Actors and Actresses

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Playing Santa Onscreen Takes Much More Than Just Donning a Red Suit

      by

      David Harbour, George Wendt and Tim Allen explain the acting challenge that is Jolly St. Nick.David Harbour isn’t the first actor most of us would cast as Santa Claus. Maybe it’s because he prefers to roll in the muck with his characters — the police chief Jim Hopper in “Stranger Things,” the super-soldier Alexei Shostakov in “Black Widow” — rather than snuggle with them.But to the director Tommy Wirkola, Harbour was perfect.For “Violent Night,” his new holiday gore-fest, Wirkola needed an actor with presence and chops: the ability to play Santa as a drunk depressive who has lost faith in humanity, Christmas and himself, but whose goodness still radiates.“Literally in our first meeting, somebody brought up his name, and it was one of those moments where we just looked at each other,” Wirkola said in a video call from Los Angeles. “It was almost too obvious; it’s such a good idea.”“Violent Night” puts Santa in the right place at the wrong time, a Christmas Eve heist at a billionaire’s mansion. He’d happily fly back up the chimney were it not for 7-year-old Trudy (Leah Brady), who has pleaded for help over the walkie-talkie her parents told her was a direct line to Santa. So he digs deep into himself and his sack of toys to summon the courage and the weaponry to save her.“I’m pretty sure it’s intimidating to some extent for an actor to do the role of Santa Claus,” Wirkola said. “So many actors have done it before, in so many movies. So how can we make it stand out?”Suiting up as St. Nick may sound like a frolic around the tannenbaum, a welcome break from more serious roles.If only.We talked with three stars about what went into portraying a Santa for the ages.David Harbour, ‘Violent Night’Alex Hassell, left, Beverly D’Angelo, Edi Patterson, Alexis Louder and Leah Brady with Harbour in “Violent Night.”Allen Fraser/Universal StudiosAs Harbour and Wirkola fleshed out their Santa, they decided he couldn’t be comical or the movie wouldn’t work. So Harbour played him straight.“It’s just inherently funny when people treat him as if he’s in on the joke, like, ‘Oh hello, Santa,’” he said, “and he’s completely deadpan because he is Santa.”And because the dynamic between Trudy and Santa needed to be respectful — and never condescending or cloying — Harbour watched the 1947 version of “Miracle on 34th Street” on his iPhone at night, recording scenes with the Santa and the child characters to discuss the next day as he and Wirkola developed the script.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.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.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.“That was the real movie I thought about all the time on set,” he said by video from Budapest, where he was shooting the upcoming film “Gran Turismo.”Harbour’s Santa was visually modeled on an old-school Coca-Cola advertising fantasy, with a curlicue beard and rosy cheeks. But that Santa wouldn’t drink himself horizontal or power-vomit on a woman. Nor would he display a Viking’s ferocity.This Santa was a warrior, which meant that Harbour had to become one, too.But as more of Santa’s origin story was revealed through action sequences, the question became what to show when.“David was adamant that he didn’t want him to be too good too quickly, or too cool too quickly and say too many cool lines too fast,” Wirkola said. “In the first couple of fights, he’s stumbling around and barely surviving. David didn’t want him to feel superhuman in any way.” Even if Harbour sometimes felt that the role’s demands required feats of imagination that more dramatic roles — where the depth and complexity is written into the script — did not.“It was a lot of digging in and trying to create a character and an arc that would be meaningful,” Harbour said. “The funny thing is, we might look down on work that happens in a soap opera or an action movie as being not artistic. But when I see somebody do something impressive in a soap opera, I’m always like, ‘You must have worked really hard on that.’”“And yeah, I worked really hard.”George Wendt, ‘Elf: The Musical’George Wendt opposite Sebastian Arcelus in “Elf: The Musical.” He was asked to humanize his Santa.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times George Wendt used to joke that if you stayed fat enough and got old enough, the Santa roles would start rolling in. But that was hardly what landed him “Elf: The Musical,” a 2010 stage adaptation of the 2003 Will Ferrell comedy. (He reprised the role in 2017 at Madison Square Garden.)“Did I want to be in the original cast of a new Broadway musical? It was a big yes,” Wendt, who is now starring in the rom-com “Christmas With the Campbells” on Amazon Prime Video, said in a call from Los Angeles. “I had just been on Broadway in ‘Hairspray.’ I was fresh meat, so to speak.”His instinct, and that of the show’s writers, was to humanize his Santa, maybe make him a little funnier than you’d think he would be — but go light on the schmaltz.“Any time I started to veer into what might be sappy Santa, Casey Nicholaw, the director, would be like, ‘Bup bup bup bup bup, don’t you dare!’” Wendt said. “He wanted me to keep it real and flip, not a reverential Santa in any way.”Wendt has played Santa five or six times — he’s lost count — and while “Elf” might have been his highest-profile gig, “A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!,” in 2008, was his weirdest one.“I came down the chimney with a bowie knife between my teeth because this bear was stalking Colbert,” he said, referring to the late-night host Stephen Colbert. “So I brawled with the bear, and I ripped him open with my knife, with Colbert cowering in a corner. And when I slit his belly open, Elvis Costello came out dressed as Bob Cratchit.”But whether he’s cracking New Jersey jokes, like in “Elf: The Musical,” or saving TV hosts, being Santa comes with an inescapable irritant that makes you wonder how the jolly old fellow grew rotund in the first place.“It’s really hard to eat much with all that hair on,” Wendt said. “That beard — that’s awful. It just goes right in your mouth, no matter how careful you are.”Tim Allen, ‘The Santa Clause’Tim Allen, opposite Eric Lloyd, in “The Santa Clause,” the film that kicked off the franchise.DisneyFor nearly three decades, Tim Allen — who jokingly claims not to be fond of children, his own included — has played Scott Calvin, a divorced dad forced to fill Santa’s suit and boots, starting in “The Santa Clause” (1994). Two sequels later, he has extended his run with “The Santa Clauses,” a new Disney+ series about Calvin’s quest to find a worthy successor.Now Allen can’t get away from kids.“I have to make up stories to real children all the time when their parents say, ‘This is Santa Claus,’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s not,’” he said, calling from Manhattan. “I play along, and I joyously do it. But it’s a little overwhelming, to be honest, for a very aggressive comedian.” In fact, “The Santa Clause” was a far darker comedy when Allen signed on. He kind of remembers that Calvin might have shot Santa.“To this day, it’s one of the best scripts, top to bottom, I’ve ever read,” he said.But for the series, Allen wanted — demanded, really — a story with a beginning, middle and end, as well as explanations for some lingering questions about what happened to the original Santa and the process for selecting a new one.“We answered those in a very wonderful, organic way,” he said. “So I had, in this one, conceptual strength in the script room. ‘Let’s get to these points and the jokes will come. And once we get to the funny stuff, I can add.’ That’s kind of my strength.” Physically getting into character originally was not.In the first film, Allen spent four hours in the chair each day, often followed by 10 hours in a hot, heavy suit — an affair he called psychotic.The process has since been streamlined, but its effect is still undeniable.Allen recalled the hush that fell over 225 people on the first day of shooting not so long ago, as he walked onto the set in his gorgeous velvet suit and uncannily realistic headpiece with beard, mustache and flawless skin that make him look younger even if you’re right next to him.“And all of a sudden you have adults, half adults, children looking at me with these big grins on their faces, and they’re silent,” he said. “I realized the magic of this image — that whatever it means, it means the same thing to all of the children in these people.”“It’s a responsibility. I don’t make fun of it.” More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      The 10 Best Actors of 2022: Michelle Yeoh, Daniel Kaluuya and More

      by

      Welcome to our portfolio of paradoxes. The first is that artists emblematic of great acting in moving images have been captured in still photographs. Another involves the state of the art itself. We chose 10 performances and could easily have doubled that tally, yet all of that talent finds itself in an iffy place. There are no guarantees for a screen actor anymore. There are no guarantees for a screen actor’s audience. We’re not even sure what we mean by “screen.” Read More

      We walked into “The Woman King” intrigued (what, exactly, would a machete-and-sandal melodrama starring Viola Davis look like?) and left astonished. A great performance can amount to something in addition to craft — personality, zeal, observation, lunacy, exactitude, risk, freedom. And that movie had all of those right there in almost every performance. Davis, for instance, did her usual bruising work — an actor at peak intensity. But not only did the film showcase and redouble the might of an established star; it also made one out of Thuso Mbedu, who plays Davis’s — well, just treat yourself.

      Here is someone whom we moviegoers deserve to get to know for years to come. But in what kinds of movies? As what sorts of people? Mbedu can act. But there just isn’t the variety of movies that could sustain all the acting she and many of the performers in the portfolio that follows could do — names you may not know, like Freddie Gibbs and Frankie Corio and, loosely, Vicky Krieps — but who once upon a time would have had a few chances to show what else they’re made of.

      Those chances feel imperiled. And not for the old reasons (for being a woman, for not being white) — although there’s still some of that. The peril is industrial shortsightedness. There’s diminished interest in the human scale of storytelling, particularly in American movies, which increasingly feel the need to go big or risk the audience’s staying home. Perhaps that’s why we’ve turned, along with many an actor, to television, where the ground feels more fertile. Maybe to the point of feeling overgrown.

      And that may be yet another paradox: a state of wild abundance that can seem a lot like scarcity. Talk of the “golden age” of television has receded in the face of the streaming gold rush. There are so many characters and narratives to keep track of. In an economy of scale, the aesthetics of scale can get out of whack. Stories that might have filled out a feature are stretched into six episodes. Eight-episode limited series flop into multiseason epics.

      Yet, somehow, acting thrives in this environment. Mediocre shows and films are often made watchable by the gift and grit of performers (George Clooney and Julia Roberts in “Ticket to Paradise”; Adrien Brody and Rob Morgan in “Winning Time”). There is enough outstanding work on television alone to fill a portfolio twice or three times the size of this one. To that end, we enfolded limited series into the survey and collided with Jon Bernthal, who, on “We Own This City,” managed to turn crooked-cop work into a feat of appalling macho cheer; and were blown away by Toni Collette on “The Staircase,” for which, despite centuries of actors’ simulating death, she invented at least four new and distressing ways to perform dying.

      But there is still, in the midst of all of that, the special lure and allure of the movies, which haven’t actually gone anywhere. Yes, you can stream “The Woman King” at home, but you would miss the bubbling joy of the families with kids — daughters and sons alike — when Davis and Mbedu get in each other’s faces and then join forces to purge their land of slavers.

      Or you would miss the sound of a stranger in the next seat sobbing into his mask during the final shot of “Aftersun,” Charlotte Wells’s memory film about a father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey. All you’re looking at is Corio, playing an 11-year-old Scottish sprite named Sophie, mugging for the camera that her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), is holding as she prepares to board a flight home from their vacation. It’s a jumpy, grainy amateur image (the film takes place in a not-so-distant pre-smartphone past), but it’s also cinema in the most exalted sense.

      Obviously, we hunger for what an actor can do for a movie: for the gruff poetry of Brendan Gleeson in “The Banshees of Inisherin”; for the salty sibling rivalry of Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya in “Nope”; for the pizazz and poignancy of Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans.” The year’s biggest hit stars Tom Cruise, and its staggering popularity is emphatic proof of what his stardom continues to mean to us. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, playing a problematic maestro in “Tár,” matched and perhaps even exceeded the character’s mastery. Forget about the multiplex: That’s a performance fit for a concert hall.

      So now that we’ve poured one out for movie-industry scarcity and rebattened the hatches for gushingly abundant TV, what is our true task here? It can’t be lamentation. We’re worried — it’s a critic’s job to be worried — but not yet woebegone. We want to applaud, marvel at and salute the achievement of screen acting, the increasing miracle of it in challenging and confusing circumstances. Because to watch the 10 artists here is to sense that acting remains in fine shape; to watch them is both life-giving and life-affirming. In one montage in “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” time warps everything around Michelle Yeoh except the astonishment on her face. Her surprise — which inspires our own — is proof of the beautiful mystery of the art form, and a reason to reconsider a longtime star’s endurance. How — how — did she pull that off?

      This issue of the magazine is testament to our inability to answer that question. Every great performance is a unique amalgam of training, talent, collaboration and luck. In the end, we don’t know how they do it. What we do know is that we can’t stop watching. More

    • 63 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      The Best Actors of 2022

      by

      Welcome to our portfolio of paradoxes. The first is that artists emblematic of great acting in moving images have been captured in still photographs. Another involves the state of the art itself. We chose 10 performances and could easily have doubled that tally, yet all of that talent finds itself in an iffy place. There are no guarantees for a screen actor anymore. There are no guarantees for a screen actor’s audience. We’re not even sure what we mean by “screen.” Read More

      We walked into “The Woman King” intrigued (what, exactly, would a machete-and-sandal melodrama starring Viola Davis look like?) and left astonished. A great performance can amount to something in addition to craft — personality, zeal, observation, lunacy, exactitude, risk, freedom. And that movie had all of those right there in almost every performance. Davis, for instance, did her usual bruising work — an actor at peak intensity. But not only did the film showcase and redouble the might of an established star; it also made one out of Thuso Mbedu, who plays Davis’s — well, just treat yourself.

      Here is someone whom we moviegoers deserve to get to know for years to come. But in what kinds of movies? As what sorts of people? Mbedu can act. But there just isn’t the variety of movies that could sustain all the acting she and many of the performers in the portfolio that follows could do — names you may not know, like Freddie Gibbs and Frankie Corio and, loosely, Vicky Krieps — but who once upon a time would have had a few chances to show what else they’re made of.

      Those chances feel imperiled. And not for the old reasons (for being a woman, for not being white) — although there’s still some of that. The peril is industrial shortsightedness. There’s diminished interest in the human scale of storytelling, particularly in American movies, which increasingly feel the need to go big or risk the audience’s staying home. Perhaps that’s why we’ve turned, along with many an actor, to television, where the ground feels more fertile. Maybe to the point of feeling overgrown.

      And that may be yet another paradox: a state of wild abundance that can seem a lot like scarcity. Talk of the “golden age” of television has receded in the face of the streaming gold rush. There are so many characters and narratives to keep track of. In an economy of scale, the aesthetics of scale can get out of whack. Stories that might have filled out a feature are stretched into six episodes. Eight-episode limited series flop into multiseason epics.

      Yet, somehow, acting thrives in this environment. Mediocre shows and films are often made watchable by the gift and grit of performers (George Clooney and Julia Roberts in “Ticket to Paradise”; Adrien Brody and Rob Morgan in “Winning Time”). There is enough outstanding work on television alone to fill a portfolio twice or three times the size of this one. To that end, we enfolded limited series into the survey and collided with Jon Bernthal, who, on “We Own This City,” managed to turn crooked-cop work into a feat of appalling macho cheer; and were blown away by Toni Collette on “The Staircase,” for which, despite centuries of actors’ simulating death, she invented at least four new and distressing ways to perform dying.

      But there is still, in the midst of all of that, the special lure and allure of the movies, which haven’t actually gone anywhere. Yes, you can stream “The Woman King” at home, but you would miss the bubbling joy of the families with kids — daughters and sons alike — when Davis and Mbedu get in each other’s faces and then join forces to purge their land of slavers.

      Or you would miss the sound of a stranger in the next seat sobbing into his mask during the final shot of “Aftersun,” Charlotte Wells’s memory film about a father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey. All you’re looking at is Corio, playing an 11-year-old Scottish sprite named Sophie, mugging for the camera that her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), is holding as she prepares to board a flight home from their vacation. It’s a jumpy, grainy amateur image (the film takes place in a not-so-distant pre-smartphone past), but it’s also cinema in the most exalted sense.

      Obviously, we hunger for what an actor can do for a movie: for the gruff poetry of Brendan Gleeson in “The Banshees of Inisherin”; for the salty sibling rivalry of Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya in “Nope”; for the pizazz and poignancy of Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans.” The year’s biggest hit stars Tom Cruise, and its staggering popularity is emphatic proof of what his stardom continues to mean to us. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, playing a problematic maestro in “Tár,” matched and perhaps even exceeded the character’s mastery. Forget about the multiplex: That’s a performance fit for a concert hall.

      So now that we’ve poured one out for movie-industry scarcity and rebattened the hatches for gushingly abundant TV, what is our true task here? It can’t be lamentation. We’re worried — it’s a critic’s job to be worried — but not yet woebegone. We want to applaud, marvel at and salute the achievement of screen acting, the increasing miracle of it in challenging and confusing circumstances. Because to watch the 10 artists here is to sense that acting remains in fine shape; to watch them is both life-giving and life-affirming. In one montage in “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” time warps everything around Michelle Yeoh except the astonishment on her face. Her surprise — which inspires our own — is proof of the beautiful mystery of the art form, and a reason to reconsider a longtime star’s endurance. How — how — did she pull that off?

      This issue of the magazine is testament to our inability to answer that question. Every great performance is a unique amalgam of training, talent, collaboration and luck. In the end, we don’t know how they do it. What we do know is that we can’t stop watching. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Orlando,’ Emma Corrin Straddles Genders and Centuries

      by

      In a freewheeling London adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Corrin plays a character whose emotions are as fluid as their identity.LONDON — The play comes perfectly matched with its leading player in “Orlando,” a freewheeling take on Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel that opened Monday at the Garrick Theater here.Neil Bartlett’s breezy adaptation of its 1928 source is playful, and ultimately moving, but the director Michael Grandage owes much of the production’s success to its galvanizing star, Emma Corrin, who made an acclaimed West End debut last year in the short-lived “Anna X.” Thankfully, this time, Corrin can be seen onstage for considerably longer; “Orlando” runs through Feb. 25.The fast-rising Corrin, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, has made headlines recently as much for their gender identity as for increasingly prominent screen roles. After winning a Golden Globe for playing Princess Diana in “The Crown,” Corrin starred in two films this season, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and “My Policeman,” which was also directed by Grandage.Yet none of those roles has connected as directly to Corrin’s ongoing self-inquiry as the restless, century-straddling Orlando. “Being nonbinary is an embrace of many different parts of myself, the masculine and the feminine and everything in between,” Corrin said in a recent interview with The New York Times.Corrin has obviously spent some time with a question that Orlando asks rhetorically throughout the play: “Who am I?” We first meet the character as a young nobleman, born into Elizabethan-era luxury and a home containing 365 rooms. (The real-life inspiration for this vast property was Knole House, the countryside home of Vita Sackville-West, the author and socialite for whom an adoring Woolf wrote the novel.)But as time hurtles forward, Orlando barely ages and awakens one day from an extended slumber, age 30, as a woman. “Well, knock me down with a flipping feather,” says Orlando’s longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Grimsditch, in response. On the other hand, this loyal sidekick has seemed comfortable with gender fluidity from the start: “Ladies and gentlemen — no, sorry, everyone” she says in an early speech to the audience. The invaluable Deborah Findlay, hair disheveled but her sense of fun unimpaired, is a delight in the role.Corrin is more than game for whatever the play requires. This includes putting on and taking off Peter McKintosh’s ravishing costumes, to keep pace with the passing centuries.The youthful male we glimpse at the play’s start has an impishly androgynous allure, along with a gift for rewriting Shakespeare: “Shall I compare me to a summer’s day?” a glinting Orlando asks early on. But with age comes experience and exposure, not just to royalty (Lucy Briers makes a memorably stern Elizabeth I) but also to lovers and intimates of various genders and circumstances, including a bawdy Nell Gwyn (Millicent Wong) who tells Orlando, “For a lady, you’re really quite the gentleman.”Corrin is in full-throated voice throughout the vicissitudes of Orlando’s fraught love life — when Orlando’s heart is broken, you know it — and in moments when Orlando is taken over by fear. It’s not just that gender is fluid, we feel, but emotions are, too, and the play comes blessed with an actor who can project confidence one minute, and surrender to uncertainty the next. “Orlando” features a cast of Virginia Woolfs, who the titular character turns to to amend or amplify the story. Marc BrennerThe production features a bustling chorus of Woolfs, nine in all, bespectacled and drably attired; each of them adroitly handles at least one additional role, and sometimes more. (That supporting cast includes another nonbinary actor in Oliver Wickham, who plays Clorinda, an early crush for Orlando.)The sobriety of the author on view in this version contrasts with the vivacity of her creation. We see an anxious Orlando interacting with the lineup of women: “Come on, you wrote me,” she says, almost pleadingly, as if Woolf could posthumously amend the story. And yet the play sustains a spryness of tone.Bartlett’s adaptation is more of a sparky, affectionate pastiche, whether invoking another Woolf title, “A Room of One’s Own,” or handing a song lyric from the musical “Cabaret” — another show about shifting identity — to an especially ardent suitor, the Archduchess Harriet. (Richard Cant has particular fun with that role.)We get a synoptic survey of changes in women’s circumstances over time — I loved the sight of the Virginias producing teacups from their bags to signal the arrival of the Victorian era — and there’s a verbal lob in the direction of Britain’s governing Conservative Party that surely owes more to Bartlett than Woolf. But Corrin’s gorgeous performance lifts the 90 minutes, no intermission, well beyond anything resembling a history lesson or a night out requiring preparatory homework.“I once did love,” Orlando says wistfully, and the play leaves us hopeful that this mutable, mesmerizing character will find his, or her, or their, own way to do that again.OrlandoThrough Feb. 25 at the Garrick Theater, London; thegarricktheatre.co.uk. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Kirstie Alley, Emmy-Winning ‘Cheers’ Actress, Dies at 71

      by

      She also starred in the NBC sitcom “Veronica’s Closet,” which aired from 1997 to 2000.Kirstie Alley, the actress whose breakout role as the career-minded Rebecca Howe in the sitcom “Cheers” catapulted her career and earned her an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe, died on Monday. She was 71.The cause was cancer, according to a statement from her family on Twitter.Ms. Alley quickly won over millions of viewers while playing Rebecca in “Cheers,” the timeless NBC show that ran for 11 seasons in the 1980s and ’90s. She had stepped in to replace Shelley Long in the ensemble cast in 1987, at the height of the series’ popularity, and remained through the final season.Critics noted how Ms. Alley had brought a refreshing new dynamic to the character, with scripts giving her a more fun arc that helped create a “denser joke machine,” as one writer noted. At times, Rebecca, who managed the bar in the show, appeared to be a hapless and gold-digging mess. In other moments, Ms. Alley portrayed Rebecca with a faux-bravado, and with an attitude of indifference to others romantic advances.Her character gradually evolved from being a corporate-pleasing manager to a full-fledged, genial member of the gang who was perky yet perpetually disappointed.In an interview with “Entertainment Tonight” in 2019, Ms. Alley looked back on her “Cheers” years as a somewhat chaotic time, with all kinds of misbehavior being the norm on a set that included co-stars like Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson.“We never paid attention, we were always in trouble,” she said. “We never showed up on time.”Kirstie Alley with Ted Danson, left, and Woody Harrelson in “Cheers.”Photo by Kim Gottlieb Walker/NBCU via Getty ImagesIn addition to her 1991 Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series for “Cheers,” Ms. Alley also won the 1994 Emmy for lead actress in a mini-series for the title role in “David’s Mother,” a drama about a mother who raises her autistic son alone.Ms. Alley, who acted regularly for about four decades, also starred in the NBC sitcom “Veronica’s Closet,” which ran from 1997 to 2000. Her character was the successful head of a lingerie company.Marta Kauffman, a creator and an executive producer of “Veronica’s Closet,” said of Ms. Alley in 1997: “She is crazy most of the time, and I mean that in the best sense of the word.”Ms. Alley was born on Jan. 12, 1951, in Wichita, Kan., where she was raised in a Roman Catholic family. She was particularly close with her grandfather, a lumber-company owner.She attended Kansas State University but dropped out to become an interior decorator. Around that time, she developed an addiction to cocaine.She eventually moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in Narconon, a rehabilitation program affiliated with the Church of Scientology.When asked by Barbara Walters in 1992 why she had joined a religion with a problematic past, Ms. Alley said that she had “not come across anything” negative.“It answered a lot of questions for me,” Ms. Alley said in 1997 of the church. “I was a pretty able person. I wasn’t looking for something like that. But I wanted to get rid of the barriers keeping me from what I wanted, to be an actress. It’s just part of my life.”While living in Los Angeles, Ms. Alley began to take an interest in acting. In 1982, she made her film debut in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” playing a half-Vulcan, half-Romulan lieutenant with pointy ears.In 1989, she starred alongside John Travolta in the film “Look Who’s Talking,” a comedy in which a baby’s thoughts are narrated by Bruce Willis. Vincent Canby, who reviewed the movie in The Times, wrote that “cute” was the “operative word” for a movie that starred “some good actors doing material that is not super.”In 2005, Ms. Alley shifted her attention to a mock-reality show about her weight. She said at the time that the show, “Fat Actress,” drew from her experience as a woman in Hollywood who did not meet the industry’s stereotypically slim beauty standards. Another show, “Kirstie Alley’s Big Life,” also focused on Ms. Alley’s weight-loss journey.Ms. Alley was married to Bob Alley, and the two eventually divorced. A later marriage to Parker Stevenson also ended in divorce.She is survived by her two children, True and Lillie Parker. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Alley told The New York Times in 1997 that she had sought out TV series throughout her career in order to have a normal schedule and be closer to her family.“It’s the best life style,” Ms. Alley said. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Brad William Henke, N.F.L. Player Who Turned to Acting, Dies at 56

      by

      A defensive lineman who played for the Denver Broncos, he later appeared in “Orange Is the New Black,” “Dexter” and “Lost.”Brad William Henke, a former N.F.L. player who later turned to acting and became known for his role as a prison guard on “Orange Is the New Black,” died on Tuesday. He was 56.His death was confirmed by his manager, Matt DelPiano, who said Mr. Henke died in his sleep but did not specify the location. He also did not cite a cause, but in May 2021 Mr. Henke posted on Instagram that he had a 90 percent blockage in an artery, and the next month he said he had received two stents in his heart.Mr. Henke played many roles in film and television across a 25-year career, but he was probably best known for his appearance on more than two dozen episodes of the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” from 2016 to 2018. His character, Desi Piscatella, a gay corrections officer at the penitentiary where the show was set, was an integral part of the drama in its fourth and fifth seasons, and in 2017 he shared in the cast’s Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series.Although “Orange” could be considered Mr. Henke’s breakout role, it was far from his first. His acting career began in 1996 with the film “Mr. Wrong,” which starred Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Pullman and Joan Cusack. Among the dozens of television shows on which he was seen were “ER,” “Judging Amy,” “Dexter,” “October Road” and “Lost.” His movies included the original “Space Jam.”Mr. Henke was born on April 10, 1966, in Columbus, Neb., and raised in Littleton, Colo. He played football for the University of Arizona in the late 1980s. A 6-foot-3, 275-pound defensive lineman, he was drafted by the New York Giants in 1989 as but was cut, he told The Tucson Citizen in 1998, He went on to play for the Denver Broncos and was on the team when it lost the 1990 Super Bowl to the San Francisco 49ers.His football career ended in the early 1990s after several injuries, and he held a number of jobs, including assistant football coach at a community college in California. An unexpected encounter with Rod Martin, formerly of the Oakland Raiders, set him on a new path.“Rod mentioned there was a need for actors to play football players for commercials, so I tried out for it and got one for Pizza Hut,” Mr. Henke told The Citizen. “While I was there, a guy invited me to attend an acting class. I went and it hit me that this is what I wanted to do.”The depth and types of roles Mr. Henke landed progressed with each credit. In a 2021 interview with CGMagazine, Mr. Henke said that at the start of his career he was learning the business and was taking jobs to earn money, but that things changed. “Lately, I’ve just tried to do it for the love of it,” he said. “Just cause I love creating the characters — figuring out how they talk, how they stand, all the physical things and all the emotional things.”Mr. Henke told the website Tell-Tale TV in 2020 that his role as Tom Cullen on the mini-series “The Stand,” the most recent adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same title, which starred Whoopi Goldberg and Alexander Skarsgard, was challenging yet rewarding.“It was the best experience I’ve had in acting so far in my whole career,” he said. “I haven’t had very many opportunities in my career where I have been offered this job three months before it starts. So many times, it’s just right before it starts. So I had so much more time to work on it and prepare and just think about it, dream about it.”Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Jesus Jiménez More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Whale’ Premiere in NYC Inspired Strong Reactions

      by

      More than 100 actors, singers and creative professionals attended the New York premiere of Darren Aronofsky’s new film at Alice Tully Hall this week. Some of them shared their thoughts.The carpet was blue. The poster was blue. The suits were blue.That is, until the actor Ty Simpkins arrived at the New York premiere of “The Whale” at Alice Tully Hall this week — in a magenta suit.“I want the summer weather back,” Mr. Simpkins, 21, explained of his choice to break with the otherwise muted palette of the film’s cast and creative team, who arrived on the red carpet — well, oceanic blue carpet — in navy suits and black dresses.The moment of levity was at odds with the character Mr. Simpkins plays in the director Darren Aronofsky’s somber new film, adapted from the play by Samuel D. Hunter and produced by A24. The movie centers on Charlie, played by Brendan Fraser, a reclusive, morbidly obese gay man trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter (Sadie Sink) after the death of his lover. (Mr. Simpkins plays a young evangelical missionary who tries to convert Charlie — and wrestles with some of his own demons in the process.)“The Whale” has received rapturous reviews at film festivals — including a six-minute standing ovation in Venice — and has been hailed as a comeback role for Mr. Fraser, whose career faltered in the years after his success in the “The Mummy” (1999). Though Fraser is regarded as a front-runner to win his first Oscar for his performance, and the film will most likely be nominated for best picture, it has also been criticized for Mr. Aronofsky’s decision to put Mr. Fraser in a so-called fat suit rather than cast an obese actor. The director has said that doing so would have been difficult.When asked about his choice to use a “fat suit,” Mr. Aronofsky objected to the phrasing. “I wouldn’t use that word,” he said. “It’s prosthetics and makeup.”The film’s makeup artists, he said, “were able to create this incredible illusion that not only works with the audience but I think helped Brendan inhabit his character and bring it to life.“That you can be transported into the life of someone who seems incredibly different than you and still learn something about yourself is why I love movies,” Mr. Aronofsky continued.On the carpet and at the after-party, the film’s cast and creative team discussed the themes the film tackles, the emotions it raises and what they hoped audiences would take away.The writer and playwright Samuel D. Hunter, left, with the actor Brendan Fraser and the director Darren Aronofsky at La Grande Boucherie after the New York premiere of “The Whale.”Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesMitch Bukhar, left, a talent agent, with Ty Simpkins, who played a young evangelical missionary in “The Whale.”Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesMr. Fraser gained weight for the role, in addition to wearing the prosthetics, which added as much as 300 additional pounds to his frame. He has said that he prepared for the part by speaking with people who have struggled with eating issues, asking about their diet and the impact of their weight on their relationships.“Very often people who live with severe obesity are disregarded and shut away and silenced,” said Mr. Fraser, 53, who attended the premiere with two of his sons, Holden Fraser, 18, and Leland Fraser, 16. “So it was my obligation — my duty — returning dignity and respect and authenticity.”He continued: “The creative choices we made — the makeup, the elaborate costuming that I wore — with the help of the Obesity Action Coalition, I’m pretty sure that we came really close to creating a film with a main character who hasn’t been seen in this way, as authentically before, and I’m proud of that.”The film, which shows Charlie inhaling whole buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and double-stacked slices of pizza — with ranch dressing added on top — and being subjected to relentless verbal abuse by his teenage daughter, can at times be hard to watch. But stories that push and challenge audiences remain essential, said Mr. Hunter, who wrote the film.“In academia, there’s kind of a push for no more trauma-based stories, and I struggle with that,” said Mr. Hunter, 41, after posing for photos next to his husband, the dramaturge John Baker, on the carpet. “Not only because that is discounting a broad swath of world literature — maybe the majority of it, certainly the Bible — but also because I think there’s utility in looking at dark things through the lens of fiction.”Mala Gaonkar and David Byrne at the after-party for “The Whale.”Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesBut Mr. Aronofsky wanted to be clear: The film is not meant to induce two straight hours of waterworks. “What’s surprising to many people is how funny it is,” he said. “I think when people see the heartfelt material, there’s a lot of laughs.”At an after-party at the heated outdoor atrium of the upscale French brasserie La Grande Boucherie on West 53rd Street, where sliders, artisanal cheeses and wine were served, David Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman, said it wasn’t the humor that had surprised him, but the humanity.“It’s surprising, the amount of heart in it,” Mr. Byrne, 70, said.Over by a gleaming Christmas tree, the comedian Jim Gaffigan was still processing what he had just experienced.“A film that moves you that much, you want to give a standing ovation to,” Mr. Gaffigan, 56, said, clutching a glass of wine. “But I feel like the audience was so emotionally drained that we needed the walker.”“Darren always does that,” he continued. “He accesses emotions that are very credible, very personal. It’s going to take a while to process.”Quick Question is a collection of dispatches from red carpets, gala dinners and other events that coax celebrities out of hiding. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      For Emma Corrin, Identity Is an Ever-Evolving Project

      by

      The British actor Emma Corrin knew that signing on to star in an adaptation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” the racy D.H. Lawrence novel, would mean nudity and sex — and lots of it. They were even prepared to be wet, thanks to a pivotal scene in the rain, when the titular couple (Corrin as the lady and Jack O’Connell as the paramour) lovingly frolic naked. “It was that scene in the script that really drew me to the project, because I was like, that’s wild. I haven’t seen anything like that onscreen,” Corrin said.And yet, that sequence was also “the single most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life,” they said. (Corrin identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.) There was no movie magic, no hiding behind camera angles and modesty protectors: It was leaping, dripping, fleshy full-frontal vulnerability. Watching the movie, they said, took “a lot of whiskey.”Corrin gamine-eyed their way to international fame and award recognition in 2020, playing Princess Diana in “The Crown,” their first major role. Though the settings are decades apart, there is a connection between the young Diana, contorting herself to meet an impossible ideal, and Constance Reid, an independent mind who marries into high aristocracy, circa World War I, only to find her Lord Chatterley dismissive of her needs. They are both “trapped women, searching for freedom,” Corrin said.Connie finds it in “Lady Chatterley” — it premieres on Netflix on Friday — through moments of sexual intimacy rarely depicted in period drama. (Masturbation under all those skirts!) Bringing that to the screen, “you know that you’re doing something that is taking up space that needs to be taken up,” Corrin said. “I felt emboldened, with this edge of, ‘Oh, this is a bit terrifying.’ That’s an exciting place to be as an actor.”Corrin opposite Jack O’Connell in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”NetflixIt’s not a big leap from the projects and characters that Corrin has lately chosen to their own exploration of gender, love, power, and the responsibilities and costs of being heard. They are currently starring in the title role in a West End production of “Orlando,” based on Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending, time-traveling novel.Corrin’s ascent could have been simple: the English rose ingénue, who’s at home in flouncy frocks and looks as if they can blush on cue. (If only, they said.) Instead, Corrin has shared images of their experiments with chest binding and has changed pronouns twice, as their understanding of how they want to present evolved.“My identity and being nonbinary is an embrace of many different parts of myself, the masculine and the feminine and everything in between,” they said. They hoped only for patience, and for roles that encompass the full spectrum of individuality. “It’s hard to be discovering something in yourself at the same time you’re navigating an industry that demands a lot of you, in terms of knowing who you are,” they said.Dan Levy, the “Schitt’s Creek” star, is a friend who has become “a lifeline” for Corrin, as they put it. He said that the expectation, in the social-media age, that all facets of a star be accessible is dangerous, “especially as a queer person navigating your place in the world.”“You want to lend your voice to the conversation,” he wrote in an email, but “doing so comes at the cost of a sense of privacy. Emma has been really thoughtful about what they want to say and who they want to be publicly.” What he admired most, he said, has been “their frankness about not being entirely sure — that who they are is an ever-evolving internal conversation. I know that must be of comfort to many people who can relate.”The Return of ‘The Crown’The hit drama’s fifth season premiered on Netflix on Nov. 9.The Royals and TV: The royal family’s experiences with sitting for television interviews have been fraught. The latest season of “The Crown” explores that rocky relationship.Meeting the Al-Fayeds: The new season includes portrayals of the Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed, his son Dodi and his personal valet — who had all connections with the royal family.Republicanism on the Rise: Since “The Crown” debuted in 2016, there has been a steady increase in support for abolishing Britain’s monarchy. Has the show contributed to that change?Casting Choices: In a conversation with The Times, the casting director Robert Sterne told us how the drama has turned into a clearinghouse for some of Britain’s biggest stars.Corrin, 26, lives in North London, in a décor-jumbled flat (they have a penchant for Lego sets), with three roommates, friends from their school days, and Corrin’s doted-upon dog, Spencer. On a warm fall afternoon, they turned up for lunch in Manhattan in shorts and a sweater vest, with short platinum hair curled, a new style they quite liked. In the group chat with the roomies, they floated the idea of getting a perm. “It’s very Renaissance boy, which I feel like I channel in my soul anyway,” Corrin told me of the look.Corrin spent the summer in New York working on a new series.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesAbsolutely not, came the immediate texted reply: a photo of three blondes in a universal, arms-crossed, N-O. They are, Corrin said, the kind of friends “who know you so well that you can’t get away with anything, which is wonderful.”Their support network is robust, almost to a fault. Corrin’s mother, a speech therapist, and two younger brothers attended the “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” London premiere. “I did give them all the disclaimers,” Corrin said. “And it was, yeah, mortifying. I think worse for my flatmates, to have to sit next to my family watching it.” But they appreciated the film, Corrin added: “I got such sweet texts from my brothers afterwards.”Since their big debut, Corrin has worked nonstop — “I’m a stranger to breaks,” they said. “I’m bad at not doing anything.” They spent the summer in New York to film a coming FX mystery series and to be profiled by Vogue, the first nonbinary star to appear on the cover.Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, the French director of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” understood why Corrin — whose pronouns were she/they during production — is in demand. The star “has a quality of being here and now,” the filmmaker said. “She’s believable in the ’60s, in the ’20s, today, but she has this immediacy and the spontaneity that brings you back to the present with her, and that’s a very strong quality. The singular energy that she has, the way she talks, the way she moves, it’s always surprising.”Physicality is a big part of Corrin’s performances. They have worked with Polly Bennett, a movement coach and choreographer, regularly since meeting on “The Crown,” where they set out to unpack “Diana-isms,” Bennett said, like the princess’s signature head tilt. “When you try to look at it from an actor’s perspective, it’s to understand why Diana did that,” Bennett said. “Match the physical world to the emotional.”Corrin as Diana in “The Crown.” They worked with a movement coach on the character’s signature head tilt.Des Willie/NetflixOn “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Bennett put the leads through “some really quite outlandish, abstract perspective drama school stuff,” said O’Connell, who plays Oliver Mellors, the solitary but sensitive estate groundsman Connie falls for. “And I don’t have drama school experience, so I was very open to it.”In rehearsals, the leads and filmmakers, along with an intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, blocked out the sex scenes and found their boundaries.For O’Connell, who is from the same part of Britain as D.H. Lawrence and recognized Mellors as a familiar sort of local figure, the coaching helped him “sit with feeling uncomfortable,” he said. “Before every take, there was like an overwhelming sensation that I did not want to do it.”The rain scene, in particular, seemed to test everyone involved.For starters, though they filmed in and around an estate in normally drizzly, muddy Wales, “it was like the most sunny summer of the last decade,” said de Clermont-Tonnerre. Cue the rain machine.The scene, which comes late in the film and serves to amplify Connie and Oliver’s love and connection, lasts 90 seconds. (To skirt an NC-17 rating, de Clermont-Tonnerre had to keep all the most explicit moments trim.) It needed to feel spontaneous and joyful, a natural exhilaration in a verdant field.“That scene was so reliant on two people in physical abandon,” Bennett said. “You can’t just send two people out to do that. We choreographed shapes and moments, and how garments came off.”But much of it was improvised. “We’re in the field and we looked at each other, and I’d never seen my own terror reflected back at me so intensely,” Corrin said. “We were like, what do we do?”For one nude scene with O’Connell, “I’d never seen my own terror reflected back at me so intensely,” Corrin said.Josefina SantosOn a closed set of about eight people, with music blasting to pump them up, Corrin and O’Connell cut loose. “It was scary for all of us,” de Clermont-Tonnerre said. “And also liberating, in the way that we all wanted to get naked and go running with them.”And O’Connell learned to quiet his inner doubts. “Once you get over the initial discomfort and sometimes shock, something really exhilarating can stem from that,” he said. “And that’s quite rewarding.”Lawrence’s novel, originally published privately in 1928, was famously banned for decades, but after social mores loosened, it was the subject of multiple screen adaptations. De Clermont-Tonnerre wanted to ground hers in Connie’s perspective, as she leaves behind the rule-bound grand manor for earthier pleasures.Ecstasy, in all its forms, was what she was after. “I needed this version to be erotic and to actually glorify eroticism as an actual and vital need,” she said. “I want people to get desire, and to really get horny.”The kind of sexual awakening that Connie undergoes, “I think it’s at the center of a lot of our lives, definitely in terms of self-discovery — probably throughout your life,” Corrin said, adding, “I think that her determination to find something that is very genuine, and a real connection, definitely made me want the same. She’s brave in a way that really inspired me.”Corrin hopes that some of the boldness sticks with them in other ways. “I’m very bad at conflict,” they said. At work, when a request feels iffy, they call Levy for advice. “He’ll be like, that’s out of order, you need to say no and set a boundary.” (“Self-preservation is a team effort!” he said.)Getting angry, raising their voice onscreen, still feels foreign to Corrin. “I’m always worried that I’m not landing it, because I’m so unused to that feeling in my own body,” they said.Crying and having sex, on the other hand, “I can do all day.” More