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      Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead Check In to ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

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      The first time that Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead shot a scene together, they were in a bathtub, mostly naked. McGregor, in a maximally unflattering wig, was sticking his gut out as far as it would go.“You were just trying to be as grotesque as you could be,” Winstead said affectionately.This was on a recent afternoon in the chilly basement of a midtown hotel where McGregor and Winstead perched on a love seat, his jacket over his shoulders, his hand on her knee. They met in 2017, on the set of the third season of “Fargo,” co-starring as Ray Stussy, a hapless parole officer, and Nikki Swango, his grifter sweetheart. (McGregor also played Emmit Stussy, Ray’s twin.) Two years later, in 2019, they filmed “Birds of Prey” but did not share scenes. They are also both participants in the “Star Wars” franchise — McGregor in the ’90s and ’00s films and the more recent “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series, Winstead in “Ahsoka” — though again they did not share scenes. In 2021, Winstead gave birth to their son. The next year, they married.Now, they have reunited onscreen for “A Gentleman in Moscow,” which premiered Friday on Paramount+ and debuts Sunday on Showtime. An adaptation of Amor Towles’s novel, it stars McGregor as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a mustached aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in a luxury hotel in the years following the Russian Revolution. Winstead appears as Anna Urbanova, an actress and the count’s sometimes girlfriend. Somehow, in the confines of the hotel, they make a life.McGregor plays a Russian count imprisoned in a luxury hotel and Winstead an actress who becomes his companion.Ben Blackall/Paramount+ with ShowtimeIn an hourlong conversation, in a hotel somewhat more modest than Moscow’s Metropol, they discussed claustrophobia, facial hair and the benefits and detriments of working with a spouse. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did you get involved with “A Gentleman in Moscow”?EWAN MCGREGOR It came to me first. I loved the grand nature of the drama, the love and loss and romance. I feel like it’s rarer and rarer to get a chance to play that stuff. At the heart of it, it’s about a man who’s learning to be a husband and learning to be a dad and crawling out of his ideas of the aristocratic way of life to find who he really is.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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      ‘Saturday Night Live’ Presents Trump Bibles

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      Ramy Youssef hosted this weekend’s episode, which also spoofed immigrant fathers and Flaco the owl.Former president Donald Trump’s recent foray into the business of selling his own Bibles provided plenty of comic fodder for “Saturday Night Live” on Easter weekend, including an opening sketch that, for a moment, seemed like a sincere retelling of the resurrection of Jesus.This weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Ramy Youssef and featuring the musical guest Travis Scott, began with a voice-over recounting that the resurrection was witnessed by three women “who had come to anoint the body of Jesus and tend to his tomb.”Following an aside from one of the women played by Sarah Sherman (who wryly observed, “When we’re done grieving, maybe we should come up with a girl’s name other than Mary”), the stone of the tomb was rolled away to reveal a glowing light.“Is it Jesus?” asked another woman, played by Heidi Gardner.“Basically, yes,” answered James Austin Johnson, in his recurring role as Trump. “Happy Easter, everybody,” he declared as he entered. “As it was stated in the Bible: ‘Guess who’s back, back again. Shady’s back.’”Johnson noted that it was “the time of year when I compare myself to Jesus Christ,” which is “just a thing I do now, and people seem to be OK with it.”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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      Chance Perdomo, Star of ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,’ Dies at 27

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      Mr. Perdomo, who died in a motorcycle accident on Friday, played the pansexual warlock Ambrose Spellman in the Netflix series.Chance Perdomo, the British actor known for his roles in the series “Gen V” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” died on Friday. He was 27.Mr. Perdomo died in a motorcycle accident, Larissa Saenz, a representative for him, confirmed in a statement on Saturday. The statement said that the “authorities have advised that no other individuals were involved.” It was not immediately clear where the accident happened.Mr. Perdomo played the pansexual warlock Ambrose Spellman in the Netflix series “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” and Andre Anderson, a superhuman with magnetic manipulation abilities, in “The Boys” spinoff series “Gen V.”He was born on Oct. 20, 1996, according to his representative, in Los Angeles and raised in Southampton, England. Details on survivors were not immediately available.Mr. Perdomo had described himself as “a Black child raised by a Latino mother in a white society with two nationalities.”He landed a small part on an episode of “Hetty Feather,” a British children’s drama set in the Victorian era, after graduating from Peter Symonds College in Winchester, where one of his majors was theater.He told The New York Times in 2020 that although the role was “one or two lines,” it was enough “to take that leap of faith” and pursue acting full time.Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Television said in a statement posted to a “Gen V” social media account that they were “devastated” by the news of Mr. Perdomo’s death.The account also shared a statement from the producers of “Gen V” in which they said they “can’t quite wrap our heads around this.”“Even writing about him in the past tense doesn’t make sense,” the statement added.Variety reported that production on the second season of “Gen V” had been “delayed indefinitely” after the news of Mr. Perdomo’s death.In Britain, Mr. Perdomo was known for starring in “Killed by My Debt,” a television movie based on the true story of a young courier who dies by suicide after two traffic tickets grow into a crushing debt.In an interview posted on social media, he recalled a conversation he had with his mother when he was about 2 years old. He told her he had two things he aspired to.“She said, ‘What do you want to be?’” he said. “I said I want to be the first Black president of the United States, and I want to be on ‘Barney.’”Mr. Perdomo went on to describe the differences between his roles on “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” and “Killed by My Debt.” Of his work, he said: “It’s been quite a year. Quite a couple of years.”“Visual mediums are great tools to be able to get messages and get thoughts across,” he added.He said that connecting with someone emotionally could help lead a person to think differently and “that can change perspectives and hopefully lead to more of a permanent change.” More

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      J.B. Smoove of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Thinks You Should Get Out More

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      Although he plays a sort of permanent houseguest on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “I tell young people all the time to go places,” he says.J.B. Smoove has been here before.“This is almost like the old ‘S.N.L.’ story,” he said, referring to when he lost his writing job on “Saturday Night Live” in 2006. “Something has to go away for something to come in.”This time, what’s ending is “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” on which he plays Leon Black, Larry David’s foulmouthed houseguest who never left.What’s coming in is Smoove Season.“Larry might be ready to hang them up,” he said. “I’m ready to take them off. This is my time to introduce all things that I love” — among them, producing and his new lines of watches and hat boxes. “I think there’s something really interesting about building something that you’re always building. It is never finished.”In fact, Smoove still isn’t certain that this 12th and final season of “Curb” is actually its last.“I never know what the temperature is because as the world keeps changing, Larry keeps thinking of ways to get us through it and explain it to us in his way,” Smoove said on a video call before talking about sharp suits, cigar cars and his beloved R.V. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Close DancingMy wife, Shah, calls me Twinkle Toes. I started in a dance crew when I was younger. And man, I’ve been dancing my whole life. My wife and I, any event we go to, we are literally the life of the party. We like dirty dancing. We like to do our little moves. And we dance even better when we know people are watching us.2Suits, Shoes, ShadesThat is the J.B. look right there. I would wear a suit every day if I could. It forces your posture. You have to purposefully have your suit to the point where you have to breathe in and then you button your top button and you don’t exhale for the rest of the night. If that belly is sticking out, you are not doing that suit justice.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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      ‘Renegade Nell’ Review: When the Highwayman Is a Superwoman

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      In a new series for Disney+, the creator of “Happy Valley” and “Last Tango in Halifax” imagines a sometimes-superpowered 18th-century justice warrior.The British television writer Sally Wainwright may not be a household name in the United States, but for more than a decade she has been turning out television shows whose variety and consistently high quality few writer-producers can match.“Scott & Bailey,” which premiered in 2011, was a smart, tart buddy-detective procedural. The blended-families drama “Last Tango in Halifax” (2012) was finely tooled, irresistible hokum, reflecting the lessons Wainwright learned during her tenure on the venerable soap opera “Coronation Street.” She raised her game with “Happy Valley” (2014), a terrific series about the intertwined work and home lives of a doggedly heroic policewoman. And she segued into costume drama with “Gentleman Jack” (2019), a fact-based Victorian saga of lesbian romance and financial maneuvering that was, like the others, well made, well acted and highly engaging.The shows have a couple of through lines. They all take place in or near Wainwright’s home ground of Yorkshire, in northern England. And they all focus on tough, take-charge women — often women whose commitment to what they know or think is right can make them a little hard to live with.Wainwright’s latest show, “Renegade Nell,” whose eight episodes premiered Friday on Disney+, takes her down some new paths. The action moves south, toward London (it was filmed in Oxfordshire), and further back in time, to the early 1700s. And in a significant departure, Wainwright dabbles in the supernatural: Her heroine, the commoner Nell Jackson, can summon otherworldly strength and agility to battle the black magic wielded by her higher-born foes.Nell, played by Louisa Harland of “Derry Girls,” is another Wainwright heroine who must learn how to harness her strength and high spirits, and not do collateral damage to her family and friends. (She gets called “unnatural,” an epithet also applied to the protagonist of “Gentleman Jack” when she acts in ways women are not supposed to.) Nell’s challenge is greater, though, because the strength is so unexpected. Stumbling upon a stagecoach robbery, she is about to be shot when a tiny light appears and gives her ruffian-bashing, bullet-dodging capabilities.The light turns out to be a winged humanoid named Billy, played by Nick Mohammed of “Ted Lasso,” who returns to bail out Nell whenever she is in danger (though not always as promptly as she would like). And she is in danger a lot: Her new powers, combined with some complicated and tragic circumstances, turn her into a fugitive suspected of multiple murders and eventually put her in the unlikely position of saving the British crown from a Jacobite invasion. (Thematically, it’s helpful for Wainwright that the actual monarch at the time, who faced an actual coup attempt, was a woman, Queen Anne, played in the show with an arch sang-froid by Jodhi May.)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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      How ‘3 Body Problem’ Created a Spectacular Disaster, With Strings Attached

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      Technical artists used a combination of digital and practical effects to slice an oil tanker into pieces in the fifth episode. Here’s how they did it.It begins slowly, almost soundlessly. As an oil tanker glides through the Panama Canal, the flow of a hose slows to a trickle. The hose has been sliced in two. Then the man holding the hose falls apart, his body severed at the knees and waist. Strands of nanofibers, each a hundredth the thickness of a human hair and strung across the canal at its narrowest point, knife through the ship, cutting smoothly through walls, through pipes, through flesh and bone. The sundered ship fans out like a deck of cards then collapses, smoldering. Every soul onboard — a thousand people, many of them children — has been killed.This harrowing sequence occurs in the fifth episode of the first season of “3 Body Problem,” the new Netflix adaptation of a popular science-fiction trilogy by the Chinese author Liu Cixin. Occurring in the first book, it lasts just a few pages and as a plot driver, it is minor. (The ship is destroyed to obtain a hard drive containing messages from an alien race.) But onscreen, as a marvel of televisual imagination and an example of a seamless integration of practical and computer-generated effects, the scene is unforgettable.“It’s basically an egg slicer going through this big tanker,” Stefen Fangmeier, a supervisor of visual effects, said. “You’ve never seen anything like that.”In the episode, nanomaterials created by Auggie Salazar (played by Eiza González as perhaps the world’s most beautiful materials physicist) are employed to deadly effect. To understand how the science might work, the series creators — David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo — consulted Matt Kenzie, a physics professor at the University of Cambridge whose father had worked with Benioff and Weiss on “Game of Thrones.”Together they imagined how nanomaterials that don’t yet exist — or exist only in minute quantities in carefully controlled lab conditions — could be deployed. The goal wasn’t necessarily realism — “It’s a science-fiction show, so in some cases the fiction has to take precedence,” Kenzie said — but a sense of plausibility given current technology.“You try not to veer into things that just look wrong or cannot be possible,” Kenzie said.The opening moments of the sequence depict the nanofibers slicing through first a hose and then the man using it.NetflixWe 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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      ‘Gladiators,’ That ’90s Show, Is Back With Extra Muscle in Britain

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      A reboot of “Gladiators,” the musclebound 1990s staple, has attracted millions of viewers in Britain. Is appointment television back?First it was the streamers: the seismic arrival of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and the rest, offering television’s previously captive viewers the chance to watch seemingly whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Then TikTok joined YouTube in conclusively shattering what was once a unified small-screen audience into a billion individual fragments.On both sides of the Atlantic, ratings plummeted. Viewers drifted away. Advertising revenue collapsed, and budgets followed. For much of the last decade, it has felt like the traditional television industry has been running up a steeply-inclined treadmill, legs pumping and lungs heaving as the ground moves rapidly beneath its feet.Now, in Britain, a group of bodybuilders, personal trainers and sundry gym rats have stepped unto the breach. Squeezed into tightfitting Lycra costumes, they have been wielding oversized pugil sticks, running around floating scaffolds and chasing only slightly less musclebound members of the public up walls, in front of a cheering crowd.In much the same format that first graced American screens in 1989 and British sets in 1992 — “regular” contestants compete in a variety of outlandish challenges against specialist, intimidating athletes each week — “Gladiators” has, in the year 2024, not only provided the BBC with an invigorating hit, but has also offered the latest sign that so-called “linear television” might be more resilient than previously thought.Even in an instant, on-demand media landscape, the idea that people would sit down to watch something — on a television set, at a scheduled time, with other people in the room — has been regaining some ground.According to the BBC, 9.8 million people have watched the first episode of the British “Gladiators” reboot, which first aired in January. More striking, though, is that the vast majority of those viewers did not see it at their convenience. Instead, the broadcaster says, 6.6 million — 10 percent of the British population — sat down to follow it as it went out.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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      ‘Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold” Is as Anxiety-Inducing as It Gets

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      On “Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold,” big-wall climbers set out to make history. Their tense conversations give a peek inside the interpersonal dynamics of those who regularly risk death.Spoilers follow.About halfway through the new National Geographic three-part docuseries “Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold,” a vibe shift starts to creep in.Honnold is one of the greatest living big-wall climbers, whose fame ballooned after his historic ascent of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot climb in Yosemite National Park that was chronicled in the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo.” Here, he is outnumbered by his five adventure-mates as they cross the Renland ice cap, a vast sheet of ice in Greenland, the first known time it has been traversed by foot.They are in the thick of a harsh 100-mile, six-week trek to Ingmikortilaq, an untouched sea wall that measures nearly 4,000 feet — about the height of three Empire State Buildings. Honnold and two of the team members, Hazel Findlay and Mikey Schaefer — both superstar big-wall climbers themselves — are planning to scale it. For any elite mountaineer, it would be a daunting, perilous and most likely inadvisable undertaking. Honnold told CNN that he had “never done a first ascent of that magnitude, of a wall of that size.”About 90 minutes into the day’s march across the ice cap, whiteout conditions and howling winds bear down on them, zapping all visibility and prompting a pointed back-and-forth.Honnold wants to continue even as they approach the center of a crevasse field, where giant cracks in the surface, some hundreds of feet deep, are hard to spot until they’re nearly underfoot. “My goal for the day is to get all the way across the ice cap,” Honnold says. When Schaefer suggests the group set up camp until the weather clears, Honnold can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Are you kidding?” he asks.The team crosses the Edward Bailey Glacier in Greenland. They would soon encounter a blizzard and have to decide whether to wait it out or continue. “I don’t like stopping if I don’t have to,” Honnold says. “I’d much rather keep moving.”Pablo Durana/National GeographicWe 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