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      ‘Barry’ Is Ending. For Anthony Carrigan, That’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of

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      Anthony Carrigan was 7 the first time he stepped onstage. And he was terrified. Debilitating stage fright, which he would struggle with for decades, would have led most children to consider alternate careers. Carrigan, a star of the tar-black HBO comedy “Barry,” was not most children.Because even that first time, he felt something beyond terror. Diagnosed at 3 with alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the hair follicles, he often found himself stared at, gawked at, even in elementary school.“People would look at my alopecia and not really look at me,” he said. “That’s kind of a weird dehumanizing thing, when someone is looking at a part of you.” But onstage, he felt as though he could control how people saw him — which meant he could make sure they saw all of him, or at least all of the character he was playing.They are seeing him now. On, “Barry,” which returns for its fourth and final season on Sunday, Carrigan, 40, plays the gangster NoHo Hank. Originally meant to die in the pilot, NoHo Hank, powered by Carrigan’s sweeping, sunshiny, Emmy-nominated performance, has survived multiple assassination attempts and a presumed panther attack. The character has become a fan favorite, complete with catchphrases (“Hey, man,” “super great!”) and multiple GIFs of a Season 2 rooftop folk dance.Two days before I met him, a young woman stopped him on the street. “She just wept, like, Beatles-level mania,” he said. “She was really lovely, though, very sweet.”We were speaking on a Monday afternoon in early April at the Tin Building, an upscale food hall in Lower Manhattan. (He is based in Los Angeles, where “Barry” shoots, but his girlfriend lives nearby.) Alopecia has rendered him bald and without eyebrows or eyelashes, a look that causes a momentary neural jar, until the force of his personality — buoyant, sincere, self-actualized — takes over. Carrigan comes here often. Maybe not often enough.Originally meant to die in the pilot, NoHo Hank (Carrigan, left, with Michael Irby) has become a fan favorite, complete with catchphrases and many GIFs in his honor.Merrick Morton/HBOHe hadn’t made a reservation at the oyster counter, and for a moment it looked as if he wouldn’t be seated. I joked that he could pull a “Do you know who I am?” maneuver, and Carrigan had the decency to look appalled.“I’ve never done that!” he said. Once seated, he listened politely as a server described the oysters of the day. He declined the ones from Massachusetts. “I’m from Massachusetts; I know how salty we are,” he said, and ordered a dozen from Canada and Maine.After high school in Massachusetts, he studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University. His hair loss was still isolated to patches at that time, and professors often cast him as the longhaired bad boy, a look that determined most of his early roles. That hair and the worry that he would lose it were sources of anxiety. And after landing his first major role, as an amateur detective on the one-season Jerry Bruckheimer series “The Forgotten,” his alopecia progressed and he did lose it. At first he covered up, with hairpieces and eyebrow makeup, a must for character continuity. But when the series ended, he put the hairpieces away.“I really had nothing to lose at that point,” he said as he spooned horseradish onto an oyster. “Because I had no idea what my career was going to look like. I just knew that it was either try it with the way that I looked, or I was going to have to find a new career.”So he kept going, without wigs or false lashes, even when his representatives argued for them. He worried that this new appearance would limit the roles he was seen for. It did. But he suspected that this new self-acceptance would free him as an actor. Whatever parts did come his way, he would play the hell out of them.The parts did come. Gone was the bad boy. In its place, he discovered, was the bad guy. He began to play villains, chief among them Victor Zsasz, the psychopath he played for 20 episodes on the Fox superhero series “Gotham.” He fretted, sometimes, that he was helping to reinforce a stereotype of bald men as sinister. But it kept him in the Screen Actors Guild. And it netted him an audition for “Barry.”NoHo Hank, intended as a minor antagonist, is a member of a Chechen mob. Carrigan had little interest in playing another villain. But the script’s violent comedy delighted him. He went back to the formal exercises of his college days. How should Hank move? What animal would he be? A scorpion, he decided, which explains the puffed-out chest, the hands on hips, the scuttling walk.“He’s a lovable scorpion,” Carrigan explained at the oyster counter. “He doesn’t want to sting anyone, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. But that’s just his nature.”He made his audition tape and sent it in. Alec Berg, a co-creator of “Barry,” recalled being struck at first by Carrigan’s atypical appearance, then by his skill and commitment.“For me, I just completely forgot that this is a guy who doesn’t have hair,” Berg said in a recent phone interview. “He just was that character so thoroughly.”When he and the series star and co-creator, Bill Hader, met Carrigan in person, they knew they couldn’t kill Hank so quickly. “He was lovely and so imaginative, he really understood the comedy,” Hader said, in a separate interview. “I was like, ‘I’d like the option that this guy lives.’”Hader described NoHo Hank as a “heavy.” But in Carrigan’s hands and in the wardrobe department’s shrunken polo shirts, he became the lightest heavy imaginable. He’s a people pleaser, a charmer. During a Season 2 near-death experience, he tells his underlings, needlessly, in his Chechen-accented English: “I know you look at me and see hard-as-nails criminal, stone-cold killer, ice man. But, uh, this is lie.” Hank should have had a career in hospitality, Carrigan said. Hank has said as much himself.Carrigan’s command of the role is exhaustive. He often devises new idioms for Hank, as when he substitutes “kid and the poodle” for “kit and caboodle” in a Season 4 episode. And he preapproves each polo shirt.“I’m playing the bad guy, but making him likable, making him winning,” Carrigan said.In playing both sides of Hank — Hank’s cheer, Hank’s sting — Carrigan complicates the stereotype of the bald villain, allowing “Barry” to pose knotty questions about good and evil, action and intention. Hank, that likable guy with the juice boxes, has killed an awful lot of people.“People would look at my alopecia and not really look at me,” Carrigan said about beginning to lose his hair as a child. But onstage, he felt as if he could control how people saw him.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesThe complications that Carrigan brings to the part have drawn the attention of other directors. He played a robot in the 2020 comedy “Bill & Ted Face the Music.” Paul Weitz cast him as comic relief in the 2021 Kevin Hart film “Fatherhood,” attracted, Weitz said, by Carrigan’s “baked-in love of performance and love of human eccentricity.”So far, no role has rivaled Hank in its complexity or its blood-spattered joy. Carrigan knows this better than anyone. When “Barry” wrapped, just before Thanksgiving, he hung up Hank’s costume for the last time and there, in his trailer, said goodbye to him, thanking Hank for the chance to play, to experiment, to make mistakes. Then he stole Hank’s watch, a fake Rolex.Berg bet that Carrigan would find other roles. “He’s just the nicest, most genuine, friendly, lovely guy,” he said. “Part of who he is goes into Hank, but he’s not just playing himself, he’s really performing.”“I don’t think it’d be hard for him to step outside of that,” Berg added, “play other things.”When I met Carrigan at the oyster counter, he was trying to take that step. He had recently returned from a location shoot in Kentucky for a new film. And the director Alex Winter, his co-star in “Bill & Ted,” was writing a role for him in another movie. “He has heart and he has physicality,” Winter said. “And he has an incredible sense of humor.” Is the character a villain? “Everyone’s a villain in this thing,” Winter said.If Carrigan worries that no subsequent role will be as beloved as NoHo Hank, he worries less than he used to. “When I’m able to curtail my anxiety enough to feel loose and feel free, then I can go in any direction,” he said.As he ate his oysters, I noticed a signet ring on his finger, a recent gift from his girlfriend. The ring shows a rabbit. Rabbits are famously fearful animals. But this one, Carrigan pointed out, was running free. “The fear is no longer taking up space,” he said.He turned it around, showing an engraving of a trap. Would the rabbit fall into it?Carrigan shook his head. “I think he’s already escaped it,” he said. More

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      ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2, Episode 4 Recap: Hunter/Gatherer

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      Teen Lottie goes out in search of prey as her allies back at the cabin become more and more like followers.Season 2, Episode 4: ‘Old Wounds’There’s a lot of driving in this week’s episode of “Yellowjackets.” The adult characters are on the road. Misty and Walter are searching for Natalie and the “purple people,” who they assume have taken her hostage. Shauna takes her daughter, Callie, into the middle of nowhere where she confesses the full extent of her crimes. Natalie sets out with Lisa (Nicole Maines), a member of Lottie’s group, with the ostensible goal of selling honey. And then there’s Taissa, who empties her gas tank on the way to an unknown destination. She hitchhikes the rest of the way there thanks to a kindly trucker.But all of these journeys end not in horror — as is typical in this show — but in something that maybe comes close to solace. Misty and Walter don’t spend the night together, but a montage showing them getting ready for bed indicates just how simpatico they are in their precise routines. There’s a moment when they both seem to consider reaching out before settling into their pillows.Shauna’s family is more stable than it has ever been once she tells Callie everything. Instead of recoiling at her mom’s confession of murder, Callie actually seems to trust her parents again.At the same time, Natalie realizes that she actually understands Lisa, a girl she previously stabbed with a fork. They have both been depressed and suicidal, and they end their day sharing a drink at a bar with Lisa’s pet fish, stolen from her overly critical mother’s house.And Taissa? Well, Taissa ends up in front of a new but familiar face: Adult Van (Lauren Ambrose). “Tai?” she says incredulously from behind the counter at a retro video store, her hair and scars unmistakable. “Hey, Van,” Taissa responds, hesitant, almost a little ashamed.The arrival of Ambrose has been one of the most eagerly anticipated aspects of the season, in part because Ambrose, best known for “Can’t Hardly Wait” and “Six Feet Under,” seemed like perfect casting, given her red hair, her 1990s cred and her perfect deployment of sarcasm. We don’t get much of her here, but it’s a relief when Taissa’s trek leads to this cozy-seeming L.G.B.T.Q.-friendly shop.There’s a hope too that the arrival of Ambrose’s Van will help illuminate some of what’s going on with Tai, in both the past and the present. At this point, her story line has been reliant more on creepy vibes than on concrete progress. Introducing her old girlfriend may give us a better picture of what’s going on inside Tai’s head.Back in the wilderness in the 1990s, Tai’s instincts also lead to the return of another character: Javi. While Natalie and Lottie are embarking on their hunting competition — more on that shortly — Van cajoles Tai to keep searching for trees that bear the mark of the mysterious symbol that is plaguing (or helping) the survivors. Their investigation leads them to a bizarrely melted patch of snow, and then, out of nowhere, Javi appears darting through the forest. They grab him and bring him back to the cabin, where he is disoriented and unable to recognize his older brother, Travis.It’s a celebration tinged with suspicion. Travis starts to suspect that Natalie fooled him about Javi’s death, while Van tries to convince Tai of her own role in saving the younger boy. “There is something deep inside of you that is connected to all of this,” Van says, while Tai looks scared and doubtful.Teen Van, despite her sardonic demeanor, has become a true believer. She first bought into Lottie’s mysticism, and now she is trying to convince Tai and the rest of the girls of Tai’s potentially magical qualities. In the present, Tai has seemingly gone to Van for help, but, in the past, Van coaxes her to darker and darker places. Their dynamic has whiffs of toxicity.That sourness is seeping into all of the interactions in the cabin as some of the Yellowjackets look for meaning in their desolate lives. Mari (Alexa Barajas), for instance, has made Lottie the center of her entire belief system. In her mind, Lottie is the one who has been keeping them alive. Lottie slew the bear at the end of Season 1. Lottie embroidered the symbol onto Shauna’s baby blanket, which in Mari’s view resulted in that mass starling death, and therefore in more food. To Mari, Natalie’s skepticism toward Lottie is hindering their survival: When Natalie doesn’t accept Lottie’s blessing when she goes on a hunt, she is decreasing the likelihood of finding sustenance.So Natalie proposes a contest: She will compete versus Lottie for who can find food first. There are no winners. Natalie stumbles upon a frozen moose in the lake and runs back to get help, but the moose disappears into the icy water when the gang tries to dislodge it. Lottie, meanwhile, almost dies of hypothermia alone.Neither of the Lotties seem as sure of themselves as they once appeared — or as their followers are wont to believe they are. After ’90s Lottie sets out on her hunt, she finds one of the symbols carved into a tree. Placing her hand on it, she tries to connect with her surroundings. She gets nothing and is frustrated. Later, finding herself in front of the shrine where she laid the bear heart last season, she hesitantly cuts open her palm, hoping the blood will yield something.Again nothing, no food. Instead, she is led to a hallucination of Laura Lee’s plane, which takes her into a fantasy of a mall where her teammates gather and eat Chinese takeout as if nothing ever went wrong.Adult Lottie knows not to trust these visions. She goes to her psychiatrist to ask for an increase in her medication so that the visions might stop. But her regular doctor isn’t there, and this unfamiliar woman challenges her request. “I would urge you to reframe the way you are thinking about these visions,” she says. “The stress of constantly pushing them away could potentially cause more to surface. So maybe ask yourself: What do you think they are trying to tell you?”Lottie responds firmly. “Nothing,” she says. “Because they’re not real.”Does she really believe that? Or is that what she is telling herself? Later, she kneels by a tree stump and once again slices open her hand, letting the blood drip and asking, “Can this just be enough?” Last week she heard a voice say, “Il veut de sang,” which translates as “He wants blood” in French. Now she is giving “him” what he wants.As the other grown up Yellowjackets tentatively open up their circles and reach out for help, Lottie is retreating into herself. She knows the results will most likely be disastrous.More to chew onNot sure how Van’s business, called “While You Were Streaming,” stays afloat, but I’m all for the revival of physical media.Once again, a banger of a music cue: Misty’s and Walter’s nighty night routines are set to Sparks’s “Angst in My Pants”Akilah (Nia Sondaya) found a cute little mouse friend in the cabin, and I am almost positive something terrible will happen to that creature before the season is up.Lottie and Laura Lee were friends, yes, but I can’t help but think that there’s some other reason Laura Lee keeps showing up in her visions. I’m just not sure what it is yet.I’m not fully grossed out by Walter’s ham, egg, syrup and mustard taco. What does that say about me?I always appreciate a “Starlight Express” burn. Thank you, Misty. More

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      Stephen Colbert Can Tell When Fox News Is Lying

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      A judge said he would probably appoint a “special master” to investigate whether Fox had misled the court. The “Late Show” host thinks he’s up to the job.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.Fox News NewsA judge sanctioned Fox News on Wednesday for withholding evidence relevant to Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit. He said he would probably appoint a “special master” — an outside lawyer — to investigate whether the network had misled the court.“So the job is to figure out whether Fox News lies?” Stephen Colbert said on Thursday. “Hold on, hold on — am I a special master? Do I get a sash?”“Over in Fox News News, today they began jury selection in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox, and this trial’s gonna be juicy. For instance, the judge has ruled that Dominion can compel testimony from Fox News personalities Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro. And to make sure Jeanine Pirro tells the truth, they’re swearing her in on a box of wine.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So the judge is furious because Fox withheld the tapes. Although to be fair to Fox, they might not have known which embarrassing Rudy Giuliani tape they were being asked for. The one where the oil was leaking from his head or the one where he’s farting in court? The one where he’s unbuttoning his pants for Borat’s daughter? Or could it be the one where he held a press conference outside a dildo shop? How are they supposed to keep track of them all?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (‘Solitary Confinement for Dummies’ Edition)“This afternoon, the FBI arrested a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman in connection with the leaking of classified documents that were posted online. The leaker is described as a lonely young man who is part of a chatroom group that shares a love of guns and military gear. You know how sometimes — you know you find yourself going, ‘It’s always who you least suspect, isn’t it?’ This isn’t one of those times.” — JAMES CORDEN“Teixeira was taken into custody in Massachusetts, where just moments before, he was seen from a helicopter reading a book on his porch. That book: ‘Solitary Confinement for Dummies.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, for taking these classified documents home, Teixeira could face charges under the Espionage Act and could get up to 10 years in prison per document. So he’s in trouble unless he declassified them with his mind.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, referring to a Donald Trump declassification technique“As a 21-year-old, he’s devastated that this mistake may cost him his future, but he’s also thrilled that he’s posted something online and it totally went viral.” — JAMES CORDEN“He posted some of the documents in a chatroom for gamers, and I don’t even know how this works. Does someone like write, ‘Hey guys, how do I win in Fortnite?’ and you respond like, ‘I don’t know, but here’s some satellite images of Ukraine.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingBen Affleck revealed a secret from his youthful past on Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This Out“Hilma” is about Hilma af Klint, who believed that spirits guided her to paint.Juno FilmsLasse Hallstrom’s biopic “Hilma” follows the life and career of the mystical artist Hilma af Klint. More

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      ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 3, Episode 9 Recap: A Familiar Home

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      Home is where the ship is. In this week’s episode of “Picard,” the crew goes home.Season 3, Episode 9: ‘Vox’If you’re going to lean into nostalgia, might as well go the whole way. If you’re going to bring back the old cast, bring back the old ship and the old villains, too.Resistance to fan service is futile. Recall that in this season’s premiere, Jean-Luc wanted to give Geordi a gift of a painting of the Enterprise D.“She wasn’t the first,” he said. “But she was certainly my favorite.”Little did he know that Geordi was preparing a gift himself the whole time: the real Enterprise D, somehow excavated from Verdian III, where the ship unceremoniously crash landed in “Generations.” It’s the ship that many of us fell in love with, just as much as we did with the characters that served on the ship. The “Picard” showrunner, Terry Matalas, has used this season of “Picard” to right many of the previous wrongs of the “Next Generation” franchise. Giving the Enterprise D a proper send-off seems as appropriate as giving the crew one.Seeing the crew take its familiar stations on the bridge felt like putting on your favorite sweater that you can never throw out. It just fits, no matter what. Seeing the renovated ship in high definition? Even better.It’s not too much nostalgia at the expense of story either. It turns out only an old Starfleet ship can be dusted off to save the day, not one of these newfangled, high-tech ones Starfleet is at the mercy of now.Once again, the Enterprise crew is all that stands between — surprise — the Borg and the Earth’s annihilation. The face that Vadic was referring to the whole time was Jean-Luc’s old nemesis: The Borg Queen. Just as the “Trek” universe keeps finding ways to bring Data back to life, it does the same with the Borg. I must confess some disappointment in seeing this become the Big Reveal that the season was building up to. Ever since “First Contact,” the Borg have been the well “Trek” writers keep going back to, including in “Voyager” and both seasons of “Picard.”It shouldn’t have been much of a surprise: Vadic hinted at this on the bridge with Seven in last week’s episode.The Borg Queen was already a major part of the story line last season with Picard’s friend Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill). You might remember, and it’s likely you don’t, since the season was so convoluted, that Jurati became the leader of a new, benevolent Borg. This goes totally unmentioned by Jean-Luc here. This felt odd, especially when Beverly said, “No one has seen or heard from the Borg in over a decade.” Well, it has assuredly not been a decade since Season 2. And what about the Borg cube in the first season that was being repurposed as a Romulan reclamation site? And the season ended with an unexplained transwarp conduit that Queen Jurati suggests is a threat! Worth a mention from Jean-Luc, methinks.It’s possible there is some timeline shift or something I’m missing, and I am eager to see the comments correcting me. (Annie Wersching, who played the queen in Season 2, died earlier this year.)Now, it’s a New and Improved Borg. When Jean-Luc was Locutus, they implanted an assimilation gene inside Jean-Luc that would be passed on to his offspring. The changelings helped the Borg place the altered DNA into the transporter systems to assimilate anybody who uses them, which explains why changelings wanted to use shuttles before. But it affects only the youngest members of the crew, not anyone over, say, the age of the main cast of “Picard.” Got it? Me either. The Borg essentially have taken over Starfleet without anyone noticing: a coup without a shot fired. Until the shots are fired. And now, Earth can be saved only by the Olds.Poor Jean-Luc: First he finds out that he has unwittingly been an absentee father and now he may have accidentally turned his son into a homicidal robot. As Jean-Luc remarks to Beverly: “He inherited the best of you. And the worst of me.”(Also: Poor Jack, who now doesn’t have a solid answer to his question, “How much of me is me?”)Jack is, in many ways, not your ideal candidate to lead the Borg collective. He has long been an independent, rogue actor who doesn’t want to play by the rules, while the very notion of individuality is anathema to the Borg. Jean-Luc’s use of Starfleet protocols to try to keep him confined to quarters was always doomed to fail, especially after he told Jack that the solution was to institutionalize him on Vulcan. Not exactly a great parental approach from Jean- Luc! In his defense, he is not exactly experienced.Jack snarls: “What about the protocols of a father? Or were you never issued those?”A fair point, and one that stands out even more when one considers how many times Jean-Luc broke protocol in this season alone. Remember when he stole a ship and put members of the Titan in mortal danger?Jean-Luc has not had his fastball this season, but luckily, his former teammates have. Geordi dusting off the Enterprise D was a shrewd maneuver. Beverly and Data are able to quickly figure out what happened to Jack and the plot to overrun Starfleet. Troi discovers the Borg connection to begin with. Riker and Worf are in prime quip form and absorbing punches when necessary.Now, they’ll have to find a way to keep Jack from becoming chief executive officer of the New Borg, which they have experience with from Data’s experience on “First Contact.”All in all, a fun penultimate episode.Odds and endsIn the opening scene with Troi and Jack, Jack references a planet Beverly used to take him to as a boy: Raritan IV. The planet is named after Matalas’s hometown, Raritan, N.J., and is also featured in the second season of “Picard.” Soji and Jurati visited deltans there in last season’s premiere.Beverly mentions her other son, Wesley, again. That guy just doesn’t seem to be checking his phone as the universe threatens to implode again!Some fun ship names in the fleet: Reliant (the commandeered ship in “Wrath of Khan”); Okuda (a reference to Michael Okuda, the longtime “Trek” graphic designer; and Sutherland (a ship that Data briefly took over as captain in “Next Generation”).Cool cameo from the now Admiral Shelby (Elizabeth Dennehy). We met her in the classic “Next Generation” episode “The Best of Both Worlds” as the ambitious commander angling to take Jean-Luc’s chair. She makes a rare reference to “Enterprise” and the NX-01. Jean-Luc points out the irony of Shelby’s schilling for a synchronous Starfleet system that is similar to the Borg, given her own history of fighting them. We don’t get to see her for very long before she is killed. At least she died doing what she loved: being in charge.A bit unclear on why the Borg need Jack to begin with. They’re already assimilating the fleet! (This is similar to “First Contact,” in which the Borg Queen didn’t really need Data. Or going back further, did the Borg need Locutus?)How did Starfleet set up fireworks to go off in space?A (presumed) goodbye to Captain Shaw. He handed command of the Titan to Seven as he dies, which felt like an unearned moment given what their dynamic had been all season. Seven’s competence has been, shall we say, not exactly high, and in a similar moment earlier in the season, he gave command to Riker, not Seven. Seven hasn’t done much since then to justify earning Shaw’s trust. Even so, after all time spent being a huge jerk to the elder Starfleet officers, Shaw still dies saving them — a contribution which is barely mentioned by Jean-Luc and the rest of the crew. He also refers to Seven by her preferred name, instead of Hansen. Overall, his character seemed like a wasted opportunity.I’m curious about the Enterprise E, which gets a glancing mention. It appears the ship was destroyed, somehow, and Worf had a lot to do with it. More

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      Jung Chae-yull, South Korean Actress, Is Found Dead at 26

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      Though the cause of the unexpected death of Jung Chae-yull was not disclosed, it has renewed concerns about mental health in the country’s highly competitive entertainment industry.A young South Korean actress still early in a promising career was found dead in her home on Tuesday, according to the production company she had been working with. Although no cause of death was disclosed, the episode has renewed concerns about the mental health of young people working in South Korea’s highly competitive entertainment industry.The actress, Jung Chae-yull, 26, is the most recent instance of the phenomenon of celebrities in their 20s dying suddenly. Some, though not all, of the cases have been acknowledged as suicide.“Actress Chae-yull has left our side on April 11, 2023,” Management S, Ms. Jung’s agency in Seoul, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We pray that Chae-yull, who has always been sincere about acting, is able to rest in peace in a warm place.”Two years ago, another 26-year-old actress, Song Yoo-jung, was also found dead at her home in Seoul. Both Ms. Song and Ms. Jung’s careers had begun only a few years before they died. Ms. Song’s agency did not disclose the cause of her death either.In October 2019, Sulli, 25, a member of a K-pop girl group, was found dead in her home after facing repeated instances of bullying. Officials determined it was suicide. A few weeks after that, Goo Hara, 28, another K-pop singer, was found dead in her home, and her death was likewise ruled a suicide.“Unless the entertainment industry and media change, South Korea will be first place on celebrity suicide,” one K-pop fan wrote on Twitter. South Korean authorities recently announced that instances of bullying will now be reflected on college applications, as the country struggles to put a stop to such abuse.Ms. Jung stepped into the spotlight in 2016 in a fashion competition show in South Korea called “Devil’s Runway,” which grouped rookie and veteran models into teams to compete on the catwalk. She scored multiple endorsements with popular brands like Etude, a large cosmetics company in South Korea, and U.S. fashion labels such as Jill Stuart.Ms. Jung on the set of the movie “Deep,” a thriller in which she had a leading role.HajunsaMs. Jung branched out into acting in 2018, when she landed a leading role in the movie “Deep,” a thriller set in the Philippines. She would go on to act in at least one more film and two series, including “Zombie Detective,” which took home a prize at the 2020 KBS Entertainment Awards in South Korea.Recently, Ms. Jung had been filming a new series called “Wedding Impossible,” based on a web novel. Filming has been temporarily suspended, according to Studio 329, the company that was working with her on the project.Ms. Jung was born in 1996 and enjoyed boxing and snowboarding, according to social media posts. Since Tuesday, fans have flooded her Instagram account to pay tribute.“I love you, Chae-yull, I’ll pray for your happiness in heaven,” one fan wrote after the announcement.Ms. Jung’s family plans to hold a private funeral, according to her agency.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Skewers Trump for Tucker Carlson Interview

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      Kimmel called the interview “a 45-minute blabfest,” saying it made “one thing very clear: the fact that Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid person.”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.Together AgainFormer President Donald Trump sat down for a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News on Tuesday.Jimmy Kimmel called the interview “a 45-minute blabfest,” saying it made “one thing very clear: the fact that Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid person.”“It was quite a chat. Trump covered everything from World War III, which he seems to be rooting for, to wanting to take the president of China to a Broadway show, and also he — as he often does — managed to shoo in some thoughts about the N-word.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He does not have the best words. He is not a stable genius. That mental competency test he’s always bragging that he passed? This is something the average 7-year-old could pass, OK? — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (‘Harsh Accurate Words’ Edition)“Last night, the former sat down with Tucker Carlson who, thanks to revelations from the Dominion lawsuit, we now know hates the president passionately, privately texting that he’s ‘a demonic force.’ Harsh, accurate words.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He’s terrified because three weeks ago, we found out he’d been texting his co-workers about Trump saying, ‘I hate him passionately,’ he’s ‘a demonic force,’ he’s ‘a destroyer, he’s not going to destroy us,’ ‘I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.’ And then, after thinking about it for four years, Tuck sat down with the demonic force and slobbered all over his Christmas ornaments.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingJoan Baez, visiting the “Late Show,” talked with Stephen Colbert about singing “We Shall Overcome” with Representative Justin Jones in Nashville this week.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightBen Affleck, star of “Air,” will pop by Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutOver the last two decades, Rita Indiana has become one of the Caribbean’s foremost cultural agitators.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesThe Novelist/musician Rita Indiana’s new show “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”) debuts in New York on Friday. More

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      The Mandalorian’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Out of the Shadows

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      It is up to Bo-Katan to try to play peacemaker with her people. But she harbors a sad secret that won’t make it easy.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘The Spies’The original “Star Wars” opens with a Rebel Alliance ship being pursued by an enormous Imperial Star Destroyer, which — in one of the most famous and fearsome images in the entire series — slowly fills the screen, obscuring everything else in the frame. This week’s episode of “The Mandalorian” features an echo of that moment, as Bo-Katan’s reassembled army of Mandalorian privateers descends on Nevarro in an old Imperial Light Cruiser, sending the locals into a momentary panic.High Magistrate Greef Karga though reassures his anxious droids, however, that this massive warship is a welcome sight. It is, perhaps, a harbinger of a brighter tomorrow, signaling that the scattered Mandalorian tribes are reuniting.I say “perhaps” because one of the themes of this episode is that “getting the band back together” may not always be such a good thing. While the Mandalorians are gathering on Nevarro, the freed Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) is meeting virtually with “the Shadow Council,” consisting of former Imperial warlords who have been dismissed by the New Republic as a mere disorganized “remnant” of the former Empire.With the Grand Admiral Thrawn still in hiding (including from “Star Wars” fans, who have been waiting for him to make his debut on this show), Gideon takes control of the cabal, insisting that the time has come for them to stop focusing only on their own territories and to begin sharing resources. Specifically, he would like them to give some of their arsenal to him so that he can eliminate the growing Mandalorian threat.“The Spies” is an odd title for this chapter given that there is not a whole lot of cloak-and-dagger action. Instead, the bulk of this nearly hourlong episode is about the different Mandalorian sects struggling to put aside old grudges. The more devout types, like Paz Vizsla, seethe in the presence of the more independent types, like Axe Woves. Those two get into a dispute over the proper rules of a combat board game, letting their lingering anger over what happened to their planet spill over into a violent skirmish. (To be fair to Axe, though, Paz should have known that only a wing guard can flank-jump.)It is up to Bo-Katan to try to play peacemaker with her people. But she harbors a sad secret that won’t make it easy. When a large cohort of Mandalorians travels to Mandalore to assess the state of their home-world and plan for its future, they run into a group of haggard Bo-Katan loyalists, who stubbornly survived “the Night of a Thousand Tears” because they knew their leader would never surrender to the Empire.But the thing is: The Princess did, in fact, surrender. She handed over the Darksaber to Gideon to save her people. And then he slaughtered most of them anyway, leaving the divided remainder to fight among themselves.Something unexpected happens, though, after Bo-Katan admits what she did. Din picks up on something she says — about how “Mandalore has always been too powerful for any enemy to defeat” and how “it is always our own division that destroys us” — and he acknowledges that the planet was probably dying long before the Empire swooped in.“We were taught that everyone but us had forsaken the Way,” he says, noting that his faction did not even care about the Darksaber or its meaning. “Your song is not yet written,” he tells the Princess. “I will serve you until it is.”The director Rick Famuyiwa and the credited screenwriters, Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, bring a sense of grandeur and heft to this episode, with a lot of scenes that survey the assembled forces and their various vehicles and weapons. The action sequences really pop, too — including one that is not necessarily essential to the plot but is still very cool, as the giant land ship piloted by the survivors on Mandalore is wrecked by an underground monster.Everything builds steadily and cleverly to the big climactic twist, when the Mandalorians arrive at the planet’s Great Forge only to find a secret Imperial base, filled with fighter ships that hang from the ceiling like bats. They also find Gideon, surrounded by next-level stormtroopers and protected by three Praetorian guards. He is sporting his new state-of-the-art beskar alloy armor, boasting, “The most impressive improvement is that it has me in it.” In the ensuing attack, Bo-Katan is able to lead a safe retreat for almost all of her people; but Vizsla is killed and Din is captured, setting up next week’s finale.What is most troubling about Gideon’s ambush is what he says to the Mandalorians before he orders their destruction. He ties many of the threads from the past few seasons together, saying that with the help of old and new technology he is building a new Dark Trooper army that will combine the ancient skills and lethal modern power of the galaxy’s strongest factions: like the Jedi, the cloners and the Mandalorians.In other words: He is reassembling the broken pieces of the old order. And this particular reunion is not so sweet.This is the wayThe closing credits this week feature a softer orchestral version of the theme music, sounding a note of solemnity rather than the usual triumphant fanfare. A nice touch.Famuyiwa and the crew bring some cool noir vibes to the opening scene, which sees Elia Kane slipping stealthily into Coruscant’s red light district — bathed in “Blade Runner”-style neon and mist — to deliver a message to Moff Gideon.Grogu has a new toy! The Anzellan mechanics have remade the killer droid IG-11 into the armed and armored vehicle IG-12, with a little seat for a Baby Yoda-sized pilot and buttons that make the machine’s voice say “yes” or “no.” In a rare bit of comic relief in this episode, Grogu has fun grabbing things and lurching dangerously about while pushing the “yes” button repeatedly. (As the Anzellans would say, “Bad Baby!”)This was a good episode overall, but it remains somewhat troublesome just how much Favreau is leaning into the B-movie roots of “Star Wars” this season, with even clunkier dialogue and hammier acting than in seasons past. Esposito is an excellent actor who usually has a keen grasp of behavioral subtleties, but he goes distractingly broad at times this week as Gideon. And some lines — as when Din says, “This isn’t working for me,” to Grogu after his IG-12 adventures cause him problems — sound jarringly modern.Isn’t it weird that Karga still calls Din “Mando” when Nevarro is now full of Mandalorians? More

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      Inside the Pods With ‘Love Is Blind,’ the Reality TV Juggernaut

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      SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Peahens choose peacocks with more elaborate feathers, earthworms mate based on size, and baboons judge on hierarchy, but humans, as more intellectually evolved creatures, have been socialized instead to seek out love.For a tiny subset of the species, this mating ritual involves 10 days on a television set in Greater Los Angeles, where participants sit alone in 12-by-14-foot rooms listening to the disembodied voices of potential mates discuss such topics as their ideal number of offspring.That is the basis for “Love Is Blind,” the voyeuristic Netflix reality series built around buzzwords, booze and mild sensory deprivation that is set to release its Season 4 finale on Friday and air a live reunion special on Sunday. On the show, 30 singles sign up to date each other, separated inside these rooms — known as “pods” — with their conversations fed through speakers. They don’t see whom they’re talking to until they decide to get engaged — a commitment that also comes with a hastily arranged wedding where they can say “I do” or walk away.Pods are set up to film, hydrate and intoxicate contestants.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesIf it all sounds rushed, chaotic, a bit unhinged, the show’s creator, Chris Coelen, understands. Brandon Riegg, the Netflix executive who greenlighted the pitch about five years ago, described the idea with a synonym for bat guano, and he recalled telling Coelen that he would be lucky to get even one couple out of it.Despite the naysayers, Coelen felt confident that people would get engaged. After all, contestants on his show “Married at First Sight” had been marrying strangers for years.“People want to find love,” he said in an interview last month on the “Love Is Blind” set, where production was beginning on a new season, “and they’re willing to do some pretty wild things to find it.”The show premiered in February 2020, taking off as viewers were adjusting to their own versions of pandemic-mandated pod life, and has continued to captivate audiences. More than 30 million Netflix subscribers watched during the first four weeks after its premiere, the company reported, and Season 4, which kicked off in March, topped the previous seasons’ opening weekends by hours watched. Last year, according to Nielsen, “Love Is Blind” was the eighth most-watched original streaming series in the United States, ahead of “The Crown” and the “Lord of the Rings” spinoff “The Rings of Power.” Versions of the show based in Japan and Brazil have already been released, with U.K. and Swedish adaptations in the works.Kim Kardashian, Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Daniel Radcliffe are among the show’s celebrity fans, and contestants have built gigantic social media followings, with one married participant from Season 1, Lauren Speed-Hamilton, reaching 2.5 million followers on Instagram. The series has also fueled cottage industries on TikTok of amateur detectives digging into the contestants’ back stories and of therapists analyzing the relationship dynamics onscreen. At times, “Love Is Blind” has prompted musings on our fraying social fabric, with commentators declaring that the show “speaks to the state of modern romance” and “holds a mirror to a reality we’d rather ignore.”Shake Chatterjee, one of the contestants in the second season of “Love Is Blind.”Patrick Wymore/NetflixContestants don’t meet in person until they have gotten engaged.NetflixFor Netflix, its appeal was more fundamental. It matched the streamer’s ethos around unscripted programming, Riegg said: relatable and optimistic.“If you look at some of the most beloved and established unscripted franchises, they’ve been running for a very long time,” he added. “And I don’t think there’s any reason that ours can’t do the same.”‘Whatever happens, happens.’So how did “Love Is Blind,” with its absurd conceit, manage to position itself as the closest thing to “The Bachelor” for the cable-less generation?Coelen said it’s because the show puts it all out there, revealing contestants’ explosive dramatics and romantic indifference without coaxing anything out of them.Producers have included footage of one participant, Andrew Liu, appearing to apply eye drops to simulate tears for the camera after he was dumped in Season 3. One couple in the current season had enough of each other and split before they got to the altar. And when Shake Chatterjee, from Season 2, tried to suss out what his dates looked like by asking if he could feasibly carry them on his shoulders, the producers said they never considered intervening.The hosts are a married couple, Vanessa and Nick Lachey — the latter of whom was the subject of his own early-aughts reality series when he married Jessica Simpson. They rarely interact with participants, occasionally dropping in during the season and serving as therapist-like mediators during the reunions.“We just watch. We involve ourselves in nothing,” said Ally Simpson (no relation to Jessica), one of the show’s executive producers. During production, she sits next to Coelen in the control room, where they monitor as many as 10 dates happening simultaneously.Chris Coelen and Ally Simpson working behind the scenes. “We involve ourselves in nothing,” Simpson said.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesBut the concept of authenticity gets complicated when the location for the dates is a 68,000-square-foot studio next to an Amazon warehouse, where dozens of crew members zip around with walkie talkies and 81 cameras pan and zoom to catch every blush and giggle. (Contestants stay in hotels overnight, though the napping and cooking can sometimes make it appear as though they’re living on set à la “The Real World.”)Inside the two single-sex lounges where the singles congregate, the plants are plastic, a digital fire roars onscreen, and those metallic goblets that have become the show’s mascots are adhered to the shelves so that guests don’t knock them over.When Kwame Appiah, a tech worker who appears on the current season, says of a woman he has never seen, “I’ve just been smitten for a really long time,” he means six days.Then there’s the influencer industrial complex. In the three years since the show’s debut, cast members with new followings have promoted Smirnoff Spicy Tamarind vodka, Bud Light hard seltzer and Fenty lipstick, as well as yogurt and laxatives.When it comes to choosing a cast, the producers say they try to weed out those seeking social media fame or joining on a whim, but if such types slip into the roster, Coelen said, he believes they still tend to become invested in the process.“We build the machinery, and whatever happens, happens,” he said.A crew member affixes goblets to a shelf with mounting tape.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe contents of the fridge in the “men’s lounge.”Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe machinery starts with Donna Driscoll, the show’s head of casting, who has been with Coelen’s production company, Kinetic Content, since the second season of “Married at First Sight.” Interested singles apply online, but Driscoll’s team also seeks people out on social media and at bars, grocery stores and church groups.A third-party company conducts background checks and psychological evaluations, and the casting team creates what are called “compatibility grids,” a spreadsheet listing key characteristics, including the desire to have children. They are effectively trying to “stack the deck,” Coelen said, so that each person comes in with some compatibility, at least on paper, with others. (If love really is blind, it is also heavily vetted.)On the show, the contestants describe being at their wits’ end with dating norms of the 2020s, which tend to involve more swiping on touchscreens than IRL spontaneity.“My parents are like, ‘Why don’t you just go meet a guy at a bar?” said Chelsea Griffin, a speech-language pathologist from Seattle who is on the current season. “Who does that anymore?”Instead, with her phone confiscated, she met a guy at a production facility where a maze of dark hallways leads to pods and to a room where contestants sit for one-on-one interviews with a blurred backdrop positioned behind them.Coelen in the show’s control room.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesA camera inside the wall of one of the pods.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAt the start of filming, budding romances begin with 10-minute speed dates, lengthening each day until the most lovestruck couples chat for hours, sometimes lingering until 3 a.m.“The rate at which you go in this experience, it’s hard for my mom to fathom. It’s hard for my brother to fathom,” Griffin said. “I could sit and try to articulate and explain the entire thing, and people still wouldn’t get it.”Members of the production team listen on headsets, logging moments like when someone says “I love you” or tears flow. They move contestant headshots around a bulletin board as they pair off and break up, like detectives on a crime procedural.At the end of the day, the contestants rank their dates on paper. The team then uses a variation on a Nobel Prize-winning algorithm, created by two mathematicians in the 1960s, to find a dating schedule in which everyone has matches. For the first four seasons, Simpson and Coelen organized the data by hand to determine the next day’s lineup of dates, but more recently, Simpson plugs the rankings into computer software.By day seven, the men are able to pick out engagement rings provided by the show. By day nine, after couples have typically spent about 30 total hours dating — albeit in separate rooms — some of them pop the question. If the answer is a yes, they finally meet.Then, it’s time to plan the wedding. Singles have been choosing among suitors they couldn’t see as far back as the 1960s (see “The Dating Game”), but “Love Is Blind” makes marriage its clear, televised conclusion.“You think about reality shows as being these zany, deviant enterprises, but when it comes right down to it, they promulgate some of our most conservative values,” said Danielle Lindemann, a sociologist who wrote a book about reality television. “Ultimately, this show is about heterosexual coupling that ends in marriage.”The lounge where male contestants gather between dates. On the show, contestants often describe being at their wits’ end with the norms of dating in the 2020s.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesSuccess, and scrutinyThe inherent limits of the show have opened it to critique. Though “Love Is Blind” might be more diverse than some reality shows in terms of race and body type, those selected for the “experiment” tend to be conventionally attractive heterosexual men and women in their 20s and 30s.Speed-Hamilton, who has gone on to co-host a podcast for Netflix about its reality series, accused the show last season of “cutting all the Black women” after the pods portion, adding that most of the couples seemed “forced” and only established “for entertainment purposes.”There have been other musings that this season of the show is falling into typical reality TV traps, zooming in on “mean girl” drama and casting people whose true intentions some viewers question. There have also been suggestions that the show has edited footage to ramp up the drama. Jackelina Bonds, a dental assistant from this season, wrote on Instagram that footage had been reordered so that it appears she went on a date before she broke up with her fiancé, when in fact, the date was afterward.Coelen said the production team works to portray the “accurate essence of each person’s journey.” He said the show focuses on building a diverse pool of participants from the start and chooses to follow the engagements that seem most genuine. Any “mean girl” behavior happened without their influence, he said.One of the most vocal skeptics of the show’s authenticity has been a former contestant, Jeremy Hartwell, who was not closely followed during his season. He filed a class-action lawsuit last year against Netflix and Kinetic Content, saying that the defendants cut off the cast from the outside world, plied them with unlimited alcohol and withheld food and sleep with the objective of leading the cast to make “manipulated decisions for the benefit of the show’s entertainment value.”Female and male contestants are kept separate throughout much of the filming of “Love Is Blind.”Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe crux of the lawsuit was an objection to the show’s payment structure at the time, which, the complaint said, involved a $1,000 stipend per filming week with a maximum of $8,000 in possible earnings. His lawsuit argued that the participants had been “willfully misclassified” as independent contractors rather than as employees who were entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay and various labor protections.Chantal McCoy Payton, a lawyer for Hartwell, declined to comment, citing the continuing litigation.Lawyers for Kinetic Content, which has said that the claims are without merit, asserted in court documents that Hartwell had been part of the show for only six days and did not qualify as an employee. Netflix lawyers argued that Hartwell had brought forward “extreme allegations” because he was “upset” about not being chosen by another contestant.Coelen declined to discuss the lawsuit, but his description of the show’s process was at odds with Hartwell’s claims.Daters are provided meals and can order food to the pods, he said, and while the alcohol supply is ample (the fridge in the lounge is stocked with champagne, beer, wine and hard seltzer), everyone decides for themselves whether they want to drink. There are two psychologists on the set, he noted, and the show offers to cover postproduction therapy for participants.Although the producers say they don’t interfere in relationships, Coelen, who is 54 and has been married for 16 years, said that they do suggest that the couples talk about important subjects like finances, parenting and religion, comparing the producers’ level of influence to Pre-Cana, a course for couples preparing to be married by the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, in Season 1, production team members encouraged one participant, Amber Pike, to tell her fiancé, Matt Barnett, that she had about $20,000 in student debt. The conversation did not go particularly well, but the pair got married anyway.“We really get invested in these relationships,” said Simpson, 45, who has been married for six years.Inside the single-sex lounges where the singles congregate, the plants are plastic and a digital fire roars onscreen.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesMembers of the production team listen to the contestants on headsets, logging moments like when someone says “I love you” or when tears flow.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesCoelen has tried to sell similarly gimmicky dating shows before. In 2017, his production company released an American version of a show called “Kiss Bang Love” in which singles met each other by kissing blindfolded. In “The Spouse House,” 14 singles bent on marriage moved in together. Both shows lasted only one season.With “Love Is Blind,” the numbers are starting to add up. From the first three seasons of the show, 17 couples came out of the pods engaged, six got legally married on the show, and four are still together.In an interview last month, Brett Brown, a design director at Nike whose marital fate will be unveiled Friday, said it is those early successes that keep viewers watching, curious to find out if this bizarre dating formula can spit out happy couples.Brown acknowledged that some participants might exaggerate their feelings in exchange for the global attention that comes with being a reality TV star.But not him.“I can only speak from my experience,” he said, “and I know that I was there for the right reason.”Susan Beachy contributed research. More