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      Lessons From Gina Prince-Bythewood on the Set of ‘The Woman King’

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      Gina Prince-Bythewood: When Thuso first auditioned for “The Woman King,” I thought, “This is Nawi” [one of the film’s leads, a warrior in training], but there were still other people she had to meet with, so I said, “Good luck with your career.” We laugh about it now, but to her that sounded like a death knell. Once we were on set, my admiration for her only grew. You see her going toe-to-toe with Viola [Davis] and Lashana Lynch. Plus I could give her harder and harder fight elements — she’s someone who has the desire to be great and who puts the work in until she is. In the big Oyo battle, her character has this sequence with a machete tied to a rope that I didn’t know how we were going to do without a stunt double. Well, Thuso learned it. She took that rope everywhere with her.culture banner More

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      in Television

      What Laura Dern and Diane Ladd Have Learned From Each Other

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      Ladd wasn’t sure she wanted her daughter to act. But Dern grew up going to work with her mother — and soon they were sharing the screen. Laura Dern: The great news about the endless challenges you had raising me as a single parent is that, when you brought me with you on location, I got an up-close view of what it really means to be an actor. Diane Ladd: When I was doing “A Texas Trilogy” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1976, you were 8 and sat with me during rehearsal. At one point the play’s director said, “Diane, you didn’t move there.” I said, “I know where I moved,” and you said, “No, Mother, he’s right.” You were really paying attention. I didn’t want you to go into acting. It’s a hard business for anyone but, as a woman, they really judge you, and for a lot more than the work. I said, “Laura, be a lawyer. Nobody cares if your backside’s too big when you’re a lawyer.”culture banner More

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      How Two ‘Yellowjackets’ Actresses Created the Same Character, Decades Apart

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      In sharing a role on the Showtime series, Juliette Lewis and Sophie Thatcher took cues from each other about never going for the obvious choice.Juliette Lewis: I first met Sophie in a big office building in Burbank before we shot the pilot [for the TV series “Yellowjackets”]. We were both like, “Oh, it’s you!” She plays a younger version of our character, Natalie, so she studied what I was doing, picking up my heaviness on set. The character is like a loaded weapon — there’s the possibility of danger at any time. Not every actor her age can make you feel that. I had that quality early on — one thing I was recognized for because of “Natural Born Killers” [the 1994 film in which Lewis played a violent fugitive] was that I could scare you. Similarly, Sophie carries herself as a rare bird because she can’t help it.culture banner More

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      in Music

      Why Madhur Jaffrey and Michelle Zauner ‘Fell Toward Each Other’

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      Madhur Jaffrey: I learned about Michelle through my granddaughter. I read her book [“Crying in H Mart,” 2021] and listened to her music, and I thought she seemed like me. Our relationships to our mothers are in many ways similar — when she said in her book that her mother used to watch QVC and buy face creams, I thought of my own mother, who would have my sisters and me rub the cow’s milk from our own cows into our faces because she heard that Cleopatra bathed in the milk of an ass for her milky complexion. Our fathers were similar, too: Michelle’s father never took her music seriously, which reminded me of my father, who told the president of India that acting was just my hobby.culture banner More

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      Book Review: ‘Honey, Baby, Mine,’ by Laura Dern and Diane Ladd

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      Laura Dern and her mother, Diane Ladd, both made careers in the movies. In “Honey, Baby, Mine,” they drop names, rehash arguments and lean on each other.HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding), by Laura Dern and Diane LaddWhen Diane Ladd is diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and given six months to live, her daughter Laura Dern looks at her and thinks, “You can’t die.” Determined to increase her mother’s lung capacity and life span, Dern gets the doctor’s permission to take Ladd on daily 15-minute walks, distracting her mother by asking questions about the past.Transcripts of those conversations are the beating heart of “Honey, Baby, Mine,” the actresses’ joint memoir, which also includes photographs, recipes, memorabilia and short, interspersed chapters written by each woman.They commiserate over the timeless frustrations of their industry, while also reflecting on what has slowly changed. Dern recalls visiting her mom’s sets as a child, catching the acting bug when Martin Scorsese asked her to appear as an extra in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Allowing a child on the set was still frowned upon nearly two decades later, when they worked together on “Rambling Rose” (for which they became the only mother-daughter pair ever to have been nominated for Academy Awards for the same film) ‌and had to advocate for their director to be allowed to nurse her baby at work.By the time Dern co-starred in the 2017 TV mini-series “Big Little Lies,” actors’ children were so commonly present that, she writes, “we had effectively created a … day care.” Along the way, they toss about glittery names, among them Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Shelley Winters, Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon (who also provides the foreword). If you’re in it for the stargazing, you’ll be rewarded with plenty — but that’s not what lingers most after the telling.As actors, Dern and Ladd have spent decades peeling back layers to reveal their characters’ fears and desires. It’s when they turn that focus to each other and themselves that something remarkable emerges.At first it seems a bit repetitive. Mother and daughter reminisce, joke and bicker, circling back to the same topics: the craft of acting, the strange experience of fame, the infinite doubts and compromises of motherhood.On one walk-and-talk, they tell funny anecdotes about Ladd’s mother, “Grandma Mary,” a wisecracking Mississippi divorcée who assisted with Dern’s upbringing after Ladd divorced Dern’s father, the actor Bruce Dern. Mary defied her era’s Southern Belle stereotypes, rejecting racism and classism in favor of everyday advocacy for equality. Her daughter and granddaughter learned a lot about independence from her, they agree.Then the tone shifts. On a later walk, Dern admits that she often resented being left with her grandmother while Ladd was away for work. A suddenly emotional Ladd says she sometimes felt unfairly burdened with the responsibility of supporting not only her daughter but her mother, “working 12-hour days making the money to pay the rent, buy her clothes, put food in her mouth for her to go get entertained and travel and play with you.” Emboldened by each day’s revelations and driven by their abiding love for each other, they wade into deeper confessions. The book is at its most memorable and affecting when they work up the courage to excavate heavy, sharp-edged emotional artifacts.Neither has forgotten the time Ladd slapped a teenage Dern in the kitchen of their home, though each remembers the moment differently. They reopen a bitter argument about the time Ladd took Dern’s young son for a significant haircut without her permission; neither party is ready to back down, still. They revisit the time Dern, racked with grief over her divorce from the musician Ben Harper, yelled, “You have no idea what I’m feeling right now!” and upended a sofa — and how her mother responded by making tea and reminding her that her scoliosis made it unwise to lift such heavy things. Eventually they confront Ladd’s greatest pain, a nearly unendurable loss she experienced as a young mother. They yell, grow quiet, accuse and forgive, allowing us to witness their relationship evolving, walk by walk. Ladd’s health improves. Dern draws even closer to her mother. For them, the experiment proves successful. For readers, it may depend on what we come for. I recommend going into “Honey, Baby, Mine” curious about the origin stories, separate and intertwined, of two prolific artists who pushed through private challenges — are pushing through still — while forging lives in the public eye.Mary Laura Philpott is the author, most recently, of the memoir “Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives.”HONEY, BABY, MINE: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding) | By Laura Dern and Diane Ladd | Illustrated | 256 pp. | Grand Central Publishing | $32 More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Chita: A Memoir,’ by Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco

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      Her new memoir finds the 90-year-old singer-dancer hungry for acclaim, but generous to others on her way to getting it.CHITA: A Memoir, by Chita Rivera with Patrick PachecoHow did Chita Rivera feel when she saw Rita Moreno, another actress of Puerto Rican descent, in the movie role of Anita that Rivera had originated on Broadway in “West Side Story”?“How dare she?” she recalls thinking in “Chita,” her playful and history-rich memoir. “That is my dress, that is my earring!” The truth is she was already kicking it up with Dick Van Dyke on Broadway in “Bye Bye Birdie” at the time. So she got over it. Then, when that show became a movie, Janet Leigh took Rivera’s part of Rosie, even after Rivera killed with “Spanish Rose,” her stereotype-bashing number, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” (Look it up on YouTube, you won’t be sorry.)Years later the steamy role of Velma Kelly that she originated in “Chicago” for Bob Fosse went to Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar for it. “She’s the perfect choice,” she responded when Rob Marshall, its director, checked in.Cutthroat as the acting game may be, and even harder for talent with Hispanic names long before J. Lo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Rosie Perez and Daphne Rubin-Vega hit the scene, Rivera comes off as thirsty for recognition — but not bloodthirsty — despite the urgings of her colleagues Gwen Verdon, Fred Ebb and others to up her diva game.She occasionally takes a satisfying swipe (Paul Lynde gets a dressing-down for being nasty and so does John Lennon, of all people, when she appeared with the Beatles in 1964). But most everyone else gets a pass, including Tony Mordente, her first husband, a dancer whom she met in “West Side Story”; Lisa Mordente, their daughter; and the many loves of her life that she recalls with generosity — the restaurateur Joe Allen and Sammy Davis Jr., among them.“There’s nothing wrong with ambition,” Davis once told her. It took some time for Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero to understand that. A tomboy born in 1933 and raised in Washington, D.C., by a poised mother of mixed ancestry who worked for the Defense Department and a dapper Puerto Rican musician father who died when she was little, Rivera got a scholarship to the School of American Ballet when she was 16. She moved in with relatives in the Bronx and describes a heady time of bodegas, subways, public school and intimidating ballet instructors. Overcoming her fear of singing, she got into the national tour of “Call Me Madam” with Elaine Stritch, then on Broadway in “Guys and Dolls” and “Can-Can,” starring Verdon. With “West Side Story,” her career took off.Broadway-loving readers will appreciate the play-by-play (pun intended) of this fizzy book, written in collaboration with Patrick Pacheco, a theater-savvy journalist and TV host. It doesn’t take much to make the pages fly when you have a scene of Stritch in rehearsals with Rivera, “blowing” on the Scotch in her coffee cup, or a pre-rehab Liza Minnelli playing her daughter in “The Rink.” Essentially a good girl, despite her insistence that she has a fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores (who occasionally makes herself heard in the book), at 90, this national icon doesn’t seem to want to burn many bridges. If roles or songs were taken from her and given to others, all for the best. She doesn’t get too political either, although she does unload about what it means to play Latina characters “subjected to racist taunts,” and on her defining early role as a street-sassy Puerto Rican. When Rivera was suggested for “1491,” one of his lesser-known shows, Meredith Willson, who wrote “The Music Man,” asked, “Doesn’t she speak with an accent?” She allows that while she bumped into ethnic stereotypes, the theater world was more relaxed than Hollywood. “I wanted to be considered for a range of roles and for the most part I succeeded,” she writes.One role she never played, this upbeat memoir makes clear — the victim.Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to The Times and the author of “Assisted Loving” and “Bobby Wonderful.”CHITA: A Memoir | By Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco | Illustrated | 320 pp. | Harper One | $27.99 More

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      in Television

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

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

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      Book Review: ‘My Cousin Maria Schneider,’ by Vanessa Schneider

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      In a troubling new memoir, Vanessa Schneider contends that the sexually explicit 1972 film exploited, and irrevocably hurt, her cousin.MY COUSIN MARIA SCHNEIDER: A Memoir, by Vanessa Schneider. Translated by Molly Ringwald.For many actresses, the path of the ingénue can be treacherous. Celebrated for her beauty and youth, the ingénue is defined almost exclusively by her sexuality. An outsize amount of attention is paid to her looks and her body, little interest to her mind. As she grows older, opportunities diminish. Forced to act younger than her age and compete with newer faces, she eventually discovers that her career has hit a dead end. Among the long list of cautionary tales: Jean Seberg, the darling of French New Wave cinema, who died by suicide at the age of 40; Debra Winger, who shocked Hollywood by retiring at the height of her fame at 40; and, of course, the French actress Maria Schneider.Schneider was only 20 years old when she catapulted to fame after starring opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film “Last Tango in Paris.” In its most notorious scene, Brando, who plays a grief-stricken man named Paul, rapes Schneider, who plays a young woman named Jeanne, improvising with butter as a lubricant. Bertolucci and Brando conspired to film the scene, which Schneider claimed wasn’t in the original script, without her consent. Bertolucci later explained his reason for that decision as wanting Schneider “to respond like a girl, not an actress.” Because of its violence and frank treatment of sex, the film was a sensation, confirming Bertolucci’s status as a provocative filmmaker and cementing the comeback of Brando, who for some time had been seen as a Hollywood has-been.For Schneider, it was her “cross to bear,” writes the French journalist and novelist Vanessa Schneider in “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” a slender memoir composed in second person, directly addressed to the actress and elegantly translated from the French by Molly Ringwald. The book, first published in 2018 in France, is both a beautiful eulogy (Schneider died of breast cancer in 2011) and a much-needed corrective — an opportunity to finally set the record straight for an actress long mischaracterized and unfairly judged.The “Last Tango” scene would define Schneider for the rest of her life, explains Vanessa Schneider. Subjected to unrelenting negative publicity and attention surrounding it (a dairy manufacturer once used Schneider’s image on its packaging; a flight attendant served her a pat of butter without prompting), Schneider acted out. She spoke too candidly to the press about her personal life; she dismissed famous directors and actors; she walked off film sets.That Schneider was also addicted to heroin didn’t help, and Vanessa Schneider wonders if the drugs and partying were ways to avoid the spotlight so instantly thrust on the young actress.Growing up, Maria Schneider was unwanted. Her father, the French actor Daniel Gélin, was not involved in her childhood, and her mother, Marie-Christine Schneider, sent Schneider to live with a nursemaid when she was 8. Her mother’s “sex life was never a secret,” writes Vanessa Schneider. “A story often told … is of the time your mother was in bed with a man and called out for you to fetch her diaphragm.” She also reveals that Schneider’s mother “elected not to take the trip from Nice to Paris” for her daughter’s funeral, “saying she was too tired.”Vanessa Schneider’s parents took in Maria as a teenager. From an early age, Vanessa worshiped her older cousin, saving every clipping of her from magazines and newspapers in a red plastic binder. As a result, this memoir is written with a rare sense of intimacy and devotion. It warmly captures the highlights of Maria Schneider’s life: her enduring friendships with Brigitte Bardot and Nan Goldin, her pride in starring in films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and her later advocacy for women in film.It is also, at moments, unsparing, describing Schneider’s struggles with addiction, financial woes and other embarrassing family drama. At one point Vanessa Schneider questions whether her cousin would like such an unvarnished portrayal of her life, and deletes what she’s written. “I often worry that you won’t approve of the story I’m telling, Maria,” she explains. “You won’t like that I’m speaking of the drugs, of your mother and father and brothers.” Yet in this post-#MeToo era, Vanessa Schneider’s evenhanded portrayal of this daring actress of the 1970s is a refreshing one. For once, a young woman is not placed on an impossibly high pedestal, where she is unfairly worshiped for her beauty and then cruelly defiled for our entertainment. Instead, Maria Schneider is presented with both her faults and her charms. In that way, this is a generous account of a rare and complicated cinematic star.Thessaly La Force is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New York Times Styles section. Previously, she was the features director at T: The New York Times Magazine.MY COUSIN MARIA SCHNEIDER: A Memoir | By Vanessa Schneider | Translated by Molly Ringwald | 160 pp. | Scribner | $26 More