Movies

The French series was a pandemic hit in the United States. And now its star, Camille Cottin, is emerging to find herself in demand.At some point during the pandemic, perhaps between the debut of “Ted Lasso” last August and “Bridgerton” in December, you may have happened upon Netflix’s French import “Call My Agent!” (“Dix Pour Cent” in French), a sweet yet absurd sendup of the global entertainment complex as seen through the lens of a Parisian talent agency where the agents are mostly good-hearted lovers of cinema at the beck and call of their highly demanding clients.If so, you were one of millions who discovered Camille Cottin, the French actress who played Andrea Martel, the hard-nosed striver with the piercing green eyes who is trying to keep her agency afloat while her personal life falls apart.The show was one of the few joys of the pandemic, one that prompted viewers to sample additional international content like “Lupin” and “Money Heist,” overcoming “the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles” that the “Parasite” director, Bong Joon Ho, referred to during his 2020 Golden Globes speech. The success of “Call My Agent!” has prompted spinoffs in Britain, Quebec and Turkey. And there is now talk of a stand-alone movie that will see Andrea Martel headed to New York.But Cottin, 42, whose background includes theater and sketch comedy, completely missed the phenomenon that “Call My Agent!” became in the United States while she was in lockdown in Paris with her husband and two young children. Turns out, she was just as miserable as the rest of us.“I was quite worried in the pandemic and I was a bit paralyzed,” Cottin said in English during a recent video call. “I wanted to be creative, but I wasn’t at all. Also I had the feeling like I’m never going to work again. I was scared.”“Now you tell me during the pandemic everybody watched ‘Call My Agent!’ I was miles away, imagining that I was buried alive,” she added with a grim laugh.Cottin as a talent rep in Paris in “Call My Agent!” with Grégory Montel, left, and Assad Bouab.Christophe Brachet/NetflixCottin was conducting this interview in a car on her way home from a costume fitting for the Cannes Film Festival. (No “Call My Agent!” fans, the fitting did not involve a fussy feathered gown like the one Juliette Binoche awkwardly donned at the end of Season 2.) Cottin’s new film “Stillwater,” in which she plays Virginie, a working actress and single mother who guides Matt Damon’s remorseful father through an ill-conceived journey in Marseilles, has just debuted to mostly positive reviews. Manohla Dargis called her “electric” in The New York Times. Vanity Fair called her performance “bright and winsome.”But this moment in the car was far less glamorous. Her 6-year-old daughter was fast asleep, head in mom’s lap. And when the car stopped, I could see the multitasking Cottin at work, scooping up her groggy child, a poof of pink taffeta in one arm, her video call still on in the other, a bright Parisian sky in the background. She paused for a moment to put her daughter to bed before continuing the conversation on the floor of her bathroom, a compromise she made with her child, who asked her not to stray too far. Then her husband, Benjamin, came home. “The father is here!” she exclaimed. “Virginie would have had to handle that situation alone.”After a small role in the 2016 “Allied,” starring Brad Pitt, “Stillwater” represents Cottin’s biggest introduction yet to American audiences. It just may be the role that lets her officially cross over from obscure French actress to global sensation. Later this year she will star opposite Lady Gaga and Adam Driver in Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci,” playing Paola Franchi, the girlfriend of Maurizio Gucci (Driver). And she’s set to reprise her role as Hélène, a high-ranking member of the assassin organization the Twelve, in BBC’s “Killing Eve.”The international community awakened to Cottin’s charms far before all of us in the United States were stuck at home. When “Call My Agent!” showed up on British television, Cottin discovered the show had found an audience across the English Channel. It was 2019, and she was attending a casting director festival in Kilkenny, Ireland, with her own French agent. Suddenly she was the center of attention.“They were like, ‘Oh could I make a selfie with you?,’ and I was like, ‘What? You’re the James Bond casting director,’” she said, laughing.That trip and another to London led to her casting in “Gucci” and to her meeting the producer of “Killing Eve.”Cottin said she was much less assured than her agent character: “If I have to make a choice, it will take me too long, always too long. And I will ask everybody his opinion about it.”Tania Franco Klein for The New York TimesYet “Call My Agent!” had no bearing on the “Stillwater” director Tom McCarthy’s decision to cast Cottin. He hadn’t yet seen the show when he met her. Rather, he hired her based on an audition that he said astonished him and his co-writers, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré.“You kind of can’t keep your eyes off her when she is on the screen,” he said in a recent interview from France. “She’s a bit scattered, a bit all over the place. She’s funny, she’s self-deprecating, she’s empathetic. She’s tough. She’s straightforward. And I feel like after watching her for a year and a half in the edit room, every moment with her is very lived.”To Cottin, Virginie, who is open and nurturing and always looking for something to fix (like Damon’s Oklahoman roughneck), is a near facsimile of herself.“Virginie is the closest character I’ve had to play to me,” she said even though it’s one of the few roles she’s played in English. “We have the same energy. And until now, I’ve mostly been counted for women with a lot of more tension. A bit more in control.”There is a disarming ease to Cottin that is evident on initial introduction and belies the icy veneer of her “Call My Agent!” character. She doesn’t take herself too seriously — McCarthy calls her “goofy” — and you realize quickly how great her potential for comedy is. It’s a skill she exhibited in her most well-known French role, playing the lead in the prank TV show “Connasse,” which means “bitch” in her native tongue. Her exploits included scaling Kensington Palace in search of an introduction to Prince Harry.Cottin with Matt Damon and Lilou Siauvaud in “Stillwater.” She won the role on the strength of her audition. The director hadn’t seen “Call My Agent!”Jessica Forde/Focus FeaturesA “Call My Agent!” producer, Dominique Besnehard, described Cottin as “the pretty, biting, bold one” who in the role of Andrea “is very good at going from harshness to fragility.”To Cottin, it’s a character she both admires and understands, yet still finds at a remove from her own personality.“I have much less assurance than Andrea. She is more self-confident and strategic and good at making decisions,” she said. “If I have to make a choice, it will take me too long, always too long. And I will ask everybody his opinion about it.”Cottin is decidedly not uncertain about her career, but as an actress in her 40s she is more aware that the highs she’s experiencing today may not predict the highs she will see in her future.“Maybe if I was 20, I would think, ‘Oh my God, maybe I’m going to have an Oscar,’” she said, laughing, in a mocking American accent. “It’s never vertical. You can make a step, you can consider that you’ve been up and then suddenly, you can go down. Nothing is a straight line. I see these projects as trips, great trips. I can’t say, ‘Oh, now that I’ve done that I can tell you what’s coming next,’ because I don’t know. And it doesn’t mean that it will happen again.”Besnehard suggested she could have a career like Binoche, taking roles both in France and the United States. “I hope the American people would not monopolize her,” he said.McCarthy sees a much clearer trajectory.“I predict great things for Cami and not just because of our movie, which I think she’s sensational in but it’s just her time,” he said. “You can feel it when someone’s earned a moment in their career, and put in the work, and they’re ready to take control of it.” More

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

The director David Lowery narrates a sequence from the film, featuring the actor and Erin Kellyman.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.The director David Lowery drew inspiration from the cosmos, Hammer horror films and an Ewoks TV movie to build this ethereal scene in “The Green Knight.”Dev Patel stars as Gawain in this adaptation of the 14th-century poem that sends its protagonist on a long, deadly quest. Gawain has several intriguing encounters along the way, including this one at a cottage, where he comes across a spirit named Winifred (Erin Kellyman).She implores him to help retrieve her head, which was decapitated and thrown into a spring. The scene, which was shot at night, has a haunting quality, and while Lowery and his crew shot in a real location in Ireland, he said he wanted the atmosphere to mimic the gothic, soundstage look of a horror film from the British company Hammer. And he said an underwater portion of the scene was inspired by the made-for-TV movie “Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure,” in which a character gets pulled into a magical pond. “That terrified me as a child,” he said, “and that’s directly what this is pulled from.”Read the “Green Knight” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

For his new Apple TV+ comedy series, Gordon-Levitt imagined what his life might have been like if he hadn’t been so lucky. “It’s probably the most me-ish thing I’ve ever made.”Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the first to admit he’s had it pretty good. He has had a wildly successful acting career on stages and screens spanning over three decades. He sings, dances, writes and directs, and he does a decent Nirvana cover. He has a wife and two kids and he hardly seems to age. More

In this diverting action comedy, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a former secret agent forced back into action to save his estranged son.At 60, Jean-Claude Van Damme has racked up roughly as many features as birthdays. Noting this prolificness, the strangely compelling “JCVD” (2008) showed the Belgian bruiser ruminating on the options available to an aging action star.“The Last Mercenary (Le Dernier Mercenaire)” arrives on Netflix as one of those options, with Van Damme evincing an impish self-awareness about himself and the genre that nurtured him. As Richard Brumère, a famed secret service agent rumored to have once felled a rhino with his bare hands, the actor is in fine fettle. It might take him a bit longer to film a stunt, but, thanks to Thierry Arbogast’s skill with a camera, the seams in the action barely show.That’s as well, because Richard prefers hands and feet to guns. And when his estranged son (Samir Decazza) is falsely accused of arms trafficking, Richard must return to Paris after a 25-year absence to set things straight. This will demand multiple disguises and international locations (the movie was filmed mostly in Ukraine), a fresh batch of sidekicks and, probably, a great deal of stretching.A farcical fusion of terrorism, stolen identity and father-son healing, the plot (by the director, David Charhon, and Ismaël Sy Savané) is bloated and sentimental. The middle section droops and not all the performances pop. (Though Nassim Lyes lays it on with a shovel to play a “Scarface”-obsessed villain.) But the fight scenes have wit and Van Damme delivers his lines with just the right amount of weary good humor.“You’ve aged,” a former colleague (played by none other than Miou-Miou) observes, and it’s a testament to the film’s tone that the comment, far from being a burn, is almost a caress.The Last Mercenary (Le Dernier Mercenaire)Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

The star said making the film available on Disney+ at the same time it opened in theaters “dramatically” lowered box office revenue, which could cost her tens of millions of dollars.Never cross a super-assassin: Scarlett Johansson, who has played the Marvel character Black Widow in eight blockbuster films, sued the Walt Disney Company on Thursday over its pandemic-era streaming strategy. The lawsuit marked a sharp escalation in a festering standoff between movie actors and media companies over compensation in the streaming age.The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims that Disney breached her contract when it released “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ earlier this month. Ms. Johansson’s suit said that Disney had promised that “Black Widow” would receive an exclusive release in theaters for approximately 90 to 120 days and that her compensation — based largely on bonuses tied to ticket sales — was gutted as a result of the hybrid release. Simultaneous availability on Disney+, where subscribers could watch the film instantly (and have permanent access to it) for a $30 surcharge, “dramatically decreased box office revenue,” Ms. Johansson said in the suit.“There is no merit whatsoever to this filing,” Disney said in a statement.Over its first three days in theaters, “Black Widow” collected $158 million at theaters worldwide and took in about $60 million on Disney+ Premier Access. Total ticket sales now stand at $327 million, the lowest total for a Marvel Studios release since 2008, when “The Incredible Hulk” collected $265 million (or $341 million in today’s dollars). Disney has not given a running total for Disney+ sales of “Black Widow.”Making “Black Widow” available on Disney+ could cost Ms. Johansson more than $50 million, according to two people briefed on her contract, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private agreement. That is how much Ms. Johansson would have made if “Black Widow” had approached $1 billion in global ticket sales; “Captain Marvel” and “Black Panther” both exceeded that threshold in prepandemic release.Films released during the pandemic — including those that have received exclusive theatrical releases — have largely disappointed at the box office, with many consumers demonstrating a reluctance to return to theaters. The entire film ecosystem has been hurt as a result: cinema chains, stars, studios.Disney has cited the coronavirus as a reason for releasing movies like “Black Widow” simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access.Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios, via Disney“First, Disney wanted to lure the picture’s audience away from movie theaters and towards its own streaming service, where it could keep the revenues for itself while simultaneously growing the Disney+ subscriber base, a proven way to boost Disney’s stock price,” the suit, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, claimed. “Second, Disney wanted to substantially devalue Ms. Johansson’s agreement and thereby enrich itself.”Disney’s statement called the lawsuit “especially sad and distressing in its callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.” The company added, “Disney has fully complied with Ms. Johansson’s contract and furthermore, the release of ‘Black Widow’ on Disney+ with Premier Access has significantly enhanced her ability to earn additional compensation on top of the $20 million she has received to date.”“Black Widow” was initially scheduled for exclusive theatrical release in May of last year. Disney ended up postponing the film’s release three times as the pandemic dragged on.Disney, citing the ongoing coronavirus threat, ultimately decided to release several major movies simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access. It used the strategy in May for “Cruella,” which starred Emma Stone and took in $221 million worldwide. (Disney has kept Disney+ revenue for “Cruella” a secret.) On Friday, Disney will give the same treatment to “The Jungle Cruise,” a comedic adventure that stars Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson. It is not known if Ms. Stone, Ms. Blunt or Mr. Johnson renegotiated their contracts with Disney as a result.In December, WarnerMedia kicked a hornet’s nest by abruptly announcing that more than a dozen Warner Bros. movies — the studio’s entire 2021 slate — would each arrive in theaters and on HBO Max. The decision prompted an outcry from major stars and their agents over the potential loss of box office-related compensation, forcing Warner Bros. to make new deals. It ultimately paid roughly $200 million to thwart the rebellion.The deeper question is this: If old-line studios are no longer trying to maximize the box office for each film but instead shifting to a hybrid model where success is judged partly by ticket sales and partly by the number of streaming subscriptions sold, what does that mean for how stars are paid — and where they make their movies?The traditional model, the one that studios have used for decades to make high-profile film deals, involves paying small fees upfront and then sharing a portion of the revenue from ticket sales. The bigger the hit, the bigger the “back end” paydays for certain actors, directors and producers.The streaming giants have done it differently. They pay more upfront — usually much, much more — in lieu of any back-end payments, which gives them complete control over future revenue. It means that people get paid as if their projects are hits before they are released (or even made).Ms. Johansson’s suit also took direct aim at Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive, and Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chairman, by citing the stock grants given to them as rewards for building Disney+, which has more than 100 million subscribers worldwide. “Disney’s financial disclosures make clear that the very Disney executives who orchestrated this strategy will personally benefit from their and Disney’s misconduct,” the complaint said.According to the suit, Ms. Johansson’s representatives approached Disney and Marvel in recent months with a request to renegotiate her contract. “Disney and Marvel largely ignored Ms. Johansson,” the suit said. More

Tween boys attempt to escape mysterious abductors in this thriller borrowing from the slasher-horror genre.Bobby and Kevin are bound and gagged in a car trunk. After Kevin is pulled out and whisked away, Bobby is left inside, but he manages to get rid of his restraints and wiggle out. Instead of running for his life, though, Bobby heads toward the sprawling house where Kevin is held prisoner: “Friends til the end,” the buddies had sworn to each other.You know that promise is going to hold, because 12-year-old boys like these two take these matters seriously.Bad, bad things happen to Bobby (Lonnie Chavis, Randall on “This Is Us”) and Kevin (Ezra Dewey) in the horror-tinged abduction thriller “The Boy Behind the Door.” And, it must be said, for the most part they happen onscreen. This is not common in American releases, where violence toward kids tends to be suggested, metaphorical or cartoonishly abstract. David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s movie steers clear of exploitation, though, because while the camera does not look away from Bobby and Kevin’s woes — there is gore — it does so in a clinical, almost neutral manner that, again, we are not used to seeing applied to children. (Some viewers may find this very detachment distasteful.)“The Boy Behind the Door,” which is streaming on Shudder, leaves no room for anything besides brutally direct suspense mechanics: Bobby spends the entire movie trying to free Kevin while evading their captors, who include Kristin Bauer van Straten, from “True Blood,” as an opaque embodiment of capricious evil.We do not know why the two were kidnapped, or what their world is like aside from their playing on a softball team — the movie never cuts to, say, anxious parents. Charbonier and Powell, themselves childhood friends from Detroit, focus on the boys’ allegiance to each other with an unwavering focus.This intent minimalism is also why the movie does not transcend its virtuosic, almost abstractly taut storytelling. Especially when a couple of puzzling, attention-grabbing flourishes needlessly slip in, most notably a scene that borrows from an ultra-famous one in “The Shining.” And why, exactly, pan over a Make America Great Again bumper sticker on the kidnappers’ car? The real world intrudes on the stylized suspense with a thud rather than a bracing jolt.The Boy Behind the DoorNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

“The Green Knight” offered the actor a movie-star moment unlike anything he’s done before. Could he conquer his insecurities and take the lead?Horses know, Dev Patel told me.“A horse can tell if you’ve only slept two hours the night before,” he said. “If you’re anxious, the horse can feel it. Armani definitely could.”Armani is one of Patel’s most significant co-stars in the new medieval fantasy “The Green Knight,” in which the 31-year-old actor plays Sir Gawain, a would-be warrior who embarks on something of a suicide mission. Parts of his quest take place on horseback and Patel, who’d never ridden before, tried to win Armani’s favor by sneaking him apples pilfered from the hotel lobby in Dublin.Still, appealing to a horse’s stomach can only do so much. If Patel couldn’t summon enough leading-man authority to embody Gawain, surely Armani would be the first to sense it. After all, they would spend their first shoot day together in an Irish wilderness where the wind blows so strong that Patel found himself gripping Armani tightly just to stay upright.As those gusts of cold air pierced the metal mesh of Patel’s chain mail in a way no sword could, did Armani know that his rider was more neophyte than knight? And could the horse sense some of the other things making Patel anxious, like his natural tendency to overthink his career — what Patel calls “paralysis by analysis” — or the way he wondered what people would make of a British-Indian actor playing King Arthur’s nephew?OK, maybe some of those concepts are a little too complicated for a horse to suss out. (Though Armani could not be reached for comment, so who’s to say?) But Patel still had a lot on his mind that first day, and I haven’t even gotten to the matter of his food poisoning yet.“All this talk of representation,” he groaned, “and I’m here on top of a horse in chain mail, in the freezing cold, hoping I don’t get diarrhea.’”Patel as Gawain in “The Green Knight.” His director, David Lowery, said, “From the moment I met him, I was very aware that he was going to be the thing that makes the film epic.” Eric Zachanowich/A24 FilmsPatel was video-chatting with me from Adelaide, South Australia, where he’s busy editing his directorial debut, a martial-arts movie called “Monkey Man,” as well as keeping an eye on the “The Green Knight,” which was originally meant to come out last summer and will now debut in theaters on July 30. Directed by David Lowery, “The Green Knight” adds a welcome swerve to Patel’s résumé of straightforward crowd-pleasers: Unlike “Slumdog Millionaire” or “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” Lowery’s film is artsy, mysterious and a little sexy.Or, let me put it more plainly: “The Green Knight” understands that Dev Patel is a heartthrob now.The once-gawky actor has grown into a leading man with romance-novel hair, empathetic eyes and a well-kept beard, and though photo shoots of Patel routinely earn big numbers on social media, no movie till this one has really capitalized on his status as an internet crush. Patel wasn’t even on Lowery’s initial casting list for “The Green Knight,” but after the director saw a Zegna fashion spread with Patel looking suave and regal, he found himself so taken with Patel’s potential that he started drawing a picture of the actor on horseback.“From the moment I met him, I was very aware that he was going to be the thing that makes the film epic,” Lowery said. “If we couldn’t move to an epic location, if we weren’t able to find the right vista, I could always fall back on him because he will give us that in a close-up.”Sir Gawain is a bit of a cad when we first meet him, a drunken layabout who’d rather woo than fight. Still, he feels that it’s his destiny to be known for something great, and when a treelike creature called the Green Knight issues a challenge to King Arthur’s court, Gawain too eagerly accepts, beheading the monstrous figure.Unfortunately, the Green Knight survives his own decapitation and promises to return the blow to Gawain in one year’s time. This means that though Patel is introduced as a romantic rogue — and Lowery steers into that idea, outfitting him in a series of low-cut blouses — it’s the rest of the movie, in which Gawain finds himself humbled by the Green Knight’s looming deadline, that is truly meant to test his mettle as a man.Patel could relate to Sir Gawain: “As a young actor in Hollywood, you’re dealing with issues of masculinity, ego, success and fame. That’s the same quest this young man goes on.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times“I’m certainly aware of all of the fans of Dev Patel’s hair and beard — I’ve seen those memes,” Lowery said. “But I don’t think people understand exactly what he’s going to be doing as an actor and ‘The Green Knight’ just scratches the surface of it.”Lowery’s film is enigmatic enough to mean different things to different viewers, and it’s sure to spawn a thousand subreddits devoted to decoding its dreamlike logic. But to Patel, the main point of “The Green Knight” is clear: Gawain thinks he is entitled to fame even when he has done nothing to prove it’s deserved. His quest, then, is a journey toward integrity that comes with some present-day parallels.“Whether you’re an Instagram model or a YouTuber, there’s this thirst to be recognized, to have your legend spoken about, to get the likes,” Patel said. “And for me as a young actor in Hollywood, you’re dealing with issues of masculinity, ego, success and fame. That’s the same quest this young man goes on to be a known knight. All of that, I related to.”NONE OF THIS was originally in the cards for Patel, who grew up in the London borough of Harrow as the younger of two children. Both his parents had emigrated from Nairobi in their teens. His father, Raju, is quiet and introverted, while his mother, Anita, is the family’s force of nature. “She’s a big personality, and she can have the whole room laughing,” Patel told me. “I think my love of playing all these characters came from her.”Patel was a hyperactive child, and his parents signed him up for years of martial-arts classes to channel that excess energy. Still, he always had something more to give, and when his mother saw a casting advertisement for “Skins,” a teen drama that would supercharge the careers of young actors like Nicholas Hoult and Daniel Kaluuya, she prodded him to audition for the role of sex-crazy Anwar.The show was a hit, but the neighbors were horrified. “It felt like suicide in the community to put your kid into a TV show and let him drop out of school at 16,” Patel said. “While everyone else’s kid is off becoming a doctor or a dentist, I’m here on this TV show,” he said, “simulating sex and taking drugs.”He had never acted on camera before, and “Skins” was a trial by fire. The money was good enough to improve his family’s situation — with his first paycheck, Patel bought his sister a new bed — but the show’s large online following cut both ways.Patel in “Skins” with, from left, Nicholas Hoult, Larissa Wilson and April Pearson.Company Pictures“I was a young kid going on these chat rooms and it was quite brutal,” Patel said. “There were all these lists of who’s the favorite character on the show or who was the best-looking character, and I was always the ugliest, the least attractive. No one liked Anwar. It really took a toll on me personally.”Maybe that’s why he still mistrusts compliments 15 years later, or why he makes fun of himself before anyone else might get the chance. When I bring up the fan base that’s rooting for him on social media, I can’t even finish the sentence before Patel interjects: “All three members of that fan base?” Even when “Slumdog Millionaire” won best picture at the Oscars in 2009 or when, eight years later, Patel himself received a supporting-actor nomination for the drama “Lion” (he lost to Mahershala Ali), all that attention made him uneasy.“I didn’t feel worthy,” he said. “That kind of speaks to my natural low self-esteem: You’re there with really impressive creatures, the best of the best, and you’re like, ‘I don’t know what I have to offer in this space.’”He said his agents still get frustrated with him for turning down major studio blockbusters. “Maybe it’s a fear of how I would fit into that world,” Patel said. Sheepishly, he begins to talk about “one of the worst movies I’ve ever done, and I shouldn’t even bring it up, but do a quick IMDb search and you’ll know what it is.” (He’s referring to M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender,” the Razzie-winning adaptation of the animated action series.)On that production, he was surrounded by green screen and special effects, and the artifice proved too difficult to wrap his head around. “I didn’t really flourish in that position,” he said. “I take my hat off to all those incredible actors that do Marvel movies where it’s, like, big, noisy fans and green screen and tennis balls and whatnot.”Authenticity is Patel’s watchword; if he can’t make a movie feel real to him, it’s not worth doing. By way of explaining, Patel told me a story about landing the role of the teenage striver in “Slumdog Millionaire,” an audition he booked because the daughter of the director, Danny Boyle, was such a fan of “Skins.”Patel in the best-picture-winning “Slumdog Millionaire.” Ishika Mohan/Fox Searchlight PicturesPatel was full of manic energy during the audition, using every trick he could think of to earn laughs in the room. But afterward, Boyle took the young actor aside and told him that if he were hired to lead the movie, he’d have to learn to be still. Could he leave enough room for the audience to enter the film through his eyes?“At the time, I was 17,” Patel said, “and I was like, ‘Well, that’s not acting. That’s just lazy!’” But over the course of his career, he has begun to understand what Boyle meant: All you really have to do is be present. A movie star knows that’s enough.That’s why the most exciting thing for Patel now is when he plays a role that lets him simply be. With its long, meditative scenes set in real locations, “The Green Knight” delivered that feeling in spades: Even when he was astride Armani and the rain hurled by the wind felt like bullets hitting his skin, Patel wouldn’t have traded the truth of that moment for anything. It’s the reason he does what he does, when all that’s left is him, the camera, and something powerful and innate that commands attention. (Horses can sense that sort of thing. Maybe audiences can, too.)“There’s a moment between ‘action’ and ‘cut’ that is like a drug,” Patel told me. “If you’re with the right filmmaker on the right set with the right script, everything just dissolves away.” He likened it to the flow state reached by great athletes, or even to Kate Winslet on the prow of the Titanic: “And there’s a metaphorical DiCaprio behind me,” he said, extending his long arms and grinning. More