Eliana Willis

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    Jodie Comer on Her Killer Beauty Regimen

    Killer acting role leads to killer skin care? Not exactly, but both are true for Jodie Comer, who is known for her role as the sociopathic but charismatic assassin Villanelle on the darkly comic “Killing Eve,” just back for Season 3. These days, Ms. Comer, 27, is sheltering in place with her family in Liverpool, England, where she grew up. Hear what she’s putting on and also cooking up.Caffeine FirstFor me, it’s definitely coffee before anything. I treated myself to an espresso machine recently, and it’s changed my world. I read a little bit. Then at some point, I get up and wash my face and kind of do what I’d be doing anyway if I was going to a day’s work.Getting Into Her SkinWhen I was in high school, I literally used to baby wipe my face. I’m mortified to admit this. Through my late teens, I was a big makeup girl. I was born in Liverpool, and I don’t know if you know this, but the girls here and in Manchester and Essex too, we love our makeup. I mean the full get-up. So much effort goes into all that. I loved it — the eyes, the full face. That was definitely me.Skin care wasn’t something I thought about much until a friend introduced me to a facialist in London, Jasmina Vico. It was through Jasmina that I became educated about the importance of skin care and how it can signal what’s going on in your body. Like now, I recently changed my contraceptive, and my skin has gone crazy. I didn’t realize how much hormones can freak out.I’ve always had kind of good skin — I’m really lucky. Now, it’s like, Whoa! I know, I know, I’m trying to not be a drama queen. Being indoors so much more probably doesn’t help and disturbs everything a bit. I think there’s something to letting the sun be on skin.The New RoutineNow I’m on a routine with a step-by-step with Noble Panacea products. The brand approached me, and I liked how the products complement one another. I particularly like the eye cream and the serum. I find the serum kind of great if you’re working out. I have oily combination skin, and I don’t want anything heavy on my skin when I work out, but I don’t want it feeling dry either. The serum hydrates just enough.And the moisturizer has such a gorgeous consistency. It feels like there’s a thin layer that continues to moisturize all day. I try to exfoliate once a week. I use the Clarisonic tool with the different brushes. I usually do that on Sunday.Makeup CleanseThe film I was doing went on hiatus. When I came back home to Liverpool, I cleaned all of my makeup brushes. I’m waiting for the day when we can all go out and party together again. The brushes, they are ready to go!Right now, I’ve just given up. I haven’t worn makeup for the past couple of weeks. I have no shame on Zoom meetings either. When I’m on sets, they’re constantly reapplying makeup. It’s kind of nice to let my skin breathe. That’s my excuse at least!In more regular daily life, I love Hourglass. You just can’t go wrong. I love the foundation sticks. They have a thick consistency, but I put it on the back of my hand and then put it on with my finger tips. I also have the highlighting palette. That’s always good for giving me the illusion of a healthy glow. I get them here at Space NK.I was very lucky that Pat McGrath sent me some of her products when I met her last year. I love her mascara, and there’s a lipstick in a color called Love Supreme. The shade is very close to my natural color but a little bit more pink. Otherwise, Nars lip crayons, they’re always a good go-to.I used to buy crazy colored lipsticks. When I was out of work when I was younger, I actually did a makeup class in Liverpool. I just hoarded makeup then. Now I’m just into giving my natural lip a boost.What Does Killer Makeup Look Like?When I think of Villanelle, I think comfort above everything. For her, makeup is not a necessity. So for her look, it’s natural and simple, day to day, and then she experiments with the other personas she inhabits. But more often than not, when I rewatch something, I’ll think, “Oh God, that makeup feels too much.” I don’t think she would be into upkeep. I don’t think she has the time to take out a lip liner and reapply.FragranceI wear Le Labo Santal 33. I feel like everyone in the universe wears it now. But it smells different on each person — or so I want to think! I definitely copied off an actress I worked with. We would ride the lift every day, and I would smell it on her, and it would be that amazing smell. But we’re all copying each other. I have no shame in admitting.Gym TimeI do Pilates with my trainer David Higgins. He’s in London, so we just do a FaceTime call. I need someone to make sure I’m not slacking. Also, we have a little makeshift gym in the back of my parents’ house. We’re all making appointments for it — it’s good fun.Or I just use these elastic bands that I have for travel. And I have a foam roller. If I just stretch out and roll my back and legs, I feel like it releases so much tension. It’s satisfying to hear all the clicks on your back — it’s like I’m a new woman. Otherwise, I’m just taking walks, really.What Diet?I just had six chocolate digestive biscuits! I’m having one of those days. I did download the Deliciously Ella app. They have a lot of vegan and vegetarian recipes, and me and my mum have been trying them. What I’ve realized during this time is how much I enjoy cooking. If I’m working long hours, I can’t be bothered. It’s the first thing that goes.There’s a place in London called Detox Kitchen, and the lady who owns it has been doing little Stories on Instagram on how to make a meal of what’s left in your fridge. You can also make the meals and stick them in the fridge or freezer — although there are four of us in the house, so nothing really makes it to the freezer.Chocolates are big. It was just Easter. We have so many mini eggs. I don’t know if you have them, but they are just so good.The weird, crazy, bizarre thing when you’re off work is that you lose track of time. We might be half into the day and it’s sunny out and we’re like, “Should we have some wine?” It’s like, “No!”You can’t do that every day, but there is really no right or wrong. The Pilates keeps me sane, but then so does the chocolate. Just do what you need to do in the moment. More

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    Bruce Myers, Actor With Voice of a ‘Stradivarius,’ Dies at 78

    This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.It was the actor Bruce Myers’s voice, above all, that people tended to remember. “His deep lion’s voice will resonate no more,” was how the French newspaper Le Monde opened its tribute to Mr. Myers, who died of the new coronavirus in Paris on April 15 at 78.A favorite of the great international director Peter Brook, with whom he worked for nearly 50 years, Mr. Myers, with his elegant diction and reverberant tones, inspired comparisons to the famously mellifluous John Gielgud.Writing about Mr. Myers’s performance in an evening of short works directed by Mr. Brook in 2011, Charles McNulty of The Los Angeles Times called him “a human Stradivarius,” with his “lush caress of vowels and precise choreography of consonants.”Bruce Myers was born on April 12, 1942, in Radcliffe, a town north of Manchester, England, to Maurice and Mitzi Myers. His father was a solicitor, his mother a secretary in her husband’s law firm. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, and studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.Mr. Myers met Mr. Brook in about 1970 and became one of the most enduring members of the Paris-based International Center for Theater Research, founded that year by Mr. Brook and the producer Micheline Rozan to stage productions but also to examine the purpose of theater. Mr. Myers toured the world, from cosmopolitan capitals to African villages, with many of its most celebrated productions.These included such signature Brook pieces as the nine-hour “The Mahabharata,” based on the epic Hindu poem, in which he played the deities Ganesha and Krishna; “The Man Who…,” inspired by a book by the neurologist Oliver Sacks; and “The Conference of the Birds,” based on the 12th-century Persian poem.Mr. Myers notably appeared in Shakespeare roles for the company, including the misanthropic Alcibiades in “Timon of Athens,” the piece with which Mr. Brook opened the renovated Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris in 1974; and as Polonius in a streamlined adaptation of “Hamlet,” seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2001.In addition to his stage work, Mr. Myers appeared in films, including Mr. Brook’s screen adaptations of “The Mahabharata” and “Hamlet,” and had supporting roles in more mainstream movie fare like “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Henry and June.” He also worked as a director and conducted acting workshops throughout the world.He is survived by his wife, Ivanka Polchenko, who confirmed the death; two daughters, Lea and Samia, from his previous marriage, to the actress Corinne Jaber; and three siblings. More

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    Bernard Gersten, Offstage Star of Nonprofit Theater, Dies at 97

    Bernard Gersten, a canny executive who helped turn two of New York’s nonprofit theater companies into powerhouse producers and presenters of award-winning plays and musicals, died on Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97. The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Jenny Gersten said.Mr. Gersten was Joseph Papp’s top deputy at the New York Shakespeare Festival for 18 years in the 1960s and ’70s, a time when the two worked together to build the Delacorte Theater in Central Park for free summer productions of Shakespeare, and to turn the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village into the Public Theater, the original home of such notable plays as David Rabe’s Vietnam drama “Sticks and Bones” and Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, “That Championship Season,” as well as the landmark musicals “Hair” and “A Chorus Line.”The two men championed the work of Mr. Rabe, Vaclav Havel, Ntozake Shange, John Guare and other playwrights and helped propel the careers of actors like James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Martin Sheen and Raul Julia.For 28 years beginning in 1985, Mr. Gersten was executive producer — the chief business officer, with responsibility for management, marketing and budgeting — of Lincoln Center Theater.Working first with Gregory Mosher as artistic director and then with André Bishop, Mr. Gersten took a theater that had almost been completely dark for eight years and a failure for 20 and helped turn it into one of the nation’s leading nonprofit stage organizations.Its successes have included Mr. Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation”; “The Sisters Rosensweig,” by Wendy Wasserstein; Tom Stoppard’s vivid intellectual dramas “The Invention of Love” and “The Coast of Utopia”; Tony-winning revivals of “Carousel” and “South Pacific”; the Tony-winning best musical “Contact”; and the Tony-winning play “War Horse.”Though Mr. Papp was the driven public face of the Shakespeare Festival, many theater people have said that Mr. Gersten was an almost equal partner. The two men were complementary, to be sure, with Mr. Gersten willing to take on the tasks that Mr. Papp hated — accounting, advertising, dealing with agents — and mending the fences that the quick-to-anger Mr. Papp was prone to tear down.In 1971, after pleading with New York City to help solve the Public Theater’s financial crisis, Mr. Papp stormed out of a meeting with the all-powerful Board of Estimate rather than respond to criticism about the way he ran his theater. Only Mr. Gersten’s swift apology, witnesses said, persuaded the board to approve the city’s purchase of the theater’s building, giving Mr. Papp the relief he had sought.It was Mr. Gersten who brought the work of the director and choreographer Michael Bennett to Mr. Papp’s attention. Mr. Gersten had seen Mr. Bennett’s work in the Broadway musicals “Follies” and “Seesaw,” and when a musical about Vietnam, “More Than You Deserve,” was struggling in previews at the Public in 1973, Mr. Gersten recommended that Mr. Bennett be brought in to help. Mr. Papp rejected the idea, but not long afterward Mr. Bennett said there was something else he wanted to talk to Mr. Papp about: He had been making some tapes, and he had a crazy idea for a musical.“And the next day he came down to the theater with the tapes,” Mr. Gersten recalled. “He had been a gypsy, a chorus dancer, and he had taped hours and hours of interviews with dancers just like himself, the kind who would journey from show to show, never become stars, never even get speaking roles. They talked about their lives, their careers, their doubts, their hopes, their frustrations, their desires, their fears, their love of the theater. He played some of the tapes for Joe and said he thought they could be the basis for a musical. He said he needed time to create it and shape it, and wanted to use the Public Theater as a home for a workshop to make it work.”Mr. Gersten urged his boss to go along with the idea, and Mr. Papp was won over.The musical, “A Chorus Line,” opened to ebullient reviews on May 21, 1975, and with its move to the Shubert Theater on Broadway, it eventually grossed almost $150 million for the New York Shakespeare Festival. Its 6,137 performances — the last one was on April 28, 1990 — made it the longest-running show in Broadway history until “Cats” surpassed it. During the run Mr. Bennett died of AIDS-related lymphoma, in 1987.“The overwhelming point is the shadow that AIDS cast on the show,’’ Mr. Gersten said after its closing-night performance. “It’s so painful to sit there and think of the innocence of the show 15 years ago, when there was no shadow of AIDS, and to the think of the number of people connected with the show who have fallen to AIDS, Michael most notably.’’ Mr. Gersten was born on Jan. 30, 1923, in Newark, N.J., to Jacob and Henrietta (Henig) Gersten. His father was a garment maker and active in his neighborhood synagogue, and his mother was a homemaker.Bernard graduated from West Side High School in Newark, spent two years at Rutgers University and went into the Army, passing much of World War II in a special services entertainment unit in Hawaii. There he became friendly with a fellow soldier, an actor named Robert Karnes, who after the war invited Mr. Gersten to join his troupe, the Actors Laboratory in Los Angeles, as technical director. Mr. Papp had joined the company a year earlier and become managing director.The Actors Laboratory was known as a center of Communist Party activity, and in 1948 Mr. Gersten and Mr. Papp campaigned for former Vice President Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate for president. Both men later left for jobs in New York.Ten years later, in 1958, Mr. Gersten and Mr. Papp appeared before a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Questioned about past Communist Party membership, they invoked the Fifth Amendment. Mr. Papp was fired from his production job at CBS, although he was later reinstated by an arbitrator. Mr. Gersten, by then working as a stage manager at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., did not lose his job, because Katharine Hepburn, a member of the festival’s board, and the director John Houseman said that if Mr. Gersten were ousted, they would quit.Two years later, Mr. Gersten joined Mr. Papp as associate producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival, beginning an 18-year tenure in which he also helped Mr. Papp run Lincoln Center’s theater company from 1973 to 1977. In 1978, their partnership ended abruptly in a dispute over whether the Public Theater should co-produce Mr. Bennett’s follow-up to “A Chorus Line,” the musical “Ballroom,” a bittersweet tale of a late-in-life romance.Mr. Papp didn’t like it. But Mr. Gersten felt that they owed it to Mr. Bennett to be involved because of all the money “A Chorus Line” had made for the festival. Mr. Papp fired him, and even removed Mr. Gersten’s name from the “Chorus Line” credits, restoring it only several years later, when the two men reconciled. Mr. Papp died in 1991. (Mr. Gersten co-produced “Ballroom,” which opened on Broadway in December 1978 and closed in barely four months.)Mr. Gersten subsequently worked for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios and the Radio City Music Hall.Then, in 1985, Lincoln Center’s board, seeking to revive its moribund theater program, chose Mr. Mosher, formerly of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, as artistic director and Mr. Gersten as executive producer. To attract audiences to the center’s two theaters — the Mitzi E. Newhouse, for Off Broadway work, and the Vivian Beaumont, for Broadway — they offered a $25 season membership that allowed members to buy a ticket to any production for $10. In the first three years, they oversaw more than 20 plays and 2,100 performances, including a smash revival of Mr. Guare’s “House of Blue Leaves,” and took in $35 million. Mr. Bishop replaced Mr. Mosher in 1992.Over all, during Mr. Gersten’s tenure, Lincoln Center Theater produced more than 120 shows, many winning Tony and Drama Desk awards.In addition to his daughter Jenny, Mr. Gersten is survived by another daughter, Jilian Cahan Gersten; his wife, Cora Cahan, a former dancer who became the founding president of the nonprofit development agency the New 42nd Street and is now the president and chief executive of the Baryshnikov Arts Center; and four grandchildren. In 2010, on the 25th anniversary of his joining Lincoln Center Theater, Mr. Gersten reflected on the nature of theater as having four elements: a building, artists, money and an audience.“How you mix them, how you adjust them, how you administer them is the secret of success or failure,” he said.“We have taken a place that was considered to be an impossible theater,” he added, “and made it into the most likely theater one could want for, long for, hope to have.”Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. More

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    What’s on TV Monday: ‘Breeders’ and ‘Never Have I Ever’

    What’s on TVPRODIGAL SON 9 p.m. on Fox. There are few subjects as rich in storytelling potential as parent-child conflict and law enforcement. This series, which wraps its first season tonight, includes a lot of both. It follows Malcolm Bright (Tom Payne), an N.Y.P.D. investigator who is trying to evade the legacy of his serial killer father, Martin Whitly (Michael Sheen). His attempts to distance himself from his paternal inheritance were stymied when a copycat case required him to turn to Martin for help. Last week’s episode ended with Malcolm being arrested and charged with an offscreen murder. In the finale, perhaps we’ll see if he has followed in his father’s bloody footsteps.BREEDERS 10 p.m. on FX. This dark comedy series about the challenges of child rearing couldn’t have come at a better time. With schools canceled and playgrounds shut down because of the coronavirus, many parents are reckoning with their offspring. Paul (Martin Freeman) and Ally (Daisy Haggard) don’t have a global health crisis to contend with but they’ve got their hands full anyway raising their kids, Luke and Ava. The arrival of Ally’s estranged father Michael (Michael McKean) earlier in the season added another ball for them to juggle. As the pressure has mounted, Paul and Ally have moved toward and away from each other. Ally caved to Paul’s desire to get married but remained distracted by work and eventually began spending her weeks in Berlin on assignment. In the finale, we’ll see how this arrangement, which has already shown signs of strain, ultimately pans out.What’s StreamingDEAD SOULS: PART 1 (2018) Stream on Mubi. In his review for The Times, Bilge Ebiri called Wang Bing’s documentary about survivors of Mao Zedong’s re-education camps “monumental.” He also explained that the film, whose three parts runs for more than eight hours together, “does not seek a complete accounting” of the camps and their legacy. “It’s partly about the inability to convey the full horror of these experiences,” Ebiri wrote. To avoid overstepping, the director focuses on the survivors themselves: “He lets the camera run as his subjects speak at length about the horrific things they saw and the comrades they buried — or, in many cases, didn’t get a chance to.” The second part of the documentary will be released on Mubi on Tuesday, with the final installment following on Wednesday.NEVER HAVE I EVER Stream on Netflix. In this new teen comedy series created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan plays Devi, an Indian-American teenager keen to put her difficult freshman year behind her. She decides to take the new school year as an opportunity to retool her identity and enlists her friends Fabiola (Lee Rodriguez) and Eleanor (Ramona Young) in a plan to elevate their lowly social status. Devi’s desire to become popular isn’t just motivated by normal adolescent insecurities. She’s also working through her father’s recent death and trying to reconcile the different dimensions of her identity. More

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    In ‘Run,’ Archie Panjabi Sees Shades of Her Most Famous Role

    In the final seconds of HBO’s romantic thriller “Run” on Sunday night, Archie Panjabi’s heat-seeking-missile Fiona steadily lowers to her knees and ever-so-gently slides her phone underneath a hotel door to record her targets, Domhnall Gleeson and Merritt Wever’s irresponsibly-reunited former lovers Billy and Ruby, (loudly) going at it. If that move reminded you of a certain leather-jacketed, high-booted, and brilliantly sly investigator from “The Good Wife,” you’re not the only one.“My first thought when I read that scene in the script was, that’s such a Kalinda moment,” Panjabi said in a Zoom call from Los Angeles one evening last week.No surprise it took just a few minutes for Kalinda to come up in our conversation, considering the character won Panjabi an Emmy and put her on the map, both as an actress and as tabloid fodder. But — wipe your drool — the 47-year-old British actress was quick to shut down questions about that scene with a smile.She is, however, game to talk about 18-page auditions, childhood trophies and how in May, HBO viewers will get a double dose of the actress when she appears both on “Run” and “I Know This Much is True,” a six-part drama based on Wally Lamb’s best seller, where she plays a wise psychiatrist to twins Dominick (Mark Ruffalo) and Thomas (yup, Ruffalo again) Birdsey. Quite a month for someone who was once told that Indian women can’t make it in Hollywood. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Fiona is a manipulative, shoplifting, calculated semi-stalker. So I’m guessing she was a dream role?It happened very quickly. I got sent the script and I had the weekend to decide whether to do it. I love [the series creator Vicky Jones and the executive producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge] and I love Merritt and Domhnall, and the chemistry between these two characters is so engaging. I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to play a character that is thrown in with the motive of tearing them apart? It’s delicious.You have such strong chemistry with both Merritt and Domnhall; I didn’t know if you wanted to seduce them or skewer them.That’s what Vicky is good at doing. To be honest, there were times when I didn’t understand the bond between Fiona and Ruby, and I would call Vicky over and she would say, “Sometimes you’re not supposed to like someone, but you just have this chemistry.” I’d never done anything like that.Fiona may be the antagonist, she’s not a stereotypical villain because at times she’s the most sympathetic character.One could read the script as it was written that Fiona was a complete [expletive] and she’s really nasty. But it was important to Vicky and [the director Kate Dennis] that it wasn’t that. The tone of the show is unique to the point that even as actors, all of us didn’t quite know what it was. Which made everything about this project out of my comfort zone.How so? Fiona feels like such an Archie Panjabi character.Maybe after playing a character for six years you lose a bit of confidence in your comfort zone. They obviously cast me so they thought it was in my range. I don’t mind being a little bit insecure. Sometimes I think it helps on set because you’re more open and wanting to trust your director and the other actors.Let’s talk about “I Know This Much is True.” You play a therapist named Dr. Patel, which reminds me that I owe an email to my therapist Dr. Patel.Your therapist and hundreds of thousands of other doctors in the world. That was the first thing I thought of with her name. It’s a big joke in London that every other doctor is called Dr. Patel. It was a huge responsibility how I was going to convey this one.Did you seek out this role or did the creator Derek Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine”) come to you?Derek likes to meet everyone, get to know their personalities. I had Skype sessions and lots of chats and I even flew out to see him. And I did an 18-page scene.An 18-page audition?They asked me to put myself on tape, which really doesn’t come up that much because I get offered a lot of stuff. But I had to come off my ego and I thought, I don’t mind because I want to work with these people. I had to put 18 pages on an iPhone. Afterward, I thought I really had the voice of this character. The similarity between her and other roles I’ve played is a calmness on the outside but you know every single wheel is turning on the inside.You’ve done a few episodes of American comedies, from “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” to “BoJack Horseman.” Did you want to change the image of you only playing that type of calm-on-the-outside character?When I was 15 or 16 I entered a drama competition in London and I came in first and I got a cup called the “Versatility Cup.” And that always stuck with me that I wanted to be able to play anything, even roles I felt I couldn’t play. I would never have thought I could have played Kalinda. I remember reading the character description and it was “stunningly beautiful Erin Brockovich.” I said, that’s not me.But you still went for it.At the time I was putting myself out for pilots and I wasn’t getting anything. And then I got an email from my agent who said, “I think you should possibly have a look at this.” I spent hours with my other half recording at home. From what I understand, I was the last on the list after they’d seen everybody.Do you remember what scene you read for your audition?It was when she opened her buttons and said, “These are better than subpoenas.” I thought, Oh God, my mum will be horrified.Was she?No, she was amused.You won an Emmy for playing Kalinda in 2010 and a decade later, there are still questions about tension on the set between you and Juliana Margulies that was rumored to be so bad that you couldn’t even film your final scene together. Will you ever tell your side of the story?You’re very naughty, Jessica.Are you surprised people want to hear your perspective?Let’s put it this way. We are living in a world where everybody wants to know everything. I completely understand why everyone asks about it. Everybody I meet asks me about it, in some roundabout way. I just feel like, I’m doing work because of that character. Before Kalinda, I was always coming in for a few lines and it was hard to get roles. If people always want to know what happened, OK, it’s a small price to pay for all the wonderful things that show has given me. It sounds diplomatic, but it’s how I feel.Did it tarnish your memories of the series?I’m not very complimentary of things. I’m very British and I like to self-deprecate, but I do feel the Alicia and Kalinda scenes were one of the highlights of the show. I’m very proud of them.But you’re taking everything else to the grave?Yeah. I’ve said what I’m going to say.Any chance Kalinda will pop up on “The Good Fight”?I don’t know. I still get a lot of love for her, but she came in as a mystery and she left as a mystery. I don’t know if bringing back a character like that feels right. It took me time to get out of that character and for people to see me in a different light.Last year you helped develop “Adversaries,” a show about a L.A. lawyer who moves to the heartland and confronts prejudices, which was supposed to be on NBC this season. What interested you about that premise?I was keen to tell a story about diversity. My character was brought up by strict parents and Asian and she works with someone who’s American, and through them we get insight into their different backgrounds. We still don’t understand why [NBC] put that aside.You once had an agent who told you that you’d never work as an Indian woman. Is there anything you’d want to say to her now?I was in my 20s then and I do feel, with respect to her, that she was justified in saying that to some degree. When I was growing up, my family used to say, “How many women of your background are onscreen? Virtually none.” I don’t hold it against her for saying it at the time.You really don’t hold onto rage, do you?I’m British and I’m Indian. So that combination is: Keep the peace! More

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    ‘Homeland’ Showrunner Declassifies the Series Finale

    This interview includes spoilers for the series finale of “Homeland.”When Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon learned after Season 5 that their political thriller, “Homeland,” would end after eight seasons, they choose not to shape the remaining installments into one long and complex arc. Instead, they would continue planning it one season at a time.The show would keep them guessing, just as it did for viewers — right up through the series finale, which aired Sunday on Showtime.When it came time to plan Season 8, much about the fate of the show’s protagonist, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), remained uncertain. But Gansa and Gordon, who created and oversaw the series, had a few definite ideas. One brought the story full circle, in a way, to its beginnings, which centered on a returning prisoner from the Iraq War, Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis).“We had decided that we wanted to tell the last story in Afghanistan, and we already knew two big things,” Gansa said. “We knew that a president’s helicopter was going to go down in a war zone, and we knew that we wanted to put Carrie Mathison in Nicholas Brody’s shoes.”In other words, they wanted her to be suspected of being a traitor.As for revealing that the C.I.A. super spy Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) had been running a highly placed Russian mole — the translator Anna (Tatyana Mukha) — that idea arose about midway through plotting out the season. And the decision to turn Carrie into a whistle-blower had been a last-minute stroke of inspiration.The tricky part, Gansa said, had been figuring out how to get the Russian officer Yevgeny (Costa Ronin) to trust Carrie enough to allow her to start spying in Moscow. After rejecting a number of possible solutions — such as having Carrie become pregnant with Yevgeny’s child — the writers were stumped. Then, on the day before the final shoot, Gansa woke up thinking about Edward Snowden’s book, “Permanent Record.”“I was like, ‘Whoa!’ What if Carrie has been spending the last two years writing an expose of the C.I.A.?” he said. Everything fell into place, and the series’s production designer quickly mocked up a jacket for Carrie’s book “Tyranny of Secrets.”During a recent phone interview, Gansa discussed bringing the show across the finish line, the impact of Snowden and his regrets about a mishandled story line. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.That’s quite a fake-out when Carrie tries to convince Saul that his life is on the line. Did you ever consider a scenario in which Carrie actually kills Saul?Carrie would never go that dark. There would always be a third way. We did try to make the scene in which she was telling Saul’s sister that he’s dead as uncomfortable as the moment where it looked like she might kill Saul. We wanted those scenes to demonstrate just how far this person was willing to go to get what she thought was right. Look, Carrie is responsible for the death of an important asset, but ultimately, Carrie is able to take that person’s place in Russia and deliver intelligence back to Saul. She is exactly in the position that she most enjoys, which is a duplicitous relationship where she’s doing the work she was meant to do.Is it a happy ending? I think Carrie is happy. We wanted the show to end in a bittersweet way, not in a grim way. And in this uncertain time, I’m relieved that there’s some redemption here. Anything that ends with a little good cheer, I’m weeping, like, “Thank God.”Having Carrie write a book gives you a chance for one last “crazy wall” when we see her office.Although it’s much more ordered! Carrie’s got it together a bit. It was patterned after my office. Most of the books were my books — all the C.I.A. source material, the spy literature, the whole nine yards. And there is just a litany of our overreaction to 9/11 on the wall. It ain’t a pretty picture. Speaking of books, all the red Tauchnitz books used for tradecraft in Saul Berenson’s library are from my father’s collection. They were just a source of aggravation because whatever city we were in, we would always stop at these antiquarian bookstores so he could look for editions he didn’t have. They finally got put to good use.Carrie’s book is dedicated to Franny. What happens to her?Well, Franny got sacrificed. Not only has Franny been abandoned by her mother, but her mother is now like Edward Snowden and is considered a traitor. That’s going to be a very hard thing for that young girl — and, eventually, that young woman — to accept and understand.How did the endgame evolve or change as the world changed?We filmed in South Africa for Season 4 and Berlin for Season 5, and Claire and Mandy wanted to come home to the United States. Even though we might have kept the story abroad, our actors were tired of being overseas. And so we were put in the position of, “OK, how are we going to fashion a narrative back in New York City?” That was tough. Luckily, at Spy Camp, [a series of brainstorming sessions the cast and creative staff did each season with intelligence and national security experts], as we were writing Season 6, Mike Hayden, [the former C.I.A. director], told us about the very interesting process of presidential transitions and what that period between Election Day and Inauguration Day looks like — how uncertain it is, and what a new president’s education would look like after two and a half, three months. [Season 6 debuted in January 2017; Spy Camp was in February 2016.] Just listening to him talk, the idea for that season evolved.For this season, we wanted to consider how America had reacted to 9/11 and how would we react to the next 9/11. Would we have learned anything? We wanted to create an event that was akin to 9/11, but not a mass-casualty attack. So we went back to Afghanistan, where we would have license to tell a more explosive story, for lack of a better word.“Homeland” was highly praised, but also highly criticized. Did criticism of the show ever affect the story?Oh, the criticism affected it enormously. First and foremost, I think both the praise and the criticism were overblown. We were taking shots from the left for being Islamophobic and shots from the right for being soft on terrorism. At the beginning of Season 5, Peter Quinn is sitting in a C.I.A. briefing room and telling people what it looks like on the ground in Syria. Our intention in that scene was to portray Quinn as somebody who had seen too much battle and whose judgment was impaired. And yet Fox News and the right wing ran with what Quinn said as: “My God, ‘Homeland’ is getting it right! You have to take a harder line with all these factions in Syria.” That’s inevitable.There was a moment toward the end of Season 5 where we all just looked at ourselves in the mirror. We were telling a story about an impending attack in Berlin, and four days before we shot the scene, the Paris attacks happened. We found ourselves on the set saying, “What are we doing?” It was truly a “come to Jesus” or “come to Allah” moment: What is the value of telling these stories in a world that felt like it had gone a little crazy? That definitely affected “Homeland” in Seasons 6, 7 and 8.What changed?We made a vow to ourselves that we were not going to dramatize any threats in “Homeland” that didn’t actually exist. From our consultants in D.C., we learned that there were no organized Al Qaeda or Islamic State terrorist cells in the U.S. There were lone wolves acting on their own, but no terror cells here. This was when both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were making it seem like we were going to face another 9/11 attack, and it was only a matter of time. So we were very careful in these remaining seasons that we were not going to be sensational. We were trying to not make it worse.Edward Snowden was one of your spy camp consultants. What did he contribute?That’s why Season 5 was all about the surveillance state, hacking and civil liberties. Bart Gellman, a former Washington Post reporter, told me he was bringing a special guest to Spy Camp, and the next thing you know, we’re Skyping with Snowden in Moscow. This was about six months before Snowden was Skyping with other people, so all of the intelligence consultants we had in the room sat up in their seats, like, “Oh my God!”We had a two- or three-hour conversation with him. He was an interesting cat, for sure. When somebody constantly refers to themselves in the third person, it’s always odd. But he made a compelling case that if he had gone through the normal channels, none of this would have become public.Did your Spy Camp consultants ever warn that opposing world powers might seek to take advantage of a crisis in which actually no one was to blame — just to consolidate their power? In “Homeland,” that happens after a helicopter goes down. In the real world, it might be the politicization of the coronavirus.Right? That’s an interesting analogy. I mean, a virus truly is nobody’s fault, and the political ramifications on all sides — the finger-pointing, the blaming, the conspiracy theories that grow up around these things — is remarkable. We did hear a lot about that in Spy Camp, just in terms of how events can be twisted for political gain in ways that we haven’t yet begun to imagine. And now we’re witnessing it in full bloom.One of the things I remember hearing very early on was how Al Qaeda began to spin events on the ground. Special Ops would go in and kill a terrorist cell, and then Al Qaeda would come in and spread Qurans all over the floor to make it look like they had massacred a prayer circle. How events are open to interpretation is profoundly unsettling. There is no one source that you can look to and say, “Well, I believe that” — some Walter Cronkite who you can look at as an arbiter of what’s real. It makes the world a scarier and more uncertain place.Don DeLillo said in “White Noise,” “In a crisis, the true facts are what other people say they are. No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.” The time we’re living in right now, I certainly feel that way. I don’t know about you, but I just cannot put my finger on what to believe. Do I wear a mask? Not wear a mask? Do we need ventilators? Do we not need ventilators? The whole thing is just so confusing. “Homeland” has always tried to live dramatically in that ambiguous space. You see that between Saul and Carrie in the last couple of episodes, how to deal with a crisis that’s unfolding in front of their eyes.Any regrets? Any stories you wish you had told differently?After Brody was falsely implicated in the C.I.A. bombing, I wish that we had found a better way to dramatize the impact of that upon his family in Season 3. I just think that if we had been thinking more clearly, we could have devised a better story around how that affected and impacted their lives.That goes back to Franny. What happens when Franny and Dana meet?That would be a great story. Save it for the movie! [Laughs.] More

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    ‘Westworld’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: The Regressive Path

    Season 3, Episode 7: ‘Passed Pawn’Each man’s death diminishes me,For I am involved in mankind.Therefore, send not to knowFor whom the app ca-chingsIt ca-chings for thee.Or something to that effect.Hard as it may seem to believe that an app designed to facilitate criminal acts could have a nefarious purpose, we finally discover what the powers-that-be have had in mind for Caleb.For weeks, there has been speculation over Caleb’s true identity: Could he be a host or some other artificial creation? Throughout the season, the jumble of fragmented moments that have circulated in his memory has recalled Bernard at his glitchiest, forever struggling to solve the puzzles created by his own consciousness. In the meantime, he has attached himself to Dolores, not least because she moves forward with a confidence and certainty that he could never manage on his own.On this week’s episode, Dolores leads him to a facility in Sonora, Mexico, where some of the biggest secrets of the Rehoboam project are stored. Earlier in the season, we got a glimpse of a Mesa-like operation where human “anomalies” are subject to whatever editing they need to bring them back in line with their predictable, algorithmically correct cohorts. The entire purpose of the Seracs’ project was to wrangle the destructive chaos of human interaction into a coherent, sustainable plan for survival. There’s no room in the system for people inclined to chart their own course because the models all point to the likelihood of extinction.It was never a great sign that Engerraund Serac’s brother was the first fly in the ointment, and many others, like Caleb, would follow. One of the smarter ideas this season is that Serac is a defensible villain: Rehoboam grew out of nuclear catastrophe and the promise of more catastrophes to come, so even the most heavy-handed tactics to keep mankind in line are sensible. It may not sound great for one man and his machine to have the power to control the destinies of individuals and nations, but it sounds better when there are no other options. In order to keep the great Westworld park known as Planet Earth operational, anomalies like Caleb had to be brought back to their loops like the hosts — and if they couldn’t be, they needed to be decommissioned.What we learn in this episode is that the human impulse to misbehave isn’t so easily buffed out. The success rate for editing anomalies is only one out of 10. And so the solution has been to use anomalies to catch anomalies, which has given guys like Caleb a purpose, even if they’re kept in the dark about why their services are needed.Dolores takes Caleb to the facility in Sonoma so he can learn about the lies that have been hard-wired into his programming like one of Lee Sizemore’s park narratives. He has been led to believe in a false memory about a mission gone wrong in Crimea, one that ends with his best friend’s getting killed by the enemy, but the truth is more unsettling and sends him back on a “regressive” path.The trip to Sonora is also a chance for Dolores and Caleb to become acquainted with Solomon, the older and bug-riddled version of what would become Rehoboam. Solomon is presented as the machine equivalent to an anomaly, which makes it dangerously useless to Serac as a tool for social engineering but ideal to Dolores as a strategist for revolution. It’s wild to imagine the rebellions of the future as something akin to the You May Also Like function on Netflix, but Dolores is looking for options on the best way forward against adversaries that are growing in strength.To that end, Team Maeve has claimed its first Dolores, as Clementine comes back from the dead to ambush Musashi-bot in Jakarta. The pre-credits sequence continues the show’s mission to bump up the action considerably this season, which seems like a reasonable response to complaints that the simulated Old West of the first two seasons was long on philosophy and short on shoot’-em-ups. There’s an emphasis on high-tech gadgetry, too. Musashi-bot’s briefcase transforms into an assault weapon at the flick of a wrist. Dolores later wipes out nearly everyone guarding the Sonora facility by using drone-operated targeting.The Jakarta sequence is book-ended by a throw-down between Dolores and Maeve that’s been seasons in the offing. Maeve’s motives for attacking Dolores are clearer now than they’ve been in the past, but “Westworld” has always struggled to make sense of the beef between them. Perhaps it’s simply that Dolores and Maeve are too alike, both strong personalities who want to do things their own way. But their journey to self-awareness, their missions of vengeance and their tip-of-the-spear personalities are so closely aligned that they’ve never had much reason to fight. That makes the climax to this episode seem like a low-stakes form of shadowboxing.“You died many times, but this will be your last,” Maeve warns Dolores. Not likely.Paranoid Androids:Pick your “Westworld” Season 3 Quarantine House! House No. 1: Dolores, Caleb, Ash, Giggles. House No. 2: Maeve, Hector, Clementine, Serac. House No. 3: Bernard, Stubbs, the Man in Black. House No. 4: Charlotte-bot, Musashi-bot, Martin-bot, Sizemore-bot. (All answers other than House No. 3 are defensible.)Bernard, Stubbs and the Man in Black had a couple of contentious scenes together this episode, but main takeaway is that the Man in Black is “Classification U,” a label given to outliers who weren’t corrected by therapy. Now they’re looking for a log of others like him.“The West was cruel, unjust and chaotic,” Dolores tells Caleb, “but there was a chance to chart your own course. I want a place for my kind. For all of us to be free.” For someone who has spent most of her existences on the wrong end of unmediated, lawless violence, Dolores’s nostalgia for the Old West is surprising.“If you die, I will adjust my projections.” Solomon is like Nate Silver 2.0.HBO announced this week that “Westworld” had been renewed for a fourth season. So viewers should not expect to be anywhere near the center of the maze after next week’s finale. More

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    Brad Pitt Plays Dr. Anthony Fauci in an At-Home Edition of ‘S.N.L.’

    Two weeks ago, “Saturday Night Live” returned to television with its first new episode of the at-home era: a collection of remotely produced sketches that were low on production value but high on spirit and innovation. It offered a window into what the show could do without most of its resources — and into the homes of its cast members, for those of us who always wondered what they looked like.Now that “S.N.L.” proved that it could be done, what would it do for an encore?In its second run at an at-home episode, “S.N.L.” got more ambitious, adding flashy graphics and editing tricks, and diving into its pool of celebrity contacts for some well-timed cameo appearances — perhaps none more surprising than the opening sketch, which featured Brad Pitt as Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.In a CNN interview earlier this month, Fauci had said with a laugh that “of course” he would love to see himself portrayed by Pitt, the Oscar-winning star of “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” Perhaps he believed it was never going to happen, but there, at the top of the show, was Pitt wearing a wig, glasses, suit and tie, speaking in a mock-Brooklyn accent and offering his thanks to “all the older women in America who have sent me supportive, inspiring and sometimes graphic emails.”[embedded content]He also offered his commentary on “misinformation” regarding coronavirus and tried to clarify remarks made by President Trump.Following a video clip in which the president said that there might be vaccines “relatively soon,” Pitt said, “Relatively soon is an interesting phrase. Relative to the entire history of earth? Sure, the vaccine’s going to come real fast. But if you were to tell a friend, I’ll be over relatively soon, and then showed up a year and a half later, well, your friend may be relatively pissed off.”After another clip in which President Trump said the coronavirus would disappear “like a miracle,” Pitt said, “A miracle would be great. Who doesn’t love miracles? But miracles shouldn’t be Plan A. Even Sully tried to land at the airport first.”A third clip showed the president stating that “anybody that needs a test gets a test,” and that the tests were “beautiful.” Pitt replied, “I don’t know if I would describe the test as beautiful. Unless your idea of beauty is having a cotton swab tickle your brain. Also, when he said everyone can get a test what he meant was, almost no one.”Pitt then addressed rumors that President Trump planned to fire him, playing a clip of the president saying that he would not dismiss him, adding, “I think he’s a wonderful guy.”“So yeah, I’m getting fired,” Pitt said.Finally, Pitt ended the segment by removing his wig and thanking the real Fauci “for your calm and your clarity in this unnerving time,” and also offering gratitude to medical workers and their families. He added, “Live, kinda, from all across America, it’s Saturday night.”‘S.N.L.’ Throwback of the WeekUnder the limitations of sheltering-in-place orders, “What Up With That?” would seem to be the kind of recurring bit that should be avoided at all costs: It’s an overstuffed talk show with an indefatigable host (played by Kenan Thompson) and it is dependent on filling a stage with as many performers and celebrities as possible, most of whom won’t get to say more than a few words.But by the grace of Zoom, “S.N.L.” pulled it off, working in recurring characters like an enigmatic saxophonist played by Fred Armisen and an enthusiastic, track-suited dancer played by Jason Sudeikis. (Bill Hader, who usually plays Lindsey Buckingham, appeared only as a frozen screen graphic.)Charles Barkley, playing himself, summed it all up: “I’m not going to lie — this is weird.”Music Video of the WeekPete Davidson led off another of his musical segments by lamenting the tediousness of his home quarantine with his sister and his mother. (“Tired of sitting in the dark / Got nothing to watch, already did ‘Ozark’ ”). Then, unexpectedly, he threw the song over to Adam Sandler, the “S.N.L.” alum who, after almost 25 years away from the show, is once again becoming a fixture there.Sandler added a verse about his own monotony, singing, “wife tried to kiss me, I straight up denied her / miss the NBA and I miss Rob Schneider.” And sure enough, there was Schneider, another “S.N.L.” veteran, to deliver the catch phrase he’s been shouting at Sandler for more than a quarter-century.Fake Commercial of the WeekWhile it has been charming to see the grass-roots “S.N.L.” segments with homemade costumes and hand-drawn, taped-up posters on cast members’ walls, let’s also appreciate the more polished efforts on display in this advertisement featuring Aidy Bryant and Kate McKinnon.They play two of the grocers at Bartenson’s, a store where staples like chicken, milk and bread are unfortunately out of stock, but where you can still find mint-flavored Pringles, fluoride bananas, Pepsi Crab and plenty of Dasani products. As McKinnon says, “We want to give you what you want, but first we need you to buy what we have.”‘Weekend Update’ Jokes of the WeekThis latest at-home edition of “Weekend Update” was a significant step up from its debut — gone were the weird audio inserts of people laughing at Colin Jost’s and Michael Che’s jokes, and the anchors now had the familiar world-map backdrop inserted behind them. (We did miss seeing Jost’s guitar, though.) The anchors riffed on Thursday’s coronavirus briefing at the White House, where President Trump floated dangerous and widely derided solutions for halting the virus’s spread.Jost:You know things are going well when #DontDrinkBleach is trending nationally after a president’s speech. After a doctor said that coronavirus dies quickly in sunlight, President Trump asked if they could bring “the light inside the body.” Though I’m pretty sure “bring the light inside the body” is what they chanted at Jonestown before drinking poison. Then President Clean suggested injecting disinfectant into your body to cure the virus. Experts called the idea “a stroke of genius,” minus the “of genius” part.Che:Trump later backtracked and said he was just being sarcastic, which is just what you say when you know you’ve said something terrible. You know, Colin, speaking of terrible, you know how when a kid has really bad parents, somebody steps in and they have to go live with another family, right? [Jost: “Sure.”] Do you think it’s possible another country could come take custody of us, maybe? I mean, like, just until our government gets back on its feet. Somewhere stable, like Germany or Japan or Nigeria. Or even Iraq. I’ll take Iraq now. Don’t they owe us a favor anyway? Didn’t we, like, kill their dad when they were in trouble? I’m being sarcastic, obviously. More