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    How the ‘Many Saints of Newark’ Stars Remade Key ‘Sopranos’ Roles

    Actors in the prequel had to put their stamp on favorite characters from the original series, whether they had watched it or not.From its debut in 1999 to its blackout finale in 2007, “The Sopranos” set a seemingly unsurpassable benchmark for acting. The cast members of that HBO crime drama, leading players and supporting performers alike, became synonymous with the menacing mobsters and manipulative family members they portrayed. When it was all over, you couldn’t imagine anyone else playing those roles.This posed a problem for the creators of “The Many Saints of Newark,” the cinematic prequel that explores the origins of “The Sopranos” during the 1960s and ’70s, and that enlists new actors to play younger versions of those indelible characters.It also a presented a challenge for the actors in “The Many Saints of Newark” — some of whom were “Sopranos” fans and others who had never watched the series — and who had to walk a careful line between preserving what audiences already expected from their characters and putting their own stamps on the roles.Vera Farmiga, who plays the film’s Livia Soprano, explained that their task was complicated by the typical time constraints of making a movie. “We didn’t have the luxury that a series allows you — that indulgence to get to know your character and get multiple tries at them,” she said. “I could do the ‘Saturday Night Live’ version, but you have very little time to get it right. And what does right even mean?”Here, five stars from “The Many Saints of Newark” discuss how they landed their roles and prepared to live up to the standards of “The Sopranos.”Vera FarmigaRole: Livia SopranoOriginated by: Nancy MarchandWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? NoWhen Farmiga, a star of “Up in the Air” and the series “Bates Motel,” was approached to play the role of Tony Soprano’s controlling mother, Livia, she knew that it was significant — but only by proxy. “There were loads of giddy responses around me,” Farmiga said. “My husband was freaking out. My agents were freaking out.” Though she hadn’t seen the series when it first aired, she said, “I understood that it was a cultural phenomenon. I understood it came with a legacy.” Farmiga also found it meaningful that David Chase, the “Sopranos” creator and “Many Saints” co-screenwriter, did not require her to audition: “All he wanted to do is meet up at a really beautiful spot and eat together,” she said. “So we blasted through a couple bottles of white wine at dessert. We got loaded and jacked up on sugar.” For her performance, Farmiga studied the work of Marchand, who died in 2000, and requested a prosthetic nose to more closely resemble her. Farmiga also sought guidance from Chase, who based Livia on his own mother. But the screenwriter proved to be characteristically tight-lipped, as Farmiga recalled: “I would press David — let’s talk about your mother. ‘Nah, she just was.’ But why? Was she dissatisfied with maternity? She wanted a career? ‘Nope. She just was. That’s who my mother was.’” Eventually, Farmiga said she found her answers in the screenplay: “You know what? Just give me the words,” she said.Corey StollRole: Corrado “Uncle Junior” Soprano Jr.Originated by: Dominic ChianeseWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? YesStoll, the ubiquitous star of television (“Billions,” “House of Cards”) and film (“Ant-Man”), was a “Sopranos” devotee who watched the series to its conclusion, then binged it again with his wife, Nadia Bowers, when she was pregnant with their son and yet again in preparation for this film. But Stoll said he may have gained just as much from catching a serendipitous revival-house showing of “The Godfather Part II,” in which Chianese, then in his 40s, played the mobster Johnny Ola. As Stoll explained, “It was super-helpful to see that Dominic Chianese, kind of like me, was always a little bit older than his years. I’ve been playing old men since I was 11. It was good to see that I didn’t have to do back flips to make him a young man. Just being in my body and in my voice, that is different enough.” His key to Uncle Junior, Stoll said, was listening to Chianese’s rhythmic speech patterns: “He has this staccato — he can speak very quickly and ratatat — and then he also has this wistful, lyrical mode that he goes into.” For extra motivation, before a scene Stoll would utter an obscene phrase favored by Junior that can’t be fully reproduced here — the first two words are “your sister’s.” “Sometimes shouting it, sometimes whispering it,” Stoll said. “But there’s something about those three words that just brought me right into character.”John MagaroRole: Silvio DanteOriginated by: Steven Van ZandtWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? YesMagaro (“First Cow”) became close with Chase when he starred in the writer’s 2012 directorial debut, “Not Fade Away.” As their friendship progressed, Chase shared a crucial piece of information: “David said that he was going to do a ‘Sopranos’ prequel,” recalled Magaro, who had no expectation he would be involved. “Then a couple of years passed and he and his producing partner Nicole Lambert, started mentioning, would you be willing to shave your head? Would you be willing to gain a lot of weight? It seemed like there was an idea of someone I could play in the film.” That turned out to be Silvio, created by Van Zandt, whom Magaro also knew from “Not Fade Away.” And there was plenty of source material that Magaro could study from the guitarist’s performances and interviews with the E Street Band: “There’s a confidence, there’s an ease to his language,” Magaro explained. “Even the way he carries his shoulders raised a bit from years of playing guitar. I kept an eye on that stuff and let it inform where I would go with the young Silvio.” The movie also confirms what some “Sopranos” viewers suspected about the older Silvio: that he is bald and wears a hairpiece. “To achieve that,” Magaro said, “I agreed to shave the horseshoe shape in my hair. For the ’60s version we would shave that every morning and make it look like a balding man. For the ’70s we would throw on a really crappy toupee.”From left, Samson Moeakiola as Big Pussy, Corey Stoll as Junior Soprano and Billy Magnussen as Paulie Walnuts.Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.Billy MagnussenRole: Paulie “Walnuts” GualtieriOriginated by: Tony SiricoWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? NoMagnussen, a dashing star of films like “Aladdin,” “Into the Woods” and “No Time to Die” and TV’s “Made For Love” may not immediately strike you as a young Paulie Walnuts, but he was just flattered to be a part of “The Many Saints of Newark.” As he explained, “I had the opportunity to audition for a different role” — he did not say which one — “and so I did an audition that way.” Through exaggeratedly clenched teeth, he added, “I guess I didn’t get that role. But they came back and they were like, hey, what do you think about trying Paulie? Would you want to do that? Knowing the ‘Sopranos’ legacy, I would be honored. Because, yeah, I think it’s a stretch. But isn’t that what acting is about?” To get into his role, Magnussen used a prosthetic nose (“My nose isn’t that wide, is it?”) and watched Sirico’s speech patterns on the TV series: “I had noticed how he talked out of the side of his mouth. And then it’s just sitting there with it, over and over again, to where you don’t have to think about it.” Magnussen may have undertaken other efforts to get to know his predecessor, too: “I broke into his house,” he said. “I went through his trash. I’m sure I slept in his underwear.”Samson MoeakiolaRole: Salvatore “Big Pussy” BonpensieroOriginated by: Vincent PastoreWatched original run of “The Sopranos”? NoMoeakiola, who is appearing in his first Hollywood film, didn’t have the benefit of a full immersion in the “Sopranos” TV series (“My parents wouldn’t let me sit around to watch it as a 7-year-old,” he said) or even know quite what he was auditioning for when he tried out for what he was told was called “Untitled New Jersey Project.” But as he remembered, “on the breakdown you can see who’s directing and who’s producing. I saw Alan Taylor and then I saw David Chase, and I was like, oh, this is ‘The Sopranos.’” But once he landed the role, Moeakiola got a leg up from Pastore, who befriended him and helped him practice dialogue. “We were on the phone at first and he was like, ‘Let me hear you, you do it first,’” Moeakiola said. “Finally I was like, just record it, bro.” Moeakiola also visited an acting class that Pastore teaches, but had to maintain strict omertà about his involvement in the film. “He was like, this is my nephew — don’t bother him, he’s not even here,” Moeakiola said. “Some students were like, you know, they’re making a prequel to ‘The Sopranos,’ you should play Vinny. I’m like, ah, I’m not an actor.” More

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    A New ‘Pal Joey’ Is Broadway Bound

    The show will be rewritten for a production set on the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s, directed by Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover.“Pal Joey” is coming back to Broadway.The 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical about a caddish nightclub performer will be rewritten, re-set, and then revived for the next Broadway season, a producing team led by Jeffrey Richards announced Monday.The production will be set in a Black community — the South Side of Chicago in the 1940s — with a new book by Richard LaGravenese, a screenwriter and director who was nominated for an Oscar for “The Fisher King,” and who both adapted and directed a 2014 film version of “The Last Five Years.” The show was originally set a decade earlier, in the 1930s, and the main characters were played by white performers.Tony Goldwyn and Savion Glover will direct the new production. Goldwyn is best known as an actor, who starred in the television series “Scandal” and the Broadway adaptation of “Network,” while Glover is best known as a tap dancer and choreographer. He won a Tony Award for “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk.”The directors: Tony Goldwyn, left, and Savion Glover.Walter McBride/Getty Images; Michael Loccisano/Getty Images“Pal Joey,” with a book originally by John O’Hara based on stories he had written for The New Yorker, is the rare Broadway musical that centers on an antihero, and is often described as cynical. Brooks Atkinson, a New York Times theater critic, wrote of the original production, “If it is possible to make an entertaining musical comedy out of an odious story, ‘Pal Joey’ is it,” and then concluded his review by posing a rhetorical question that has bedeviled the show over the decades, “Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”The original, starring Gene Kelly and Vivienne Segal, ran for less than a year, but some of its songs, particularly “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” became standards; a 1952 revival was more successful, and prompted a 1957 film adaptation that starred Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak (but Hollywood turned Joey into a nice guy and gave the story a happy ending).By 1961, another critic for the Times, Howard Taubman, was pronouncing the musical “wonderful” and “vivid proof of what a great musical can be,” declaring that “its disenchanted, acidulous mood conforms well with the realism, if not cynicism, of our day.”There have been three subsequent Broadway revivals, all short-lived; the most recent, in 2008, was panned by New York Times critic Ben Brantley as “a production in mourning for its own lifelessness.”Of course, that history leaves room for reinvention, and that’s what the new team is hoping to do. Among other anticipated changes: In addition to an original score best known for “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “I Could Write a Book,” they plan to add other songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, including “Where or When,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “My Heart Stood Still,” “Falling in Love With Love” and “There’s a Small Hotel.”The music is being overseen by Daryl Waters, who won a Tony for the orchestrations in “Memphis.” Also, one of the women treated poorly by Joey — Linda — will be portrayed as an aspiring singer, rather than as a stenographer, which will facilitate the use of the new songs; a parallel shift was made in the film, which also added some songs.In addition to Richards, the producing team for the upcoming revival includes Funny World Productions, Willette Klausner and Irene Gandy, a longtime theater publicist who this year received a Tony honor for excellence in theater. The producers said they expect to bring the revival to Broadway during the 2022-2023 season; they did not announce any casting. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: A Rita Moreno Documentary and ‘Ghosts’

    “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” airs on PBS. And a new sitcom debuts on CBS.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, Oct. 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.MondayCOAL MINER’S DAUGHTER (1980) 8 p.m. on TCM. TCM is offering a country music biopic double feature on Monday night. First up is “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the 1980 hit about the life of Loretta Lynn that won an Oscar for its star, Sissy Spacek, and helped turn Lynn’s rags-to-riches journey — from a cabin in Kentucky to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry — into folklore. On the B-side, at 10:15, is the black-and-white musical YOUR CHEATIN’ HEART (1964), about the life and early death of Hank Williams, played by George Hamilton.TuesdayAMERICAN MASTERS: RITA MORENO: JUST A GIRL WHO DECIDED TO GO FOR IT (2021) 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). If you wanted to make a documentary about a Hollywood figure, you’d be hard pressed to find a subject whose career offers more angles to cover than Rita Moreno. An EGOT winner who became a star after her Oscar-winning performance in “West Side Story” (1961), Moreno was (and is) outspoken about her Puerto Rican identity, and has demonstrated a dedication to social activism. This film, directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, explores all of these angles — the glory and the challenges of Moreno’s life — through extensive interviews with Moreno, with input from fellow artists including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Gloria Estefan. “It is not your average paean because Moreno, a trailblazing Puerto Rican actress whose career spans more than seven decades, is not your average star,” Beatrice Loayza wrote in her review for The New York Times. “Moreno is given full rein of her story,” Loayza added, “which doubles as a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.”BET HIP HOP AWARDS 2021 9 p.m. on BET. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion will be both collaborators and competitors at this year’s BET Hip Hop Awards: They’re tied for the most nominations, with nine each, and some of those are shared. That’s thanks to “WAP,” their 2020 exercise in pull-out-all-the-stops raunch, which is up for the song of the year, best collaboration and best hip-hop video. The two are also both up for the artist of the year prize, for which they will compete with Drake, J. Cole, Lil Baby and Tyler, the Creator.WednesdayJessie Ross and Robert Pattinson in “High Life.”A24HIGH LIFE (2019) 9 p.m. on Showtime 2. If one were presented with only a poster for “High Life,” with Robert Pattinson’s eyes gazing back at them through the visor of a spacesuit, they would probably assume that the film is a sci-fi spectacle. Unless, that is, they saw the name of the director: Claire Denis. Denis, the French filmmaker known for sensual, understated movies like “Beau Travail” (1999) and “35 Shots of Rum” (2008), set “High Life” in space but skipped the laser beams and aliens. The film centers on Monte (Pattinson), one of a handful of criminals sent on a mission to a distant black hole under the supervision of a mysterious doctor (Juliette Binoche), who uses them for experiments. “Their journey ostensibly has something to do with the earth’s looming environmental catastrophe, but mostly plays out as an excuse for Denis to explore the farther, darker side of her imagination,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times.ThursdayRose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar in “Ghosts.”Cliff Lipson/CBSGHOSTS 9 p.m on CBS. The premise of this new CBS sitcom could just as easily be the setup for a season of “American Horror Story.” It follows a couple (played by Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar) who buy a dilapidated country house with the intention of turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. It turns out to be haunted, as these onscreen houses often are. But if you see one of these ghosts in the mirror, they’re more likely to make a sarcastic comment about your vanity than to harm you — it’s a sassy group of disturbed spirits.THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011) 11 p.m. on BBC America. Daniel Craig is set to return to U.S. theaters this weekend in “No Time to Die,” his final romp as James Bond. With that gig finished, Craig should have more time to take non-Bond roles like the character he played in David Fincher’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” an adaptation of the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s novel about a disgraced journalist charged with investigating the 40-year-old disappearance of a teenager.FridayFrom left, the opera singers Ailyn Pérez, Isabel Leonard and Nadine Sierra.Metropolitan OperaGREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The opera stars Ailyn Pérez, Nadine Sierra and Isabel Leonard perform at perhaps the most diva-ish venue imaginable — the Palace of Versailles — in this latest entry of the “Great Performances at the Met” series. Recorded in May at the Royal Opera of Versailles, the program includes works by Mozart, Offenbach and Bizet, and nods at the three singers’ shared Latin American heritage with songs including “Bésame Mucho” and “Cielito Lindo.” The pianist Vlad Iftinca and the classical guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas accompany the three singers.SaturdayCARRIE (2013) 8 p.m. on AMC. Two generations of Stephen King’s “Carrie” will be shown on AMC on Saturday night. First comes the 2013 version, which casts Chloë Grace Moretz in the titular role of a bullied high schooler and Julianne Moore as her abusive, militantly religious mother. Directed by Kimberly Peirce, this version brings King’s novel, first published in 1974, into the 21st century; it lives, of course, in the blood-red shadow of Brian De Palma’s classic CARRIE (1976), with Sissy Spacek, which AMC is showing afterward, at 10:15.SundayDIANA 9 p.m. on CNN. This new, six-part documentary series looks at the life and legacy of Diana, Princess of Wales. The first episode focuses on her upbringing in Norfolk, England, which was privileged but challenging: Her parents separated, then divorced, when she was a child. Subsequent episodes, which will air weekly, explore her marriage to Charles, Prince of Wales, and the legacy she left after her death in 1997. More

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    Damian Lewis Discusses the Future of ‘Billions’

    In an interview, the actor talked about his character’s big twist and what it means for the Showtime series and his career.This article includes spoilers from Sunday’s Season 5 finale of “Billions.”One of TV’s last great antiheroes departed Sunday night on Showtime’s “Billions.” Bobby Axelrod, the proudly venal hedge-fund titan played by Damian Lewis, flew off into the sunset in the Season 5 finale, slipping the grasp of the law and his chief nemesis, Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), one last time on his way to a less punitive future in Switzerland.While the character’s final scene was somewhat open-ended, with Axe (as he is most commonly known) being welcomed by the Swiss authorities after fleeing America, Lewis confirmed in a recent video interview that he was leaving the show.“There’s an opportunity maybe for me to return,” he said from his home in North London. “But for now, broadly speaking, Axe has been vanquished.”Lewis’s exit ends what amounts to “easily the most time I’ve spent playing one character,” he said. The actor was previously best known for his three-season stint on another Showtime series, “Homeland.”It also comes just months after a personal tragedy. Lewis’s wife, the acclaimed actress Helen McCrory, died in April, not long after “Billions” returned from its pandemic production hiatus. Lewis shot much of his final stretch on the show remotely, from England.Over five seasons on the pulpy markets-and-machers drama, Axe embodied the culture’s often contradictory feelings about the superrich. A self-made, self-described capitalist monster, he shamelessly destroyed anything — careers, lives, entire towns — that got between him and his next billion. But he did so with enviable audacity and panache, with an equally alluring penthouse-and-private-jet lifestyle.“When I’m walking down the street in New York, it’s: ‘Axe, you the man!’” Lewis said. “He’s a really despicable human being, but no one seems to care.”That’s owed largely to Lewis, who from the beginning imbued a character that could have been a sneering caricature with emotional depth and a predatory physicality. (When he was developing the character, his acting exercises included moving about on the ground like a cheetah.) Much as Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston made Don Draper and Walter White irresistible even when they were awful, Lewis made Axe’s financial marauding fun to watch.“Damian Lewis is not an actor who’s scared the audience is going to dislike him,” said Brian Koppelman, who is a showrunner along with David Levien. “He is willing to play the character in as caustic a manner as the character requires, and he has faith that if he’s true to that, it will connect with the audience.”But after 60 episodes of elaborate, at times inscrutable schemes, and of Chuck and Axe squaring off in various configurations, Lewis was ready to move on.“It’s difficult to keep mining, creatively,” he said. “We know who he is.”And after six years of spending months at a time in New York filming “Billions,” he plans to stick close to home and to his two teenage children after “we had a sadness in our family,” he said, referring to McCrory’s death, at 52, from cancer.It’s a subject he’s reluctant to talk about, his normal expansiveness giving way to terse responses. He wants to remain in London for the foreseeable future for “obvious reasons,” he said. “It is self-evident.”Lewis said McCrory’s death did not explain his departure from “Billions.” He initially signed on for five seasons and “always just assumed that would be enough,” he said. Koppelman said the show, which premiered in 2016, had been building toward Axe’s departure for several years.But it does explain why Lewis spent much of the last few episodes appearing remotely. Actors and crew flew to England to shoot scenes that were framed within the show as a stint for Axe in Covid quarantine. (Lewis did return to New York for part of the final episode.)“We wouldn’t ask him to come to America in that situation — right after the love of his life passed away, who was a remarkable, incredible artist and human being,” Koppelman said.Lewis’s character channeled mercenary hedge-funders in the wake of the Great Recession, embodying the culture’s often contradictory feelings about the superrich.   Showtime“It’s Damian’s private life, so it’s not really ours to comment on,” he continued. “We just feel truly, unbelievably lucky to have had five years with Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti together.”From the beginning, the cat-and-mouse dynamic between Axe and Chuck has been the show’s defining dimension. (A close second: The abundant awkward cameos by real-life financiers and Manhattan luminaries.)When the show returns on Jan. 23 for its sixth season, Corey Stoll’s Mike Prince, who arrived this season, will be the master-of-the-universe foil for Giamatti’s ethically ambiguous lawman. The finale found Prince literally taking Axelrod’s seat, after buying his company in an offer Axe couldn’t refuse.With his carefully cultivated image and world-saving rhetoric, the Prince character has more in common with our current crop of rocket-riding billionaires than with the mercenary hedge-funders Axe channeled in the wake of the Great Recession. (Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times editor and columnist who chronicled the 2008 crash in his book, “Too Big to Fail,” is a creator and executive producer of “Billions.”)“A long-running show has to evolve,” Levien said. “So it’s like a reload in a great way, at the right time.” Showtime has not yet committed to a seventh season, but Gary Levine, the network’s president of entertainment, said, “From what I’ve seen of Season 6, I’m very encouraged.”For Lewis, who is currently preparing to shoot the British Cold War series “A Spy Among Friends,” his departure from American television comes almost exactly 20 years after he was introduced to U.S. viewers, as a star of the HBO World War II mini-series “Band of Brothers,” in September 2001. It also wraps up a decade he spent mostly on Showtime, beginning with his time on “Homeland” as the soldier turned sleeper agent Nicholas Brody. (“I’ve had to say goodbye to Damian twice now,” Levine said.)An Eton-educated Brit, Lewis has displayed a remarkable knack for playing blue-collar Americans. (Axe wears his Yonkers roots on the sleeve of his cashmere hoodie.) But he isn’t sure when, if ever, he will seek out another American series.“I don’t like closing chapters,” he said. “But it does feel like it’s the end of that for now.”Lewis won’t miss playing Axelrod, he said. But he is proud that he and the writers had been able to capture something about both the allure and the corrupting influence of extreme wealth. While there are still plenty of appealingly terrible rich people on TV — “Succession” returns Oct. 17 — Axe’s particular flavor of swaggering villainy has gotten rarer in an era currently defined by the likes of Ted Lasso.“We did somehow make him a thing in the culture,” Lewis said. “And that’s always fun to achieve.” More

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    ‘Billions’ Recap, Season 5 Finale: The Axe Falls

    The walls close in on Bobby as Chuck sharpens his knives. Then an unlikely ally intervenes.Season 5, Episode 12: ‘No Direction Home’“So this is what it is to lose,” says Bobby Axelrod. “OK.”He’s talking to Mike Prince, the man who helped engineer his downfall — a decisive one this time. How do we know it’s decisive? Because, I think, of that concluding “OK.” (Also, Damian Lewis, who plays Axe, just made public he is leaving the show.) Until this point, Axe has always scratched and clawed like a cornered animal to fight his way out of defeat, whether at the hands of his legal nemesis Chuck Rhoades or his business rivals, like Prince. This time, though? He admits he has been beaten, and makes his peace with it.So why does it feel like a loss for Chuck, too?At a glance, it looks as if Chuck got (almost) everything he wanted. He caught Bobby going into business with a shady cannabis company with an illegal sideline selling the black-market stuff, a deal Axe rushed into without doing his own due diligence. He has ended the era of Axe Cap/Axe Bank for good. He has busted up his mortal enemy’s romance with his ex-wife. He has harpooned his white whale at last.Only the whale gets away.What Chuck didn’t count on, as the jaws of the law began closing on Bobby, was that his own supposed teammate Mike Prince would help Axe escape. It was Prince who alerted Axe Cap to Bobby’s impending arrest, with a single goal in mind: seizing control of Axe’s empire. It was Chuck, he says, who wanted to see Bobby behind bars, a “Cheryl Tiegs fishnet fantasy” that Prince doesn’t share. All he wants is to see Axe gone.Taking advantage of the brief window of time before Bobby or his lawyer, Orrin Bach, are officially notified about his indictment, Prince swoops in with an offer. He buys Bobby’s businesses — Axe Holding, the bank, the asset management arm, Taylor Mason Carbon, the whole enchilada — for the princely sum of $2 billion. It’s exactly the kind of liquid cash Axe will need to live life on the run once the rest of his assets are frozen by the government.So Bobby steps into the helicopter meant to ferry him to the chosen place for his surrender — then simply steps out the other side and slips into a waiting car, which takes him to his escape flight. He winds up in Switzerland, where he is greeted with a new passport and a warm welcome. He accepts both with a smile. And why shouldn’t he? Even in exile, he’ll live a life of luxury unimaginable by any normal standard. “So this is what it is to lose”? I’d be OK with a loss like that, too.Chuck and his allies, meanwhile, are left fuming — but they’re not the only ones. When Prince rolls into the Axe offices to take control, two of Bobby’s underlings, Dollar Bill and Mafee, walk right out. These two former rivals, who once staged a charity boxing match to give their enmity an outlet, agree to an alliance while they’re still in the elevator.Other ex-Axe employees find themselves in a shaky position even when they stay behind. Prince says he needs Wendy and Taylor in order to effectively run the firm, but it’s impossible to imagine the two of them getting along anymore — not when Taylor, a crucial player in the conspiracy to take Axe down, figures out almost immediately that Wendy knew Bobby was planning to flee.Then there’s Rian, the trader Taylor used to help move the anti-Axe plot along. Moved by something like pity for the young woman, Taylor warns her that what’s left of her ethics will be whittled away if she continues to work in the field, going so far as to encourage her to quit. But there’s Rian in the office when the conquering Prince appears; she’ll be a valuable asset to both Prince and Taylor, no doubt, but she is also shaping up to be one of Taylor’s biggest regrets.And what about Axe’s right-hand man, his “Tom Hagen”? The last we see of Wags in this episode, he is dueling with Scooter, Prince’s Wags equivalent, to pull out an office chair on Prince’s behalf. Once a henchman, always a henchman, I guess. It’s true that Wags’s legal jeopardy over the banking deal disappeared once he revealed that he had never officially signed on as chief executive — at least not on any documents Chuck and company can find. But still, a second banana needs a top guy. Any port in a storm, you know?If I have one complaint about Axe’s departure from what Dollar Bill refers to as “the field of battle,” it’s that the character’s long-delayed romance with Wendy never really materialized. No steamy assignations in exotic locales, no drama from growing pains as their relationship matures, no examination of how Wendy and Chuck navigate the new normal — hell, not even so much as a kiss goodbye!“If we can’t finish it,” Bobby says as he and Wendy bid adieu, “we can’t start it.” Too bad for them, and too bad for us.But this, of course, is subsumed by a greater loss: that of the steely presence of Damian Lewis. It is frankly amazing how well he and Paul Giamatti served as opposite poles on the show. Giamatti’s Rhoades is verbose and blustery, displaying a lawyer’s way with words and a to-the-manor-born respect for the rules, even when he himself breaks them. Lewis’s Axelrod, by contrast, had a clipped, clenched-jaw cadence in his speech; the precision of his voice, the sharklike cool and speed of his body language, every bit of it was in service to creating a character for whom “move fast and break things” was the byword.Corey Stoll’s comparatively laid-back Mike Prince will be a major departure as Chuck’s next antagonist; it’s impossible to imagine Axe standing still for three minutes while Chuck cooks him an omelet. That’s a testament to Lewis’s work. The real cliffhanger for Season 6 is simply how “Billions” will fill its Axe-shaped void.Loose change:I don’t know about you, but when those workers chiseled the words “Axe Cap” from the office walls — a change not even the firm’s switch-over into Axe Bank occasioned — it really did feel like the changing of the guard.In addition to all the storytelling and acting ramifications described above, am I the only one who thinks Bobby’s flight from the law speaks poorly to his parenting? Obviously his kids still have their mother, Lara, to look after them. (The actress Malin Akerman departed the show long ago, but her character is still out there.) But I find myself thinking of the sequence earlier this season when he bullied his son Gordie’s headmaster into calling off the kid’s expulsion, then delivered a fiery “greed is good” speech to the assembled student body. What kind of message does this send, I wonder?One unexpected note of grace from Bobby’s departing deal with Prince: Axe pushed, albeit unsuccessfully, for Taylor Mason Carbon to be set free. Clearly he still has some respect for the protégé who almost eclipsed him.On a happier note, this finale saw the return of Sarah Stiles as Bonnie, one of the Axe gang’s funniest members. Here’s hoping she is back in the fold full-time for Season 6, which its co-creator Brian Koppelman has said will debut in early 2022.Rather cynically, Prince refers to Axe as “the new poster boy for inequality” … as he makes his play to seize control of Bobby’s empire. What does that make Prince? Until this point in the season, I think “Billions” used Prince to toy with the idea of what an ethical billionaire might look like: one who attempts to make amends with his former partner’s mother, who joins with Chuck and Taylor after Bobby destroys the renewable energy sector. Even the sight of Prince smoking a joint and eating eggs with Chuck and his daughter was humanizing. Do ethical billionaires exist? This episode may have given us the show’s answer. More

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    in Theater

    ‘The Nosebleed’ Review: ‘Who Here Hates Their Father?’

    Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play is a belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own.“Who here has a father who has died?”As show-of-hands questions for an audience go, that one is pretty personal. But when an actor asked it from the stage the other evening during “The Nosebleed,” Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play, many hands went up.Other questions for the crowd come later: “Who here loves their father?”And, at least as relevant in this emotionally complex, autobiographical show: “Who here hates their father?”At that, all four actors sharing the role of Aya — the playwright — raise their hands, in character.Directed by Ogawa at Japan Society, which presents it with the Chocolate Factory Theater, “The Nosebleed” is a grown-up play about grief and remorse, loathing and legacy. A belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own, it is a touched-with-grace ritual of probing and purgation: about the elements of inheritance that must be passed down, the poison bits that must be expelled and the missing pieces it is too late to claim.If that all sounds grim and — what with the four Ayas — hard to follow, it is not. Impeccably structured and lucidly staged, this play has a disarming sense of welcome, and a down-to-earth ease familiar from Ogawa’s many English translations of the Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada (“Zero Cost House”), who is known for his colloquial immediacy.“The Nosebleed” also has some wackily funny, psychologically insightful scenes reenacted from the reality TV show “The Bachelorette.”“Why haven’t you talked to your dad in two years?” the bachelorette asks her date.“Is it my responsibility to reach out to him and make sure that there’s a relationship there?” her date says. “I don’t know.”In a news release about the play, Ogawa says that it “chronicles what I believe is one of the biggest failures of my life, which is that when my father died almost 15 years ago, I failed to do anything to honor him or his life because of the nature of our relationship.”“The Nosebleed,” in which she plays both her father and her bloody-nosed 5-year-old son, goes some distance toward atoning for that without sentimentalizing the past. The father she shows us is a stolid, taciturn executive who immigrated from Japan to Northern California with young Aya and her mother, and considers his financial support of them proof enough of his love.The gap between Aya and her father, then, is partly cultural. Having spent a good chunk of her childhood in the United States, she fits into it more comfortably than he did — even if entrenched idiots like the character called White Guy (Peter Lettre) can hardly believe that she doesn’t speak English with an accent.With set and costumes by Jian Jung, and lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, “The Nosebleed” is a visually uncomplicated show: a vessel for holding ghosts and regrets, and for deciding what to do with what a parent leaves behind.With the four Ayas — Drae Campbell, Haruna Lee, Saori Tsukada and Kaili Y. Turner, terrific all — and some audience participation from volunteers, the performance becomes a moving communal rite that accommodates both love and hate and locates the filial kindness for a loopily generous send-off.But what it mourns most deeply are the questions for a dead father that went unasked, and the understanding that might have been.The NosebleedThrough Oct. 10 at Japan Society, Manhattan; 212-715-1258, japansociety.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    in Television

    Alessandro Nivola Put His Foot Down and Won the ‘Many Saints’ Role Anyway

    When he landed his first major lead in 25 years, he sobbed. “I’d been down that road so many times, and the number of disappointments I can’t count on 10 hands.”The throbbing in the back of Alessandro Nivola’s head was growing more intense.It was fall 2018 when he’d auditioned for the role of Dickie Moltisanti in “The Many Saints of Newark,” the “Sopranos” prequel, and “I felt pretty sure I was onto something,” he said. Though he wasn’t sure what that something was.Then after a lunch with David Chase, creator of the series, and Alan Taylor, the film’s director, the full script arrived and the stakes shot through the roof. Dickie, it turned out, was the film’s protagonist, and Chase had been told he could cast anyone he wanted. And the word was that Chase wanted Nivola, who hadn’t carried a movie of this magnitude in his nearly 25-year film career.That’s when the throbbing kicked in. “I’d been down that road so many times,” Nivola said, “and the number of disappointments I can’t count on 10 hands.”So when a month passed without an offer — the noise in his head by now impossible to ignore — he decided to put an end to his misery. “Call them,” he instructed his agents, “and tell them that if they don’t tell me today I’m out.”Four hours later, in a downstairs bathroom at the Chateau Marmont during a layover in Los Angeles, he learned that Dickie was his. He locked himself in a stall and cried, muffled sobs of relief and release, for 10 minutes.Nivola at the wheel as Dickie Moltisanti with Michela De Rossi next to him and Michael Gandolfini behind him.Warner Bros. “You see, at some point you just have to put your foot down,” he told his people.Only, they hadn’t made the call. It was simply his lucky day.To hear Nivola, 49, tell it, good fortune has been elusive. But on a balmy September afternoon at the Mulberry Street Bar in Little Italy, he gave off the scent of a man swimming in it. Sleek in an unseasonably warm suit he’d worn to a photo shoot (his stylist had driven away with his clothes), he radiated Dickie’s debonair charisma, minus most of his menacing edge. James Gandolfini, the original Tony Soprano, glowered in a poster overhead, but Nivola looked like a boss.“The Many Saints of Newark” has been positioned as Tony’s origin story, with Michael Gandolfini cast as the teenage version of his father’s iconic character. But the movie belongs to Dickie, an explosive, tomcatting mobster — long dead when Tony mythologized him in “The Sopranos” — who somehow managed, despite his best efforts, to twist a basically decent kid into a tormented mafia kingpin.Chase had wanted to make a respectable gangster film. “So, there’s no more Jimmy Gandolfini,” he said in an interview, “but we wanted someone who could, in his own way, be as criminally intelligent and charismatic.”Dickie is more elegant, more handsome, more stylish than Tony. “But he is carrying exactly the same set of tones,” said Taylor, the director, “which is this combination of introspection and complete blindness and rage and regret.”Nivola’s induction into the “Sopranos” family actually began with his sleazy prosecutor in “American Hustle,” which impressed Chase and made him wonder: “Who is this guy and where has he been? I have to keep him in mind.”“So I kept him in mind,” Chase said, “and when this role came up, he seemed to me to be the perfect guy for it.”Nivola ticked off the boxes: Italian American with an immigrant back story — his grandfather a Sardinian sculptor who resettled in Manhattan’s downtown bohemia during the war, his father a Harvard graduate and Brookings Institution fellow — and an innate grasp of the language.“When it came to Italian, curse words or otherwise,” Chase said, “he got the words and the tune.”And Nivola — a Boston-born Yale man who spent his grade-school years mostly in rural Vermont and high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire — was an eyeful. “On ‘The Sopranos,’ I never went that direction but I felt, well, we can’t blame the guy for being handsome,” Chase said. “He’s really good, and I knew he could deliver the right level of sinister.”Taking those “Sopranos” colors, Nivola painted a Jekyll and Hyde, longing to be remembered for doing something noble but dragged down by impulsive violence that horrifies even him.His interpretation was “pitch perfect, every beat of it,” starting with his audition scenes, said Taylor, who had to resist trying to get Nivola to recreate their perfection when they actually started shooting.Nivola has been bringing it since his film breakthrough in 1997 as Pollux Troy, the weirdo brother of Nicolas Cage’s terrorist in “Face/Off.” After which he essentially went undercover.“I always was drawn to roles that allowed me to hide myself and to burrow into some other kind of personality or behavior that felt like a disguise,” he said. “That’s been the blessing and the curse of my whole career up until now.”Nivola adroitly shapeshifted from one character to the next, without an obvious through line — the British frontman who beds a much older record producer in “Laurel Canyon,” the Orthodox Jew drawn into a love triangle in “Disobedience,” the lunatic sensei in “The Art of Self-Defense.”But along the way, disappointment over films that flopped or weren’t even released, and a sense of entitlement at being asked to repeatedly prove himself — hadn’t he already? — gave rise to crippling nerves and depression. Eventually he felt so uncomfortable auditioning in person that he stopped altogether.“My most successful friends are sort of relentlessly positive,” said Nivola, citing his wife, the actor and director Emily Mortimer, and his pal Ethan Hawke. “I’m trying to be more that way but it’s not my nature.”Then came David O. Russell’s “American Hustle.” And after a humbling seven-year break when he stopped auditioning but also stopped getting much-wanted roles, he showed up to compete for the job.Nivola, left, with Bradley Cooper in “American Hustle.”Francois Duhamel/Columbia PicturesNivola had begun to reassess how he wanted to work, choosing great directors over great parts. But Russell’s idiosyncratic style — writing a script and then yelling out alternate lines for the actor to say in the midst of shooting — left Nivola feeling utterly out of control. Thrillingly so.“It was a big turning point for me, where I just completely gave over to him,” he said. “And from that moment on, I really liked that feeling. I wanted to give every director that I worked with that power.”Whatever caused Nivola to hesitate or overthink before, Russell has seen that drop away in favor of “enthusiastic inventiveness,” he wrote in an email. “I think he can do almost anything — he’s fearless. He takes what I’ve written and makes it his own. We trust each other, which allows risk and a hell of a lot of fun.”“American Hustle” was also Nivola’s first film with Robert De Niro, whom he considers a mentor. “I mean, he might not describe himself that way,” he said, laughing, “but I insist.”But it was watching him in motion on “The Wizard of Lies” — De Niro as Bernie Madoff and Nivola as his son Mark — that affected the way Nivola worked more than any other experience. He began learning his dialogue early so that he could untie himself from the words. He started repeating phrases in the middle of scenes, like a reset, until he’d forgotten he was performing.“It’s almost like he’s playing music rather than saying text,” Taylor said — even if it does send the dolly crew dashing when he suddenly takes a scene back to the beginning. The director added, “Frequently what comes out of his third version is the one he was aiming for, and it really, really works.”In September, the day after “The Many Saints of Newark” premiered at the Beacon Theater, Nivola, true to form, was elated if cautious. Critics for IndieWire, CNN and others singled his performance out with phrases like “absolutely brilliant” and “riveting.”“So far, these have been the best reviews I’ve ever had for a performance,” he wrote in an email, adding, “I’m trying not to put too much or too little stock in them.”But back on Mulberry Street, Nivola had intimated that his shining moment hadn’t dropped from out of the blue — not really. “I felt, to be honest, leading up to when this opportunity came, some intangible feeling that something like this was brewing,” he said haltingly.Still, unlike Dickie, he wasn’t willing to wager on his future. “I will never think about this movie as a success,” he added, “until I’m proven otherwise.” More

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    Pat Robertson Ends His Long Run as Host of ‘The 700 Club’

    Mr. Robertson, the evangelical leader who started the show in the 1960s to help save the Christian Broadcasting Network, said his son would take over as host of the program.The evangelical leader Pat Robertson said on Friday that he was stepping down as host of the “The 700 Club” after more than 50 years at the helm of a program that channeled Christian conservatism into millions of American homes and turned him into a household name.“It’s been a great run,” Mr. Robertson said on the show, adding that his son Gordon Robertson would take over as host.Mr. Robertson, 91, made the announcement at the end of the broadcast on Friday, the 60th anniversary of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which Mr. Robertson started in a small station in Portsmouth, Va., in 1961.“The 700 Club” grew out of a series of telethons that Mr. Robertson began hosting in 1963 to rescue the network from financial troubles. At the time, Mr. Robertson said he was unable to pay for a suite of offices the network had added to the station.“I was praying on my knees with the staff,” Mr. Robertson said on Friday. “I needed $200,000, and I was praying and praying for the money.”It was then that Mr. Robertson said Jesus appeared to him with a “vision for the world.”“Our job was to reach the world, not just pay the bills,” he said.The network began holding telethons, asking for 700 viewers to pledge $10 a month to the station. The efforts inspired the “700 Club” name.The show transformed evangelical broadcasting, moving it away from scripted sermons and recordings of tent revivals and turning it into a cozy talk-show format where Mr. Robertson discussed topics such as nutrition, relationships, marriage and politics, said John C. Green, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Akron.Mr. Robertson greeting supporters outside a union hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1988 during his campaign for president.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesEvangelical Christians have long used stories of wayward people saved through the teachings of Jesus as a way to spread the Gospel and gain followers. Mr. Robertson’s show featured “very vivid presentations of these testimonials,” which engaged audiences, Dr. Green said.“It was through the success of ‘The 700 Club’ that he was able to have a real impact on politics,” he said.Mr. Robertson interviewed President Ronald Reagan; Shimon Peres, the former prime minister of Israel; and other world leaders. In 1988, he ran as a Republican candidate for president and made strong second-place finishes during the primary, performances that underscored the organizing potential of evangelical Christians.Through the show, Mr. Robertson “helped cement that alliance between conservative Christians and the Republican Party,” Dr. Green said.The show also gave Mr. Robertson a regular platform to vilify gay people and Muslims. He often quoted Bible verses in a soft, gentle voice to justify remarks that infuriated Arab Americans and gay rights organizations.In 2002, he described Islam as a violent religion that wanted to “dominate and then, if need be, destroy.”In 2013, a viewer sent a letter to the show asking how Facebook users should respond when they see a picture of two men kissing. Mr. Robertson said, “I would punch ‘vomit,’ not ‘like.’”He dismissed feminism as “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”He once told the story of an “awful-looking” woman who complained to her minister that her husband had begun drinking heavily. Mr. Robertson said the minister told her that it was likely because she had gained weight and neglected her hair.“We need to cultivate romance, darling,” Mr. Robertson said. He blamed natural disasters and terrorism on moral and spiritual failings. In 2012, after deadly tornadoes pounded the South and Midwest, Mr. Robertson said that God would have intervened if “enough people were praying.”He also made comments that surprised both his followers and critics.Gordon Robertson, chief executive of the Christian Broadcasting Network and son of the founder Pat Robertson, in 2018. He will take over as host of “The 700 Club.”Steve Helber/Associated PressIn 2011, Mr. Robertson said that a man whose wife had Alzheimer’s disease should be able to divorce her and find a new partner. The next year, he called for the legalization of marijuana, saying that the “war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”“I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up,” he said.During Friday’s broadcast, the show steered clear of Mr. Robertson’s divisive comments.Instead, it showed clips of Mr. Robertson embracing diversity — the program named the Rev. Ben Kinchlow, a Black minister, as Mr. Robertson’s co-host in 1975, a time when there were few Black television hosts. Another clip showed Mr. Robertson asking President Donald J. Trump if the women in his cabinet would earn the same as men.Mr. Robertson said he told his son to expect him to return to the show from time to time.“In case I get a revelation from the Lord, I’m going to call you” and participate in the show, he said. “I’ll come in as a commentator, as a senior commentator, from time to time.” More