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      Ben Platt on the Unfortunate Timeliness of His ‘Parade’ Revival

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      When Ben Platt was a kid, listening to show tunes in the family car, he developed a fondness for “This Is Not Over Yet,” an optimistic and upbeat Jason Robert Brown song from the short-lived musical “Parade.”It was only years later, as Platt grew up, that he encountered the rest of the show, and realized what it was actually about — the 20th-century lynching of a Jewish Southerner, fueled by antisemitism.Now Platt is starring in a seven-performance revival of the 1998 musical at New York City Center, and says the timing is sadly perfect, given the antisemitism once again coursing through the nation’s culture. “It’s felt urgent,” he said, “in a way that is shocking to all of us.”The musical, which won Tony Awards both for Brown’s score and Alfred Uhry’s book, tells the story of Leo Frank, an Atlanta factory manager who was convicted in 1913 of murdering a 13-year-old girl. A public outcry over whether Frank was actually guilty prompted the Georgia governor to commute Frank’s death sentence, at which point Frank was lynched by a mob.Laura Dreyfuss with Ben Platt as Evan in “Dear Evan Hansen.” “It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something,” he said in an interview, “and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe City Center revival, directed by Michael Arden, begins performances Tuesday and runs through Sunday; there is already talk of a possible Broadway transfer, but no firm plans.Platt, 29, vaulted to fame, and won a Tony, playing the title character in the 2016 musical “Dear Evan Hansen.” In the years since, he has been working onscreen, starring in “The Politician” for Netflix and a film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” as well as the forthcoming “The People We Hate at the Wedding” for Amazon Prime Video and a movie called “Theater Camp,” which he wrote with a group of friends. He also created a new lane for himself as a performer: writing songs, recording albums and touring.In an interview, he talked about “Parade,” the ups and downs of “Dear Evan Hansen” (the stage version was a hit; the film adaptation was panned), and his decision to drop off Twitter. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Tell me why you wanted to do “Parade.”This was a character I related to. I recognized this guy. And I realized how much modern application there is for it. It’s a lot harder to distance from than I was hoping it would be. This show is all about not only antisemitism, but the failure of the country to protect lots of marginalized groups, and we’re all feeling that really intensely right now.How do you connect to your character?The very obvious thing is that we’re both Jewish. He’s also, similar to other characters that I’ve played, not the best at expressing his emotions. Leo learns during his journey that vulnerability does not mean you’re any less strong, and I definitely relate to that journey. Being wrongly convicted of murder, I fortunately cannot relate to. I hope I never learn that.What does this show tell us about antisemitism?I don’t necessarily want to dictate what people feel when they come away from the show. There’s a lot of gray in the show. It doesn’t make any decisions for you. Hopefully, most of all, it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.“Hopefully, most of all,” Platt said of the show, “it shows how hatred is learned. With every character, you see how they got to where they are.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWhat’s it like being back onstage after five years away?It’s just the best. I spent my whole life doing it, pretty much nonstop, from 6 years old to 24. It just feels like a homecoming.I never fully understand why actors want to do these short-run shows. You put in all this time for a few nights.Two reasons. One is the unselfish reason, which is it’s just a story worth telling, especially right now. The selfish reason is that I carry ulterior hopes that maybe we’ll have a longer opportunity in the future.You spent so many years working on “Dear Evan Hansen.” How are you feeling about that experience?I’m feeling really grateful for it. It was my ultimate dream come true, to originate something, and it inspired me to start looking inward and writing my own music. It will always be a piece of me. I feel a simultaneous constant pride and desire to keep it in my heart at all times, but also a real readiness and excitement at having moved forward and embracing my adulthood and playing characters that live in different worlds than that. I got to live in that world for a very long time, and it was not the easiest world to live in. So I look at it fondly but I’m also happy to be moving ahead.Your boyfriend is your successor in the role, Noah Galvin. Is that weird?I don’t think about him in that way, because I knew him for three or four years before we even had that experience. There’s this lore that that’s how we met, but it’s not. But it’s nice to have that detail of him understanding deeply what that experience was. And I feel very lucky to be with him — he’s changed my perspective, and made things, in a very positive way, feel a bit smaller and more manageable.You’ve been working on a film version of “Merrily We Roll Along,” to be shot over 20 years. What’s that like?There are so many variables. The only way I’ve found to approach it is that you have to treat [each shoot] like short films, let it go, and move on and live your life, and as the next one rolls around, find your way back into it. If I constantly have it in the back of my head, it just feels so unimaginable to get to the end, that I get scared about it in a way that’s not productive. So I’m just taking each of the little gifts along the way and hoping we make it to the end of the road.Platt in “Dear Evan Hansen.” After the film version of the musical was criticized, he left Twitter. “I wasn’t getting anything positive,” he said, “and it’s been really nice to be away.”Erika Doss/Universal PicturesOne of your closest friends, Beanie Feldstein, who is also starring with you in “Merrily,” had a bumpy ride with “Funny Girl” on Broadway. I wonder what you make of how her experience went.I know more than anything, she just wants everybody to move on. So I’ll just say that I love her and I admire her strength.You had your own rough ride with the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen.”It was definitely a disappointing experience, and difficult, and it definitely opened my eyes to the internet and how horrific it can be. You’d think, after doing “Dear Evan Hansen” onstage for four years, I would have already known that. I try my best to focus on people who tell me it was moving to them and they really felt seen by it. It is very easy for the good to get drowned out by the bad.I don’t know if this is connected, but I noticed that you’re no longer on Twitter. What’s that about?I find that Twitter is almost exclusively for tearing people down. I wasn’t getting anything positive, and it’s been really nice to be away.Since “Evan Hansen” you’ve become a pop performer, recording and touring.It’s a whole different animal because it’s been the only avenue in which to express my perspective. I find that in everything else — film and TV and especially theater — as much as you’re giving of yourself, you’re also doing your best to disappear, to serve somebody else’s mission or tell somebody else’s story. I love that experience, being a cog in a larger wheel. But I also think that being afforded the opportunity to do the opposite is a very liberating and freeing experience. One makes me really appreciate the other.Do you see yourself back on Broadway?I would love to, yes. I’m very much so hoping, whether it’s this or something else, to get back there as soon as I can. More

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      She Knew the Cello. The Acting She Learned With Cate Blanchett.

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      Sophie Kauer was a cellist studying for a degree when a friend urged her to audition for “Tár.” She watched Michael Caine videos on acting and dove right in.Lydia Tár commands with the gravitational pull of a planet: Everyone and everything, including the camera in “Tár,” Todd Field’s epic about a fictional maestro, lives in her shadow. But when Lydia (Cate Blanchett), who has been accused of sexual harassment, sets her sights on Olga, a rising Russian cellist, she is confronted with a foil of sorts. Is the young woman disarmingly naïve or particularly cunning?In reality, Sophie Kauer, who plays Olga, is a British-German cellist who, after responding to a vague open casting call practically on a lark, found herself months later plunked down in front of Blanchett shooting two-hander scenes in Berlin. She was 19 and had never acted in her life.“Sometimes I feel like everything’s happening backwards,” Kauer, now 21, said recently on a video call from a professor’s classroom at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she is studying for a classical music performance degree. “I’ve kind of just been dropped into the thick of it, which is both wonderful and so weird at the same time.”Kauer appeared grateful, dazed and remarkably well-adjusted about the film and the attention. She has been meticulous about scheduling classes around press duties to maintain her school’s mandatory 80 percent attendance rate.Born in London, she picked up the cello at 8 and has always been naturally driven — she speaks five languages, and for early auditions developed her Russian accent through YouTube videos. (After she was cast, two dialect coaches took over.)“If I want to do something, then I’ll just do it,” Kauer said, not with arrogance but rather the air of someone who is self-assured about her passions. Music, she emailed after we spoke, “has been my absolute rock through everything. But what I really don’t like is being put in a box and told that classical music is all I am allowed to do or I am not sufficiently serious about my career.”Kauer spoke about the casting process, working with Blanchett, and what she thinks about that Juilliard scene. These are edited excerpts from our interview.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.What has your life been like these past few weeks?I’m still getting the hang of all of this. Every interview I do is completely different and I learn so much from it. I just think it’s so surreal that someone wants to talk to me. [Laughs]How did you become involved in the film?My friend sends me a casting call that has been posted in our school Facebook group, saying, “Look, they’re looking for a young cellist who could do a Russian accent and feels comfortable in front of a camera. I think you should apply for this.” And I was like, “Oh, but I don’t do any acting. I wouldn’t get it.” And she was like, “Oh, just apply. It’ll be fun.”I wasn’t really thinking about what size the role was. I had a Zoom audition with [Field] and I was like, “This is so cool. I’m going to tell my grandkids that I did a Zoom audition with Todd Field.” Then I got a call asking if I could send a recording of the piece you hear Olga playing in the film, the Elgar Cello Concerto. I had played it before, but I had to get it back in my fingers in like a day and send it straight away. They were really cryptic the week after. It wasn’t until I actually was put on a Zoom call with Avy Kaufman [a casting director] and Todd that I found out I had got the part. No one had actually explained it to me.Kauer in the film. It’s not clear whether her character is naïve or cunning. “That’s the thing — you are not meant to know,” she said.Focus FeaturesDid you have any acting experience?When the occasional Shakespeare compulsory play came around [in school], I’d play the noble man in the background with the painted-on beard who says “Aye” three times or something like that. [Laughs] That was the extent of it.Michael Caine did these lessons on film acting [available on YouTube]. That was very technical, but I picked up a lot. I kind of figured it out as I went along. When I would have days or hours off, I asked Todd if I would be allowed to watch everyone else act their scenes. I was trying to pick up everything that they were doing,What was it like to go from no acting experience to suddenly working opposite Cate Blanchett?I remember I saw her for the first time she put out her hand and she said, “Hi, I’m Cate.” And you’re just like, “I know!” [Laughs] And then I had to [rehearse with] her after having met her five minutes before.I quickly learned that she’s one of the world’s loveliest people, and she’s so supportive and generous. I would even go as far to say that I learned to act from her and Todd.Olga has a very specific dynamic with Lydia. She seems to be the only one Lydia can’t fully control. Why is that?That’s the thing — you are not meant to know. We have no idea if Olga was just super naïve and very caught up with her life going exactly to plan and her achieving her wildest dreams. Or if she’s super calculating and knows exactly what she’s doing. Part of me would like to think that she’s smart, and the other part of me wants to think that she’s careless and young and kind of free. None of us actually really know the entirety of our characters. I don’t think Todd does either. What do you make of how the film examines notions of power in the world of classical music?The release of this film is very timely because the Independent Society of Musicians just released a study saying that sexual harassment, bullying and racism is at its all-time worst in the classical music industry, and that people feel like they can’t speak out about it because they’re freelancers. And when they do speak out, they face repercussions and are not rebooked.It’s perfect that this film is coming out now. I also think the fact that it’s a woman in a position that a man would stereotypically be in is really good, and in a way is slightly less offensive. People kind of just see the problem for what it is, rather than getting offended.The film has been discussed at length within the framework of the culture wars, in particular with the scene at Juilliard when a student expresses discomfort playing music written by straight white men. Lydia has no patience for him. As someone in these classrooms, do you have sympathies for either side in that Juilliard scene?Of course I do. We need to be open to discussing it and including all these new voices that have been unheard for so long — music by women or including more cultures and ethnicities. And we can’t just forget what has gone before because this is what our whole history is based on. I can’t wake up tomorrow and say, sorry, I’m never going to play a piece written by a white male composer again. Because unfortunately that is just how history is, and that is the vast majority of our music.You can’t exclude the majority of music history because you don’t identify with it. But I also do think that the point he makes is very relevant. There is very little representation for a lot of genders and ethnicities and cultures, and classical music may have been a bit slower to evolve. But it is evolving. Every time I watch, my sympathy for each character changes. Sometimes I think Lydia is totally right, and other times I’m like, no, Max, he’s the one who’s totally right.What’s next for you?I am still in the middle of studying for my music degree, so I have a lot of stuff to catch up on. I’m looking forward to being a musician again. But I did enjoy the acting a lot. I’m still very young, so I’m kind of seeing what happens and taking it one thing at a time. I would like to hope that this isn’t my last project. It was really quite something. More

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      Leslie Jordan, ‘Will & Grace’ Actor and Instagram Star, Dies at 67

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      Shows like “Will & Grace” made him a familiar face, then the pandemic brought new fame. He was killed in a car crash in Hollywood.Leslie Jordan, a comic actor who after a late start in his performing career became a recognizable face from roles on numerous television shows, most notably “Will & Grace,” then achieved even more fame during the pandemic when his quirky homemade videos attracted millions of Instagram followers, died on Monday in a car crash in Hollywood, Calif. He was 67.David Shaul of the BRS/Gage Talent Agency, which represented him, confirmed the death. News reports quoting the police said Mr. Jordan’s car crashed into the side of a building after he had apparently experienced a medical emergency. A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that someone driving a BMW collided with a wall in Hollywood at 9:30 a.m. and died, but he declined to identify the victim.“Not only was he a mega-talent and joy to work with,” Mr. Shaul said of Mr. Jordan by email, “but he provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times.”That was a reference to Mr. Jordan’s surprising foray into viral videos during the pandemic. Sitting out Covid-19 in Tennessee, near his family, he began posting vignettes on Instagram — simple, amusing moments from his life — and was surprised to find his number of followers balloon into the millions. He had accumulated more than 130 television and film credits, so he hadn’t been exactly undiscovered, but the Instagram stardom at age 65 was an unexpected treat.“I’ve loved attention, wanted it my whole career,” he told The New York Times in 2020, “and I’ve never gotten this kind of attention.”He also found that he had become a sort of de facto comforter to those fans.“What I love, though,” he said, “are people that pull me aside and say: ‘Listen, I don’t want to bother you, but I’ve had a rough go. I’ve been locked down. I’ve got kids, and I looked forward to your posts and you really, really helped me through this tough time.’ When people tell you things like that, you realize comedy is important.”Mr. Jordan in 2020. The popular home videos he made during the Covid-19 pandemic “provided an emotional sanctuary to the nation at one of its most difficult times,” his agent said.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesComedy came easily to Mr. Jordan, though it took him a while to find his way to a performing career. At under five feet tall, he was small enough that in his 20s he made a stab at becoming a jockey. But in his later 20s he gave up that idea, earned a theater degree and in 1982 took a bus to Hollywood.It was a difficult period for a gay actor like Mr. Jordan to find work, but he began getting jobs, first in commercials.“I was like Flo,” he said in the 2020 interview, a reference to the Progressive Insurance pitchwoman. “People would recognize me. I was the PIP Printing guy. I was the elevator operator to Hamburger Hell for Taco Bell, where you went if you didn’t eat tacos.”He began to get TV roles in 1986 — guests spots on “The Fall Guy,” “Murphy Brown,” “Newhart” and others, then recurring roles on “The People Next Door,” “Top of the Heap,” “Reasonable Doubts,” “Hearts Afire” and more.He made a particular impression on the sitcom “Will & Grace,” about the friendship between a gay lawyer and a straight interior designer sharing a New York City apartment. Mr. Jordan played the tart-tongued socialite Beverley Leslie, appearing both in the original series beginning in 2001 and in the recent reboot.In 2006, he won an Emmy for the role, for outstanding guest actor in a comedy series.Leslie Allen Jordan was born on April 29, 1955, in Memphis to Allen and Peggy Ann Jordan and was raised in Chattanooga, Tenn. His Southern drawl was as distinctive a part of his résumé as his height.Mr. Jordan said he knew from early in life that he was gay — he liked to say that he went directly from his mother’s womb into her high heels and had been “on the prance ever since.”The household was conservative, and his father, who was in the Army and died in a plane crash when Leslie was 11, was concerned enough about Leslie’s effeminate qualities to send his son to an all-boys summer camp one year. As Mr. Jordan told the story to The Times in 2020, at the camp’s parents day, awards were handed out, with the moms and dads looking on.“So here’s one for the best archer, here’s for the best horseback rider, here’s for the best swim person,” he said, “and I didn’t win anything. And my mother said my dad was just sinking lower and lower.”But the staff eventually brought out a trophy, presented it to Leslie, and someone announced: “This is for the best all-around camper. We have this kid who wasn’t actually the best at anything, but boy, he sure did make us laugh.”He loved horses but realized he wasn’t suited to be a jockey.“People think it’s size, or something,” he told The Telegraph of Britain in 2021. “It has nothing to do with that. You have to weigh about 104 pounds, and honey, my ass alone weighs 104.”When he decided to try showbiz, he said, “I had $1,200 that mother pinned into my underpants,” and he had to decide which direction to go from Tennessee, to New York or Hollywood.“If I was going to starve, I wanted to starve with a tan,” he said. He headed west.Mr. Jordan in 2010. In recent years he was much in demand, with recurring roles on several TV series.Richard Perry/The New York TimesAs he wrote in his book “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet” (2008), he knew that being gay might not help his prospects in Hollywood.“I decided I was going to make a real effort to ‘butch it up’ and hide any signs that I was a Big Homo,” he wrote. “The funny thing is, I am, without a doubt, the gayest man I know.”Once he began landing roles, they came quickly, but Mr. Jordan also had substance abuse problems.“I tell people: If you want to get sober, try 27 days in the L.A. men’s county jail,” he told The Guardian in 2021. At 42, he kicked his addictions to alcohol and crystal meth.Information on his survivors was not immediately available.Most of Mr. Jordan’s work was in television, but he also took the occasional film role, including in “The Help” (2011). He also had a one-man stage show that he performed frequently, titled, like his first book, “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet.” It was an autobiographical collection of stories.“I am a high school cheerleader stuck in a 55-year-old man’s body,” he confessed in one memorable line. “If you were to cut me open, Hannah Montana would jump out.”David Rooney reviewed it for The Times when the show was presented in New York in 2010.“Many gay rites-of-passage stories are echoed here: hostile small-town environment (Chattanooga, Tenn.); rigidly masculine father; humor as armor against bullies; unrequited loves; drug and alcohol dependency; internal homophobia; weakness for rough trade,” Mr. Rooney wrote. “But Mr. Jordan’s candor gives them a fresh spin.”In recent years Mr. Jordan was much in demand, with recurring roles in the TV series “American Horror Story,” “Call Me Kat,” “The Cool Kids” and “Living the Dream.” In 2021 he published another book, “How Y’All Doing? Misadventures and Mischief From a Life Well Lived.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      How George Clooney and Julia Roberts Quietly Became the Tracy-Hepburn of Our Time

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      “Ticket to Paradise” and other team-ups take advantage of their onscreen glamour and stellar chemistry and their offscreen affection for one another.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.They don’t share the screen until 49 minutes into their first film together, and it’s not an amicable conversation. She’s expecting her boyfriend, but the hand on her shoulder belongs to her ex-husband, and her first words to him (“What are you doing here?”) are loaded with a mixture of shock and residual anger. The irritation quickly takes over; there’s fire in her eyes, enough to dampen the twinkle in his. “You’re not wearing your ring,” he notes.“I sold it,” she fires back. “I don’t have a husband, or didn’t you get the papers?”“My last day inside,” he replies.“I told you I’d write.”Julia Roberts and George Clooney’s first scene together, in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven,” runs less than five minutes total, but they’re packed with barbs and pronouncements, insults and callbacks, relitigations of ancient arguments and (for him at least) flashes of longing. Tess (Roberts) is the reason Danny Ocean (Clooney) has assembled the titular crew to rob three high-profile Las Vegas casinos — all of which happen to be owned by Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), Tess’s current beau. (When Danny meets Terry, he fidgets with his wedding ring absent-mindedly. Or perhaps deliberately.) The payday is huge, but it’s incidental to Danny; as he tells her during that strained first conversation, “I came here for you.” So Danny and Tess, and thus Clooney and Roberts, have to generate enough heat and chemistry underneath the snippy surface to justify everything else in the movie. It’s a tall order. They pull it off without breaking a sweat.“Our scenes are really fun,” Clooney explained at the time, “because they’re like an old Howard Hawks film where they’re both going at each other and nobody wins. Which is the way it should be.” Roberts concurred: “The dialogue is so sharp and exacting, it’s like a 1940s movie.”Danny Ocean (Clooney) fiddling with his ring during a run-in with his ex (Roberts) and her new love (Andy Garcia).Warner Bros., via AlamySuch callbacks to old Hollywood were no accident. For years now, Clooney has been described as one of the last movie stars of the old-school mold. As GQ’s Tom Carson put it in 2007, “He’s shrewd, he’s virile, he’s merry, and the camera loves him with the devotion of a headwaiter rushing over to light a billionaire’s cigar.”5 Movies Featuring the Clooney-Roberts DuoCard 1 of 5‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (2001). More

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      The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir

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      BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — When I pictured Matthew Perry, the actor frequently known as Chandler Bing, I saw him on the tangerine couch at Central Perk or seated on one of the twin recliners in the apartment he shared with Joey Tribbiani.In September, after arriving at his 6,300-square-foot rental house and being ushered through a driveway gate by his sober companion, I sat across from Perry, who perched on a white couch in a white living room, a world away from “Friends,” the NBC sitcom that aired for 10 seasons and catapulted all six of its stars into fame, fortune and infinite memes. Instead of the foosball table where Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross gathered, nudging each other through the first chapters of adulthood, Perry, 53, had a red felt pool table that looked untouched. There was plenty of light in the house, but not a lot of warmth.I have watched every episode of “Friends” three times — in prime time, on VHS and on Netflix — but I’m not sure I would have recognized Perry if I’d seen him on the street. If he was an ebullient terrier in those 1990s-era Must See TV days — as memorable for his full-body comedy as he was for the inflection that made “Can you BE any more [insert adjective]” the new “Gag me with a spoon” — he now seemed more like an apprehensive bulldog, with the forehead furrows to match.As his former co-star Lisa Kudrow confesses in the foreword to his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” the first question people ask about “Friends” is often “How’s Matthew Perry doing?”Perry answers that question in the book, which Flatiron will publish on Nov. 1, by starkly chronicling his decades-long cage match with drinking and drug use. His addiction led to a medical odyssey in 2018 that included pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag, more than a dozen stomach surgeries, and the realization that, by the time he was 49, he had spent more than half of his life in treatment centers or sober living facilities.Most of this is covered in the prologue. At one point, he writes in a parenthetical, “Please note: for the next few paragraphs, this book will be a biography rather than a memoir because I was no longer there.”The book is full of painful revelations, including one about short-lived, alcohol-induced erectile dysfunction, and another in which Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket. (He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: “Yes, all of them.”)Perry said he had a moment after he recorded his audiobook when he thought, “Oh my God, what a terrible life this person has had!” Then he realized, “Wait a minute, it’s me! I’m talking about me.”Quietly and then, as he relaxed, at a volume that allowed me to stop worrying about my recording device, Perry settled into the conversation about his substance abuse. It started with Budweiser and Andrès Baby Duck wine when he was 14, then ballooned to include vodka by the quart, Vicodin, Xanax and OxyContin. He drew the line at heroin, a choice he credits with saving his life.“I would fake back injuries. I would fake migraine headaches. I had eight doctors going at the same time,” Perry said. “I would wake up and have to get 55 Vicodin that day, and figure out how to do it. When you’re a drug addict, it’s all math. I go to this place, and I need to take three. And then I go to this place, and I’m going to take five because I’m going to be there longer. It’s exhausting but you have to do it or you get very, very sick. I wasn’t doing it to feel high or to feel good. I certainly wasn’t a partyer; I just wanted to sit on my couch, take five Vicodin and watch a movie. That was heaven for me. It no longer is.”Perry said he had been clean for 18 months, which means that he was newly drug- and alcohol-free when the “Friends” reunion aired in May 2021.“I’ve probably spent $9 million or something trying to get sober,” he estimated.Most addicts don’t have Perry’s resources. But they have what he called “the gift of anonymity,” while his bleakest moments have been photographed, chronicled and occasionally mocked. For the record, Perry isn’t a huge fan of secrecy as it pertains to Alcoholics Anonymous, where he sponsors three members. He explained: “It suggests that there’s a stigma and that we have to hide. This is not a popular opinion, by the way.”Perry’s demeanor brightened when we talked about pickleball, his latest obsession. He built a court at the house he’s moving into in the Palisades. He plays with friends and hired pros. He said, “I thought it would be a good idea, to pump myself up, to play pickleball before this interview, but basically I’m about to fall asleep in your lap.”So what inspired him to write a book?After his extended stay in a Los Angeles hospital, Perry started tapping out his life story on the Notes app on his phone. When he hit 110 pages, he showed them to his manager, who told him to keep going. He worked at his dining room table for about two hours a day, no more: “It was hard to face all this stuff.”Perry has written for television (“The Odd Couple,” “Mr. Sunshine”) before but, “writing a book I had not really thought of before,” he said. “Whenever I bumped into something that I didn’t really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going.”Over the course of the next hour, Perry returned to the idea of helping fellow addicts 15 times. The dedication at the front of the book reads: “For all of the sufferers out there. You know who you are.”He said: “It’s still a day-to-day process of getting better. Every day. It doesn’t end because I did this.”“I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center,” Perry writes.Danny Feld/Warner Bros.The memoir came together without a ghostwriter, which is rare for household-name authors. Megan Lynch, the senior vice president and publisher at Flatiron, said of the proposal she read last year: “There was a real voice to it. It was clear that he was going to share intimate details not just about his time on the show but about his entire life, and that felt revelatory. I’m not working on an assembly line of books by celebrities and it’s something as an editor I want to be very choosy about. For me, this really rose to a level that I do not ordinarily see.”Lynch, who watched “Friends” when she was 14 and credits it with providing a vision for a future life in New York City, added, “Unlike any celebrity that I think anyone has ever worked with, Matthew turned in his manuscript ahead of the deadline.”Although Perry hopes that “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” will eventually be shelved in the self-help section of bookstores, “Friends” fans will find poignant nuggets in its pages. Perry writes gratefully and glowingly of the 10 seasons he and his co-stars worked together, earning $1 million per episode at their peak.He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, “in a kind of weird but loving way,” that the group knew he was drinking again. “‘We can smell it,’” she said — and, he writes, “the plural ‘we’ hits me like a sledgehammer.” Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room.Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: “I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in ‘Friends,’ the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”In a phone interview, Kudrow said: “It’s a hideous disease, and he has a tough version of it. What’s not changing is his will to keep going, keep fighting and keep living.”She added: “I love Matthew a lot. We’re part of a family. I’m basically ending this with ‘I’ll be there for you’ [the ‘Friends’ theme song], but it’s true. I’ll always be there for him.”Perry’s childhood friends Christopher and Brian Murray echoed this sentiment. “He’s gone through more than any human being I know and he’s come out on the good side of it,” said Brian, the older of the two brothers who have known Perry since first grade. Riding bikes around their rural corner of Ottawa, the trio would belt out the theme song from “The Rockford Files” and rib one another in the cadence that Perry later immortalized on “Friends.”“A lot of it was tough to understand,” Christopher said. “You wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Fundamentally, his personality and his heart are absolutely in the same place they were when he was a kid.”“Alcohol really did save me for a while,” Perry said. “Then it didn’t. It’s like your best friend turns to you and goes, Now I’m going to kill you. And then you raise your hand and say, I need help here.”Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesFailed relationships were among the hardest things to write about, Perry said (“I’m lonely, but there’s a couple of people on the payroll to keep me safe”), though he hopes to marry and have children in the future. “I think I’d be a great father,” he said.Eighteen years after “Friends” aired its last episode, Perry is tickled by its staying power, and its popularity among the children of its original viewers. “There are 15-year-old people wandering around, seeing me and wondering why I look so old,” he said.When I mentioned I’d seen a young woman in my hotel gym wearing a “Friends” sweatshirt — you rarely see merch from, say, “E.R.,” which capped off NBC’s Thursday night lineup in the ’90s — he laughed. “You should set me up with that girl,” he said. “Just say, I know this guy, he’s as single as they come.”Perry’s candid, darkly funny book now earns him an honorary folding chair — and shelf space — beside David Carr, Caroline Knapp, Leslie Jamison, Nic Sheff, Sarah Hepola and other authors who have explored the minute-to-minute, tooth-and-nail skirmish of recovery.“There is a hell,” Perry writes. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. I’ve been there; it exists; end of discussion.”He said, “Now I feel better because it’s out. It’s out on a piece of paper. The ‘why’ I’m still alive is definitely in the area of helping people.” More

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      Zar Amir Ebrahimi, an Iranian Exile, Channels Trauma in ‘Holy Spider’

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      Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who had to flee Iran after an intimate tape was leaked, has been transfixed by the protests erupting there as her film “Holy Spider” is released in the U.S.“I know that fear, I know that humiliation,” Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the winner of the best actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, said in a recent interview. “I know how men in Iran use their power to keep you quiet.”Ebrahimi is an Iranian exile who, in 2008, decided she had to flee after being subjected to a smear campaign based on her love life. Now, that experience and her role in the film “Holy Spider,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Oct. 28, have intersected with disarming intensity, as women in Iran burn their head scarves to protest the oppression of the Islamic Republic.The story of Rahimi, the fictional investigative journalist at the heart of “Holy Spider,” is one of female defiance in the face of male violence. Based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in the Iranian city of Mashhad, a religious center, the movie traces with unflinching, sometimes harrowing, intimacy Rahimi’s efforts to penetrate the world of men obfuscating Hanaei’s crimes.“We need to finish this story,” Ebrahimi said, her pale eyes burning, during the 75-minute interview in Paris. “This Islamic Republic has to end. Women today know their rights. They know what life and freedom of expression are. It will take time and blood, but there is no other way.”It took time and flexibility to make “Holy Spider,” which is directed by Ali Abbasi, an Iranian exile based in Copenhagen. Filming was impossible in Iran, given the government’s hostility to the project, and months of preparation in Turkey came to nothing when the Turkish authorities, apparently under pressure from Tehran, blocked the production. The young Iranian actress who was set to play Rahimi withdrew, abruptly overcome by fear of reprisal, just as filming was about to start in Jordan, according to Ebrahimi.“I got so angry with her,” said Ebrahimi, who was then the casting director for the movie. “And I think that night when I got so crazy, I’m pretty sure that Ali saw something in me.”So, in extremis, Ebrahimi, 41, who found fame in the early 2000s as a star of the Iranian TV soap opera “Narges,” took on the lead role. Given all of these obstacles, it is, Ebrahimi told me, “a miracle that we have it to screen.”In “Holy Spider,” Ebrahimi plays a journalist investigating a serial killer.UtopiaThe killer, played by Mehdi Bajestani, is based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei.UtopiaAbbasi, the film’s director, said he wanted to challenge the image of “the Islamic Republic and its leaders as some sort of theocratic, dry people who are very conservative.” At a deeper level, he suggested, “these people are obsessed with sexuality.” Iran is a country, he said, where the authorities “get some sort of pleasure out of humiliating women.”For the director, who visited Mashhad as part of his preparations for the movie, “there is a Lynchian undercurrent of fetishized suppressed sexuality in every aspect of the Islamic Republic.”His words brought to mind a meeting I had in the holy Iranian city of Qum in 2009. A mullah sat on a raised dais as he explained in measured terms the rationale of the Islamic Republic. Then the subject turned to women. How could any man not lose control, he suddenly frothed, if women’s hair and the curves of their bodies were allowed to be seen in public? This was the gateway to hell, he shouted.Ebrahimi’s life as an actor in Iran had fallen apart a few years before that meeting, when a video of lovemaking she said she had made with her boyfriend at the time was leaked by a friend, another actor, who somehow stole it when at their apartment. It became known as the “sex tape case,” and the hounding of Ebrahimi knew no bounds.“All these people were watching my naked body and just kept copying the video and selling it in the street,” she said. “And I had to lie every day and just say it was not me, and I can’t tell you how painful it all was. Not because I was ashamed of what I did, but because of the betrayal from my colleagues and this whole society.”The government set about finding every man with whom she had shaken hands, or been photographed, she said; every man she had ever kissed on the cheek. It was clear her career in Iran was over. She was about to confront her various accusers in court, facing a prison sentence and 97 lashes on the charge of having sexual relationships outside wedlock, when she decided to flee.Ebrahimi flew to Azerbaijan, she said, and later from there to Paris, where she has since built a life. She has not returned to Iran, where most of her family still lives, and became a French citizen in 2017.After fleeing Iran, Ebrahimi settled in Paris. She said she had not returned.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesIn recent weeks, as antigovernment protests have spread across Iran and more than 200 people have been killed, Ebrahimi has been transfixed. Watching a new generation resisting arrest and shouting, “I don’t want this hijab, what’s your problem with my hair?” has given her hope.“I saw these images of three actresses throwing away their hijabs, saying we don’t want to lie anymore, we don’t want to hide ourselves,” Ebrahimi said, “and I figure if they arrived at this point, the whole of society is kind of there.”At the same time, she says she knows that the guardians of the Islamic Republic will resist to the end. “The last foundation they have for the regime is women and imposing the hijab,” Ebrahimi said. “They believe if the hijab comes off, everything will be destroyed — the Islamic Republic will tumble down.”Ebrahimi said she felt a lot of emotion that her film was arriving in American theaters at the same time as the protests; it feels like “all these things are happening in the same direction,” she said.“We can’t be controlled by them anymore,” Ebrahimi said. “We can’t hide ourselves and play this game. We grew up learning how to lie. There are 84 million people in Iran, and they are 84 million actors. Lying, existing inside and outside. Lying inside to our parents that we didn’t meet someone outside, lying outside that we don’t party inside.”In making the film, Ebrahimi drew on these experiences of being humiliated by an oppressive government. Her trauma became a source of inspiration and resolve.Rahimi, determined to find the murderer who keeps dumping strangled women on the outskirts of town, and driven by the memory of how an overbearing male editor had abused her, encounters forms of male contempt and evasion.She meets a mullah who assures her that every effort is being made to solve the crimes, even as he hints that it may be God’s will that these female sinners be eliminated. She encounters various men who form a protective shield around the killer, admired in his community as a husband, father and war veteran. She confronts a police officer who comes to her hotel room and tries to seduce her, dangling the possibility of information for sex.“We worked on that scene with the policeman for two hours, and I saw that I could link my personal experience of life to this journalist,” Ebrahimi said. “She was living inside me, and you know, improvisation is an important part of Ali’s work. I came up with the idea of the memory of harassment by a colleague and editor as the motivating force for the journalist.”The film is about female defiance in the face of male violence. “Women today know their rights,” Ebrahimi said about Iran, where protests have erupted recently. “They know what life and freedom of expression are.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesEbrahimi, who received threats from the Islamic Republic soon after she won the award at Cannes, including an allusion by the culture ministry to the fate of the author Salman Rushdie, said that the impact of living in Iran “affects men, too. If they drink or not, if they read something or not — there is this continuous pressure to deceive.”Hanaei’s crimes were called the “spider killings” by local news media because of how he carried them out. He confessed to killing 16 women, and was executed in 2002. In “Holy Spider,” the character is played with psychological intricacy by Mehdi Bajestani. He is desperate to believe that he is doing God’s will, and that of the Islamic Republic, by killing prostitutes. The pressure on him grows. He snaps at his wife. He feels suspicion growing.“I think he’s kind of a victim of the whole society, of the whole mind-set,” Ebrahimi said.At one point, his wife surprises him at home after a murder. He hurriedly wraps the corpse in a carpet. His wife finds him tense and impenetrable; she coaxes him to have sex. On top of his wife, sweating, thrusting, he sees the foot of the strangled prostitute sticking out from the carpet.“He has something of what I call Travis Bickle syndrome,” Abbasi said, a reference to the hero of “Taxi Driver.” “Back from a war, in an existential black hole, missing the violence. And in that scene, sexual pleasure and violence juxtapose each other.”“It’s a movie about a serial killer,” Ebrahimi said, “but also about a serial-killer society. I know, because at some point, I got killed actually by each person in that society, except perhaps 10 percent who still had my back.”She continued: “I sometimes think, for an actress, I’m happy to have this much pain in my life, to have experienced this sex tape story. I put everything into the movie, all my life.”When at last Rahimi finds the killer by impersonating a prostitute, he asks her name.“Zahra,” she says, falsely.“This was pure improvisation,” Ebrahimi said. “It was not in the script. I said ‘Zahra,’ which is my real name, even if I don’t use it anymore.” More

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      ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Barrels Into Awards Season

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      At a screening filled with Oscar voters, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and the directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.LOS ANGELES — You make a movie because you hope people will respond to it, but no one involved with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” expected all of this, the cast and crew kept telling me in the reception area of a luxe Westwood theater on Tuesday night. The “this” in question was a tastemaker party with Oscar voters and industry veterans meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender. But the bigger “this,” the one that really boggled them, was the fact that they were embarking on a monthslong awards campaign to begin with.“We did press all through the summer, and then took a break and thought, ‘This will all die down. The feelings will die down, the excitement will die down,’” said Daniel Kwan, who co-directed the film with Daniel Scheinert. “And then we came back and somehow it’s gotten even stronger. At one of the screenings, someone came up to me and said, ‘This is my 14th time watching the movie!’”Passion counts for a lot during awards season, and “Everything Everywhere” has plenty of it: This sci-fi comedy about a Chinese immigrant and laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh) who becomes the multiverse’s last hope earned stellar reviews in its March release, played for several months in theaters, and made more than $100 million worldwide on a $14.3 million budget. In doing so, it became A24’s highest-grossing title and reinvigorated a specialty-film market that has been ailing since the pandemic began.When the film was released and an awards campaign was suggested, Scheinert said, “I full-on thought it was a joke.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesFrom right, Yeoh, Kwan and Quan. The director said one fan had told him about seeing the movie 14 times.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThough I expect the film will be nominated in several categories at the Oscars, including best picture, it hasn’t taken a traditional path toward that goal. Instead of debuting at a prestigious fall film festival, “Everything Everywhere” chose a raucous spring premiere at South by Southwest, and it was released in theaters on March 25, a time when awards attention was trained exclusively on the Oscar ceremony held that weekend.The film will also have to win over older voters, who may prove more resistant to its wacky charms, since “Everything Everywhere” is laden with sight gags and traffics heavily in down-market genres like sci-fi, action and gross-out comedy. Could it surmount all of those hurdles and become the first significant Oscar contender to feature a dildo fight scene? (If “Frost/Nixon” happened to have one, please write in to remind me.)“I full-on thought it was a joke when this was coming out and they said, ‘What if it’s awards-y?’” Scheinert said. “It was an ode to ‘Jackass’ and Stephen Chow movies!”Still, there is a potent emotional core to the film that has moved audiences: As Yeoh’s Evelyn explores the multiverse, she comes to better understand the people who used to get on her nerves, including her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and even her tax auditor, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). And that empathy extends off the screen, to the movie’s stars: Quan, the first actor to show up at the party, was mobbed by well-wishers eager to praise his sensitive performance. “I was so famished for a role like this,” the 51-year-old Quan told me. “Famished!”After breakout child-star parts in the 1980s as Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and Data in “The Goonies,” Quan’s good fortune quickly evaporated. “I was faced with a horrible reality and I had to step away because the phone stopped ringing,” he said. “Hollywood didn’t write roles for Asian actors.”In 2000, a disillusioned Quan moved behind the camera to work in stunt choreography, though he continued to pay his Screen Actors Guild dues every month without question: “Maybe subconsciously, I was thinking, just be patient.”“How often does a man in his 50s get a chance like this?” Quan asked.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAfter watching “Crazy Rich Asians” in 2018, he was inspired to return to acting and called an agent friend to represent him; two weeks later, that agent sent him “Everything Everywhere,” which let him play a character who was underestimated, sweet-natured, fierce and romantic all at once.“To have this as my comeback movie and to get this recognition and warm embrace? I’ve cried so much in the last six months from reading the comments or from people coming up to me,” Quan said.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, who defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.Aiming for the Oscars: At a screening meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender, actors and directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.The most meaningful interaction came in September at Disney’s starry D23 convention, where Quan went to promote his role in the coming season of the Marvel series “Loki.” Harrison Ford was there touting the fifth “Indiana Jones” film, due next year, and though Quan worried his old co-star wouldn’t recognize him, the actor turned, pointed and said, “Are you Short Round?”“Yes, Indy,” Quan replied. And as they embraced, memories came flooding back from the beginning of Quan’s career, which has now regained its initial promise.“How often does a man in his 50s get a chance like this? How often do actors get a second act?” Quan asked. “I really hope that if people are reading my story, it gives them hope, it gives them courage to give voice to that dream they once had. It’s so difficult to be an actor in this business, and I want those people who are doubting themselves or have dreams fading away because they think it’s not going to happen …”Quan grew too emotional to finish his thought and swallowed, collecting himself. “Anyway,” he said.Recent awards-season events for the film have often ended in tears, according to Scheinert: “In a weird way, we’re finally getting to debrief with our cast and crew about what this really meant to us.” It all began with a viral GQ video when Yeoh cried as she discussed reading the “Everything Everywhere” script, which asked her to play so many more modes than she was used to. “To be funny, to be real, to be sad — finally, somebody understood that I could do those things,” she said in the clip.That touched her directors and also took them by surprise, since on set Yeoh was more likely to affectionately razz them than to confess her innermost feelings. “Some of the stuff she said in interviews, she had never said to us,” Kwan said. “Michelle’s a very guarded woman, and she has to be.”The costume designer Shirley Kurata was among the crew members at the screening.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesOne academy voter paid tribute to the film’s hot dog fingers.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesRight on cue, Yeoh finally arrived, a vision in yellow Gucci. “I’m the canary, nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. The very busy actress, who will soon be seen in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and the Disney+ series “American Born Chinese,” had hotfooted it to the party from the nearby premiere of “The School for Good and Evil,” a Netflix fantasy film where she plays one of the teachers at an enchanted boarding school. That red carpet had been packed with ingénues and TikTok stars, and Yeoh was surprised when a young girl recognized her and passed her an appreciative note.“I thought, ‘I’m out of my league here, nobody’s going to know who you are,’” Yeoh said.“Michelle, you are huge,” Kwan replied. He recalled a San Francisco screening of “Everything Everywhere” where the heavily Asian crowd, which had revered Yeoh since her start in Hong Kong action movies, cheered so loudly that the actress was afraid to go onstage, lest she become too emotional in public.“For a long time, they would say, ‘You have to tell everybody about your experiences,’ and I couldn’t, because it would overwhelm me,” Yeoh said, turning to Kwan and Scheinert. “And the one time I listened to you — the one time — I did an interview and I was blubbering! Oh, I was so embarrassed.”Was she referring to that GQ clip? “Yes,” said a mortified Yeoh, burying her face in Kwan’s shoulder. “See, everyone knows!”Yeoh told me the reason she has trouble articulating what “Everything Everywhere” means to her “is because when you really talk about it, suddenly it comes crashing in that you have waited for so many years for something like this. And as the years go by, you see it slipping away from your fingers, and you can’t get it back because you are aging. But even though I’m 60, I can still do a lot! Don’t put me in a box.”Yeoh seen through a chandelier at the theater. She said she had a hard time talking about the film’s success because each time she is reminded that she “waited for so many years for something like this.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesRecent supporting roles in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and “Crazy Rich Asians” were meaningful, Yeoh said, but on “Everything Everywhere,” being listed first on the call sheet gave her a sense of ownership she’d never really felt before. She hopes that Hollywood will continue to consider her for lead roles, though she’s well-aware of whom those parts are traditionally written for.“I read scripts and it’s the guy who goes off on some big adventure — and he’s going off with my daughter!” she said. “I’m like, no, no.”Yeoh excused herself to greet Roger Spottiswoode, who directed “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the 1997 James Bond film that help introduced her to American audiences; meanwhile, the “Star Trek Into Darkness” screenwriter Roberto Orci greeted Quan with a deferential bow. Later, as the cast and directors gathered in a theater to introduce the film — alongside a huge cohort that included its fight choreographers, composers, visual effects artists and costumers — a man from the audience yelled, “You rock!”This sort of unalloyed success is a new sensation for Kwan and Scheinert, who recently signed a lucrative five-year pact with Universal but got their start making odder fare like face-melting music videos and a debut feature, “Swiss Army Man” (2016), that involved Paul Dano riding a dead Daniel Radcliffe like a jet ski powered by flatulence. How does it feel when their avowedly left-of-center sensibility happens to score a cultural bull’s-eye?“It’s unsettling,” Scheinert said.“It makes us feel like we messed up somewhere,” Kwan joked. “The whole world likes it? What did we do wrong?” More

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      Quintessa Swindell, a Trans and Nonbinary Star of DC’s ‘Black Adam’

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      “My trans and nonbinary identity is the thing that I’m the most confident about in my life,” Mx. Swindell said.Name: Quintessa SwindellAge: 25Hometown: Virginia Beach, Va.Now Lives: In a loft in Downtown Los Angeles and a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village of Manhattan.Claim to Fame: Quintessa Swindell is a nonbinary trans actor who stars in DC’s “Black Adam,” a big-budget film in which Mx. Swindell plays Cyclone, a superhero who has the power to manipulate the wind. The film, which opens on Oct. 21 and also stars Dwayne Johnson, marks one of the first times that a transgender actor has been cast in a main role in a DC production. “My trans and nonbinary identity is the thing that I’m the most confident about in my life,” Mx. Swindell said. “Having that understanding and comfort has enabled me to progress through my life with way more ease than I ever had in the past.”Big Break: Raised by a single father in Virginia Beach, Mx. Swindell took theater classes at the Governor’s School for the Arts during high school as an outlet for personal growth. “Acting became therapy sessions because I was forced to translate bottled-up feelings into whatever scenes I was studying,” Mx. Swindell said.In 2015, Mx. Swindell moved to New York City to study theater at Marymount Manhattan, before dropping out two years later to pursue acting in Los Angeles. A former acting coach put Mx. Swindell in touch with Robert Myerow, a talent agent at the Gersh Agency, which led to roles in the 2018 film “Granada Nights” and, later, as a high school senior grappling with family issues on HBO’s “In Treatment.” “I’m always super-focused on how every performance or piece of work can be better than the last,” Mx. Swindell said.Mx. Swindell plays Cyclone in “Black Adam,” who has the power to manipulate the wind.Frank Masi/Warner Bros.Latest Project: Balancing comic-book blockbusters with independent films, Mx. Swindell also stars in “Master Gardener,” a philosophical thriller with Sigourney Weaver that premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival. (The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called the film “an austere, beautiful, romantic, wordy, implausible and touchingly Utopian story of love, loneliness, violence and redemption.”) “When I met Sigourney, the first thing I thought was, ‘How am I possibly going to thank her for everything she has done?’” Mx. Swindell said.Mx. Swindell also stars in “Master Gardener,” a thriller with Sigourney Weaver that premiered at the Venice Film Festival.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesNext Thing: Mx. Swindell is in the early stages of producing two films that “say something about the world we live in today.” One is “a movie about female dispatch riders during World War II.” The other is “about two female D.J. pioneers in London’s ‘second summer of love.’”Gender Performances: Mx. Swindell found New York City to be a wellspring for identity studies — not only in college classrooms, but at after-hours parties like Battle Hymn, where gender fluidity was flaunted and celebrated. “I was learning things in my gender-studies classes, and at the same time I was going out at night and seeing the very things I was learning about in the wild.” More