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      Ed Asner, Emmy-Winning Star of ‘Lou Grant’ and ‘Up,’ Dies at 91

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      Best known as the gruff newsman he first played on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” he was also a busy character actor and a political activist.Ed Asner, the burly character actor who won seven Emmy Awards — five of them for playing the same character, the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, introduced on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — and later starred in film hits like “Up” and “Elf” — died on Sunday at his home in Tarzana, Calif. He was 91.His death was confirmed by his family via Twitter. No cause was specified.Mr. Asner also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981 to 1985 and was active in political causes both within and beyond the entertainment industry. The issues he supported over the years included unionism (in particular the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981) and animal rights; those he protested against included the American military presence in El Salvador.Mr. Asner was 40 when he was approached for the role of Lou Grant, the irascible but idealistic head of the fictional WJM television newsroom in Minneapolis and the boss of Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards. His place in television comedy history was secured when, during the first episode, he told Ms. Moore, an eager young job seeker, “You’ve got spunk,” then paused and added, “I hate spunk.”“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ran on CBS from 1970 to 1977, and Mr. Asner was nominated for the Emmy for best supporting actor in a comedy series every year. He won in 1971, 1972 and 1975. He went on to win twice for best lead actor, in 1978 and 1980, for the spinoff “Lou Grant,” making him the first performer to have received Emmys for playing the same character in both a comedy and a drama series.“Lou Grant” (1977-82) itself was an unusual case, a drama series developed around a sitcom character. In the show, Mr. Grant returned to his first love, editing a big-city newspaper, and the scripts tackled serious issues that included, in the first season alone, domestic abuse, gang rivalries, neo-Nazi groups, nursing-home scandals and cults.In between playing Lou Grant, Mr. Asner also won Emmys for his appearances in the 1976 mini-series “Rich Man, Poor Man,” as Nick Nolte’s bitter immigrant father, and the groundbreaking, lavishly lauded 1977 mini-series “Roots,” in which he played a slave-ship captain with scruples. He also won five Golden Globes, one for “Rich Man, Poor Man” and two each for the two series in which he played Lou Grant.In more recent years he had been seen in guest roles on television series like “The Good Wife,” “The Middle,” “Grace and Frankie,” “Hot in Cleveland” and “Cobra Kai,” and as recurring characters on “The Practice” and “ER.” In television movies, he played the billionaire Warren Buffett (in “Too Big to Fail,” 2011) and Pope John XXIII (in a 2002 movie by that name).Edward David Asner was born on Nov. 15, 1929, in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in Kansas City, Kan. He was the youngest of five children of Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Morris David Asner, a junkyard owner from Poland, and Lizzie (Seliger) Asner, from Russia.As a boy, Mr. Asner became interested in dramatics and worked on a school radio program. After high school he was accepted at the University of Chicago, but dropped out after a year and a half to work at odd jobs — taxi driver, encyclopedia salesman, metal finisher at an auto plant — while he tried to build an acting career..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1gp0zvr{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:25px;}In 1951 he was drafted into the Army and sent to France. Mustered out in 1953, he returned to Chicago to work with the Playwrights Theater Club and the Compass Players, a precursor of the Second City comedy troupe. But he soon moved to New York, where he found work onstage (a small part in “The Threepenny Opera” at the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village and a short-lived Broadway play, “Face of a Hero,” starring Jack Lemmon) and in a handful of television shows.Moving to California in 1961, he found the acting jobs more lucrative, and was cast in a short-lived CBS political drama, “Slattery’s People,” starring Richard Crenna. He made a point of largely avoiding comedy — out of fear, he said in a 2002 appearance at Vanderbilt University, and because “in those days you got discovered by doing the drama shows as a guest star.” But he agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as he said in an Archive of American Television interview, Lou Grant “was the best character I’d ever been asked to do” in either television or film.Mr. Asner as Lou Grant with Mary Tyler Moore in a scene from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He won three Emmys for his portrayal on the show, and two more when the character moved to his own dramatic series.CBSLou was a hard-drinking, straight-shooting, short-tempered journalist who had tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era; and “a great common core of honor,” as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, the authors of “Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’”In the post-Lou Grant era, Mr. Asner worked on both screen and stage. He returned to Broadway in 1989 to play the pugnacious Harry Brock opposite Madeline Kahn in a revival of “Born Yesterday.” His last Broadway play was “Grace” (2012), a tale of gospel-themed motels and murder, in which he played an exterminator.He provided the voice of the lead character in the Oscar-winning animated movie “Up” (2009), about an elderly widower who flies to South America by attaching roughly a zillion colorful balloons to his house. Manohla Dargis’s review in The New York Times, which praised Mr. Asner and the supporting characters — including a portly stowaway scout and several talking dogs — called it “filmmaking at its purest.”Mr. Asner also played a levelheaded Santa Claus in the Will Ferrell comedy “Elf” (2003), about a tall human raised by North Pole elves, which has become a Christmas-season classic. (It was Santa’s fault, really; the human baby crawled into his giant bag of gifts one busy Christmas Eve.) The Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert called the film “one of those rare Christmas comedies that has a heart, a brain and a wicked sense of humor.”He was a former F.B.I. man in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK,” he did voice work for several animated series and he starred briefly in several more prime-time series. They included “Off the Rack” (1984), as Eileen Brennan’s business partner; “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” (1991), with Sharon Gless; “Thunder Alley” (1994), a sitcom in which he played a retired stock car racer; and “Center of the Universe” (2004), as John Goodman’s intrusive father.Mr. Asner continued working late in life, appearing on “The Good Wife” in 2015 with Julianna Margulies.Jeff Neumann/CBS One of his last film appearances was as a New York psychologist in “The Garden Left Behind” (2019), a drama about a young Mexican transgender woman that won a SXSW Film Festival audience award. That year he also appeared on several television series, including five episodes of “Dead to Me,” a Netflix drama about grief.Mr. Asner married Nancy Sykes in 1959, and they had three children. They divorced in 1988. Ten years later he married Cindy Gilmore, a producer; they separated in 2007 but did not divorce until 2015. He is survived by two daughters, Liza and Katie Asner; two sons, Charles and Matthew, and 10 grandchildren.In a 1999 interview, Mr. Asner looked back fondly on his long-running series. “To me, the best performances come from those milieus where you create the family,” he said. “Of bolstering each other, of love for each other’s work, of trying to help each other, of trying to get the best out of each other. And I believe it pays off.”Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Candyman’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      How ‘Candyman’ Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Became the Next Big Name

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      The actor’s career has surged thanks to projects like “Aquaman” and “Watchmen.” He’s even become a Warner Bros. favorite. Now on the brink of movie stardom, he’s ready to steer.“What time is it?” Yahya Abdul-Mateen II wondered. “I don’t know. I’ve been in this room …” He trailed off. “It could be any time of day right now.”The bright lights and white backdrop of his windowless room conjured a void from which Abdul-Mateen had been videoconferencing for hours. He was doing remote press for “Candyman,” a new spin on the 1992 horror film with the 35-year-old actor playing Anthony, a painter mesmerized by the urban legend of a hook-handed killer. It’s said that Candyman can be summoned by speaking his name five times into a mirror, but as Anthony goes searching for the killer, he begins to see his own haunted face staring back.Though the film is set in Chicago, Abdul-Mateen was beamed to me from London, where he has spent the last few months shooting a sequel to “Aquaman” (he plays the villainous Black Manta). It was a rare day off from the superhero film, carved out so he could spend time promoting another hopeful franchise-starter. Was Abdul-Mateen tired from working so much? Sure, he told me as he shrugged off his black leather jacket. But he was also used to it.“People tell me, ‘Keep it going, man. If it’s hot, ride the wave,’” he said.Abdul-Mateen has been caught up in a significant swell since 2015, when he graduated from drama school at Yale and promptly booked a showy part as a nightclub owner in the Netflix series “The Get Down.” That role served as a signal flare to Hollywood casting directors: Here was a brand-new, 6-foot-3 hunk with formal training, screen charisma and eyes that can lock onto his scene partner like high beams.Men like that don’t come in droves these days, and Abdul-Mateen found himself entering a seller’s market: After “The Get Down” was canceled, he promptly began nabbing roles in high-profile projects like “Aquaman,” “The Greatest Showman” and “Black Mirror.” Last fall, he won an Emmy for the HBO limited series “Watchmen,” in which he played Doctor Manhattan, a blue, frequently nude superhero inhabiting the body of a Black man; months after that win, he made a strong impression as the Black Panther activist Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”Abdul-Mateen’s rise has become the sort of thing that everyone wants to get in on, and Warner Bros. is particularly enamored with the actor. In addition to the “Aquaman” sequel, Abdul-Mateen will be seen in December starring opposite Keanu Reeves in the studio’s “The Matrix Resurrections,” and next summer, he films “Furiosa,” the highly anticipated “Mad Max: Fury Road” prequel from the director George Miller.Abdul-Mateen as Black Manta in “Aquaman.” He’s shooting the sequel now.Jasin Boland/Warner BrosThat is the sort of keys-to-the-kingdom access that Warner Bros. has historically reserved for a handful of stars like Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, and Abdul-Mateen doesn’t take the studio’s investment for granted. Still, he has recently discovered a brand-new superpower, something he never dared to employ on his path up the summit: saying no.What has he been turning down lately? “Jobs, appearances, meetings, people,” he said. “It’s like ‘no’ is one of my favorite words.” He mulled it over some more: “Sometimes you’ve got to get to zero in order to get back to one, two, three and beyond. You get so far down the line, it’s like, ‘Wait, where did zero go? Where’s the ground?’”Over the past six years, in addition to earning all those jobs, “I’ve been learning life,” he said. “I’ve been learning bills and debt and burying family members — life and death, heartbreak, location, relocation. And having success coincide with all of those things is interesting, because I’m also missing the birth of babies and weddings and things like that.”Sure, it’s great to become a movie star, especially at a time when new ones have proved so difficult to mint. “But I’m also learning that you have to protect yourself,” Abdul-Mateen said. “You have to have balance with all of this.” He scratched his head and put it more bluntly: “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Look, man, I want to get off the wave and create my own.’”THE YOUNGEST OF six children, Abdul-Mateen was born in New Orleans and initially lived in the city’s Magnolia Projects, where the kids would all play outside and the families took care of each other. “A sense of community was such a strong thread throughout my entire life that now sometimes it’s a bit strange to be out doing this by myself,” he said.His family moved around often, and Abdul-Mateen treated it like an adventure even though it meant he went to 13 different schools before he became a teenager. In each new class, whenever the teacher introduced him as Yahya, the other students would burst out laughing at his unusual name. But within a week, he’d have worked to win them all over, a pattern that taught him adaptability.“A sense of community was such a strong thread throughout my entire life that now sometimes it’s a bit strange to be out doing this by myself,” he said.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesThat came in handy when Abdul-Mateen took an acting class at University of California, Berkeley, where he had gone to study architecture. He found playing different characters to be so much fun that after a short-lived stint as a city planner, he pursued a major swerve and applied to drama school at Yale.Was he good at acting back then? Well, he was good at commanding attention, and that’s not nothing. But a turning point came during Abdul-Mateen’s first year at Yale, when he found himself stymied by the Stephen Adly Guirgis play “The ___________ With the Hat.” He couldn’t understand why his character would brush off a girlfriend’s infidelity, and he stayed up all night until he finally cracked the man’s motivation: Because he loved her, he was able to tell himself a lie.“That’s when I knew that there was something else behind this that I wanted to figure out,” he said. “If I was going to be successful, I couldn’t just think like myself — I had to learn to be empathetic and understanding of other people’s perspectives and lives and outlooks. It would make me a better person, but it would also make me a better actor.”According to his “Candyman” director, Nia DaCosta, that empathy is key to Abdul-Mateen’s appeal. “He is incredibly skilled at imbuing each character he plays with specificity, humanity and a lived-in individuality,” said DaCosta, who praised “his ability to draw you into the life of a character as though he were a new friend or a stranger at a bar you’re dying to get to know.”That’s part of what made “Candyman” such a natural fit for Abdul-Mateen’s first major leading role: The movie is strewn with details that conjure something from his own lived experience. When Anthony is up all night painting, caught in the grip of an artistic revelation, it’s the sort of mania Abdul-Mateen knew from trying to crack Guirgis’s play. And when Anthony looks down and finds his hands smeared in black paint, Abdul-Mateen might have recalled his construction-worker father, whose hands were often covered in grease and motor oil.Abdul-Mateen in his first major leading role, in “Candyman” opposite Vanessa Williams.Universal PicturesThe first “Candyman” grounded its story in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, a place that has been long-gentrified by the time DaCosta’s film picks up the tale. That, too, hit home for Abdul-Mateen, whose work as a city planner in the highly gentrified Bay Area gave him even more perspective on the projects he grew up in.“One of the first things that I did when I went to Chicago was to go to Cabrini-Green and put on that community planner hat,” he said. “And for a place that has a history of being as Black as that neighborhood was, that was not what I found. One has to wonder what happened to all of those families, all of those spirits? For every household, there’s a story, but when there’s no one there anymore to tell those stories, then that’s a tragedy.”With the clout he’s beginning to accrue, Abdul-Mateen wants to make sure those stories are told right. He also knows that if he can bring even more of himself to bear on these movies, he can start steering the wave instead of surfing it.Maybe it will help, too, once he feels he has a world to return to. Abdul-Mateen has spent the last few hectic years without a home of his own; even when he secured the keys to a New York apartment in January, he left the next day to film a new movie in Los Angeles. “This has been a very isolating experience,” he said. “I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore.”In the future, he plans to take more cues from his “Aquaman” co-star Jason Momoa, who keeps his family and close friends around him on set: “It helps him to stay true to who he is, because he’s not always the one having to speak up and support his own values all the time.” Abdul-Mateen hopes that will help the movies he makes feel more like himself, more like the homes he grew up in, more like the community that raised him in New Orleans.In the meantime, he’ll bring that feeling with him. When I asked Abdul-Mateen if he could name the most New Orleans thing about him, he grinned and spread his legs wide.“The way I take up space,” he said. “Somebody from New Orleans, they sit with their legs from east to west, they’re going to gesture big.” He waved his hands, then looked into the camera and fixed me with those high beams. “I don’t necessarily do that in my everyday life. But when I decide to take up space, nobody can take it from me.” More

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      ‘Together’ Bears Witness to Britain’s Lockdowns

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      The new film, starring Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy, is a tensely funny relationship drama, as well as a chronicle of the first year of the pandemic.LONDON — In “Together,” Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy play a couple in meltdown. And then the pandemic begins.Ten minutes into the film, which debuts in theaters in the United States on Aug. 27, the unnamed female protagonist (Horgan) tells her partner (McAvoy) that he is the worst human alive.“You’ve got the same level of charm as diarrhea in a pint glass,” she says.“Lockdown’s going to be hard then,” he responds.The drama, written by Dennis Kelly and directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”), begins on 24 March 2020, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Britain’s first coronavirus lockdown. It unfolds, claustrophobically, over the course of a year in the couple’s home, which they share with their young son.As well as taking a wide view of the virus’s deadly impact — captions mark the rising death toll in Britain, from 422 in the first scene to 126,284 in the last — “Together” also zooms in on the disintegration and tentative rebuilding of a relationship. It’s sad, but also scabrously funny — “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” with added hand sanitizer. There’s shouting and crying, reminiscing and makeup sex, panic buying, jostling for vaccines and shocking, visceral grief.Stephen Daldry, top left, directed the film, which was shot over 10 days in London.Peter Mountain/Bleecker StreetHorgan said in a phone interview that the film was, on one level, an exercise in bearing witness, in particular to the “hidden trauma” of those families who lost loved ones in nursing homes. More than 39,000 nursing home residents in England died with the virus between April 2020 and March 2021, according to a study by the Care Quality Commission, a government agency. For many of those people, because of visiting restrictions and staff shortages, it was a lonely death.In “Together,” the mother of Horgan’s character moves into a nursing home at the start of the pandemic. “She’ll be safe there, right?” the daughter says. In the following scene, her mother is on a ventilator.Horgan said she felt “an enormous responsibility” in telling the story of what happened in Britain’s nursing homes. “We were incredibly shocked by it as a country, but the specific experience that families were having — of not being able to say goodbye, of watching loved ones die on FaceTime — people felt like they weren’t seen,” she said. “We wanted people to feel the pain of it.”The drama was filmed in London over 10 days in April this year, and was broadcast here by the BBC in June, in the same week that the government delayed the lifting of restrictions because of a surge in the Delta variant of the virus. As it premieres in the United States, just over half of Americans are fully vaccinated, but the long-term effects of the pandemic — physical, psychological and financial — are still being felt.“I’ve never written anything as immediate as this,” Kelly said in a phone interview. The script required little research, beyond observing day-to-day events, he added: “It’s the one event we’ve all been through.”Perhaps that’s why a number of recent films have tackled the strains of life in a pandemic. “Locked Down,” starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, throws an improbable heist into its story of a bored, bickering couple. “Lock Down Love” and “The End of Us” play out as more straightforward romantic comedies, in which being forced apart or together makes couples reassess. If “Together” stands apart, it is because fury and horror at what is happening in the wider world run in parallel to the central love story.Writing the movie was a cathartic experience, Kelly said. “There are a lot of people out there who are really angry. They lost people, and they know they died alone,” he said. “We still haven’t got anywhere near processing what we’ve been through.”Before Kelly approached Horgan about starring in “Together,” she had little interest in making a lockdown film: She had already turned down scripts based on the pandemic, she said. In the shows she was working on, including the BBC comedy “Motherland” and the second series of Aisling Bea’s “This Way Up,” the current circumstances were more or less glossed over, she added. Then she read “Together.”“I could see it was really important,” Horgan said of the script. “Of course, it’s rooted in Covid. But it transcends that, as a voyeuristic, in-depth X-ray of a relationship.” For that reason, Horgan doesn’t think people will feel fatigued by the events of last year and a half while watching it. “If it was just related to the pandemic, you couldn’t watch an hour-and-a-half of it,” she said.It helped that Horgan and Kelly are old friends. Horgan grew up on a turkey farm in Ireland, but has lived in London since the early 1990s, when she and Kelly met performing in a youth theater production. Years later, they bumped into each other in a pub. Horgan was in her late 20s and working at a job center; Kelly mentioned he’d written a play, called “Brendan’s Visit.” The next day, Horgan called and convinced him to put it on.“She was unbelievably driven,” said Kelly, who went on to win the Tony Award for Best Book with “Matilda the Musical” in 2013. “If it weren’t for Sharon, there’s no way I’d have been a writer.”From left: Tanya Franks, Rebekah Staton and Sharon Horgan in “Pulling.”HuluThe pair started writing together and created “Pulling,” a cult comedy about three 20-something female housemates, which debuted on the BBC in 2006. Watching it now, Horgan’s character, Donna, seems like a godmother to Fleabag from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s 2016 TV hit, as well as the many chaotic, honest portrayals of womanhood that have followed, but at the time there was no one like her on television.If “Pulling” was based on Horgan’s 20s, “Catastrophe,” the dramedy she co-wrote and starred in with Rob Delaney about a couple who get pregnant after a one-week stand, was based on her 30s: She and her now ex-husband Jeremy Rainbird had been together for six months when she found out she was expecting a daughter.Now, she is working on the third part of her loose trilogy based, as she described it, on the “life cycle of a woman.” It will encompass turning 50, divorce and watching her children grow up, she said.Horgan spent lockdown in London, with her two teenage daughters, who were “like caged animals,” she said. “So as a separated family we had to negotiate that, and make that work,” Horgan said. “It was intense.”The boundaries between her life and work have always been porous, Horgan said. “I don’t think I give too much of myself to my work; my work gives an awful lot to me, if I’m honest,” she said. “I’ve never really given away something incredibly personal that I haven’t felt better for having got it off my chest,” she added.When it came to rehearsing “Together,” in April, Horgan’s own experiences came pouring out.“Everyone was sharing stories, not just about Covid, or lockdown, but about relationships,” she said. “The emotion of it felt within arm’s reach.” More

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      ‘He’s All That’ Review: Much Ado About Nothing

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      This gender-flipped reboot of “She’s All That” lazily rehashes the original but without its endearing weirdness.Set in the late-90s heyday of MTV, “She’s All That” featured a jock who, after being dumped by his girlfriend, accepts a bet to turn a geek into a prom queen. His prize? Saving face. In “He’s All That,” the new gender-flipped Netflix remake, the stakes have shifted. For the teen beauty influencer Padgett (TikTok superstar Addison Rae), popularity pays the bills. When she’s humiliated by her jerk boyfriend on a livestream, she decides to transform the brooding Cameron (Tanner Buchanan) into a prom king in a bid to win back her followers and brand endorsements.It’s a smart premise that speaks to how the times have a-changed, so it’s a pity that “He’s All That” makes such little use of it. Save for the cellphones the characters wield like weapons, Mark Waters’s reboot lazily rehashes the 1999 film, although without its endearing weirdness. Where the original had Freddie Prinze Jr. doing performance art to woo his edgy conquest, Padgett takes riding lessons with Cameron, who we’re supposed to believe is a loser in spite of his equestrian skills and eight-pack abs.Not that it was any easier to buy that Rachel Leigh Cook (who cameos here as Padgett’s mom) was ugly because she had glasses on. Hot people pretending to be homely is par for the course in makeover movies; the real thrill lies in watching opposites attract. But the catfights, confessions, and dance-offs in “He’s All That” lack the sting of real romantic conflict, and there’s nary a spark between Rae and Buchanan. Rae struggles to modulate her camera-ready bubbliness in moments that require pathos, while Buchanan plays the emo loner with reluctance, switching too easily to handsome-loverboy mode. If they dutifully deliver the film’s platitudinous message — “be yourself” — it’s with the conviction of a makeup brand selling a “natural look.”He’s All ThatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Vacation Friends’ Review: Life Lessons Amid Chaos

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      Clay Tarver’s movie is a better grade of outrageous couples comedy.The outrageous couples comedy is by now an established if not reliable genre. “Vacation Friends” has a quality advantage in the casting of the couples; Lil Rel Howery, Yvonne Orji, John Cena and Meredith Hagner are all guaranteed laugh generators.Howery and Orji are Marcus and Emily; Marcus is a buttoned-up planner whose surprise proposal to Emily is overturned pretty much as soon as they arrive at a swank Mexican resort. Their own suite, which had been festooned with rose petals, is flooded on arrival. The culprits are the upstairs neighbors Ron and Kyla, who left their Jacuzzi running before they went out to jet ski.Played by Cena and Hagner, the couple embody spontaneity pushed to the point of psychopathy. These two rim their margarita glasses with cocaine. In less than 24 hours they trash both a jet ski and a yacht. Ron initiates a William Tell act with his automatic. And then things get sloppy.Seven months later, Marcus and Emily are to be wed in Atlanta. Components designed to sabotage a serene union include the bride’s snobbish father, hostile brother, a pair of heirloom rings that Marcus must keep safe, and more. Ron and Kyla literally crash the event. True to the subgenre, the ensuing chaos also contains mutated “life lessons.”Clay Tarver, a veteran of the TV series “Silicon Valley” (and a founder of the postpunk band Chavez) directs with an eye and ear that’s a cut above what one usually gets with this sort of fare. (A scene in which Marcus and Ron hallucinate on tree fungus is inventively lo-fi.) What Kyla says of the cocaine-margarita stunt — “it gets the job done” — can be applied to the movie as a whole.Vacation FriendsRated R for outrageous couple comedy outrageousness. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Ynairaly Simo Reps the Bronx (and Tweenage Zest) in ‘Vivo’

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      The 14-year-old Dominican American actress makes her big screen debut in the animated musical on Netflix, with songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.Every time Ynairaly Simo’s mother asks her what she wants to eat at home, Simo tells her the same thing: moro de guandules con bistec, or rice with pigeon peas and steak.But if they’re dining out? It’s got to be the mofongo — a Puerto Rican dish made with fried plantains — from a shop two blocks away from where Simo lives with her family in the West Bronx.The rich food culture in Fordham Heights is a piece of what makes their life so full there.“We are proud to live in the Bronx, and we are proud that we are Latinos,” Ynairaly’s mother, Ydamys Simo, said in an interview. “And we always encourage that to her: Always be proud of who you are. And never change the essence that makes you you.”Ynairaly (pronounced ya-NAH-ruh-ly) Simo, 14, is the voice of Gabi, an energetic and eccentric preteen, in the animated musical “Vivo” on Netflix. Though Ynairaly was born and raised in New York, both sides of her family are Dominican.“I’m very glad to be playing Gabi and be Dominican,” Simo said in a video interview, in front of a canary yellow wall in her mother’s room. “Because girls my age — or younger — can be like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s Dominican! And she’s an actress? I could be an actress. I’m Dominican.’”Simo felt a similar spark when she saw Zoe Saldaña as Gamora in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.” She instantly loved the green warrior character, and looked up who played her.When she realized Saldaña played Gamora — and that the actress was Dominican — it hit her: She could be in a Marvel movie someday, too.Four years later, Simo and Saldaña would end up working together. Saldaña plays Rosa, Gabi’s mother, in “Vivo.” Since their recording sessions took place separately, the two have never met, but Simo still hopes to meet her idol.“I’m very glad to be playing Gabi and be Dominican,” Simo said.Josefina Santos for The New York Times“Vivo” is Simo’s first major role — although she’s been acting for years — and she worked alongside a cast of “icons,” as she put it, including Saldaña.Lin-Manuel Miranda voices the titular Vivo, a singer-musician kinkajou; the Buena Vista Social Club legend Juan de Marcos plays Andrés, Vivo’s owner; and Gloria Estefan plays Marta, Andrés’s old musical partner and unrequited love.Because of the nature of voice performance, Miranda was the only cast member Simo met in person. She was more than familiar with his work — she had, in fact, auditioned for a role in the film version of “In the Heights” — and was eager to collaborate with him.Miranda spent one-on-one time with Simo in the recording studio, helping her pin down high notes in her head voice and low notes in her chest voice. (Simo attends the Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music, where she learned she is naturally an alto.)The actress sings on five songs on the movie’s soundtrack, including “My Own Drum” — an earworm rap about being true to yourself — and its remix with the Grammy winner Missy Elliott. Miranda, known for his signature rapid-fire rapping, guided Simo along her first time in the genre.“He taught me: Get a deep breath,” Simo said. “And then learn the words, spit them out and make sure to say them, pronounce them very sharply.”Onscreen, “My Own Drum” unfolds in Gabi’s tween tornado of a bedroom (her backpack is full of slime) in Key West, Fla. It features, in the words of the director Kirk DeMicco, “almost like a Busta Rhymes, fisheye lens, fun-house scene,” intended to shake Vivo out of his comfort zone. Here, the role fit the actress.“There was this exuberant unpolished-ness to her that she just had, and this moxie that you can’t even act,” DeMicco said in an interview. “The way she delivered her lines” and “the little improvs that she did, the way she filled things in, the texture was just her.”Simo’s father, Joseph Simo, is a big fan of the scene, the song and the soundtrack. It’s his “No. 1 pick” whenever he’s at work, he said: He flips on the soundtrack and listens straight through from beginning to end.“One of the things that she always wanted to do is inspire kids: Latinos — and all the kids that are into acting and into music — to follow their dreams,” Joseph said in an interview. “And I told her the other day, ‘You see, your dreams are coming true.’”Simo’s parents are, of course, her biggest fans: Two weeks into August, they had already watched the movie 16 times. (The film began streaming on Aug. 6.) They’re not planning on stopping anytime soon.Ynairaly, center, with her parents, Ydamys and Joseph Simo.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesThey have supported their daughter’s career in the arts since it began. At age 3, Simo started modeling. At 5, she started acting — doing smaller gigs, like commercials. “Vivo” was her first singing role (although since its premiere, she’s performed the national anthem for the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Gotham Girls and the New York Liberty).But the road here was by no means easy. In July 2019, while “Vivo” was in production, Ynairaly underwent an almost 10-hour surgery to correct advanced scoliosis. Twenty screws and two metal plates later, doctors told her parents she might not be able to “move the way a normal child could” — at least for a while.The day after the surgery, the physical therapist asked her to take a couple of steps, one step at a time, her father said. She walked 20. That same summer, she learned how to swim. She danced. A month after the surgery, she convinced the doctors to let her go back to Los Angeles to record.Her family called her “Ynairaly la guerrera,” or Ynairaly the warrior. “Because that’s who she is,” her mother said. “She’s really determined.” More

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      ‘Candyman’ Review: Who Can Take a Sunrise, Sprinkle It With Blood?

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      The new take on the 1990s cult horror film returns the story to its old stomping ground, this time with Jordan Peele as a producer.The first time Candyman, the hook-wielding ghoul, hit the big screen it was 1992 and he was making mincemeat out of people in Cabrini-Green, the troubled public housing development in Chicago. Since then, residents have left (or been moved out), and more than a dozen buildings have been razed. Forgettable sequels have come and gone, too, yet Candyman abides, cult film characters being a more enduring and certainly more prized commodity than affordable housing.The original “Candyman,” written and directed by Bernard Rose, is more icky than scary, but it has real sting. It centers on the son of a formerly enslaved man — Tony Todd plays the title demon — who, once upon a time, was punished by racists for loving a white woman. Now he wanders about slicing and dicing those who summon him. Just look in a mirror and say his name five times (oh, go ahead), and wait for the blood to spurt. Among those who did back in the day was a white doctoral student who becomes a red-hot victim. The pain wasn’t exquisite, as Candyman promised, but it had its moments.In the sharp, shivery redo directed by Nia DaCosta, Candyman seems on hiatus. The time is the present and the place is the bougie community that’s sprung up around Cabrini-Green. There, in sleek towers with designer kitchens and walls of windows, the gentrifying vanguard sips wine, enjoying the view. Beyond, the city sparkles prettily and its ills are at a safe distance (if not for long). As the restless camera clocks the scene, Sammy Davis Jr. — a Black civil rights touchstone turned Richard M. Nixon supporter — belts out his sticky 1970s hit “The Candy Man” (“Who can take tomorrow/dip it in a dream.”) It’s a sly reminder, and warning, that the past always troubles the present.Sometimes the past also bites the present right where it hurts, and before long the opening calm has been violently upended. As the blood begins to gush and the body count rises, the story takes shape, as does the somewhat tense domestic life of a painter, Anthony (a very good Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), and a curator, the pointedly named Brianna (Teyonah Parris). They soon learn that Candyman never left (well, he is a valuable franchise property). Enter the scares and shrieks and anxious laughs, and the dependably indispensable Colman Domingo, who pops up with a Cheshire cat grin. There are also flashing police lights that aren’t as welcoming as they might be elsewhere.“Candyman” is the second feature from DaCosta, who made her debut with the modest drama “Little Woods.” She might have seemed a counterintuitive choice for this horror rethink, but while her first movie didn’t fully hold together, it was clear that she could direct actors and make meaning visually. She didn’t just clutter the frame with talking heads; she set (and exploited) moods and created an air of everyday, prickling unease, demonstrating a talent for the ineffable — for atmosphere — that she expands on here. It’s easy to shock viewers with splatter but the old gut-and-run gets awfully boring awfully fast. Far better is the slow creep, the horror that teases and then threatens.The dread inexorably builds in “Candyman,” which snaps into focus after Anthony learns of the boogeyman. Intrigued, he seizes on the tale of a Black spirit who stalked the area’s disadvantaged residents as grist for his art, which could use a creative kick. DaCosta — who shares script credit with Win Rosenfeld and Jordan Peele, who’s also a producer — nicely fills in the texture, stakes and emotional temperature of Anthony’s milieu with its cozy domesticity, artistic frustrations, gnawing jealousies and crossover dreams. The banter is believable, as are the pinpricks of disquiet and the weird suppurating wounds that increasingly mar this otherwise ordinary scene and its genial hero.It takes nothing away from DaCosta to note that “Candyman” is of an intellectual and political piece with Peele’s earlier work, including “Get Out” and “Us.” Like those movies, “Candyman” uses the horror genre to explore race (Peele gets under the skin), including ideas about who gets to play the hero — and villain — and why. Peele isn’t interested only in what scares us; he’s also asking who, exactly, we mean when we say “us.” As a form, horror is preoccupied with the unknown and ostensibly monstrous, a fixation that manifests in visions of otherness. Much, of course, depends on your point of view. (The series’ genesis is Clive Barker’s “The Forbidden,” set in a presumptively British slum.)DaCosta plays with perspective, shifting between Anthony’s and the intersecting, sometimes colliding worlds of more-successful artists, urban-legend propagators and, touchingly, profoundly scarred children. Throughout, she intersperses bits of shadow puppetry that work as a counterpoint to the main narrative, a reflexive device that emphasizes that “Candyman” is also fundamentally about storytelling. We tell some fictions to understand ourselves, to exist; others we tell to turn other human beings into monsters, to destroy. In “Candyman,” those who summon up this ghoul, thereby allowing him to tell his tale, first need to look at their reflections. When they do, they see innocence staring back at them — that, at least, is the story they tell themselves.CandymanRated R for horror-movie violence. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More