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    in Television

    A Woman Who Says Bill Cosby Molested Her as a Teen Begins Testifying

    Judy Huth, who is suing Mr. Cosby on sexual assault grounds in a civil case, took the stand in California to begin describing an encounter with the entertainer that took place decades ago.Judy Huth took the stand in Santa Monica on Monday to describe a moment in 1975 when, as a teenager, she said she met Bill Cosby in a California park where he was making a film.Days later, at his invitation, she said, she and her friend went along to his tennis club and then ultimately to the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.“It was an adventure,” Ms. Huth said. “We were kids. He was a celebrity.”But later that day, the man she had admired as a famous comedian molested her, she said, after taking her to an isolated room at the mansion. Ms. Huth said she was 16 years old at the time.Mr. Cosby has denied he sexually assaulted Ms. Huth or any of the other women who have come forward in recent years to accuse him of sexual misconduct. He has said any relationship was consensual.But Ms. Huth, 64, has sued Mr. Cosby for sexual assault, and her account, which was not finished on Monday, is the centerpiece of her case against the entertainer, which completed its fourth day of testimony. Ms. Huth testified that she and her friend had been impressed when they saw Mr. Cosby — along with other movie stars — in a park in San Marino on the set of the film “Let’s Do It Again.” According to her account, Mr. Cosby gave the two teenagers alcohol at a house where he was staying, telling them to drink if he bested them in a game of pool, and then asked them to follow him in a car to the mansion. The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.“Are you girls ready for your surprise?” he said, according to Ms. Huth. “I had no clue what it could be,” she said. Her lawyers showed the jury a photograph of Ms. Huth standing with Mr. Cosby in the game room at the mansion, taken, she told the court, “before he molested me. It happened 15 minutes after.”Ms. Huth’s testimony was interrupted by the end of the court day before she was able to discuss what she has, in court papers for her case, accused him of doing: placing his hand down her pants and then forcing her to fondle him.The impact of that event, her lawyers have told the court, included depression and anxiety. She had experienced a happy childhood, she said, growing up in Temple City, Calif. But her lawyers said that the incident had derailed her and that she didn’t earn her high school diploma until she was 60.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have disputed Ms. Huth’s account, suggesting that their meeting actually happened years later, when she was an older, and willing, visitor to the mansion who by her own account did not flee after the encounter but stayed on for hours, swimming in the pool and watching a movie.Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, filed in 2014, was largely on hold while prosecutors in Pennsylvania pursued Mr. Cosby, 84, criminally on charges that he had sexually assaulted Andrea Constand, a former Temple University employee.But Mr. Cosby’s 2018 conviction in that case was overturned last year by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on due process grounds, and Mr. Cosby walked free after serving nearly three years of a three- to 10-year sentence.Mr. Cosby, flanked by two of his lawyers, outside his home in the Philadelphia suburbs after being freed from prison last year. Mark Makela/ReutersEarlier on Monday, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers had cross-examined Donna Samuelson, Ms. Huth’s friend who accompanied her to the mansion. She had told the court last week that Ms. Huth had been distraught after her encounter with Mr. Cosby but that Ms. Samuelson persuaded her to stay.Mr. Cosby’s defense tried to undermine the credibility of that account, suggesting that the two friends had coordinated their stories before Ms. Huth first went to the police in 2014. (Prosecutors ultimately declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.)But Ms. Samuelson said she had simply misremembered when she had initially reported to authorities that Ms. Huth was 15 at the time, not 16 as Ms. Huth now says.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers showed a layout of the game room at the Playboy Mansion and said that Ms. Samuelson had been wrong to say a person could access the bathroom only through an adjoining bedroom.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers also said it was impossible for Ms. Samuelson to have played the arcade game “Donkey Kong” there in 1975, as she has testified in a deposition. The game was not released until six years later.Ms. Samuelson said she meant that she had played a game like Donkey Kong.She denied that she and Ms. Huth had coordinated their accounts before Ms. Huth went to the police in 2014. “We were not putting anything together,” she said. “We were just telling our memories.”Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, also brought up the subject of race in a way that suggested Ms. Samuelson was motivated to take down Mr. Cosby because he is Black. She said, for example, that Ms. Samuelson, in her pre-trial deposition, had described the décor of his house in Los Angeles as “jungly” and “African,” referring to the leaf print on the wallpaper.“It wasn’t atypical for people in your friend group to use racial slurs like the N-word,” the lawyer asserted.Ms. Samuelson said she never did that.“I am not racist,” she said.One of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers, Jennifer Bonjean.Lucy Nicholson/ReutersMr. Cosby’s lawyers have noted in court proceedings that Ms. Huth’s recollection of when her encounter took place has changed: While she initially said it had happened in 1974, when she was 15, she more recently concluded it was in 1975, when she was 16. The law in California classified a 16-year-old as a minor. In disputing Ms. Huth’s account, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have suggested they met years after the time she said they did, when she was no longer a minor.Last week, Ms. Huth’s legal team introduced two other women who testified about encounters with Mr. Cosby. Kimberly Burr testified that she was 14 years old when he tried to kiss her in his trailer on the set of “Let’s Do It Again” in 1975 as well.Margie Shapiro testified that she was 19 that year when Mr. Cosby met her at the doughnut shop where she was working and invited her to the set of another movie he was filming in Los Angeles. Later that day, according to her testimony, she went to his house and then they went to the Playboy Mansion, where, she said, he drugged and assaulted her, an accusation that Mr. Cosby denies.Mr. Cosby is not expected to testify at the trial, having asserted his Fifth Amendment rights. But lawyers for Ms. Huth deposed him several years ago, and a portion of that testimony is expected to be presented in court before the conclusion of the trial, which is expected to last through the week. More

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    in Theater

    Portraits of the 2022 Tony Nominees

    The Broadway season that just ended, the first since the pandemic shutdown, will be remembered for many reasons — the persistence of Covid, the death of Stephen Sondheim, the dwindled tourism and the indispensable understudies. It was a season for renewed appreciation: of song and storytelling and shared experiences, of a beloved art form and a rebounding industry. And it was a season that featured an extraordinary volume of work by Black artists, catalyzed by the social unrest of 2020. The 2022 Tony Awards, which take place June 12, offer an opportunity to honor some of Broadway’s best work; in anticipation of that event, we photographed and interviewed many of the performers, and a few of the writers, directors and choreographers, nominated for awards. Below are portraits and edited excerpts from the interviews.“MACBETH”Ruth Negga“I’ve always wanted to be an actress, since I was a really young kid. I just love stories in all shape and form. And for me, there’s a whole different draw: There’s an aspect of the performer, the peacock — something kind of lovely about being looked at, at the same time I’m quite shy in my normal life, so that’s an interesting dichotomy.” — Ruth Negga“POTUS”Rachel Dratch and Julie White“People really, really want to laugh. The laughs are like hyperlaughs. Maybe that’s pandemic-flavored. Obviously, I’ve done a lot of comedies, but this one you can just feel the cackles coming off the audience. I think it’s because people have been shut in for so long.” — Rachel Dratch“All the lady shows — we’re all keeping our clothes on. It’s the boys that are taking them off. I feel like that’s a step in the right direction.” — Julie White“TAKE ME OUT”Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jesse Williams and Michael Oberholtzer“I decided at the age of 5 I was going to become an actor or a baker or a zookeeper. My dad reminded me that zookeepers were going to have to pick up lots of poop, and so then I narrowed it down to the baker and the actor, and the acting just seemed more fun. So it was a very early decision, and I’m glad it panned out.” — Jesse Tyler Ferguson“I’m making discoveries every day. It’s really liberating. It’s incredibly stressful. And it’s a lot of pressure.” — Jesse Williams“This is something that I never really thought about, and it’s kind of all I ever thought about at the same time. Not so much the Tonys, but to be in a position to have an opportunity to be in a play, in a production that is seen by people, that excites people, that’s talked about.” — Michael Oberholtzer“hangmen”Alfie Allen“I was going to be a snowboard instructor at one point if the acting didn’t work out. Came back from getting that qualification, and then I got a part in a film.” — Alfie Allen“Paradise Square”Joaquina Kalukango, A.J. Shively and Sidney DuPont“There’s hope in community. There’s hope in love. There’s hope for this country. And I think the more we see the things that are alike within us, the less we see the differences.” — Joaquina Kalukango“There’s 40 of us in this cast. To sing in a big group like that, which has been unsafe for a long time, it feels wonderful. That first rehearsal back when we all sang together, we were all just crying.” — A.J. Shively“I’m hoping that by me being in this space and by doing what I’m doing, that I can inspire young Black boys and men and inspire young hearing-impaired people to believe that they can do it — that there’s nothing, nothing that can get in your way as long as you push for it.” — Sidney DuPont“dana h.”Deirdre O’Connell“Because everything had stopped so radically, it felt like there was a real wide open spirit to the way people were going to the theater.” — Deirdre O’Connell“funny girl”Jared Grimes“I started dancing in the subways. We would set up the board, and we would just dance.” — Jared Grimes“company”Patti LuPone, Jennifer Simard and Matt Doyle“To experience any of Steve’s work is to realize what a human is capable of. He is complex, deeply human, nuanced and daring. He dares to write about every aspect of the human condition with a deeply beating heart.” — Patti LuPone, on Sondheim“Thank God Stephen actually came to the first preview. It was like a rock concert. He adored it, and he laughed from his head to his toes.” — Jennifer Simard“The first preview back was just so magnificent and overwhelming. And to have Stephen Sondheim sitting there with us, it’s a night that I will never forget.” — Matt Doyle“the music man”Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster and Jayne Houdyshell“I get bored of myself. I think that’s why I like acting. With acting, you get to have complete freedom to do all sorts of things.” — Hugh Jackman“The pandemic was crazy. I remember when the theater shut down and all of a sudden you realize, ‘Wait a minute, what I do for a living just doesn’t exist right now.’ I don’t think anyone plans for that.” — Sutton Foster“It feels like a big privilege to be part of the group of people that have come together to make Broadway reopen and do it as safely as possible.” — Jayne Houdyshell“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf”Camille A. Brown and Kenita R. Miller“I didn’t grow up during the internet, so we went to the library and we got videos of our favorite musicals and we would watch them over and over again, and the dance sequences, and I would learn them.” — Camille A. Brown (nominated as director and choreographer)“I get this tribe of sisters that have shown me what it really means to be a sister.” — Kenita R. Miller“How I learned to drive”Mary-Louise Parker, Paula Vogel and David Morse“I didn’t think the play would ever be produced. I didn’t think I’d ever find actors who could do it. I thought I was going to be judged and condemned for writing it. I realized I shouldn’t be afraid of telling the truth.” — Paula Vogel (nominated as playwright)“Just living in a world right now where judgment of other people comes quickly and it’s severe. And what Paula wrote, it doesn’t allow you to do that. It just opens you up.” — David Morse“We all have darkness. We all have things we need to be forgiven for. And I think that is something kind of important to remember.” — Mary-Louise Parker“A STRANGE LOOP”Michael R. Jackson, Jaquel Spivey, L Morgan Lee and John-Andrew Morrison“I’m a writer because I have questions, and I have things that scare me, and the only way for me to get over my fears is to confront them directly.” — Michael R. Jackson (nominated as book and score writer)“I grew up watching movie musicals. I was obsessed with them. ‘Dreamgirls,’ the movie: As soon as I saw Jennifer Hudson singing, I thought ‘I want to do that!’” — Jaquel Spivey“In many ways, I feel like it took the world to turn upside down for me to start to find some sense of visibility.” — L Morgan Lee“When I first moved to this city, and I would be auditioning, I would hear things like ‘Oh, your pearls are falling out of your mouth,’ or ‘You’re not thug enough.’ So to be able to be in a show where I can be as queer and as flamboyant and as gay and as big as I possibly can be, and it’s not only needed but celebrated, is amazing.” — John-Andrew Morrison“Mr. Saturday night”Billy Crystal and Shoshana Bean“People are starved for entertainment, and you look out and they’re all masked and yet they’re laughing as hard as they can and we’re getting the same energy we would get. It’s so important that people get entertained and we get some sort of semblance of normal life. This show has been very healing for all of us in a lot of different ways.” — Billy Crystal“The first night that we had an audience and heard that laughter en masse: It’s a drug. It’s crazy.” — Shoshana Bean“Lackawanna blues”Ruben Santiago-Hudson“There was a lot of trepidation, and a lot of second-guessing. I wasn’t sure if one person would show up. But one of the things I discovered is people need theater as bad as we need people to need theater. Human beings need to do what is innate in us, and that’s to be social creatures and to have shared experiences with one another.” — Ruben Santiago-Hudson“MJ”Myles Frost and Christopher Wheeldon“What I cherish the absolute most is getting here — the journey that it took even before I hit the stage the first time, and learning myself, learning more about Michael, meeting my cast mates for the first time. It’s little moments like that that stick out to me the most.” — Myles Frost“The last few months have been filled with highs and lows and a lot of fear, just around whether we could actually get up and get running, keep our cast on the stage, get our audiences in the door. I have learned a lot about my capacity to handle fear as an artist, and also, like the rest of the world, as a human being, and actually to find the best ways that I can to turn that fear into some positive and creative energy.” — Christopher Wheeldon (nominated as director and choreographer)“Clyde’s”Uzo Aduba and Kara Young“It’s exciting to be a part of the thing that people are craving, which is community. Theater has always served as something that is more than just entertainment, but in this time, even more than in the past, it feels like a healing. Some days, when the curtain will come up, I’m not even sure they’re applauding the show. A layer of this feels like it’s for another need.” — Uzo Aduba“I have to admit that I really was very eager to work. And because this was the cards that were dealt, I really hugged this moment with all of myself.” — Kara Young“Clyde’s” and “MJ”Lynn Nottage“I feel very proud to be part of a season in which we’ve had more representation by Black writers than in the history of, probably, Broadway in its entirety.” — Lynn Nottage (nominated as playwright for “Clyde’s” and book writer for “MJ”)“Skeleton Crew”Phylicia Rashad“Theater is always bumpy. That is nothing new. But it was great to be back in the theater.” — Phylicia Rashad“American Buffalo”Neil Pepe and Sam Rockwell“It’s come back in such a big, big way. And we were shut down two years ago. I think that’s why it’s really exciting.” — Sam Rockwell (shown with Neil Pepe, who is nominated as director)“Trouble in mind”LaChanze and Chuck Cooper“We need more stories that are showing the diversity in our community, not just the broad strokes.” — LaChanze“I just hope that those who made it into our little theater and were able to go on our journey with us, I hope that they left the theater moved and thinking and curious.” — Chuck Cooper“girl from the north country”Mare Winningham“I’ve learned that marinating in a role is really good.” — Mare Winningham“Mrs. Doubtfire”Rob McClure“When I was 15, I saw a community theater production of ‘Sweeney Todd’ that changed me, and by that, I mean my DNA. I went into that theater as one person, and I left that theater a different person. It was a magic trick that I didn’t know existed. And then I discovered that I could provide that magic trick for other people. And that’s why I act.” — Rob McClure“THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH”Lileana Blain-Cruz and Gabby Beans“When a piece of theater is good — and I feel like everybody is struggling and reaching for that — you walk out of the theater feeling more alive. And for me, wrestling with what it means to be alive is the eternal question.”— Lileana Blain-Cruz (nominated as director)“This character is completely free. She has no boundaries or self-consciousness. So I feel like inhabiting that energy has made me just expand as a person.” — Gabby Beans“the minutes”Tracy Letts“I’ve never felt more camaraderie with my fellow theater artists. This does not feel like a competition to me, these Tony Awards. It feels like a celebration — getting to return to our art form.” — Tracy Letts (nominated as a playwright) More

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    in Television

    ‘Ms. Marvel’ Introduces a New Hero (and a New Actress)

    When Iman Vellani watches herself as the title character in “Ms. Marvel,” she cannot help but feel a sense of disbelief. Before this Disney+ series came her way, she was a high school senior with a seemingly impossible dream to be in a Marvel project — now she’s playing one of its powerful costumed champions, just like some of the actors she has spent her life idolizing.At times, Vellani said it was hard to connect her present-day self with the person she sees on the show. “I look so young,” she said recently. “I feel different now. I feel like I’ve matured 20 years.”To be clear, Vellani had turned 18 when she filmed “Ms. Marvel,” and she is 19 now.For all the experience Vellani has gained from the series (which debuts on Wednesday), she knows she will still be underestimated for her age and her status as a newcomer whose greatest concerns, not all that long ago, were writing term papers and applying to colleges.But none of that has discouraged Marvel from placing her at the center of its latest superhero adventure.In “Ms. Marvel,” Vellani (with Matt Lintz) plays a New Jersey high school student who gains mysterious powers.Marvel Studios/Disney+“Ms. Marvel,” based on the comic-book series, tells the story of Kamala Khan, a Jersey City high schooler who admires the Marvel superheroes from afar — until she is mysteriously granted powers that allow her to fight alongside them.When the character was given her own comics series in 2014, Khan was a crucial part of Marvel’s effort to diversify its publishing lineup — she was a rare protagonist who was Muslim and Pakistani American. Now “Ms. Marvel” offers a similar potential for wider representation in the ever-expanding behemoth that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.If that’s not enough of a burden, Vellani is making her screen acting debut in “Ms. Marvel,” and does not have the years of celebrity or lengthy résumés that her newfound peers already possessed when they were recruited into the Marvel pantheon.But what she does have is a fan’s unapologetic love for the franchise she has joined.“My entire world, everything I talked about was Marvel,” Vellani said. “And now people actually have to listen when I talk about it.”In mid-May, Vellani was speaking in a video interview from Los Angeles as part of her first-ever round of media promotion. Only two years prior, she was in high school in Markham, Ontario, where her family had emigrated from Karachi when she was about a year old.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’: With a touch of horror, the franchise’s newest film returns to the world of the mystic arts.‘Moon Knight’: In the Disney+ mini-series, Oscar Isaac plays a caped crusader who struggles with dissociative identity disorder.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: In the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series, the web slinger continues to radiate sweet, earnest decency.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.Though she was just 5 when the first MCU movie, “Iron Man,” was released, Vellani has grown up to be the type of zealous Marvel devotee who blithely confesses that her three favorite people in the world are Robert Downey Jr., Billy Joel, and the Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige.“My entire world, everything I talked about was Marvel,” Vellani said. “And now people actually have to listen when I talk about it.”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesWhen she auditioned for her high school’s drama department at age 13, Vellani said then that her dream role would be anything in the MCU. A few years later, she came to school for Halloween dressed in a Ms. Marvel costume she had made with her grandmother.“No one knew who I was,” Vellani said. “Everyone thought I was the Flash. So I had to buy a comic book and hold it with me.”At a certain point in her studies, the precocious teen had soured on becoming a professional actor. “When you’re in a room with 15-year-old kids who all think they’re Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s like the worst place to be in,” she said. “You immediately hate drama.”But her curiosity was reignited when she learned of an opportunity to try out for “Ms. Marvel.” “My aunt opened a group chat that she never opens and someone had forwarded this casting call through WhatsApp that she sent to me,” Vellani explained. “It was the most brown way this could have happened.”Compared to longstanding Marvel heroes like Captain America (who predates the United States’ entrance into World War II) or Spider-Man (introduced in 1962), Kamala Khan is a youngster.She was created less than a decade ago by a team that included Sana Amanat, who was a Marvel publishing editor before becoming a production and development executive at the studio and an executive producer on “Ms. Marvel.”The Kamala Khan character was given her own comic book series in 2014 as part of Marvel’s effort to diversify its lineup.Marvel EntertainmentIn conversations with her then-colleague Stephen Wacker, who also helped create the character, Amanat said she expressed a desire for a heroine who, like herself, was Muslim and a child of Pakistani immigrants. Amanat said she wanted her stories to reflect “some of the tribulations of being an awkward brown teenager — going to prom by myself, fasting and playing basketball or lacrosse, wearing tights underneath my shorts in 90-degree weather.”In her earliest comics, written by G. Willow Wilson and illustrated by artists that included Adrian Alphona and Jamie McKelvie, Khan deliberately sought to model herself on Captain Marvel, the superhero alter ego of Carol Danvers.That narrative choice, Amanat said, was meant to illustrate a real-life dynamic that she had experienced in her youth.“For a person of color,” she said, “you look outside and who are the people that you’re worshiping and want to be like? They look nothing like you. Captain Marvel is really emblematic of that — she’s blonde, blue-eyed and tall. And so the story spun from there.”Bisha K. Ali, who is the head writer and an executive producer of the “Ms. Marvel” television series, said she faced competing goals in her adaptation of the comics: to preserve the parts of Khan’s character and her world that readers already appreciate, and to help viewers establish connections to her for when she makes further MCU appearances — which she is already slated to do in “The Marvels,” a new movie planned for 2023 release.“The challenge was really, what do we pick?” said Ali, who was also a writer on Marvel’s “Loki” TV series. “What do we choose that will set this person up for being in the MCU — being part of this huge, global media phenomenon, but also feels intimate and personal and vital?”Ali said she approached “Ms. Marvel” as the story of a person discovering who she is: “All superheroes have powers,” she said. “But if someone in their heart knows themselves, there’s so much empowerment in that, especially for someone from a historically marginalized group.”From left, Mohan Kapur, Vellani, Saagar Shaikh and Nimra Bucha in “Ms. Marvel.” The writers sought to preserve key aspects of Khan’s world while connecting her to the MCU.Marvel Studios/Disney+As Vellani cleared the various stages of her casting process in early 2020 — providing a headshot; submitting a self-taped audition; traveling to Marvel’s offices in Los Angeles for an on-camera test — her future colleagues found themselves charmed by her enthusiasm and her guilelessness. (“Not only is Iman an incredible new talent,” her hero Feige wrote in an email, “but she’s also a huge fan of the MCU who knows and loves this character as much as anyone at Marvel Studios.”)Recalling a video conversation with Vellani, Amanat said, “When she was showing me her room, she had this Iron Man cologne. She’s like, ‘I don’t know, my dad got this for me — it doesn’t smell that bad.’” (In the “Ms. Marvel” series, Khan will also have Iron Man cologne in her bedroom.)When she and Vellani were introduced in Los Angeles, Ali said, “She spots me and she’s like, ‘You’re Bisha? I’m Iman. You’ve got to tell me everything about the TV and film industry.’ She just embodied Kamala-ness. She’s so curious and so active.”Vellani said she grew increasingly anxious about her prospects, particularly after her visit to Marvel. “I felt like I was on the inside, man,” she said. “I got this little taste of what life could be like. I was like, I can’t possibly go to university after this. I can’t think of anything else I would want to do.”Later that spring, after she’d already been accepted into her first-choice college, Vellani was driving around Markham with friends when she got a fateful call from Feige and asked to step out of the car.After learning she’d gotten the role, Vellani said, “I was trying not to have a reaction because my friends were watching. I got back into the car and my friends were like, ‘Did you win the lottery?’ I was like, ‘Basically.’ And then we got celebratory burritos.”Now Vellani must reckon not only with the benefits of playing a Marvel superhero but also the drawbacks — not least of which is a subset of audience members who regard any effort to depict diversity as an infringement on past tradition and register their outrage on social media.Asked if she had encountered this strain of criticism in her time at Marvel, Amanat gave a knowing chuckle. “Oh boy,” she said. “Don’t look for my name on YouTube — it’s not a good idea.””If I go to work every day thinking, ‘I’m the first Muslim superhero,’ I’m never going to get anything done,” Vellani said.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesSuch backlash “is just the nature of the business,” Amanat said. She added, “I don’t understand why the toy box is so small. We’re not taking anything away from Captain America — we’re over here doing our own thing. It makes me a little sad and a little frustrated.”Even so, Amanat said that projects like “Ms. Marvel” were important to an audience that is not accustomed to seeing themselves in entertainment franchises.“I think of my nieces and my goddaughters and my friends’ kids,” she said. “I think about them growing up and having Iman Vellani, out in the world, wearing a superhero outfit, and it’s really amazing to me. They’ve never had this.”Vellani was more circumspect in how she talked about this criticism of the Ms. Marvel character.“I’m not on social media, so I haven’t encountered anything directly,” she said. “You can’t make everyone happy, and that’s not our goal, anyway. That’s just setting yourself up to fail.”She added, “If I go to work every day thinking, ‘I’m the first Muslim superhero,’ I’m never going to get anything done.”The high-class problems Vellani would rather contend with include deciding whether to watch new MCU movies in her hometown theater with her friends, or in exclusive screenings for the Marvel employees who worked on them.When she “finessed” her way into a recent showing of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” that had been arranged for Marvel staff, Vellani said she enjoyed aspects of it, like meeting Xochitl Gomez, who plays the young hero America Chavez.But there were downsides to watching with a fervent Marvel squad, too.“I realized I like watching these movies a lot more with a normal group of nerds,” Vellani said. “Because these guys clap for everything, man. People will show up, who we know are in the movie, and they’ll clap.”“I get it — they’re clapping for their crew,” she added. “But still, I need to focus when I’m watching.” More

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    in Television

    What’s on TV This Week: The Tony Awards and ‘P-Valley’

    The 75th Tony Awards air on CBS. And Katori Hall’s “P-Valley” is back on Starz.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, June 6 – 12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayIRMA VEP 9 p.m. on HBO. With a wink, Olivier Assayas revisits his 1996 film of the same name in this mini-series, which itself follows a disastrous attempt to remake “Les Vampires,” the silent serial film from the 1910s. The show stars Alicia Vikander as an American movie star who signs on to play Irma Vep, the heroine in the old story. The role seeps into her own life.TuesdayPENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981) 10 p.m. on TCM. Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken and Jessica Harper star in this offbeat musical, which was adapted from a BBC series. Martin plays a sheet-music salesman in Depression-era Chicago whose knotty romances are heightened by lip-synced renditions of popular songs from the 1920s and ’30s. A “neo-Brechtian comedy-melodrama with music,” is the label that the critic Vincent Canby used in his 1981 review for The New York Times, adding that he watched the movie “with what might be best described as baffled interest.”WednesdayChris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in “Jurassic World.”Chuck Zlotnick/Universal PicturesJURASSIC WORLD (2015) 5:30 p.m. on FX. How many $100 bills do you have to stack to reach the average height of a T. rex? You might ask the producers of the “Jurassic World” trilogy: This 2015 entry and its first sequel, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” (2018) are among the highest-grossing movies of all time. The final entry in the trilogy, “Jurassic World: Dominion,” is set to hit theaters this weekend. Here’s a chance to revisit the first entry — about the meltdown of a theme park populated by cloned dinosaurs, set more than two decades after the original “Jurassic Park” — alongside the sequel “Fallen Kingdom,” which airs immediately afterward, at 8 p.m. on FX.ThursdayLAMB (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime. A ewe gives birth to an unusual creature on a foggy, forlorn, somberly photogenic Icelandic sheep farm in this debut feature from Valdimar Johannsson. The husband and wife who run the farm, Maria and Ingvar (Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snaer Gudnason), raise the oddball offspring as their own. As it grows, things become tenser — and weirder. The result, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times, is a film that “plays like a folk tale and thrums like a horror movie.” It contains “an Oscar-worthy cast of farm animals,” Catsoulis added.FridayJUDY GARLAND MOVIES all day on TCM. Friday would have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. To celebrate, TCM has an entire day of a Garland lined up. Highlights include: ZIEGFELD GIRL (1941), airing at 8 a.m., which also stars James Stewart and Hedy LaMarr; the Busby Berkeley-directed musical FOR ME AND MY GAL (1942), in which Garland stars opposite Gene Kelly, in his first feature, airing at 2 p.m.; and, naturally, THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), at 8 p.m., followed at 10 p.m. by THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ: 50 YEARS OF MAGIC (1990), a documentary about the making of that movie.SaturdayOscar Isaac in “The Card Counter.”Focus FeaturesTHE CARD COUNTER (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader took another dive into the mind of a loner in this drama, which centers on an American military veteran and professional card player named William Tell, played by Oscar Isaac. (For more of Schrader’s loners, see his previous movie, “First Reformed,” and his screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”) Tell is haunted by memories of an old, abusive superior, Maj. John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). His life changes when he begins a partnership with a gambling manager (Tiffany Haddish) and meets the teenage son (Tye Sheridan) of one of his former military compatriots. “It’s a haunting, moving story of spirit and flesh, sin and redemption, love and death,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. Schrader, she said, “likes playing with film form but he isn’t interested in conventional heroes and beats, and even when he hits familiar notes he does so with his own destabilizing rhythm and pressure.”SundayTHE 75TH ANNUAL TONY AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. This year’s Tony Awards will be the first to recognize shows that opened after the theater closures during the time of pandemic lockdowns. Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer-winning meta-musical, “A Strange Loop,” will go into the night with the most nominations (it received 11), though it has formidable competition in the best new musical race: The other shows nominated in that category are “Paradise Square,” “Six,” “MJ the Musical,” “Girl From the North Country” and “Mr. Saturday Night.” The nominees in the best new play category are “Clyde’s,” “Hangmen,” “The Lehman Trilogy,” “The Minutes” and “Skeleton Crew.” The acting categories include a range of well-known performers, including Sam Rockwell, Mary-Louise Parker, Billy Crystal, Hugh Jackman, Uzo Aduba, Rachel Dratch, Phylicia Rashad, Ruth Negga and Patti LuPone.Nicco Annan and Brandee Evans in “P-Valley.”StarzP-VALLEY 10:06 p.m. on Starz. The Pulitzer-winning playwright Katori Hall (“Hot Wing King,” “The Mountaintop”) is behind this series, a drama set at a strip club in a fictional Mississippi town. In the new, second season, which began last week, the personal and professional pressures felt by the show’s characters — including Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan), who owns the club, and Mercedes (Brandee Evans), a decorated dancer there — are heightened by the pandemic. Hall discussed the intention of the show in a recent interview with The Times: “I wanted to create an image of women who could hold their own weight, literally and figuratively, but in the next second, could burst into tears because the power dynamic in their life shifted for whatever reason,” she said. “I wanted to show Black women in their full humanity.” More

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    Woman Testifies That Bill Cosby Kissed Her When She Was 14

    She testified at a civil trial in Los Angeles brought by another woman accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault. A spokesman for Mr. Cosby denied all the accusations against him.Kimberly Burr testified Friday that she was 14 years old when Bill Cosby invited her into his trailer on a film set in Los Angeles in 1975 and started kissing her.Ms. Burr was testifying in the civil trial in Los Angeles where Mr. Cosby has been sued by another woman, Judy Huth, who has accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her that same year, when she was also a teenager.Ms. Burr, who is now 61, said that she had met Mr. Cosby at a tennis tournament in Palm Desert that year, where he had invited her to the set of the film “Let’s Do It Again” in Los Angeles with the promise of being an extra. While her mother and other members of her family waited outside, she said, he led her into his trailer to help him fix his bow tie, where he grabbed both her arms and started kissing her.“I was stuck,” Ms. Burr told the court. “I was struggling, trying to get away.”When he let go, she said, she “walked right out of the trailer down the steps” and didn’t tell her family because she didn’t want to ruin the day for them.During cross-examination, Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, challenged her account, asking how, after such a traumatic experience, she could have kept photographs in the family home of the meeting showing Ms. Burr and her brother with Mr. Cosby. “Did it bother you that they were there?” she said.A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, dismissed the testimony. “These are just allegations made up to support Judy Huth, whose claims are not factual at all,” he said in an interview.Ms. Huth’s case is the first civil suit accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. In her lawsuit, Ms. Huth says that she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 1975, when she was 16, after she and a friend met him in a park where he was filming “Let’s Do It Again,” the same movie he was working on when he met Ms. Burr.The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.Days after their meeting, Mr. Cosby invited Ms. Huth and her friend to his tennis club, Ms. Huth’s lawyers have said, where Ms. Huth played a game where she had to drink alcohol every time he won at billiards, and then they both followed him in their car to the Playboy Mansion. Once there, Ms. Huth has said, Mr. Cosby forced her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom.Mr. Cosby has denied he sexually assaulted Ms. Huth, or any of the other women who have come forward in recent years to accuse him of sexual misconduct.More than 50 women have accused Mr. Cosby of sexually abusing them. This was the first time Ms. Burr has spoken publicly.As Ms. Huth’s lawyers have sought to demonstrate a pattern of behavior and abuse by Mr. Cosby, they called another witness, Margie Shapiro, 65, who had already come forward with accusations in 2015.Ms. Shapiro testified that she was 19 in 1975 when Mr. Cosby met her at the doughnut shop where she was working and invited her to the set of another movie he was filming in Los Angeles. Later that day, they went to the Playboy Mansion, where, she said, he drugged and assaulted her. She said that they had played pinball together in the game room at the mansion, and that he had offered her a pill after she lost. She said she remembered waking up: “My next memory was foggy, but I was in a bed naked and Bill Cosby was naked, inside me,” she said.She said she told a friend what had happened but never went to the police. “I felt I went there consensually, I took a pill and he’s him and I am me,” she said. “I felt stupid because I felt at the time I put myself in that situation.”Mr. Cosby’s spokesman, Mr. Wyatt, issued a statement Friday afternoon which said that the accusers were “discrediting themselves” and questioned their accounts. “Since we stand on the foundation of truth and facts,” he said in the statement, “we believe that Mr. Cosby will be vindicated of ALL allegations in order to move forward with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”In challenging Ms. Shapiro’s account in court, Mr. Cosby’s legal team questioned whether she was working at the doughnut shop on the morning she said she met Mr. Cosby, and whether she went to the Playboy Mansion. They acknowledged that Ms. Shapiro went to Mr. Cosby’s house, but they insisted that the relationship was consensual. Ms. Shapiro said she stood by her account.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have noted in court proceedings that Ms. Huth’s recollection of when her encounter took place has changed: While she initially said it happened in 1974, when she was 15, she more recently concluded it was in 1975, when she was 16. The law in California classified a 16-year-old as a minor. In disputing Ms. Huth’s account, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have suggested they met years after the time she said they did, when she was no longer a minor.In their opening remarks, his lawyers sought to discredit Ms. Huth’s account by pointing out that she and the friend who accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion stayed for hours after the alleged encounter with Mr. Cosby, swimming in the outdoor pool and watching a movie.The friend, Donna Samuelson, has testified that Ms. Huth was distraught and wanted to leave but Ms. Samuelson persuaded her to stay.Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, which she filed in 2014, had largely been put on hold while prosecutors in Pennsylvania pursued Mr. Cosby criminally on charges that he sexually assaulted Andrea Constand.Mr. Cosby’s 2018 conviction in that case was overturned last year by an appellate court, which ruled that a non-prosecution agreement he made with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case. Mr. Cosby walked free after serving nearly three years of a three- to 10-year sentence.Mr. Cosby, 84, is not scheduled to testify and has not attended the opening days of testimony, but his deposition testimony is expected to be played in court.Ms. Huth, 64, who has been in attendance, is intending to give her account to the jury. More

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    Asked to Adapt a Classic Play, This Writer Rethought Her Life

    As she sought the truth for her characters on the page, Mara Vélez Meléndez’s real self began to emerge. Now she’s making her Off Broadway debut.In 2018, as part of a masters program in playwriting at Hunter College in Manhattan, Mara Vélez Meléndez was given a life-changing assignment: adapt a classic play. She chose “John Gabriel Borkman,” a rarely revived late Ibsen play about an ambitious banker, and in her reworking, the characters became members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, created in 2016 by the U.S. federal government to resolve the island’s debt crisis.The resulting work, “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” recently opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan. But when Vélez Meléndez, now 29, embarked on the project, she knew little about the board, or “la junta” as it’s known colloquially in her native Puerto Rico, other than that a large percentage of the population was against its unelected power to oversee the island’s budget.Working against the clock — “I had one week until the deadline,” she recalled — the playwright hit a wall. No amount of research helped her understand who the board members were or why they were appointed by the Obama administration. The board’s mission — to put the island on a path to sustainable economic growth — has led to fiscal austerity and criticism that it has taken away the island’s sovereignty, effectively creating a modern colonialism.“Puerto Rico es la isla que se repite (is the repeating island),” Vélez Meléndez said, alluding to the Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo and his seminal reflection on the interminable colonial impositions laid upon Caribbean islands since Columbus’s arrival. “We’re always going back to the same thing,” she added.Christine Carmela, left, as Lolita and Samora la Perdida, who plays outlandish versions of the board members.Julieta CervantesIntrigued by the lack of information on the board members, Vélez Meléndez wrote a play that employs what she called a queer lens to investigate how “Puerto Rico was turned into a neoliberal playground.” (The play, a coproduction of Soho Rep and the Sol Project, is running through June 19.)Every trace of Ibsen disappeared in the process. It’s all Vélez Meléndez now. The play takes place in the office reception of “la junta,” a liminal space that conveys the timeless vacuousness of bureaucratic hellscapes. Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans woman, arrives with one mission: “to decolonize the island of Puerto Rico.”On Being Transgender in AmericaPhalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.Throughout the play, Lolita meets various characters, including a Nuyorican receptionist whose gender identity is unresolved and outlandish versions of board members (all played by Samora la Perdida). They not only fail to take Lolita seriously but try to convince her that they know more about her needs than she does.The playwright realized in trying to decolonize Puerto Rico, she was also learning how to decolonize gender identity, including her own. When she started writing the play, Vélez Meléndez had not yet begun to transition and identified as “cis, queer, question mark,” believing she didn’t have the right label to give herself.“I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics,” Vélez Meléndez said.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesGrowing up in Puerto Rico, she had learned that being queer meant she had to like men, “but I never wanted to be around them,” she says laughing. She began writing for pleasure while pursuing a double major in journalism and theater at the University of Puerto Rico. “I wasn’t dating and really didn’t like sports,” she explained, so she found solace and unexpected joy in the works of Beckett and Ionesco.This in turn led to an interest in modern theater, including works like “An Octoroon” by her future Hunter professor Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. One of her mentors, the Puerto Rican playwright and performer Sylvia Bofill, suggested she should write her own plays.Upon moving to New York City for grad school in 2017, Vélez Meléndez found that gay and transgender people were everywhere. “There were trans girls on the subway, lesbian couples holding hands in the street, everything felt like a possibility,” she said. Soon, she added, she found a safe space among fellow theater-makers and new friends who allowed her to experiment with her gender expression in ways that would have seemed forbidden in Puerto Rico. Once she sat down to write, her sister had begun transitioning, and Vélez Meléndez wanted to include a trans character as a homage.Originally, it wasn’t Lolita who was trans but the receptionist character. Lolita is inspired by the real-life Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who, in 1954, led an attack in the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in the wounding of several members of Congress. Writing scenes in which Lolita talks to the receptionist about decolonization made the playwright feel horrible.“It’s the TERF-iest I’ve ever been with myself,” she explained, using an acronym for “trans exclusionary radical feminists,” a term used to describe feminists who are transphobic. “Here I was telling this trans character they have to decolonize themselves when they had done it years ago.”Dissatisfied with the draft she presented at Hunter, Vélez Meléndez said she was shocked by the encouragement she received from her classmates and professor. Jacobs-Jenkins then introduced her to the director David Mendizábal, overseeing the Soho Rep production, who helped the play take a turn by asking, “what if it was Lolita who was trans instead?”Suddenly, as Vélez Meléndez was able to identify more with her lead character and her pleas, the play took on a life of its own. “It was a beautiful journey to witness,” Mendizábal said, “the truth of these two characters emerged on the page as she was emerging more and more in real life.” It was around this time that Soho Rep first showed interest in producing the play, but then the pandemic happened.This forced period of isolation allowed the young playwright to open up her spectrum of presentation. She started wearing more dresses and skirts, fully shaved her facial hair for the first time since high school, and when she tried on a crop top, she realized she looked like the kind of girls she crushed on. “Seeing myself in one of those women I was attracted to I knew that I could love myself,” she said.One day at the post office, when a clerk referred to her as “ma’am” everything clicked. “It kept clicking through the play,” she explained, recalling the effect this had on Lolita’s agency as well. Last July, she came out to her partner by saying, “I’m not trying to copy my sister, but I think this is happening.”“This was a case where the play was just writing itself. I was writing it, writing me, writing itself,” she added.With the newfound confidence she discovered during her transition, as well as the joy and elation of making her Off Broadway debut, Vélez Meléndez is looking forward to spending her summer working on a batch of new plays. “I’m going to write about my experience as a trans girl from the diaspora,” she explained. “I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics.”Although she didn’t uncover much about how the oversight board works, writing “Notes on a Killing” allowed Vélez Meléndez to realize “there are many things we need to decolonize within ourselves before we actually get to start the country we dreamed of.” That in itself feels like the ultimate kind of political awakening, a revolution in the making. More

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    Mark Rylance on ‘Jerusalem’ and the Golf Comedy ‘Phantom of the Open’

    One Tuesday afternoon last month, Mark Rylance was sitting in his London home, his face and body bearing the accouterments of Johnny (Rooster) Byron, the rowdy onetime daredevil he has been playing in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem.”His mustache was long and feral; his bare arms stuck out of a sleeveless T-shirt, flaunting temporary tattoos. Despite the intimidating display, Rylance offered his assurance in a video interview that he was still very much his usual subdued self.“I’m not in character at the moment,” he said in his gentle speaking voice. “I’m still Mark at this time of day. He’s in there somewhere.”In a little while, Rylance would travel to the Apollo Theater, do some vocal warm-ups, play some volleyball in the empty seats with his co-stars, and spend another night in the wild and energetic guise of Rooster. The actor won Olivier and Tony Awards for the original West End and Broadway runs of “Jerusalem” just over a decade ago. Now 62, he has hardly lost a step in the revival: Reviewing the 2022 production for The New York Times, Matt Wolf wrote, “There’s mighty, and then there’s Mark Rylance in ‘Jerusalem,’ a performance so powerfully connected to its part that it feels almost superhuman.”This feat feels 180 degrees removed from the soft-spoken, introspective film characters that Rylance has played in recent years: his Oscar-winning turn as the Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel in Steven Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies,” or Peter Isherwell, the bumbling tech billionaire from Adam McKay’s farce “Don’t Look Up.”“I’m still Mark at this time of day,” Rylance said. As for Rooster, the character he plays in “Jerusalem,” Rylance said, “He’s in there somewhere.” Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesRylance is once again in understated mode for the biographical comedy “The Phantom of the Open,” which Sony Pictures Classics will release June 3. He plays the golfer Maurice Flitcroft, a crane operator who slipped into a qualifying round of the 1976 British Open and proceeded to shoot an atrocious 121, making him an instant celebrity of sorts.Like the mercurial Flitcroft, Rylance enjoys defying audience expectations and slipping back and forth between roles at either end of the energy spectrum. As he explained, any character — whether easygoing or off-the-wall — could be an opportunity for new personal discoveries.“When I was younger, I was much more egotistically attached to concepts that would come up in my mind about how a character should be,” he said. “But now I know that there’s no bottom to the depth of insanity that will come up through me.”Rylance spoke further about his return to “Jerusalem,” the stark contrast between his stage and film roles and his performance in “The Phantom of the Open.” These are edited excerpts from that conversation.What has it been like to come back to “Jerusalem” after all these years?It’s a powerful event to be at the center of. The central dynamics of it have got stronger in society, the struggle between whatever you want to call it — order and chaos, machine and nature. Sometimes during rehearsals, I experienced feelings of resistance and doubt in myself.What got you past those feelings?Coming to my senses. I mean that literally: Stop thinking and smell the air. Taste whatever you’re tasting. Listen and look at the other actors. It immediately moves you into something much larger than your own fears or expectations. Doing long runs of plays, you can get into a rut of self-consciousness, and it feels like you’re in some kind of prison yard. But actually, when you come to your senses, the prison yard is open to the sky.The dynamism Rooster embodies — particularly compared to the inwardness of the film characters you’ve been playing lately — was that hard to conjure up again?It’s not a territory that I give myself license to explore very much, that kind of boldness of expression. He’s an exhausting but enjoyable character for me. I have to be quite careful with him. His appetite is strong. There’s a certain wrangling of him to the floor at the end of the show. “OK, calm down — it’s my turn again for a few hours.”Rylance in “Jerusalem” with, from left, Charlotte O’Leary, Mackenzie Crook, Kemi Awoderu and Ed Kear.Simon AnnandShould more actors revive the roles they played earlier in their careers?I’ve been lucky in my life to revive a number of parts. I played Hamlet at 16 in high school and then at 28 to 31 for the R.S.C. [Royal Shakespeare Company] and the A.R.T. [at Harvard], and then again at 40 at the Globe [Shakespeare’s Globe, where Rylance was artistic director]. Reviving parts was the normal practice for hundreds of years before filmed work came in. If we didn’t have film and television, Robert De Niro would probably be doing “Raging Bull” or “Taxi Driver” every five or 10 years, because people would want to see it again. Jimmy Stewart would be doing “It’s a Wonderful Life” every Christmas.Do you think of your film acting as a different undertaking than your stage acting, or are they one continuous thing to you?It all comes from the same place, of enjoying pretending to be someone you think is other than who you are. Eventually it’s all still you. It pulls different things out of me, things that are buried in the back of the drawer. Certainly, in the theater, I have a lot more access to a collective consciousness when I’m playing with an audience and it’s going well. You’re lifted into something larger than yourself. You don’t get it in film because the audience isn’t there.Have you been seeking out a specific type of character to play in the movies?I’m in the fortunate position to turn down roles, so I’m not completely a victim of fate. After a very explosive character like Rooster, I will be more interested in an implosive character like Cromwell in “Wolf Hall” or Abel in “Bridge of Spies.”Where would you place a character like Peter Isherwell from “Don’t Look Up”?I suppose the role in “Don’t Look Up” could have been either of those things. He might have been a much more expressive character like Elon Musk. But in the conversations with Adam, we were interested in his inability to communicate. There’s some kind of barrier between that kind of person and a true, intimate, satisfying connection with other human beings — or plants, animals, anything on the planet. He just didn’t know how to do that.“I was very much like Maurice,” Rylance said of the golfer Maurice Flitcroft, whom he plays in his new film. “I learned by watching television.”Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesDoes making a movie like that feel like playing a professional sport?It’s a bit like what you see in English football matches, the coach and the player who’s about to be substituted, having a quick word. “Watch out for him” or “Keep on the lefthand side.” That’s what it’s like on film. You’re suddenly joining a team who have already been playing for a while — Leonardo [DiCaprio] and Meryl [Streep], they were all quite tired. They’d been playing for months when I arrived for my 10 days.Was there a time in your career when you’d turned your back on film and TV acting entirely?There definitely was. When I came to New York for “Boeing-Boeing” on Broadway, I became friends with Fran McDormand and Joel Coen, and they auditioned me for “A Serious Man.” I was very enamored of the script and their films and really wanted to do it. When I didn’t get the part, I was surprised by how sad I was. It was an unusual feeling for me. I can picture myself now sitting in the cafe, thinking, oh, I really want this. So I pursued getting a New York agent and manager and started to go for auditions. And they were breathtakingly dull and bad things. Eventually, out of guilt, I took a film where I ended up lying on the floor, being beaten with a hammer, fish and chips being sicked up on my face, covered in blood. The director was on his Game Boy, 100 yards away, not even watching. And I quit.You were ready to walk away from screen acting entirely?All my career, I’ve been told by agents that unless I make time for film and TV, I’m not a serious actor. I thought, my favorite Kabuki actors and Kathakali actors, they don’t worry about film and television. I’ve got this fabulous theater career, I make a fine living at it, I have great parts. And I got rid of all these agents and decided I would never work in film again, unless someone really asked me and I had the time. I guess nature abhors a vacuum, because a few years after that, Spielberg asked me to be in “Bridge of Spies.”But no hard feelings about how “A Serious Man” turned out?Michael Stuhlbarg was wonderful in that role and the better actor for it, no doubt about it.What appealed to you about “The Phantom of the Open”?I’ve done a lot of comedies in the theater and enjoyed it. That was always a surprise to me, because I was very shy as a teenager and completely surprised when I got up and made people laugh. Even “Jerusalem,” tonight, there’ll be moments that I’ll think, why are they laughing? And it’ll take me a while to figure out what it is. This is one of the few comedies I’ve been asked to be a part of in film, with a lot of aspects of Don Quixote, jousting at windmills, believing his own identity, not being persuaded by other people’s perception of who he is. Not sociopathic or psychopathic, where he doesn’t even hear what other people are saying — there’s a dignity to Maurice, that he honors his own truth, and I loved that about it.Rylance in “The Phantom of the Open” as the quite bad amateur golfer Maurice Flitcroft.Nick Wall/Sony Pictures ClassicsDid playing a real-life figure interest you?I’m wary of playing very famous people. Even William Kunstler [whom he played in “The Trial of the Chicago 7”] is a bit on the edge of people really knowing him. The comments from some of the real-life Chicago Seven people, when they saw the film, and the nasty things they said about us trying to portray these characters, stung. I’ve been asked to play Truman and different people like that. The shoe is a bit too tight.Did you know anything about Maurice Flitcroft before making the movie?No. Fortunately, there’s a lot of wonderful YouTube stuff. His interviews are amazing, because you think, “You can’t be serious. You can’t really mean that. You must be brilliant at winding up reporters for a laugh.” But I’ve watched them hundreds of times and I can’t see a crack in the sincerity. I just have to play this guy sincere.Are you a golfer yourself?As kids, we would borrow our granddad’s golf clubs and make a golf course in his lawns in Kent. As we got to 15, 16, we would sometimes go to the local golf course on a Monday morning, when no one else was there, and play — very, very poorly and with no training. I was very much like Maurice. I learned by watching television.As we see in the film, Flitcroft gained a new level of recognition when he came to America. Did that feel familiar to you?Sometimes, the Americans have more appreciations for the English soul than the English. But there’s also a reverse thing — maybe we English have a deeper appreciation for American culture. I certainly learned more about American culture when I came to study at RADA [the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art] in ’78 than I’d learned in America [where his family lived in the 1960s]. The young acting students were the ones who turned me on to Spencer Tracy, Bob Mitchum, Montgomery Clift, Jimmy Dean, Brando. Even Bob Dylan and Elvis, Frank Sinatra. All those people that my parents had loved to some degree — I hadn’t realized how deeply cultural and soulful they were until I was amongst young English actors saying, “Watch this, listen to this.”This makes me want to take a trip to England and learn what I’m missing about American culture.You could just take a day trip to New Jersey and get the same thing. More

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    Chekhov Two Ways, With a Robot and Baryshnikov Along for the Ride

    When the director Igor Golyak began working on a staging of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” he had an idea in mind. “There was a concept,” he said, then interrupted himself. “I’d rather not talk about what it used to be, if that’s OK. The war started, me being from Kyiv and having this affinity for the Russian culture. …”Golyak’s voice trailed off. He was speaking in a coffee shop a block from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, in Midtown Manhattan, where his show, now titled “The Orchard,” is set to begin previews June 7 with a cast headed by the busy stage and screen actress Jessica Hecht as the estate owner Lyubov Ranevskaya. Also onboard is the center’s namesake, Mikhail Baryshnikov, as the old servant Firs.Golyak was born in Kyiv and his family landed in the United States in 1990, part of a wave of Jewish refugees. He finished high school in Boston then studied theater in Moscow — you might say Chekhov is in his bones. But although he felt he had a handle on the Russian writer’s work, the war in Ukraine made him reconsider his approach.Mikhail Baryshnikov, center, on the set of “The Orchard,” at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local,” Baryshnikov said.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“How do you do theater and Chekhov when there’s bombings and killings?” he said. “I keep asking ‘How and why and why is it important?’ But not on the theoretical level — on the level that really touches me. For me, every show is very personal. The idea in ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is the loss of a world, loss of connection, loss of each other, loss of this family. It’s a story where a human being is forgotten — Firs is forgotten,” he added. “And right now human being is forgotten.”In the play, a family in financial straits must decide whether it should sell its beloved orchard. In “The Orchard” this will be starkly visualized in a parallel virtual version that complements rather than merely captures the physical one — though streaming viewers get to watch parts of the version being performed live. (Audience members can attend either or both.)The virtual world is a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which the Baryshnikov Arts Center stands in for the orchard. There, the building, now a husk of its former self, is for sale, and virtual audience members can tour it as if they were doing a walk-through of a home on a real estate website.“It’s almost as if you’re inside this building and you find these magical rooms, and in each room, it’s like you’re finding a lost world,” the producer Sara Stackhouse said. “You’re discovering a letter or a memory, then you discover this theater where a play is in progress and you join it.”Jessica Hecht, center, with Nael Nacer during a rehearsal.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesThis grounds the show in a historical reality — Baryshnikov portrays the playwright in the digital version, and Hecht pops up as Chekhov’s wife and his mistress — while nodding to our troubled current circumstances.“The miracle of Chekhov’s writing is that, no matter where it’s performed, it feels local to the culture,” Baryshnikov wrote in an email. “How that translates in Igor’s version remains to be seen. Obviously he speaks the language the play was written in, but he’s taking a lot of risks — technical and artistic — and avoiding clichés.”Something that definitely can’t be called a Chekhov cliché is a 12-foot robotic arm, which sits in the middle of the physical stage — it is part of the family and tries to understand humans — and was painstakingly programmed to execute such tasks as serving coffee or sweeping the floor. (The production process has demanded many hours of Zoom calls with a technical team spread all over the world.)The juxtaposition of past and future (typically, Oana Botez’s costumes for the physical version are a hybrid of period and modern), human and robot feels like yet another leap for Golyak’s Arlekin Players Theater, which is based in Needham, Mass., and has been the rare company to use the pandemic as a creative spur.Until then, it had been a bit of a tough slog. As Golyak, now 43, learned the hard way, a young Russia-trained director was not a hot commodity in the American theater scene of the early 2000s.“Nobody wanted me,” he said. “For an immigrant, it’s very difficult: Where do you go? How do you start? I had an accent — and I still do, of course. I would send résumés but nobody would call me back. At some point I decided that I’m going to stop doing theater because it’s just not possible to make a living.” His day jobs included selling ads for the Yellow Pages.Eventually Golyak befriended a small group of other immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who asked him to help them work on scenes, guide them through what worked or not. He requested a nine-month commitment, and they agreed. Arlekin Players Theater emerged from that initiative, in 2009, and the troupe, which then mostly performed in Russian, developed an esprit de corps.From left: Nacer, Elise Kibler, Mark Nelson, Hecht, John McGinty, Juliet Brett and Baryshnikov during a recent rehearsal.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“We are like a family,” said Darya Denisova, 32, an actor with Arlekin and Golyak’s wife. “We celebrate holidays together, we support each other when there are emergencies. Now that there’s this awful war going on between Russia and Ukraine, we are all trying our best to support people in Ukraine. We’re looking for ways to send more money, to support, to organize more and more help.”The company quickly earned plaudits on the community-theater circuit, but it took the pandemic to give the company a decisive push into greater recognition.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Power consolidation. More