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    This Math Tutor Keeps Popping Up in Wes Anderson Films

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    Michael Maggart spends most days running the online tutoring company he founded after a decade working as a math teacher. But every now and then, his high school friend Wes Anderson, the director, contacts him out of the blue, summons him to a film set and sends him to wardrobe.There’s Maggart playing a security guard in “The Phoenician Scheme,” Anderson’s latest film, which was released in May. Previously, he played a detective in Anderson’s 2023 film, “Asteroid City,” and a hotel concierge in Anderson’s second feature film, “Rushmore” (1998). His credits also include a series of AT&T commercials that Anderson directed, and Anderson’s 2023 short film, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.”Maggart as a casino cashier, one of several roles he played in “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” (2023).Mike MaggartMaggart said he sometimes felt guilty about landing roles that an aspiring actor would covet, but “then I just kind of enjoy it.”Vincent Alban/The New York TimesMaggart, 55, who splits his time between Austin, Texas, and New York City, has no formal training or interest in pursuing a career in acting. He has no other acting credits and would never have appeared in movies at all if not for an old friend who happens to be a celebrated film director — one who likes him enough to put him on camera. For Maggart, this has meant hobnobbing, dining and running lines with A-list actors like Tom Hanks, Bill Murray and Benicio Del Toro.“I do feel a little guilty sometimes because, for example, the scene in ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ that I have is three lines,” he said. “And I’m sure that it would be quite a moment for the career of a young actor or any actor to get those three lines instead of me. But I only think of that briefly and then I just kind of enjoy it.”Maggart is not certain why Anderson keeps thinking of him for bit parts in his films. Anderson, 56, who did not respond to an interview request, described his old friend as a “crucial collaborator” in a video message for an event in Houston celebrating the 25th anniversary of “Rushmore.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      How ‘Superman’ Star David Corenswet Won the Role

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      Even before he became the linchpin of a new superhero universe, David Corenswet took great pride in being reliable.“I don’t know whether I’m a good actor in the sense that I see people onscreen and think, that’s a good actor,” he said. But what he does know, and what he aspires to, is that people can count on him. It’s a reputation Corenswet has cultivated since he was a child actor, when he once delivered his lines so efficiently during a commercial shoot that the crew got to go home early.“I want people to feel that every day that my name is on the call sheet is going to be a better day — a little bit of an easier day, and maybe a more fulfilling day,” he said.Now, Corenswet’s reliability will be put to its ultimate test. The 32-year-old is playing the iconic title character in James Gunn’s “Superman” reboot, which arrives in theaters this weekend burdened by big expectations. It’s the first feature from the newly rebranded DC Studios, which previously managed some successes (“Wonder Woman,” “Man of Steel”) and a passel of bruising bombs (“Justice League,” “The Flash,” “Shazam: Fury of the Gods”) in its efforts to keep pace with Marvel’s highly lucrative cinematic universe.David Corenswet wasn’t immediately sold on the role of Superman: “When the easy conversation is so exciting, I want to have the hard conversation: Let’s talk about what could go wrong.”These days, though, even Marvel is facing headwinds: In a market saturated with comic-book content, audiences don’t always show up for cape-and-tights spectaculars the way they used to. Warner Bros. is betting that Gunn, who was hired to co-lead DC Studios after directing Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy, can restore the luster to its superhero shingle. But the future of the DC slate, including next year’s “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” hinges largely on just how high “Superman” can soar.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      The Best Mafia Show, According to Morgan Spector of ‘The Gilded Age’

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      The actor, who plays a railroad magnate on HBO’s period drama, is into Russian war novels, “lefty” podcasts and his home gym.Morgan Spector’s character on “The Gilded Age” always seems to have it together, even if, behind the scenes, his business empire is teetering on the brink of collapse.In real life, well — he’s trying.Speaking from his home in Hillsdale, N.Y., where he lives with his wife, the actress Rebecca Hall, he was sleep-deprived because his 7-year-old daughter had been up in the middle of the night. His 1-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, Stella, had vomited all over the house. His phone was acting up.“It’s been one of those days,” he said.Spector, 44, has become a fan favorite for his scene-stealing turn as the railroad magnate George Russell on HBO’s period drama about what happens when old money meets new money. His character has a crisis of confidence this season, as he allows himself to be swept along by a marriage plot hatched by his wife, Bertha (Carrie Coon), involving their daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), and the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) — a man George knows she doesn’t love.“It causes him to have a kind of existential reckoning,” Spector said. “Because despite all the sort of horrible robber baron-y things he does, he thinks of himself as someone with a moral code, particularly with regard to his family.”He shared his 10 cultural essentials, including the book that “made his entire personality” and the magazine he reads cover to cover. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.MomMy wife and I are both relatively busy working actors, which means our lives are logistically chaotic. That would make it extremely challenging to provide a grounded, consistent experience of childhood for my daughter, were it not for my mom. She jumped on board our crazy train early on and, as a result, it all functions pretty seamlessly.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares62 Views

      in Television

      James Carter Cathcart, Voice Behind Memorable ‘Pokémon’ Characters, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Cathcart was known for playing the characters Professor Oak and Meowth in the long-running franchise. He also made appearances in other popular animated series such as “Yu-Gi-Oh!” and “One Piece.”James Carter Cathcart, a voice actor who portrayed some of the most indelible characters in the “Pokémon” franchise and became a familiar presence in several other popular animated series, died on Tuesday. He was 71.His wife, Martha Jacobi, confirmed in a social media post that he died at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. His ex-wife, Jeanne Gari, said in an interview that the cause of his death was throat cancer.For more than two decades, Mr. Cathcart was the voice of several popular characters in the “Pokémon” series and movies, including the genial Professor Oak, his grandson Gary, the antagonizing James and the wisecracking feline creature Meowth, one of the few Pokémon who could speak.Mr. Cathcart joined the cast of “Pokémon” in 1998, just as the franchise exploded into a global craze. While many of the characters cycled in and out through the series’s more than 1,000 episodes, his voice remained a steady presence.Mr. Cathcart also had roles in an array of other anime series, video games and animated shows, including “Yu-Gi-Oh!,” “One Piece” and “Shadow the Hedgehog.” He retired from voice acting in 2023 after he was diagnosed with cancer. Mr. Cathcart appeared in more than 100 roles, according to the entertainment database IMDb, but his work in “Pokémon” is his best known.The voice actors who also had roles in the “Pokémon” universe acknowledged his death on social media. Erica Schroeder, who played Nurse Joy and the creature Wobbuffet, said: “The community will miss you. The world will miss you.”James Carter Cathcart was born on Jan. 4, 1954, in West Long Branch, N.J., and graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan.He is survived by Ms. Jacobi; his daughters Nicole Zoppi, 41, and Mackenzie, 30; and his son, Carter, 31.Mr. Cathcart said in an interview in 2017 that he was grateful the “Pokémon” franchise had continued to thrive and that he wanted to keep voicing the characters for as long as he could.“Who could imagine 20 years ago that we would still be doing the show and it would be doing so well, but there’s a new generation of kids that loves the Pokémon?” Mr. Cathcart said.Sheelagh McNeill More

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      in Television

      ‘The Gilded Age’ Enriches Its Portrait of Black High Society

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      The air felt different as I sat across from Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald and Denée Benton. I was lifted simply by being with these women, three generations of Broadway royalty. (Of course, as the former Clair Huxtable, Rashad qualifies as TV royalty as well.)Now they are together on “The Gilded Age,” the HBO drama about late 19th-century New York City and the old-money elites, arrivistes and workers who live and clash there.I was initially worried about the show when it debuted in 2022. As a long-term fan of the creator Julian Fellowes’s more homogenous hit “Downton Abbey,” I feared this American counterpart would similarly overlook the racial dynamics of its era. But I was pleasantly surprised by the nuance of the character Peggy Scott (Benton), an aspiring journalist and secretary for Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and a member of Brooklyn’s Black upper-middle class.An early version of Peggy had the character posing as a domestic servant to gain access to Agnes. But Benton and the show’s historical consultant, Erica Armstrong Dunbar, pushed for a more multifaceted exploration of the lives of Black New Yorkers, who often interacted with Manhattan’s white elite even as they lived separately. (Dunbar and I were colleagues at Rutgers University.)This season, “The Gilded Age” has its most diverse and in-depth portrayal of Black high society yet, often pitting Peggy’s mother, Dorothy (McDonald), against the aristocratic Elizabeth Kirkland (Rashad), who arrived on the show on Sunday. Like other wealthy mothers on this show, Elizabeth spends most of her time trying to control the marital fate of her children and discriminating against other families, like the Scotts, that she believes to be socially inferior.Audra McDonald, left, and Denée Benton in the new season of “The Gilded Age,” which includes the show’s most in-depth portrayal of Black high society yet.Karolina Wojtasik/HBOWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares75 Views

      in Movies

      Danielle Deadwyler on ’40 Acres and Balancing Brutality and Family

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      The star plays a stoic matriarch raising a militant brood to protect their land and each other against cannibals in R.T. Thorne’s new horror indie.Onscreen, the actress Danielle Deadwyler has become known for expressing with her eyes what words rarely do. She can appear at once steely and heartbroken, fierce and fragile.She has used this ability to great effect in the HBO Max dystopian drama “Station Eleven”; in Jeymes Samuel’s 2021 western, “The Harder They Fall”; and in Chinonye Chukwu’s 2022 historical drama, “Till,” in which she played the doting mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.Now, Deadwyler, 43, is applying her skill to R.T. Thorne’s first feature, the horror indie “40 Acres,” which is set in the near future. She plays a mother and former soldier, Hailey Freeman, who, alongside her partner, an Indigenous man named Galen (Michael Greyeyes), is preparing her brood for the harsh truths of their famine-decimated postapocalyptic life. They must fight threats from all sides, the scariest of which are bands of ferocious cannibals.The family tries to balance survivalist reality, including grisly encounters, with serene farm life. Days are spent training the four children to be warriors while also honoring their heritage and their land, finding surprising joy in the small things. In his critic’s pick review for The Times, Robert Daniels wrote that “Deadwyler’s forceful energy fills the frame” and that she “lends power and humor to this lovingly stern mother.”Hailey and her family are the descendants of African American farmers who settled in Canada after the Civil War, when the United States failed to fulfill Gen. William T. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres of land for Black Americans freed from enslavement.“It’s a unique family — R.T. said he hadn’t seen Black and Indigenous families together onscreen,” Deadwyler told me in a video interview in June. “I hadn’t either, like this.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares71 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Heathers: The Musical’ Returns to New York, Fueled by a Devoted Fandom

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      When the pitch-black comedy “Heathers” came out in 1989, a review in The New York Times said it was “as snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited.” An early scene was said to have “the air of a demonic sitcom.” This may explain why the composer Laurence O’Keefe initially had reservations about working on a musical adaptation.“I thought it was too nihilistic,” O’Keefe said of the movie, in which a frustrated senior (Winona Ryder) and her murderous boyfriend (Christian Slater) dispatch members of their high school’s bullying elite with theatrical violence. “This material is in some ways more despairing than ‘Sweeney Todd.’”Yet O’Keefe still thought there was a way to make the story palatable for the stage. He was right: These days, “Heathers: The Musical,” the adaptation he created with the writer Kevin Murphy and the director Andy Fickman, is gaining cult-classic status in its own right.It took a decade, but in December the Off Broadway production’s cast album, from 2014, went gold. Packed with a mercilessly catchy mix of bangers (“Candy Store”) and ballads (“Seventeen”), the recording was instrumental in fueling a “Heathers” craze in Britain, where the show has had several West End runs and tours, which were further immortalized in a second cast album and a live capture.From left, Winona Ryder, Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk and Shannen Doherty starred in the pitch-black high school comedy “Heathers.”Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock PhotoNow “Heathers: The Musical” has returned to New World Stages, where it had its original New York engagement back in 2014. This version incorporates changes, including new songs, made to the show in the intervening decade. It will open on July 10 with a sterling cast list led by Lorna Courtney (“& Juliet”) as the arty senior Veronica; Casey Likes (last seen on Broadway in “Back to the Future: The Musical”) as the vengeful J.D.; and McKenzie Kurtz, Elizabeth Teeter and Olivia Hardy as the school’s queen bees, all named Heather.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares92 Views

      in Television

      How a Show About Truly Terrible People Became the Defining American Sitcom

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      As one of my last acts as a suburban teenager, about two weeks before moving out of my parents’ house for college, I watched the pilot episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” in my family’s living room. This would have been Aug. 4, 2005, a Thursday. A comedy about a group of malignant narcissists who own a trashy bar in Philly called Paddy’s, “Always Sunny” was, from Day 1, offensive even for an era in which offensiveness was so ingrained in our culture that it went largely unremarked upon. George W. Bush was seven months into his second term as president. You could still smoke in most bars. If you watched cable TV past 9 p.m., you would reliably see long infomercials for direct-to-video series like “Girls Gone Wild” or “Bumfights,” both of which were somehow less offensive than “Entourage,” then considered one of the smarter shows on HBO.Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffMy high school friends and I had all just received .edu email addresses from the colleges that accepted us, which was a prerequisite for joining a new social network called The Facebook, a website founded only the year before by a computer-science major in his Harvard dorm room; he made it shortly after creating another website, Facemash, a campuswide ranking system of female coeds by order of attractiveness. In a parking lot at NBC’s studios in Los Angeles, Donald Trump, who was the host of a reality show on that network, spoke into a hot mic during an interview with a host from “Access Hollywood” — who was George W. Bush’s first cousin — and remarked upon how he treats the women he encounters: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”You can do anything. That was just how it was then. “Always Sunny” stood out to me immediately as the greatest sendup of a time when the bad guys kept getting away with it and the ignorance of an American culture that was happy to let them. Being so young, I didn’t know at the time that this would remain an evergreen topic 20 years later. Nor did I realize that “Always Sunny” would become — as it begins its 17th season this month on FX — the longest-running live-action sitcom ever to appear on television by a fairly wide margin.Our very method of viewing TV has changed immeasurably and continually over this period. Being a chronic “Always Sunny” watcher, I can track time, in a big-picture sort of way, by recalling how I viewed certain seasons of the show — basic cable, DVD box set, pirated online, streaming. And I’ll forever remember the spring of 2025 as the year I interviewed the show’s main cast over a series of Zoom calls and watched its 17th season in an early-look unfinished copy somewhere deep in the bowels of the Disney corporation’s online library. Through everything — mergers, acquisitions, wars, a life-altering pandemic, seismic technological and ideological shifts — the show remained itself, on the same network, using the same sets and writers and production staff, with the same actors doing the same characters.The series creator, Rob McElhenney, plays Mac, a closeted and deeply insecure man who serves, poorly and unnecessarily (because there are rarely any customers), as the bar’s bouncer. Last month, McElhenney legally changed his last name to Mac. But Charlie Day has always shared a name with his character, Charlie, the bar’s janitor, an illiterate stalker who suffers from what the DSM-5 has labeled pica, or the compulsive consumption of inedible objects, especially viscous chemicals like paint, bleach and suntan lotion. Working behind the bar are Dee (Kaitlin Olson), a failed actress with no self-worth, and her fraternal twin, Dennis (Glenn Howerton), who is the closest thing the group has to a true leader but is also a Ted Bundy-esque tyrant who keeps a kill kit in a hidden compartment in the trunk of his car. Worst of all is Dennis and Dee’s father, Frank, played against type by national treasure Danny DeVito, who is a little bit of all of the above. In his first appearance on the show, as part of a story line in which all members of the main cast fake being disabled, each for a distinctly idiotic reason, he pretends to be paraplegic in order to receive special treatment from the dancers at a strip club.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares65 Views

      in Television

      Julian McMahon, ‘Nip/Tuck’ and ‘Fantastic Four’ Star, Dies at 56

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      He played the half-human, half-demon Cole Turner in the WB supernatural series “Charmed” and a self-destructive playboy in the FX series “Nip/Tuck.”Julian McMahon, an actor known for playing the promiscuous plastic surgeon Dr. Christian Troy in the television show “Nip/Tuck,” as well as the egoistical evil scientist Dr. Victor Von Doom in two “Fantastic Four” movies, died on Wednesday in Florida. He was 56.His death was confirmed by his wife, Kelly McMahon, who said in a statement that the cause was cancer.Mr. McMahon began acting in Australian soap operas in the early 1990s and first found success in the United States on the NBC soap opera “Another World” in 1993.After switching to prime-time television, his breakout role came when he played the half-human, half-demon Cole Turner on three seasons of the WB supernatural series “Charmed.”Mr. McMahon achieved leading-man status when he began starring in the FX series “Nip/Tuck” in 2003.His performance as Dr. Christian Troy, a self-destructive playboy, contrasted with Dr. Troy’s strait-laced best friend, Dr. Sean McNamara, played by Dylan Walsh.On the show, which ran from 2003-10, the pair ran a plastic surgery practice, first in Miami and later in Los Angeles, and frequently sparred over the morality of their profession.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More