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    ‘S.N.L.’ Imagines the Origins of Abortion Law

    On an episode hosted by Benedict Cumberbatch, “Saturday Night Live” contemplated the possibility that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade.“Saturday Night Live” dug deep for its opening sketch this weekend, far into the text of a leaked draft opinion indicating that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, at the section where the draft opinion’s author, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., cites legal theory from 13th century England.As an introductory voice-over described the scene, “We go now to that profound moment of moral clarity, almost a thousand years ago, which laid such a clear foundation for what our laws should be in 2022.”Within the stone walls of a medieval castle, wearing period costumes and wigs, the cast members James Austin Johnson and Andrew Dismukes were brainstorming with a third character, played by the show’s guest host, Benedict Cumberbatch.“While I was cleaning the hole on the side of the castle where we poop and then it falls through the sky into a moat of human feces, I started to think about abortion,” Cumberbatch said, adding, “Don’t you think we ought to make a law against it?”“Exactly. Something fair and reasonable like those laws. We should make a law that will stand the test of time, so that hundreds and hundreds of years from now, they’ll look back and say, no need to update this one at all — they nailed it back in 1235.”Dressed as a medieval woman, Cecily Strong interrupted the men’s discussion. “I was outside watching the sheriff throw left-handed children into the river and I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about a new law,” she said.Strong asked them, “I was just wondering since I’m almost at the childbearing age of 12, shouldn’t women have the right to choose, since having a baby means like a 50 percent chance of dying?”Cumberbatch answered, “Yes, but that’s why we’re also offering maternity leave. When you’re done with 20 years of continuous maternity, you can leave.”When the three men all voted in favor of their new law, a fourth man, played by Chris Redd, attempted to vote against it.“I’m just playing,” Redd said. “I know I can’t vote. But you know, Moors gonna be Moors.”Kate McKinnon entered the room wearing long gray hair and a pointed hat, and Cumberbatch recoiled: “An ogre!” he exclaimed.“No, no, just a woman in her 30s,” McKinnon replied. She explained that eating a weird mushroom had given her the power to see far into the future, when this oppressive law would be overturned and then that outcome would itself be undone.McKinnon tried to offer some words of encouragement. “No matter how many choices they take away from women, we’ve always got the choice to keep fighting,” she said.“That’s really inspiring,” Cumberbatch responded. “And after hearing your perspective, I suddenly realize — you’re a witch and we’re going to set you on fire.”Hidden Talent of the WeekOne potential upside of hosting “S.N.L.” is that you might get to show off a skill or talent the audience doesn’t know you have. In the case of Cumberbatch, the Oscar-nominated star of “The Power of the Dog” and the “Doctor Strange” films, he demonstrated that he’s a pretty decent singer when he assumes the guise of a prison inmate on a chain gang in 1950s Georgia.While fellow convicts played by Johnson, Redd and Kenan Thompson smash rocks and lament their long internments, Cumberbatch is the one enjoying cherry pie and boasting that he’s the prison snitch. (He also put his pipes to use in a later sketch playing half of a 1980s New Wave rock duo that finds itself playing a gig at Chuck E. Cheese.)Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the Supreme Court’s draft opinion and its potential impact on abortion access.Jost began:Well, guys, tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Whether you wanted to be one or not. In an unprecedented move that could cause lasting damage to the Supreme Court, a draft opinion was leaked which indicates that they intend to overturn Roe v. Wade. So the Court is usually careful, but they slipped up just this once and now they’ve got to live with it forever. Sounds really unfair.The opinion was written by Justice Samuel Alito, and he bases his arguments on laws from the 1600s. So it’s an outdated opinion from an angry 70-year-old? This shouldn’t be a Supreme Court decision; it should just be a Facebook post. The opinion also seems like it was written in a weird conservative bubble. Here’s how you know: He quotes his own colleague Brett Kavanaugh six times. One for each beer in the pack. He even cites Kavanaugh on civil rights, which is like citing Amber Heard on how to make a bed. Chief Justice John Roberts said that the leak was “the work of one bad apple.” One bad apple is also another legal argument used in Alito’s opinion [his screen shows a picture of Eve in the Garden of Eden].Che continued:As a man, there’s no way I can understand the full impact of this issue. But I asked a bunch of women around the office what their personal experience was with abortion, and I’ve got to admit, I learned a lot from the HR meeting they made me go to.But I do know this ruling will have a disproportionate effect on poor people. I mean, most Americans don’t have access to the same resources that I do. The average person can’t just text Lorne in the middle of the night and say, “Yo, it happened again.” I just don’t get why Republicans are so against this. Maybe don’t think of it as an abortion. Think of it as a patriot storming a uterus to overturn the results of an unfair pregnancy.Weekend Update Desk Segment of the WeekMcKinnon, who for many years was “S.N.L.”’s resident impersonator of the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appeared this week at the Update desk to play her conservative successor, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.Playing Barrett in a comic back-and-forth with Jost, McKinnon tried to tamp down the perception that she was pleased about the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I don’t know what would make you think that, other than everything I’ve ever said,” she explained.McKinnon also emphasized so-called safe-haven laws that allow parents to give up custody of an infant.“Give it to a stork and the stork will give it to a lesbian,” she said. “I would think that lesbians would be happy because now there’s more babies for them to adopt. Until we ban that, too.” More

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    Fred Savage Fired From ‘The Wonder Years’ Over Misconduct Allegations

    The former child star of the original television series was dropped as director of a reboot after allegations of “inappropriate conduct,” 20th Television said.Fred Savage, the former child star of the television comedy “The Wonder Years,” has been fired as an executive producer and director of a reboot of the show after allegations of “inappropriate conduct,” the studio behind the new series said in a statement on Saturday.“Recently, we were made aware of allegations of inappropriate conduct by Fred Savage, and as is policy, an investigation was launched,” the statement from 20th Television said. “Upon its completion, the decision was made to terminate his employment as an executive producer and director of ‘The Wonder Years.’”The studio did not provide additional details or immediately respond to follow-up questions on Saturday. Representatives for Mr. Savage did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. Deadline reported the news of his firing on Friday.Mr. Savage, 45, was a child when the original “The Wonder Years” premiered in 1988 on ABC, kick-starting his career with his portrayal of the suburban, sunny middle schooler Kevin Arnold. The television comedy — a nostalgic look back at 1968 from the vantage of 1988 — was acclaimed at the time and brought Mr. Savage two Emmy Award nominations. The show aired until 1993.A new version of the show premiered in 2021 on ABC, this time focusing on a Black family in Montgomery, Ala., in the 1960s, with Don Cheadle serving as the narrator.Mr. Savage told The Hollywood Reporter in January that he had reservations about rebooting the show. But when the idea of centering it on a Black family was presented to him, he was on board.“I had to kind of get over myself a bit and realize that we were telling a new story,” he said.Mr. Savage has faced accusations of misconduct in the past.In 2018, Alley Mills, who played Mr. Savage’s television mother, Norma, in “The Wonder Years,” said in an interview with Yahoo that a costume designer for the show filed a sexual harassment suit in 1993 against Mr. Savage, then 16, and Jason Hervey, then 20 and an actor on the show who played the older brother, Wayne, claiming the actors had verbally and physically harassed her.“It was so not true,” Ms. Mills said at the time, adding that the lawsuit had been a major factor in the show’s cancellation that year. “It was my dresser, and I don’t care if she’s listening — I probably shouldn’t be telling this, but I don’t care.”Representatives for Mr. Savage and Mr. Hervey had denied those claims, the The Los Angeles Times reported.That same year, Mr. Savage was also accused of creating a hostile work environment and being verbally abusive in a lawsuit filed by a costume designer on his Fox television series, “The Grinder.” Mr. Savage denied the allegations, and the suit was later dismissed, according to The Hollywood Reporter. More

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    ‘Last Ward’ Review: Ashes to Ashes, Dirt to Dirt

    Yaa Samar! Dance Theater’s production at Gibney is an uncommonly deft combination of dance and verbal theater.Picture a standard, sterile hospital room. From behind a cabinet, an arm snakes out, followed by the rest of the body — a man with serpentine moves who slinks around and creeps under the bed. Immediately, the death implicit in the setting has become visible, corporeal, though still metaphorical, in a particular way. The man suggesting death is a dancer.“Last Ward,” which Yaa Samar! Dance Theater premiered on Thursday at the Gibney: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, is a dance work, with choreography by the company’s artistic director, Samar Haddad King. But it’s a play, too, with poetic text by Amir Nizar Zuabi, who also directs the 65-minute production. The uncommonly deft combination of dance and verbal theater heightens the impact of what might sound like a cliché: a profound meditation on life and death.At the center is a patient, played by the accomplished Palestinian actor Khalifa Natour. He and a woman who appears to be his wife (Yukari Osaka) look bewildered as they enter the hubbub of the hospital. Dancers in scrubs skip around and gesture officiously, doing a stylized version of the inscrutable activity that any patient might recognize.The stylization brings out the absurdity, and as Natour receives plant-bearing guests, the physical comedy continues. Two visitors who might be his grown children squabble over proximity to his bed. Later, the medicine he’s given seems to induce hallucinations. A friend (the lithe Mohammed Smahneh, who also plays the serpentine figure at the start) appears to come undone, his body parts all going in different directions.But the stakes remain high, as is confirmed when Natour — who does almost all of the talking, in Arabic, with English supertitles clearly projected onto the back wall — recounts the moment when his doctor gave him his diagnosis.His condition is incurable. Unnamed, it sounds like cancer: “the same power that created life” now “gone wild.” Zuabi’s text and Natour’s understated performance give the disease a terrible beauty: “My cells divide and divide and divide.”This mix of beauty and the awful truth is the text’s power, made more affecting by quotidian details, as when Natour lists “Things You Will Do After I’m Gone.” Earlier, he tells the boyhood story of buying a fish in a plastic bag. On his way home, bullies snatch the bag and toss it to one another. “I could see my fish swimming calmly in midair,” he says, before the bag is dropped and he watches as the fish’s gills open and close and go still — his first understanding of death.Death is all around him in the hospital, of course. The production reminds us of this when dancers wielding IV bags emerge during his fish story. His room opens to a hallway at the rear, and periodically an orderly wheels by with a body on a gurney.And then there is the dirt. It first appears as the food he’s given, an oddity you might not initially notice. But soon dirt is spilling everywhere, despite the desperate efforts of his wife to tidy it up or the semi-comic cleaning routines of staff members (to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” mixed into an effective electronic score by King). As a theatrical metaphor, the dirt is not subtle. It’s strong.The proliferation of dirt summons a memory of Natour’s character helping to bury his grandmother when he was 15. He remembers thinking of her not as the old woman she had become but as the desirable girl she once was, a thought he acts out by shoveling dirt onto a dancer embodying feminine allure. After burying his grandmother, he says, he went behind the house with his girlfriend, undressed and fell to the ground with her “again and again and again.”The repetition of those words echoes the cells that “divide and divide and divide,” the force that will kill him. It’s the “swirl of life” that will fill the void he leaves, a force that King’s choreography gives form to in a swirl of dancers. The inextricable connection between life and death is what “Last Ward” understands. The connection between words and dance, too.Last WardThrough May 12 at Gibney: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; gibneydance.org More

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    ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 2, Episode 10 Recap: Q’s Last Gift

    The “Picard” crew tries to find its way home.Season 2, Episode 10: ‘Farewell’So after all that, all the Jurati-Borg Queen combination had to do was show up earlier and none of the this season’s craziness would’ve happened?A very funny moment comes when an Excelsior crew member, during the “Picard” finale’s climax, wonders what happened to Rios, who was left behind in the 21st century. Picard snaps, “Stay on task, helm. That’s an order.” That’s essentially how the show’s writers have treated the audience for most of its two-season run. Don’t worry about the things that don’t make sense. Just focus on where the story is going.In this case, what the story reveals to us is that Q, in his dying moments, wanted to let Picard know that his mother’s death wasn’t his fault. (Why is Q dying? Of what? It’s never explained.) And that the first step to Picard finding love was for him to love himself. It’s a wonderful lesson, except, as Picard points out, there were innocent people who died along the way for a life lesson.Not that Q cares. And neither does Picard, it turns out, because Picard gives his soon-to-be-deceased tormentor a hug. It’s a touching moment. The thing is, everything we’ve seen in “Picard” has taught us that what is dead will never die. There is no reason to believe that Q is actually dying, in the traditional sense, because no major character dies in this show. This includes even the ones who do, because they’re just brought back later — sometimes with a literal snap of a finger, like our old friend Elnor. (If I was Picard, I might have asked Q for some other people to be brought back to life. “Hey, while you’re at it, instead of bringing back Elnor, whom I’m not that close to, would you mind bringing back Data? Or Tasha Yar?)John de Lancie did a wonderful job as Q, as he normally does. But the way the character was written this season felt off. If all this was to teach Picard forgiveness, why did Q seem so angry and vindictive earlier in the season? Recall his previous conversations with Soong, where he seemed to imply he wanted to get revenge on Picard.Odds and EndsSo after all the talk about shifting the timeline with the slightest use of futuristic technology, Rios ends up staying behind in the 21st century with Teresa with centuries worth of knowledge in his head. We find out from Guinan that he didn’t use much of that knowledge. Rios is a better man than me. If I went back in time 400 years and stayed there, I would be known as the inventor of cars, the iPhone, electricity and Twitter.That was a really lovely return from Wil Wheaton as the Traveler formerly known as Wesley Crusher. I have no idea if this is a one off, or if he’ll factor into next season, when the “Next Generation” cast returns. But Wesley was a character who generally got the short end of the stick in the original “Next Generation.” (The last we saw of him — when he was spotted at Riker and Troi’s wedding in “Nemesis” — he seemed to have returned to Starfleet.)Soong pulling out the folder labeled “Project Khan” gives us a hint of what next season will be about. We know Soong is an expert in genetics and that the greatest villain in all of “Trek,” Khan Noonien Singh, was a result of genetic experimentation. This looks like a precursor to the Eugenics Wars. Should be fun!Alison Pill has already said she’s not coming back for Season 3 of “Picard,” and with Rios now dead in the past, I’m wondering how much of the “Picard” crew comes back, if at all. Maybe next season will really be a “Next Generation” season.What’s up with the transwarp conduit that Jurati-Borg Queen want to find out about? That could also be a hint for Season 3. There are just so many questions about what the Borg have been up to in the past 400 years. Were they hiding from the Evil Borg? Did the previous assimilation attempts not happen? Stay on task, helm! That’s an order!A farewell to the Watcher, Tallinn, who stays away and watches until she doesn’t. Who had special powers, except for when she didn’t.Finally, what happened to the F.B.I. agent, Martin Wells? Imagine working your whole life to find out if aliens exist, having your theory confirmed and then … what? More

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    Greta Lee Is Still a Pool Shark

    The actress, who stars in “Russian Doll,” visits her favorite Koreatown haunts.“I like to find the most impossible shot and then get really disappointed when it doesn’t happen,” the actress Greta Lee said, leaning over a billiards table in the Koreatown section of Manhattan. “I don’t know what that says about me.”She aimed at a solid red ball, which obediently dropped into a center pocket. Ms. Lee allowed herself a brief celebration: “Mommy’s still got it, OK?”This was on a recent Wednesday evening, just before the premiere of the second season of the Netflix drama “Russian Doll,” in which Ms. Lee, 39, stars as Maxine, a best friend of Natasha Lyonne’s time-trapped Nadia. A standout of the first season (people approach her on the street, parroting Maxine’s tag line, “Sweet birthday baybeeee”), Ms. Lee returns with a deeper performance, in delirious outfits and statement eyeliner.She is also a star of the Apple TV+ drama “The Morning Show, in which she plays Stella Bak, a tech genius and network president who favors Balenciaga and vintage Chanel.For this outing, she had dressed down — wide-legged pants and diaphanous blouse, worn under a daffodil duster, with a Prada fanny pack to match — and had taken a car to this block of West 32nd Street where she and her husband, the comedy writer Russ Armstrong, had passed a lot of hazy evenings in their 20s. The couple, who relocated to Los Angeles during the pandemic, have two sons, 3 and 5, so the nights are hazy for different reasons.Ms. Lee began the night at the Korean grocery H Mart. In her 20s, as a California transplant making her Broadway debut, she had prowled its aisles for delicacies that reminded her of home. On this night, she filled her cart with an orange drink, an Asian pear drink, a sponge cake.“This is where you cross the threshold with your white friends who say they love Korean food and then you serve them this,” she said, pointing to some fried anchovies. Then she went in search of strawberry Pocky and dried squid.With Natasha Lyonne in a scene from Season 2 of “Russian Doll.”NetflixMr. Armstrong, who had been catching up on work, met her in the snack aisle, just as she was reaching for a bag of sweet corn chips. “We have an industrial supply of these at home,” he said approvingly.Groceries paid for, they made their way down the block to Woorijip, a popular cafe that serves premade Korean comfort foods. “Any time of night, it could give you everything you needed,” Mr. Armstrong said nostalgically.The cafe had made a few improvements since they last frequented it. “I have mixed feelings about this,” Ms. Lee said. “Because it’s so much nicer than it used to be.”They loaded a tray with Korean sushi, an omelet, a kimchi stew. “This stew tastes exactly the same,” Mr. Armstrong said. “It’s 5 percent saltier than it should be, which is exactly how I like it.”Ms. Lee dipped a spoon in. “Oh yeah,” she said. “There’s so much MSG. Just how our grandmothers intended.”Fortified, they headed to Space Billiards, a 12th floor pool hall hung with orange lanterns. They tried to order Korean beers, but they were sold out, so they settled at a table with a Heineken and a Budweiser. Ms. Lee tested out a cue. She said that she hadn’t played in a while.“Mommy’s still got it, OK?” said Ms. Lee, who played a lot of billards when she was growing up in Los Angeles. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesShe played a lot as a Los Angeles teenager, mostly in Koreatown pool halls, trying to impress Koreatown boys. As a student at Harvard-Westlake, a prestigious secondary school, she learned code switching early on, wearing poofy dresses to her white friends’ sweet 16 birthday parties and giant cargo pants to the pool halls after.That ability to inhabit different roles has served her career well, in supporting roles in shows such as “Inside Amy Schumer,” “High Maintenance” and “Girls.” She has a particular talent for satirizing privilege and entitlement.As an oddball character actress, she has rarely played roles that felt true to her own experience, she said. That will change with “Past Lives,” a romantic drama due later this year, in which Ms. Lee plays a first-generation immigrant who reconnects with a childhood sweetheart. She is also developing the essay collection “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning” for series television. She plans to star in it.“I’m not hiding,” she said of her work on “Past Lives.” “And that is really scary for me, because maybe I’ve been hiding a part of myself behind these characters. And I don’t know if people are going to be receptive to this version of me.”For now, Ms. Lee had a different role to play: pool shark. She is a devotee of Jeanette Lee, the Korean American professional pool player. “I’m going to act like I know what I’m doing,” she said.Feasting on Korean comfort food with her husband, Russ Armstrong, at Woorijip.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesMr. Armstrong broke. Ms. Lee sunk a ball. They traded shots back and forth, her long red nails gripping the cue. “With your nails and the full outfit it’s an intimidation thing,” Mr. Armstrong said.But her performance was not so threatening. “I’m trying to make all of those K-Town boys proud,” Ms. Lee said as she lined up a shot. She missed. “Never do anything to try to impress someone else,” she said.She undershot. Then she overshot. “I was so good at geometry,” she said. “What happened to me?”It look her a few rounds of 8-ball, but she seemed to hit her stride. “No more messing around, let’s do this,” she said, aiming for the corner pocket. She soon cleared the table as Mr. Armstrong, who had several balls remaining, looked on approvingly.“I didn’t think I was going to win,” Ms. Lee said.“I knew you were going to win,” Mr. Armstrong said, congratulating her. “I always bet on you.” More

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    Trevor Noah Has Thoughts on the Rise in Interest Rates

    Noah blamed inflation on “the pandemic, supply chain issues and a Russian man who clearly wasn’t hugged enough as a child.”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.High Level of InterestThe Fed raised interest rates by half a percentage point on Wednesday in an effort to curb inflation.On Thursday’s “Daily Show,” Trevor Noah blamed inflation on “the pandemic, supply chain issues and a Russian man who clearly wasn’t hugged enough as a child.”“And because of that, everything costs more: groceries, gas, blackmail. It’s terrible!” — TREVOR NOAH“Think of the economy like a house party, all right? Yeah, you want it to be banging, you know what I mean? You want it to be banging, but you don’t want it to get out of control because then no one can get a drink, and everyone is punching and fighting over what is left — it’s chaos, basically, it’s chaos! So raising the interest rate is like trying to calm the party down. But if you’re too extreme and you call the cops or you turn on the light and everyone sees who they were dancing with, now the party ends. The whole thing shuts down, that’s the recession of a party. So what the Federal Reserve is trying to do is change the players just enough so people stay, but then also make sure that nobody is dancing on the table.” — TREVOR NOAH“After yesterday’s rate hike, the markets went up 932 points. Pretty good. But this morning, as one reporter described it, ‘Investors woke up with a binge-trading hangover.’ Oh, you’ve got to be careful when you binge-trade; otherwise, you could wake up next to a stock you don’t even remember acquiring.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Then today, everything went kablooey. The Dow tumbled over 1,000 points, in the worst day of the year so far, eclipsing the previous worst day of the year: every day of the year.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Mexican St. Patrick’s Day Edition)“Happy Cinco de Mayo. Yeah, it’s that one day when people are excited to hear someone say, ‘I’ve got Corona!’” — JIMMY FALLON“What a day after two years of working from home — it was nice to have those vaguely problematic parties back in the office again.” — JIMMY FALLON“Meanwhile, today President Biden hosted a Cinco de Mayo reception in the Rose Garden with the first lady of Mexico. Yeah, Biden talked about the warm relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. It’s better than Trump’s message on Cinco de Mayo, which was ‘Think outside the bun.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Now, a lot of people mistakenly believe that today is Mexican Independence Day. It’s not — it’s Mexican St. Patrick’s Day. That’s why we drink green margaritas.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Cinco de Mayo isn’t even celebrated in all of Mexico. And here in the U.S., it only began to take off in the 1970s and ’80s, when brewing companies began capitalizing on it as a way to appeal to consumers. Wow, promoting a holiday for corporations to make money? That is so — that is so crass. I can’t believe it. You know, breaks your heart. Well, at least we’ll always have the Feast of St. Oktoberfest.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingAhead of Mother’s Day this weekend, celebrities like Kristen Bell, Andy Cohen and Sandra Oh read texts from their moms on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutOn her show, “Oh God, a Show About Abortion,” Alison Leiby addressed the news that the Supreme Court could be on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade. Desiree Rios for The New York TimesAlison Leiby had just performed her show “Oh God, a Show About Abortion” when she learned of the leaked draft opinion showing that the Supreme Court could be on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade. More

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    Frank Langella Blames ‘Cancel Culture’ After Firing From Netflix Show

    The actor said his dismissal from “The Fall of the House of Usher” followed a love scene in which the actress playing his wife accused him of touching her leg.Frank Langella, who was fired in April from his leading role in a Netflix mini-series after a misconduct investigation, said on Thursday that his dismissal followed a love scene in which the actress playing his wife accused him of touching her leg — an action not in the script.“She then turned and walked off the set, followed by the director and the intimacy coordinator,” Langella wrote in a column for Deadline, about a March 25 incident on the set of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The series is based on works by Edgar Allan Poe and created by Mike Flanagan.“I attempted to follow, but was asked to ‘give her some space.’ I waited for approximately one hour, and was then told she was not returning to set and we were wrapped,” Langella wrote.Langella said he and the actress were both clothed during the scene. During the ensuing investigation, he said, someone in human resources told him that the intimacy coordinator had suggested where the actors should place their hands during the scene. Langella called the instructions “absurd,” he said.“It was a love scene on camera,” Langella said. “Legislating the placement of hands, to my mind, is ludicrous. It undermines instinct and spontaneity.” Referring to the human resources employee, Langella wrote, “Toward the end of our conversation, she suggested that I not contact the young lady, the intimacy coordinator, or anyone else in the company. ‘We don’t want to risk retaliation,’ she said.”Netflix did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday evening.Langella said that he had been “canceled,” and that the harm to him has been “incalculable,” including losing a thrilling part, facing a stretch of unemployment and suffering a tarnished reputation. These indignities, he said, are “the real definition of unacceptable behavior.”“Cancel culture is the antithesis of democracy,” he said. “It inhibits conversation and debate. It limits our ability to listen, mediate, and exchange opposing views. Most tragically, it annihilates moral judgment. This is not fair. This is not just. This is not American.”The production plans to recast Langella’s role as Roderick, the reclusive patriarch of the Usher family, and reshoot the scenes in which he had already appeared. The series also stars Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell and Mark Hamill, among others.Langella, 84, known for his performances both onscreen and onstage, shot to fame in the title role of the 1979 film “Dracula” after starring in a Broadway production as the count. He also played President Richard M. Nixon in both the stage and screen versions of “Frost/Nixon,” earning an Oscar nomination as well as a Tony Award for best actor in a play in 2007. Recently, Langella appeared as the judge in the Netflix film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” More

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    Equity Drops ‘Waitress’ Unionization Effort and Files Grievance

    The union said it was withdrawing the petition because the producers of the nonunion tour now plan to end its run in June.Actors’ Equity, the union representing performers and stage managers, has withdrawn its attempt to organize a touring production of “Waitress,” and instead has filed a grievance against the musical’s producers.The union last month filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board, seeking an election to represent the nonunion touring cast and stage managers, saying they were doing the same work as those working for a touring production of the same show, but being paid far less.But on Thursday the union said it was withdrawing the petition because the producers of the nonunion tour said they were ending its run in June, which is too soon for the election process to take place. The union said the tour had previously planned performances into next year.The union said that it had filed a grievance against the musical’s licensors, Barry and Fran Weissler and the National Artists Management Company (NAMCO), for “double-breasting” — simultaneously running union and non-union operations.A “Waitress” spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More