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      Betty Gilpin Is a Vivid Talker

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      It was 2020, and like pretty much everyone else on planet Earth, the actress Betty Gilpin was having a strange year: Her first leading role in a movie, Craig Zobel’s “The Hunt,” had already stirred a manic level of controversy and drawn the ire of President Trump, before it came out on March 13.Shortly after, filming for the fourth and final season of her television show, Netflix’s critically adored “GLOW,” was paused. That June, Ms. Gilpin received her third subsequent Emmy nomination for her performance as harried new mom turned wrestling warrior queen Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan. And yet, that October, Netflix announced the show was canceled, and the fourth season would be scrapped due to ongoing pandemic uncertainty.Then in November 2020, Ms. Gilpin gave birth. And five weeks after her daughter Mary came into the world, Ms. Gilpin started writing what would become her first book, “All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns,” which will be released on Sept. 6.“I became an actor because I felt like I was the strange girl with split ends on the sidelines in a saliva-soaked hoodie, taking notes on human behavior,” Ms. Gilpin said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times“I wanted to use the fact that people probably don’t know who I am, and to have my book be a comedic allegory for what it feels like to be a woman in the world,” said Ms. Gilpin, 36, over a Zoom call from Los Angeles on a recent Saturday.In a collection of 20 essays, Ms. Gilpin explores the sweeping questions of “Who am I?” “Who am I supposed to be?” and “How does the world see me?” showing how they ripple out into other arenas: the built-in identity crises of acting; the thunderdome of girlhood; her family life with charming, working-actor parents; female friendship; treading the boards off-off-Broadway; the love of a dog; and more.The book felt like a natural progression for a woman known to her friends to be a vivid talker, though Ms. Gilpin is wary of how she comes across in print interviews, at least. (“When I read them, I’m like, ‘Oh, I said that in a funny accent with fake vocal fry and a shrug,’ but it’s in print. It looks like I’m saying it teary-eyed on the steps of Congress,” she said.) The book presented an opportunity to put her own voice on the page.Theatricality is in Ms. Gilpin’s bones. As the oldest of three children, she lived in New York City until she was 9, when the family moved to rural Connecticut, but continued to live a “carny lifestyle,” as she writes in the book, thanks to her parents’ itinerant work lives. (Her father Jack Gilpin and mother Ann McDonough have had careers spanning stage, film and television; Mr. Gilpin plays Church the butler in “The Gilded Age” while Ms. McDonough was in “The Ferryman” on Broadway.)Ms. Gilpin eventually attended the Loomis Chaffee School, a private boarding school in Windsor, Conn., before studying theater at Fordham University in Manhattan, a place she knew she could “harvest weirdness.”“I became an actor because I felt like I was the strange girl with split ends on the sidelines in a saliva-soaked hoodie, taking notes on human behavior,” she said. “And now my job is to present said notes on human behavior while wearing a costume with ringlets.”After graduation, Ms. Gilpin found rather steady work in theater (“This Face,” “I’m Gonna Pray For You So Hard” and “We Live Here”) and eventually regular television roles (“Nurse Betty,” “Masters of Sex,” “Elementary”) before landing her breakout role in “GLOW.” It was during this time that she started publishing essays, including in this newspaper.For Ms. Gilpin, the process of writing this book began in the terrifying, pre-vaccine days of the pandemic, which for her was also that psychedelic gulf of time after giving birth.“I think that combination of society shutting down, and the hormones of feeling like there are no bad ideas, you just lifted a Mack truck and threw it across the universe,” she said, referring, of course, to childbirth, served as inspiration. “Now you can do your secret goal and write the damn book.”Flatiron BooksMs. Gilpin’s friends are not surprised by this development. As the actress Cristin Milioti described it, “She’s always excavating. She deep dives, and the way that she’s able to put things in perspective, there are metaphors that she’s using, that I still use to this day to navigate the way I approach things in the world.”The book came out in one draft, writing on her computer, hunched in a “self-isolating gargoyle position” on the living room floor “between semi unsuccessful breastfeeding sessions, and whatever hours I could get between terrible naps,” Ms. Gilpin said. By the time the new baby high had worn off, the book was in motion.“I knew she could write, having read her essays and having been the recipient of texts,” said the actress Zoe Kazan, also a friend of Ms. Gilpin’s. She describes the writing as “if David Rakoff and David Sedaris had a baby and that baby was Betty.”It’s hard to quantify Ms. Gilpin’s inventiveness as a speaker in conversation and writing: She uses extravagant, original metaphors, dropping dense citations like a lost Gilmore Girl (“Michael Bay going to Wesleyan — that’s like Stanley Kowalski going to Montessori,” she said at one point in the interview), creating great, grand spindly images off the top of her head, and suddenly it’s perfectly clear that yes, a subject like giving birth is absolute witchcraft cauldron business, something that stood in stark difference to her expectations.“I’d been told that my body was a Tamagotchi, and it’s a NASA supercomputer. And I could have been using it as a NASA supercomputer this entire time?” she said, using an expletive for emphasis. “What a heartbreak. What a waste.”“I really only relate to people who are so passionate about what they love and want to do and how they see the world — and also are truly embarrassed to be alive,” Ms. Gilpin said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesFor people who first saw Ms. Gilpin in “GLOW,” the idea that she has never been a starry blonde bombshell is surprising (for one, in real life her hair is naturally brown), but in her book, she explains her self-perception as that of a beta woman, an outsider, on the sidelines. She even refers to her acting career as something that she deliberately pursued with beta expectations — not to be the leading ingénue, but the funny girl whose jokes hit.Yet she crossed the line at some point, and she’s found that with some success, she now has “this alpha schedule for this beta marketing.”There is something Sphinx-like about Ms. Gilpin, where she can tell you a great story but she knows the game of talking to a reporter. She muttered at some point that she was Zooming from a friend’s house, the sort of detail that means I can’t read too much into the interior design of the place. Her metaphors are splashy, but they serve as the comic guide to where she’s most honest as a writer, and the themes that come up through her book are dark, from ‌ ‌depression to the absolute grind of Hollywood’s sexism.Regarding the latter, she writes about auditioning for a high school student on the original “Gossip Girl” and being called back for a role of an older teacher; the fact that you have to smile and claim you were born under George W. Bush to be considered sexy and marketable; the whiplash of performing the right version of yourself at a meeting, especially when they’re expecting no insight, just a shiny and vacuous shape of a woman.Ms. Gilpin’s self-deprecation can be credited to her mother. “My humor is just complete counterfeit from Ann McDonough,” she said. “Even in the most funereal list of circumstances, she was a winking elf, making fun of herself and you and everything and made every day so goddamn funny.”It’s a quality, she clarified, of being both passionate and embarrassed. “I really only relate to people who are so passionate about what they love and want to do and how they see the world — and also are truly embarrassed to be alive.”While “GLOW” is still mourned by its stars, Ms. Gilpin has been able to bring her specific, salty and surprising presence to new projects. In the past year, she appeared in Apple TV’s “Roar” and played Mo Dean on Starz’s “Gaslit.”Last year, she filmed “Three Women” — set to premiere in November 2022 on Showtime — an adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s best-selling nonfiction book, which “just totally changed me as a person,” Ms. Gilpin said. “And I chased that role so embarrassingly hard.”Ms. Gilpin has been waking up at 5 a.m. every day this summer to begin another day of filming on her current project, “Mrs. Davis,” for Peacock, in which she plays “a nun who goes to battle against an all-powerful artificial intelligence.” She has been working 14-hour days, appearing in every scene — and doing this while wearing a wool habit.Returning to acting after the nesting of new family life with her husband Cosmo, a nurse with whom she lives in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, has given her whiplash. “I went right from this bubble of terror, protecting my tiny baby, to a set, which sort of feels like a fake Orwellian society where the pandemic hasn’t touched anything. It’s a big corporation society, where I dance around in a habit, sometimes sob in a habit, or pratfall in a habit,” she said.At one point in the book, Ms. Gilpin writes that with success comes loneliness. One year of work took her on 50 plane rides. But, when she’s done with “Mrs. Davis,” she is planning on a different approach. “I’m trying to find the balance of working enough to still barrel toward this weird dream and passion while also seeing my daughter and touching a leaf and understanding that being an actor in the grand scheme of things is meaningless and silly,” she said, “while also loving the meaningless and silly thing.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Claim to Fame’ and ‘American Gigolo’

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      ABC wraps up its new celebrity-adjacent competition show, and Showtime airs a modern TV version of the Richard Gere film.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Sept. 5-11. Details and times are subject to change.MondayOUT OF OFFICE (2022) 8 p.m. on Comedy Central. Though this is a scripted film and not a documentary, it might as well be since it focuses on a topic many of us have been experiencing for the last two-plus years: the blurring of work and personal boundaries as people work from home. The movie, created by the producers of “The Office,” has an all-star cast: Ken Jeong, Leslie Jones, Jay Pharoah and Paul F. Tompkins, to name a few, as well as “Office” alum Oscar Nuñez. The film follows each character as they live through the “new normal” of working in the place where they also live.From left: Victoria Zito, Margaux Lignel, Emily Gorelik and Anya Firestone in “Real Girlfriends in Paris.”Fred Jagueneau/BravoREAL GIRLFRIENDS IN PARIS 9:15 p.m. on Bravo. This new reality show is as if you took “Emily in Paris” but made it real life. It follows six American young women who are living in Paris as they focus on their careers, dating and their friendships with each other. Viewers can expect beautiful views of Paris, lots of date nights and plenty of luxury shopping.NO ORDINARY LIFE (2022) 10 p.m. on CNN. On-camera personalities often get the glory, but this documentary focuses on five women behind the camera: the photojournalists Jane Evans, Maria Fleet, Margaret Moth, Mary Rogers, and Cynde Strand. . The director Heather O’Neill, a CNN alum herself, used behind-the-scenes footage and archival interviews to paint a picture of their careers across decades. The CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour is also featured as she describes the aftermath of Moth being shot in the face by a sniper in Sarajevo while on the job in 1992.TuesdayLIES, POLITICS AND DEMOCRACY 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In this two-hour documentary special, which is also acting as Frontline’s season premiere, the filmmaker Michael Kirk examines the fragility of American democracy and investigates the lies and misinformation surrounding the 2020 presidential election, leading to the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol Riot. This documentary also comes as primaries for the 2022 midterm elections are underway.CLAIM TO FAME 10 p.m. on ABC. In this new show, each contestant is related to a celebrity, and the other contestants must guess who is related to which celebrity for a prize of $100,000. It’s hosted by two celebrity relatives themselves, the eldest and youngest Jonas brothers: Kevin and Frankie (not to be confused with the Jonas Brothers, which includes Kevin but not Frankie). In this week’s episode, all of the contestants identities will be revealed, but so far eliminated contestants include Chuck Norris’s grandson, Simone Biles’s sister and Laverne Cox’s twin.WednesdayJay Leno and Brie Larson in “Jay Leno’s Garage.”Nicole Weingart/CNBCJAY LENO’S GARAGE 10 p.m. on CNBC. Jay Leno’s talk (and car) show is back for an eight-episode season — but this time with a twist. The only vehicles featured are electric or use alternative fuel sources. As always, the show will be as celebrity-filled, featuring Brie Larson, Post Malone, Kelly Clarkson, Pitbull and James Marsden, just to name a few. Elon Musk will also be making an appearance.ThursdayDEAD RECKONING (1947) 8 p.m. on TCM. This film noir mystery tells the story of Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart) and Jonny Drake (William Prince) as they are sent to D.C. to receive top honors for their military services. Jonny jumps out the train to avoid photographers and later turns up dead. Murdock suspects foul play and tries to solve the mystery, but the femme fatal Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott) is a roadblock.THE CON 10 p.m. on ABC. A small town pastor who stole $40 million from his investors, wrote a suicide note, then jumped on a ferry to Fort Myers, Fla.? A mom who made fake coupons to use at stores? These are a few of the stories about con artists recounted in this docuseries, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg. As this second season wraps up, the final episode tells a story about a man who was taken into police custody for pretending to be a doctor but then was still able to open a medical practice.FridayCAMPFIRE SESSIONS 10 p.m. on CMT. This cozy show, which features country music stars doing acoustic sets, is coming to an end this week after a star-studded second season: Jason Aldean, Old Dominion, Brett Eldredge, Brandy Clark, Jon Pardi, Old Crow Medicine Show, Clay Walker and Tracy Lawrence have all been around the campfire to perform their songs. Now they will gather together to sing their favorite covers.SaturdayCREATIVE ARTS EMMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on FXX. These awards were actually handed out last weekend, but on Saturday viewers can watch an edited and condensed version of the two-day event. Judd Apatow, Ashley Nicole Black, RuPaul Charles and the cast of “Queer Eye” are a few of the presenters. The Creative Arts Emmys focus on the technical and logistical achievements of television with such awards as outstanding period costumes, outstanding stunt performance and outstanding main title design.SundayJon Bernthal in “American Gigolo.”Hopper Stone/SHOWTIMEAMERICAN GIGOLO 9 p.m. on Showtime. This modern interpretation of the film by the same name, staring Jon Bernthal as Julian (played by Richard Gere in the original), is starting off its first season this week. The series begins around 15 years after the movie ended with Julian being exonerated for a wrongful murder conviction and released from prison. As he leaves behind his old life and reconnects with his mother and his former lover, Detective Sunday (Rosie O’Donnell) figures out the real story behind the murder. More

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      Richard Roat, Seen on ‘Cheers,’ ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 89

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      A familiar TV face for years, he appeared on many of the most popular prime-time shows of recent decades.Richard Roat, a versatile character actor whose half-century-long career was punctuated by notable guest appearances on three of the most popular sitcoms of recent decades, “Cheers,” “Friends” and “Seinfeld,” died on Aug. 5 in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 89.Kathy (Arntzen) Roat, his wife and only immediate survivor, said the cause was a heart attack. She said Mr. Roat, who lived in Glendale, died in a condo while on vacation.On a 1985 episode of “Cheers,” as the imperious boss of the barstool habitué Norm Peterson (George Wendt), he threatened to fire Norm if he didn’t accept a promotion (and raise) to become the company’s “corporate killer” — the person who terminates people.“Studies have shown that it’s particularly humiliating when you’re fired by someone who is clearly and markedly superior to yourself,” Mr. Roat’s character tells Norm coldly. “That wouldn’t be the case with you, Norman. You’re just an ordinary Joe. We checked out your home life. You have absolutely nothing that anyone could possibly envy or resent.”In 1996, on “Seinfeld,” Mr. Roat was a dermatologist who labeled Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) a “difficult” patient when she sought treatment for a rash. His character turned from friendly to stern when he checked her patient history.“Well, that doesn’t look serious,” he says, barely examining her. “You’ll be fine.” He then adds notes to her history when she complains that the rash is “really itchy.”And on “Friends,” in 2000, he was a professor at the college where Ross (David Schwimmer) taught. At one point he tells Ross that he was violating campus rules by dating a student.“They’re going to fire you,” he says.“Really, it’s not just frowned upon?” Ross asks.Mr. Roat worked primarily in television, starting in 1962 with two very different series about police officers: the sitcom “Car 54, Where Are You?” and the drama “Naked City.” He was a regular on the daytime soap opera “The Doctors” from 1963 to 1964, and over the next 45 years was seen on comedies like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Murphy Brown” and “Ellen” and dramas like “The Fugitive,” “Columbo,” “Matlock” and “Dynasty.”In a 1986 episode of “The Golden Girls,” as the boyfriend of Rose (Betty White), he dies in bed after they sleep together.He also worked regularly in regional theater. He starred with Jo Anne Worley in Ken Ludwig’s theatrical farce “Moon Over Buffalo” at the Pasadena Playhouse, and in William Luce’s one-man show “Barrymore,” about the actor John Barrymore, at the Dorset Theater Festival in Vermont. He played the title role, based on Lyndon B. Johnson, in Barbara Garson’s political satire “Macbird!” at the Players’ Ring Gallery in Los Angeles, and a married character in Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band,” about a group of gay men, at what is now the Montalbán Theater, also in Los Angeles.In 1962 he played Mark Antony in the New York Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Julius Caesar.” Mr. Roat, seated, with Jay Leno and Ellen Reagan in the 1978 television movie “Almost Heaven.”G Stein/ABC via Getty Images
      Richard Donald Roat Jr. was born on July 3, 1933, in Hartford, Conn. His father was a glazier, and his mother, Lois (Bowan) Roat, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Trinity College in Hartford in 1956, Mr. Roat acted with the Mark Twain Masquers and other local theatrical groups. He also earned a living by driving a bakery truck and holding other odd jobs.In 1961 he made his Broadway debut as a replacement for Michael Ebert in “The Wall,” a play about Jews in occupied Poland during World War II. Mr. Roat played Dr. Jerry Chandler during 172 episodes of “The Doctors” and told The Portland Press Herald that he felt grateful for the opportunity to act regularly.“There’s room for less than one percent of the new actors in nighttime television,” he said. “Unless you’re a ‘regular’ and get a running assignment for a season-long series, your chances in nighttime television are practically nil.”His last television role was in the drama “24” in 2009.Mr. Roat had another long-running role, which he pursued as an actor and continued after he retired that year: as a tax preparer for people in the entertainment business. During a slow period in his acting career in the late 1960s, he took a job in an accountant’s office. On April 15 of that first year, the accountant had a nervous breakdown, Kathy Roat said, and Mr. Roat “took some tax forms and decided to become a tax preparer.” More

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      David Milch Still Has Stories to Tell

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      LOS ANGELES — The door to a room at an assisted-living facility swung open, and out darted one of its occupants: a cat named Mignonne, who was eager for some fresh companionship. Then, with more deliberation, came the apartment’s primary resident, David Milch, who was similarly happy to have visitors.“I’m so grateful,” he said, allowing entrance to the quarters where he has lived for nearly three years, but which still feel to him like an intermediate space. “As you may imagine, things are all in a state of flux.”To television viewers who have followed the medium’s resurgence of erudition and artistic credibility, the 77-year-old Milch is a towering figure. A onetime writer-producer on the influential 1980s police drama “Hill Street Blues,” he went on to help create boundary-busting programs like “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and his personal masterpiece, the uncompromising HBO western “Deadwood.”Betty Thomas as Lucy Bates in Hill Street Blues, an influential television drama from the 1980s.Shout! Factory/20th Century FoxIn his industry, Milch is well known for his writing style, which blends articulate grandeur with defiant obscenity, and for his appetites. He is a recovered drug addict and a compulsive gambler who, by his own admission, lost millions of dollars on horse racing and other wagers.Now he rises each day in his modest accommodations here, decorated with family photos, some Peabody Awards near a sink and some Emmy statuettes on a shelf, and furnished with a bed, a small TV and a refrigerator containing a single can of LaCroix sparkling water. This is where he has lived since the fall of 2019, a few months after publicly disclosing that he had been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.Having welcomed me and his wife, Rita Stern Milch, into the room, Milch explained that he has not lost the powers of observation and articulation that have served him as a writer. Instead, he has found himself training those abilities on his own life as he navigates his experience with the disease.“When you’re in transition, there’s a sense that life lives you,” he said, fiddling with an elastic bracelet that he wore to keep his room key attached around his wrist. “You’re holding on and trying to accommodate all of the impositions and uncertainties.”Describing his present relationship to life and the way he once lived it, he added, “I’m estranged. I can kid myself, but I ain’t a regular.”Preserving what he can remember about himself and sharing it with an audience are already demanding tasks for Milch, and now they have taken on a particular urgency. In the years since he received his diagnosis, he has been working on a memoir called “Life’s Work.”The book, which will be published by Random House on Sept. 13, offers a poetic but unvarnished account of his personal history, abundant with the barbarity and grace that have animated Milch’s fictional characters.The project is a quintessentially Milchian lesson in accurately depicting a life, even one composed of events that he may not always be proud of having lived.As Rita explained, the memoir showed there was beauty in “how he took his life and turned it into art — all the experiences he had, which seemed so wild, he was able to tame in narrative and take back.”David saw an even more fundamental value in the project: “I have felt the blessing of feeling like I know who I am,” he said.A few days before the visit, Rita — who lives about 20 minutes away — had cautioned that he has bad days and good days; even on good days, he can be discursive in his thinking or unaware of his surroundings.“He still thinks like a storyteller,” she said. “And maybe because I love him, but I just find it fascinating. Even when it doesn’t make a lot of sense, there’s something in it that’s just Dave.”On a Tuesday morning in July, David Milch was in a genial mood and voluminous in his affectionate praise for Rita. He said something elliptical about the difficult work that lay ahead, now that it was time for students to enroll in their classes. He saw me admiring a trophy he’d won for a racehorse he once owned and asked, with a gleam in his eye, if I liked going to the track.Milch is happiest “when he’s figuring out a story,” said his wife, Rita Stern Milch. “Sometimes people talk about him as if he’s dead already. Wait a minute, he’s very much alive. And he’s still got something to offer.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesAt the start of 2015, amid other health problems and difficulties with his memory, Milch received a neuropsychological evaluation and was told he had dementia; a few years later he was given a diagnosis of “probable Alzheimer’s.”By the summer of 2019, he was becoming confused on car rides where he was a passenger and fighting with Rita over car keys he had forgotten he was no longer allowed to use. On one exit from his house, he had a particularly nasty, face-first fall on the steps. That October, he moved into the facility where he now resides.Milch was already in the habit of composing his screenplays through dictation and had been recording his speeches at work for the past 20 years. His family members and colleagues expanded that process, recording his personal remembrances and reaching out to others for stories that could stimulate Milch’s memories, all in the service of creating “Life’s Work.”“There were days where the recordings are a lot more wading through confusion,” said his daughter Olivia Milch. “And then there are days where he just rolls and it’s stunning, how he’s able to talk about the disease and what he’s going through.” The book’s prologue was essentially transcribed verbatim, she said, including her father’s ethereal opening words: “I’m on a boat sailing to some island where I don’t know anybody. A boat someone is operating, and we aren’t in touch.”“Life’s Work” is by turns a brisk and brutal memoir, beginning with its author’s upbringing in Buffalo, N.Y., at the hands of his father, Elmer, an accomplished surgeon as well as a relentless gambler and philanderer. Elmer operated on mobsters, scammed Demerol prescriptions for himself and enlisted David, while he was still a child, to run his bets for him.The author himself grew up to develop his own crippling vices — he recalls being introduced to heroin as a high-school senior — as well as a prodigious writing talent. As an undergraduate at Yale, Milch studied with the Pulitzer Prize winners Robert Penn Warren and R.W.B. Lewis, and he vacillated between futures at Yale Law School and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop while he made L.S.D. in Mexico and continued to use drugs. “I loved heroin,” Milch writes in the memoir. “I loved checking out. You were here and you were not here at the same time. That has appeal.”Milch was a writer-producer on “Hill Street Blues,” then helped create “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” and “Deadwood.”20th Century FoxIn television, Milch writes that he found a constructive outlet for his energies and learned to open his “imagination to the particular truths of a different person and a different environment.” He was hired at “Hill Street Blues” by its co-creator Steven Bochco, and together they created “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” whose sophisticated storytelling and then-unprecedented use of nudity and explicit language influenced decades of prestige TV that followed.Milch continued to gamble, betting tens of thousands of dollars on individual horse races; he had a heart attack, received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and got sober at the age of 53. Then in 2004, he created his magnum opus, “Deadwood,” a drama set in the Dakota territory in the 1870s, a merciless era of American frontier expansion.On that show, Milch writes, “It was time to listen, to find the characters up and walking and hear who they were and what they had to say.” He adds, “The actors told me their characters’ deepest truths. They gave themselves up, and they inhabited the parts they had come to.”Paula Malcomson, who played the saloon prostitute Trixie, said that Milch maintained a daily presence on the “Deadwood” set as a kind of wandering, salty-tongued philosopher.“He granted us permission to be ourselves,” she said. “He let us bring forth the things that most people would say, ‘That’s too much. This is uncouth.”Robin Weigert, who played Calamity Jane on the series, said her portrayal of the disenchanted sharpshooter was influenced by Milch’s own language and physical demeanor.“I will always feel that there is a little piece of David’s soul that I got to dwell inside of,” Weigert said. “It creates a different feeling than when you just work for somebody. I felt like I worked inside of him.”But “Deadwood” was canceled at HBO after only three seasons; other shows Milch made for the network, like “John From Cincinnati” and “Luck,” had even briefer runs and still others weren’t picked up at all.In 2011, Milch writes, his wife went to their business advisers and learned that he had spent about $23 million at racetracks in the previous 10 years. They had $5 million in unpaid taxes and were $17 million in debt, she found.A yearslong period of downsizing followed for the Milches, during which David was able to complete the story of “Deadwood” in an HBO movie that aired in 2019. He has been open about his disease with his colleagues and co-stars, many of whom remain in his life, and say that Milch has retained his fundamental expressiveness.Many in the original cast of the series “Deadwood” gathered again for the movie, which completed the story.Warrick Page/HBOWeigert visited Milch while he was still living at his home. He had forgotten the names of some of his dogs, she said, and where his bedroom was, but “we had this high-level conversation about the transmigration of souls.”W. Earl Brown, who was an actor and writer on “Deadwood,” visited Milch after he moved to the care facility. As Brown recalled, “Dave takes a long look around the room, leans into me and says, ‘I have to tell you something, Earl: The indignities of decrepitude are boundless.’ That quote perfectly encapsulates David Milch.”Malcomson described Milch as “the most human of anyone I’ve ever known.”“I comfort myself a little bit, thinking he burned so bright and there was so much life lived, and maybe that was his exact quota,” she said. “I’m not saying he’s not living life now, but I’m saying that it is a different version of it.”As the publication of “Life’s Work” approaches, Rita Stern Milch said she was anxious about seeing so many intensely personal stories about her husband and their family shared with a wide readership. Having worked as a film producer and editor, she said, “I’m a background person, a behind-the-scenes person. It doesn’t make me comfortable.”But she said those concerns were less important than allowing David to tell readers what he has experienced while he still can. “It’s a horrible diagnosis and it ain’t fun,” she said. “But life goes on. You don’t have to hide people away. They don’t have to disappear.”“This is the game,” Milch said. “This is what’s going on. You can tell yourself it’s something else. But you know that you’re, in many ways, holding on.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesOver a pizza lunch at an outdoor restaurant near the facility, David and Rita explained that they continue to work together on writing projects, whether they end up getting produced or simply provide David with a means of keeping his mind active. (As he writes in the memoir, “I still hear voices. I still tell stories.”)They had revisited an early screenplay of David’s called “The Main Chance,” which takes places at the Saratoga Race Course, but Rita said they backed off once David became agitated, thinking he was back at the track. They have also continued to develop a biographical series about the late-night host Johnny Carson.On the car ride back from lunch, they listened to a radio station that was broadcasting news updates about Major League Baseball.“Did we bet on baseball games?” David asked from a passenger’s seat.“No,” Rita answered as she steered the car.David smiled and seemed glad for the admonishment. “Nor are we going to,” he said happily. More

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      ‘S.N.L.’ Loses Three More Cast Members

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      Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat and Aristotle Athari are the latest performers to depart “Saturday Night Live.”Lorne Michaels continues to make good on his vow that “a year of change” is coming to “Saturday Night Live”: Three more cast members are departing the long-running NBC sketch series before the start of its 48th season.Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat and Aristotle Athari are leaving “S.N.L.,” according to a person familiar with the departures who was granted anonymity to discuss plans NBC had not announced publicly.Villaseñor and Moffat both joined “S.N.L.” as featured players in fall 2016 and were promoted to the main cast in fall 2018. On the show, Villaseñor has portrayed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well as original characters like Cesar Perez; she hosted the Film Independent Spirit Awards in April 2021. Moffat’s repertoire included a recurring impersonation of Eric Trump as well as characters like Guy Who Just Bought a Boat.Athari, who performed previously in the comedy troupe Goatface and appeared on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” joined “S.N.L.” last fall as a featured player.NBC declined to comment on Thursday. The network did not respond to questions about why these performers were leaving or whether further changes were expected at “S.N.L.” in the coming weeks.Their off-season exits follow the departures of the veteran cast members Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney, who all made their final “S.N.L.” appearances on the show’s 47th season finale, in May. The new season is expected to begin in October. More

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      Lea Michele Is Well Aware That the Pressure Is On

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      She’s landed her dream role in “Funny Girl.” Now she’s tasked with rescuing the faltering Broadway show and proving that she is not the person she once was.Fifteen years ago, Lea Michele was sulking in her “Spring Awakening” dressing room, heartbroken over a guy, when the Broadway show’s director offered her a bit of advice.The director, Michael Mayer, suggested that she watch “Funny Girl,” which, he explained, was about a performer learning to not let a man drag her down.“I gave it to her as a kind of comfort,” Mayer said in a phone interview last month. “You’ve got this great career, you’re the lead in this significant new musical, and you’re young still.”Michele watched the movie that night. Dazzled, she watched it again the next night, resolving to one day land the lead role of Fanny Brice. A few weeks later, she gushed about “Funny Girl” and its star, Barbra Streisand, at dinner with a television producer, Ryan Murphy, who went on to create a new series, “Glee,” with Michele in mind.This is where it gets meta: Playing a glee club captain who graduates to become a striving theater actress, Michele’s character lands her dream role in the first Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” since its debut in 1964.Murphy’s plan to transfer Michele’s Fanny Brice from the TV screen to stage never materialized. But on Tuesday, a tale that feels to many like life imitating art culminates with Michele’s first performance as Brice, a 20th-century Jewish performer, at the August Wilson Theater.Like the two other actresses who occupied the lead role this year (first Beanie Feldstein, then her standby Julie Benko), Michele must seek to avoid the shadow of Streisand’s star-making performance in the original musical and movie.Unlike the other actresses, Michele, 36, must contend with another shadow: her past self. Two years ago, she faced a wave of criticism from former colleagues who publicly accused her of bullying behavior and a prima donna attitude. And she must step into a show whose behind-the-scenes machinations and cast changes have been one of the juiciest running stories on Broadway this summer, prompting reams of coverage and gossip.Michele during a “Funny Girl” rehearsal. She is playing Brice with the character’s feverish energy dialed up a bit higher than the two Fannies before her this year. Jenny Anderson“I feel more ready than I ever have before, both personally and professionally,” Michele said in an interview three weeks before her debut. She spoke from a dressing room vacated by the actress Jane Lynch, who ended her run as Brice’s mother earlier than planned, ensuring that the former “Glee” co-stars would never perform together onstage.The allegations prompted an “intense time of reflection” about her conduct at work, Michele said — which, she believes, has equipped her to be a part of, and lead, a Broadway company for the first time since leaving “Spring Awakening” in 2008.“I really understand the importance and value now of being a leader,” she said. “It means not only going and doing a good job when the camera’s rolling, but also when it’s not. And that wasn’t always the most important thing for me.”For Michele, who temporarily stepped away from performing after the birth of her son, Ever, in 2020, the explosive internet reaction to her “Funny Girl” casting was not, perhaps, the return-to-Broadway narrative she had imagined.Before the news was announced, Feldstein, who had generally received underwhelming reviews in the role, said on Instagram in July that she would be leaving the show two months earlier than expected, writing that the production had “decided to take the show in a different direction.” The announcement fueled speculation that Feldstein’s departure had something to do with Michele, who was rumored to be taking over the part.“I really understand the importance and value now of being a leader,” Michele said. “It means not only going and doing a good job when the camera’s rolling, but also when it’s not.”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesRebukes of Michele resurfaced online, with some questioning whether she should have been offered the role at all.To go back to June 2020: After Michele tweeted a message with the Black Lives Matter hashtag, Samantha Marie Ware, a Black actress who appeared on “Glee,” said Michele had been responsible for “traumatic microaggressions” toward her, saying that Michele had threatened to get her fired and made a humiliating remark in front of castmates.A deluge of criticism followed, including from former “Glee” actors who described Michele as exclusionary and demeaning to colleagues. The meal-kit company HelloFresh, saying it “does not condone racism nor discrimination of any kind,” ended its partnership with her.Another co-star from “Glee,” Heather Morris, tweeted at the time that it had been very unpleasant to work with Michele, writing that “for Lea to treat others with the disrespect that she did for as long as she did, I believe she should be called out.” (Morris did not respond to an interview request.)Michele apologized in 2020 for her past behavior. In the interview last month, she declined to address the specifics of Ware’s account, saying she doesn’t “feel the need to handle things” through the media. Ware declined to comment, but shortly after Michele’s “Funny Girl” casting was announced, Ware posted a tweet in which she said, “Yes, Broadway upholds whiteness.” Her account and tweets have since been made private.Michele now acknowledges that her work style is intense, sometimes to a fault. “I have an edge to me. I work really hard. I leave no room for mistakes,” she said. “That level of perfectionism, or that pressure of perfectionism, left me with a lot of blind spots.”She traced that psychology to her days as a child actress on Broadway, where, she said, the expectation to perform at a consistently high level often put her in a “semi-robotic state.”Her performance career started unexpectedly when she was 8, living in Tenafly, N.J., with her father (a Jewish deli owner) and her mother (an Italian-Catholic nurse). As Michele tells it, her mother was asked to drive a friend’s daughter, whose father had just had a heart attack, to an audition for the Broadway production of “Les Misérables.” Michele insisted on coming along, and she ended up landing the dual role of Young Cosette and Young Éponine. Hungry for more, Michele was 9 when she was cast in the new musical “Ragtime.”At 14, she met Mayer when she landed the role of Wendla in a workshop of “Spring Awakening.” The role, as a teenager exploring her sexual desires within the strictures of a 19th-century German household, left no questions about her dedication to the theater. Michele was beaten with a switch onstage by her co-star, Jonathan Groff, and when she was older, she was asked to bare her chest and simulate sex onstage.Groff, who formed a close bond with Michele during the run, remembers Michele being upset by the uncomfortable laughter that beating scene would elicit from audiences.“It would really crush her,” he said, “like, ‘Oh gosh, are we not doing the scene well enough? The people are laughing!’”Groff was the person who invited her to dinner with Murphy, setting the stage for Michele’s “Glee” role. At 22, Michele became known to the world as Rachel Berry, an anal-retentive high school glee club member whose middle name, Barbra, is after a certain Brooklyn-born diva.By the time Berry lands the “Funny Girl” role in the series, her affinity for the musical is well established, having already sung “Don’t Rain On My Parade” and the movie-specific “My Man.” In the show’s fifth season, Berry belts “I’m the Greatest Star” on a Broadway stage, with Lynch watching from the audience.You can be forgiven for mixing up which plot points belong to Michele and which to Berry. “It all kind of morphed together a little bit,” Michele said.In a moment of Rachel Berry-like perfectionism, she admitted that during a “Glee” concert tour, she asked that “Don’t Rain On My Parade” be removed from the set list because she had messed up during a live performance.Behind the scenes, Michele said, she was getting a “quick education on addiction” while dating Cory Monteith, her co-star who had long struggled with substance abuse. Monteith died in 2013 of a combination of heroin and alcohol, devastating Michele and other cast members.Performing in 2010 with Cory Monteith, who died of a combination of heroin and alcohol in 2013.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesNot long after, Michele got within reach of her dream role, as Murphy snagged the rights to a Broadway revival of “Funny Girl.” It was a difficult time, Michele said, and she felt uncertain about the plan because she had just performed many of the show’s songs on TV.“I didn’t feel like there was anything new that I could bring,” she said.The new emotional material came in the years since — when, like Brice does in the show’s second act, Michele got married and had a child, reordering her priorities.Her friends started to notice changes. Groff recalled that at Michele’s wedding to Zandy Reich, a businessman, in 2019, Murphy, who officiated, told a story about his first dinner with them as a couple. According to Groff, Murphy lightheartedly said, “This was the first time I’ve had dinner with Lea where the main topic of the conversation wasn’t about her, what she wanted to do next creatively.” (A representative for Murphy said he was unavailable to comment for the story.)Michele gave birth to Ever the next year after months of pregnancy complications. He was still a baby when the team behind the London production of “Funny Girl” was casting for the transfer to Broadway. Mayer said that even though Michele was at the top of the list for Brice, he sensed she would not be ready to return to work.After the show cast Feldstein, Mayer had a conversation with Michele to explain the decision. “I said, ‘Look, I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear, but this is what we’re doing,’” Mayer remembered telling Michele.Down the road, he added, “‘I would love to do ‘Funny Girl’ with you some time.’”Michele said she had not been set on returning to Broadway until November 2021, when she performed in a one-night-only “Spring Awakening” reunion concert. Around that time, she said, she had another conversation with Mayer, in which she said that if Feldstein’s run ended, and they wanted a replacement, she would be “honored” to step in.After Feldstein initially announced her planned departure in June, the wheels for Michele to take over were set in motion, Mayer said. He added that he loved Feldstein’s performance and stands by her “100 percent.” Asked why Feldstein decided to leave earlier than expected, he said he was unsure.“I haven’t spoken to her about it,” Mayer said. “I think it was hard for her once she knew she was going to be leaving and that someone else was taking over.” (A representative for Feldstein didn’t respond to requests for comment.)Mayer said Michele’s deal went through relatively quickly because she and Feldstein had the same agent, who already knew the details around the show. By late July, Michele was in the rehearsal room. Benko took over as Brice for the month of August, with the assurance she’d perform one show a week in the role after Michele’s debut.On one of Michele’s first days with the full cast, she sang “Don’t Rain On My Parade” onstage, and an ensemble member, Leslie Blake Walker, said she remembered watching her perform the song on “Glee” — Walker’s first exposure to “Funny Girl.”Rehearsing “Greatest Star” onstage last month, Michele played Brice with the character’s feverish energy dialed up a bit higher than the two Fannies before her this year. The comedy was her way of taking things to the extreme: grabbing a fistful of Jared Grimes’s sweatshirt when trying to convince him of her talent, or hoisting herself on top of the piano, as Mayer suggested, standing partially on the keys.Referring to her “Funny Girl” colleagues, Michele said, “Everyone here has been through a lot, and I just have to come in and be prepared and do a good job and be respectful of the fact that this is their space.”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesThe structure of the show itself will see some changes, including a new interlude of a Brice song, “I’d Rather Be Blue Over You,” that Streisand sings in the movie.Michele, like her predecessors, has tried to remove the pressure of the comparison, saying, “​​I will never be as good as Barbra Streisand.” Whatever performance she delivers, it will not be eligible for a Tony: Only the originating actress in that production, Feldstein, can be considered for the award.But the pressure on her to save this revival is hard to dismiss. Mayer said he sees this as a “second chance” for “Funny Girl,” whose ticket sales had been on the decline, dropping to an average weekly gross of about $760,000 in Feldstein’s final month from $1.2 million in the first two, according to data from the Broadway League. Prices have now skyrocketed for Michele’s debut: The most expensive ticket on her first night is more than $2,600, as of Wednesday.Despite the evident star power, Michele seems aware that she should avoid behaving like a diva.“Everyone here has been through a lot, and I just have to come in and be prepared and do a good job and be respectful of the fact that this is their space,” she said.A humbling element of the process is that she had to learn how to tap dance from square one, practicing with a nursery rhyme tap video one of the show’s choreographers, Ayodele Casel, sent her. (After the first tap rehearsal, she said, she cried in the bathroom, wondering if she really could pull this role off, before the steps eventually clicked.)Still, Michele admits that she is only just learning how to be publicly vulnerable. Online hatred of her can verge on gleeful, and she fears that if she responds to criticism — or a bizarre rumor that she is illiterate — it will fuel the fire.“I went to ‘Glee’ every single day; I knew my lines every single day,” she said. “And then there’s a rumor online that I can’t read or write? It’s sad. It really is. I think often if I were a man, a lot of this wouldn’t be the case.”Right now, Michele said, she is focused on what’s in front of her: inhabiting the role, and this time, doing it as a wife and mother rather than a fame-hungry former glee club captain.Maybe Rachel Berry would throw a fit if her performance was ineligible for a Tony Award, but present-day Lea Michele insists that she isn’t bothered.“You might think that’s the biggest piece of bull that I’m going to say to you all day,” Michele said, using the stronger version of the word, “but I really don’t care about that at this point. It’s just about being able to play this part.” More

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      The Many Violations of the Violent Birth Scene

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      Does the gory surprise C-section in “House of the Dragon” represent a grim historical reality, an urgent political statement or a worn cultural cliché?“Are you sure you want to watch this?” my husband asked as we cued up the “House of the Dragon” premiere last week.We had both seen the online warnings that the “Game of Thrones” prequel kicked off with a “grisly,” “brutal” and “gory medieval C-section.” I had undergone a cesarean section a couple of years ago, during the birth of my son, and now I was again pregnant and preparing for the possibility of a second surgery. But yes, I was sure I wanted to watch it.I was, I guess, curious about what the most horrific interpretation of the procedure might look like. I’m still thinking about the scene — not because it is so violent, but because its violence is framed as so profound. Like so many depictions of pregnancy, its visceral and emotional possibilities are largely obscured by a tangle of clichés posturing as insight.King’s Landing, after all, is not a subtle place. At the top of the episode, an uncomfortably pregnant Queen Aemma foreshadows her fate: “The childbed is our battlefield,” she tells her daughter, Princess Rhaenyra. “We must learn to face it with a stiff lip.” Meanwhile, her husband, King Viserys, is ominously confident that this pregnancy, after a run of miscarriages and stillbirths, will finally produce a male heir.Instead, the queen’s labor reaches a dangerous impasse. The grand maester informs the king that the baby is in a breech position, and that “it sometimes becomes necessary for the father to make an impossible choice” — to “sacrifice one or to lose them both.” Viserys approves the surgical removal of the baby without Aemma’s knowledge or consent. As birth attendants restrain their desperate, confused queen, the grand maester slices into her belly. The queen dies, and her baby dies soon after.Throughout the violent birth scene, the queen is shot from seemingly every angle; no perspective on her pregnant body goes unseen.Ollie Upton/HBOWhat is the meaning of this gruesome spectacle? George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” the book on which “House of the Dragon” is based, has the queen die in childbirth in an unspecified manner; only in the show does it become a murder by way of a rogue belly slicing. In a series of interviews, Miguel Sapochnik, one of the showrunners and the episode’s director, exhaustively explained the resonance of the choice. The scene — intercut with a bloody jousting tournament mounted by the king in premature celebration — was designed to be “a distillation of the experience of men and the experience of women” in Westeros, Sapochnik said. But it was also meant to reveal “parallels to our own past and present,” he added. It represents the grimness of childbirth in the medieval era, from which Martin’s fantasy world draws, when “giving birth was violence”; but it also represents the grimness of childbirth in post-Roe America, when the scene reads as “more timely and impactful than ever.”“Anxious not to get it wrong,” eager “not to shy away” but also “not to sensationalize,” the creative team — the episode was written, directed and edited by men — enlisted two midwives to advise on set and innumerable women to screen the sequence before it aired. The scene, Sapochnik promised, was just the beginning of a whole season of portentous births, each seeded with additional gender commentary. The theme of this birth, he explained, was “torture.”The sheer violence of the scene didn’t shock me. (Earlier in the episode, a character slices off a man’s penis and tosses it atop a pushcart piled with various severed appendages — violent spectacle is a major element of the show.) But the implied profundity of the violence struck me as faintly ridiculous. The loading of meaning onto the queen’s death felt like an attempt to sidestep the criticism that dogged “Game of Thrones” — that it indulged in senseless violence against women. But the imposition of sense on such violence can also feel unsatisfying, as the female character’s interiority is subsumed into the creators’ effort to make a statement.The showrunners intercut the childbirth scene with the cartoonish violence of the jousting to make points about both the past and the present.Ollie Upton/HBOThe scene creaks under the weight of so many signifiers. The queen is shot from seemingly every angle; no perspective on her pregnant body goes unseen. We see her moaning in the background, tangled in bedclothes. We zoom close on her delirious face in gauzy light, evoking the softness of a maternity shoot. Often we see her from above, as if we are peering down on her in a surgical theater. Or we spy her from beyond her rounded stomach, as if we are attendants assisting in the delivery. We look down upon her as she is cut open, drained of blood and stuffed with reaching hands.As the scene wears on, the camera itself seems moved by cowardice. It retreats further and further from the queen’s perspective, assuming a remote and clinical gaze. Often it looks away entirely, focusing instead on the cartoonish gore of the jousting,which comes to stand in for the violence of the birth. The queen’s screams are silenced, overlaid with the sounds of a roaring tournament crowd and the outlandish squishing of skulls and brains. In its desperation for meaning, the scene does become senseless.Being pregnant can feel like passing from the physical world into the world of signs. Pregnancy is weighted with so much metaphorical significance that it is even a metaphor for significance — pregnant with meaning. But I’m not pregnant with meaning; I’m just pregnant. And so I watch depictions of pregnancy and birth from my own removed position, curious what my experience signifies to other people, and what it is supposed to say about our culture and politics.The “House of the Dragon” C-section is neither historically accurate (the mother’s life was valued over that of the fetus in much medieval teaching, as Rebecca Onion detailed in Slate) nor particularly of the moment (post-Roe, many women are begging doctors for surgical interventions in their pregnancies). But it does access a persistent cliché: The C-section is a birth choice loaded with stigma, as Leslie Jamison noted in an essay on the procedure last year. It is coded as “both miraculous and suspect, simultaneously a deus ex machina and a tyrannical intervention” — the antithesis of a “natural birth.”This construction voids the mother’s role in childbirth, ceding it to a patriarchal medical establishment. The riddle from “Macbeth” — which posits that because Macduff was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb, he is not “of woman born” — persists. On-screen pregnancies still rarely end in C-sections. When they do, they are the stuff of horror. As the film critic Violet LeVoit has argued, the vaginal birth is framed as the climactic final struggle of the hero’s pregnancy journey. A C-section, then, renders our hero a victim — and a failure.None of this coincides with my own experience. I didn’t feel bad for having a C-section, or feel that I didn’t truly “give birth” to my son; I felt that my doctors and I did what was medically necessary to deliver him safely. And yet I feel nagged by this imposed narrative, and I am reminded of it whenever I see a birth scene shot from above, as the “House of the Dragon” one often is.Birth was, for me, an overwhelmingly sensory experience, not a visual one. During labor, I couldn’t see past my own abdomen. My strongest memory of the surgery, which the hospital shielded from my view with a raised blue tarp, is of the uncanny release of pressure in my anesthetized body when the baby was removed. As it was happening, a doctor asked if I wanted her to photograph the moment, and I impulsively agreed, thinking that I could always delete the image if I couldn’t stomach it. When I look at the photo now, I recognize my son’s features emerging from the bloodied edges of my body, but I don’t recognize the point of view. It is as if I am reliving another person’s memory, not my own.So no, the depiction of violence in birth does not bother me. But the bird’s-eye view of it does. The camera’s insistence on its lofty perspective, on looking down on the birthing woman’s full body from a spectator’s remove — that strikes me as the real violation. In those jarring shots, the depiction of male violence becomes indistinguishable from the male gaze.Maybe future “House of the Dragon” births will resonate with my own feelings about childbirth. And I’m sure other parents, bringing their own experiences to the episode, left it with different interpretations. But that is the trouble with trying to distill the entire “experience of women” into a scene — the idea is absurd, even in a fantasy world. More

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      Ayo Edebiri and Her Dog Gromit Go to the Bookstore

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      A morning out in Los Angeles with the surprise star of “The Bear” and her Chihuahua mix.LOS ANGELES — Ayo Edebiri has an arresting screen presence because she doesn’t look like she’s acting. In “The Bear,” the frenetic restaurant drama that has been one of the most talked-about shows of the summer, she is usually the calm at the center of the storm.In real life, she’s the same — unassuming, unshowy — and she speaks in an even tone. In other words, she’s not the kind of person who will break into a series of practiced anecdotes when a reporter shows up.On a hot day in Los Angeles, she was standing outside her apartment complex in the Los Feliz neighborhood, waiting for her puppy, Gromit, to do his business. She then picked up what he had left in the grass with a biodegradable green baggy. She looked around for a trash can but couldn’t find one, so she ended up tucking the baggy into her canvas tote.Gromit is a small dog with black and white hair. He is part Chihuahua, part minikin and part terrier, Ms. Edebiri said, adding that she knows the mix because she had his DNA tested.“He’s a melting pot,” she said. “I think he’s the American dream.”Ms. Edebiri, whose first name means joy in Yoruba, grew up in Boston, where she sang in a church choir and appeared in plays put on by the congregation. At 26, after a few years of writing for television and working as a stand-up comic and podcaster, she finds herself becoming known as an actress.“I love doing the show,” she said of “The Bear.” “Even when we were making it, we all felt like it was really special and an honor to do. But also because of that, I think there was this fear that people wouldn’t get it.”Ms. Edebiri plays the sous-chef Sydney Adamu on the critically acclaimed show “The Bear.” FXPeople got it. And they responded to her character, the even-keeled sous-chef Sydney Adamu, a kind of stand-in for every unflappable Gen Z-er who suspects that they might have a better idea of how to run a workplace than their chaotic boss.Gromit started moving toward some broken glass in the street. “That’s glass,” Ms. Edebiri said in her calm voice. “We are not doing that, dude.” She gave the leash the gentlest of tugs, and Gromit heeded her command.Before “The Bear,” Ms. Edebiri liked to make roast chicken for friends. While preparing for her role, she took courses at the Institute of Culinary Education in Pasadena and shadowed several chefs in Chicago and New York. And, yes, she learned how to prepare the cola braised ribs that become an obsession for her character.“I made it a lot,” she said. “There was a lot of practicing. It needs to look real. And if we’re practicing it, you might as well make it taste real.”Ms. Edebiri with Gromit near her home.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesIn addition to her work on “The Bear,” she played Hattie on the AppleTV+ show “Dickinson.” She also provides the voice for Missy Foreman-Greenwald, a biracial girl feeling her way through puberty, on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth.” So far in her acting career, the characters she plays seem to deal with anxiety by putting on a brave front, and they share a quiet confidence.“I don’t have to dig too deep to access that anxiety,” she said.For a time, she said, she was ready to accept that she didn’t have what it takes to be a performer.“I remember singing in the choir and doing plays, and my god-mom, she was like, ‘You know what? This may not be your gift,’” Ms. Edebiri recalled with a laugh. “She was like, ‘You’re good, but this might not be for you.’ I was like, ‘For sure.’”She changed her mind during middle school and high school, she said, when she started doing improv. After that, she went to New York University with the aim of becoming a teacher, only to realize it wasn’t for her. At the behest of some college friends, she started doing stand-up.“I was definitely nervous about the idea of performing alone,” she said. “I didn’t like being onstage and was very nervous at first.”Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAfter a few years spent working in writers’ rooms Ms. Edebiri became known for her work in front of the camera.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesAfter graduation, she moved to Los Angeles and wrote for the NBC sitcom “Sunnyside,” the FX series “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Dickinson.” Leaving the comfort of the writers’ room to go in front of the camera was a big adjustment, she said.“It’s weird,” she said. “I look like this, so I might as well look like this. I don’t want to be self-mythologizing, but I do feel like, growing up, on TV, there weren’t a lot of young Black women who I felt actually looked like me or people I knew, or were allowed to have imperfections.”“There’s a lot of Black women on TV in the media,” she continued, “and I feel like we look different, but we also still look like ourselves. I feel like that’s important and beautiful.”She went into Bru, an airy coffee shop, and ordered a lavender lemonade with sparkling water. When asked what she has learned from her various roles, she demurred. “This is like an actress question,” she said. “I’m not used to answering questions like an actor.”Gromit gets V.I.P. treatment at Skylight Books.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesSoon, Ms. Edebiri and Gromit walked into the Skylight Bookstore, an indie shop with a huge ficus tree surrounded by walnut colored shelves. She came across “The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories” by the late Finnish writer, illustrator and comic book author Tove Jansson. She tapped the cover with her index finger, ornamented with a rustic gold signet ring that reads “Libra.”“She rules,” Ms. Edebiri said, picking up the book. “She’s like this incredible lesbian that made the Moomin comics.”As she moved toward the checkout area, Ms. Edebiri was asked if she would like to go back in time and give her younger self some words of advice.“I don’t think I would say anything, because that messes with the rules of time travel,” she said. “Everything you learn is in the time and in the season that you’re supposed to.”Near the cash register, she spotted a cookbook, “Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora,” edited by Bryant Terry. She set Gromit on top of the checkout table — along with the Tove Jansson book — before she squatted down to open the cookbook.Ms. Edebiri and Gromit on a recent morning in Los Angeles.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesWhile she flipped through its pages, her dog was becoming a star of the store. He wagged his tail on the makeshift stage, ears pointed upward, as three store employees fussed over him, petting him and giving his ears a scratch. After Ms. Edebiri set the cookbook near the cash register, one of the workers started reading to Gromit from the Jansson book.“He is loving it,” Ms. Edebiri said with a laugh. More