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    Sprinter Vans Have Become a Staple for Celebrities at the Met Gala

    Famous actors, singers, athletes and housewives are fans of the Mercedes-Benz van, which has become a staple in streets outside events like the Met Gala.When Kendall Jenner attended the 2022 Met Gala in a Prada gown with an enormous flowing skirt, getting her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art required special transportation. A limousine would not do, nor would an SUV — walking in the dress was a challenge; sitting, impossible. The solution: Ms. Jenner would be driven, standing, in a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van.On the way to the event, as a way to relieve her anxiety about running late, Ms. Jenner relieved herself in an ice bucket while standing in the van. “Best decision I ever made,” she said of that moment in an episode of “The Kardashians” on Hulu.The Sprinter van, a towering box on wheels with nearly six-and-a-half feet of head room, is a direct descendant of the earliest motorized caravans developed by Karl Benz in 1896. (Some 30 years later, he and Gottlieb Daimler founded the Mercedes-Benz company.) The Sprinter, first released in Europe in 1995, started being sold domestically in 2010. Last year, Mercedes-Benz unveiled an electric version.The van — which can be used to transport up to 15 passengers (or cargo) — is appreciated by automotive enthusiasts for its build quality, reliability and versatility, as well as for the thrust and longevity of the diesel engine in most versions.But other people have come to recognize the Sprinter for different reasons, among them its proximity to celebrities. The van has become a preferred mode of transportation for actors, singers, athletes and “Real Housewives,” and is now a staple in streets outside star-studded events like the Oscars and the Met Gala.Sprinter vans, like the one behind Amber Valletta, a model and actress, have become a staple in streets outside red carpet events. Neil Rasmus/BFAWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Saturday Night Live’ Welcomes Dua Lipa and Jerry Seinfeld

    The pop star hosted and performed as the musical guest. The comedian poked fun at the abundant promotion he has been doing for his Netflix movie.A fake commercial from this weekend’s broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” offered these tepid endorsements for “a bigass aluminum tray of penne alla vodka”: “Loved by none, but tolerated by all. Because it’s not that good. But it’s not that bad either.”So, think of this episode as the penne alla vodka of the season. It was hosted by Dua Lipa, who was also the musical guest. The first sketch of the night had something to do with parents of college students who have protested the Israeli offensive in Gaza. But if you stuck around until Weekend Update, you did get a surprise appearance by Jerry Seinfeld.That opening sketch, a satire of cable TV public affairs shows, was hosted by Michael Longfellow and featured Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner and Kenan Thompson as parents of college students who were weighing in on the protests at their children’s campuses.“I want to let my son make his own choices, but to be honest, it’s a little scary,” Day said.“My daughter is an adult and has to live her own life,” Gardner said.“Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices to fight what they believe in,” Thompson said — until it was explained to him that his daughter was one of these protesters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Kenan Thompson Takes on the College Protests on ‘Saturday Night Live’

    The pop star hosted and performed as the musical guest. The comedian poked fun at the abundant promotion he has been doing for his Netflix movie.A fake commercial from this weekend’s broadcast of “Saturday Night Live” offered these tepid endorsements for “a bigass aluminum tray of penne alla vodka”: “Loved by none, but tolerated by all. Because it’s not that good. But it’s not that bad either.”So, think of this episode as the penne alla vodka of the season. It was hosted by Dua Lipa, who was also the musical guest. The first sketch of the night had something to do with parents of college students who have protested the Israeli offensive in Gaza. But if you stuck around until Weekend Update, you did get a surprise appearance by Jerry Seinfeld.That opening sketch, a satire of cable TV public affairs shows, was hosted by Michael Longfellow and featured Mikey Day, Heidi Gardner and Kenan Thompson as parents of college students who were weighing in on the protests at their children’s campuses.“I want to let my son make his own choices, but to be honest, it’s a little scary,” Day said.“My daughter is an adult and has to live her own life,” Gardner said.“Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices to fight what they believe in,” Thompson said — until it was explained to him that his daughter was one of these protesters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Dark Matter,’ Sci-Fi Thriller, Explores Alternative Realities

    In this new Apple TV+ techno-thriller, a portal to parallel realities allows people to visit new worlds and revisit their own past decisions.In the new series “Dark Matter,” a physics professor (Joel Edgerton) is abducted off the streets of Chicago and replaced by an alternative version of himself. This version, instead of toiling away teaching distracted undergrads, is a prize-winning scientist who, among his various accomplishments, has invented a box that can superposition people into parallel worlds.This alternative Jason, despite his riches and renown in his own universe, covets the humbler Jason’s life and family — his loving wife (Jennifer Connelly) and son (Oakes Fegley). So he steals them, leaving the original Jason to negotiate a limbo of parallel realities, hopping from one to another as he tries to find his way home, like a sci-fi Odysseus.“Dark Matter,” which premieres May 8 on Apple TV+, was created by Blake Crouch, adapting his own 2016 novel of the same title. The series is part thriller, part family drama and part physics primer, enlisting heady concepts like quantum mechanics, superposition and, well, dark matter, to tell a story about longing, regret and desire.It is the latest project to depict physics as a vital, fraught and even sexy subject, joining the Oscar giant biopic “Oppenheimer” and the Netflix alien invasion series “3 Body Problem,” which is named for a classical mechanics problem. In these stories, physicists wrestle with matters of life and death that, as in reality, are intertwined with matters of love.They’re human tales about human dilemmas. But they’re also happy to throw some science into the equation.“More than anything, Blake and I wanted people to be excited in every episode, learn something in every episode, but also maybe cry in every episode,” Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry said in a video interview. She is a writer and producer on the series and has been Crouch’s developmental story editor since the publication of his 2012 novel “Pines” — she is also married to him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Wants to Testify at Donald Trump’s Criminal Trial

    “I think I can keep Trump awake during the trial,” Kimmel said after learning that text messages about his talk show were entered as evidence in the case.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Another Historic FirstDuring Donald Trump’s criminal trial on Thursday, a series of text messages between Michael Cohen and Keith Davidson was entered into evidence containing several references to “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Kimmel said he was excited, proud, and “exhilarated, even, because from here on, we aren’t just following the Donald Trump drama in New York, we are part of it now.”“It’s the first time — I don’t want to brag — but first time a late-night talk show has been introduced into evidence at the criminal trial for a president of the United States. Johnny Carson didn’t get that with Nixon — we got it here.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Suffice it to say that when Ryan Murphy makes the nine-part mini-series about this for Fubo, I will be in it. I would assume someone like George Clooney or maybe Chris Hemsworth will be playing me. Guillermo, you will be in it. You’ll be played by — you’ll be played by Pedro Pascal.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I’m sick of being out of the court — I want to be in it. Why was I not asked to testify? It’s outrageous! I’m going to start suing people!” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I think I can keep Trump awake during the trial.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (More Trump Takes Edition)“Yesterday was a day off from the trial, so Trump jetted off to Wisconsin and Michigan to perform his hit one-man show, ‘Complaining for Applause.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Prosecutors argued today that former President Trump should be sanctioned again for violating his gag order. Apparently, he talks in his sleep.” — SETH MEYERS“The courtroom sketch artist hates him. I mean, absolutely, she turned him into the hunchback of ‘Bloatra Dame.’ It’s like his tongue is about to shoot out and get a fly on it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Scientists in England recently revealed the facial reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman that was buried about 75,000 years ago in a cave. Or it might have just been another courtroom sketch.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingKate Hudson made her T.V. performance debut on Thursday’s “Tonight Show” with the song “Gonna Find Out” from her forthcoming album, “Glorious.”Also, Check This OutRichard Gadd and Jessica Gunning star in “Baby Reindeer,” a semi-autobiographical Netflix mini-series in which Gadd plays a version of himself.Ed Miller/NetflixThe Netflix hit “Baby Reindeer” is based on a true story from the life of creator and star Richard Gadd. More

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    What to Know About ‘Baby Reindeer,’ Netflix’s True-ish TV Hit

    The mini-series, based on the star’s experiences, has viewers wondering how much of it is real. Here’s the back story.Some spoilers follow.“Baby Reindeer,” Netflix’s absorbing, claustrophobic seven-episode thriller, has been an unexpected global hit — a success made even more surprising given its intense themes. It is far and away the most-watched show on Netflix, according to the streamer’s publicly released numbers, dwarfing every other show on the platform.The mini-series follows the character of Donny Dunn, a bartender and floundering comedian trying to navigate the fog of trauma and cobble together a sense of self while being mercilessly stalked and tormented by a woman named Martha, with whom he maintains a codependent connection, despite the harassment. The title refers to one of Martha’s many nicknames for Donny.Here’s what’s real about “Baby Reindeer,” and what viewers seem most curious about.Yes, That Is the Real Guy“Baby Reindeer” is the work of Richard Gadd, 34, who plays Donny, a slightly fictionalized version of himself. And if you were wondering how a regular guy could be such a confident, complex actor, it’s because he is a seasoned, award-winning performer who parlayed his autobiographical one-man show, titled “Baby Reindeer,” into the series, for which he wrote every episode.But once upon a time, he was the self-loathing performer we see depicted. “Baby Reindeer” takes meta storytelling to new levels.Yes, It Is Based on His Real ExperiencesEarly in the first episode, a message across the screen reads, “This is a true story.” And it is.“It’s all emotionally 100 percent true,” Gadd, who was the real-life victim of the stalking, said in a recent interview with Variety. “It’s all borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met.” True with the caveat that “for both legal and artistic reasons,” as he put it, details had to be changed. “You can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television,” he said. “We were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people,” he added, “so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult.”The series is largely punctuated by language from real messages sent by his stalker (played by Jessica Gunning), which we see typed out onscreen. In his one-man show, a 70-minute monologue that premiered at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and would go on to win an Olivier Award (Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys), Gadd played her voice mail messages to the audience, and projections of her emails scrolled across the venue’s ceiling.According to Gadd, she sent him over 41,000 emails, tweeted at him hundreds of times and left him 350 hours of voice mail over the course of a few years.For the series, certain timelines were moved around “to make them pay off a little better,” he said. Nonetheless, “it’s a very true story.”Gadd Has Asked Viewers Not to Dig …While the saga, at first glance, is one of stalking and obsession, it is equally about the life-shattering effects of sexual assault. In the fourth episode, Gadd’s character is repeatedly drugged, assaulted and raped by a powerful television writer named Darrien O’Connor (played by Tom Goodman-Hill) who’d made false promises to help catapult the comedian’s career. (The sexual assaults were explored in Gadd’s earlier solo show “Monkey See Monkey Do.”)“Abuse leaves an imprint,” Gadd recently told GQ magazine. “Especially abuse like this where it’s repeated with promises.”The depiction of the abuse is graphic and disturbing, and knowing that the characters were based on real people prompted great interest in the identities behind them. But Gadd was quick to urge viewers to stop investigating. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be,” he wrote on Instagram. “That’s not the point of our show.”… Yet Viewers Keep DiggingAs more and more people binge the show, social media platforms have become amateur detective rings, with viewers trying to suss out the identities of the characters. The British writer and director Sean Foley was the subject of online threats when some thought that he was the real-life Darrien character.“Police have been informed and are investigating all defamatory abusive and threatening posts against me,” Foley said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) in late April.On Instagram, Gadd defended Foley specifically, writing, “People I love, have worked with, and admire (including Sean Foley) are unfairly getting caught up in speculation.”In the first episode, Gadd’s character searches Martha’s name online and uncovers a trove of articles about her past stalking — “Serial Stalker Sentenced to Four and Half Years,” reads one headline — which led some online sleuths to try to find the actual versions of those same articles.The show has become such a phenomenon that The Daily Mail published an interview with a woman purporting to be the “real” Martha, lodging her complaints about the show, though her name was not disclosed.When GQ asked Gadd what the stalker might make of the show, he said, “I honestly couldn’t speak as to whether she would watch it,” calling her “an idiosyncratic person.”“We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself,” he said. “What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.” More

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    What to Watch This Weekend: A Supernatural Dramedy

    “The Big Door Prize” returns for another season of charming small-town folks grappling with their fates.Chris O’Dowd in a scene from Season 2 of “The Big Door Prize.”Apple TV+“The Big Door Prize,” on Apple TV+, is set among humble, fragile people, and it cradles them with gentle care. But the show itself is full of moxie — not defiant but confident that yes, it can blend “Gilmore Girls” with “The Leftovers.” Quirk and ache, baby! Come and get it.The show is set in the sweet small town of Deerfield, where everyone attends elaborate local festivals and enjoys the garish Italian restaurant where you can sit in a gondola. Then one day a fortunetelling machine called the Morpho appears in the general store, promising to reveal one’s true potential. In Season 1, the cards it spit out seemingly told characters what their true fate was: magician, royalty, or in the case of Chris O’Dowd’s repressed family man, “teacher/whistler.” In Season 2, the next level awaits. When the Deerfield denizens put their cards back into the machine’s slot, each sees a unique, personal 32-bit videogame on the screen, though one absorbs it more than plays it. For some, the interlude resolves their greatest regrets; for others, the action is too cryptic to understand at first glance.“Door” uses plenty of tricks from mystery-box shows and from, of course, its own literal mystery box. Little overlapping connections abound, and throwaway objects become significant totems. Like lots of high-end shows, it has departure episodes that focus more on side characters — but because the show features such a broad cast, almost every episode has that feel. “Door” avoids many of the frustrating aspects of its various predecessors by only glancingly investigating the Morpho’s origins. The show’s central question is not “Where did this come from?” but “What should I do?”Despite the woo-woo goings on, the folks here are not at much of an advantage. Being told exactly who they were didn’t liberate anyone per se, and living out one’s own little Greek myth is no great treat. Does being told you’re a liar make you more truthful? If a big ego is authentic, earned self-love and not just a cover for insecurity, might it be wonderful? If you regret one big life decision, does that mean you regret all the decisions that followed it?All 10 episodes from Season 1 of “The Big Door Prize” are available along with the first four from Season 2, with new episodes arriving Wednesdays. Because they are each a blissful half-hour, they make for a superb binge. More

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    The Voice of a Hundred Faces: Dee Bradley Baker’s ‘Star Wars’ Journey

    With “The Bad Batch” ending this week on Disney+, the man who has voiced hundreds of “Star Wars” characters over the past two decades looks back on his run.For “Star Wars” fans who have seen only the theatrical blockbusters, clone troopers are peripheral figures, at most recalled as the title menace in “Attack of the Clones,” from 2002. But over the past two decades they have become essential to the franchise, the pillar of animated “Star Wars” series including “The Clone Wars,” “Star Wars Rebels” and most recently, “The Bad Batch.”And in that time one man has been essential to the clones: Dee Bradley Baker, who has voiced them all.Not all of the shows — all of the clones, hundreds of them since getting cast for “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” which debuted in 2008 with a feature film and an animated series that lasted for seven seasons. Now Baker’s incredibly prolific gig, which also included plenty of non-clone roles, has finally come to an end: “The Bad Batch,” the “Clone Wars” sequel series, concludes its three-season run on Disney+ this week, and there are no plans for more clone shows.“It’s been wonderfully gratifying to go on this journey,” Baker said.Baker, 61, has been a voice actor for nearly 30 years, working on series like “Dexter’s Laboratory,” “American Dad,” “Codename: Kids Next Door” and “Space Jam.” Before “Star Wars,” he almost exclusively played funny parts: He voiced every animal in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” Perry the Platypus in “Phineas & Ferb” and creatures in live-action projects like Sebastian the rat in “The Suicide Squad.”“I would get cast as more young, energetic and comedic because that’s how I thought of myself,” Baker said. The “Star Wars” shows “pulled so much more from me as an actor because it asked things of me I wouldn’t even think of.”“Nothing can be more fun than to play in the universe that captured your imagination as a kid,” Baker said.Jesse Grant/Getty ImagesMany of the dramatic and emotional stories early on in “The Clone Wars” involved the clone troopers. After all, it is easier to kill a replaceable clone, one of millions, than a Jedi who also shows up in the theatrical movies.Though the series was on Cartoon Network and aimed at kids, the war stories were intense and put the increasingly hard-bitten clones through one wringer after another. One story arc channels the novella “Heart of Darkness”: The troopers are led by a ruthless Jedi General in a jungle planet, until the general’s constant sacrifice of lives leads to insurgency. One episode was directed by Walter Murch, the Oscar-winning sound designer behind the Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now,” itself inspired by “Heart of Darkness.”“Voice acting is acting, you need the same skill and the same talent,” said Ashley Eckstein who played Ahsoka Tano. (This central “Clone Wars” character last year became the center of a live-action show, “Ahsoka,” starring Rosario Dawson.)“It can even be harder and more difficult to do voice acting,” Eckstein continued. “Dee and I had to do some deeply emotional and action-packed scenes, and we had to stand still behind a microphone. You can’t act it out or move around. You have to convey all of it just through your voice.”“The Clone Wars” was followed by “Star Wars Rebels,” which follows a small Rebel crew that eventually includes a group of surviving clones, and “The Bad Batch,” centered on a squad of “defective” clones with even more distinct personalities.Baker voiced a menagerie of creatures in “The Clone Wars.” He said his improv background prepared him for the odd sounds “Star Wars” shows require and for moving quickly between characters.Lucasfilm/Disney+One obstacle to making clone troopers compelling is the challenge of differentiating them. (They are, after all, clones.) There were small attempts from the beginning to make them distinct from a design standpoint. The creators gave them colorful armor and insignia to contrast them with the Empire’s more well-known stormtroopers, according to Dave Filoni, who was supervising director and an executive producer of “The Clone Wars” and is now the chief creative officer of Lucasfilm.“They were able to express their individuality, where stormtroopers are individuals taken into service and stripped of their personality and identity,” Filoni wrote in an email. Still, a look is little without the voice and personality that goes with it, and Baker’s performance was a big reason the characters became so central.The first test to see if Baker voicing all the clones would work came in “Rookies,” the fifth episode of “The Clone Wars.” The episode came from an idea by George Lucas, who wanted to do an episode of just clones, and follows a group of cadets who come together as a squad and stave off a droid invasion.As Henry Gilroy, the show’s head writer, recalled, “That recording session was actually a revelation, for we realized that we could write anything for the clones to do with story and character and Dee would execute to perfection.”The clones soon went from being one-off characters with little personality to proper members of the expanded cast, with their own emotional and dramatic arcs that carried on throughout the show’s seven seasons and into “The Bad Batch.” (The character Echo is the last surviving member of that rookie squad.)Baker comes up with one or two defining qualities for each clone to help differentiate them.Lucasfilm/Disney+All the clones are based, fittingly, on the same voice: the one Baker created to play Captain Rex, the second-in-command to Anakin Skywalker and his closest friend in “The Clone Wars,” after Obi-Wan Kenobi. Baker would settle on one or two defining qualities for each clone — rank, age, attitude, quirk — to guide his performances. He used to record one clone at a time, going through an entire script with one and then doing the same with the next and so on until an episode was done.But as “The Clone Wars” developed more complex arcs, he took a faster, more daunting approach. “I would start to play all of them and just jump back and forth,” Baker said. “I just read through the scenes straight through as if they’re characters playing out a scene, but it’s just me going from one voice to the other.”Michelle Ang, who stars in “The Bad Batch” as Omega, is amazed by this process. “He can not only perform the different personalities, but hold five different viewpoints of all the ‘Bad Batch’ characters and argue for each one,” she said. “It feels like there are four distinct people I’m working with.”Eckstein called Baker a mentor, comparing their relationship to that of Ahsoka, her young Padawan character, and Baker’s seasoned Captain Rex. “He taught me the ways of the Force, the ways of voice acting,” she said. When she too was asked to play multiple characters in the same episodes, “I learned from Dee, who is brilliant at doing that.”Baker, who started out in comedy, said improv helped train him to embrace the odd vocalizations “Star Wars” shows can require and to move fluidly between characters.“I am not so much prepared as I’m ready,” he said. “You want to be open and available to steer this and configure that in a way that the writers you’re working with want things to go. You can’t prepare for it. You get that in the immediate human connection of now, and that is inherently improvisational.”The end of “The Bad Batch” is the end of an era, even if other “Star Wars” roles eventually come Baker’s way, like the upcoming video game “Star Wars Outlaws.” Though characters like Ahsoka Tano live on in live-action, and Captain Rex made a cameo in “Ahsoka,” “The Bad Batch” characters were the last characters that Lucas, the “Star Wars” mastermind who is no longer involved with the franchise, had direct input on. The significance of this isn’t lost on Baker.“I’ve loved ‘Star Wars’ since I was a kid,” he said. “Nothing can be more fun than to play in the universe that captured your imagination as a kid.” More