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      Simona Tabasco, ‘White Lotus’ Fan Favorite, on the Best Parts of Italy

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      The actress shares some of the places she loves the most, and the art that both inspires and disturbs her.The day Simona Tabasco got a callback for “The White Lotus” with the show’s creator, Mike White, she tested positive for Covid-19. So she auditioned over FaceTime and landed the part.A month later, she was on set in Sicily playing Lucia, one of the two local prostitutes — the other played by her real-life friend, Beatrice Grannò — who spend the television show’s second season charming and swindling Americans on vacation. By the time the season ended in December, the duo had become fan favorites, inspiring memes, think pieces, conspiracy theories and style tips.“I’ve never been part of a project of this magnitude, something that was so big and involves so many artists — people that, yes, are famous, but also such amazing artists,” Tabasco, 28, said in a video interview from Rome, where she plays an undercover police officer in the Italian TV series “I Bastardi di Pizzofalcone.”Speaking through a translator, the Neapolitan actress talked about why the city where “The White Lotus” was shot is so meaningful to her — as well as some of the other places she loves in Italy — and the horror movie she couldn’t stop thinking about even though it annoyed her. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Taormina It’s where we filmed “The White Lotus,” and it’s where I received an award for best young actor after my first film, “Perez,” at the film award ceremony Nastro d’Argento. One of the local cafes, Bam Bar, is known for its granita. My favorite flavor is almond. It became a tradition for Beatrice and me to have breakfast there together on days we didn’t have to wake up too early. Every time we went, we saw someone from the “White Lotus” cast or crew.Inside the World of ‘The White Lotus’The second season of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s incisive satire of privilege set in a luxury resort, is available to stream on HBO.End of a Journey: The actress Jennifer Coolidge discussed the ending of the second season and where the series, already renewed for a third season, might go from here.Dressing Gen Z: The costume designer for “The White Lotus” sees your mean tweets about how the younger characters dress. She told us how she created the chaotic and divisive looks.Michael Imperioli: The “Sopranos” star is enjoying a professional renaissance after years of procedurals and indies. In the new season of “The White Lotus,” he tries his hand at comedy.F. Murray Abraham: The buzzy series is one of several featuring the actor, who at 83 is finding some of the most satisfying work of his career.2. Nuovo Cinema Olimpia This theater in central Rome is special for me. It has only two rooms, and it’s not like the other cinemas in the city. There are usually very few people, and it’s where I like to have movie marathons. I’ve spent hours in there watching films. Sometimes I just need to binge on movies, and for me, this is the perfect place to do it. Right after, I like to drink a beer and talk about what I’ve just seen with friends. It can sound a little boring, but I have so much fun during these kinds of days.3. Monti I used to live in this neighborhood with classmates way back when I was in acting school. Known as the artists’ quarters, it’s a beautiful area. It’s small, and it kind of gives you the feel of being in a little village, which is rare for such a big city like Rome. It’s also filled with vintage clothing stores, which I started going to because of auditions. My favorite vintage shop is called King Size.4. “Titane” I love this movie, which is a horror/sci-fi mix, because it disturbs me. It’s a film that annoys me. I went to see it and then I had to go see it again. I thought about it for days. And I think that’s how art should be — I love when art is that way. It’s something that you encounter by chance, or not, and then it changes your day or your life.5. Tate Modern Five years ago, I was staying in London for a month to enjoy the city and practice English, and I think I went every day for seven days. The first time I went in, I had this sense of shock because it looked like such a big empty space. I would go and listen to this tower of radios, Cildo Meireles’s “Babel,” and I was totally blown away. I’m not sure what the artist wanted to say, but that’s also the beauty of art. Maybe the artist had one idea and whoever witnesses an installation like that then has a different reaction.6. Kintsugi My favorite thing about visiting Japan in 2017 was seeing the art of kintsugi, which is their practice of putting back together broken things with gold and varnish. They turn something that seems like it no longer has purpose into something extremely beautiful through the act of repairing it. It’s a very powerful symbol of resilience.7. “Lo Potevo Fare Anch’io” by Francesco Bonami The title of the book translates to “I could have done it too,” which the author wrote because he wanted to bring people closer to and push people farther away from contemporary art, which I think is very provocative. One of the artists mentioned in the book is Robert Ryman, who creates these paintings and sculptures using only white paint, which is something that gives you the impression of being incredibly simple when you first think about it, but then you realize that it’s impossible to replicate. It tells you that art can be — and most of the time is — simple.8. Sziget Festival I went when I was 24. I wanted to see Budapest, because I think it’s a great European city to visit and to live in. During the day, I would explore local neighborhoods and in the evening, I would go to the festival. The setting is so crazy; it’s this island off Budapest with 60 different stages. It becomes difficult to see everything that you want to but attending is one of my favorite memories. I love music. One of my dreams is to go to Burning Man; it’s on my list.9. Naples I probably have a better relationship with Rome because it’s where I’ve built a life, but the thing I love about Naples is the state of mind that it puts me in. It reminds me of my family, of my childhood. Most of what I am and how I grew up — my mannerisms, the way I talk, the way I move — most of it comes from there. It’s something that I try to bring with me whenever I’m on set because it’s such a big part of who I am.10. “Je So’ Pazzo” You could classify Pino Daniele’s music as blues, but what we say in Naples is just that it’s “Pino’s music,” because it’s its own thing. He was so incredible because of his technical talent but also because of the way he used his music to express a moment in time in Italy, specifically in Naples. This song talks about Masaniello, a kind of spokesman of the Neapolitan people. It literally translates to “I’m crazy.” More

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      Adam Rich, Who Starred in ‘Eight Is Enough,’ Dies at 54

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      Mr. Rich played Nicholas Bradford, the youngest son who was known for his glossy pageboy haircut, in the hit television series “Eight Is Enough.”Adam Rich, a former child actor who starred in the hit television series “Eight Is Enough,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 54.Danny Deraney, Mr. Rich’s publicist, confirmed the death. On its website, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner did not immediately list a cause.Mr. Deraney described Mr. Rich as “kind, generous and a warrior in the fight against mental illness.”“He was unselfish and always looked out for those he cared about. Which is why many people who grew up with him feel a part of their childhood gone, and sad today,” Mr. Deraney added. “He really was America’s Little Brother.”From 1977-81, Mr. Rich starred in the hit television series “Eight Is Enough,” a comforting show about a family of eight children that aired on ABC for five seasons. He played Nicholas Bradford, the youngest son, who was known for having a glossy pageboy haircut.Adam Rich began acting as a child and was best known for playing Nicholas Bradford on “Eight Is Enough,” on which he had a pageboy haircut.BC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesThe show, set in Sacramento and based on a memoir by Tom Braden, dealt with family drama such as the death of a parent, remarriage and tensions among siblings.Adam Rich was born on Oct. 12, 1968, in Brooklyn, N.Y., according to his IMDb page. He studied acting at Chatsworth High School in California’s San Fernando Valley.Mr. Rich was not married and did not have children, Mr. Deraney said.Mr. Rich began acting as a child and appeared in 1976 in the television show “The Six Million Dollar Man,” according to IMDb. He had appearances in other television shows, including “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “CHiPs,” “St. Elsewhere” and “Silver Spoons.”In the 1980s, he appeared in television shows such as “Code Red” and “Dungeons and Dragons.”In the past, he had sought treatment for substance abuse. In 1991, he was arrested on suspicion of burglarizing a California pharmacy, and the actor Dick Van Patten, who played Mr. Rich’s father in “Eight Is Enough,” bailed him out of jail, The Orlando Sentinel reported. More

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      Teen Stars of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Sue Over Nudity in 1968 Film

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      Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting assert in a lawsuit that Paramount Pictures should have known nude images of them in their teens were “secretly and unlawfully obtained.”When Franco Zeffirelli’s film “Romeo and Juliet” was first released in 1968, a brief scene of its teenage star-crossed lovers waking up in bed together nude caused what the film critic Roger Ebert described as “a lot of fuss,” including blaring headlines that Queen Elizabeth II had witnessed the scene at the London premiere.Earning two Oscars and critical acclaim, the film became a classic adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy and a staple of many English classrooms for decades.But now, more than 50 years later, the two actors who portrayed the titular characters, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, have filed a lawsuit against the film’s distributor, Paramount Pictures, claiming that the bedroom scene was deceptively filmed when they were underage and that they had been assured that no nudity would be included in the final product.The lawsuit, filed on Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, lays much of the blame for the deception at the feet of Mr. Zeffirelli, who died in 2019, but it asserts that Paramount Pictures “knew or should have known images of plaintiffs’ nude bodies were secretly and unlawfully obtained during the performance.”The company is “repackaging what is essentially pornography,” the complaint said.Representatives for Paramount did not respond to requests for comment about the lawsuit.In the scene, Mr. Whiting’s Romeo rises from bed and basks in the Veronese sunshine, his bare backside onscreen for several seconds. Juliet remains mostly tucked under the sheet, before leaping out of bed — her bare chest showing briefly.Ms. Hussey was 16 years old when the scene was filmed, and Mr. Whiting was 17, said Tony Marinozzi, a manager for both of the actors, who are now 71 and 72. (The scene was filmed in September 1967, he said, though the lawsuit that was filed contains an inaccurate date.)According to the lawsuit, Mr. Zeffirelli told the actors that no nudity would be filmed and that they would be wearing flesh-colored undergarments during the bedroom scene, but on the morning of the shoot, he told them that “they must act in the nude or the picture would fail.”The director “showed them where the cameras would be set so that no nudity would be filmed or photographed for use in ‘Romeo & Juliet’ or anywhere else,” the lawsuit said.The actors sued just before the end of a three-year window in California that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations so people who said they were sexually abused as children could file civil cases. In recent days, the state has seen a flood of litigation under the statute, called the California Child Victims Act, before the window expired on Saturday.The lawsuit alleges sexual harassment and childhood sexual abuse, among other claims.Giuseppe Zeffirelli, one of the director’s sons whom he adopted as an adult, said in a statement on Thursday that the scene was “as far from pornography as you can imagine,” noting that his father was an outspoken critic of pornography.“It is embarrassing to hear that today, 55 years after filming, two elderly actors who owe their notoriety essentially to this film wake up to declare that they have suffered an abuse that has caused them years of anxiety and emotional distress,” Giuseppe Zeffirelli, who is known as Pippo, said in the statement.He said that over the years, the actors had maintained a “relationship of profound gratitude and friendship” with Mr. Zeffirelli, noting that Ms. Hussey had worked with the director again in the 1977 mini-series “Jesus of Nazareth,” playing the Virgin Mary.In her 2018 memoir, “The Girl on the Balcony,” Ms. Hussey recalls the filming of the scene, writing that after a makeup artist approached her to apply full body makeup, she confronted Mr. Zeffirelli following a “small panic attack,” and he assured her that she would be wearing a nightgown in the scene.“‘Although should things, you know, flow in another direction, I want you to be ready,’” Ms. Hussey recalled the director saying.The scene was filmed on a closed set, Ms. Hussey recalled in the memoir, meaning that only essential crew members were allowed to be present, but there was one incident in which a “dirty old man” on the crew had to be removed, she wrote.In interviews from around the time of the memoir’s publication, Ms. Hussey had expressed some approval of how the scene was filmed, telling Variety that it was tastefully shot. She told Fox News that “it wasn’t that big of a deal” and that the film’s production crew had become a “big family.”John C. Manly, a lawyer who has long represented plaintiffs alleging sexual abuse, said that Ms. Hussey’s statements as an adult would likely make the case more difficult for her to win.Mr. Marinozzi said that Ms. Hussey’s interviews about the scene showed her trying to “come to grips” with the situation and express her pride for the film and her performance, although, he said, she was never proud of that scene.“They did what they were directed to do because they were professionals,” he said.Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams

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      With “The Fabelmans,” the Oscar-nominated actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances: “I wanted to make work that an audience member had to deal with.”“I’ve been working as hard as I know how to make myself ready for a moment when I would meet a role like this,” Michelle Williams said of her performance as Mitzi in “The Fabelmans.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“You’re really organized,” I said to Michelle Williams.“I’m a Virgo,” she replied.On a rainy, late-November afternoon, Williams sat opposite me in a Brooklyn cafe, beaming with the kind of pleasure you can only get from plotting your day out to perfection. As we spoke, her three children were all occupied and accounted for: Her teenage daughter Matilda was at school, her toddler Hart was napping, and her newborn wouldn’t need to be fed for the next hour and a half.For all those things to come together at the same time was nothing short of a mothering miracle, and though her husband, the director Thomas Kail, was out of town, her own mother had come to New York to pitch in with the kids, freeing Williams to arrive at the cafe with the wide-eyed, can-hardly-believe-it expression of someone who had just pulled off a heist.“This is the perfect guilt-free time because nobody needs me,” Williams said, though she noted it isn’t easy to meet the demands of a press tour while breastfeeding: “I’m on somebody else’s timeline, because I’m the food.”Still, she’s doing all she can to promote “The Fabelmans,” a semi-autobiographical family drama from Steven Spielberg where the 42-year-old actress plays Mitzi, a character Spielberg based on his own mother. Though her dreams of being a concert pianist were put aside to raise her family, Mitzi treats child-rearing as a brand-new creative playground: One day, she’ll pack the kids into the car to go chase a tornado, while another time, she’ll impulsively buy a monkey as a family pet.People might look at the eccentric character and think she’s too much, but Mitzi looks at her life and knows it’s not enough. She’s married to dutiful, dull Burt (Paul Dano) but pines for his best friend (Seth Rogen), a transgression her budding-filmmaker son Sammy only cottons onto when he puts Mitzi in front of his lens. You sense that Spielberg, too, is using Williams as a vessel to better understand his late mother: The director has rarely seemed so wowed by a leading lady, shooting Williams with the same awe Sammy exhibits when he films his mother in the grips of an artistic reverie.Williams has already picked up nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards for her live-wire performance. “I’ve been working as hard as I know how to make myself ready for a moment when I would meet a role like this,” she said. At the Gotham Awards, where she picked up a tribute award in November, Williams drew a line all the way back to her work on the teen soap “Dawson’s Creek,” which she starred in at age 16 alongside actors James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes.Michelle Williams at the Long Island Bar in Brooklyn.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“She seemed so different from the other kids, a creature unto herself even then,” said the actress Mary Beth Peil, who played Williams’s grandmother on the show. “Working with her then, her honesty was almost painful. That’s one of the main things I learned from her, that the camera can see honesty. It’s at the root of every breath she takes.”What motivated her to pursue an acting career at such a young age? “It was like a stand-in for selfhood,” Williams said, “like maybe I could get regard for a woman that I was playing and that would somehow transfer to me, this person that I didn’t really know how to inhabit yet.” As she grew older and won parts in Off Broadway plays or indie films like “The Station Agent,” it felt to her “like I was given a little morsel, and I would tuck it away,” she said. “I collected them and strung them along, and then they started adding up.”With her Oscar-nominated roles in “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine” and “Manchester by the Sea,” as well as the naturalistic films she has made with the director Kelly Reichardt (their next collaboration, “Showing Up,” comes out this year), Williams established herself as a top-tier actress capable of unvarnished authenticity. But she is keen to experiment in a more heightened register, as she did in 2011 playing Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn” and in 2019 with her Emmy-winning role as the dancer Gwen Verdon in the FX series “Fosse/Verdon.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.In an email, Spielberg, who wrote “The Fabelmans” with Tony Kushner, said, “She has a secret energy that poured from her when she played Gwen Verdon. That went a long way into making her my first choice to play Mitzi.”To hear Williams tell it, that shift to bigger, more stylized performances took a concerted effort; in person, she’s much more contained, with a presence as close-cropped as the pixie haircut she often favors. “It’s good for me to live like that for periods of time because it’s not my natural place,” Williams said, smiling as she recalled how much bigger she had to become to inhabit Mitzi Fabelman. “It’s the most wonderful thing to borrow.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Seth Rogen, Paul Dano and Michelle Williams in a scene from “The Fabelmans.”Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentOften, when you watch these kinds of autobiographical coming-of-age movies, the moms get short shrift. But in “The Fabelmans,” the mother-son dynamic feels like the central story.I couldn’t believe it when I started turning pages in this script. My husband was in the room with me, and I kept saying, “It’s just getting better.” Very often when you have a script, you have a great scene and you think, “Oh, that’s going to be splashy.” And this was just page after page of that, just this undulating, gorgeous aliveness. When I finished, I said to my husband, “It’s a feast. They made her a feast.”It took me a long time to wrap my head around the material because the words and ideas are classic Kushner, through the lens of Steven Spielberg. So it’s filmic and it’s theatrical, which is something that really interests me and I’ve been purposefully concentrating on since I started doing theater again. I prep a lot before a movie, and there was so much to grab hold of. It felt more akin to making a mini-series because the material was so rich.What was the furthest reach for you when it came to playing a big character like Mitzi?In the first part of my career, I was doing sitcoms, TV commercials, soap operas, and I started seeing this other style called naturalism. I wanted that for me, but I had to learn what that was and how to inhabit it, and when I felt like I had arrived at that place that I had yearned to belong in — like with Kelly Reichardt, and every indie movie that I made until I was 30 — the next place that I wanted to go was into something that was more expressionist. That felt like a much further distance to cross.I felt like the journey in my 20s was to finding an authentic way to center myself so that I felt natural inside of my own skin and could offer that to other women that I was playing, but then I wanted to shed that skin completely and be able to find entirely new ways of relating to characters that didn’t always bring me along, that didn’t bind me to just myself for the rest of my working life. That required breaking myself down and then rebuilding myself in somebody else’s image, and making bigger choices.“The journey in my twenties was to finding an authentic way to center myself so that I felt natural inside of my own skin and could offer that to other women that I was playing,” Williams said, “but then I wanted to shed that skin completely and be able to find entirely new ways of relating to characters that didn’t always bring me along.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWhat do you think drew you toward these more stylized characters?I think one of the things that I realized about naturalism — and it’s still a place that I live, I just made my fourth movie with Kelly Reichardt — is that I also wanted to make work that left a mark and that wasn’t open to projection. I wanted to make work that an audience member had to deal with, where there was less interpretation on their part because the interpretation was really my work. I feel like Mitzi belongs there, and Gwen and Marilyn belong there, and the work that I’ve done in theater belongs there. But it took a lot of learning and a lot of mistakes along the way to be comfortable leaving my own skin.I wonder if that spectrum between naturalism and stylization hasn’t been with you since the beginning. Even with something like “Dawson’s Creek,” you were given pages and pages of very dense, stylized dialogue and you had to find a way to make it sound natural.So much dialogue, oh my God. Twelve pages a day, really verbose. And yeah, the situations and scenarios that you’re working through on “Dawson’s Creek” are a little heightened.But I think people appreciate that you don’t disavow that show, and that you actually made a point of drawing a line back to “Dawson’s Creek” in your Gothams speech.Maybe there’s a connection between firstness and lastness, so I’m constantly reconnecting with my time on “Dawson’s Creek” because every project that I end somehow recalls that to me. But it was an incredible kind of training because you’re also learning these really fundamental things, like how to have a conversation with somebody where you’re looking them in the eye but some part of you is also scanning downward to hit your mark. It’s that kind of technical stuff that seems sort of silly and small that still comes in handy for me.And it’s also kind of funny that on that show, Dawson was so obsessed with Spielberg, and now here you are playing Spielberg’s mom.Oh, it’s so weird! I know. It’s so weird.From left, James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams, Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson in a “Dawson’s Creek” episode that aired in 1999. “I’m constantly reconnecting with my time on ‘Dawson’s Creek,’” Williams said.Columbia TriStar Television, via Everett CollectionHow did you feel the day before you started shooting “The Fabelmans”?It felt like when the race is about to begin and you’re on the starting block and your feet are itching and you’re in this state of readiness. It was that kind of high.What had you so excited about inhabiting Mitzi?First of all, it feels good to be her. She was filled with music, so there was an emotional vibration running through her body at all times. I think about the scale of the piano, and that was her range: That’s how low she can go and that’s how high she can hit, so to contain all of that in you for a period of time is thrilling. And it’s the way that she approached so many things as, “Won’t this be so much fun? Won’t this make such an excellent memory for my family?” There was creativity in every aspect of her life, from how she played with the children to how she dressed herself and cut her hair. She was an artist in every fingertip.Tell me about her hair, because that helmet bob is a striking look.The hair was the first thing that we talked about. She was so acutely aware of what looked smashing on her — she wore those Peter Pan collars her entire life and they suited her so beautifully — and that curving haircut was her signature. When you look at pictures of her, they look like film stills, because she looks like a character. She was her own creation, and her entire life and her children’s lives were works of art. Ultimately, that’s what still gives me the chills as a mother of three. I can’t think of a better thing to aspire to.Do you feel the same? Are you creating lives for your children that are like works of art?It’s my aspiration. We’ll see when they’re all grown up how I did.Spielberg ends the movie shortly after Mitzi leaves her husband for another man, but what did you know about the rest of his mother’s life that helped inform how you thought of Mitzi?Later in life, she and Steven’s father had a reconnection and spent their final years together. It’s overlapping love stories, which is ultimately why the story is heartbreaking, because this love hadn’t disappeared between these two people — it had changed and turned into something else. There was still enough love in their relationship to hold a family, but in your one and only life, it still wasn’t enough to make her stay. The bravery of that decision to me! And so I never encountered her as being selfish, or unhinged. I thought this is a woman who is living so truthfully, so expressively and so bravely, and then giving that gift to each of her children because they saw her do it.Many pundits thought you were a lock to win the supporting-actress Oscar for this role, but instead, you chose to be campaigned as a lead in a very competitive awards race.I think that was a conversation that was happening outside of the core group that made this movie, and I don’t really know why there was a disparity. Although I haven’t seen the movie, the scenes that I read, the scenes that I prepped, the scenes that we shot, the scenes that I’m told are still in the movie, are akin to me with experiences that I have had playing roles considered lead. So for myself, or for anybody involved in the movie, I think we were all in unspoken agreement.“She has a secret energy that poured from her when she played Gwen Verdon,” Steven Spielberg, the director of “The Fabelmans,” said. “That went a long way into making her my first choice to play Mitzi.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesYou still haven’t seen “The Fabelmans”?I’m not able to watch my own work. I think the last thing I saw was “Meek’s Cutoff” in a theater with my daughter, so it’s been about a decade.How come?When I’m working on something, I feel so completely inside of it, and when I switch to an audience member, it alters my experience — and the experience is ultimately what I’m in it for. I can’t seem to go back and forth between the two ways to be involved in storytelling, even though I would like to be strong enough and capable of watching myself, figuring out what I would like to technically adjust and then applying it to the next time. I’ve tried to do that, but I’m getting internal bounce-back. I’m happier and maybe healthier just staying in my personal experience of playing these women.Did that make the end of filming “The Fabelmans” more fraught, because it was the last experience you’d really have with the character?On our last day, I grieved like somebody had actually died. I shocked myself by how grief-stricken I was to say goodbye to the woman that I had inhabited and the relationships that I had with these other characters. I still miss being her and having that spirit coursing through mine, so it’s nice to remember her and the urgency of that period of filming. When you’re making something, you feel like the whole world is available material — everything is tingling and anything is possible — and then, once the filming is over, you go back to breakfast tables. Which I clearly love, because I keep doubling down on kids.You seem to throw yourself into that part of your life with equal relish.It’s kind of a great way to live, to careen between these two realities of this incredibly full-on work experience and then this incredibly domestic life. I enjoy the extremity of both, but something else this experience has given me is the reminder to try and synthesize both sides of my brain.In my real life, I’m very practical, I’m very organized. I’m always making lists and feeling great if I check them off, and my work life is a place where I let all of that go and I allow myself to live unbound from time and order and right and wrong. I want to give myself more of that in my everyday life. It doesn’t have to be so linear, and Mitzi is my best reminder for that: Once she knew what she wanted, she wasted no time taking that for herself. It’s how we should all live, don’t you think? More

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      Jeremy Renner Is in Critical Condition After Snow Plowing Accident

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      The actor, known for his role as Hawkeye in Marvel’s Avengers movies, had surgery, his representative said.Update: Jeremy Renner was run over by a 7-ton snow plow, authorities said. The actor Jeremy Renner was in critical but stable condition after being hospitalized with serious injuries from an accident while plowing snow in Nevada, his representative said in a statement.Mr. Renner had surgery on Monday and had “suffered blunt chest trauma and orthopedic injuries” from the accident, the representative, Samantha Mast, said in a statement, adding that Mr. Renner remained in the intensive care unit. The sheriff’s office in Washoe County, Nev., said Mr. Renner had suffered a “traumatic injury” in Reno on Sunday morning. He was the only person involved in the accident and was flown to a nearby hospital, the sheriff’s office said. Mr. Renner has a house in the Mount Rose-Ski Tahoe area, according to The Reno-Gazette Journal.Mr. Renner, 51, has played Hawkeye, a member of Marvel’s Avengers superheroes team, in several movies and a television series. He has also twice been nominated for an Oscar, for his roles in “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “The Town” (2010).Ms. Mast said Mr. Renner and his family were “tremendously overwhelmed and appreciative of the outpouring of love and support from his fans.”Mr. Renner has shared several updates on social media this winter as the Reno area received large amounts of snow.“Nearly done With sledding hill For the kids,” said a caption on an Instagram video clip showing a snow plow last week.“Lake Tahoe snowfall is no joke,” he said last month in a tweet that showed a vehicle covered in snow.Mr. Renner stars in “Mayor of Kingstown,” a thriller whose second season is set to be released on the Paramount+ streaming service on Jan. 15. Another show, “Rennervations,” which follows Mr. Renner as he helps communities to reimagine purpose-built vehicles, is scheduled to air on Disney+ early this year.The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning over the weekend for the areas around Reno, in addition to a warning that was in place for the Lake Tahoe Basin. On Saturday and Sunday, the Tahoe Basin at lake level received between 20 and 24 inches of snow, the Weather Service in Reno said.The Weather Service on Sunday advised those with travel plans through the Sierra Nevada to prepare for winter weather driving conditions and warned of icy roads as additional storms arrive. About 22,000 customers in Nevada were without power early Monday after the storm, according to PowerOutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities across the country. More

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      Diego Calva and the Detour That Took Him to ‘Babylon’

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      A VHS tape of “Peter and the Wolf,” the Disney animated short from 1946, played on repeat at home when Diego Calva was growing up in the 1990s.Both terrified and tantalized by that first cinematic obsession as a child, Calva discovered the power of audiovisual storytelling in the unnerving leitmotif of the villainous wolf.“Without being able to put in words, it made me realize that I was a little box of feelings and that movies could make them surface,” Calva explained, speaking in Spanish. “That hooked me.”After only one major independent movie, the actor from Mexico City is now starring alongside Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in his first mega-budget American production: the director Damien Chazelle’s silent-era revel “Babylon,” about the grotesque origins of the Hollywood film industry and why movies fascinate us.Calva, 30, recently received a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a musical or comedy for his performance as the Mexican-born Manny Torres, who slowly moves up the ranks in 1920s Hollywood — from catch-all production assistant to influential producer.Calva with Brad Pitt in “Babylon,” the Mexican star’s first big-budget American feature. Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures, via Associated PressHis character functions as the story’s driving force: as both the link between Pitt’s and Robbie’s characters — two successful, often deranged actors — and as the viewer’s guide to this decadent world. Calva gives Manny an adoring naïveté about the movies, which fuels the character’s determination to become a part of them, even if his devotion eventually backfires.While Calva worked hard to win the part, performing wasn’t his original dream. Long before Hollywood called, Calva had ambitions to become a writer-director, as he explained in an interview at a hotel in Beverly Hills. The tall, easygoing novice wore a preppy look comprised of a gray sweater vest over a white T-shirt, black slacks and a pair of shiny black shoes.From a young age, he surrounded himself with friends a few years older who were making short films. Like Manny, Calva helped out in miscellaneous positions behind the scenes of those independent shoots, whether it was catering or holding a boom mic.On one such set, he was asked to step in for an actor who hadn’t shown up, which led to more jobs, mostly unpaid, in front of the camera. He eventually landed his first lead in a feature film, appearing in the director Julio Hernández Cordón’s 2015 gay drama “I Promise You Anarchy,” a festival hit.‘Babylon’: The Essence and the Excesses of the 1920sDamien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie in  a tale about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.Review: “There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging,” our critic writes.Characters: “Babylon” draws on film history just enough to flatter cinephiles and risk their ire. Here is a guide to the real-life figures behind the epic.Visuals: Chazelle and the production designer Florencia Martin discuss how they sought to convey the mythical nature of 1920s Hollywood.Hairstyle: The silent-screen star played by Robbie wears her locks long and frizzy — and that’s by design.The story follows two male skateboarders in a tumultuous romance, as they become involved with criminals trafficking human blood on the black market.On a friend’s recommendation, Hernández Cordón checked out Calva’s Facebook profile. Afterward, the director eagerly reached out to Calva, who had been skating since early adolescence.“Within five minutes of meeting Diego, I knew he was the right person for the part because of his confidence and charisma,” Hernández Cordón said on a video call from Mexico City.While there was no formal casting process, Calva and his co-star, Eduardo Eliseo Martinez, had to agree to the intimate scenes in the screenplay. Their openness to portraying intense desire solidified the director’s trust in them.“I’ve always considered myself a bit punk and I love skating,” Calva said, “so the movie was like bringing to life some situations I was already going through at the time.”As Hernández Cordón pointed out, Calva straddles the line between his middle-class upbringing, raised by a single mother who instilled in him an affinity for the arts, and the street smarts attained by wandering a large metropolis with kids from other socioeconomic backgrounds.“I knew Diego had an innate talent, but I worried that he wouldn’t realize the gift he has,” Hernández Cordón said. “I’m very happy that he’s starting a new chapter with ‘Babylon.’”Calva is up for a Golden Globe for his turn in “Babylon.”Carlos Jaramillo for The New York TimesThat introduction to performing professionally, however, didn’t dazzle Calva enough to make him push his filmmaking aspirations aside.He went on to enroll at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, one of Mexico’s pre-eminent film schools, to study directing. But to stay afloat financially, Calva took on acting work, which created a conflict with the institution’s policies.Ultimately, he chose to leave the school and returned to acting full time, appearing on TV series and in supporting parts on the big screen, and putting on acting workshops for children.It was during this period of doubt about his future that the opportunity to audition for the third season of the Netflix hit series “Narcos: Mexico” arrived. He aced it. And while playing the real-life drug lord Arturo Beltrán Leyva on the show introduced him to production on a larger scale, Calva couldn’t anticipate what would soon come his way.As Damien Chazelle searched, in late 2019, for a fresh face to star in “Babylon,” he came across Calva’s image amid a stack of headshots. The Oscar-winning director was struck by the actor’s gaze.“There was something of a dreamer in his eyes, something of a poet,” Chazelle said via video. “But I had no idea if he could act.”The character he envisioned Calva for, Manny, is partly inspired by two Latin American filmmakers whose careers started to take off in the 1920s: Enrique Juan Vallejo, the Mexican cinematographer and director, and René Cardona, the prolific Cuban-born director.Calva submitted several self-taped auditions and eventually met with Chazelle online during the early months of the Covid pandemic. The more intrigued Chazelle became by Calva, the more it also became apparent that the actor had limited experience and that his English needed work.Chazelle and Olivia Hamilton, his wife and a producer of the film, “debated whether it was a gamble worth taking with Diego,” Chazelle said. “She had this full 100 percent unwavering belief in him.”Several months into the casting process, Calva began to feel overwhelmed by the life-changing magnitude of the opportunity, which seemed closer to materializing but not yet certain. Aside from executing Chazelle’s increasingly specific notes about his line delivery, improving his English became a priority.In late 2020, Calva finally traveled to Los Angeles to meet with Chazelle and Robbie, who would play Nellie LaRoy, a fictional starlet and Manny’s love interest.Using his cellphone, Chazelle filmed the chemistry read between Calva and Robbie in his backyard. Their palpable energy convinced him that Calva could deliver on his potential.“He had this kind of Al Pacino-level ability to command the camera without seeming to do anything,” Chazelle said. In fact, Pacino’s arc from innocence to corruption as Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” films served as a key reference for Calva’s turn.Robbie admired Calva’s ability to improvise in his second language.“It’s so transformative to act with him because he’s so present that you forget you’re doing a scene,” Robbie said. “He was the greatest scene partner I could ever wish for.”Calva opposite Margot Robbie in “Babylon.” She said Calva is “so present you forget you’re doing a scene.”Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures, via Associated PressFor Calva, the parallels between him and Manny feel almost like docu-fiction. “I identify with him in wanting to belong in the world of the movies,” he said. The actor’s wide-eyed reactions to an epic set piece early in the sweeping story came from genuine emotion.“My first day on a Hollywood set was also the character’s first day on a Hollywood set,” Calva explained. “All of the expressions of surprise you see on my face are real.”By the time one of the final scenes was shot, in which Manny watches the musical “Singin’ in the Rain” and cries, Calva had been immersed in the universe of Chazelle’s movie for nearly eight months. For that emotional moment, the director asked him to replay “Babylon” in its entirety, from Manny’s point of view, via facial expressions.“It’s such a crazy piece of direction, and he does it,” Robbie said. “You feel everything you’ve felt for the last three hours play out on his face in a few seconds.”“I needed an actor who could really dig deep and summon something,” Chazelle said. “It’s the hardest kind of acting to do because you don’t have the benefit of words, language or even body movement. You have to do it all just in your face, in your eyes.”As Manny rises in Hollywood, he loses perspective, even denying his Mexican identity and claiming to be from Spain. Calva, grounded in advice from his mother, whom he considers his best friend, said he believed that wouldn’t happen to him.“I don’t want to lose my childlike outlook on life, my ability for wonder,” Calva said. “I want to remember the road back home and know that if I make mistakes I won’t lose myself.”For now, Calva plans to remain in Mexico City and build his burgeoning career, but whenever he’s wanted on this side of the border, the actor will joyfully oblige.“They invited me to this party,” Calva said with a hint of mischievous glee. “Getting me out of Hollywood is going to be difficult.” More

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      in Television

      Jeremy Renner Is in Critical Condition After Snow-Plowing Accident

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      The actor, known for his role as Hawkeye in Marvel’s Avengers movies, was stable, his representative said.The actor Jeremy Renner was in critical but stable condition after being hospitalized with serious injuries from an accident while plowing snow in Nevada, his representative said in a statement.“His family is with him, and he is receiving excellent care,” the representative, Samantha Mast, said in a statement on Monday.The sheriff’s office in Washoe County, Nev., said Mr. Renner had suffered a “traumatic injury” in the Reno area on Sunday morning. He was the only person involved in the accident and was flown to a nearby hospital, the sheriff’s office said. Mr. Renner has a house in the Mount Rose-Ski Tahoe area, according to The Reno-Gazette Journal.Mr. Renner, 51, has played Hawkeye, a member of Marvel’s Avengers superheroes team, in several movies and a television series. He has also twice been nominated for an Oscar, for his roles in “The Hurt Locker” (2008) and “The Town” (2010).Mr. Renner has shared several updates on social media this winter as the area received large amounts of snow.“Nearly done With sledding hill For the kids,” said a caption on an Instagram video clip showing a snow plow last week.“Lake Tahoe snowfall is no joke,” he said in a tweet last month that showed a vehicle covered in snow.Mr. Renner stars in “Mayor of Kingstown,” a thriller whose second season is set to be released on the Paramount+ streaming service on Jan. 15. Another show, “Rennervations,” which follows Mr. Renner as he helps communities to reimagine purpose-built vehicles, is scheduled to air on Disney+ early this year.The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning over the weekend for the areas around Reno, in addition to a warning that was in place for the Lake Tahoe Basin. On Saturday and Sunday, the Tahoe Basin at lake level received between 20 and 24 inches of snow, the Weather Service in Reno said.The Weather Service on Sunday advised those with travel plans through the Sierra Nevada to prepare for winter weather driving conditions and warned of icy roads as additional storms arrive. About 22,000 customers in Nevada were without power early Monday after the storm, according to poweroutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities across the country. More

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      in Theater

      A Cop Called Coco, an Actor Named Mani, a Quebecer Exploring Quebec

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      MONTREAL — Just five years ago, Mani Soleymanlou, a Quebec actor of Iranian origin, was playing characters named Ahmed, Hakim and Karim on French-language television shows produced in the province. Today, his roles include Patrick, a banker, in one successful TV series, and a corrupt police officer with the very Québécois name Robert “Coco” Bédard, in another.Coco appears in “C’est comme ça que je t’aime,” or “Happily Married,” a dark, rollicking comedy set in the 1970s in a suburb of the provincial capital, Quebec City — a time and place where the chances would have been slim of running into someone like Mr. Soleymanlou: an immigrant who was born in Iran, and grew up in Paris, Toronto and Ottawa, before landing in Quebec.“I think,” Mr. Soleymanlou said in French, with an accent picked up in Paris, “Québécois culture has long been very homogeneous.”But that is changing — thanks in part to people like him.That Mr. Soleymanlou, 40, went from playing typecast outsiders to an insider named Coco Bédard in a few short years is also indicative of larger shifts in Quebec society.Though it still remains rooted in the French language, in ethnicity and in a shared history, Québécois identity is in flux right now — and what it means to be Québécois is what Mr. Soleymanlou has spent the past decade deconstructing in his other career as a playwright.With his family, Mr. Soleymanlou was among the Iranian exiles who streamed to France in the years after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980.At a recent performance at the Théâtre Jean-Duceppe in Montreal, the packed audience gave Mr. Soleymanlou a standing ovation for his trilogy, “Un, Deux, Trois.” For four and a half hours, he dissects his own search for identity after arriving in Quebec, which made him feel like more of an outsider than anywhere else, and he explores the meaning of identity itself and the place of French speakers in Canada, an otherwise overwhelmingly Anglophone country.Collectively, the three plays raise difficult questions that go to the heart of Québécois identity.Can an immigrant from Iran, or anywhere else, ever be considered Québécois? If the French language is a pillar of Québécois identity, what is the place of the French spoken by newcomers from the Maghreb or West Africa, accents heard more and more throughout the province? Is French Québécois identity fated to disappear because of demographics and geography? Or can it — should it? — reinvent itself by becoming part of the global Francophone world?If the success of Mr. Soleymanlou’s trilogy and the arc of his acting career suggest that Québécois identity is expanding, the recent provincial elections also show that the evolution hasn’t been smooth and isn’t a given. The provincial premier, François Legault, and his allies won in a landslide, partly by promoting a cultural nationalism that portrayed immigrants as a threat to Quebec society.Quebec nationalists, especially during the heady days of the independence movement in the 1970s and 1980s, upheld immigrants’ mastery of French as the key to acceptance and integration in Quebec society.But Quebec nationalists have moved the goal posts in recent years, emphasizing instead that immigrants must adhere to an amorphous notion of Quebec values. Politicians like Mr. Legault and his allies, while stressing the importance of French, have also described immigration as undermining Quebec’s identity.“They’re using identity to score political points, especially among older voters, because that’s where fear works,” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “And that’s the problem. They’re not talking to the new Quebec.”Mr. Soleymanlou’s trilogy, “Un, Deux, Trois,” explores identity in Quebec and the place of French speakers in Canada, an otherwise overwhelmingly Anglophone country. Mr. Soleymanlou spoke recently during an interview at a café in Hochelaga, a Montreal neighborhood where he lives with his partner, Sophie Cadieux, a Québécoise actress, and their son. Appointed to the prestigious position of director of the French theater at Canada’s National Arts Centre in Ottawa last year, Mr. Soleymanlou was in the middle of a tour of eight Canadian cities with his trilogy.“In his work, he was able to use humor and laughter and this technique almost like standup comedy to talk about his experiences,” said Yana Meerzon, a professor of theater at the University of Ottawa, contrasting his plays with the straightforward tragedies of some other migrant stories.She added that his work acknowledged the differences between adult immigrants and child immigrants. “They don’t speak from that culture, necessarily, they speak from their own culture, which is mixed.” Mr. Soleymanlou’s successful dual career as actor and playwright points to the opening up of French Québécois popular culture, which has long existed apart from the rest of Canada. Despite the province’s demographics being changed by successive waves of immigration over many decades, the stage and the screen had until recently been dominated by stories told by French Québécois for an audience of French Québécois. “We were very late,” Mr. Soleymanlou said, “but now we’re accelerating to catch up.”Born in Tehran a couple of years after Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Mr. Soleymanlou and his family joined a stream of Iranian exiles to France. In Paris, he attended public schools and learned French, before the family packed up again, this time for Toronto, when he was 9.In Toronto, he went to schools with immigrants like himself and eventually “forgot about himself” — immersed in the ever-widening circle of multiculturalism that is the ethos of Canada outside Quebec.He arrived two decades ago in Quebec to study at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal. By then, newcomers from Francophone Africa, many of them Muslim, were reshaping the city’s landscape, the way previous immigrants from Europe and Asia already had for decades. Still, the arts were the domain of the French Québécois.That was made clear to him on his first day at the school where he and three others accounted for the only non-French Québécois students. Four was the most there had ever been in a school with more than 100 students.“Since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never felt more like a guy from elsewhere, like a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant,” Mr. Soleymanlou said in his play “Un.” The school director at the time made a joke of struggling to pronounce his name, Mr. Soleymanlou recalled. Then, using two common French Québécois family names, she said, “They’ll stop criticizing us for having only Tremblays and Girards at the National Theatre School.”“I didn’t understand at all why we were being separated into two categories of students,” he said.That first day set off a search for identity — his own and that of the French Québécois — that, almost by accident, eventually launched his career.In 2009, he was invited to perform at the Théâtre de Quat’Sous in Montreal, which then showcased immigrant artists every Monday evening. Drawing on his life, he wrote and performed a monologue that would become “Un,” the first part of his trilogy.“Since my arrival in Quebec, I’ve never felt more like a guy from elsewhere, like a stranger, an exile, lost, an immigrant,” he said in the play. “Never have I had to explain so often where I came from, to justify my accent, to describe my path, to pronounce over and over again my family name.”His anguished search for identity in “Un” resonated in a province where the dominant French Québécois had long fought to preserve their own sense of self, surrounded as they are by an English majority.“Quebec is a society that’s had to protect and defend itself, always positioning itself in opposition to the other,” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “That’s something I didn’t understand in the beginning — that the Québécois want to know how you define yourself because they have to define themselves to protect themselves.”Mr. Soleymanlou continued his search for identity in “Deux,” in a dialogue with a bilingual Jewish Montrealer, and then in “Three,” which featured three dozen French speakers who were not French Québécois.Before 2017, Mr. Soleymanlou had never been offered a role with a French name. “There’s been a radical change in the past decade, a phenomenal paradigm shift in the arts in Quebec,” he said. As his theater career took off, the scripts sent his way changed. In 2017, while performing his trilogy in Paris, he got a call from Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster, offering him the role of “Philippe” in a new series. He had never been offered a role with a French name before.“Philippe on Radio-Canada? My God, yes,” Mr. Soleymanlou recalled answering.But when he got the script, he found that his role had been changed to a Greek named “Yaniss.” The producers said sorry, but he remained Yaniss.He had to wait two more years for his first meaty role as an ethnic French Québécois — that of the corrupt, though lovable, cop in “Happily Married,” a series about two couples in a very French Québécois suburb, Sainte-Foy, who turn to organized crime while their kids are away at summer camp.“The role of a police officer, in the 1970s, in Sainte-Foy, in Quebec, played by someone of Iranian origin?” Mr. Soleymanlou said. “Ten years ago, that would have been impossible.” More