I think it was important for her to really feel a sense of safety with me and a sense of trust,” McCormack said.As they strolled, Thompson found him instantly calming, she wrote in an email — “gentle and curious and apparently unsaddled with too much in the way of personal ambition. Somehow he was going to be able to relax Nancy, who is in a state of tension comparable to a first-time bungee jumper.“He was the right person to step off the bridge with,” she continued, “and fly down hoping the cord won’t break but knowing if it does, it was all worth the effort.”When Thompson texted “I’ll see you on set” the next morning, McCormack, stunned to learn he’d been cast, checked to make sure that she hadn’t notified him by mistake.“It was quite life-changing, that moment,” he said. “My world just did a somersault.”After taking a walk with McCormack, Emma Thompson concluded that “he was the right person to step off the bridge with” in “Good Luck, Leo Grande.”Searchlight PicturesCalling from Australia, where he and Thompson were promoting the movie, McCormack, 29 and laid back in a gray hoodie, looked more like the ace athlete he was as a schoolboy (in the Irish sport of hurling) than the seductive, silky-voiced fantasy man he conjured in “Leo Grande.” He knows the sex comedy, considered an Oscar contender, has changed his career.“The film has definitely opened up doors for me in a big way,” he said, “like just even speaking to people that I’ve admired for a long time, work finding me a lot quicker, having a bit more of a selection to do work that I really want to do.”He was still in the midst of shooting the movie when Horgan reached out about “Bad Sisters.”McCormack may have been consumed by Leo at the time, but Horgan could see Matthew Claffin, the insurance agent, in his magnetism, his nimble acting chops and, when needed, his goofiness. And in the audition process, his chemistry with Brian Gleeson, who plays his half-brother, as well as Eve Hewson, who plays the youngest Garvey and a potential romantic interest, was undeniable.In fact, McCormack initially found it nearly impossible to keep it together through scenes with Gleeson because of the desperation Gleeson brought to his version of a bad cop.“Daryl is a giggler all right, but obviously a consummate professional,” Gleeson said. “I tend to over-worry things, and that has the weird effect of trying to do too much acting, basically. At one point, Daryl just kind of burst out laughing. But it had a great effect of relaxing everybody.“He’s got a lovely gentle sort of disposition,” he added, “but there’s a lot of steel in him.”McCormack grew up in Nenagh, in County Tipperary, the son of a white Irish mother and a Black American father he rarely saw. But his paternal grandfather, Percy Thomas, who runs a theater company in Maryland, helped fill that void.“The second he heard of himself having a grandson, he instantly made his way over to Ireland and connected with my family,” McCormack said. “Our relationship is so special. I think because we both had such an interest and connection to the performing arts, he just loved me because I was someone he could speak to about acting all the time and I’d never get bored, never get sick of it.”When McCormack was 17, Thomas took him to see “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, England.“That was actually quite fundamental to me in terms of wanting to pursue acting,” McCormack said. “It just blew my mind, completely moved me. I really saw the power of storytelling in that night.”Thomas has been a sounding board for McCormack throughout his studies at the Conservatory of Music and Drama at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and later at the Gaiety School of Acting, and his work: a post-drama school soap opera part, two seasons as a gangster in “Peaky Blinders” and his breakout as a leading man in “Leo Grande.”McCormack said that, throughout his career, he had given up parts that were easy in favor of ones that left him feeling daunted.“I want to pick roles that scare me a little,” he said. “It’s probably my main antenna in terms of trying to find the next job.”“I don’t want this ever to become a job,” McCormack said. “I want this always to be an experience.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesHe was drawn to “Bad Sisters” by Horgan’s sharp-fanged writing and the chance to work with many actors he admires, most of them Irish, including Eva Birthistle and Sarah Greene along with Gleeson, Hewson and Horgan.Other films and series are on the horizon. He recently wrapped Alice Troughton’s psychological thriller “The Tutor,” alongside Richard E. Grant and Julie Delpy, playing an ambitious writer hired to tutor the son of a famous author with whom he is obsessed.“Daryl is an incredibly gifted young actor,” Grant wrote in an email. “Seemingly without any neurosis and as collaborative as one could wish for.”And it was announced on Wednesday that McCormack would star opposite Ruth Wilson in “The Woman in the Wall,” a BBC and Showtime thriller inspired by Ireland’s infamously abusive Magdalene Laundries, where “fallen women,” orphans and abandoned children were forced to perform unpaid labor by Roman Catholic nuns.It will be yet another performance opposite a formidable female lead, a situation McCormack has repeatedly sought out in his still-burgeoning career. For instance, in late 2019, when McCormack learned that Ruth Negga would be doing “Portia Coughlan” at the Young Vic in London, he made it his mission to play the role of her lover.“She was such an inspiration,” he said. “As a biracial Irish actor, there’s not many people you can look up to that have the same experience as you.”He hounded his team to get him an audition, and after being told that the production team was looking for someone older, he hounded them some more. Finally, he was asked to read for the part.“I’m about to go in, and it was around late February, March 2020, and we all know what happened then,” he said, referring to having his dreams dashed by Covid.Working with Negga remains on his bucket list. He also hopes to one day write a movie or a series inspired by his mother and her efforts to protect him against the struggles that sometimes came with being biracial and, in the eyes of others, different.“I keep chasing that feeling of not feeling comfortable,” McCormack said before pulling on a baseball cap and heading out into a world that is increasingly aware of him. “If I continue to take roles where I feel like my back is up against the wall, that makes me excited — because I don’t want this ever to become a job. I want this always to be an experience.” More

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    Meet the ‘Better Call Saul’ Staffers Who Kept Its Story Straight

    Ariel Levine and Kathleen Williams-Foshee, members of the show’s “brain trust,” tracked every minor character trait and historical reference.If there’s one takeaway from the moral and ideological universe of “Better Call Saul” — and its similarly meditative parent series “Breaking Bad” — it might be that details matter. Small decisions and non-decisions tend to accumulate until, to paraphrase the character Mike, who appeared in both series, we find ourselves at the end of a road, not necessarily conscious of where it began.The force of accumulated history was baked into the premise of “Better Call Saul,” which ended after six seasons on Monday. But the creators of the show, which began its story — following the exploits of the morally-challenged lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), the taciturn and principled fixer Mike (Jonathan Banks) and his fastidious drug lord boss Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) — six years before the famous events of “Breaking Bad,” went out of their way to reinforce notions of predestination within the narrative. To an unusual degree, it spun a kind of clockwork ecosystem, teeming with portentous allusions, callbacks and foreshadowing that encouraged the most passionate viewers to scrutinize its every frame.Behind the scenes, members of the show’s writing staff were no less obsessive. Ariel Levine, a staff writer on “Saul,” and Kathleen Williams-Foshee, the script coordinator, were part of what was known internally as “the brain trust” — a group of staffers who functioned as the show’s institutional memory. Working closely with a team of writers, assistants and producers — led by the showrunner and co-creator Peter Gould — Levine and Williams-Foshee maintained detailed notes on virtually every person, place, thing or event ever mentioned or implied on either the show or its predecessor.Speaking with The Times on Tuesday, the day after the “Better Call Saul” finale, they discussed solving hard story problems (whatever happened to Saul’s ex-wives?), making the choice to contradict “Breaking Bad” and staying ahead of Reddit sleuths. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How long did you each work on the show and in what roles?KATHLEEN WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I’ve been the script coordinator since Season 3 and also worked briefly as a writer’s assistant in Seasons 5 and 6.The End of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” spinoff has concluded its run after six seasons.Series Finale: If the ending of “Better Call Saul” surprised you, take comfort in this fact: It surprised Saul Goodman, too. Here’s our recap.More Than ‘Breaking Bad 2’: Both prequel and sequel, the show was a time machine that asked how we become who we are, our critic writes.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.ARIEL LEVINE And I started in Season 1 as a postproduction assistant, worked as writer’s production assistant in Season 2, a writer’s assistant in Seasons 3 through 5 and then staff writer for 6.In the writers’ room, how did you keep track of all the history in play as you were trying to generate new stories?LEVINE In the room, figuring out what we could and couldn’t do, or what we should and shouldn’t do, was primarily the writers’ assistants’ job. When I was a writers’ assistant, Kathleen and I would use this living document I made with every established fact or character on both “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” So if Saul said in “Breaking Bad,” “I’ve been divorced three times,” that would be in there. Or if Gale [a meth cook in “Breaking Bad” played by David Costabile] had a résumé that appeared in one shot in one episode that said he went to a certain college, that would be in there, as well. Whenever the writers were discussing a particular character or event, we would speak up in the moment and tell everyone what is known about it.How long is this document?LEVINE [Checking her computer.] The final version was 52 pages.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE It was beautiful.LEVINE We expanded it into a spreadsheet that we called the Gillaverse Mega Timeline [after Vince Gilligan, the creator of “Breaking Bad” and co-creator of “Better Call Saul”] and then had smaller individual documents for all of the recurring characters.In “Breaking Bad,” Saul was the attorney for that show’s hero/villain, Walter White (Bryan Cranston).Ursula Coyote/AMCHow many times have you both watched “Breaking Bad”?LEVINE All the way through? Seven. But there are individual episodes, like the one that introduces Saul, or the one that gets into the relationship between Gus and the Salamancas [collaborators in a cross-border drug cartel] that I’ve easily seen 20, 25 times or more.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I’ve watched it at least five times, all the way through, but probably more. When [“Saul”] was in production, we were looking at scenes from “Breaking Bad” every day.How did you deal with story decisions that might contradict something that was established on “Breaking Bad”?LEVINE We always wanted to be as consistent as possible, but we reserved the right to decide that something you saw on “Breaking Bad” might have been wrong. Ultimately, we chose to do what we felt would serve this story. Saul’s diploma on “Breaking Bad” said that he graduated from the University of American Samoa in 1986. But that didn’t work for the timeline of our show, so we changed it to 1998. Similarly, on “Breaking Bad,” Saul mentions a second ex-wife, and there’s a deleted scene from the show where he says he has three ex-wives, total. We actually talked about including a flashback scene to one of his previous marriages, but it seemed like too much to introduce an entirely new character. So we just had him present two previous dissolution of marriage certificates in the scene where he and Kim [Saul’s true love, played by Rhea Seehorn] get married at the courthouse.WILLIAMS-FOSHEE It helps that Saul talks out of his ass a lot, because in a way it makes sense that not everything is going to add up. He’s just riffing constantly; that’s part of who he is.What was the hardest needle to thread between the two shows?WILLIAMS-FOSHEE I think the thing that took the most time and reasoning was Gus and the super lab [a giant underground meth operation that figured heavily into the plot of “Breaking Bad”]. We wanted to show how Gus and Mike came together to pull that off, but it’s clear that the lab has only recently been completed in the timeline of “Breaking Bad.” We decided that not only did we have to explain just how much time and effort went into building the lab, but that something would have to interrupt them at a certain point and essentially force them to start over.Fans on Reddit never let any detail or perceived misstep go unnoticed. Were there any oversights that came back to haunt you?LEVINE I think the thing that usually haunted us was stuff that was shot that we didn’t know about, or weren’t around for. Dates were a big issue. We were always shouting at production, “Please, don’t show any calendars!” More