Television

“I Know This Much Is True,” an HBO limited series based on Wally Lamb’s 1998 brick of a book, begins when Thomas Birdsey enters a public library and amputates his right hand. This is only the first calamity.A decades-long story of love and sacrifice, the show stars Mark Ruffalo as both Thomas and his identical twin, Dominick. The director Derek Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine,” “The Place Beyond the Pines”) also wrote all six episodes of the series, which premieres on May 10.Onscreen, Ruffalo alternately fights, comforts and runs after himself, a tricky double act Cianfrance captured via shrewd camera placement, occasional CGI and a six-week production shutdown. That was when Ruffalo, who had shot for 17 weeks as Dominick, went away to gain 30 pounds and walk back his skin care routine in order to return as Thomas, who has schizophrenia. The show is Cianfrance’s first series and the first for Ruffalo in 20 years.Last month, the actor and the director logged onto a Zoom meeting, Ruffalo from his house in upstate New York, Cianfrance from his Brooklyn home. During a 90-minute discussion, with occasional breaks to repark cars and rejigger Wi-Fi, they talked about catastrophe, twinning and why a family tragedy might be just what people sheltering with their families need now. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Did you ever think, in reading the book, that there was maybe too much catastrophe?MARK RUFFALO I didn’t think there was enough, actually. I was just so moved by it. It was personal in a lot of ways. I lost my brother, of course. [Scott Ruffalo, Mark Ruffalo’s younger brother, was killed in 2008.] That will always be something that I’ll draw from. We were basically Italian twins, barely a year apart from each other.DEREK CIANFRANCE I like slow songs. I like the ballads. A tragedy about one man and his relationships, that seemed like an honest and deep and rich text to draw from. Maybe that’s just my messed-up taste.Mark, why did you want to do a series?RUFFALO My wife is an avid show watcher. She turned me on to it. I was jealous that actors were getting to really dig into characters. But there’s a continuity in having one director and one writer, which I insisted on from the very beginning. Me and Derek both, we’ve always talked about it as a six-hour movie. We shot it that way.CIANFRANCE On 35-millmeter film. We shot like 1.78 million feet of film, 590 hours of 35-millimeter film stock. Our motto was, Let’s keep Kodak in business. It gave us some real interesting limitations on set. When you shoot digital, you can kind of shoot forever. If you put a load of film in, you have nine minutes and 20 seconds. Film sets this natural boundary. There’s a sacredness, a kind of preciousness to the time.Tell me about the challenge of playing twins.RUFFALO I’ve always been a little crazy, you know? I’ve always bit off more than I can chew, as a form of self-destruction. But some part of me also is willing to meet the challenge as best as I can.Derek and I, we didn’t want it to feel like I would shoot Dominick and run and put on a wig and shoot Thomas. I had shot “Normal Heart” [the 2014 HBO film based on Larry Kramer’s play], and we’d shut down so Matt Bomer [an actor in the film] could lose all that weight. So I knew HBO would conceivably let us shut down production so I could gain weight. We really wanted to create two separate people that were so distinctly different from each other, even though they were identical.Dominick, he’s the favorite son, brought up in this very masculine way. We couldn’t find Dominick’s character until Derek told me to do 50 push-ups between each take. That became how we grounded Dominick — very upper body, very tense, very aggressive. Thomas has a mental illness. He’s living with schizophrenia. But he has a kind of emotional facility that’s alien to Dominick.How much research did you do about what it’s like to live with schizophrenia?RUFFALO A lot. That was the most daunting thing for me. We tried some iterations of it along the way; none of it was working, and we knew so much was riding on it. But I got to know someone who was living with schizophrenia: Richard Wheaton is doing it beautifully. One thing about YouTube and social media is that you can get to know people who are living with this, they speak so openly about it. I probably watched 1,000 hours of people living with schizophrenia.We tried many different versions of Thomas, even on set. A lot of times I see people playing the illness as personality. That’s the trap of it, a trap that I have to admit that I had fallen into myself. Finding the personality of Thomas was the most difficult part of it.You shot the Dominick sections first?CIANFRANCE I didn’t want this to be a technical movie. I didn’t want it to be about all the tricks we could do with the camera or the tricks we could do with twinning. And I didn’t want to shoot it on a stage with green screen. We didn’t really know if it was going to work. But that was why we had to do it, to see if we could make these two guys work in the same scene together.On the first day that Mark came back as Thomas he was basically locked in this trailer. Mark is the least prima donna actor you’ll ever find, right?RUFFALO [Laughing] I was scared!CIANFRANCE I went to his trailer and spent about an hour with him. Mark went out to set and there was an audible gasp from the crew as they saw Mark. People didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know if they could talk to him. Mark sat down and he was absolutely in the pocket immediately. There was nothing we had to force, he just found it. To play someone who has a mental illness is a big responsibility — we all breathed a sigh of relief because it felt honest, it felt true. It didn’t feel like an affectation.What did you do during those six weeks away from the set, Mark?RUFFALO Not push-ups. I started to sequester myself. I was trying to imagine a life of hearing these voices that are constantly judging you and attacking you. And eating and eating and eating. I mean, there was a point where I was like, I can’t make it.CIANFRANCE I have those text messages.RUFFALO I was a basket case. The last two weeks I was by myself in a rental house and I got really bad indigestion so I couldn’t even enjoy the food. I had to sleep sitting up at night because I had such bad acid reflux. In the end, it was only oatmeal with like half a stick of butter and heavy whipped cream and maple syrup that got me got me to where I needed to be.You previously described the shoot as “brutally tough.” I’m starting to understand why.RUFFALO Listen, in one sense it’s been the most amazing thing I’ve ever done. But it’s 600 pages of dialogue. I was on every page. I mean, I can retire now. My feeling of, Did I push myself? Did I leave it all there? I’ve never felt that. I’ve always held back something. With this thing, I made a decision: I’m 52 years old; I’m not going to leave anything behind.How did you work the twinning?CIANFRANCE For Dominick, Mark needed someone to be Thomas. He needed a real actor so that he could be alive. My good friend Gabe Fazio, who was in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” I asked him, “Would you be interested in acting in this movie opposite Mark Ruffalo, being his twin brother? But here’s the caveat. No one’s ever going to see a frame of your performance.” And Gabe, without hesitation, said yes. There’s a version of the movie out there that’s all Gabe. Like a bootleg.RUFFALO I told Derek so many times: “He’s doing it so well. I don’t know that I can do any better than that! Maybe we can make him look like me?” There was even a point where we had a mask made of my face that we put on him. It didn’t work at all.CIANFRANCE There are different ways to do the twinning: shot/countershot, with motion control, or through head or face replacement where there’s no way to do motion control. There’s a handful of those moments throughout the six hours. [Jody Lee Lipes, the cinematographer], early on, we’re like, “Let’s shoot this movie the way we want to shoot and let the technical side figure itself out.”RUFFALO When the two characters are touching each other, when they’re in direct physical contact, that’s the only place where it really gets tricky. So we stayed away from that except for these precious moments, beautiful moments.What do you think it means for the show to arrive at this strange time?CIANFRANCE My family and I, we’re isolating at home, we try to watch something every night. The point of entertainment and art is to help people, comfort people, be people’s friends. That’s what art has always done for me. People can either take this or not, they want to see it or they don’t. We tried to make something as honest as we possibly could. My biggest hope is that it keeps people company, that it’s a friend to people. Sometimes a very dramatic friend.You’re not afraid it’s going bring everybody down?CIANFRANCE Sometimes when you go through the toughest things, drama makes you feel not alone. That’s why I started making movies. When I watched movies where everyone was perfect and the actors all had nice teeth, I always felt like left out, because my own life didn’t match. I have been trying for the beautiful ugliness of real life.RUFFALO It’s all about family right now and our show is all about family, the responsibility we have to each other and how challenging it is, but also so essential. The show is right for this strange experience we are living through. It is raw and sincere and so comforting in its basic truth: We are bound to each other, whether we like it or not. We are better for it. More

What’s on TVA PARKS AND RECREATION SPECIAL 8:30 p.m. on NBC. What does “Parks and Recreation” look like with social distancing in place? Can Amy Poehler and the rest of the cast recreate the show’s distinctive energy remotely? And what’s the status of Nick Offerman’s ever-changing facial hair? Get answers to these questions and more in this half-hour special, a benefit to raise money for the national food-bank network Feeding America. In addition to Poehler and Offerman, the program is set to include appearances from Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt, Aziz Ansari, Retta, Adam Scott, Rob Lowe and Jim O’Heir.WE’RE HERE 9 p.m. on HBO. In last week’s debut episode of this new reality show, the hosts — Shangela Laquifa Wadley, Bob the Drag Queen and Eureka O’Hara, all of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” fame — helped locals in Gettysburg, Pa., put on a drag show. It involved lipstick, glitter and “I Will Survive.” This week, they’ll do the same in Twin Falls, Idaho. Expect more glitter and lipstick (no guarantee of more “I Will Survive,” though).LONDON HAS FALLEN (2016) 10 p.m. on TNT. In a trailer for this thriller, the vice president of the United States (played by Morgan Freeman) delivers a televised warning to the bad guys threatening democracy. “Make no mistake,” he says. “We will find you, and we will destroy you.” If you hear in those words an echo of the Liam Neeson line “I will find you, and I will kill you” from “Taken” — well, maybe be generous. Consider labeling it a homage, instead of an imitation. Indeed, the very setup of “London Has Fallen,” a sequel to “Olympus Has Fallen” (2013), borrows heavily from its own predecessor: Just like the first film, the sequel casts Gerard Butler as a Secret Service agent charged with protecting the American president (Aaron Eckhart), who gets captured by terrorists. “Will this hard-luck president again defy death while his stoic sidekick vanquishes the nasty, uncivilized terrorists?” Neil Genzlinger asked in his review for The Times. “It’s hard to care when a movie is this formulaic and moronic.”What’s StreamingCIRCUS OF BOOKS (2020) Stream on Netflix. Family secrets and gay pornography commingle in “Circus of Books,” a documentary that charts the history of a porn shop and sex-toy store that operated for decades in West Hollywood. The store was run by a couple, Karen and Barry Mason, who kept their work a secret from their family and others. For a while, at least: The couple’s daughter, Rachel Mason, directs this documentary. Mason places her parents’ voices alongside interviews with the store’s employees and customers. Those members of the community “reflect on a bygone era with wit and warmth, and the film supports their memories with golden-lit archival footage of the neighborhood in the 1980s,” Teo Bugbee wrote in her review for The Times. “It also grounds the store in its political history,” she added, “including the devastation of the AIDS crisis.” More

At a time when the world has become defined by unsettling news and social distancing, how is a writer supposed to focus on telling a funny story about physical intimacy?That’s the conundrum facing Laurie Nunn, the creator of the acclaimed Netflix comedy “Sex Education.”“We’re suddenly living in a world where human touch has become something to be feared,” she said recently from London, where she is sheltering in place and working on the show’s next season.A surprise hit when it debuted in 2019 — Netflix said more than 40 million viewers watched at least some of the first season — “Sex Education” won over audiences young and old with its breezy charm and unvarnished depictions of teen sexuality. (“Just wish this was around when I was a kid,” one presumably older fan noted in a representative post on Nunn’s Instagram.)The show, which revolves around an inexperienced high school student named Otis (Asa Butterfield) whose mother is a sex therapist (Gillian Anderson), received more plaudits for its second season, which arrived in January. It was renewed for a third in February, with filming originally scheduled to start in May.Then the coronavirus pandemic brought most TV production to a halt, along with the rest of society. So as “Sex Education” is probably racking up more fans as much of the world sits inside watching Netflix (the series has shown up on many “best shows to binge in quarantine” lists in recent weeks), Nunn has moved her writers’ room online to work on the next chapter with an eye toward filming this summer at the earliest.“I keep trying to remind myself that, despite this horrible pandemic, teenagers will still have a lot of sex and relationship questions that hopefully our show can help answer,” she said.It was a similar sense of purpose that led Nunn, 32, to aggressively pitch herself a few years ago to Eleven Film, the company that developed “Sex Education” for Netflix. At the time she was a 20-something writer with no TV experience or particular expertise in adolescent issues, but she believed strongly that she was the right person for the project.“I sent all these photographs of myself as a teenager and basically just begged: ‘I have to write this show,’” she said. “I felt instantly it was something I could bring a lot to.”Jamie Campbell, a founder of Eleven Film and an executive producer on the series, said Nunn was convincing. “She immediately knew exactly what she wanted to do with the world of the show,” he said, “and how to tell it.”While Nunn had never written anything specifically about teenagers, she said that everyone has an inner adolescent and she was instinctively drawn to that sensibility. “They feel so much — everything feels like life or death — the angst is so potent,” she said. “As a writer, that gives you a lot to play with because everything is on the surface.”“They haven’t grown that armor yet,” she added.In some ways, Nunn is giving voice to her own personal history with “Sex Education.” Raised in England and Australia, she was an introvert who took refuge in young adult novels as well as John Hughes films (“Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club”) and other teen movies, like “Mean Girls,” “Never Been Kissed” and “10 Things I Hate About You.”“I know every line,” Nunn said. “I was kind of an awkward teenager — a bit like Otis.”She came into her own when her mother gave her a small video camera — Nunn started making her own short movies and eventually immersed herself in boxed sets of TV series like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under.”She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in film and television from the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne in 2007 and a master’s in screenwriting from the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England, in 2012. She had just a few projects under her belt — namely some short films and her first stage play, “King Brown,” which won a 2017 judge’s award from the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting — when she convinced Eleven Film to hire her to write “Sex Education.”In creating the series, Nunn has mined her own experiences. In Season 2, for example, the character Aimee is molested on a bus, a story line based on Nunn’s personal encounter with sexual misconduct. She revealed the connection on Instagram in January, linking to a video conversation with cast members about assault.“I tried to brush it off as an unfortunate random event, but it stayed embedded in my mind and left me feeling shaken and unsafe in my environment,” she wrote. “Sadly, this horrible experience isn’t the only time I’ve been made to feel anxious in a public space by an unknown man.“Even sadder is the fact that almost all of my female friends and family members have been through something similar in their own lives,” she continued. “In fact, unwanted sexual attention in public spaces is so common to the female experience that it almost feels like a right of passage, and that is a devastating reality.”Nunn has approached “Sex Education” with a sure hand, becoming an executive producer on the series in Season 2, making her a rarity in an entertainment industry still dominated by men. And in her writing for the show, she has fearlessly tackled once-taboo TV topics like female pleasure, anal douching, abortion and lesbian love.“Young people don’t want to be patronized,” she said. “They want to be challenged and told difficult stories.”The series’s straightforward approach to sex is also particularly timely, given increasing cultural awareness about the unrealistic male fantasies perpetuated by online porn.“It’s tackling different sexual topics with an honesty I don’t think I’ve seen elsewhere, embracing the awkwardness of teenagers’ first exploring themselves as sexual beings,” said Ita O’Brien, the show’s intimacy coordinator. (In his review of “Sex Education” for The Times, the TV critic James Poniewozik wrote that “sex, in this show, isn’t an ‘issue’ or a problem or a titillating lure: It’s an aspect of health.”)Nunn acknowledged that working on the new season during a pandemic has not been easy. But she has found comfort in the show’s comedy, which helps her stave off the “constant sense of low-level anxiety and dread in the air that is difficult to ignore,” she said.As a writer, Nunn added, she is accustomed to working mostly in isolation. And that work continues to feel necessary.“The main message of the show is the importance of honest communication,” she said. “Hopefully that will always be something worth writing about.” More