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      Ricardo Darín: Argentina’s Lucky Charm at the Oscars

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      When the country has a nominated film, it has usually starred this veteran. But the actor says other people have believed in his talent more than he has.WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Fortune has long favored Ricardo Darín. More than the subjective concept of talent, it is providence, manifested as other people’s unwavering confidence in his abilities, that the actor credits for his storied career as Argentina’s most celebrated film star internationally.“I’ve had all the luck that my parents didn’t have as actors,” he said in Spanish during a recent interview at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood. “Many times, people have valued me far more than I value myself, and I often think, ‘Do I deserve all that?’”The latest example of his relationship with Lady Luck is his turn as the real-life prosecutor Julio Strassera in “Argentina, 1985,” a historical courtroom drama about the Trial of the Juntas, when military leaders were tried for human rights violations during the former dictatorship. Directed by Santiago Mitre, it earned Argentina an Oscar nomination for best international feature film.Darín seems to be his country’s lucky charm when it comes to the Academy Awards. He has starred in all four movies to earn Argentina a nod this century, including “Son of the Bride,” “Wild Tales” and “The Secret in Their Eyes,” which took home the statuette in 2010. And Argentina has also submitted several other Darín-led productions to the academy over the years — meaning that even though they didn’t all make the cut, the films in which he appears are almost synonymous with the best of Argentine cinema.From the first handshake, Darín, 66, radiates a welcoming aura. Casually dressed in bluejeans and a navy sweater, he speaks with a warmth and candor that most people reserve for their closest friends. That temperament translates onscreen.“Ricardo has an immense power to elicit empathy from the audience, and that’s rare,” said the director Juan José Campanella, who has collaborated with Darín on four features.“Ricardo has an immense power to elicit empathy from the audience, and that’s rare,” said the director Juan José Campanella.David Billet for The New York TimesThough the actor inherited a passion for performance from his parents, who were both working actors in Buenos Aires, neither was enthusiastic about his carrying on the family’s craft. “They didn’t fight me on it, but they also didn’t encourage me to do it,” he recalled.Darín thinks of his path as preordained. He was a regular on film and TV sets and theater stages in childhood, first acting professionally at 3 years old in the 1960 series “Soledad Monsalvo.” At 10 he debuted onstage alongside his parents. By the time he attended his first theater workshop at 14, Darín felt like a seasoned veteran who had already experienced many facets of the job firsthand.For a time in adolescence, he contemplated becoming a veterinarian, a psychologist or even a lawyer. But in the end, the world he had always been familiar with persuaded him to stay. Doors opened easily for him, with frequent invitations to participate in a variety of projects.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Tom Cruise’s Gravitational Pull: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.That trust from notable people in the industry is what he calls fortune. Darín has dear memories of the television director Diana Álvarez, who got into a fight with a network in 1982 so that he could be part of the show “Nosotros y Los Miedos.” She saw in him potential that others couldn’t.“In our profession, luck is very important,” Darín said. “There are very talented people out there with lots to tell who can’t find opportunities.”In the 1990s, Darín found immense success as the co-star of the sitcom “Mi Cuñado” (“My Brother-in-Law”), playing an impertinent but charming screw-up. His contract restricted him from other TV ventures but allowed him to pursue films. Among them was his first outing with Campanella, “The Same Love, the Same Rain” (1999), which helped other directors see beyond his TV persona.Darín’s academy-nominated films, clockwise from top left: “Argentina, 1985,” “Son of the Bride,” “The Secret in Their Eyes” and “Wild Tales.” Amazon Prime (“Argentina, 1985)”; Sony Pictures Classics (“Son of the Bride,” “Wild Tales”); María Antolini/Sony Pictures Classics (“The Secret in Their Eyes”)One of them, Fabián Bielinsky, cast him in the thriller “Nine Queens” (released in Argentina in 2000) as a sleazy con man. “He told me, ‘I hadn’t thought about you for this role. You are too charismatic, and I don’t want the audience to have any empathy for him,’” Darín recalled.In Campanella’s view, “There’s only one thing Ricardo cannot be, and that is unlikable. The clearest proof is ‘Nine Queens,’ where he plays an amoral crook, but we still root for him.”Campanella’s heartfelt “Son of the Bride” arrived the next year and mined Darín’s comic sensibilities for the role of a restaurant owner dealing with his aging parents.“Once an Argentine critic called him ‘our Henry Fonda’ because he projects great integrity,” Campanella said. “But he has something that Fonda didn’t, which is a great sense of humor.”Darín maintains that it was the one-two punch of “Nine Queens” and “Son of the Bride” that cemented his film career.“It was a great calling card for an actor to have the possibility of showing two absolutely opposite facets almost at once,” Darín said. “Even though I was already well known for TV and theater, that’s when I started to feel my colleagues were seeing me in a better light.”Since then, Darín has enjoyed his choice of roles, including Campanella’s acclaimed “The Secret in Their Eyes,” in which he starred as an investigator haunted by a gruesome, unresolved case.Another of Darín’s personal favorites is the dramedy “Truman” (2017), centered on a terminally ill man spending his final days alongside his best friends — one human and one canine. His wry character reminded Darín of his late father, also named Ricardo Darín, whom he described as a peculiar Renaissance man with an acid sense of humor and wild ideas that others found difficult to digest.Hollywood has reached out a handful of times, but he has declined, mostly because the most difficult thing for an actor to do is to think in another language, he said, adding that close-ups reveal when someone is reciting from memory rather than inhabiting an emotion.“I’ve always trusted my gut, more than my heart or my head,” Darín explained, then added, motioning to his stomach, “I trust in how the material hits me right here.”Hollywood has come calling, but Darín is largely uninterested because, he said, thinking in another language is the most difficult thing for an actor to do.David Billet for The New York TimesIn Argentina, his turn in Damián Szifron’s “Wild Tales” (released stateside in 2015) as a frustrated citizen who fights back against oppressive bureaucracy was widely embraced by audiences. “Ricardo has a lucid outlook on the realities that affect his country,” Szifron said. “He is a popular figure while at the same time being a sophisticated actor.”For “Argentina, 1985,” Mitre and Darín agreed not to mimic the voice or exact mannerisms of the real Strassera, but instead took a degree of artistic liberty in their re-creation.Mitre, who had directed Darín as a fictional Argentine president in the 2017 political saga “The Summit,” said he admired how the actor produces a truthful performance through a synthesis of his own sensibilities and the character’s.“It’s as if the camera could capture him in his entirety, show him in all his complexity,” Mitre said. “Whenever you see Ricardo act, you know there will be great honesty onscreen.”Beyond the positive critical reception of “Argentina, 1985” — and its Golden Globe win — Darín said the film’s most significant effect was making a younger generation aware of a sorrowful chapter in the country’s history.“We can’t forget that behind this reclaiming of the historical event that has brought us a lot of praise and happiness, there’s a deeply painful story about the kind of suffering for which there is no balm,” Darín noted with a solemn expression.His family’s acting tradition is being carried on by his son, Chino Darín, with whom he has formed a production company. The two starred in and produced the 2019 comedy “Heroic Losers.” The elder Darín never opposed his child’s interest in the craft, only advising him to follow the path that would bring the most satisfaction.“I’m one of those people who believe the most important thing in life is to try to be happy,” Darín said. “The closer you are to your vocation, the better chance you have at being happy.” More

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      Christoph Waltz Has Some Thoughts

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      Christoph Waltz knows a few things about acting, and he has the Academy Awards to prove it. Yet in a recent conversation, he made light of the skills required.“I don’t believe in good actor, bad actor,” he said. “If you’re playing an interesting part in a worthwhile story and you’re cast properly, you’d have to be a complete idiot to not be good.”It is difficult to tell how serious Waltz is when he makes this type of deliciously arch grand statement, just as it is difficult to pinpoint what exactly drives his latest screen creation — the title character of the satirical new Amazon workplace thriller “The Consultant.”Adapted by the “Servant” creator Tony Basgallop from the 2015 novel by Bentley Little, the eight-episode series, debuting Friday on Prime Video, tells the story of a video game studio after the sudden, violent death of its young founder, which sends the company into a tailspin. Out of nowhere, an off-putting stranger named Regus Patoff (Waltz), who claims to be a hired consultant from Crimea, appears and takes over. It is obvious immediately that something is a little off — or maybe a lot.Like many of Waltz’s best known characters, Regus is unfailingly soft-spoken and courteous — even when firing a guy for how he smells — as was Waltz, himself, on a recent morning in the Drawing Room of the Greenwich Hotel, in Lower Manhattan. And yet there is usually a wry edge to what he does, which often plays as ruthless in his characters, not least the two for which he won Oscars: an SS officer in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and a bounty hunter in Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.”His character stays true to form in “The Consultant,” which he described as “the first series that I’ve done.” That isn’t entirely accurate — he has had many guest spots and he had regular roles in a few European series decades ago — but it is the first time Waltz, 66, has carried a modern Hollywood series, and with a role so thoroughly Waltz-like. (A series of Quibi short-shorts in which he starred, “Most Dangerous Game,” has since been condensed into a film.) Regus is as seductive as he is ominous, a frightening mix of outwardly pleasant and subtly menacing, a balance that Waltz has perfected over the years.“On the page the character is very harsh and forthright, but onscreen there’s only so far you can go in being nasty,” Basgallop, who is also the showrunner, said in a video conversation. “You also have to have a lot of charm, which I think Christoph brought to it,”“He never says, ‘I am the boss,’” Waltz said of his character in “The Consultant.” “He just acts like a boss and everybody immediately accepts it,” Waltz said. Michael Desmond/Prime VideoIn person, that edge Waltz brings to his roles is the furthest thing from menacing, but it does make for good sport. He is intellectual, playful, a little mischievous — as likely to challenge a question as to answer it. A man of wide-ranging interests, he quoted or paraphrased Stanley Kubrick, Charles Eames, Albert Einstein, Timothy Snyder, Aristotle and Stephen Sondheim in the course of an 80-minute conversation.In a typical rally, he hit a deceptively gentle lob back over the net after being asked if he had ever felt he nailed a scene or role.“All this market-economy vocabulary: ‘nailed it,’” he said. “Well, if you nail it, where do you nail it to? What kind of nail do you use? Why nail it in the first place? It can’t go anywhere anymore. Wouldn’t it be the goal to keep it flowing?”He leaned back in his seat, smiling like the Cheshire Cat.Born and raised in Vienna, Waltz spent decades bouncing around Europe in the workaday worlds of theater and television, doing the occasional film before landing his breakout role, in “Inglourious Basterds,” which debuted when he was 52. At the time, he told The New York Times that after acting in a lot of comedies, playing the villain had become “sort of the flavor of the past few years.”Most of it wasn’t particularly rewarding, but his relationship with Tarantino freed him to combine his facility for both comedy and villainy in more interesting ways — and to be choosier. It also brought him to Los Angeles, where he has been living full-time since the mid-2010s. (Just before the pandemic, he added American citizenship to his Austrian and German ones: “I very much believe in this old dictum of no taxation without representation,” he said, “and I wanted to be represented because I pay a lot of taxes here.”)With a successful run of films with some of the world’s biggest directors under his belt (Wes Anderson, Guillermo Del Toro and Cary Joji Fukunaga among the most recent), he hesitated, at first, to sign on for a TV show. Television requires a particular leap of faith, he said, that films do not.“They ask you to do a whole series but you don’t get anything but the pilot,” Waltz said. It was an experience he had never had before, and he described it with an unlikely metaphor.“The fastest animal is an alligator, but only for five meters,” he informed me. “So I thought, ‘What kind of alligator is that, jumping at me?’”Waltz has credited his analytical approach to acting, in part, to the technique of script interpretation taught by Stella Adler, to which he was exposed during a stint in New York beginning in the late 1970s. In his analysis, the power of his character in “The Consultant” rests in little more than people’s eagerness to follow someone who assumes an air of authority.“He never says, ‘I am the boss’ — he just acts like a boss and everybody immediately accepts it,” Waltz said.He segued to Representative George Santos of New York, who has built a career on brazen lies and self-confidence — but is still standing, even after being exposed.“He should be sitting in a quiet corner, hoping that this thing passes,” Waltz marveled with a gleam in his eye, like a gourmand about to dig into a particularly elaborate dessert. “Now it is pathology, clearly.”Waltz is interested in what makes people tick, but that doesn’t mean he wants to find an explanation or a meaning behind every decision he makes as an actor. Or at least he doesn’t want to dwell on it publicly.“I don’t talk about the process — or sometimes have a, let’s say, ironic distance to disclosing the process — because it’s a very personal thing,” he said. “You follow inklings that you don’t know where they’re coming from.”Regus is the latest in a line of roles in which Waltz deploys an unshowy virtuosity: He does a lot with little. (“It’s about the viewer, not the actor,” he said. “I’m not interested in seeing the actor work; I’m interested in forgetting about the actor altogether.”) Still, getting there takes plenty of experimentation and conversation that you don’t see onscreen. Waltz’s colleagues described him on set as collegial, honest and down to earth.Waltz takes an analytical approach to acting, preferring not to talk too much about his “process,” or at least to have “an ironic distance” when disclosing it. Erik Tanner for The New York Times“When he speaks, you listen because you know it’s heartfelt — you don’t think he’s trying to sell you something or trying to convince you of something,” Basgallop said. “He brings that to his characters as well — someone who has a very strong intellect but is also very calm and measured.“For some reason I think human beings find that terrifying: We’re programmed to be scared of someone like that because they can outthink us.”It’s tempting to draw parallels between Regus’s hold on the video game company’s staff and the one the best actors have on their audiences — and, evidently, on some of their colleagues.In a phone conversation, Nat Wolff, 28, who plays a coder, recalled shooting scenes in which his and Waltz’s characters take off on a bonding expedition. At the end of a busy day, Wolff said, Waltz volunteered some feedback.“He turned to me and he said, ‘You were …’ He took a long pause while I felt my anxiety rising, and then he went ‘ … exquisite today,’” he said. “I really wanted to get his approval, like a paternal figure.”The anecdote illustrates Waltz’s dry humor and precise timing, as well as the way he envisions the best conversations: as impish dialectic. Wolff recalled telling Waltz that he had wanted to get a puppy.“And he said, ‘Think about it from the puppy’s point of view,’” Wolff said, imitating his co-star’s German accent. “‘You’re going to be off on set and the puppy is going to be thinking, Where’s Nat?’”“So I didn’t get a puppy,” he added, laughing. “Whatever Christoph says, you listen to and you follow.” More

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      Richard Belzer Had a Ball With the Relationship Between Comic and Crowd

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      Unlike his TV characters, his live shows were marked by spontaneity and physicality. He could even keep up with Robin Williams line by line.When Richard Belzer did stand-up on “Late Night With David Letterman,” he always entered to the opening riffs of “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones, dancing his way onstage, looking like the life of the party in dark shades. Once he arrived at the microphone, he made a point of engaging with the studio audience in a way you rarely saw on television. More than once, he asked, “You in a good mood?” and waited for a cheer. Then his tone shifted: “Prove it.”With that opening pivot, he turned the relationship between comedian and crowd upside-down. The expectation was now on the people in the seats: Impress me.Belzer, who died Sunday, is best known for his performances as a detective on TV, but his acting career was built on a signature persona in comedy, as a master of seductive crowd work who set the template for the MC in the early days of the comedy club. Often in jackets and shirts buttoned low, he cut a stylish image, spiky and louche. He could charm with the best of them, but unlike many performers, he didn’t come off as desperate for your approval. He understood that one of the peculiar things about comedy is that the line between irritation and ingratiation could easily blur.Throughout the 1970s, he ran the show at the buzziest of the New York clubs: Catch a Rising Star, stand-up’s answer to Studio 54. He roasted the crowds while warming them up, quizzing them about where they were from and what they did, establishing rapport and dominance. Long before Dave Chappelle dropped the mic at the end of shows, Belzer regularly did so.If the crowd wasn’t laughing, he could lay on a guilt trip: “Could you be a little more quiet? Because I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.” And if someone heckled, look out. According to a story from the comic Jonathan Katz, one night someone in the crowd yelled, “Nice jacket!” and Belzer responded that he got it on sale in his mother’s vagina.Belzer didn’t get famous as quickly as many of his peers, but he was a cult figure with wide influence in comedy. You can hear his clipped cadences, not to mention his use of the word “babe” as a nickname, in the act of Dennis Miller, who once referred to him as “the dark prince” of Catch a Rising Star. Andy Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton was partly inspired by Belzer (notice the glasses).Even as an MC, Belzer was his own star attraction. He became famous for taking an incredibly long time to introduce a comic. In an interview for a documentary on him that has yet to be released, Belzer recalled once taking an hour and forty-five minutes to bring up the next comic. The writer Bill Scheft, who is producing the movie, said Belzer ad-libbed many lines “that became stock MC lines for others.”Few of Belzer’s live shows were taped, but you can find traces online. An all-purpose showman who could sing and dance, he even did pratfalls while spoofing a hipster pose. One wonderfully goofy bit involved getting his hand stuck while running it through his hair, dragging his whole body down to the ground. He leaned hard on flamboyant impressions including those of Ronald Reagan, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and especially Mick Jagger. There’s a wonderful competitive moment from the 2011 show “Green Room” when, in the middle of a conversation, Belzer gets into a “Jagger-off” with the comic Rick Overton. He triumphs, doing an impression he always called “peacock on acid.”More than any joke, what stands out from a deep dive into Belzer’s online comedy was an attitude: impatient, sarcastic, friendly but quick to jab. There was a percussive sound to his running retorts to the crowd: “Yeah, right, sure.” These move-it-along interruptions had a rhythm and sound that was quintessentially New York. When he dove into a familiar premise, his voice could move from dry to wry in a blink, mocking himself. It’s no wonder that Letterman, another ironist whose attitude perpetually commented on and upstaged his own jokes, booked him so often.Today, crowd work is much easier to see, in specials but also all over social media, where it has become a critical part of marketing and selling tickets for young comics. But in the 1980s, unless you went to a club, you didn’t often find people turning “Where you from?” into spontaneous comedy, so it’s striking that in his 1986 HBO special, he included plenty of such basic interactions. “There’s a lot of parts of New Jersey that are very nice,” he said, responding to one guy from the state. “I can’t think of any right now.”As early as 1978, he opened sets with a touch of hostility, looking up and asking, “Could you make these lights brighter? I’d like to go blind.”Nothing on video displays his stature as much as a 90-minute show celebrating the 10th anniversary of Catch a Rising Star that aired on HBO in 1982. It’s a terrific portrait of New York comedy at the time, with a long bill including Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal, Rita Rudner and David Brenner, along with the singer Pat Benatar, who was managed by the club’s owner, Rick Newman. Belzer introduces them all, keeping things just sarcastic enough to prevent anyone from taking themselves seriously. Once Joe Piscopo finished a Frank Sinatra impression in full costume and makeup, Belzer marveled: “What an honor. What a surprise. What a man. What a toupée.”At the end, Robin Williams heckled Belzer from the crowd, before going onstage and improvising a series of scenes to close out the night. Whereas Belzer was relatively unknown to the mainstream then, Williams was a giant television star and powerhouse live performer, frenetic and wildly unpredictable. Williams riffed punch lines effortlessly, but Belzer kept up and matched him, line by line. That some don’t land only adds gravitas to the feat, since it proves this was not an act polished for HBO but a real attempt to translate high-wire improv to television.This ephemeral work is not the part of comedy you tend to see in movies or specials, but when done well live, it can be thrilling. And part of the job of the MC is to be alert to the value of spontaneous moments. Belzer understood this as well as anyone.“The greatest thing for me is when I make the audience laugh in a moment that could only happen that night with that audience,” he said in a recent interview. “Sometimes I laugh with the audience because I’m hearing the joke the same time they are.” More

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      Barbara Bosson, 83, Dies; Brought Family Drama to ‘Hill Street Blues’

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      She received five consecutive Emmy nominations for her role as Fay Furillo, the frenetic ex-wife of a police precinct captain.Barbara Bosson, who starred in a half-dozen TV crime dramas from the 1970s to the ’90s but who is best known for her five seasons on “Hill Street Blues,” for which she was nominated for five consecutive Emmy Awards, died on Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 83.Her son, Jesse Bochco, confirmed her death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Ms. Bosson was a relatively unknown actress when she burst through the doors of a police station in the pilot episode of “Hill Street Blues,” the much-lauded police drama that ran from 1981 to 1987. She played Fay Furillo, the frenetic ex-wife of Capt. Frank Furillo (played by Daniel J. Travanti), and she had come to demand alimony, which he was chronically late in paying.Fay’s was supposed to be a one-off appearance, but producers, critics and audiences liked her so much that the writers — including her husband, Steven Bochco, the show’s producer and co-creator — quickly made her a part of the main cast.With its busy camera work and overlapping story lines, “Hill Street Blues” is widely considered a landmark in TV history. Set in a gritty (but unnamed) American city, the show offered a textured take on working-class life that struck a chord with a country in the midst of stagflation and deindustrialization. It was nominated for 97 Emmys, a record at the time for a one-hour drama (it has since been surpassed by “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “ER” and “Game of Thrones”), and won 25.Ms. Bosson’s performance as Fay was central to that success. Her character was difficult and self-pitying, but she was also a hardworking single mother struggling to make ends meet.“Fay is one of those transition women,” she told The Washington Post in 1987. “She grew up in one kind of set of values — she’s not unbright, but she never thought she’d have to support herself. And then she found herself divorced, poor, with a child and real angry.”Ms. Bosson faced accusations that she had won the role because she was married to Mr. Bochco. She brushed them off, but she also said they drove her add depth to the character as a way of showing her creative independence. It was her idea, for example, to make Fay a victims’-rights advocate.Mr. Bochco left the show over creative differences at the end of the fifth season. Ms. Bosson left soon after, claiming that the producers were trying to strip Fay of the endearing qualities she had worked so hard to add.Ms. Bosson went on to star in several more crime shows, including the Bochco creations “Hooperman,” “Cop Rock” and “Murder One,” Her performance as a deputy district attorney on “Murder One” earned her a sixth Emmy nomination.Ms. Bosson at a Screen Actors Guild event in 2005.Mark Sullivan/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBarbara Ann Bosson was born on Nov. 1, 1939, in Charleroi, Pa., about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Her father, John, was an aspiring tennis coach who made ends meet as a milkman, and her mother, Doris, was a homemaker. When Barbara was a teenager, her family moved to Gulfport, Fla., where she graduated from high school in 1957.She gained admission to the drama department at Carnegie Tech (today part of Carnegie Mellon University), but it was too expensive for her parents. Instead she moved to New York, where she worked as a secretary and took acting classes at night. She also worked for a time as a hostess at the Playboy Club in Midtown Manhattan.“I put up with a lot of leering men to be able to study acting,” she told The St. Petersburg Times in 1990.She eventually saved enough money to enroll at Carnegie Tech in 1965, but left before graduating to pursue acting. Her classmates included several future “Hill Street Blues” colleagues, among them Mr. Bochco and the actors Bruce Weitz and Charles Haid.Mr. Bochco was married, but he had divorced by the time they met again, in Los Angeles, in 1969. They married at the end of the year.They divorced in 1997. Mr. Bochco died in 2018. Along with her son, Ms. Bosson is survived by a daughter, Melissa Bochco; two grandchildren; and her brother, Richard.Ms. Bosson’s first screen credit was in the 1968 crime thriller “Bullitt,” with Steve McQueen, and through the 1970s she was seen in a series of small TV and film roles. She was also a member of the Committee, an improv troupe.Though she continued to find work in the 12 years between leaving “Hill Street Blues” and her retirement in 1997, she found it increasingly frustrating, with good roles for women her age few and far between.“There’s this wonderful tradition in Hollywood where men as old as 60 or 70 play opposite women of 20,” she told The Washington Post. “The only time you’ll see an older woman with a younger man is if she’s so knock-them-down-dead gorgeous that anybody would go for her.” More

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      Chase Stokes Turned Down ‘Outer Banks.’ He’s Glad He Reconsidered.

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      The actor plays John B. in the hit Netflix drama, which returns for its third season on Thursday.Before Chase Stokes started playing John B., the teenage treasure hunter at the center of “Outer Banks,” on Netflix, he played a fictional Hollywood manager, mass emailing talent agencies to tout an up-and-coming young actor named Chase Stokes.He also worked as a bartender and a food photographer to make ends meet, and he spent months couch-surfing and occasionally sleeping in his 2009 BMW in the parking lot of the Ovation Hollywood (formerly Hollywood and Highland) mall as he took acting classes.Despite his circumstances, Stokes said he initially turned down offers to audition for “Outer Banks” — it felt like a “Goonies” remake, and he didn’t want to besmirch a classic, he said. But eventually an apartment eviction notice and his car’s overheating engine and expired tags convinced him to give it a shot. He considers himself lucky that he did.“But I think luck is when consistency and determination and hard work meet,” Stokes said.“Outer Banks” is a teen drama about a group of attractive young adventurers (known as “pogues”) battling their island community’s rich kids (“kooks”) and chasing treasure linked to the disappearance of John B.’s father. It debuted in 2020 but broke out when its second season premiered in July 2021, becoming Netflix’s most watched English-language series globally for four weeks. A fan event to promote the third season drew more than 4,000 attendees to Huntington Beach, Calif., on Saturday, to watch performances by acts like Khalid and Lil Baby. The cast also took the stage to announce that the show had already been renewed for a fourth season.Season 3 of “Outer Banks” begins on Thursday, following John B. and the other pogues as they take on new territory in another quest for gold after the first two seasons saw them successfully scavenge and subsequently lose treasures in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The crew was last seen on a deserted island they had named Poguelandia, and the unexpected discovery of John B.’s presumed-dead father, Big John (played by Charles Halford), sparks a new itch to uncover yet another bounty.In a video call from a West Hollywood hotel, Stokes talked about how he initially declined the role that has made him famous and what “Outer Banks” says about friendship and the class divide. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You initially turned down the “Outer Banks” audition. What convinced you to reconsider?I really wasn’t making money as an actor up until the job that I did right before “Outer Banks,” which was a show on Amazon called “Tell Me Your Secrets.” But the money had kind of run dry from that show — I had an eviction notice on my door, the registration on my car had expired, my engine was steaming everywhere I went. I’m not a mechanic, so I didn’t know how to fix it, nor did I have the money to do so.After declining the “Outer Banks” audition a couple of times I got a call from Lisa Fincannon, a wonderful casting director, and she said, “You need to read for this.” That was a Wednesday. Sunday came around, and I get a call and [my agent] said: “You’re getting on a plane tonight. Here’s 14 pages of dialogue. Here’s the first four episodes. You’re going to be on the very last row of a plane in the middle seat on a red eye, and you’re going to land in Charleston. The audition is right when you get off the plane.” And I did it, and the rest is history.How would you describe “Outer Banks” to someone who hasn’t seen it?If “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Scooby-Doo” had a baby, and that baby became best friends with “The Goonies.”Was there anything about John B. that you particularly related to?I feel like on the exterior, there are a lot of similarities. I grew up on the water; I grew up in Florida, about 30 minutes away from Cocoa Beach, so [I was familiar with] the surfing elements. I got my boater’s license before I got my driver’s license. I think one thing John B. goes through, especially in the third season, that I really related to was the anxiety of the world around him and the fear of failure. That’s something that I’ve kind of always felt, so we definitely share that.Among the pogues: from left, Stokes, Madelyn Cline and Carlacia Grant in the new season of “Outer Banks.”Jackson Lee Davis/NetflixWhen did you know the show was a hit?I think it was six months after the show came out when they finally told us we were going back for the second season. During Covid, seeing hundreds and hundreds of people show up to watch us film — that was when I think we started to put two and two together.They would follow our base camp. All of our trailers would set up in different areas of Charleston, and it would be like an alarm or a mass text would be sent out: You’d see people start to trickle in, and sometimes it’d be 20 people, sometimes it would be 2,000.Stokes describes “Outer Banks” as “if ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and ‘Scooby-Doo’ had a baby, and that baby became best friends with ‘The Goonies.’”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesWhat have been some of your more interesting fan interactions?I’ve had people who’ve fainted in front of me, and we’ve had people who have cried. I’ve had people telling me that I saved their lives, which is always interesting, to know the show has helped people through a troubling time in human history. So the range of emotions is super vast, but all equally heartwarming.And now it’s really cool because the whole Charleston community has really accepted us, and you walk down the street or you go to a restaurant and people kind of give you a wink or a thumbs up.Are you going to the Poguelandia event?Of course.Where did the concert concept come from?We haven’t had a premiere; the show never had a red carpet. We’ve worked incredibly hard to create something the world has consumed at a really crazy rate, and obviously the platform sees it, and they wanted to congratulate us. I think it’s an ode to the show: The show is kind of a party; it’s kind of a riot. So why not throw a music festival?“Outer Banks” revolves largely around the class divide between the working-class pogues and the wealthy kooks. Is there a message in there about class discrimination?I think it’s a testament to how there has consistently been a class divide not just in this country, but in the world. And the lower class is going to fight tooth and nail to find a way to make an extra buck, and the upper class is going to find a way to save an extra couple thousand bucks. There’s a frustration that’s inevitably going to be there, and I think that’s the driving factor for the pogues. They’re right there, you know? They can see it. It’s so close to them, but they just can’t comprehend how to get there.The popularity of the show has led to many different kinds of fan interactions. “The range of emotions is super vast, but all equally heartwarming,” Stokes said.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesWhat does the show say about friendship?It’s every kid’s dream to have a group of friends who are going to ride or die and just go the distance with you, and these kids have grown up in an environment where they don’t have a lot. So they learn to do a lot with a little, and it’s a beautiful thing to see. I’m very proud and thankful to be part of a project that gives a true interpretation of friendship — not just the highs of it but also the lows and showing just as much love as when the wins come around.Has this friendship onscreen translated into one among the actors when the cameras are off?All of us came into the show with slim-pickings resumes. So to get into this and to feel like we need to create this truth and transparency through these characters, you sort of fall in love with one another and build this crazy camaraderie and chemistry.Do you think this friendship will carry beyond the show itself? How long do you think it will last?I hope forever. It’s been almost four years now, and I hope we do another 40. More

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      Why I Watch the Closing Credits of Every Movie I See

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      One look is enough to challenge the myth of the genius auteur calling all the shots. I watch the closing credits of every movie I see. I learned from my parents, who would always sit in the dark theater watching the names scroll down the screen while the ushers trickled in and the rest of the audience collected their belongings. Their ritual confused me as a kid: “Muppet Treasure Island” was over; Kermit and his friends were reunited; and the villain had his comeuppance. But my parents were still in their seats, eyes on the screen. What more were they expecting?My parents were practicing what now feels like a lost pastime, one I happily joined in as I got older. Back in the golden age of Hollywood, the credits (albeit far less comprehensive) appeared at the beginning of the movie, for all to see. Now they run at the end, like the answers to a special round of movie trivia for those in the know. Before Google and IMDb, if you weren’t sure of the name of a certain scene-stealing character actor, or who was responsible for the exquisite editing, the credits were your source of confirmation. Childhood movie nights at home with my parents and brother would often end with us opening “The Film Encyclopedia,” by Ephraim Katz, an impressive A-to-Z volume that compiled bios and credits from the silent era to the early aughts. We’d go down rabbit holes and hop from one actor or director to another.“You were right — it was a young Norman Lloyd!”“Well spotted! What else was he in?”The first line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Love of the Last Tycoon” could describe my coming-of-age: “Though I haven’t ever been on the screen, I was brought up in pictures.” Both of my parents have backgrounds in film — they met cute while working on an independent feature — and I grew up visiting sets with my dad when I was on break from school. I remember sitting in a director’s chair next to Sidney Lumet, watching the monitor. It seemed to require hours of takes to get through one page of dialogue. When I got bored of watching the (in)action, I played slapjack with the director of photography’s daughter on one of the sets that wasn’t being used. I visited the wardrobe department and practiced sewing in a straight line on a sheet of loose-leaf paper. I learned about other crew assignments too, including the script supervisor, who showed me her clipboard with the meticulous notes she kept to ensure each scene’s accuracy and consistency. I learned the difference between a gaffer and a grip, and soon I began using acronyms like “D.P.” — they made me feel like an insider.Because of this, I especially loved movies about movies. I watched “Singin’ in the Rain” over and over as a child; in college, I fell hard for “Day for Night” (“La Nuit Américaine”), François Truffaut’s love letter to cinema. My parents, who had their own version of a movie romance, say that the film manages to capture the daily joys and frustrations of life on set. It also conjures that bittersweet moment when the film wraps and the cast and crew go their separate ways. It’s the nature of the business. I imagine that for industry people like my parents, reading the credits is akin to looking through an old yearbook, spotting familiar names and wondering wistfully what so-and-so is up to these days.Our culture of on-demand binge-watching conditions us to race past the credits, taking for granted the collective creative efforts behind the movies and TV shows we so voraciously consume. Many streamers shrink credits, making them illegible on our screens; some even allow us to skip them entirely. Post-credits sequences, meanwhile — a mainstay of franchise fare like the Marvel films — have trained audiences to regard credits as mere backdrops for the latest Easter egg or teaser. We forget that countless individuals, each a storyteller in their own right, make our viewing possible. The distinction between art and “content” is lost.There’s a line in Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” that suggests attention is a form of love — a statement that resonates in this era of diminished attention spans. That’s one of the reasons I linger to watch the credits, and I encourage anyone with an appreciation for movies, and for the people who make them, to stay after the final scene. One look at the credits is enough to challenge the myth of the genius auteur calling all the shots. Credits are the closest that many behind-the-scenes, below-the-line artists and technicians get to a curtain call. These unsung collaborators — the crew members we don’t see hitting the talk-show circuit or strutting down the red carpet, but whose long workdays and skillful labor are an essential source of film magic — deserve their moment in the spotlight.So I’m heartened when I notice those moviegoers who, like me, take a few extra minutes to sit through the credits. They might be looking for the name of someone they know, or curious about the shooting locations. Maybe they’re savoring the closing music while they reflect on what they’ve watched. And, yes, maybe they’re partially hoping to discover a bonus scene. It doesn’t matter. We’re in the same club. An unspoken intimacy and solidarity exists among us, the attentive viewers, and the village of filmmakers we honor. Sometimes I’m tempted to seize on this connection. I could offer a nod or a glance of recognition. Even bolder, I imagine turning to them and asking, “So, what did you think?” Above all, though, I think of my parents — and the other members of the extended moviemaking family — every time I stay behind in my theater seat. I hope I do them credit.Emma Kantor is a writer and editor at Publishers Weekly. More

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      Damson Idris Was Raised on ‘Def Comedy Jam’ and Bagel King

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      The star of “Snowfall,” which is kicking off its final season on FX, talks about getting into character with a book about 1980s Los Angeles and why he always feels his best in a tuxedo.The British Nigerian actor Damson Idris can see the connections between his career trajectory and that of Franklin Saint, the character he plays on the FX cocaine saga “Snowfall.”“I came as a kid, and today I’ve got a show under my belt, and I’m meeting new people and there’s a different level of respect that they give me,” said Idris, who was 23 when the show’s creators, including John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”), anointed him the lead.“And that happened with Franklin, too,” he said. “He was this pushover kid who was getting beaten up every episode, and he grew into this guy who was running an empire.”So the end of the road was bound to be emotional.Idris, now 31, had just wrapped the sixth and final season and was still riding a wave of euphoria and exhaustion on a video call from his home in Los Angeles. That season begins on Wednesday, picking up a day after the events of the Season 5 finale, after Franklin sees $73 million of his nest egg vanish along with his dreams of a new life and a new wife.Now, with his back against the wall, he’s willing to take out everyone by any means necessary. “The sweet kid has finally turned into the monster,” Idris said.He had planned to take a long break from television after “Snowfall,” he admitted while discussing the first book he read (“I was never a book guy”), the music that moves him and the importance of humility. But then Donald Glover called to discuss his coming series “Swarm,” about an uberfan of a Beyoncé-like pop star, “and I’m like, When do I need to be at work, sir?”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Young Locs on the Westside’This is actually, embarrassingly enough, the first book that I read. It was given to me by John Singleton, and I used it to understand South L.A. in the ’80s. You follow these kids as they’re transitioning through adolescence to adulthood, and the horrible things that they go through but also the wonderful things that they go through. After I read it, I immediately got into the mentality of Franklin Saint. It helped me get through six seasons.2AmapianoIt’s a subgenre of house music that emerged in South Africa in the mid-2010s, and it doesn’t matter what mood you’re in, you’re going to find your body moving. I tweeted about it last year when I was introduced to it. I said, “If you’re not listening to amapiano music, you’re missing out on life.” There’s a new dance move on TikTok to it every single day. I probably wouldn’t ever do it publicly, but I do it in the house often. My favorite song is “Tanzania” from the D.J. Uncle Waffles. It’s so culturally relevant that artists from Beyoncé to Rihanna are all dabbling.3‘Def Comedy Jam’When I was younger, I’d steal the tapes from my older siblings, wait for them to leave the house and spend all day watching the likes of Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker, Bernie Mac, Katt Williams, Dave Chappelle. I would impersonate their stand-ups word for word. It was a brilliant party trick for family gatherings, minus the cussing.4FIFA Ultimate TeamI grew up wanting to be a football player. But I remember being 18 and Lionel Messi was 22 at the time. And I was so far behind, talent-wise, to him. He made me quit. [Laughs] The FIFA Ultimate Team is a game mode that’s possibly taken up a third of my life. You are essentially making a super team and then you compete with other people around the world. And till this day, if you lose at FIFA in my friendship circle, you have to give a written and verbal apology to the other person for wasting their time.5Fela Kuti’s ‘Beasts of No Nation’He is so important in Nigerian culture, so important to my family, so important to me. He’s talking about the civil rights of Nigeria of that time and the conflict between the common man and the politics. The song started coming back into my life during George Floyd. I understood the parallels of racism and how it really is a global issue and a pendulum that needed to swing. “Beasts of No Nation” comments on it perfectly.6Mum’s Beef StewI’ve tried a million times to make it, but there’s something I’m missing. Maybe her perfume falls into the soup, and that’s what the missing ingredient is. I would get on a 10-hour flight to London to taste my mother’s cooking and her mix of palm oil, tomatoes, garlic and onion, and then the beef. I hope to get married one day and that beef stew comes with the contract.7Bagel KingIf you grew up in inner-city London, as soon as the party gets shut down, everyone’s going to Bagel King to have a beef patty in buttered cheese-coconut bread and some plantains. It’s a staple in London culture, and it’s housed some of the funniest yet terrifying moments in my life.8‘Liberian Girl’When I was a kid, I remember watching the music video, and it was the first time that I saw a range of artists from different fields. Athletes, musicians, actors, poets — they were all in the same video, all paying homage to the greatest performer of all time. I became infatuated with Hollywood. I said, “I wish I was in that room.”9‘The Black Godfather’This documentary follows the life of Clarence Avant. It dives into the genesis of Black Hollywood and how there was one man behind it all, lurking in the shadows, that was pulling the strings and introducing some of the most amazing people of all time to each other — which then led to greatness. It was incredibly inspirational because it taught me that regardless of the problems that I may face on this journey — the ups and downs, which will inevitably come — those things will not matter as long as you have friends, as long as you’re a good person, as long as you walk in humility.10TuxedosWhen I was 4 or 5, for my birthday my mother would put me in these cute little tuxedo suits. All my friends would be dressed down in their tracksuits, their Reebok classics — here I was in a full-on suit, like I was about to get married. And then my sister would put me in the same suit and force me to marry her doll, who was my height. The doll’s name was Wendy, and she had a string that you could pull that would say “I love you.” It was the first person that said “I love you” to me after my mom. So I fell in love with tuxedos very early. And today I always say a tuxedo makes me feel I’m at my greatest level of excellence. More

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      Stella Stevens, Hollywood Bombshell Who Yearned for More, Dies at 84

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      She starred alongside the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lewis. But she wanted to direct and write, and she felt held back by industry sexism.Stella Stevens, whose turn as an A-list actress in 1960s Hollywood placed her alongside sex symbols like Brigitte Bardot, Ann-Margret and Raquel Welch, but who came to resent the male-dominated industry that she felt thwarted her ambitions to be more than a pretty face, died on Friday at a hospice facility in Los Angeles. She was 84.Her son, the actor and director Andrew Stevens, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Stevens was among the last stars to emerge from Hollywood’s studio system, an arrangement that guaranteed her work but, she often said, also limited her creative aspirations. She won a Golden Globe in the “most promising newcomer” category for her role in “Say One for Me” (1959), a musical comedy starring Bing Crosby and Debbie Reynolds, but felt coerced into joining the cast of “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962), an empty Elvis Presley vehicle.Like Ms. Welch, who died on Wednesday, Ms. Stevens was ambivalent, if not outright indignant, about being cast as a Hollywood sex symbol. She described herself as introverted and bookish, and she sought to work with auteurs like John Cassavetes, who cast her as the female lead in “Too Late Blues,” his 1961 drama about a jazz musician (played by Bobby Darin).”I wanted to be a writer-director,” she told the film scholar Michael G. Ankerich in 1994. “All of a sudden I got sidetracked into being a sexpot. Once I was a ‘pot,’ there was nothing I could do. There was nothing legitimate I could do.”She worked with many of the top directors and actors of the 1960s. She starred as the love interest of the title character, a timid college professor who undergoes a personality transformation, in “The Nutty Professor” (1963), which Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in; “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963), a romantic comedy directed by Vincent Minnelli; and “The Silencers” (1966), a spy spoof starring Dean Martin.In between, though, she had to take a series of mediocre roles in mediocre movies, and critics came to view her as a star who was perpetually kept away from realizing her full potential.From left, Shelley Winters, Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall and Ms. Stevens in “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972).20th Century FoxTwo exceptions came in the early 1970s: She acted opposite Jason Robards in “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” (1970), a comic western directed by Sam Peckinpah, and as part of an all-star cast assembled for “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), joining Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters and Gene Hackman in an overturned ocean liner.By then her sex-symbol days were fading, and Ms. Stevens hoped to have the time and reputation to become a director. But female directors were almost unheard-of at the time, and her attempts to get support for what she called “a marvelous black comedy” that she wanted to make met repeated dead ends.“Every man I’ve gone to for four years has smiled at me and then double‐crossed me,” she told The New York Times in 1973. “Every man I’ve talked to in every office in this industry has tried his best to discourage me from directing. They don’t want me to find out it’s so easy because it’s supposed to be terribly hard.”Stella Stevens was born Estelle Caro Eggleston on Oct. 1, 1938, in Yazoo City, Miss., though she often told interviewers she was from a town called Hot Coffee, a nearby community. Her agent said anything sounded better than “Yazoo.”Her father, Thomas, worked for a bottling company in Yazoo, and her mother, Estelle (Caro) Eggleston, was a nurse. When Stella was still young, they moved to Memphis, where her father worked in sales for International Harvester.Stella dropped out of high school at 15 to marry Herman Stephens. They had one child, Andrew, and divorced in 1956. (She later changed her surname to Stevens because, she said, it was easier for people to pronounce.)Ms. Stevens in 1968. She worked with many of the top directors and actors of the 1960s, but she also had to take a series of mediocre roles in mediocre movies.Jack Kanthal/Associated PressShe returned to school after the divorce and earned a high school diploma. She enrolled at Memphis State College, now the University of Memphis, with plans to become an obstetrician.She also took up theater. A role in a college production of William Inge’s “Bus Stop” brought an invitation to audition in New York, and by 1959 she was in Los Angeles, on a three-year contract with 20th Century Fox.She finished three movies in six months, including “Say One for Me,” but the studio dropped her soon after. With a young son to feed, she took an offer from Playboy to pose nude for $5,000. After the shoot, she said, Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s publisher, would pay her only half and told her that she had to work as a hostess at the Playboy Mansion to earn the rest.Before the photos ran she signed a new contract, with Paramount. She asked Mr. Hefner to cancel the magazine feature, but he refused, and she appeared as Playmate of the Month in the January 1960 issue, a few months before winning her Golden Globe.“People don’t realize how horrible men can be toward a beautiful woman with no clothes on,” she told Delta magazine in 2010.Her relationship with Playboy remained complicated. Despite her anger at Mr. Hefner, she posed nude for the magazine two more times. She then sued Mr. Hefner and Playboy in 1974, citing several instances of invasion of her privacy, but the case was thrown out because the statute of limitations had expired.In 1998, Playboy named Ms. Stevens 27th on its list of the 20th century’s sexiest female stars, just behind Sharon Stone.Ms. Stevens in 2002. She became a regular guest star on television shows. Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesIn addition to her son, Ms. Stevens is survived by three grandchildren. Her longtime partner, Bob Kulick, died in 2020.Despite her career’s post-1960s fade, Ms. Stevens remained eager to work. She turned to television and had roles in some 80 episodes over the next four decades. Most of them were guest appearances on shows like “Murder, She Wrote,” “The Love Boat” and “Magnum P.I.,” though she was also a member of the regular cast of several shows, including the soap opera “Santa Barbara.”When she did return to film, it was often for soft-core erotic thrillers and campy horror movies, like “Chained Heat” (1983), in which she played a prison warden, and “The Granny” (1994), in which she played a wronged grandmother who comes back to life to get revenge on her scheming family.She eventually did get into the director’s chair, for “American Heroine,” a 1979 documentary, and “The Ranch,” a 1989 comedy starring her son. She also wrote a novel, “Razzle Dazzle” (1989), which featured a thinly fictionalized version of herself.“I don’t feel I’ve been successful yet,” she told The Vancouver Sun in 1998. “I’m still waiting to be discovered. I see myself as a work in progress. I keep trying to work and improve and do things I’m proud of.”Danielle Cruz contributed reporting. More