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      Why Brandon Perea’s ‘Nope’ Audition Made Jordan Peele Cry

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      The actor’s unexpected take on Angel, the Fry’s worker, so won over the director that he decided during their meeting to rewrite the script.When Brandon Perea was 15, touring the country as a professional dancer and roller skater, he had an epiphany in the parking lot of a Blue Coast Burrito: He would move from Chicago to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of becoming an actor.But dreams rarely account for the rough patches. Perea thought he had it made when, at 20, he booked the series-regular role of student Alfonso Sosa, known as French, on the enigmatic Netflix serial “The OA,” but the show was canceled two seasons into its planned five-year arc.“I had so much confidence where I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m probably going to book a bunch of stuff after this,’” Perea said, though new roles proved elusive. “It’s that weird middle ground where ‘The OA’ was a good, life-changing job, but it’s not a piece on your résumé that’s going to beat out the A-list people that want the great stuff. You’re auditioning just in case they say no, and who the hell is going to say no to something great?”Still, Perea kept plugging away at his dream, and his efforts were rewarded when he scored a breakout role in Jordan Peele’s new film “Nope,” which stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings trying to photograph an extraterrestrial entity looming above their California ranch. Their efforts eventually involve the bleach-blond electronics-store employee Angel, whom Perea has a ball playing: Though Angel appears terminally bored when we meet him, he quickly warms to the brother-sister duo, oversharing about his recent breakup and chatting eagerly about “Ancient Aliens” even as their circumstances grow ever more outlandish.Peele was so pleased with Perea’s work that he beefed up the role during the shoot, and now that “Nope” is out (and No. 1 at the box office), the 27-year-old actor is glad he stuck to his convictions.“I call this the miracle job for a reason — this is a God-given miracle for me, because this is far bigger than what I could ever imagine or dream,” Perea told me last week over Zoom. “To be working in Hollywood is a privilege and it’s tough to keep, so you’ve got to be grateful if you can keep it. If I wasn’t grateful, kick me out.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.With Daniel Kaluuya, left, and Keke Palmer in “Nope.” Perea met the film’s stars for the first time during filming. Universal PicturesWhat was going on in your life when you were cast in “Nope”?I hadn’t worked on anything truly significant in a long time, and there were a lot of lows before “Nope.” I got close to a big show — I went in the room three or four times and I just thought, “Oh man, this is it, I’m back” — and then I didn’t get that role. Then there was a really good script, and I felt like I murdered that audition. People I showed the audition to were like, “Oh man, you’re going to book this thing,” and I didn’t end up getting it.But there was a switch for me where I was just like, “You know what? I’m proud at the level that I’m performing at, and someone will trust me someday.” That eased the pressure I put on myself. It was the first time that I came to terms with it so I could move on and not sulk over a job.And then you heard about “Nope”?I got an email for an untitled Jordan Peele project, my first big audition in a long time. I was assuming it’d be a one-liner or something because he’s at the point where he can get any actor in the world to be in his films, but then I saw it was one of the leads. I was like, “Oh my God, he’s seeing auditions for a lead role? That’s insane. I’m going to deliver the best that I can, but what can I do that’s going to be different than everyone else?”So what was your take on the character?The initial audition was just three pages of simple dialogue of this dude working at an electronics store: “Hi, I can help you over here. Would you like an account with us?” It was very happy, very up. And I was like, “Hmm, you don’t see that when you go into an electronics store. The employees do not want to be there.” So, I played it that way, sent the tape off into the universe, and two weeks later I got a callback to meet with Jordan on Zoom.How did you feel?I was excited, humbled, nervous. I was like, “Man, I’m just happy to meet the dude. If I get the role, great, but also, I’m happy with where I got.” But then I had people around me that were like, “No, dog. Ask, believe, receive. This is your job and you’re going to get this.” And my roommate at the time introduced me to some Steve Harvey motivational videos and that really helped, because that got my confidence way up.I went in with this energy that was like, “I’m not here to audition, it’s a work session. I’m going to set. I’m not here to beg for the job.” And I acted like I already knew Jordan, because I had watched so many of his interviews to prep — I was like, “Yo, what’s good, J.P.? How we doing?” Just very comfortable and not like, “Hello, Mr. Peele, how are you?”Perea said the dialogue he was handed for his “Nope” audition depicted Angel as a happy, up worker. “I was like, ‘Hmm, you don’t see that when you go into an electronics store. The employees do not want to be there.’” Victor Llorente for The New York TimesYou were bringing colleague energy rather than fan energy.Yeah, exactly, and after it was over, I was so proud that I cried. I was alone on my couch, just like, “Man, I don’t even care if I get the job, he’ll book me one day.” And two days later, my reps reach out and they’re like, “Hey, are you free for an improv session this afternoon with Jordan?” I go in the Zoom call and Jordan’s like, “The thing is, the character you brought to the table is far different than what I wrote for. So, I need to see you do it some more ways, because I’d have to rewrite my entire script to cast you in this thing.”I’m like, “Damn, I’m probably out of the job.” And he was like, “You know what? That’s what I’m going to do. Yeah, I’m going to rewrite my script.” I was like, “What?” He was like, “Yeah, man. You got the job.” Boom, instant tears. I started going on a whole spiel: “Man, with Hollywood stuff, you get beat down — it’s a roller coaster full of ups and downs. Thank you for trusting me. You go through a million nos to get one yes, and I’d go through a billion to get this one.” And Jordan started crying as well. I remember him removing his glasses just like, “You got me, man, you got me.”That’s the tricky thing about being a working actor, I’d expect: You can continue to deliver knockout auditions, but you never know if you’re exactly what they’re looking for.It took a while, but I’m so glad I didn’t get the other jobs that I thought I needed and wanted so much. “Nope” came along at the perfect time because now I’m here and I’m prepared. There’s a lot of pieces missing that I really had to learn in life, not just as an actor or as an artist.What would have happened if you booked something like this right on the heels of “The OA”?I just wouldn’t have handled success the best, I think. At that time, I probably would have let it steer me away more from the art form just to get some money grabs or a big following. There was a popular TV show I thought I was close to booking, but I think my intentions were in the wrong place, where I was like, “Oh man, I can get a lot of viewers and young people to be on my side.” I wasn’t looking at it like, “I love this character, I really want to deliver in this series.” So I’m glad there was a no on that front, because it’s a very viral show and — —Was it “Euphoria”?Ooh, you guessed it. You’re good. But everything happens for a reason, and I had to learn that.So Jordan cast you. Then what?It was just an emotional roller coaster right after that — like, “Phew, now I have to go do the job and deliver.” And there was so much mystery. There was no synopsis, I had no clue what the hell I was about to do. On the day I got the movie, Jordan sent me a movie list of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Jaws,” “Alien,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “No Country for Old Men.” I was like, “OK, this is a random-ass list of movies. What’s he conjuring up? How does all this stuff connect?” And then a little while later, I get a text message from him being like, “Merry Christmas,” and he sent me a link to the script.”I remember reading it, being like, “Oh my gosh, no one’s going to expect this from Jordan.” And I did not know who the cast was, either, but he just started texting me random hints — he sent me “D.K.,” and I was like, “D.K., Daniel Kaluuya?” We’d even had a little conversation about Kaluuya because I took a nugget from watching his YouTube interviews, where a director gave him a note to never play the funny, always play the truth.Perea said he learned he got the job directly from Peele during a meeting. His reaction? “Boom, instant tears.” Victor Llorente for The New York TimesAfter watching so many videos of Daniel Kaluuya, what happens when you’re actually acting opposite him?The first time that we all met in person was the first time that we met on-screen. I was a stranger to him and Keke, and they already had their bond, so I was like, “Let me play this to my advantage. I’m just going to play Angel throughout, then I’ll say what’s up after.” And that’s what we did. The beats are awkward, and I’m challenging Daniel because he’s giving me eyes. I remember hearing him say to Keke, “My eyes see everything.” So I wasn’t breaking eye contact with him — it was hard nose vs. hard nose. I was like, “I’m here with you.”You posted a video of your emotional reaction to seeing the “Nope” billboard for the first time. What does it mean for you to be on those billboards and posters?My intention when I was younger was just, “I want to be on a billboard.” I wasn’t looking at it from a more complex, deeper meaning. But if you really look at the billboard for “Nope” and dissect it, it’s like, “Wow, I’m on a billboard, but I’m a Filipino Puerto Rican kid sharing this poster with Asian representation, Black representation and a Black director in a big spectacle film.” Man, I’m glad it took this long, because now I appreciate this privilege. Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Jordan Peele — I’m working with some of the best to be doing it right now. I am the new kid on the block, so the fact that I get to share a poster with all those people? I’m very grateful that they trusted me. More

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      ‘We Met in Virtual Reality’ Review: Home Sweet Home

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      This innovative documentary tags along with people who are finding happiness in a graphical online world.Joe Hunting’s “We Met in Virtual Reality” is the rare documentary shot entirely within an online world. It surveys the sort of space — specifically, a platform called VRChat — where people hang out “in person” as avatars of their choice. It’s a place of acceptance and social ease, and while it might not look as mind-bending as the fantasy realms portrayed in science fiction, it’s clearly no less liberating.Cannily conceived as an observational documentary, the movie tags along with a few regulars and also tracks a couple of relationships. The activities include chatting at a bar, learning belly-dancing or sign language in a class, going on a dinosaur safari, and vibing to music at a club. Despite the virtual setting, the locales lean into bodily endeavors, as well as special occasions that foster community, like a birthday or a wedding.The avatars tend to have anime-character physiques, lovingly (and sometimes bodaciously) self-fashioned. The animated landscape can be mildly trippy in its lo-fi glitchiness, and amusing: At one point the point-of-view pans to reveal that a voice we’re hearing comes from a Kermit the Frog look-alike.The prevailing mood is sweet and affectionately dorky. But again and again we hear how life-changing VR can be, creating a sanctuary for recovery (from depression, alcoholism, grief) and acceptance (for nonbinary visitors, for example, and for people of all abilities).Hunting’s documentary catches up with where many people are finding their dreams realized, and understands that sometimes the dream is simply to be yourself.We Met in Virtual RealityNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      Rediscovering Australia’s Generation of Defiant Female Directors

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      Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Essie Coffey and others had waited years to tell their stories, as a Museum of the Moving Image series shows.In the opening moments of Gillian Armstrong’s debut feature, “My Brilliant Career” (1979), a freckled, tawny-haired young woman stands in the doorway of her house in the Australian outback and declares: “Dear countrymen, a few lines to let you know that this story is going to be all about me.” The woman is Sybylla, played by a fiery, young Judy Davis, and she dreams of a long, fruitful career as a writer — love, marriage, motherhood and all of society’s other expectations be damned.Sybylla’s words might as well have been the rallying cry for a whole generation of Australia’s female filmmakers, who had waited for years to tell their own stories. Their defiant and eclectic body of work is the subject of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema, a fascinating series that opened last week at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, N.Y.“My Brilliant Career,” which shot Armstrong into global prominence, was the first feature to be directed by an Australian woman in more than 40 years. In 1933, “Two Minutes Silence,” the fourth and final feature by the three McDonagh sisters — Isabel, Phyllis and Paulette — had closed out a brief but booming era of early Australian cinema in which women had been active as producers and directors. (The MoMI series includes the 1929 film “The Cheaters,” the only feature by the McDonagh sisters for which a print still exists.)The intervening decades had drastically shrunk not just opportunities for women interested in film, but the scope of Australian cinema itself. Stiff competition from Hollywood and the ravages of World War II had more or less shuttered the country’s film industry by the 1960s. Government initiatives to subsidize production and establish a national film school eventually spurred a rebirth in the 1970s. The Australian new wave, as this resurgence came to be called, thrust antipodean cinema onto the world stage with stylized, maverick films like Bruce Beresford’s “The Adventures of Barry McKenzie,” Fred Schepisi’s “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” and George Miller’s “Mad Max.”Tracey Moffatt in “BeDevil,” a horror anthology she also directed.Women Make MoviesThe new wave was a male-dominated movement, with many of the films flaunting a grisly, macho vision of Australian culture; Armstrong often stood out as the sole female exception. But “My Brilliant Career” also represented the beginning of another kind of renaissance in Australian cinema — one led by women. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s, a number of women directed landmark films across genres, introducing rousing new feminist narratives to the Australian screen.“My Brilliant Career” is one of many firsts in the aptly named MoMI series, which was curated by the programmer and critic Michelle Carey. These include Essie Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal” (1978), often hailed as the first documentary to be directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman; the dystopian lesbian heist film “On Guard” (1984), written and directed by Susan Lambert and believed by some to be the first Australian film made with an all-women crew; and Tracey Moffatt’s rollicking three-part horror anthology, “BeDevil” (1993), regarded as the first feature to be directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman. Then there’s “Sweetie” (1989), the oddball black comedy that was the debut feature of Jane Campion, who would go on to make “The Piano” (1993), the first film by a woman to win a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.This flurry of breakthroughs resulted from two intersecting developments: the creation of state film institutions like the Australian Film Television and Radio School and the Australian Film Commission in the 1970s; and campaigns by women’s and Aboriginal groups to demand policies that would ensure fair access to these public resources. Armstrong was part of the inaugural class of 12 at the school, whose graduates also include Campion and her “Sweetie” cinematographer Sally Bongers, as well as Jocelyn Moorhouse, who produced the 1994 crossover hit “Muriel’s Wedding.” “Proof,” Moorhouse’s disarmingly mordant feature debut as a director, is part of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema.While state support helped nurture a fledgling mainstream industry, it proved crucial in the development of a feminist documentary and experimental film tradition in Australia, which benefited greatly from the commission’s Women’s Film Fund. “On Guard” is a striking example. Lambert’s hourlong movie follows a group of lesbians who scheme to destroy the data held by a multinational company, U.T.E.R.O., which they suspect is performing illegal reproductive experiments on women. A kind of Aussie sister-film to Lizzie Borden’s 1983 cult classic, “Born in Flames,” “On Guard” subverts patriarchal control in both form and narrative. Told in short, sleek fragments, the film strips the heist thriller of all its usual machinations and violence, instead dwelling on the everyday struggles of its heroines — be it with child care, domestic division of labor or living an openly gay life.Essie Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal” serves as both a manifesto and an heirloom for her descendants.Ballad FilmsMoffatt’s movies similarly reimagine cultural and film tropes, but through the lenses of gender and race. The short film “Nice Coloured Girls” uses clever juxtapositions of image, voice and text to turn a wily story about three Aboriginal women who seduce and scam white men into a historical meditation on the power plays between early settlers and the women’s ancestors. This theme of colonial haunting is expanded with raucous invention in Moffatt’s “BeDevil,” which draws on Aboriginal folklore to tell a series of modern-day gothic tales. Tracing lines between past and present evils — colonialism, gentrification, cultural appropriation — with an irreverent and experimental approach to editing and sound, “BeDevil” refashions Australian history as a deeply unsettling ghost story. Like many films in the MoMI series, “BeDevil” feels startlingly ahead of its time.As does Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal,” despite its simple and straightforward documentary structure. Made one year before “My Brilliant Career” — and no less seminal than that film in inspiring an entire tradition of filmmakers — “My Survival” is both a personal manifesto by Coffey and an heirloom for her descendants. Coffey speaks bluntly, straight into the camera, of the violence suffered by her people, the Muruwari, at the hands of white settlers. Then she sets out with the camera, brusque and determined, to ensure that her heritage is preserved and passed down to future generations. She teaches the local children the traditional skills of her people — hunting, gathering, surviving in the bush — and laments that their education has left them without this essential cultural knowledge. At the end, Coffey declares, “I’m going to lead my own life, me and my family, and live off the land. I will not live a white-man way and that’s straight from me, Essie Coffey.”Between Sybylla’s fictional “this story is going to be all about me” in “My Brilliant Career” and Coffey’s raw and real “I’m going to lead my own life,” a whole history of Australian women’s cinema was born.“Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema” runs through Aug. 14 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Go to movingimage.us for more information. More

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      B.J. Novak Went to Texas Looking for ‘Vengeance’ and Found America

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      A funny story that B.J. Novak likes to tell from the making of his new movie is about the day he thought he was having a stroke. Are you chuckling yet?At the start of 2020, Novak, a writer, comedian and alumnus of “The Office,” had finally gotten the green light to make “Vengeance,” a dark comedy set in small-town Texas. That’s when he thought he was slurring his speech and called a colleague to ask if he was noticing it, too.As Novak recalled, “I was like, you hear that, don’t you? And he said, I do. And I called my doctor and went in the next morning for an M.R.I., and they said you’re fine, and I realized I’m terrified to make this movie.”Like a lot of the humor that appeals to Novak — whose symptoms, rest assured, were completely psychosomatic — what’s funny about this story is a matter of perspective. You can laugh at it in relief, when you know the person telling it is no longer in danger.This is a theme that comes up frequently in “Vengeance,” which blends some of the awkward cringe comedy that “The Office” was famous for with a knowing, cynical sharpness that would never fly in the hallways of Dunder Mifflin.The film, which opens Friday, is Novak’s debut as a feature director and screenwriter, and he stars in it as Ben Manalowitz, a self-assured New York writer. When Ben learns that a woman he dated casually — very casually — has died under hazy circumstances in her Texas hometown, he travels there in hopes of turning the story into a hit podcast.Though Ben arrives with selfish motives and a stereotypical sense of red-state values, he grows enamored of the dead woman’s family (played by Boyd Holbrook, J. Smith-Cameron, Isabella Amara and Dove Cameron, among others). His investigation also leads him to an astute record producer (Ashton Kutcher) who exerts an ominous influence over the town.Boyd Holbrook, left, with Novak in a scene from the new film “Vengeance.”Patti Perret/Focus FeaturesFor Novak, “Vengeance” is an ambitious attempt to step out of his sitcom comfort zone and see if he can make it as an Albert Brooks-like leading man. As he said of his acting résumé, which has included small roles in “Inglourious Basterds” and other films, “I’m very much a reaction-shot guy. I’ve never been a point-of-view character.”“Vengeance” is also one of a small number of original comedies that will receive a theatrical release, and getting it made required a level of commitment that Novak had never expected.“I really felt like a madman on the corner,” he said. “I’m going to star in this movie, and it’s a comedy but also a thriller but also a love story. But it’s also about how technology does this to us. I really thought I was nuts, but I kept going.”One afternoon in June, Novak was relaxing in the patio of a hotel in downtown Manhattan, where he’d presented “Vengeance” at the Tribeca Festival. For the first time in several months, Novak said, “I haven’t been under some terrible cloud of writing and editing and fighting. I really like it.”Face to face, Novak, who turns 43 on July 31, comes across as easygoing and effortlessly humorous. Describing his life as a Boston-area transplant now residing in Los Angeles, he said, “Everyone in L.A. assumes I live in New York, which I take to mean: You’re Jewish, right? Or, I haven’t seen you in a while.”But there’s an intensity that colors all his anecdotes about “Vengeance,” whose central premise he had been kicking around for several years.“We live in divided times, quote-unquote, because we communicate completely on our own timelines,” he said. “It was from my experience dating and being a somewhat shallow person who didn’t really know what he was missing until it was too late.”Novak added, “Every year that went by, it became a more topical film, which I didn’t ever intend it to be.”Novak, concerned about starring in the film as well as directing, had a panic attack before shooting started.Erik Tanner for The New York TimesBetween 2015 and 2018, Novak said, he took research trips to Texas cities like Abilene and Pecos, seeking to dispel his misconceptions about a part of the country he assumed would be unwelcoming.“I thought that these huge dudes with beards and pickup trucks would be very suspicious of a Hollywood blue-state guy, and I found the exact opposite,” he said. “It’s the warmest culture I ever found. I went to Easter dinners and people would show me the poetry they had written.”Novak returned from his travels with the foundation for what would become “Vengeance,” and with the intention that he would play the lead. “I wrote the role to be impossible to cast with anyone but me,” he said. “You know, superficial with a possible hidden heart, blah blah blah.”Though the movie can be equally scathing in its satirical treatment of snobbish urbanites and credulous country folk, Novak said that the “Vengeance” screenplay benefited from lessons he learned while working on “The Office.”In particular, he said the sitcom taught him “the confidence to throw away your best joke if it didn’t feel authentic or damaged the character long-term — if you play an emotional moment honestly, the laugh will be more satisfying later.”That said, Novak also had to remind himself it was OK to depict his “Vengeance” character with some positive attributes — an approach he would have never taken at “The Office,” on which he, Mindy Kaling, Paul Lieberstein and other writers portrayed its supporting miscreants.On that show, Novak said, “We were too shy to pitch anything redeeming, so we played the least redeeming characters. We were all allergic to that in the writers’ room.”The cast for “Vengeance” grew to include Issa Rae, who plays a podcast producer Ben is hoping to impress; the singer-songwriter John Mayer, who plays one of Ben’s self-centered New York friends; and Kutcher, who previously employed Novak as an on-camera accomplice for his MTV prank series, “Punk’D.”Kutcher said he was particularly impressed with a long monologue that his character delivered, about people who seem to care less about the lives they lead than the digital records of them that they leave behind.“When you look at human behavior, and the obsessive nature of chasing that dopamine hit from posting every moment we think is interesting or cool or funny, you realize his theory has merit,” Kutcher said.Also, Kutcher said, he appreciated that Novak was open to letting him play his character with a mustache. “I just saw him having a mustache. I don’t know why,” Kutcher said.But as production moved forward, Novak became increasingly anxious about feeling that he had to carry the movie as the leading man, setting off his panic attack. It was in this time that he reached out to Mayer for what Novak described as “handsomeness coaching.”Mayer has been a longtime friend of Novak’s, dating to “The Office.” (In an email, Mayer explained that he allowed the show to use his song “Your Body Is a Wonderland” in return for a Dundie Award.)Mayer said he could not remember all the suggestions he offered Novak, but one of them was to give up alcohol before he started shooting. “First and foremost, you have to put drinking away,” Mayer said. “I know people wince just hearing that stuff. But that’s the truth.”He continued, “I think I mentioned getting the right haircut, basic stuff. But how sweet and vulnerable is that, for B.J. to ask before filming what advice I could give him?”Novak had to remind himself it was OK to depict his “Vengeance” character with some positive attributes — an approach he would have never taken at “The Office.”Erik Tanner for The New York TimesA few weeks into filming, production was suspended for several months because of the pandemic. At times Novak found himself juggling duties on the film and his FX on Hulu anthology series “The Premise.”“I filmed the FX show and then I went back to filming ‘Vengeance,’” he started to say, then corrected himself. “No, I was editing ‘Vengeance’ while I was writing. It was a mess, and I had Covid.”“I took extra time, because I was writing poorly and editing poorly because my brain was bad for a few weeks,” he said. “They were both going badly at various points because I couldn’t balance them and I thought I could.”Now “Vengeance” arrives in theaters on the heels of the blockbusters “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Jurassic World Dominion” and “Thor: Love and Thunder,” at a time when many other low-budget comedies and dramas about more earthbound matters are being released directly to streaming platforms.Jason Blum, the chief executive of Blumhouse, one of the companies that produced “Vengeance,” said the film could have just as easily received a streaming release.“I can’t tell you we didn’t contemplate that during the pandemic,” he said. “We contemplated every possible distribution outlet, ever.”But, Blum said, his company has had success with films from writer-directors who blended comedy and thriller genres, like Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” and he was hopeful that “Vengeance” might find a similar lane.“This movie is exactly the kind of movie that people say they want to see,” Blum said. “If it does well, it’ll open a path to put other original movies in theaters, too, not just movies based on existing intellectual property.”For Novak, the theatrical release is an opportunity to show “Vengeance” to the same people he hopes it captures, and to determine if they appreciate how he has depicted them.“I really want Texans to like it,” he said. “I wanted to make this Texans’ favorite movie. I even put a Whataburger in it. I remember seeing Dunkin’ Donuts in ‘Good Will Hunting.’ As a Bostonian, you just felt so seen.” More

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      Study Shows Disability Representation Onscreen Is Increasing, but Still Falls Short

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      The study published Tuesday also showed that television continues to lag behind film when it comes to representation of characters with disabilities.“CODA,” a film about the hearing child of deaf parents, won this year’s Academy Award for best picture, and one of its stars, Troy Kotsur, became the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar when he took home the award for best supporting actor. Lauren Ridloff became the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first deaf superhero in “Eternals.” The Hulu mystery-comedy series “Only Murders in the Building” won acclaim for an almost entirely silent episode that highlighted the perspective of a deaf character (played by James Caverly).Even with these prominent examples of disability representation onscreen, relative to the approximately 26 percent of adults in the United States who have a physical or psychological disability, representation continued to lag behind, a new study released Tuesday by Nielsen found. The report, whose release was timed to the 32nd anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, analyzed the representation of disabled characters on film and TV shows released from 1918 to 2022.The titles came from a Nielsen database that included about 164,000 films and TV shows that premiered over the past century. Of those, about 4.2 percent, or 6,895 titles, were tagged as having significant disability themes or content.Disability inclusion was highest, the study found, in 2019, when 518 productions with disability themes were released.Across the board in this year’s report, films again fared better than television — of the 6,895 titles that featured significant disability themes or content, about 59 percent (4,066) were feature films, and 18 percent (1,209) were regular series. (The remaining depictions were in other categories like short films, limited series, TV movies or specials.)Those numbers represent a slight shift toward television from last year, when a Nielsen report showed that 64 percent of depictions of disabled characters were in feature films, and 16 percent were in regular television series.A survey of more than 2,000 smartphone users on disability representation in media conducted in the first quarter of 2022 also found that people with disabilities were much more likely to take issue with portrayals of disabled characters. Viewers with disabilities were 34 percent more likely to say there was not enough representation of their identity group in media, and they were 52 percent more likely than those who did not identify as having a disability to characterize a TV portrayal of their identity group as inaccurate.Lauren Appelbaum, a vice president at RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization that participated in the Nielsen study last year, told The Times then that though the number of disabled characters continued to increase, approximately 95 percent of those roles were still portrayed by actors who did not have disabilities.But there have also been positive representations, as on the HBO series “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” which features a character who uses a wheelchair (played by Lauren Spencer, known as Lolo), a confident student who attends the show’s iconic nude party. Alaqua Cox also won acclaim for her performance as Maya Lopez/Echo, a deaf Cheyenne woman who has the ability to imitate other people’s movements, in the Disney+ series “Hawkeye.” More

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      Paul Sorvino, Master of the Mild-Mannered Mobster, Dies at 83

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      A would-be singing star, he found success in Hollywood playing a variety of roles, but they were often quiet, dangerous men, like Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas.”Paul Sorvino, the tough-guy actor — and operatic tenor and figurative sculptor — known for his roles as calm and often courteously quiet but dangerous men in films like “Goodfellas” and television shows like “Law & Order,” died on Monday. He was 83. His publicist, Roger Neal, confirmed the death, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. No specific cause was given, but Mr. Neal said that Mr. Sorvino “had dealt with health issues over the past few years.”Mr. Sorvino was the father of Mira Sorvino, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995). In her acceptance speech, she said her father had “taught me everything I know about acting.”“Goodfellas” (1990), Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed Mafia epic, came along when Mr. Sorvino was 50 and decades into his film career. His character, Paulie Cicero, was a local mob boss — lumbering, soft-spoken and ice-cold.“Paulie might have moved slow,” says Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, his neighborhood protégé in the film, “but it was only because he didn’t have to move for nobody.” (Mr. Liotta died in May at 67.)Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role because he couldn’t fully connect emotionally, he told the comedian Jon Stewart, who interviewed a panel of “Goodfellas” alumni at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. When you “find the spine” of a character, Mr. Sorvino said, “it makes all the decisions for you.”Mr. Sorvino with Ray Liotta in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s mob epic “Goodfellas” in 1990. Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role.That didn’t happen, he recalled, until one day when he was adjusting his necktie, looked in the mirror and saw something in his own eyes. When he saw what he called “that lethal Paulie look,” Mr. Sorvino told The Lowcountry Weekly, a South Carolina publication, in 2019, “I knew at that moment I had embraced my inner mob boss.”He had made his mark onstage as a very different but perhaps equally soulless character in “That Championship Season” (1972), Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tragicomedy about the sad reunion of high school basketball players whose glory days are decades past. In the original Broadway production, Mr. Sorvino played Phil Romano, a small-town strip-mining millionaire arrogantly having an affair with the mayor’s wife.Mr. Sorvino received a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a play and reprised the role in a 1982 film adaptation.Paul Sorvino (1939-2022)The tough-guy actor, who was best known for his role as the mobster Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas,” died at 83.Obituary: A would-be opera singer, Paul Sorvino found success in Hollywood playing quiet but dangerous men.Remembering ‘Goodfellas’: In 2015, we asked the cast to reflect on the film’s production 25 years later. Here’s what Mr. Sorvino recalled.An Operatic Soul: “Singing allows me to be me,” Mr. Sorvino told The Times ahead of his New York City Opera debut in 2006.Paul Anthony Sorvino was born on April 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, the youngest of three sons of Fortunato Sorvino, known as Ford, and Marietta (Renzi) Sorvino, a homemaker and piano teacher. The elder Mr. Sorvino, a robe-factory foreman, was born in Naples, Italy, and emigrated to New York with his parents in 1907.Paul grew up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and attended Lafayette High School. His original career dream was to sing — he idolized the Italian American tenor and actor Mario Lanza — and he began taking voice lessons when he was 8 years old or so.In the late 1950s, he began performing at Catskills resorts and charity events. In 1963, he received his Actors Equity card as a chorus member in “South Pacific” and “The Student Prince” at the Theater at Westbury on Long Island. That same year, he began studying drama at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York.Acting jobs were elusive. Mr. Sorvino’s Broadway debut, in the chorus of the musical “Bajour” (1964), lasted almost seven months, but his next show, the comedy “Mating Dance” (1965), starring Van Johnson, closed on opening night.Mr. Sorvino worked as a waiter and a bartender, sold cars, taught acting to children and appeared in commercials for deodorant and tomato sauce. After his first child, Mira, was born, he wrote advertising copy for nine months, but the office job gave him an ulcer.“Most of the time I was just another out-of-work actor who couldn’t get arrested,” he told The New York Times in 1972. “I had confidence in my ability, and I was angry as hell when other people didn’t recognize it.”Mr. Sorvino, second from left, with other cast members of “That Championship Season,” which started Off Broadway before moving to Broadway. With him, from left, were Walter McGinn, Richard Dysart, Michael McGuire and Charles Durning.Leo FriedmanThen his luck changed. He made his film debut in “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), a dark comedy directed by Carl Reiner, in a small role as a retirement-home owner. Then “That Championship Season” came along, starting with the Off Broadway production at the Public Theater.The film role that first won him major attention was as Joseph Bologna’s grouchy Italian American father in “Made for Each Other” (1971). Mr. Sorvino, almost five years younger than Mr. Bologna, wore old-age makeup for the role.He appeared next as a New Yorker robbed by a prostitute in “The Panic in Needle Park” (1972) but did not fall victim to the cops-and-gangsters stereotype right away. In 1973. he was George Segal’s movie-producer friend in “A Touch of Class” and a mysterious government agent in “The Day of the Dolphin.”Mr. Sorvino later played an egotistic, money-hungry evangelist with a Southern accent in the comedy “Oh, God!” (1977) and God Himself in “The Devil’s Carnival” (2012) and its 2015 sequel. He was a down-to-earth newspaper reporter in love with a ballerina in “Slow Dancing in the Big City” (1978). In “Reds” (1981), he was a passionate Russian American Communist leader just before the Bolshevik Revolution.Mr. Sorvino in 2000 with castmates in “Law and Order.” With him, from left, were Chris Noth, Michael Moriarty and Richard Brooks.NBCHe was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, complete with German accent, in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995). And he played Fulgencio Capulet, Juliet’s intense father with an ancient grudge, in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996).But in a half-century screen career, Mr. Sovino’s characters were often on the wrong side of the law. He played, among others, Chubby de Coco (“Bloodbrothers,” 1978), Lips Manlis (“Dick Tracy,” 1980), Big Mike Cicero (“How Sweet It Is,” 2013), Jimmy Scambino (“Sicilian Vampire,” 2015) and Fat Tony Salerno (“Kill the Irishman,” 2011).And in at least 20 roles, he played law officers with titles like detective, captain or chief. For one season (1991-92), he was Sgt. Phil Cerreta on NBC’s “Law & Order,” but he found the shooting schedule too demanding — and difficult on his voice.Mr. Sorvino continued to sing professionally, making his City Opera debut in Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” in 2006.His personal life sometimes reinforced his tough-guy image. Most recently, in 2018, when the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was on trial for criminal sexual acts — and Mira Sorvino had accused him of harassment — Mr. Sorvino predicted that Mr. Weinstein would die in jail. “Because if not, he has to meet me, and I will kill the [expletive deleted] — real simple,” Mr. Sorvino said in a widely aired video interview. Four months later, Mr. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison.Mr. Sorvino’s final screen roles were in 2019. He played a corrupt senator in “Welcome to Acapulco,” a spy-comedy film, and the crime boss Frank Costello in the Epix series “Godfather of Harlem.” Mr. Sorvino with his daughter Mira Sorvino in 2007. Kathleen Voege/Associated PressHe married Lorraine Davis, an actress, in 1966, and they had three children before divorcing in 1988. Mr. Sorvino’s second wife, from 1991 until their 1996 divorce, was Vanessa Arico, a real estate agent. He married Dee Dee Benkie, a Republican political strategist, in 2014.Mr. Sorvino began making bronze sculpture in the 1970s and considered his nonperforming arts work particularly satisfying. “That’s why I prefer it,” he told The Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, in 2005. “No one really tells you how to finish something.”“Acting onstage is like doing sculpture,” he said. “Acting in movies is like being an assistant to the sculptor.”Mr. Sorvino is survived by his wife, Dee Dee Sorvino; three children, Mira, Amanda, and Michael; and five grandchildren.Johnny Diaz More

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      Bob Rafelson, Director of ‘Five Easy Pieces,’ Dies at 89

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      A central figure in the New Hollywood movement, he was also the co-creator of the TV pop group the Monkees and featured it in a movie, “Head.”Bob Rafelson, an iconoclastic director and producer who was a central figure of the New Hollywood movement that jump-started American cinema in the wake of the 1960s counterculture upheavals, died on Saturday at his home in Aspen, Colo. He was 89.He had lung cancer, his wife, Gabrielle Taurek Rafelson, said in confirming the death.As a director, Mr. Rafelson was best known for “Five Easy Pieces,” his melancholic 1970 road movie about a classical pianist, played by Jack Nicholson, who spurns the bourgeois life to drift through California working as an oil rigger.Nominated for four Academy Awards, the film embodied the era’s downbeat, anti-establishment ethos and cemented Mr. Nicholson’s position as a Hollywood leading man.More than a filmmaker, Mr. Rafelson was also a skilled navigator of the rapidly shifting pop-culture and media landscapes of the 1960s. For a television series he co-created the pop group the Monkees and later featured it in the subversive feature film “Head” (1968), Mr. Rafelson’s directing debut.Looking to the cinematic new waves that had galvanized younger filmmakers and audiences in France, Japan and elsewhere, he saw an opportunity for a similar renaissance in the United States, where the old studio system was in disarray.In 1965, with his friend and business partner Bert Schneider, Mr. Rafelson established Raybert, a Los Angeles production house that they envisioned as a breeding ground for up-and-coming risk-takers. “I said to Bert that I felt America had extraordinary talent, but that we lacked the talent to appreciate that talent,” Mr. Rafelson told the entertainment site The A.V. Club in 2010.Raybert became BBS Productions with the addition of another partner, Steve Blauner, and the trio scored an outsize success with Dennis Hopper’s generation-defining “Easy Rider” (1969), which recouped more than 100 times its budget at the box office.Mr. Rafelson and Jack Nicholson on location during the filming of “Five Easy Pieces,” Mr. Rafelson’s best-known film.Bettmann via Getty ImagesDespite producing eight films in its seven-year existence, BBS was an influential model of artistic and economic independence. A trailblazing company that doubled as a cool-kid clubhouse for what was also called the American New Wave, BBS remains today a romanticized symbol of the freedom once permissible at the edges of Hollywood.Robert Rafelson was born on Feb. 21, 1933, in New York City. His father was a hat manufacturer who expected his sons to enter the family business. But Mr. Rafelson found inspiration in his uncle, the screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who worked with the director Ernst Lubitsch on many films, including “Trouble in Paradise” and “The Shop Around the Corner.”Rebelling against his comfortable Upper West Side upbringing, Mr. Rafelson left home as a teenager to work at a rodeo in Arizona and to play with a jazz band in Acapulco, Mexico. He returned to the U.S. to study philosophy at Dartmouth College and on graduation was drafted into the Army. He served in Japan, working as a D.J. for the Far East Network of military radio and television stations. He was court-martialed twice, once for striking an officer and once for uttering an obscenity on the air.Mr. Rafelson, an avid moviegoer as a child, had been exposed to foreign films at a young age, and while in Tokyo he worked as a consultant for the Japanese studio Shochiku. Back in New York, he got his start as a story editor on the “Play of the Week” TV anthology series.After moving to Los Angeles in 1962 with his first wife, Toby Carr, a production designer, he continued to work in television, but the strictures of the format were a poor fit for his ambitions and eclectic tastes.He lost his job at a television arm of Universal Pictures when he got into an argument with the Hollywood titan Lew Wasserman over a casting choice. Mr. Rafelson knocked everything on Mr. Wasserman’s desk to the floor and was escorted off the premises.At Screen Gems, then the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, he met Mr. Schneider, a kindred spirit whose father, Abraham, was a top Columbia executive. The two well-connected young producers sought to capitalize on the success of Beatlemania with a show about an invented pop group. Their ads seeking “4 insane boys, 17-21” yielded the Monkees, and the heartthrobs became bona fide chart-toppers.While the group continued to record and perform, the series, which aired on NBC and won two Emmy Awards, lasted only two seasons, from 1966 to 1968.The promotional poster for the film “Head,” starring the Monkees, a group Mr. Rafelson helped create for a television series.Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesMr. Rafelson and Mr. Schneider bid a perverse farewell to the project with the self-reflexive feature “Head,” which expanded on the concept of the band as “a manufactured image with no philosophies,” as the movie’s rewrite of the Monkees’ theme song put it. With Mr. Schneider as executive producer, Mr. Rafelson co-wrote the script with Mr. Nicholson, who was then a B-movie actor as well as the writer of the psychedelic Roger Corman film “The Trip” (1967).A freewheeling media satire full of visual tricks and topical references to the Vietnam War and the media guru Marshall McLuhan, “Head” tanked at the box office. But the success of the Monkees allowed BBS to bankroll Mr. Hopper’s “Easy Rider,” in which Mr. Hopper and Peter Fonda played road-tripping bikers who, as the tag line put it, “went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere.”“Easy Rider” landed BBS a six-picture deal at Columbia Pictures that gave the partners final cut and a 50-50 split on profits, provided they kept budgets under $1 million. The company set up an office on North La Brea Avenue, and it became “a hangout for a ragtag band of filmmakers and radicals of various stripes,” as Peter Biskind described it in his New Hollywood chronicle “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.”BBS followed “Easy Rider” with Mr. Rafelson’s second feature as director, “Five Easy Pieces,” which had its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1970. With Mr. Nicholson as Bobby, an alienated antihero who flees his patrician clan, along with its famously ambiguous ending, the film came to be enshrined as a touchstone of ’70s American cinema. Written by Carole Eastman from a story by Mr. Rafelson, “Five Easy Pieces” is perhaps his most personal film.Its themes — American self-invention, the traps of family and class — would recur throughout Mr. Rafelson’s films, including another BBS production, “The King of Marvin Gardens” (1972), a story of two estranged brothers, played by Mr. Nicholson and Bruce Dern, in Atlantic City. Mr. Rafelson’s working relationship with Mr. Nicholson would span four decades.True to the spirit of the times, BBS functioned as a collective of sorts: Mr. Nicholson, Mr. Dern and Karen Black appeared in multiple BBS films; the cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs shot several of them.The company also produced Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” (1971), which was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and the first features by Henry Jaglom (“A Safe Place”) and Mr. Nicholson (“Drive, He Said”).Outside his BBS endeavors, Mr. Rafelson was an uncredited producer on “The Mother and the Whore,” a classic of 1970s French cinema by Jean Eustache.After winning an Oscar for the Vietnam War documentary “Hearts and Minds” (1974), BBS ceased operations, as Mr. Schneider shifted his focus to political activism and Mr. Rafelson to directing.Mr. Rafelson during the filming of “Five Easy Pieces.”Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty ImagesWhile his later films never matched the acclaim of “Five Easy Pieces,” many of them were instrumental in launching or relaunching acting careers. The cast for his 1976 bodybuilding comedy “Stay Hungry” included Sally Field, then known only as a TV star, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first significant role.Mr. Rafelson’s 1981 remake of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” — which featured the first screenplay by David Mamet — helped revive Jessica Lange’s career, which was floundering after her panned debut in “King Kong.”Even by the standards of New Hollywood — a scene dominated by self-styled bad boys and hotheads — Mr. Rafelson had his share of notable blowups.“I was one of those guys that took on all comers,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997. Some of his outbursts came with a price; he was fired from the prison drama “Brubaker” a few days into the shoot for getting into a physical altercation with a studio executive.Mr. Rafelson worked across a range of genres. His films include the erotic thriller “Black Widow” (1987), with Debra Winger and Theresa Russell, and the old-fashioned adventure epic “Mountains of the Moon” (1990), about the Victorian-era explorer Richard Francis Burton, a childhood hero of Mr. Rafelson.He teamed again with Mr. Nicholson and Ms. Eastman, his co-writer for “Five Easy Pieces,” for the 1992 romantic comedy “Man Trouble.” Mr. Nicholson also appeared in Mr. Rafelson’s 1996 heist movie “Blood and Wine.”In his later years, Mr. Rafelson lived full time in Aspen.Besides his wife, he is survived by a son, Peter, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; and two sons, E.O. and Harper, from his second. His daughter, Julie, died of injuries from a gas stove explosion in 1973Mr. Rafelson’s final film was the 2002 neo-noir “No Good Deed,” based on a Dashiell Hammett short story.Even after he retired from moviemaking, he was often called upon to reminisce about the mythic days of the New Hollywood. In a 2010 video interview for a DVD box of BBS titles, Mr. Rafelson described BBS as “a company that could go out and say, all right, now let’s get the maddest creatures we can find on the planet.”He added: “They turned out to be some really first-grade wackos.”Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      Marvel Studios Unveils ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’

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      The studio announced news of the film’s release on Saturday at the pop-culture convention Comic-Con International in San Diego.Marvel Studios has unveiled a trailer for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — the long-awaited sequel to its hit film “Black Panther” — which it said would open in cinemas in the United States on Nov. 11.The teaser, screened on Saturday at the pop-culture convention Comic-Con International in San Diego, features several cast members from the first film, as well as a tribute to Chadwick Boseman, who played one of the protagonists, King T’Challa. Boseman, whose image appears on a mural in the teaser, died from colon cancer at age 43 in 2020.The film follows Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), M’Baku (Winston Duke), General Okoye (Danai Gurira) and the elite women warrior group Dora Milaje (including Ayo, played by Florence Kasumba) as they “fight to protect their nation from intervening world powers in the wake of King T’Challa’s death,” the studio said on Saturday in a news release.“As the Wakandans strive to embrace their next chapter, the heroes must band together with the help of War Dog Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and forge a new path for the kingdom of Wakanda,” the studio added.The trailer — a visually dazzling glimpse of the future world of Wakanda — is set to a cover of the Bob Marley song “No Woman, No Cry.” Ludwig Goransson, the film’s composer, described it as “an aural first glimpse of Wakanda Forever.”The “sound world” for the film, he said in the statement, was created during trips to Mexico and Nigeria, where he and others worked with traditional musicians to learn about the “cultural, social and historical contexts of their music.”Then, they built a catalog of instrumental and vocal recordings together with those artists, and “began to build a musical vocabulary for the characters, story lines and cultures of Talocan and Wakanda,” Goransson said, adding that the idea was to create “an immersive and enveloping sound world for the film.”The film’s release was announced by the president of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, who also noted the upcoming release of several other films and shows, including “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” starring Tatiana Maslany; “Secret Invasion,” featuring Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn; and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.”Speaking at the Comic-Con event on Saturday, Nyong’o said that it felt “monumental” to return to Wakanda. “The universe of Wakanda is expanding,” she said. “You guys have a lot to look forward to.”Gurira, who plays Okoye, the general of Wakanda’s elite female bodyguards and the head of armed forces and intelligence, said that when she was growing up in Zimbabwe she always looked up to the way America “made superheros onstage and on the big screen.”To the crowd, she added: “You’re taking in that culture, and you’re celebrating it. That, to me, is everything.” More