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      ‘Ms. Marvel’ Introduces a New Hero (and a New Actress)

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      When Iman Vellani watches herself as the title character in “Ms. Marvel,” she cannot help but feel a sense of disbelief. Before this Disney+ series came her way, she was a high school senior with a seemingly impossible dream to be in a Marvel project — now she’s playing one of its powerful costumed champions, just like some of the actors she has spent her life idolizing.At times, Vellani said it was hard to connect her present-day self with the person she sees on the show. “I look so young,” she said recently. “I feel different now. I feel like I’ve matured 20 years.”To be clear, Vellani had turned 18 when she filmed “Ms. Marvel,” and she is 19 now.For all the experience Vellani has gained from the series (which debuts on Wednesday), she knows she will still be underestimated for her age and her status as a newcomer whose greatest concerns, not all that long ago, were writing term papers and applying to colleges.But none of that has discouraged Marvel from placing her at the center of its latest superhero adventure.In “Ms. Marvel,” Vellani (with Matt Lintz) plays a New Jersey high school student who gains mysterious powers.Marvel Studios/Disney+“Ms. Marvel,” based on the comic-book series, tells the story of Kamala Khan, a Jersey City high schooler who admires the Marvel superheroes from afar — until she is mysteriously granted powers that allow her to fight alongside them.When the character was given her own comics series in 2014, Khan was a crucial part of Marvel’s effort to diversify its publishing lineup — she was a rare protagonist who was Muslim and Pakistani American. Now “Ms. Marvel” offers a similar potential for wider representation in the ever-expanding behemoth that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.If that’s not enough of a burden, Vellani is making her screen acting debut in “Ms. Marvel,” and does not have the years of celebrity or lengthy résumés that her newfound peers already possessed when they were recruited into the Marvel pantheon.But what she does have is a fan’s unapologetic love for the franchise she has joined.“My entire world, everything I talked about was Marvel,” Vellani said. “And now people actually have to listen when I talk about it.”In mid-May, Vellani was speaking in a video interview from Los Angeles as part of her first-ever round of media promotion. Only two years prior, she was in high school in Markham, Ontario, where her family had emigrated from Karachi when she was about a year old.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’: With a touch of horror, the franchise’s newest film returns to the world of the mystic arts.‘Moon Knight’: In the Disney+ mini-series, Oscar Isaac plays a caped crusader who struggles with dissociative identity disorder.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: In the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series, the web slinger continues to radiate sweet, earnest decency.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.Though she was just 5 when the first MCU movie, “Iron Man,” was released, Vellani has grown up to be the type of zealous Marvel devotee who blithely confesses that her three favorite people in the world are Robert Downey Jr., Billy Joel, and the Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige.“My entire world, everything I talked about was Marvel,” Vellani said. “And now people actually have to listen when I talk about it.”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesWhen she auditioned for her high school’s drama department at age 13, Vellani said then that her dream role would be anything in the MCU. A few years later, she came to school for Halloween dressed in a Ms. Marvel costume she had made with her grandmother.“No one knew who I was,” Vellani said. “Everyone thought I was the Flash. So I had to buy a comic book and hold it with me.”At a certain point in her studies, the precocious teen had soured on becoming a professional actor. “When you’re in a room with 15-year-old kids who all think they’re Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s like the worst place to be in,” she said. “You immediately hate drama.”But her curiosity was reignited when she learned of an opportunity to try out for “Ms. Marvel.” “My aunt opened a group chat that she never opens and someone had forwarded this casting call through WhatsApp that she sent to me,” Vellani explained. “It was the most brown way this could have happened.”Compared to longstanding Marvel heroes like Captain America (who predates the United States’ entrance into World War II) or Spider-Man (introduced in 1962), Kamala Khan is a youngster.She was created less than a decade ago by a team that included Sana Amanat, who was a Marvel publishing editor before becoming a production and development executive at the studio and an executive producer on “Ms. Marvel.”The Kamala Khan character was given her own comic book series in 2014 as part of Marvel’s effort to diversify its lineup.Marvel EntertainmentIn conversations with her then-colleague Stephen Wacker, who also helped create the character, Amanat said she expressed a desire for a heroine who, like herself, was Muslim and a child of Pakistani immigrants. Amanat said she wanted her stories to reflect “some of the tribulations of being an awkward brown teenager — going to prom by myself, fasting and playing basketball or lacrosse, wearing tights underneath my shorts in 90-degree weather.”In her earliest comics, written by G. Willow Wilson and illustrated by artists that included Adrian Alphona and Jamie McKelvie, Khan deliberately sought to model herself on Captain Marvel, the superhero alter ego of Carol Danvers.That narrative choice, Amanat said, was meant to illustrate a real-life dynamic that she had experienced in her youth.“For a person of color,” she said, “you look outside and who are the people that you’re worshiping and want to be like? They look nothing like you. Captain Marvel is really emblematic of that — she’s blonde, blue-eyed and tall. And so the story spun from there.”Bisha K. Ali, who is the head writer and an executive producer of the “Ms. Marvel” television series, said she faced competing goals in her adaptation of the comics: to preserve the parts of Khan’s character and her world that readers already appreciate, and to help viewers establish connections to her for when she makes further MCU appearances — which she is already slated to do in “The Marvels,” a new movie planned for 2023 release.“The challenge was really, what do we pick?” said Ali, who was also a writer on Marvel’s “Loki” TV series. “What do we choose that will set this person up for being in the MCU — being part of this huge, global media phenomenon, but also feels intimate and personal and vital?”Ali said she approached “Ms. Marvel” as the story of a person discovering who she is: “All superheroes have powers,” she said. “But if someone in their heart knows themselves, there’s so much empowerment in that, especially for someone from a historically marginalized group.”From left, Mohan Kapur, Vellani, Saagar Shaikh and Nimra Bucha in “Ms. Marvel.” The writers sought to preserve key aspects of Khan’s world while connecting her to the MCU.Marvel Studios/Disney+As Vellani cleared the various stages of her casting process in early 2020 — providing a headshot; submitting a self-taped audition; traveling to Marvel’s offices in Los Angeles for an on-camera test — her future colleagues found themselves charmed by her enthusiasm and her guilelessness. (“Not only is Iman an incredible new talent,” her hero Feige wrote in an email, “but she’s also a huge fan of the MCU who knows and loves this character as much as anyone at Marvel Studios.”)Recalling a video conversation with Vellani, Amanat said, “When she was showing me her room, she had this Iron Man cologne. She’s like, ‘I don’t know, my dad got this for me — it doesn’t smell that bad.’” (In the “Ms. Marvel” series, Khan will also have Iron Man cologne in her bedroom.)When she and Vellani were introduced in Los Angeles, Ali said, “She spots me and she’s like, ‘You’re Bisha? I’m Iman. You’ve got to tell me everything about the TV and film industry.’ She just embodied Kamala-ness. She’s so curious and so active.”Vellani said she grew increasingly anxious about her prospects, particularly after her visit to Marvel. “I felt like I was on the inside, man,” she said. “I got this little taste of what life could be like. I was like, I can’t possibly go to university after this. I can’t think of anything else I would want to do.”Later that spring, after she’d already been accepted into her first-choice college, Vellani was driving around Markham with friends when she got a fateful call from Feige and asked to step out of the car.After learning she’d gotten the role, Vellani said, “I was trying not to have a reaction because my friends were watching. I got back into the car and my friends were like, ‘Did you win the lottery?’ I was like, ‘Basically.’ And then we got celebratory burritos.”Now Vellani must reckon not only with the benefits of playing a Marvel superhero but also the drawbacks — not least of which is a subset of audience members who regard any effort to depict diversity as an infringement on past tradition and register their outrage on social media.Asked if she had encountered this strain of criticism in her time at Marvel, Amanat gave a knowing chuckle. “Oh boy,” she said. “Don’t look for my name on YouTube — it’s not a good idea.””If I go to work every day thinking, ‘I’m the first Muslim superhero,’ I’m never going to get anything done,” Vellani said.Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesSuch backlash “is just the nature of the business,” Amanat said. She added, “I don’t understand why the toy box is so small. We’re not taking anything away from Captain America — we’re over here doing our own thing. It makes me a little sad and a little frustrated.”Even so, Amanat said that projects like “Ms. Marvel” were important to an audience that is not accustomed to seeing themselves in entertainment franchises.“I think of my nieces and my goddaughters and my friends’ kids,” she said. “I think about them growing up and having Iman Vellani, out in the world, wearing a superhero outfit, and it’s really amazing to me. They’ve never had this.”Vellani was more circumspect in how she talked about this criticism of the Ms. Marvel character.“I’m not on social media, so I haven’t encountered anything directly,” she said. “You can’t make everyone happy, and that’s not our goal, anyway. That’s just setting yourself up to fail.”She added, “If I go to work every day thinking, ‘I’m the first Muslim superhero,’ I’m never going to get anything done.”The high-class problems Vellani would rather contend with include deciding whether to watch new MCU movies in her hometown theater with her friends, or in exclusive screenings for the Marvel employees who worked on them.When she “finessed” her way into a recent showing of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” that had been arranged for Marvel staff, Vellani said she enjoyed aspects of it, like meeting Xochitl Gomez, who plays the young hero America Chavez.But there were downsides to watching with a fervent Marvel squad, too.“I realized I like watching these movies a lot more with a normal group of nerds,” Vellani said. “Because these guys clap for everything, man. People will show up, who we know are in the movie, and they’ll clap.”“I get it — they’re clapping for their crew,” she added. “But still, I need to focus when I’m watching.” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: The Tony Awards and ‘P-Valley’

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      The 75th Tony Awards air on CBS. And Katori Hall’s “P-Valley” is back on Starz.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, June 6 – 12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayIRMA VEP 9 p.m. on HBO. With a wink, Olivier Assayas revisits his 1996 film of the same name in this mini-series, which itself follows a disastrous attempt to remake “Les Vampires,” the silent serial film from the 1910s. The show stars Alicia Vikander as an American movie star who signs on to play Irma Vep, the heroine in the old story. The role seeps into her own life.TuesdayPENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1981) 10 p.m. on TCM. Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken and Jessica Harper star in this offbeat musical, which was adapted from a BBC series. Martin plays a sheet-music salesman in Depression-era Chicago whose knotty romances are heightened by lip-synced renditions of popular songs from the 1920s and ’30s. A “neo-Brechtian comedy-melodrama with music,” is the label that the critic Vincent Canby used in his 1981 review for The New York Times, adding that he watched the movie “with what might be best described as baffled interest.”WednesdayChris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in “Jurassic World.”Chuck Zlotnick/Universal PicturesJURASSIC WORLD (2015) 5:30 p.m. on FX. How many $100 bills do you have to stack to reach the average height of a T. rex? You might ask the producers of the “Jurassic World” trilogy: This 2015 entry and its first sequel, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” (2018) are among the highest-grossing movies of all time. The final entry in the trilogy, “Jurassic World: Dominion,” is set to hit theaters this weekend. Here’s a chance to revisit the first entry — about the meltdown of a theme park populated by cloned dinosaurs, set more than two decades after the original “Jurassic Park” — alongside the sequel “Fallen Kingdom,” which airs immediately afterward, at 8 p.m. on FX.ThursdayLAMB (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime. A ewe gives birth to an unusual creature on a foggy, forlorn, somberly photogenic Icelandic sheep farm in this debut feature from Valdimar Johannsson. The husband and wife who run the farm, Maria and Ingvar (Noomi Rapace and Hilmir Snaer Gudnason), raise the oddball offspring as their own. As it grows, things become tenser — and weirder. The result, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times, is a film that “plays like a folk tale and thrums like a horror movie.” It contains “an Oscar-worthy cast of farm animals,” Catsoulis added.FridayJUDY GARLAND MOVIES all day on TCM. Friday would have been Judy Garland’s 100th birthday. To celebrate, TCM has an entire day of a Garland lined up. Highlights include: ZIEGFELD GIRL (1941), airing at 8 a.m., which also stars James Stewart and Hedy LaMarr; the Busby Berkeley-directed musical FOR ME AND MY GAL (1942), in which Garland stars opposite Gene Kelly, in his first feature, airing at 2 p.m.; and, naturally, THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), at 8 p.m., followed at 10 p.m. by THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ: 50 YEARS OF MAGIC (1990), a documentary about the making of that movie.SaturdayOscar Isaac in “The Card Counter.”Focus FeaturesTHE CARD COUNTER (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader took another dive into the mind of a loner in this drama, which centers on an American military veteran and professional card player named William Tell, played by Oscar Isaac. (For more of Schrader’s loners, see his previous movie, “First Reformed,” and his screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”) Tell is haunted by memories of an old, abusive superior, Maj. John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). His life changes when he begins a partnership with a gambling manager (Tiffany Haddish) and meets the teenage son (Tye Sheridan) of one of his former military compatriots. “It’s a haunting, moving story of spirit and flesh, sin and redemption, love and death,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. Schrader, she said, “likes playing with film form but he isn’t interested in conventional heroes and beats, and even when he hits familiar notes he does so with his own destabilizing rhythm and pressure.”SundayTHE 75TH ANNUAL TONY AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. This year’s Tony Awards will be the first to recognize shows that opened after the theater closures during the time of pandemic lockdowns. Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer-winning meta-musical, “A Strange Loop,” will go into the night with the most nominations (it received 11), though it has formidable competition in the best new musical race: The other shows nominated in that category are “Paradise Square,” “Six,” “MJ the Musical,” “Girl From the North Country” and “Mr. Saturday Night.” The nominees in the best new play category are “Clyde’s,” “Hangmen,” “The Lehman Trilogy,” “The Minutes” and “Skeleton Crew.” The acting categories include a range of well-known performers, including Sam Rockwell, Mary-Louise Parker, Billy Crystal, Hugh Jackman, Uzo Aduba, Rachel Dratch, Phylicia Rashad, Ruth Negga and Patti LuPone.Nicco Annan and Brandee Evans in “P-Valley.”StarzP-VALLEY 10:06 p.m. on Starz. The Pulitzer-winning playwright Katori Hall (“Hot Wing King,” “The Mountaintop”) is behind this series, a drama set at a strip club in a fictional Mississippi town. In the new, second season, which began last week, the personal and professional pressures felt by the show’s characters — including Uncle Clifford (Nicco Annan), who owns the club, and Mercedes (Brandee Evans), a decorated dancer there — are heightened by the pandemic. Hall discussed the intention of the show in a recent interview with The Times: “I wanted to create an image of women who could hold their own weight, literally and figuratively, but in the next second, could burst into tears because the power dynamic in their life shifted for whatever reason,” she said. “I wanted to show Black women in their full humanity.” More

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      Woman Testifies That Bill Cosby Kissed Her When She Was 14

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      She testified at a civil trial in Los Angeles brought by another woman accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault. A spokesman for Mr. Cosby denied all the accusations against him.Kimberly Burr testified Friday that she was 14 years old when Bill Cosby invited her into his trailer on a film set in Los Angeles in 1975 and started kissing her.Ms. Burr was testifying in the civil trial in Los Angeles where Mr. Cosby has been sued by another woman, Judy Huth, who has accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her that same year, when she was also a teenager.Ms. Burr, who is now 61, said that she had met Mr. Cosby at a tennis tournament in Palm Desert that year, where he had invited her to the set of the film “Let’s Do It Again” in Los Angeles with the promise of being an extra. While her mother and other members of her family waited outside, she said, he led her into his trailer to help him fix his bow tie, where he grabbed both her arms and started kissing her.“I was stuck,” Ms. Burr told the court. “I was struggling, trying to get away.”When he let go, she said, she “walked right out of the trailer down the steps” and didn’t tell her family because she didn’t want to ruin the day for them.During cross-examination, Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, challenged her account, asking how, after such a traumatic experience, she could have kept photographs in the family home of the meeting showing Ms. Burr and her brother with Mr. Cosby. “Did it bother you that they were there?” she said.A spokesman for Mr. Cosby, Andrew Wyatt, dismissed the testimony. “These are just allegations made up to support Judy Huth, whose claims are not factual at all,” he said in an interview.Ms. Huth’s case is the first civil suit accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. In her lawsuit, Ms. Huth says that she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 1975, when she was 16, after she and a friend met him in a park where he was filming “Let’s Do It Again,” the same movie he was working on when he met Ms. Burr.The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.Days after their meeting, Mr. Cosby invited Ms. Huth and her friend to his tennis club, Ms. Huth’s lawyers have said, where Ms. Huth played a game where she had to drink alcohol every time he won at billiards, and then they both followed him in their car to the Playboy Mansion. Once there, Ms. Huth has said, Mr. Cosby forced her to perform a sex act on him in a bedroom.Mr. Cosby has denied he sexually assaulted Ms. Huth, or any of the other women who have come forward in recent years to accuse him of sexual misconduct.More than 50 women have accused Mr. Cosby of sexually abusing them. This was the first time Ms. Burr has spoken publicly.As Ms. Huth’s lawyers have sought to demonstrate a pattern of behavior and abuse by Mr. Cosby, they called another witness, Margie Shapiro, 65, who had already come forward with accusations in 2015.Ms. Shapiro testified that she was 19 in 1975 when Mr. Cosby met her at the doughnut shop where she was working and invited her to the set of another movie he was filming in Los Angeles. Later that day, they went to the Playboy Mansion, where, she said, he drugged and assaulted her. She said that they had played pinball together in the game room at the mansion, and that he had offered her a pill after she lost. She said she remembered waking up: “My next memory was foggy, but I was in a bed naked and Bill Cosby was naked, inside me,” she said.She said she told a friend what had happened but never went to the police. “I felt I went there consensually, I took a pill and he’s him and I am me,” she said. “I felt stupid because I felt at the time I put myself in that situation.”Mr. Cosby’s spokesman, Mr. Wyatt, issued a statement Friday afternoon which said that the accusers were “discrediting themselves” and questioned their accounts. “Since we stand on the foundation of truth and facts,” he said in the statement, “we believe that Mr. Cosby will be vindicated of ALL allegations in order to move forward with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”In challenging Ms. Shapiro’s account in court, Mr. Cosby’s legal team questioned whether she was working at the doughnut shop on the morning she said she met Mr. Cosby, and whether she went to the Playboy Mansion. They acknowledged that Ms. Shapiro went to Mr. Cosby’s house, but they insisted that the relationship was consensual. Ms. Shapiro said she stood by her account.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have noted in court proceedings that Ms. Huth’s recollection of when her encounter took place has changed: While she initially said it happened in 1974, when she was 15, she more recently concluded it was in 1975, when she was 16. The law in California classified a 16-year-old as a minor. In disputing Ms. Huth’s account, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have suggested they met years after the time she said they did, when she was no longer a minor.In their opening remarks, his lawyers sought to discredit Ms. Huth’s account by pointing out that she and the friend who accompanied her to the Playboy Mansion stayed for hours after the alleged encounter with Mr. Cosby, swimming in the outdoor pool and watching a movie.The friend, Donna Samuelson, has testified that Ms. Huth was distraught and wanted to leave but Ms. Samuelson persuaded her to stay.Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, which she filed in 2014, had largely been put on hold while prosecutors in Pennsylvania pursued Mr. Cosby criminally on charges that he sexually assaulted Andrea Constand.Mr. Cosby’s 2018 conviction in that case was overturned last year by an appellate court, which ruled that a non-prosecution agreement he made with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case. Mr. Cosby walked free after serving nearly three years of a three- to 10-year sentence.Mr. Cosby, 84, is not scheduled to testify and has not attended the opening days of testimony, but his deposition testimony is expected to be played in court.Ms. Huth, 64, who has been in attendance, is intending to give her account to the jury. More

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      Antony Starr Contends With Accountability, Onscreen and Off

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      Starr, who plays the cruel superhero Homelander on the Amazon Prime Video series “The Boys,” returns to TV after his conviction in an assault in Spain earlier this year.One lesson taught repeatedly by “The Boys,” the superhero series on Amazon Prime Video, is the danger of celebrity: Do not be too worshipful of any public figures, it warns, because you never really know what they’re like behind the scenes.The show’s most vivid embodiment of this message is the character of Homelander, a seemingly virtuous crime fighter played by Antony Starr. In the eyes of the wider world, Homelander can do no wrong; he is stalwart and honorable, with blond hair, a gleaming smile and a striped, star-spangled cape.But as viewers of “The Boys” know well, this is all a facade. Beneath these superficialities, Homelander is self-centered, manipulative and cruel.“The Boys,” which returns Friday for its third season, takes place in a morally gray world where good deeds are not always rewarded and transgressions are not always punished. Its other characters can be measured against Homelander and by the choices they will or won’t make in the service of stopping him, but he himself is the one person who cannot be redeemed — the unapologetic heel of the show.Actors are not the roles they play, but Starr, 46, a veteran film and TV star from New Zealand who has gained new visibility from “The Boys,” knows exactly what he signed on for.As he said in an interview recently, “The standard superhero movies that are out there, they’re bound to their moral compass. Even if Superman goes bad, you know he’s coming back to true north because that’s the model.”But in “The Boys,” if Homelander were to find a glimmer of goodness in himself, Starr said, “you’re going to have to turn him back into a narcissistic psychopath at some point.”It is not a role every performer might want for a long-term assignment, but Starr said he appreciated how it offered moments where all pretenses are dropped and the truth of the character is revealed.Citing a favorite expression from an old acting teacher, Starr explained, “He said you’re never more yourself than when you eat alone, and I love that this show gives us those moments of eating alone, where we really get to see what’s going on.”Starr has faced a different sort of reckoning in recent months. In early March, he was arrested after he assaulted another man in Alicante, Spain, where Starr was filming a movie. The actor was drinking in a pub late one night when, after a brief confrontation, he twice punched the man, 21-year-old Bathuel Araujo, and hit him with a glass, the Spanish newspaper Información reported.Starr pleaded guilty in a local court. He was given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay a fine of about $5,500.In our interview nearly three months later, in late May, Starr did not dismiss questions about the assault, but he tended to speak about it in general terms.“You mess up,” he said. “You own it. You learn from it. You move forward.”Starr spoke with me in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. Freed from his Homelander guise, the actor had dark brown hair and a shaggy beard and wore a pair of rectangular, Clark Kent-like eyeglasses.And he had little of his alter ego’s zealotry as he spoke about the country where he now resides. “I love America,” Starr said. “America’s been very good to me, but the old girl is definitely in need of some therapy at the moment.”Working in the film and TV industry of his native New Zealand, Starr broke through with a series of roles, most notably on the series “Outrageous Fortune,” a comic crime drama that cast him as identical twin brothers with diametrically different personalities.In America, he gained notice for his lead performance in “Banshee,” an action series about an ex-convict masquerading as the sheriff of a fictional Pennsylvania town, which ran on Cinemax from 2013 to 2016.When Starr was first approached about portraying Homelander on “The Boys,” which is adapted from a comic-book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, he was busy with other work and initially dismissive of a request to film himself for an audition.In the earliest script pages he was given, Starr said, “There wasn’t a hell of a lot for me to go on, other than ‘Bad Superman.’ So I did the audition almost out of anger. Threw it down, sent it in and went, there’s your audition.”But as Starr got further into the tryout process and learned more about the series, he became intrigued with the opportunistic Homelander, who has no compunction about using his abilities for his own gain and delights in punishing anyone who might try to expose him for who he actually is. He saw an opportunity to connect with audiences by playing the character’s deficiencies to their fullest degree.“I want people to revel in seeing him in pain,” he said. “I want people to really enjoy watching him do horrible things with a little bit of a glint in his eye.”Erin Moriarty, a “Boys” co-star who plays a more trustworthy and righteous hero named Starlight, said her scenes with Starr can sometimes be “gut-wrenching” to film, because of the raw emotion involved and also “the possibility that he could just laser her right there and kill her.”“You have to be able to shake it off at the end of the day,” Moriarty said. “It might take a second, but it definitely helps that Antony, in addition to being professionally present as a human being, is so unlike Homelander and so kind and so funny.”And as Starr anticipated, his work on “The Boys” has led to other prominent projects, including his role in the upcoming action film, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, that he was working on in Spain earlier this year.Información reported that Starr and Araujo had encountered each other at the pub. Araujo told Información that a friend with him had asked a friend of Starr’s to calm down the actor who appeared drunk. Araujo said Starr began to curse and shove him, and that when he pushed back, Starr punched him and hit him with a glass. After Starr was ejected from the pub, the two men encountered each other outside, Araujo said, and they scuffled further.In our interview, Starr did not offer an account of what happened on the night of the assault. “There’s not much point in me re-litigating the facts,” he said. “They’re out there. They’ve been said. I’ve got nothing to add to that.”He added that he is a someone who “believes in accountability and taking responsibility.”“I got myself into a situation that was negative and I reacted poorly, and the way forward from that was very clear,” Starr said. “It was quite simply to take ownership of it, which I do, and then really learn from it and move forward.”Had he considered quitting drinking after this incident?“I wish it was that simple,” he replied. “I don’t know anyone that hasn’t, on a personal level, got things that they want to work on.”Contacted on social media, Araujo reaffirmed his previous descriptions of his confrontation with Starr. He said that he did not bear the actor the actor any ill will.“I feel that all humans have the right to make mistakes and he was no exception,” Araujo wrote. “He has lived the consequences of his actions and I hope he has learned from it. I wish him good things and I hope he doesn’t go through the same thing again.”Moriarty said she felt no hesitation about continuing to work with Starr in the future.“There’s no world in which I would feel uncomfortable or unsafe,” she said. “I think he’s a wonderful dude that got caught up in a moment and is implementing the lessons appropriately. It’s not impacting my perception of him at all, as an actor and as a human.”Since Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock in late March, Hollywood has had to confront the question of what sort of consequences are appropriate when celebrities engage in violence, however brief. For Starr, the incident in Spain does not appear to have affected his status on “The Boys.” In recent weeks, Starr he has continued to appear in magazine features promoting the series and he attended a premiere event for it with his co-stars in Paris.Eric Kripke, who developed “The Boys” for television and is its showrunner, declined to comment for this article.Starr, however, seemed uncomfortable examining himself through a broader cultural lens. “I’ve really just kept this issue to a personal level, because it is a personal issue — a personal issue that I’ve taken responsibility for,” he said.He spoke with more enthusiasm about “The Boys” and its seemingly inexhaustible versatility at the present moment.On the one hand, he said the show can be viewed as a caustic parody of countless other films and TV shows adapted from comic books, one that uses now-familiar elements of the genre to comment on the frustrations and futility of 21st-century society.Or, Starr said, it can simply be watched as a superhero entertainment itself, where good guys and bad guys put on colorful costumes and engage in combat until only one side is left standing.“You could take it at face value,” he said. “Let it wash over you and go, aha — there’s blood and gore and fun stuff, and enough drama to make it interesting.”“I think you can go as deep as you want,” he said. More

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      ‘This is Going to Hurt’ Finds Dark Humor on the Maternity Ward

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      “This Is Going to Hurt,” a dramedy starring Ben Whishaw, kindled debate in Britain about hospital care for pregnant women and the pressures on doctors.LONDON — In December 2010, Adam Kay was working on a British maternity ward helping a more junior doctor to perform a cesarean section. Kay had successfully delivered well over 1,200 babies, but this operation was a disaster.The mother had an undiagnosed condition affecting the placenta, and she should not have been allowed to go into labor. The doctors only just managed to save her life — she lost 12 liters of blood — but they couldn’t save the baby.“You want healthy mum plus healthy baby, and it was the first time I’d had neither of those things and was the most senior person in the room,” Kay said in a recent interview. He said that he had felt traumatized but that the reaction from the hospital “was like I’d sprained my ankle or something.”Adam Kay, who created the show and wrote the book it is based on, said its central character was supposed to be reprehensible.Charlie CliftAfter that incident, Kay left medicine. A scene revisiting the operation does not appear in “This Is Going to Hurt,” a medical drama written by Kay and starring Ben Whishaw that premieres on AMC+ and Sundance Now on Thursday after being a hit in Britain. But plenty of other episodes from his six years of working in hospitals do, in fictionalized form.Given that the show tries to show the reality of life on a maternity ward, some moments are harrowing. But many are also funny, including a moment when Whishaw’s character, an overstressed and underpaid doctor called Adam, has to retrieve, from inside a woman, a toy egg containing an engagement ring — the woman had inserted it as a surprise for her boyfriend.The show was commissioned shortly after Kay published a warts-and-all collection of diaries (called “This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor”) documenting his life in British hospitals. That collection, released in 2017, sold more than 2.5 million copies and was translated into 37 languages.Kay described the book as a “confidence trick,” where silly anecdotes were used to sell a book that contained serious comments about health care and about how politicians treat doctors and nurses (it was published the year after doctors in England went on strike over working conditions). The book’s success led to Kay’s meeting Matt Hancock, the British health minister at the time, to push for more funding for doctors in need, and to his writing columns in newspapers.Kay said that the current health minister, Sajid Javid, had also sent a note, saying that his wife liked the book. Kay’s reaction, he said, was to wonder about the minister, “Have you read it? It’s you who needs to read it.”Whishaw and Michele Austin, who plays a midwife in the show. Anika Molnar/AMCDespite his prominence, when “This Is Going to Hurt” appeared on the BBC in February, Kay didn’t get a universally positive reaction. Milli Hill, founder of the Positive Birth Movement, which tries to combat negative ideas around giving birth; and some users of Mumsnet, an influential parenting website, labeled both Kay and Whishaw’s acerbic character misogynist for mocking women in his care. There was also criticism over the absence of pregnant people’s voices in the show, while Hill said that the birthing scenes would be unpleasant to watch for anyone expecting a baby or who had gone through a traumatic birth.Sitting in a London hotel bar recently, Kay, 41, seemed confused by those responses. “I heard criticism that the show should be about mums,” he said. “But that’s someone else’s program. I’m a bloke who used to be a doctor.”Whishaw’s character was also meant to be reprehensible, Kay added — a doctor so under pressure that his life falls apart, affecting others around him. Once a few episodes had aired, Kay said, the public debate changed and he started getting emails from doctors thanking him for raising awareness of the mental health struggles that medics can face.The show wasn’t really about the ward at all, Kay said, but about the pressures doctors are under at work, including unsustainable hours, bullying bosses and patients, low pay and often disintegrating home lives — with little way out. Whishaw’s character can be seen as passing his troubling behaviors onto a colleague, Shruti (Ambika Mod), a younger doctor meant to be under his wing.Those mental strains are still “a taboo topic” in many hospitals, Kay said. “Doctors are not meant to get ill, and they’re specifically not meant to get mentally ill,” he noted, adding that a doctor dies by suicide every three weeks in Britain.The pressure on doctors in the country is only getting worse, he added. There is a severe shortage of workers in the N.H.S. — the service has around 100,000 vacancies — and staff were already suffering burnout long before the pandemic. “When I left, I was a total outlier, as no one ever stopped being a doctor,” Kay said. “Now everyone’s got one eye on the exit sign as the workload feels absolutely unsustainable.”Ambika Mod plays Shruti, a younger doctor on the maternity ward. Mod said that she received a “crash course” in obstetrics and gynecology before filming.Anika Molnar/AMCDespite the message at its heart, Kay and the show’s two lead actors — Whishaw and Mod — said in interviews that the series was a joy to make. Whishaw said in an email that when he got the script it immediately “rang out with a truth.” The dark comedy “was exactly the type of humor people use when faced with awful things,” he added, “and I liked the awkward, flawed, troubled person at the center of it.”Mod, in her first major role, said that the two actors received a “crash course” in obstetrics and gynecology before filming, including learning how to deliver babies with forceps and how to perform cesarean sections. On set, real doctors, scrub nurses and anesthetists appeared as extras, she added, while prosthetics helped give the show its realism.She said that she was surprised by viewers who called the show’s operations gory and intense in posts on social media. “I didn’t think about that at all when we were filming as we would just be surrounded by pools of blood and amniotic fluid talking about what we were going to have for lunch,” she said.Kay said that, despite the show’s focus being on Britain’s health service, he hoped it would touch a nerve in the United States, too. He imagines that “a labor ward’s a labor ward, wherever it is,” he said. After his book came out in 2017, he got messages from doctors in countries including Chad, Belarus and Venezuela, he added, saying that the themes also rang true for practitioners in those countries.“This Is Going to Hurt” was written as a one-off series, and Kay said that he had no plans to do a follow-up. He knew he would hit his “shelf life as a writer” at some point, he said, and when that happened, he expected to return to medicine, to teach or to try and change health policy.“I’ve got a lot of guilt about leaving,” Kay said. “Obviously, I believe the arts have enormous value, but you’d have to have quite some ego as a writer to think it was anything other than 10 steps away from saving someone’s life in an operation.” More

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      Jana Schmieding Navigates Single Life With Indica and Stevie Nicks

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      The “Rutherford Falls” co-star talks about beading for joy, writing to Fleetwood Mac and (mostly) avoiding ghosts.Early in her career, Jana Schmieding didn’t feel like she could mine Native culture in her comedy. If for no other reason, the material would have had a hard time landing. To get the joke, you have to know what’s going on.“For comedy to exist you need to have a sort of a prior understanding,” she said. “You need to have a contextual understanding of the different power dynamics and the relationality. Because of Native erasure, it’s really hard to give audiences those kinds of deep cuts without first laying the groundwork.”Schmieding is part of two shows that are providing that context. In FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” she plays an Indian Health Service receptionist, a role that she says is being expanded in the second season. She’s also a writer and co-star on Peacock’s “Rutherford Falls,” a show about a town, a neighboring tribe and a reckoning of their shared history that’s inspired by a statue of “Big Larry,” the town’s founder.On “Rutherford Falls,” Schmieding plays Reagan Wells, a woman who runs the cultural center at a Native casino. Her close friend, Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms), runs a heritage museum out of his home and acts as a kind of self-appointed town mascot. By the start of the new season — which premieres June 16 — some of the land in Rutherford Falls has been signed over to the Minishonka Nation in a settlement, including Nathan’s museum. The museum has been converted into the Minishonka Cultural Center, run by Reagan.“We’re providing the literacy needed in order to tell these jokes,” Schmieding said. “I think you’re going to see in season two of ‘Rutherford Falls’ a lot more in-community hijinks and acknowledging more relevant issues that Native people face in-community.”In a recent Zoom interview from her apartment in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles, Schmieding discussed the Native art, expensive butter and aunties — on records, onscreen and in her family — that help her navigate through life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Beaded Jewelry I come from a long line of beaders and bead artists. I got into making beaded jewelry through my grandmother when I was a young girl and have been beading ever since. I bead for joy, I bead for focus, I bead for relaxation. I bead in the writer’s room and on set. It’s a nice, focused activity that’s tactile and artistic and that helps keep me cool.2. “Russian Doll” Before I canceled my Netflix account recently, I binged the second season of “Russian Doll.” We get to see a woman solve issues for herself and in her personal life by traveling through time. It’s fantastical and nuts. Also, she’s a single New Yorker. That’s the life that I lived for 11 years, and it was badass. To see women portrayed outside of the male gaze, outside of heterosexuality and even outside of partnership and the need for that, I’m obsessed. I gobble that up.3. Aunties Aunties play a sacred and important role in Native culture. I have a single, cool aunt who we call Fifi, who almost felt like more of my mother at times when I was growing up. Aunts have this amazing way of holding space without judgment for children where parents have a hard time being objective. Where my parents didn’t want me to party, my aunt wanted to make sure that I was doing it safely. There are things aunties can do that parents feel restricted by, and we need that in our culture. I still talk to my aunt all the time.4. Fleetwood Mac I’ve been listening to the band’s albums in their entirety, trying to pick up the flow of each one, as I’ve been writing a screenplay that honors aunties. Fleetwood Mac gives off auntie vibes. People think of Stevie Nicks as kind of this witchy lady — this ethereal, magical, romantic woman. I also see her as this carefree, wild, adult single woman who has paved her own path, been sexually free and holds this place in our culture of the hot auntie.5. Laurie Metcalf Aunt Jackie on “Roseanne” is the cool aunt OG: She’s single, she’s flighty, she’s sexy, she’s funny — she’s the best. I don’t think I’ve seen a bad Laurie Metcalf character. Her work never fails. I just saw her as the tour manager in the new season of “Hacks,” and I haven’t stopped thinking about her character. Give me Laurie Metcalf’s career. I would die.6. Fancy Butter I’m obsessed. I’ve been putting a lot of butter into my eggs lately. When I go to the grocery store, I just look for butter labels that are in French. I’m going straight for the brick that is just, like, one cup of butter and costs $8 or $9. It’s my splurge.7. Jamie Okuma She is a Native and Japanese-American bead artist and fashion designer. She’s an incredible artist. Michael Greyeyes and I have both worn some Jamie Okuma pieces on “Rutherford Falls.”8. “Are Prisons Obsolete?” I’ve read a lot of Angela Davis in my life. This book of hers is sort of an original text that I think is very helpful in understanding the need to re-evaluate and disrupt the criminal justice system right now. Native men and Native women have some of the highest rates of incarceration in our country. It’s a huge issue that we have faced since colonization.9. “Radio Rental” I like spooky podcasts, and “Radio Rental” is a great one. It’s people telling their own experiences with spooky ghosts. Something about being frightened and afraid of the unknown is very appealing to me. I’ve had spooky run-ins of my own, but I try to avoid them.10. Indica I’ve been having difficulty sleeping, so I’ve been putting a few drops of an indica tincture under my tongue before bed. My parents actually made a tincture that I used for a while. Last night I tried a gummy that had both indica and sativa and it was not doing the trick. If a little sativa gets in there, my brain is just, like: Oh, what do we wanna think about right now? I need something to just knock me out cold. More

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      In Opening Statements, Cosby Is Accused of Assaulting Judy Huth as Teenager

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      The trial stemming from Ms. Huth’s lawsuit, which says Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted her when she was a minor, began in Los Angeles as her lawyers described what she says occurred in the Playboy Mansion.Bill Cosby had taken Judy Huth and her friend to the game room of the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles in 1975 when she asked to use the bathroom in an adjoining bedroom, Ms. Huth’s lawyers said in court on Wednesday.When she came out of the bathroom, Mr. Cosby was sitting on the bed. “He taps on the bed,” said Nathan Goldberg, a lawyer for Ms. Huth who has said she was 16 at the time, as if to say, “‘Come here.’”“When she did timidly, that’s when he pounced,” Mr. Goldberg said during opening statements in the trial of a civil case brought by Ms. Huth against Mr. Cosby for sexual assault.In their opening remarks, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers disputed Ms. Huth’s account, suggesting she had been an older, and willing, visitor to the Playboy Mansion who, by her own account, did not flee after an encounter with Mr. Cosby but rather stayed on for hours, swimming in the pool and watching a movie.“Boy, did Judy and Donna enjoy themselves,” a lawyer for Mr. Cosby, Jennifer Bonjean, said, referring to Ms. Huth and her friend.The trial, expected to last seven to 10 days, is being held at the Santa Monica branch of Los Angeles Superior Court.In their filings, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have denied the allegations, describing them as a fabrication. “We believe that Mr. Cosby will fully be exonerated once the jurors hear the evidence as well as examine the many inconsistent accounts given by Ms. Huth,” Mr. Cosby’s spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, said in a statement.The Sexual Assault Cases Against Bill CosbyAfter Bill Cosby’s 2018 criminal conviction for sexual assault was overturned, the first civil case accusing him of sexual misconduct has now reached trial.The Civil Trial: Judy Huth has accused Mr. Cosby of assaulting her as a teenager. She sued in 2014, but the case had been on hold while he was criminally prosecuted.Criminal Conviction: In 2018, a jury found the disgraced entertainer guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near 14 years earlier,His Release From Prison: After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the conviction, Mr. Cosby was released from prison on June 30, 2021.The Ruling: The conviction was overturned on the grounds that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on a promise not to charge him.In detailing Ms. Huth’s account, Mr. Goldberg said Mr. Cosby tried to kiss her and put his hands down her pants. When she told him she was on her period, he dropped his pants, and “took her hand with his” and forced her to perform a sex act, he said.Mr. Goldberg spoke for a little more than an hour, recounting how Ms. Huth and her friend were playing Frisbee when they spotted Mr. Cosby filming a movie in a park in San Marino, Calif.He invited them onto the set and days later brought them to his tennis club, where, Mr. Goldberg continued, Mr. Cosby encouraged them to take a drink every time they lost at pool. Afterward, Mr. Goldberg said, Mr. Cosby had them follow him in a car to the Playboy Mansion, where the encounter in the game room occurred.Mr. Goldberg said Ms. Huth wanted to leave at that point, but her friend, Donna Samuelson, persuaded her to stay. Ms. Samuelson, who testified on Wednesday, said that Mr. Cosby had Ms. Huth “locked in the room,” and said Ms. Huth was crying when they went outside.“She grabbed her purse and said we are getting out of here,” Ms. Samuelson told the court. “She told me Bill Cosby tried to have sex with her.”She said she and Ms. Huth talked for about half an hour in her car, but she persuaded her friend to stay because she thought spending an evening at the mansion would calm her down.“She told me not to tell anyone,” said Ms. Samuelson. “It was embarrassing and humiliating to her.”They swam and ordered drinks, mingled with famous actors and, later, watched a movie. Only years later, in 2014, when Ms. Huth’s son turned 15 and other women started to come forward with similar accounts about Mr. Cosby, did the emotional damage of what had happened to Ms. Huth come to the fore, her lawyer said.“It was like a cork popped out of the bottle and all of her buried feelings rushed to the surface,” Mr. Goldberg said.Ms. Huth has produced photographs of the visit taken by Ms. Samuelson at the mansion showing Ms. Huth with Mr. Cosby. Ms. Bonjean accused Ms. Huth and her friend of “saving mementos of their rape,” raising questions about why a sexual assault victim would keep such tokens of the visit. The photographs were part of “a plan to make a buck,” said Ms. Bonjean, who spoke for about an hour. “Judy Huth has been trying to cash in on these photos for decades.”Mr. Cosby’s legal team has also introduced records from the Playboy Mansion that showed Mr. Cosby visiting with two unnamed guests, and said the records showed that the two guests had stayed at the mansion for about 12 hours. Ms. Huth’s suit, first filed in 2014, had been largely put on hold while Mr. Cosby was being criminally prosecuted in another case in Pennsylvania where he was accused of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand. The 2018 criminal conviction in the Constand case was overturned last year by an appellate court on “due process” grounds, and he was freed from prison.Ms. Huth’s case is now being followed by some of the many other women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexual misconduct, in part because it is the first civil case accusing Mr. Cosby of sexual assault to reach trial. Mr. Cosby has denied all allegations of sexual assault, and said any encounters were consensual.Bill Cosby has denied sexually assaulting Ms. Huth and has challenged the timeline she has put forth of when they met. Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Cosby has acknowledged meeting with Ms. Huth at the Playboy Mansion but denied her allegation of sexual battery and has challenged her contention that she was a minor at the time.Ms. Huth’s legal team said it intends to introduce two other women to testify about similar encounters with Mr. Cosby.One of the women will testify, Mr. Goldberg said, that Mr. Cosby, whom she met at a doughnut store where she worked, was also taken to the Playboy Mansion by Mr. Cosby. In the game room, Mr. Cosby gave her a pill, the lawyer said, and he assaulted her as she lost consciousness.“In each instance, he meets them in circumstances that don’t appear threatening,” Mr. Goldberg said. “He takes them places where they seem comfortable. They don’t feel threatened in this mansion, the movie set. He does not care about their family or friends nearby. He has no fear.”Mr. Cosby, 84, has invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and will not testify or attend the trial, his spokesman has said. Ms. Huth, 64, attended court Wednesday and is expected to testify later in the trial.Ms. Huth also reported her accusation to the police in 2014, but prosecutors declined to file criminal charges because the statute of limitations had passed.She was able to file a lawsuit because under California law, in some cases, the statute of limitations can be extended for people who say they only recently recognized as adults the damage done by a repressed incident of sexual abuse they experienced as a child.The deadline to file such a suit is determined in part by when the person, as an adult, becomes aware of the severe psychological effect of the abuse.Mr. Cosby’s lawyers have questioned whether she had only remembered the alleged abuse a short time before filing the suit because, they said, she had contacted a tabloid about it 10 years earlier.They also tried to stop the trial from going ahead when Ms. Huth recently changed her recollection about when the encounter occurred. She initially said that it had happened in 1974, when she was 15. But more recently she concluded that it was actually in 1975, when she was 16. The law in California, then and now, holds that a 16-year-old is classified as a minor, but Mr. Cosby has contended that he did not meet Ms. Huth until several years later.She said she only recently realized she had the date wrong after, among other things, reviewing documents put forward by Mr. Cosby that clarified when the movie filming she recalled witnessing had taken place. More

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      For Norm Macdonald and Bo Burnham, No Audience Is No Problem

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      Filmed during lockdown, a new Netflix special from Norm Macdonald and outtakes from Bo Burnham’s “Inside” suggest that crowd laughter can be limiting.If a comic tells a joke in the forest, did it really kill?There’s a school of thought, one I have long been sympathetic to, that believes that stand-up without a live audience isn’t stand-up at all. Just listen to the debrief among famous comedians that, oddly, follows right after Norm Macdonald’s “Nothing Special,” his posthumous set recorded in his home during lockdown in 2020 and released this week on Netflix.Dave Chappelle compares comedy without an audience to a swim meet without water. David Letterman keeps returning to the point that without an audience, Macdonald didn’t have his “partner,” and something was missing. The closest to a dissent comes from Conan O’Brien, who makes the point that Macdonald always seemed like he could do comedy by himself, saying that when Macdonald appeared on his talk show, the host felt irrelevant.Macdonald is perhaps uniquely positioned to serve as an example of the shortcomings of the audience. His standards could be higher than the crowd’s. There are stories of him deciding to do jokes on “Saturday Night Live” that he knew were funny even if they died in rehearsal.This final special, a raw and moving production, is a gift to fans. It’s a pleasure to hear one last time his faux-folksy locutions (“It doesn’t make no sense”) and the way his jokes could twist (“I have opinions that everyone holds, like, I don’t know, yellow is the best color”) or move full steam ahead. After years of therapy, he says, he discovered why he has a fear of flying. “It’s the crashing and the dying,” he says, his wide eyes twinkling.Judged by aesthetic slickness and tight jokes, this hour isn’t nearly as successful as his last one, from 2017, “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery.” But it’s mesmerizing in different ways. There’s something uncanny about letting the jokes stand on their own, the quiet awkwardness and messy intrusions (a dog barks, a cellphone goes off) offering a reminder that something bigger than showbiz is happening here, a glimpse of a man facing the end, giving his last jokes everything he’s got.Norm Macdonald made Netflix’s “Nothing Special” in his home during lockdown in 2020; he died last year.NetflixMacdonald, who died of cancer last year and is quoted in a scroll at the start of the special saying he filmed it before a medical procedure because he “didn’t want to leave anything on the table in case things went south,” becomes unusually earnest about his mother, expressing what she means to him. In what seems like a tangent, he points out that she didn’t speak with irony and couldn’t tell a good story but she “knew how to love.” As he gazes off, his face inches away from the screen, you might wonder if this is heartfelt or part of a joke (hint: could be both) before the punchline lands. There’s a cleverness as well as a poignancy here that I don’t think could be replicated if an audience were there.Live entertainment is of course singular, and the lockdown only emphasized my appreciation for it. But despite what you might have heard, audiences are often wrong. (Think of the famous comic you hate the most and I promise you they have delighted the crowd.) The audience has an underexamined impact on the aesthetic of specials. Comics spend so much time thanking and praising the people in the seats that it’s worth at least considering an opposing view.Here goes: The audience in specials is fundamentally manipulative, a bullying intrusion on the relationship between artist and observer at home. It can operate like peer pressure. And just as it adds to the excitement of stand-up, the steady, familiar sound of laughter, the most beloved cliché in all of comedy, can also be limiting. When Macdonald talks about his fear of dying and finding a different God than he expected, no sound distracts from the poignancy, and you find yourself looking closer at his face, studying it for clues, hints that may or may not be there.The pandemic forced so many comics to learn about performing to screens. Most didn’t like it, but some had considerable success. And a comic working by himself, Bo Burnham, made “Inside,” the most acclaimed special last year and one of the finest works of art about that period.As it happens, Burnham, who has been relatively quiet for the past year, released over an hour of outtakes from “Inside” the same week that Macdonald’s special premiered.Burnham and Macdonald are from different generations and have clashing styles, one theatrical and flamboyantly satirical, the other deadpan and folksy. But they share a love of language and a bone-deep ironic sensibility. And in these specials, both haunted by death, they show that removing the audience can access emotions a traditional special cannot.Burnham tapped into the pandemic zeitgeist while mounting a musical comedy that portrayed his own unraveling mind. The lockdown became a metaphor for larger trends of the internet age, and “Inside” became a hit not only on Netflix but also on social media, among young audiences who will delight in and study this fertile new release, free on YouTube.Burnham includes many cut songs and satirical sketches as well as alternative versions of familiar bits. It doesn’t play like a director’s cut, but it’s also more than a series of odds and ends not ready for prime time. If anything, it’s instructive to see how some of the bits are funnier than what is in the original special.In one outtake, Burnham performs a parody of a Joe Rogan podcast.YoutubeAmong the darlings that Burnham killed was a scathing, spot on parody of a Joe Rogan podcast, with Burnham on split screen playing two different guys. It captures an essential incoherence of so many thin-skinned comics when they complain about offended audiences: The podcasters insist they are just telling inconsequential jokes a second before describing comics as philosophers.An even more hilarious spoof comes later when multiple versions of Burnham, one representing the writer of “Inside,” the other the director and on and on, appear in a grid onscreen to be interviewed by a glib internet journalist. When they’re asked why there isn’t more diversity, they all freeze and then one Burnham pipes up to flamboyantly offer gratitude for the question. Burnham is gifted at mocking the performative liberal sanctimony of the moment as well as corporate attempts to exploit it, such as his very realistic YouTube ads that pop up below. One reads, “It’s mental health awareness decade at Kohl’s,” followed by the promise: “All laceless shoes 60 percent off.”He has a song at the end of these outtakes that is a clever riff on the chicken crossing the road joke. It could have been a closer to the special, but he cut it. Instead, we see him panicking at the sight of an audience.Performing to no one doesn’t fit most comedy, but it has its advantages. Burnham and Macdonald created a more direct relationship with the viewer, one with more intimacy than can be generated by a close-up.Burnham wanted to capture the uneasy mood of the early pandemic as viscerally as possible. And he clearly succeeded. When my 13-year-old daughter saw “Inside,” her first reaction was: “Is he OK?”It’s not something you would ask about a comedian who just received a round of applause. More