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      ‘House of the Dragon’: Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke on Forgiveness and Favorite Drinks

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      In a joint interview, Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke talked about the forces that drive their characters apart — and pull them together.This interview includes spoilers for the first eight episodes of “House of the Dragon.”By the time Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke debuted, in the sixth episode, in HBO’s fantasy smash “House of the Dragon,” you had seen them before. Well, their characters, anyway.D’Arcy and Cooke play Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Queen Alicent Hightower, childhood friends driven apart by a power struggle over who will inherit the Iron Throne from King Viserys (Paddy Considine), Rhaenyra’s father and Alicent’s husband.But because of the story’s unusual structure — the show covers decades in its first season, during which Rhaenyra and Alicent grow up and have children of their own — their roles were played by the younger performers Milly Alcock and Emily Carey in the first five episodes. As the time for the cast switch-over drew closer, D’Arcy grew more and more nervous.“I found that bit the most pressurized point of the whole job so far,” D’Arcy said during a conference call from London earlier this week. “The audience only gets to meet you in a state of grief, having just lost the person they spent five hours with. The closer we got to inflicting that on people, the more stressed I felt.”Cooke looks at it a bit differently. “Those were the halcyon days,” she said. “We weren’t confronted with millions and millions of people watching our performances week after week. Usually, you do a film, it comes out, it goes away.”“No one watches it!” D’Arcy chimed in, prompting raucous laughter from both actors — a common occurrence in the conversation.“No one watches it” is certainly not a problem faced by “Dragon,” a “Game of Thrones” prequel that has thus far has lived up to the blockbuster success of its predecessor. The complicated relationship between D’Arcy’s and Cooke’s characters is the primary engine of the story, and that centrality, along with a series of charming promotional videos and appearances, has made the actors among the show’s most popular performers. Even D’Arcy’s favorite drink order — “a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it” — now has its own online fan base.Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” prequel series is here.The Princess and the Queen: Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, who play the grown-up versions of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower, talked about the forces that drive their characters apart — and pull them together.A Man’s Decline: By the eighth episode of the season, Viserys no longer looks like a proud Targaryen king. Paddy Considine discussed the character’s transformation and its meaning.The New Littlefinger?: Larys Strong, a shadowy character, burns bright as a major player in the show. Here’s his back story.A Rogue Prince: Daemon Targaryen, portrayed by Matt Smith, is an agent of chaos. But “he’s got a strange moral compass of his own,” the actor said.Seeing how well the two actors get along, it is easy to forget that they play bitter enemies. At the end of the show’s most recent episode, there was a hint that the cold war between their characters might finally thaw. But given the dying king’s garbled prophecy and the patriarchal system that seems determined to divide Rhaenyra and Alicent, their renewed peace appears to be in peril.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Rhaenyra and Alicent have been estranged for the duration of your time on the show, but there’s a moment near the end of this week’s episode when their former closeness seems to have been rekindled.OLIVIA COOKE Even in fury, there is still a desire to be as close to one another as possible. They’ve not seen each other for such a long time, since Alicent attacked Rhaenyra [during Episode 7]. Alicent has been alone in that castle with all these men, and she’s probably been festering and thinking about that for a very, very long time.EMMA D’ARCY We had an amazing conversation, in advance of shooting the episode, about it being sort of set in a hospice [for the dying King Viserys]. Proximity to death can alter your chain of priorities; it offers a canvas for forgiveness where there wasn’t one previously. Going in, we really wanted to make sure that that moment at the end felt honest, that we could buy that these two people get there. It’s not an “all is forgiven” moment, but it’s a gesture to forgiveness.COOKE They’re really seeing each other for the first time since they were children — probably since the first time Rhaenyra found out that Alicent was marrying her dad. It’s unification in grief, and recognizing each other’s inner child in this loss.It feels like a small moment of freedom for two characters who’ve been forced into their roles by the men in their lives.COOKE These characters are being watched all the time. They’re always operating under the constraints of this straitjacket and learning how to maneuver within it. In this episode, it’s about taking chances and jumping on an opportunity Alicent may never get again — desperation for a friend and ally.D’ARCY It’s no coincidence that the male figures with power within this court have created conditions where Alicent and Rhaenyra’s relationship becomes untenable. It’s no coincidence that patriarchal structures look to divide and conquer strong female relationships. They would be the ultimate allies because there’s no one else who can truly understand what it is to be the oppressed party. Patriarchal structural oppression operates in such a multiplicitous and slimy way. That understanding can’t be conjured in someone who doesn’t live through it.In a scene earlier this season, Alicent physically attacked Rhaenyra. “Even in fury, there is still a desire to be as close to one another as possible,” Cooke said.HBOMilly and Emily have discussed the possible presence of a sublimated romantic or sexual spark between Rhaenyra and Alicent. Does that motivate the characters, even as adults?COOKE I don’t know if Alicent knows what it feels like to feel those things now. There’s layers and layers of repression; sexuality and lust are probably a prehistoric, sedimentary layer by now. From Alicent’s point of view, I don’t think she’s that self-aware, in terms of what she’s feeling, to know what’s propelling her to reach out to Rhaenyra again.D’ARCY That sort of erotic energy is very present in their early relationship. I think Rhaenyra is primarily motivated by a deep desire to be known and seen. The hurt and pain is so dominant that I don’t know if there’s a space, at this point, for a conscious interaction with sexual lust, but she definitely yearns for the old physical intimacy that they shared. It’s different from what she shares with her current husband and her children. A different form of contact.Olivia, I’ve seen a lot of debate over the end of this episode, when Viserys mistakes Alicent for Rhaenyra and tells her about his ancestor Aegon the Conqueror’s prophecy of a messianic “Prince That Was Promised.” She mistakenly believes Viserys is referring to their son, Aegon. Does she fully believe it, or is she hearing what she wants to hear?COOKE We spoke a lot about this. There was a massive amount of relief when Alicent told Rhaenyra, “You will make a great queen.” She’s so over the fighting and having this ball of bitterness and anxiety in her stomach: Just let it go, Rhaenyra is the heir, this is fine.When Viserys says that, I genuinely think she thinks he’s talking about Aegon, her son. And I think she’s furious. She’s like, “After all that?” But Viserys is on his deathbed; that’s what he requested, and so she must follow it through. Whether that’s unconscious wishful thinking, I don’t know, but that’s how I played it.Emma, this is shifting gears pretty dramatically, but there’s a video clip of you telling Olivia that your favorite drink is “a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it” that went viral on TikTok and Twitter and inspired a number of articles. Is this something you’re aware of?D’ARCY I thought it’d be quite funny to be drinking one right now, but I’m not. [Laughs.] I keep thinking I should tell my mum that I’ve become a meme in the hope that she’ll be happy for me, but I’d have to explain what a meme is, and I’ve decided it’s too much effort.I feel so embarrassed. Because in those interviews, when we’ve been at it for six hours, I’m honestly only trying to make Olivia laugh.COOKE [Laughs.] Is that right?D’ARCY No, I’m obviously doing Campari’s next campaign.COOKE I’d be like, “Ten million pounds, please!”Speaking not as your characters but as yourselves: Whom would you side with? Alicent or Rhaenyra?COOKE It’s funny: The whole point of this story is that these two women have been split apart and people have been forced to take sides. Now the whole internet is doing the exact same thing, even though “House of the Dragon” is supposed to be a cautionary tale. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t pit either of them against each other. [Pause.] But yeah, probably Rhaenyra. [Both laugh.]D’ARCY I don’t know the answer to that. I’m married to my uncle. Who’s to say? More

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      in Theater

      Angela Lansbury, TV’s Favorite Sleuth on ‘Murder She Wrote,’ Dies at 96

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      She was a Hollywood and Broadway sensation, but she captured the biggest audience of her career as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher.The New York Times sat down with Angela Lansbury in 2010 to discuss her life and accomplishments on the stage and screen. She spoke with us with the understanding the interview would be published only after her death.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAngela Lansbury, a formidable actress who captivated Hollywood in her youth, became a Broadway musical sensation in middle age and then drew millions of fans as a widowed mystery writer on the long-running television series “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.Her death was announced in a statement by her family.Ms. Lansbury was the winner of five competitive Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina. She also received a special Tony for lifetime achievement at this year’s ceremony. Yet she appeared on Broadway only from time to time over a seven-decade career in film, theater and television in which there were also years when nothing seemed to be coming up roses.Ms. Lansbury as Madame Arcati in the 2009 production of “Blithe Spirit” with, from left, Jayne Atkinson, Christine Ebersole and Rupert Everett. The role won Ms. Lansbury her fifth Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe English-born daughter of an Irish actress, she was just 18 when she landed her first movie role, as Charles Boyer’s cheeky Cockney servant in the thriller “Gaslight” (1944), a precocious debut that brought her a contract with MGM and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”It was a giddy start for a young woman who at 14 had fled wartime London with her mother and had only recently graduated from New York’s Feagin School of Dramatic Art. Ms. Lansbury imagined she might have a future as a leading lady, but, she said in a New York Times interview in 2009, she was not comfortable trying to climb that ladder.“I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.”It might also have been a matter of bones. Her full, round face was not well suited for the dramatic lighting of the time, which favored the more angular looks of stars like Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. In any event, she appeared in many a forgettable film before breaking out as the glamorous, madcap aunt in “Mame” on Broadway.MGM regularly cast her as an older woman, or a nasty one. Of the 11 movies she made after “Dorian Gray,” perhaps her most notable role was in “State of the Union” (1948), with Ms. Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in which she played a newspaper magnate trying to get her married lover elected president.With the expiration of her MGM contract in 1951, Ms. Lansbury joined the national touring productions of two stage plays, “Remains to Be Seen” and “Affairs of State.” But when she returned to the movies as a freelance actress, she again found herself cast as either of two types: as she put it, “bitches on wheels and people’s mothers.”Ms. Lansbury with Roddy McDowall in the Disney musical fantasy “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” She played a witch.DisneyShe was Elvis Presley’s possessive mother in “Blue Hawaii” (1961). She was Laurence Harvey’s sinister mother in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), a role that won her a third supporting actress Oscar nomination. (Though she was only three years Mr. Harvey’s senior, her maternal authority was entirely convincing when she told him, “You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head.”) She played a woman who kills her husband in “Please Murder Me” (1956) and an overbearing mother in “The Reluctant Debutante” (1958). And so it went.On to BroadwayMs. Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 in “Hotel Paradiso,” a translation of a 19th-century French farce. Good reviews encouraged her to try more theater work. She returned to Broadway in 1960 as the alcoholic single mother of a pregnant teenager in “A Taste of Honey.”In 1964 she was cast as a corrupt mayor in the Arthur Laurents-Stephen Sondheim musical “Anyone Can Whistle.” A notorious failure, it closed after only 12 previews and nine performances, but it showed she could summon the right stuff for live musical performance. “I had a little, high soprano, and they wanted a belter,” she said in 2009. “So I learned how to belt.”Ms. Lansbury with Frankie Michaels in “Mame.” More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn, were said to be under consideration for the role.via Angela LansburyMs. Lansbury was anything but a shoo-in for the coveted lead in “Mame,” the Jerry Herman musical adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s novel “Auntie Mame,” which had already been adapted into a stage play and a movie — both starring Rosalind Russell, and both great successes.Ms. Russell did not want to play Mame again. Mary Martin was cast but opted out. More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Ms. Hepburn, were said to be under consideration. But Ms. Lansbury was one of the few willing to audition for the role in front of the show’s creative and financial principals.In a Life magazine cover article about the show and her part in it, she recalled that there had been many distracting interruptions by men in dark glasses, compelling her to sing the songs over again. “Then they said, ‘Goodbye, thank you.’ That was all,” she said.Back home in Malibu, Calif., with her husband, Peter Shaw, an MGM executive, and their teenage children, Anthony and Deirdre, she waited for months for a call from the East. Finally, she flew to New York and confronted the producers.“I am going back to California,” she recalled telling them, “and unless you tell me — let’s face it, I have prostrated myself — now, yes or no, that’s the end of it.” That afternoon, she got an official yes.Her performance made her a genuine star at last. The show opened in New York on May 24, 1966, and the columnist Rex Reed reported in The Times that on the night he attended, “when the people got tired of whistling and clapping like thunder, they stood up in the newly refurbished seats in the Winter Garden and screamed.” He likened Ms. Lansbury to “a happy caterpillar turning, after years of being thumb-nosed by Hollywood in endless roles as baggy-faced frumps, into a gilt-edged butterfly.”Ms. Lansbury in 1966. In 2013, she received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.”Sam Falk/The New York TimesTo Ms. Lansbury’s disappointment, though, Lucille Ball was chosen for the film version of “Mame,” which was not a success.Ms. Lansbury won her second Tony for best actress as the 75-year-old Countess Aurelia in “Dear World,” a 1969 musical adaptation of “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” The production itself was not well received and closed after 132 performances. For a while, though, it held the distinction of charging the highest ticket prices on Broadway: $12.50 for the best seats (the equivalent of about $105 today).She then returned to Hollywood, where she played an aging German aristocrat in “Something for Everyone” (1970), a rare cinematic effort from the Broadway producer and director Harold Prince, and a witch in the Disney movie “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971).But this was a tumultuous time for her and her family. Their Malibu house was destroyed in a brush fire. Her son and daughter were using hard drugs. She and Mr. Shaw decided to leave California for the coast of County Cork, Ireland, where they built a home based on traditional farmhouse design.It was the sanctuary they had hoped for: Ms. Lansbury became a serious gardener, and her children overcame their drug problems. Anthony became an actor and then a television director, with credits including numerous episodes of “Murder, She Wrote”; Deirdre eventually married Enzo Battarra, a restaurateur, and became his business partner.With Len Cariou in “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lansbury won a Tony Award for her performance as the baker Mrs. Lovett.Martha SwopeOver the next decade Ms. Lansbury worked mostly on the stage, in London and New York. She starred as Mama Rose in a revival of “Gypsy,” which opened in London and won her a third Tony when it reached Broadway in 1974. She won yet another for her performance as Mrs. Lovett, the baker with a grisly source of meat for her pies, in Mr. Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd,” with Len Cariou in the title role, which opened in March 1979 and ran for 557 performances.Success on the London stage closed a circle for Ms. Lansbury.Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London on Oct. 16, 1925, and grew up there in upper-middle-class comfort, the daughter of Moyna MacGill, an Irish actress, and Edgar Lansbury, a timber merchant and politician who was the son of a Labour Party leader, George Lansbury. Her father died of stomach cancer when she was 9; her grandfather died five years later, and that loss, together with the Blitz, prompted her mother to move to the United States with Angela, her half sister and her twin younger brothers.“We left everything behind,” Ms. Lansbury recalled. “Suddenly, we just weren’t there anymore.”Ms. Lansbury as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the hugely successful CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”CBSA Surprise HitFor all her stage success, Ms. Lansbury would capture the biggest audience of her career in 1984, when she was cast as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”It was widely believed that the series, whose protagonist was a bicycle-riding widow living in a small town in Maine, had little chance against sexier competition like the action crime drama “Knight Rider” on NBC. The conventional wisdom was that advertisers would not go after the older audience the show was likely to attract.“We were getting condolences even before we went on the air,” Richard Levinson, one of the show’s creators, recalled. “At best, we hoped that it would be a marginal success.” Instead, the show became a huge hit. In its second season it outdrew Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated anthology series, “Amazing Stories,” by more than two million viewers a week, and it went on to run until 1996.“What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher,” Ms. Lansbury said in an interview with The Times early in the show’s second season, “is that I could do what I do best and have little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman.”She received 12 successive Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher, but she never won.Ms. Lansbury remained active on television (she returned to her signature role in four made-for-television “Murder, She Wrote” films) and in movies, notably the Disney animated hit “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), in which she was the voice of the talking teapot Mrs. Potts. And there were more Broadway performances to come. Neither arthritis nor hip and knee replacements could keep her off the stage for very long.She starred with Marian Seldes in the Terrence McNally comedy “Deuce” in 2007 and played the eccentric medium Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” earning Tony No. 5. Her lifetime achievement award brought the total to six — a total matched only by Audra McDonald and Julie Harris (including Ms. Harris’s own lifetime achievement award). Ms. Lansbury received another nomination for her performance later that year as Madame Armfeldt in a revival of the Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music.”Though she never won an Oscar or an Emmy, Ms. Lansbury received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2013 for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.” A year later, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II.Ms. Lansbury and the MGM executive Peter Shaw. They married in 1949.via Angela LansburyMr. Shaw, her husband, died in 2003. An earlier marriage to Richard Cromwell, an American actor, ended in divorce after less than a year. Ms. Lansbury is survived by her sons, Anthony and David; her daughter, Deirdre; a brother, Edgar; three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.While many older actresses complained about a shortage of roles, Ms. Lansbury never lacked for work and seldom turned it down.She did opt out of a big chance to return to Broadway for the 2017-18 season, in a revival of “The Chalk Garden,” saying she had decided to spend more time with her family rather than face a long, lonely stretch of living in New York. But other good roles continued to catch her fancy, including the rich, imperious Aunt March in the BBC mini-series “Little Women” and the nice lady who sells magical balloons in the film “Mary Poppins Returns.” Both were released in 2018.“I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she told Katie Couric of CBS in 2009. “So when something comes along and is presented to me, and I think ‘Gee, I could have some fun doing that,’ or ‘I think I could bring something to that,’ I’ll do it.”Ms. Lansbury in 2009. “I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she said that year.Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesBut, she added, there was one thing she was still missing after all those years: “I’d like to do one great movie before I pass along the way. I don’t know what it’ll be, but I think there’s one out there somewhere.” More

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      in Movies

      Angela Lansbury, Broadway’s Beloved Everywoman

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      She performed without sentimentality or histrionics, embodying the full range of human joy and depravity while remaining professional and approachable.We know that actors are not their roles, but it still came as a shock to see Angela Lansbury backstage in bunny slippers and a tatty robe, offering visitors a nice hot cuppa.This was in May 2007, just minutes after she’d finished playing Leona Mullen, a retired tennis player, in Terrence McNally’s “Deuce,” the play that brought her back to Broadway, at age 81, after a 24-year absence. She’d based Mullen in part, she told me secretly, on Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, borrowing her bearing along with the bright red suit.You’d think that after playing hundreds of characters over a 75-year career, at least some element of some of them would have stuck. But the woman in the slippers and robe was no Cora Hoover Hooper, the cartoon mayoress of “Anyone Can Whistle,” her first stage musical role, in 1964. Nor was she Mame Dennis, the glamorous bohemian she created in the show that made her a Broadway star in 1966. And she was certainly no Nellie Lovett, the human-pie-maker of “Sweeney Todd,” a performance that earned her the fourth of six Tony Awards, in 1979.These, along with several still to come — the daffy Madame Arcati in “Blithe Spirit” and the imperious Madame Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music,” not to mention her dozens of movie and television roles from 1944 to 2018 — were, she told me, just “gloves.” She put them on and took them off.Lansbury as the daffy Madame Arcati, with Rupert Everett, in “Blithe Spirit” in 2009.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd underneath? “Just a cabbage,” she said. “I absorb everything.”If Lansbury, who died on Tuesday at 96, was “boring as all get out,” as she later added, that too was a costume, and a tool. The hausfrau disguise permitted all the others, allowing the cabbage to store everything for later use. The corollary was that she needed to play many different kinds of characters, to make the best yield of all she’d observed. Her family said she’d go anywhere for a false nose.So when she was creating the amoral Lovett in “Sweeney,” she thought back to her childhood in London, and the cheerful, can-do Cockney help in her home. Their attitude turned out to be the key to the comedy: She played the character not as an accessory to murder but as a woman brightly solving problems. (Dead clients at the barbershop upstairs? Not enough meat for her pies downstairs? Bingo!) Far from critiquing her by applying an ironic varnish to the performance, Lansbury dared to advocate for her by making her as clever and merry as possible. The audience could supply the irony.Hers was a prodigious memory, but to achieve such effects it also took finesse and courage. McNally, the “Deuce” playwright, marveled that “if you say to her, ‘You’re doing 1.3 on that line, can you do 1.4?’ she could do it and you’d see the difference.” Marian Seldes, her co-star, agreed: “She is such a brilliant technician as well as having a pool of emotions she can tap into in a second to show the audience and then take away. The technician is like a great musician: I play this note and then I stop.”Taste, for Lansbury, was a matter of making the right choices in the right amounts. She disdained acting that depended on personality instead of action, and when I spoke to her at length in 2007, she seemed to connect that to a childhood spent shouldering her mother’s grief after her father died and the Blitz began. She was already independent, unafraid and a problem solver:“I remember taking the bus home in absolute pitch black, walking up Finchley Road alone, the balloons in the air. It was exciting; anything could happen. The first time the air-raid alarm went off my sister lost it, but I did not. There’s a portion of me that simply doesn’t react to things like this. Instead, I slow down to a dead crawl and then make the right choices.”Lansbury as the amoral Mrs. Lovett, with Len Cariou as the title character, in “Sweeney Todd” in 1979.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsThat’s how she performed, too, without sentimentality or histrionics. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t stand up for herself and her characters. While working on “Anyone Can Whistle,” she complained to Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the songs, that she didn’t really understand and thus feel comfortable playing the corrupt mayoress: There was “no there there.”Sondheim didn’t know what to do about that, but when she added that her co-star, Lee Remick, “has five songs while I have four,” he said, “That I can solve.” He immediately wrote “A Parade in Town” for her — a great song that evened the score and not incidentally gave Lansbury a deeper character to play.In a way, her characters were like her family: People she cared for deeply but recognized as separate beings. She was connected to them through action. It was thus an easy if no less painful decision to drop out of the musical “The Visit” to care for her husband, Peter Shaw, when he became very ill, taking care of him until his death in 2003. “And when I say I took care of him,” she said, with as much overt emotion as I ever heard from her, “I really took care of him.”That lack of personal neediness made her perhaps the best-loved of all Broadway (and television) stars of her time, embodying the full range of human joy and depravity while remaining, in her own deportment, professional, approachable and neatly tucked in. You never felt, as you did with so many divas, the need to feed her ego or point her toward help. Quite the reverse: When she met McNally, drunk at a party in 1981, she told him — “with such love and concern,” as he later recalled — “I don’t know you very well, but every time I see you, you’re drunk, and it bothers me.” It was the beginning of his sobriety.Feeling through action was the Lansbury touch, and if it came at some cost to her, it never showed. “She’s very brave,” Seldes told me. “She never wants to be loved; she wants to play the part.”What showed was the brilliance of her technique, informed by feeling you couldn’t in fact see. Perhaps McNally was thinking of that when he had Seldes’s “Deuce” character say, “People should love what they do,” to which Lansbury provided a sharp correction.“People should be good at what they do,” she said. More

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      in Movies

      Eileen Ryan, Actress of Stage and Screen, Dies at 94

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      She put her career on hold for a time to raise her sons, the actors Sean and Chris Penn and the musician Michael Penn.Eileen Ryan, a stage, television and film actress who paused her career to raise her sons, the actors Sean and Chris Penn and the musician Michael Penn, then later racked up dozens of acting credits, sometimes working with her sons and her husband, the director Leo Penn, died on Sunday at her home in Malibu, Calif. She was 94.Her family announced her death through a spokeswoman.Ms. Ryan was in her late 20s and appearing in “The Iceman Cometh” at Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village in 1956 when she met Mr. Penn, who stepped into a role being vacated by Jason Robards. They married soon after.Her career was going well at that point; she had already made her Broadway debut in “Sing Till Tomorrow” in 1953 and would return to Broadway in 1958 in “Comes a Day.” But she prided herself on making her own decisions — “I don’t think anybody could have felt stronger than I did about controlling my own destiny,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1986 — and soon she made a difficult one, choosing to scale back her acting.The choice, she said, began to be clear when she had a job that took her away from home and had to leave Michael, then a baby, with Leo.“I was out of town and all I did was cry,” she told The Times. “That made it very clear to me that I wanted to be home with the kids.”The family moved to the West Coast, and she still performed occasionally in the 1960s and ’70s; she appeared in episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “Bonanza” and other shows, some of them directed by Leo Penn, who, though blacklisted in the 1940s and ’50s, emerged to become a prolific television director.But, she said in 1986, for a long stretch her most important performance came in a supporting role in a home movie made by young Sean Penn and his neighbor Emilio Estevez, son of the actor Martin Sheen.“I was a background mother screaming from the kitchen,” she said.Ms. Ryan went back to acting more regularly with her appearance in the 1986 film “At Close Range,” a crime drama in which she played the grandmother of characters played by her sons Sean and Chris. Two years later she played the mother of Sean Penn’s character in the movie “Judgment in Berlin,” a drama directed by Leo Penn whose stars also included Mr. Sheen.Ms. Ryan and her husband also returned to the stage, starring in “Remembrance,” a drama by the Irish playwright Graham Reid staged in 1997 at the Odyssey Theater in Los Angeles, with Sean Penn as producer.Leo Penn died in 1998. Ms. Ryan continued to act, accumulating more than two dozen additional TV and film credits, most recently in the 2016 movie “Rules Don’t Apply,” directed by Warren Beatty.Eileen Rose Annucci was born on Oct. 16, 1927, in the Bronx. Her father, William, was a lawyer and a dentist. Her mother, Rose (Ryan) Annucci, was the source of the surname Eileen later adopted for her acting career.That career, or at least the aspiration to it, started early. As a child growing up in New York she would stage plays in the courtyard of her apartment complex.“I remember beating up all the little boys in my apartment building so they’d be in my plays,” she said.She earned a bachelor’s degree at New York University, then embarked on an acting career, putting her on a path to meet Mr. Penn.Once she restarted her career in the 1980s, among her first credits was Ron Howard’s comic drama “Parenthood” (1989). She played one-half of an older couple; the male half was played by Mr. Robards, the man whose departure from “Iceman” decades earlier had allowed her to meet Mr. Penn.Ms. Ryan’s son Chris died in 2006. In addition to her other sons, she is survived by three grandchildren. More

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      in Movies

      Douglas Kirkland, Who Took Portraits of Movie Stars, Dies at 88

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      His many memorable shots included one of his earliest assignments and probably his most famous: Marilyn Monroe in bed, wrapped in a silk sheet.Douglas Kirkland, a photojournalist and portraitist whose subjects included Marilyn Monroe wrapped in a silk sheet and Coco Chanel at work in her Paris atelier, died on Oct. 2 at his home in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 88.Francoise (Kemmel-Coulter) Kirkland, his wife and manager, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.For more than 60 years, Mr. Kirkland was a leading celebrity photographer, first for Look and Life magazines and then as a freelancer for various magazines, Hollywood studios and advertising agencies. Courteous and exuberant — he was no annoying paparazzo — Mr. Kirkland was welcomed into stars’ homes and hotel rooms and onto movie sets.The tall, dashing Mr. Kirkland “had this magical quality,” said Karen Mullarkey, who worked with Mr. Kirkland as director of photography at New York and Newsweek magazines. “He had this way of making people comfortable — he was so enthusiastic.” For an issue of New York, she recalled, she brought the model Kathy Ireland a bunch of peonies, and as he photographed Ms. Ireland, Ms. Mullarkey heard him saying: “Caress them! Kiss them! They’re your boyfriend!”“I am new with this magazine,” Mr. Kirkland recalled telling Elizabeth Taylor, whom he was assigned to shoot for Look. “Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”Douglas KirklandIn 1961, a year after joining Look, Mr. Kirkland had two dramatic encounters. For the first, he accompanied Jack Hamilton, a reporter, to Las Vegas for an interview with Elizabeth Taylor, then one of the biggest stars in the world. When the three met, Ms. Taylor said that she would talk but not sit for pictures.After the interview, Mr. Kirkland recalled to the website Vintage News Daily in 2021, he tried to persuade her to pose for him. He held her hand and said: “I am new with this magazine. Can you imagine what it would mean to me if you let me photograph you?”“I did not let go of her hand; she wore jungle gardenia perfume which I could smell later on,” he continued. “She thought for a while and said, ‘Come back tomorrow at 8 p.m.’”Mr. Kirkland perched himself on a balcony to photograph Marilyn Monroe.Douglas KirklandHiding everything but her face in the sheet and hugging the pillow, she was, it seemed, directing herself.Douglas KirklandThe result — a picture of Ms. Taylor in a yellow jacket, wearing spectacular diamond earrings — appeared on the cover of Look’s Aug. 15, 1961, issue.Later that year, Look sent Mr. Kirkland to Los Angeles to photograph Ms. Monroe. They met at her house, where she told him what she wanted for the shoot: a white silk sheet, Frank Sinatra records and Dom Perignon Champagne.When they met at a studio four days later, she slipped out of a robe and got into a bed, swaddled herself in a sheet and posed for Mr. Kirkland, who for part of the shoot perched himself in a balcony above her. She was, it seemed, directing, herself, with what looked like joy. She hugged the pillow, hid everything but her face in the sheet and turned her back to the camera.“I had everything technically right,” Mr. Kirkland said in an interview with “CBS This Morning” in 2012. “My Hasselblad — click, click, click — but it was Marilyn Monroe who really created these images.”Ann-Margret in Las Vegas in 1971.Douglas KirklandHe recalled that shoot in the 2020 documentary “That Click: The Legendary Photography of Douglas Kirkland,” directed by Luca Severi: “What the pillow represents is what she would like to be doing to a man, and I could have been in there and been the pillow. But I chose to keep taking pictures, because that’s how Douglas Kirkland really, bottom line, is.”Look used only one of the Monroe pictures, inside the magazine, but Mr. Kirkland collected many of them in a 2012 book, “With Marilyn: An Evening/1961.” His other books of photographs include “Light Years: 3 Decades Photography Among the Stars” (1989), “Icons” (1993) and “Legends” (1999).At Look and Life, and then as an on-set photographer, Mr. Kirkland shot pictures during the production of more than 100 films, including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “Rain Man” and several Baz Luhrmann films, starting with “Moulin Rouge!” in 2001. Mr. Luhrmann said in “That Click” that Mr. Kirkland’s photography “captures the romance of cinema.”Sophia Loren in Rome in 1972.Douglas KirklandHis career started at a time when his subjects were accessible to journalists, and it continued into a time when stars and their handlers exerted greater power over the media. “In the ’60s, there was an idea of letting the camera be revealing of truth,” he told The New York Times in 1990. “Today, it’s more like ‘Entertainment Tonight.’”Douglas Morley Kirkland was born on Aug. 16, 1934, in Toronto and raised from age 3 in Fort Erie, Ontario. His father, Morley, owned a shop where he made men’s made-to-measure clothing, and his mother, Evelyn (Reid) Kirkland, kept the books in the store.He took his first picture with a Brownie camera as a young child: his family standing at the front door of their home on Christmas Day. By 14, he was photographing weddings. After high school, he studied at the New York Institute of Photography and then returned to Canada, where he worked for two local newspapers, and then moved to Richmond, Va., to work as a commercial photographer.In 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with the designer Coco Chanel in Paris.Douglas KirklandWhile there, he wrote three letters to the influential fashion photographer Irving Penn, seeking a job. In 1957, Mr. Penn hired him as his assistant.“I was paid $50 a week, and even in those days in New York it was not too simple,” he said in an interview with the American Society of Media Photographers in 2017. “But I was with Penn and I was quickly learning.”In 1960 he joined Look. He stayed there until the magazine folded in 1971, when he was hired by Life, where he remained until it stopped weekly publication the next year. For the rest of his career he was a freelancer, working for Time, Paris Match, Sports Illustrated, Town & Country and other magazines.He received the American Society of Cinematographers’ Presidents Award in 2011 for his photographic work on film sets. The next year, he was commissioned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create a series of official portraits of the Oscar nominees in the four acting categories, among them George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.One of them, Michelle Williams, had been nominated for playing Ms. Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn.” In the documentary “That Click,” she said that being photographed by the same man who had photographed Ms. Monroe a half-century earlier had been a moving experience.“Never could I have imagined this sort of circumstance,” she said.Mr. Kirkland with examples of his work at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles in 2009.Gabriel Bouys/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Kirkland is survived by his son, Mark, and his daughters, Karen Kirkland and Lisa Kirkland Gadway, from his marriage to Marian Perry, which ended in divorce; five grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.In August 1962, Mr. Kirkland spent three weeks with Coco Chanel in Paris for Look. At first she was wary of him, permitting him to shoot only the outfits she had designed but not her. But after he showed her his first set of prints, she backed off, letting him observe her at work — always in a hat and usually surrounded by her staff. On his last day there, she suggested that they take a ride to the Palace of Versailles. He took one last picture of her, walking alone in the palace’s gardens.“It was chilly and had started to rain, even though it was August, so I gave her my raincoat,” Mr. Kirkland told The Guardian in 2015. “She put it over her shoulders and it looked almost like a fashionable cape. She said that she often liked to go there because it gave her an opportunity to get lost in time while being surrounded by the magnitude of old French culture.” More

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      The Power Player of ‘Triangle of Sadness’: Dolly de Leon

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      The Palme d’Or-winning class satire hinges on her surprising character, but the veteran Filipina actress never thought she had a chance to land the role.This interview includes spoilers about the plot of “Triangle of Sadness.”LOS ANGELES — Humble though not self-deprecating, the actress Dolly de Leon speaks of the shortcomings in her process with a casual matter-of-factness that makes her sincerity clear. “I really do poorly at auditions,” she confessed.Despite her assessment, she clearly did well enough at one of them: At 53, the Filipina veteran of theater, television and film in her home country is enjoying international attention for her trope-defying role in the class satire “Triangle of Sadness,” in theaters Friday.De Leon plays Abigail, a crew member on a luxury cruise ship carrying entitled oligarchs and fashion models. After things go awry, her practical skills are much more valuable than wealth or beauty on a seemingly deserted island.The multinational ensemble piece, which features Woody Harrelson, Harris Dickinson and the late Charlbi Dean, earned the top prize, the Palme d’Or, at the Cannes Film Festival in June. There, Indiewire described de Leon’s performance as “bold and heartsick,” while Screen Daily praised her for “playing it canny and ruthless.”But when the film’s writer-director, Ruben Ostlund, traveled to the Philippines in 2019 to cast the pivotal role, de Leon couldn’t fathom that she would get the job — in part because of her troubled relationship with auditions. Yet Ostlund recalled being impressed with her playfulness in a romantic scene they tried. Her lack of expectations probably played to her advantage.“Dolly has a fox behind her ear, as we say in Sweden,” the director Ruben Ostlund said. “That is to say that she is not who you expect.”Rosie Marks for The New York Times“I’m just an actor who needs the work,” de Leon said. “Whatever the role was, it was just another job for me. But, of course, I knew there was prestige attached to it because it was Ruben,” and she had seen his art-world satire, “The Square,” which won the Palme d’Or in 2017.Interested in inverting the power dynamics between the superrich and those underpaid to serve them, Ostlund found de Leon’s transformation from shipboard housekeeping staffer to authoritative captain ashore to be searingly convincing. “In very few scenes you have to buy that she is taking control of this group,” he said via video call.De Leon explained: “I admire Abigail because she just took it upon herself to be in charge without asking for approval from anyone. If I were in her situation, I’d probably still be following people around.”Sitting in a hotel meeting room in West Hollywood during a recent interview, de Leon, in a white top and tennis shoes and light bluejeans, exuded a relaxed energy while occasionally inhaling from a minuscule vape.A native of Manila, she traced her acting epiphany to a grade-school skit. A teacher asked students to pretend their mother had died. In that tragic scenario, she found a therapeutic outlet for her real, long-suppressed emotions.“It felt so good because at home we weren’t allowed to cry,” she explained. “It was liberating. And after that, I was hooked.”As a theater arts student at the University of the Philippines Diliman, de Leon played extras on TV until parts with dramatic substance gradually came her way. “I wasn’t choosy. I would take any role that was offered to me,” she said. Meanwhile, the stage — her first love — provided greater artistic challenges.De Leon with Charlbi Dean, left, and Vicki Berlin in a scene from “Triangle of Sadness.”Plattform ProduktionWith time, cinema also became an option as she developed a following as a character actor in projects involving top local talent. One director, the celebrated Filipino auteur Lav Diaz, cast her in his 2019 film, “The Halt,” based solely on her reputation. Back then, he had not seen any of her performances.“Here in the Philippines, she’s earned that imprimatur, that status, that level of respect already,” Diaz said via email of his blind trust in de Leon. The two would collaborate again on “History of Ha” (2021), a period drama about a famed puppeteer.Unlike Ostlund, who requests anywhere from 30 to 70 takes per shot, Diaz does only one take per setup, tacitly asking his cast for hyper focus.“When I say I trust an actor, the fundamental transcriptions of that act are responsibility and commitment,” Diaz explained. “An affirmation of that would be an actor’s eventual portrayal. All I can say is that Dolly is amazing in ‘Ha’ and great in ‘Triangle of Sadness.’”In Ostlund’s biting comedy, de Leon embraced the task of dignifying a character who essentially represents the millions of Filipinos working abroad to support their families back home.“To a lot of Filipinos, they’re heroes because they bring dollars into our country and boost the economy,” she added.For de Leon, “Triangle of Sadness” isn’t only about financial inequality but also about physical attractiveness as currency, illustrated by Abigail’s transactional affair with a model (Dickinson). Their encounters were de Leon’s first-ever onscreen love scenes.That Abigail’s abilities to fish and make fire turn her into a leader in this microcosm demonstrates, de Leon said, that authority can take many forms.“We often feel so powerless in this world because we’re surrounded by beauty, fame and money,” she explained. “We forget that no matter how less privileged you are, you still hold a certain power in the world that we can harness to our advantage.”By putting someone unexpected in a position of power, however, Ostlund wanted to examine whether abuses would occur. “There’s a possibility that it really corrupts her,” he said of Abigail.De Leon said she admired the way her character took charge: “If I were in her situation, I’d probably still be following people around.”Rosie Marks for The New York TimesIn the film’s open-ended conclusion, Abigail faces a dilemma about whether to protect her status. Ostlund zeroed in on de Leon’s face for dozens of takes.“I could feel this was the scene that Dolly had been charging for during the whole production,” Ostlund said. “Dolly has a fox behind her ear, as we say in Sweden. That is to say that she is not who you expect.”Initially, de Leon tackled that moment with a version of Abigail determined to use force. But ambiguity and doubt ultimately rendered the scene psychologically richer.“We tried a different approach where she’s at a crossroads and is torn,” she said, adding, “It was ultimately a better choice in that it highlighted Abigail’s humanity.”As de Leon looks ahead at the possibility of collaborating with American and European storytellers, she remembered Dean, who died in August. It was her friend Dean who encouraged her to get a manager to expand her professional horizons.“I really feel the loss of her while I’m in L.A. because she used to live here,” de Leon said. “I imagine that if she were still with us, she would be sitting next to me doing this interview.”The Cannes reception to her performance still astounds de Leon. But even if her children playfully mock her newfound profile in the West, she maintains a modest outlook.“What an incredible feeling to experience something like this, however late in life,” she said. “I’m not in my 20s anymore, so this happened at the perfect time because my head is not up in the clouds. I’m more grounded as a person and as an actor. If I were younger, I’d be acting like I’m better than everyone,” she said with an unassuming laugh. More

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      Kitten Natividad, Movie Star in Russ Meyer’s Bawdy World, Dies at 74

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      She was top-billed in his final feature, “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.” She was also his paramour and, he said, his favorite leading lady.Kitten Natividad, who brought audacity and ample physical attributes to some of the final films of Russ Meyer, whose over-the-top sexploitation movies acquired a certain cachet in some quarters and influenced John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and other directors, died on Sept. 24 in Los Angeles. She was 74.Eva Natividad Garcia, her sister, said the cause was complications of kidney failure.Ms. Natividad had little film experience and was working as a go-go dancer and stripper when, in the mid-1970s, she met Mr. Meyer, who was by then near the end of his notorious filmmaking career.In the 1960s Mr. Meyer, who died in 2004, became known for outlandish films like “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” and “Vixen,” most of which featured absurd plots and insatiable naked women with large breasts.According to Jimmy McDonough’s “Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film” (2005), Mr. Meyer was already editing his 1976 feature, “Up!,” when he decided to add a part for a dancer who had been suggested to him by an actress from one of his earlier films. He asked Roger Ebert, the film critic, who was one of the writers of “Up!,” to throw together some dialogue for a character he named the Greek Chorus.“It doesn’t matter what she says,” Mr. Ebert recalled Mr. Meyer saying. “She just has to say something. And it should sound kinda poetic.”The newcomer was Ms. Natividad, and what Mr. Ebert wrote for her paraphrased the Imagist poet Hilda Doolittle.“Armed with Ebert’s lofty gobbledygook,” Mr. McDonough wrote, “Meyer took the New Girl out in the woods, stripped her down, and made her recite all this complex, arcane narration while she hung from trees and hid in bushes.”Mr. Meyer also fell for Ms. Natividad, who was married at the time, and they began a relationship that lasted for the rest of the 1970s. And he made her the star of his next movie, which would be his final feature film: “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens” (1979).The movie is often described as Mr. Meyer’s riff on “Our Town” — for instance, it employed an onscreen narrator named “The Man From Small Town U.S.A.” Ms. Natividad plays a woman whose husband’s preoccupation with anal sex leaves her sexually frustrated.Ms. Natividad had little film experience when she met Mr. Meyer. It didn’t matter.via Siouxzan PerryCritics didn’t have much good to say about the movie, which Mr. Meyer wrote with Mr. Ebert.Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Ebert’s television partner on the film review show then known as “Sneak Previews,” wrote that Mr. Meyer’s “Vixen,” released in 1968, had been “an enjoyable nudie film because it featured the first joyfully aggressive woman we’d seen in a skin flick.” But he added, “Meyer hasn’t grown up in 10 years; if anything, he’s deteriorated.”“Beneath the Valley” would be Meyer’s last hurrah, but it held a special place in his heart. In a 1999 interview with Pop Cult magazine, he called Ms. Natividad his favorite leading lady.“She could just go and go and go,” he said. “It was just marvelous. You really had to measure up to this girl, or you caught hell.”Mr. McDonough said that Mr. Meyer had “met his match in Kitten Natividad.”“Meyer’s productions were mercenary boot camps, with the woman inevitably in an adversarial role,” Mr. McDonough said by email. “And in 1979’s ‘Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens,’ Meyer puts Kitten through the usual insane challenges, perching her buck naked atop mountains, in rivers at the bottom of canyons, and shot from below a metal bed frame (sans mattress) while she bounced vigorously atop metal bedsprings.“She blew through Meyer’s challenges like a marathon runner, always a wide, gung-ho smile across her face, and try as he might, Meyer could not vanquish her. That movie is a dazzling, obsessive tribute to Natividad.”Ms. Natividad in 2011. In her later years, she had small parts in mainstream movies like “Airplane!”Brian Cahn/Zuma Press, via AlamyFrancisca Isabel Natividad (she later used the first name Francesca) was born on Feb. 13, 1948, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua to Juan and Delia Davalos Natividad. In 2018, when she received the Legend of the Year award from the Burlesque Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, she told an audience that when she was growing up along the U.S. border, she would gather other children and make clandestine trips to a disreputable stretch of road where they would peek in on strip shows.“When I looked in there and I saw these beautiful women with the big breasts, the red lipstick, the big hairdos,” she said, “I wanted to grow up to be just like them.”Her mother later moved the family to the United States, and at 14 Ms. Natividad worked as a house cleaner for the actress Stella Stevens, getting a taste of the Hollywood crowd.She got a job as a key punch operator, but when she learned that a neighbor who worked as a stripper was making twice as much as she was, she changed careers, taking her first job as a go-go dancer in 1969 and soon moving to stripping. When an agency urged her to adopt a stage name, she chose “Kitten,” she said, because she was considered the shyest among the dancers she worked with.In 1973 she won the Miss Nude Universe title in San Bernardino, Calif.She was dancing at the Classic Cat, a club in Hollywood, when a fellow dancer, Shari Eubank, who had starred in the 1975 Meyer film “Supervixens,” suggested she introduce herself to the director. She is said to have done so by poking him in the back with her bare breasts.That got her into “Up!,” which she once described this way: “I’ll skip over the plot, which had something to do with Hitler’s daughter and sadomasochism. The film starts with me perched in a tree, nude.”Mr. Meyer paid for her to have breast augmentation, replacing an earlier enhancement. He also paid for a voice coach to help her lose her Mexican accent. (Her dialogue in “Up!” was dubbed.)When she and Mr. Meyer were together, he would revel in the attention her body and her bubbly personality brought. In 2004 Ms. Natividad joined three other Meyer favorites in a round-table discussion for The New York Times; one of them, Erica Gavin, the star of “Vixen,” recalled the couple’s entrance at her birthday party.“Kitten walked in first,” she said. “Russ loved to walk behind Kitten, because then he could see all the reactions after she passed people. She was wearing a nude-colored chiffon sheer outfit with no underwear at all.”After Mr. Meyer’s career died out, Ms. Natividad appeared in numerous other movies, including some hard-core pornography, and had small parts in “Airplane!” (1980), “My Tutor” (1983) and a few other mainstream films. She had a double mastectomy in 1999 as part of treatment for breast cancer.In the 2004 round table, Ms. Natividad reflected on her career.“I’m proud to be a Russ Meyer girl,” she said. “There are lots of beautiful women with great bodies and even bigger boobs than ours, but they didn’t get to be Russ Meyer girls. We are very, very special.”Ms. Natividad was married and divorced three times. In addition to her sister and her mother, she is survived by six half siblings, Teresa Natividad, Amelia Natividad, Diana Ramirez, Victor Ramirez, John Natividad and Estella Ramirez.Mr. McDonough, in his email, said he first saw Ms. Natividad at Show World in Manhattan, where her act consisted of splashing around naked in a baby pool while the song “Rubber Ducky” blared from the loudspeaker. Then, for a few dollars more, she’d pose for Polaroids.“Somehow Kitten made it all seem innocent,” he said. “She possessed a ferociously positive spirit, and that light always blasted through, no matter how tawdry the circumstances.” More

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      In ‘A Friend of the Family,’ Jake Lacy Breaks Character

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      The actor Jake Lacy, whom I met for tacos on a recent weekday evening, has an All-American handsomeness that verges on caricature — brown hair, blue eyes, a chin so strong it must work out. He looks as though a 3-D printer were fed images of lacrosse players and then told, ‘Go ahead, make this.’ His face at rest — though, over dinner it was that way only very rarely — suggests a guy who captained a team or two in high school and then joined a frat in college. A craft brewery fan. A fleece wearer.“There’s a bro element to my look,” he acknowledged as the guacamole arrived.“He’s got this handsome blank canvas thing,” Murray Bartlett, his co-star on the HBO hit “The White Lotus,” told me. “But he’s incredibly versatile with that handsome blank canvas. He can take that in many directions.”Until recently, most of those directions — “Obvious Child,” “High Fidelity,” “Girls” — confirmed Lacy as a go-to nice guy. Vulture once created a list ranking the niceness of his various characters. Several of these characters were mere way stations or end points on some female protagonist’s journey. And Lacy — citing, in a very un-bro way, the patriarchal history of TV and cinema — liked that fine.“What a great way to start in this business,” he said, sincerely.In “The White Lotus,” Lacy played privilege personified. With, from left, Jolene Purdy, Murray Bartlett and Alexandra Daddario.Mario Perez/HBOBut he switched up that persona with last year’s “The White Lotus,” in which he played Shane, a paragon of white male entitlement in a succession of sherbet-colored polos, earning him his first Emmy nomination. (At last month’s ceremony, he lost, happily, as he tells it, to his scene partner, Bartlett.)His new show, the fact-based drama “A Friend of the Family,” uses that bland handsomeness as both camouflage and cudgel. “Weaponizing that” is how Lacy put it.He had suggested meeting at La Superior, an unassuming, Michelin-starred taco place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, near a few of his old apartments. (Mid-pandemic, he and his wife, Lauren DeLeo Lacy, packed up and moved to Connecticut.) This was a comfortable spot for him, though he seemed, in a faded red T-shirt with a few holes in the torso, not entirely comfortable there, apologizing often for rambling, pausing, digressing.“He’s very earnest, not in a cheesy way; he’s just a good guy,” Bartlett had said. And this seemed true enough. While Lacy has little particular professional interest in playing likable characters, he has a personal need — a need that most of us share — to be likable. And he is. (“I’ve gotten better about my own people-pleasing,” he said.) “A Friend of the Family,” works with and against that likability, in ways more insidious and less comic than his work in “The White Lotus.”In the past, Lacy has struggled to disentangle himself from his characters. That wasn’t the case with “A Friend of the Family,” he said. Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesIn this nine-episode limited series, which streams on Peacock, Lacy plays Robert Berchtold, an Idaho husband and father who in the mid-1970s twice abducted Jan Broberg, the eldest daughter of a family that he had known for years. (This case was previously explored in the Netflix documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight.”) As the show tells it, and as Broberg confirmed in a recent interview, Berchtold, or B as those close to him knew him, used his smile, his jokes, his great charisma to insinuate himself with the Brobergs. The two families were so enmeshed that when Jan was first taken, her parents delayed contacting the FBI.(Following the first abduction, Berchtold was convicted of kidnapping. Sentenced to five years, he served just 45 days. After the second, he avoided prison entirely, serving five months in a psychiatric facility instead. In 2005, having been found guilty of aggravated assault and possession of a firearm for a later offense, he committed suicide.)Most of the episodes of “A Friend of the Family” had been written before casting began. Finding the right Berchtold was particularly daunting, because the actor needed to project an uncanny charm.“He had to have a natural charisma that would come through the screen and drop into the living room of whoever was watching the show,” said Broberg, who is a producer on the series. Because charisma, she continued, was “B’s superpower.” And yet, that same actor would also have to travel to some very dark places.Nick Antosca (“The Act,” “Candy”), the showrunner on “A Friend of the Family,” had been impressed by Lacy’s turn on “The White Lotus” and the sympathy that he brought to such an unpleasant character. An audience isn’t meant to sympathize with B, Antosca clarified. “But you have to understand how that family fell in love with him,” he said.B doesn’t think of himself as a monster, though — inarguably — he is one. Antosca suspected Lacy would be able to play both aspects at once.In “A Friend of the Family,” Lacy stars as Robert Berchtold, who twice abducted Jan Broberg (Hendrix Yancey).Erika Doss/PeacockNot every actor on a hot streak would choose to play a pedophile for his follow-up. And Lacy, who has two young sons, nearly turned down the show. But the challenge of the character attracted him, as did the scripts, and he appreciated the involvement of both Jan Broberg and her mother, Mary Ann, who is also a producer.“Had they not been involved, it would be so voyeuristic and so tabloid and not grounded in some greater purpose,” Lacy said.That purpose, he believes, is to show how grooming can operate and how abuse is perpetrated most often by intimates. Before shooting began, Broberg had left a letter for Lacy, detailing all the positive things she remembered about B — his charm, his sense of fun — while also encouraging Lacy to make the role his own and assuring him that the choices he made would not cause her further harm.“I was wildly impressed by that level of grace,” Lacy said.This allowed him to pour as much of himself as he could into the role. “He’s a very nice person and a caring father,” Broberg observed of Lacy. “You have to bring all of those things to the role for it to work.”As for the darker aspects, Lacy filled those in with research — evidence from the various trials, audio that Berchtold had recorded, material on psychology. Sometimes he had to put a time limit on that research. “Like, that’s enough for now,” he said. “Let’s not spend all night listening to these tapes of Robert Berchtold.”“There wasn’t a need to go into his thoughts,” Lacy said of Berchtold. “Because my point of view on his thoughts is so rightfully so filled with judgment.”Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesWhen it came to pedophilia, that wasn’t a place that he went to imaginatively, though he did read “Lolita.” Instead he worked through what he described as substitutions, trusting that if he looked at his young scene partners with love, the camera would read that love as something dark and unsafe. (The show doesn’t include any scenes of rape, so Lacy never had to portray these acts directly.)Neither he nor Antosca saw a need to locate Berchtold’s humanity. “He was a sociopath who kept telling himself self-justifying stories,” Antosca explained. So in nearly every scene, he said, it was enough to know what B was trying to achieve and how he was trying to achieve it without marinating too deeply in the why.“There wasn’t a need to go into his thoughts,” Lacy said. “Because my point of view on his thoughts is so rightfully so filled with judgment.”In the past, Lacy has struggled to disentangle himself from characters he has played. That didn’t happen here. “When people were like, ‘Is it hard to leave that on set?’ I was like, ‘No, it’s a very clean break,’” he said.Antosca confirmed this. “He is a super-thoughtful and technical actor, not method,” he said. “I didn’t see him struggling to get out of character.”Lacy doesn’t know what he’ll play next, if he’ll continue this particular heel turn or return to nice-guy roles or try something else. (“He has tremendous depth and this range that hasn’t been fully used yet,” Antosca told me.) He mentioned a Los Angeles project. And one in London. He is glad to have made “A Friend of the Family,” glad to promote it, but also glad to leave it in the rear view.“I’m very happy to just take a little breath and hold my kids,” he said. More