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      John Boyega Won’t Let Go of ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Coming to America’

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      The star of “Breaking” talks about Fela Kuti, Hans Zimmer, Cha Cha Chicken and other sources of inspiration.John Boyega was born in London to parents who grew up in Nigeria and raised their children in a house that felt like a piece of their home country inside the United Kingdom.“When we got into our house, that was Lagos to us, that was Nigeria,” Boyega said in a recent interview. “The way we were disciplined and the lessons that we learned were all in direct link to Nigeria.”That meant he was always told he was going to work hard, education was a priority, bible study was on Tuesday and church was on Sunday. At services, he played the drums, his sister played keyboard, and his father was the minister.“Other ministers would say the story of Noah’s Ark in a way that was kind of simple,” he said. “But my dad would give the animals characters and break the story down so you could relate and he would act out things.”Boyega inherited his father’s flair for storytelling and was drawn to acting. Hollywood, however, seemed remote. “Growing up in inner-city London, American movies felt worlds away,” he said. “We didn’t even have the same accents.”American films don’t get any bigger than the Star Wars franchise, which carried Boyega to international stardom when he was cast as Finn — the stormtrooper turned resistance fighter — in the most recent trilogy, culminating with 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker.” This month, Boyega stars in the movie “Breaking,” as a father and former Marine who robs a bank to avoid homelessness.Here, he talks about the films that inspired his career, the music that brings him closer to home and the chicken he takes extra-spicy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Burna Boy He’s one of the most prolific leaders in bringing Afro beats to the forefront. The lyrics, melody, soul and spirit of his music includes what we know as African and what we know as Nigerian. His song, “Time Flies,” is almost like an emotional letter for me. I just love his music.2. “MJ the Musical” I think Michael Jackson was one of the main factors that motivated me to act. It was the music videos for me, the imagination, the dance moves, the energy of the performance. Going to see “MJ the Musical” on Broadway recently was mind-blowing. The lead actor, Myles Frost, was an absolute standout.3. “Coming to America” This movie is a lifelong classic in my family. The first time we watched it, my dad walked in during the scene where the woman tells him: “The royal penis is clean, your highness.” That was real awkward. I watch it at least once a year just to get a little giggle on. There’s always something new I find.4. Young Vic Theater Especially for me growing up in the theater scene, the Young Vic in London has always been a place where you can see new writers and directors come in and do some really great plays. The last time I went there, I was actually working at the Old Vic, just a few yards away.5. New Afrika Shrine: I first visited Fela Kuti’s venue in 2017 to see a concert by his son, Seun Kuti. It was my first time being with my boys in Nigeria. We had a great night. Now I go back every time I go to Nigeria. For me, it’s one of the most prolific cultural hubs, especially if you are into Afro beats and if you want to hear music from the same lineage from the king of Afro beats, which is the great Fela Kuti.6. “Half of a Yellow Sun” I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, which takes place against the backdrop of the Nigerian civil war, after I was offered to play a role in the movie. Knowing that I was going to star in the feature film while I was reading it brought me closer to a history that I didn’t know about my own culture.7. Hans Zimmer I’ll listen to any of Hans Zimmer’s movie scores. I don’t always listen to music that tells me what to think. I find that with movie scores, especially if you’re an avid listener, the songs can change up on you and mean something completely different. Also, I like to work out to a song of his called “I Don’t Think Now Is the Best Time” off the “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” score. It’s more than 10 minutes long and it gets me through a lot of my workouts.8. “Kidulthood” I never considered that I would exist in American movies. But when I watched “Kidulthood,” which had Black Brits in it, I thought: wow, you can be an actor. The accents that are in it, I’m sure that they were local, from places I knew in London. It kind of opened my eyes that there was British film and there were opportunities in British film for Black actors.9. Cha Cha Chicken This is one of my favorite places to go in Santa Monica. It’s a really grounded, Jamaican/Caribbean-inspired restaurant. I literally just took my mom and nephews down there. The food is delicious. I get the half Cha Cha chicken — extra spicy — plantains, rice and beans, and the salad on the side.10. “Star Wars: Battlefront” This is the video game that I play the most. I started playing it before Finn was an idea, long before I was cast in the films. Now, sometimes I play as Finn against people I don’t know. So, being a fan of it and now being on it, that’s something that I’ve always kept private. More

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      Anne Heche, Actress Known for ’90s Film Roles, Dies at 53

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      Ms. Heche, who won a Daytime Emmy early in her career and whose films included “Donnie Brasco” and “Wag the Dog,” had been critically injured in a car crash.Anne Heche, an actress who was as well known for her roles in films like “Six Days, Seven Nights” and “Donnie Brasco” as for her personal life, which included a three-year romance with the comedian Ellen DeGeneres, died on Sunday in Los Angeles, nine days after she was in a devastating car accident there. She was 53.Her death was announced by a representative, Holly Baird, who said late Sunday in an email that Ms. Heche had been “peacefully taken off life support.”Ms. Heche was critically injured on Aug. 5 when a Mini Cooper she was driving crashed into a two-story home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles, causing a fire that took firefighters more than an hour to extinguish. Ms. Heche, who was alone in the car, sustained burns and a severe anoxic brain injury, caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.A spokesman for the Los Angeles Police said the department was continuing to investigate whether drug use contributed to the accident.A statement released by her publicist on behalf of her family on Thursday night said Ms. Heche had remained in a coma at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles.“It has long been her choice to donate her organs, and she is being kept on life support to determine if any are viable,” the statement said.On Friday, a representative said Ms. Heche had been declared brain-dead on Thursday night.Ms. Heche was a soap opera star before she became known to movie audiences. In the late 1980s, soon after she graduated from high school, she joined the cast of the daytime drama “Another World,” where she played the good and evil twins Vicky Hudson and Marley Love. She won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991 for outstanding younger actress in a drama series.By the mid-1990s, she was a rising star in Hollywood. She played Catherine Keener’s best friend in “Walking and Talking” (1996); Johnny Depp’s wife in “Donnie Brasco” (1997); a presidential aide in the political satire “Wag the Dog” (1997), with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro; and a fashion magazine editor who crash-lands on a South Seas island in an airplane piloted by Harrison Ford in “Six Days, Seven Nights” (1998).Ms. Heche with Dustin Hoffman, left, and Robert De Niro in a scene from the movie “Wag the Dog” (1997).P. Caruso/New Line Cinema“Romantic comedies don’t get more formulaic than this bouncing-screwball valentine, but they don’t get much more delightful, either,” Rita Kempley wrote in her review of “Six Days, Seven Nights” in The Washington Post. “The same goes for Heche and Ford as squabbling opposites drawn together during this tropical adventure.”Ms. Heche began a relationship with Ms. DeGeneres in 1997, at a time when same-sex relationships in Hollywood were not fully accepted. The relationship became widely known in April of that year when they appeared, hand in hand, at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. A few days later, Ms. DeGeneres’s character on her sitcom, “Ellen,” came out as gay.Ms. Heche’s decision to reveal that she was in a lesbian relationship, The New York Times wrote, “confronted Hollywood with a highly delicate problem: how to deal with a gay actress whose career has been built on playing heterosexual roles.”After that relationship ended, Ms. Heche married and later divorced a man, Coleman Laffoon, with whom she had a son, Homer. She also had a son, Atlas Heche Tupper, from her relationship with the actor James Tupper.Remembering Anne Heche (1969-2022)The actress, who appeared in several popular Hollywood films and TV shows, died on Aug. 14, after being critically injured in a car accident.Obituary: Anne Heche started her career as a soap opera star on “Another World.” In the 1990s, she dated Ellen Degeneres, becoming one half of one of Hollywood’s most scrutinized couples.‘Donnie Brasco’: Heche starred in the 1997 gangster film as the wife of an F.B.I. agent who infiltrates a crime family. Read our review of the film.On Stage: The actress made her Broadway debut in 2002, in David Auburn’s Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Proof,” stepping into a coveted female role.Playing It Normal: In 2009, she spoke with The Times about her journey to success, facing professional downturns and making new starts.Complete information on her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Heche told The New York Post in 2021 that she had been “blacklisted” in Hollywood because of her relationship with Ms. DeGeneres.“I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years,” she was quoted as saying. “I was fired from a $10 million picture deal and did not see the light of day in a studio picture.”After she starred in “Six Days, Seven Nights” and in Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” as Marion Crane, the role originally played by Janet Leigh, leading roles in movies largely gave way to guest appearances on television shows like “Ally McBeal” and “Nip/Tuck.”She also starred in the short-lived sitcom “Men in Trees,” had recurring roles on “Everwood” and “Chicago P.D.” and landed a featured part on the HBO series “Hung,” which starred Thomas Jane as a male prostitute.Ms. Heche, right, with Ellen DeGeneres at a fund-raising dinner for the Human Rights Campaign in 1997. They began seeing each other at a time when same-sex relationships in Hollywood were not fully accepted.Win McNamee/ReutersShe appeared on Broadway in the play “Proof” from 2002 until it closed in 2003, then in the 2004 revival of “Twentieth Century,” the 1932 comedy about a Broadway producer (Alec Baldwin) who, as a passenger on the Twentieth Century Limited train, meets a former discovery, Lily Garland (Ms. Heche), who has become a Hollywood star. The role earned Ms. Heche a Tony Award nomination for best performance by a leading actress in a play.In his review in The Times, Ben Brantley wrote, “Her posture melting between serpentine seductiveness and a street fighter’s aggressiveness, her voice shifting between supper-club velvet and dime-store vinyl, Ms. Heche summons an entire gallery of studio-made sirens from the Depression era: Jean Harlow, the pre-mummified Joan Crawford and, yes, Carole Lombard, who famously portrayed Lily in Howard Hawks’s screen version of ‘Twentieth Century.’”In 2004, Ms. Heche was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a mini-series or movie, for her performance in “Gracie’s Choice,” a TV film about a teenager faced with raising her half siblings after their drug-addicted mother is sent to prison.She appeared most recently in the films “The Vanished” (2020), a psychological thriller, and “13 Minutes” (2021), which centers on a tornado, as well as several episodes of the courtroom drama “All Rise.” Ms. Heche with Johnny Depp in “Donnie Brasco” (1997).PhotofestAnne Celeste Heche was born on May 25, 1969, in Aurora, Ohio, to Nancy and Donald Heche. Her father was an evangelical Christian and, it turned out, a closeted gay man. Her first acting role was in a New Jersey dinner theater production of “The Music Man,” which paid her $100 a week.In 1983, after her father died of AIDS, her mother became a Christian therapist and lectured on behalf of James Dobson’s organization Focus on the Family about “overcoming” homosexuality.Ms. Heche wrote in her 2001 memoir, “Call Me Crazy,” about being sexually abused by her father, and about her mother’s denial of that abuse. She said that when she called her mother after years of therapy to confront her about it, her mother ended the conversation by saying, “Jesus loves you, Anne,” before hanging up.Ms. Heche was critically injured on Aug. 5 when the car she was driving crashed into a two-story house in Los Angeles.Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life,” Ms. Heche said in an interview with The Times in 2009. “And it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”In 2018, she said she had been fired from a job at Miramax when she refused to give oral sex to Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced film magnate who founded the company with his brother, Bob, and who was accused of sexual assault by dozens of women. He was convicted of two felony sex crimes in 2020 and is serving a 23-year prison sentence.“If I wasn’t sexually abused as a child, I don’t know if I would have had the strength to stand up to Harvey — and many others, by the way,” she told the podcast “Allegedly … With Theo Von & Matthew Cole Weiss.” “It was not just Harvey, and I will say that.”Vimal Patel More

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      Roger E. Mosley, Actor Best Known for ‘Magnum, P.I.,’ Dies at 83

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      He played Leadbelly and Sonny Liston on the big screen. But his most high-profile role was a rugged, wry Vietnam War veteran opposite Tom Selleck on TV.Roger E. Mosley, whose knack for playing a tough guy with a mischievous streak earned him accolades playing an action-ready helicopter pilot on the hit 1980s television series “Magnum, P.I.,” as well as real-life figures like Sonny Liston and Leadbelly on the big screen, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 83.He died after sustaining injuries from a car accident in Lynwood, Calif., last month that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down, his daughter Ch-a Mosley announced on Facebook.Mr. Mosley, who grew up in a public-housing project in the Watts section of Los Angeles, appeared on dozens of television shows over four decades, starting with 1970s staples like “Cannon” and “Sanford and Son.” He also appeared in the mini-series “Roots: The Next Generations” in 1979.Aspiring to a career in film, he made early appearances in so-called blaxploitation films of the early 1970s like “Hit Man” and “The Mack.” He also appeared in “Terminal Island,” a 1973 grindhouse film that also starred Tom Selleck, who would later recommend him for “Magnum, P.I.”A strapping 6 feet 2 inches tall, Mr. Mosley was often cast as a bruiser. But his natural warmth and humor brought a depth to even the most macho parts, including the title role in “Leadbelly,” a 1976 movie about the brawling early-20th-century folk and blues pioneer Huddie Ledbetter, which Roger Ebert called “one of the best biographies of a musician I’ve ever seen.”“Leadbelly” offered Black audiences “the kind of film they’re hungry for,” Mr. Mosley was quoted as saying in a 1976 article in People magazine. “Not a Super Fly character but the story of a man who actually lived.”The next year, he earned critical praise playing Sonny Liston, the heavyweight boxing champion famously dethroned in 1964 by Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay), in the 1977 film “The Greatest,” which starred Ali as himself.While Mr. Mosley’s career continued to build momentum during that decade, it was “Magnum, P.I.,” the popular CBS crime drama that ran from 1980 to 1988, that brought him mass recognition.His character, Theodore Calvin, known as T.C., was a rugged yet wry Vietnam War veteran helicopter pilot who was continually rescuing Thomas Magnum, Tom Selleck’s Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, Ferrari-driving private investigator character, when he landed in danger in the jungles or on the beaches of Maui, where he lived in a guesthouse on a lavish estate. (According to the Internet Movie Database, Mr. Mosley was a certified helicopter pilot but was not allowed to do his own stunts on the show.)The part was originally written for a white actor, Gerald McRaney, The Hollywood Reporter wrote in its obituary for Mr. Mosley, but the producers reached out to Mr. Mosley to bring diversity to the cast.Although Mr. Mosley reportedly had little interest in the role at first because his sights were on work in feature films, he later said he was proud that he helped break stereotypes as one of television’s first Black action stars.Mr. Mosley with Dana Manno in the 1976 film “Leadbelly,” in which he played the folk and blues pioneer Huddie Ledbetter. Roger Ebert called it “one of the best biographies of a musician I’ve ever seen.” Museum of Modern Art“I’m a good actor, but I’m a Black man; there’s a lot of pride in that,” Mr. Mosley told “Entertainment Tonight” in 1985. He always aimed to set a good example for Black youth; for example, he refused to let his “Magnum” character drink or smoke.The show’s diversity, he said, was a factor in its success. “We have myself for Black people, we have John for the Europeans, we have Magnum for the ladies,” he said. (John Hillerman played Higgins, the estate’s stuffy English caretaker — although Mr. Hillerman was actually American.) “We have a little bit of everything for everyone.”When CBS rebooted “Magnum” in 2018, with Jay Hernandez as Magnum and Stephen Hill as T.C., Mr. Mosley appeared in two episodes as a barber.Roger Earl Mosley was born on Dec. 18, 1938, in Los Angeles, the eldest of three children raised by his mother, Eloise, a school cafeteria worker, and his stepfather, Luther Harris, who ran a tire shop in Watts supplying eighteen-wheelers, his son Brandonn Mosley said. (His mother later changed her first name to Sjuan, pronounced “swan.”)In addition to his daughter Ch-a and his son Brandonn, Mr. Mosley’s survivors include his wife, Antoinette, and another son, Trace Lankford. Another daughter, Reni Mosley, died in 2019. His first marriage, to Saundra J. Locke in 1960, ended in divorce.Mr. Mosley was a standout wrestler at Jordan High School in Watts, but after graduation he decided to try acting and took a drama class at the Mafundi Institute, an arts education center in the area. One day, a visiting director from Universal Pictures lectured the class on the self-discipline needed to make it in the field.“I know actors who had to eat ketchup sandwiches,” Mr. Mosley recalled him saying in 1976.Mr. Mosley fired back: “You have the audacity to tell us to eat ketchup sandwiches for our art. I know people who are eating ketchup sandwiches to survive. We need somebody to give us a break.”“Young man,” the director said, “I want to see you at the studio next Wednesday.” More

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      in Theater

      What to Do With an Absent Father? Cast Him as a Character Onstage.

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      The experimental theater maker Aya Ogawa ponders her distant father as well as failure and forgiveness in “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater.The Brooklyn-based experimental theater maker Aya Ogawa hadn’t thought about her father in 10 years. When that fact occurred to her, in 2017 — a decade after his death, which she and her mother had chosen not to mark with a funeral, or even an obituary in the local newspaper in his California town — she didn’t feel guilty about it.It seemed indicative of the remoteness of their relationship, and how painful it had been for her. Yet Ogawa, then in the midst of creating a show called “Failure Sandwich,” did think she had failed somehow as a daughter to him.“He would have wanted to be memorialized,” Ogawa, 48, said one afternoon last week, sitting casually barefoot on the floor of a rehearsal studio upstairs at Lincoln Center Theater. “He would have wanted to be celebrated and acknowledged and all that stuff.”It was too late for her to do anything about the absence that her father had been in her life, even when they shared the same house. The bond they’d never forged would never be. But she could use the tools of her art to imagine an alternate ending to their relationship — a gesture of forgiveness to him, “for not being able to be any other way,” she said, and a gesture of forgiveness to herself as well.And so “Failure Sandwich,” a piece she had been building out of other people’s stories of failure, evolved into her acclaimed play “The Nosebleed,” a kind of mourning ritual in dramatic form, with comedy. After a brief run last fall at Japan Society, it’s back through Aug. 28 at the Claire Tow Theater at LCT3, Lincoln Center Theater’s stage for new works.In “The Nosebleed,” Ogawa portrays her father at various ages as well as her younger son.Julieta Cervantes“The Nosebleed” contemplates what Ogawa describes to the audience as “one of the greatest failures of my life.” That’s not something she had been eager to dissect publicly.“I never wanted to write autobiography,” said Ogawa, who grew up in Japan and the United States and graduated from Columbia University. “I never thought I would be writing about my father. It presents really vulnerable aspects of my life, and, you know, it’s very scary to do that.”With Ogawa portraying her father at various ages and her younger son at age 5, four other actors play prismatic versions of their playwright-director.“It’s a mind trip, you know?” said Drae Campbell, who has worked with Ogawa for 20 years, considers her “like family” and plays the character Aya 4.Ogawa’s unsentimental play eschews bitterness in favor of kindness, humor and emotional complexity. It invites but does not compel audience participation, primarily by asking for a show of hands at questions like “Who here has a father who has died?,” “Who here hates their father?” and — more lightheartedly — “Who here has watched the reality shows ‘The Bachelor’ or ‘The Bachelorette?’”There is also a Japanese Buddhist funeral ritual for Ogawa’s father, in which some spectators may choose to take part, using chopsticks to pick ersatz bone fragments out of his imaginary ashes. The playwright, who watches that scene in character as her father, said it has become for her, unexpectedly, “this incredible, profound, spiritual practice.”“I am seeing the remains of my body come out before me,” she said, “and I’m seeing strangers come up and help me put that body to rest.”To Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s artistic director, Ogawa’s compassion and vulnerability are part of what marks her as “a real outlier” among experimental theater makers.“There are a lot of artists who work in formally experimental modes, and the end result of that work is very often cerebral or intellectual or clever,” he said. “Aya’s work is all of those things, but primarily it leads from the heart. And, I think, from a sense of opening, and from a sense of softness and care.”That might sound like a backhanded compliment, but only if the ideal is tough-guy theater. Which for Ogawa — who uses she/they pronouns and is developing a play about motherhood called “Meat Suit” — it is decidedly not.A major catalyst for “The Nosebleed” was a pan of Ogawa’s 2015 play, “Ludic Proxy,” by the critic Helen Shaw in Time Out New York — a brisk 600-plus words, three of which were fails, failure and failing. To Ogawa, the review was a devastating dismissal that lodged the notion of failure inside her, demanding that she examine it.From left, Haruna Lee, Akiko Aizawa, Eddy Toru Ohno and Dawn Akemi Saito in “Suicide Forest.” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat same year, the experimental playwright Haruna Lee, who uses they/them pronouns, was just out of graduate school at Brooklyn College and seeking a director for their play “Suicide Forest,” which no one who read it seemed to understand. Then they sent it to Ogawa, whom Lee knew only from a distance as “this badass Japanese American director with an asymmetrical haircut and double nose piercings.”Ogawa, who has a considerable track record, too, as a supple translator of Japanese plays, responded with “like 50 questions,” Lee said, and an immediate comprehension of how Japanese and American cultures were “mixing in a very raw way in that play.” The script is also in part autobiographical, about a parent-child relationship.Lee was afraid to perform the central role of a teenage girl, but Ogawa pushed them to do it anyway. Lee acquiesced out of trust, embarking on an exploration that eventually led to Lee coming out as nonbinary. When Ogawa directed the play at the Bushwick Starr in 2019, it was a hit.By then, Lee was also playing one of the Ayas in “The Nosebleed” — something they aren’t doing at Lincoln Center only because it conflicted with joining the writers’ room for Season 2 of the Apple TV+ drama “Pachinko.”Ogawa thinks of “Suicide Forest” and “The Nosebleed” as works that “were kind of percolating in the same brain swamp,” with Lee’s play giving her the courage she needed for her own.Aya Ogawa thinks of “Suicide Forest” and “The Nosebleed” as works that “were kind of percolating in the same brain swamp,” she said.Shina Peng for The New York TimesThe title of “The Nosebleed” comes from Ogawa’s then 5-year-old son, Kenya, waking up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose on a family trip to Japan in 2017. His big brother, Kai, had accidentally punched Kenya in his sleep. But the reason for the title is the metaphor of the child’s blood — the lineage that links Ogawa’s son to her, and to her father. (As a parent, Ogawa’s husband is a stark contrast to her own father: engaged, invested and emotionally present with their children, she said.)She finds it easier to play her child, but not difficult to slip into her father. “I don’t know how to describe what is happening to me,” she said, “except that it kind of does feel like a channeling. And dropping into him somehow, or like my body becomes a vessel for the image that I have of him.”And like every actor who has had to find sympathy for a character in order to play that person, she has had to find a way to understand her father.Her sons are 10 and 12 now, both born after their grandfather died. But on opening night at Lincoln Center last week, she wanted them to take part in the play’s funeral ritual — to be first in line for it, as the closest kin would be in a real funeral.And so they were. Onstage in front of the symbolic cremated remains of their grandfather, they took chopsticks and together helped lay his body to rest.Their mother, in character as an enfeebled old man, watched and felt release — felt absolution. More

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      in Television

      Julia Lester on Her ‘More Knowing’ Little Red Riding Hood

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      Her bold choices for “Into the Woods” have garnered the 22-year-old actress critical acclaim and a Broadway debut.Conventional wisdom has it that actors should not audition in costume. But Julia Lester did so anyway — fashioning a red cape out of a circle skirt — when she videotaped her audition for the part of Little Red Riding Hood in the Encores! production of “Into the Woods” this spring. Two weeks later — without even a callback — she heard from her agent: “Stephen Sondheim wants you to play Little Red.”Indeed, it was her many bold acting (as well as sartorial) choices for the fabled girl bound for grandmother’s house — her raised eyebrow, brassy willfulness and wry sophistication — that captured the attention of critics in May and catapulted Lester to a Broadway debut at just 22 years old after the show transferred there this summer. (The Broadway run has just been extended through Oct. 16.)“In Lester, we witness a major new comedic talent emerge,” said Johnny Oleksinski in The New York Post. “All her well-known jokes feel fresh, and she is unbelievably funny. My face was a lot red from laughing so hard.”The New York Times called her “pert and twinkling”; The Washington Post, “uber-confident, rough-and-ready”; The Wall Street Journal, “deliciously impish and knowing.”It was her aura of worldliness and tenacity that made the show’s director, Lear deBessonet, so certain in casting Lester. “I knew she was right 10 seconds into her audition video,” deBessonet said. “Having seen a number of Little Reds over the years, any sort of cutesy, girlie, victim thing was totally not of interest to me. As a woman, there are certain things I don’t ever want to see onstage again.“There is a lot of pressure on actors to live through other people’s eyes,” Lester said. “Learning to live unapologetically and as myself has been really important.”Raphael Gaultier for The New York Times“For me, the defining quality of the character is hunger, this delicious power lust which is so refreshing and unexpected,” deBessonet continued. “It was immediate upon seeing Julia. I was like, ‘Yup, well: There she is.’”Sipping water in a theater district hotel before a recent performance, in a braid and Doc Marten lace-up boots, Lester did come across as preternaturally comfortable in her own — admittedly callow — skin.Despite her cherubic face and wide-eyed words about getting to share the stage with so many veterans (including Sara Bareilles, Gavin Creel and Phillipa Soo), Lester talked about how she has grown increasingly self-assured over the last few years.“There is a lot of pressure on actors to live through other people’s eyes,” she said. “Learning to live unapologetically and as myself has been really important for me.“Our whole career is based on what other people think about us,” Lester continued. “It’s quite a struggle to know that other people are silently or non-silently judging you on a daily basis.”If onstage she seems experienced beyond her years, that’s because she is, having performed professionally since she was 5 and just completed her third season as Ashlyn Caswell in the Disney+ series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” the musical drama about high school theater students. (The fourth season starts shooting in Salt Lake City in September.)Lester, at the piano, with Olivia Rodrigo in the TV series “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.”Fred Hayes/Disney +Show business also runs in Lester’s blood. Her great-grandfather and his siblings were part of a Yiddish opera company in Poland at the turn of the century. Her maternal grandparents, Helen and Peter Mark Richman, met doing summer stock theater. Her mother, Kelly, and father, Loren, continue to perform, as do her two older sisters, Jenny and Lily.“We’re a big performing family,” Lester said. “I can’t stress enough how supportive we all are of each other.”Her version of Take Your Daughter to Work Day was going to the Universal Studios lot and hanging out with her dad on commercial shoots. “I always knew from the second I was born that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” Lester said. “So being able to be surrounded by it on a daily basis, and really learn from my family, is such a blessing.”Born on Jan. 28, 2000, in Los Angeles, Lester had been in productions of “Into the Woods” twice before: first as the cow Milky White in a community theater production when she was in elementary school (her sisters played other parts) and the next time at age 18 as Little Red in a 99-seat theater in Los Angeles.While many actors dread having to try out for parts — given their nerves and the statistical likelihood of rejection — Lester said she loves auditioning.“You’re being given the opportunity to do what you were put on this earth to do,” she said, “which is to perform.”Lester is also personally drawn to the character of Little Red, who, after being rescued from the mouth of the wolf, goes on to carry a knife for protection, to look after Jack (of beanstalk fame) and to grow up before the audience’s eyes. “She is so feisty and so funny,” Lester said. “In a lot of the moments when it’s really high stakes and dark themes are happening, she is a beacon of comedy and light. That’s always really fun — to be able to bring down the house during a quiet, serious moment.”Lester as Little Red Riding Hood and Cole Thompson as Jack in the Broadway revival of “Into the Woods.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith her performance in this Encores! revival, which originated at New York City Center before moving to the St. James Theater on Broadway, the actress said she “wanted to reinvent the way people see Little Red.”“When I was working on the script, I tried my very best to look at every line that she says, and really think about, ‘What’s the most unexpected way to portray what’s written?’” she said.James Lapine, who wrote the show with Sondheim (who died in November), said it was the first time that he had seen an adult play the part, which its usually played by actors under 18. “She’s bringing something a little punchier to it and more emotional shadings,” he said. “She’s a more knowing Little Red Riding Hood.”The show’s actors say they, too, have been struck by Lester’s sure hand in getting big laughs and by how she brings a modern sensibility to the role without bastardizing it. “She has that radar which the greats have — they know when to put their foot on the brake or the gas,” said Brian d’Arcy James, who plays the Baker, adding that Lester’s interpretation is “totally fresh but also honoring what’s preceded.”Bareilles, who plays the Baker’s Wife, said she had been pleasantly surprised by Lester’s “natural fire” as well as by her palpable respect for the opportunity she had been given, for her fellow performers and for live theater itself. “She feels like an old soul to me,” Bareilles said. “She doesn’t carry any neediness or urgency to get seen. There is a reverence in how she approaches the work.”From left: Sara Bareilles, Brian d’Arcy James, Phillipa Soo and Lester in the show. “She has that radar which the greats have — they know when to put their foot on the brake or the gas,” James said of Lester.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs “a real die-hard theater kid,” Lester said, there is a pinch-yourself quality to what she’s living through, since she long admired from afar the very people she now finds herself performing next to onstage.“I never expected that I would be making my Broadway debut in a Sondheim show, let alone be surrounded by so many people that I’ve grown up loving and watching,” she said, adding, “Every single person has taken me under their wing.”While she is only committed to the show until Sept. 4, Lester said she would love to return to this Broadway production and to see it live on. “I’m sort of hoping for this show to be the new ‘Chicago’ and just be long-running forever and I can come back to it like home base whenever I am available,” she said. “This is definitely a show that I am not ready to say goodbye to anytime soon.”The personal response she has received from members of the audience has been particularly rewarding. Well aware that, as a full-figured young woman, she may not meet the traditional physical definition of an ingénue, Lester said she was gratified that other young women have looked to her as an affirming role model.“It’s taken a second to grow into myself and be comfortable with who I am, but it’s got to start somewhere,” she said. “If someone can say, ‘I see myself in you when you’re playing Little Red’ — when I’m standing on a Broadway stage — that’s exactly why I’m an actor and a performer.”“I’m really grateful to the people who have seen beyond what I look like,” she added, “and seen what I can offer to the world.” More

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      In ‘House of the Dragon,’ Paddy Considine Claims the Crown

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      A string of critically acclaimed roles has made him many British actors’ favorite actor. It has also lifted him from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.WINSHILL, England — On a blindingly sunny June afternoon, Paddy Considine whipped his sedan through a working-class neighborhood in this suburb in the West Midlands, pointing out the stolid taverns, churches and council houses that combine to cast the long shadows of his childhood.There was the gospel hall where he and his friends sang hymns when they weren’t “getting kicked out for fighting about.” The pub where men from his estate pursued nightly oblivion. The post office where his tempestuous father “tossed a wheelie bin through the front window” during one of his frequent swerves into rage, a moment Considine memorialized in his bleakly beautiful 2011 film, “Tyrannosaur.”He pulled to a stop in front of a pale gray two-family house and pointed to an upstairs window. It was his old bedroom, and he told a story about a kid desperate to show the world he had more to offer than it might think.“I’d run home after school and then put the music on and stand in the window, dancing to Adam and the Ants, so the parents would see me and look up,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was a show-off. I just wanted to be seen.”He looked at me with a grin that was equal parts affable and intense. “There’s a difference, you know,” he said.Over a two-decade career in film, TV and the occasional blockbuster play, Considine has thrived within that difference. He has crafted performances that demand to be seen, partly because they forgo performative pyrotechnics in favor of a palpable, at times unsettling sense of the real. The fact that he hasn’t had what you might call a signature role hasn’t kept him from becoming many British actors’ favorite actor.“I just believe him,” said Olivia Colman, a longtime admirer. “You sort of look into his eyes, and he’s feeling it all, and he means it all.”Considine’s profile is more modest in America, but it might not stay that way: Beginning on Aug. 21, he will be dancing in his largest window yet. That’s when “House of the Dragon,” the long-awaited “Game of Thrones” prequel series, lands on HBO. A family melodrama with all the violence, sex and power-lust one would expect from a tale set in Westeros, the series seeks to recapture the magic that made the original a global phenomenon before it stumbled to its polarizing conclusion in 2019.The story, based on “Fire & Blood,” a spinoff novel by the saga’s mastermind, George R.R. Martin, is set nearly 200 years before the events of “Game of Thrones.” It involves an earlier battle for the Iron Throne, one that threatens to crater the Targaryen clan long before their combustible descendant Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) arrives in the original series.At the heart of it all is Considine, who stars as King Viserys, the ruler whose decisions and frailties set into motion much of the conflict and carnage to come.Paddy Considine, who plays King Viserys Targaryen, in a scene from “House of the Dragon.”Ollie Upton/HBOIt is a surprising bit of casting, at first glance. After arriving as an eccentric thug in the 1999 film “A Room for Romeo Brass,” Considine has made his name mostly in small-bore dramas playing emotionally conflicted men who feel it all, and then some: a grieving immigrant father in “In America”; a religious zealot ex-con in “My Summer of Love”; a murderously vengeful veteran in “Dead Man’s Shoes.”While he has appeared in franchises (“The Bourne Ultimatum”), genre series (the Stephen King adaptation “The Outsider”) and surprising detours before (the goofball cop comedy “Hot Fuzz”), a dragon epic did not seem like the most natural fit.“If you look at the body of his work and the type of movies that he does, it doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a big HBO franchise like this,” said Matt Smith, who stars in “House of the Dragon” as Viserys’s belligerent brother, Daemon. “But I think he’s got good taste, and I think he realized the part was really interesting.”Considine, 48, is a man of multitudes and paradoxes. An acclaimed actor, he nonetheless struggles with attacks of insecurity to the point that he considered leaving projects like “Hot Fuzz” because he felt he was flailing. He has an unmistakable toughness, but what makes it captivating is the sensitivity that bleeds through.Ryan Condal, one of the “House of the Dragon” showrunners, said that Considine imbued Viserys, a relatively passive character in the script, “with a bit of Paddy’s working class background.”“What Paddy brought to it was Targaryen-ness, this fierceness,” he said. But as the other showrunner, Miguel Sapochnik, noted: “He wears his insecurities on his sleeve.”Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” spinoff will debut on Aug. 21.A Primer: Though it is the successor to the groundbreaking fantasy drama, “House of the Dragon” is actually a prequel. Here’s what else you need to know.The Stakes: Can the new series save the future of the “Game of Thrones” franchise? George R.R. Martin and HBO are about to find out.Wearing the Crown: A string of critically acclaimed roles has lifted Paddy Considine, who stars as King Viserys Targaryen in the show, from hardscrabble roots to a seat on the Iron Throne.‘Thrones’ Guide: Want to take a deep dive into past episodes and plot twists? Check out our obsessive compendium to the original series.This combination has already won over the toughest “Thrones” fan of all: Martin, who said Considine’s Viserys surpasses the one in the book.“Every once in a while, an actor or the writers will take a character in a somewhat different direction that is better,” Martin said. “And I look at it and I say, ‘Damn, I wish I had written it that way.’”Considine admits that he was flattered to be asked to lead such an enormous undertaking, which will almost certainly result in more people seeing him than ever before. But what drew him in were the same things he seeks in all his roles, qualities that his past and predisposition help him depict with rare delicacy.“There was just conflicts in him; there was pain in him,” he said. “There was stuff for me to do.”CONSIDINE SPENDS MOST OF HIS TIME far from the show-business fray. He lives with his wife of 20 years, Shelley, and their three children in the town of Burton-on-Trent, near where he grew up, located roughly 110 miles northwest of London. It helps him avoid having to glad-hand industry types or audition for roles, which he loathes because he’s terrible at it, he said.While Considine is generally immune to Hollywood cliché, he certainly looked the part when we first met. Sitting inside a coffee shop in a posh village near his home, he was wearing black on black with dark glasses, and he spent the first 20 minutes talking about his rock band, called Riding the Low. He knew how it all came across.“I know … an actor with a band,” he said.But the reality is, he has been playing music for longer than he’s been acting, and the band is no mere vanity project: In June, they played Glastonbury Festival, and their latest record included a cameo by Considine’s musical hero, Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices.As for the glasses, they contain special lenses to treat Irlen syndrome, a disorder that is believed to affect the brain’s ability to process visual information. (Much of the science and medical community is skeptical about the affliction, but Considine and many others say the lenses changed their lives.) Generally funny and easygoing in conversation, Considine said this condition, along with a mild form of Asperger’s he was diagnosed with in his 30s, contributed to a reputation for aloofness as a young actor.“I couldn’t concentrate or focus on you, so I’d have to look away,” he said. “It led to this behavior of me going within myself and being slightly unapproachable.”But he is used to being misunderstood — even as a boy in Winshill, Considine had a reputation that preceded him. But it wasn’t his own.Considine’s father was known as a brawler with a quick temper. “I grew up with a lot of labels on me when I was a kid, just because of the reputation mainly of my father,” the actor said.Max Miechowski for The New York TimesHe grew up with a brother and four sisters in one of the few two-parent households in his social circle. His mother, Pauline, was a natural nurturer who temporarily took in kids from around the council estate when things got rough at their own homes. “I’d go downstairs and there’d be, like, a six-foot punk lying on the sofa under a blanket, with a big red mohawk,” Considine said.His father was another matter. An Irish alcoholic with a depressive streak, Martin Considine was known as a brawler with a quick temper, and was given to staying in bed until the afternoon, “watching ‘Raging Bull’ over and over again,” Considine said.“I grew up with a lot of labels on me when I was a kid, just because of the reputation mainly of my father,” he said.For a while, he lived up to them, alienating his teachers by being an uninterested student and a class clown. But when he signed on to a school production of “Grease,” it was transformative in more ways than one. When he opened his mouth to sing “Greased Lightning” in the first rehearsal, he discovered a robust voice he didn’t know he had. On opening night, everyone else discovered something, too.“It changed the entire school’s perception of me,” he said. “The teachers perceived me differently, the students. And I thought, this is powerful.”At 16, Considine began a drama program but “didn’t really learn that much, and I just left,” he said. (He eventually got a photography degree.) But he struck up a fortuitous friendship there with Shane Meadows, a fellow Midlander with similar tastes in music and film. Several years later, Meadows cast Considine in “Romeo Brass,” which won both men acclaim.Higher-profile roles followed in films like the Factory Records chronicle “24 Hour Party People” (2002) and the melancholy immigrant tale “In America” (2003). Then came “Dead Man’s Shoes,” a nervy, lo-fi riff on a slasher picture that stars Considine, in a frightening but grounded performance, as an ex-soldier stalking his brother’s former tormentors.The film is still revered in Britain — nearly everyone I talked to about Considine mentioned it — though the actor long ago tired of discussing it. (“Part of me wants to die” when people bring it up, he said, but he has made his peace with it.)That indelible performance indirectly enabled Considine to subvert it, to change perceptions again. He met Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright on the awards circuit for “Dead Man’s Shoes” — it and their film “Shaun of the Dead” were both released in Britain in 2004 — and the result was a part as a doofus detective in “Hot Fuzz.”“Meeting Paddy in person was a revelation; he was incredibly warm and funny,” Wright wrote in an email. “We knew he had a comic presence that hadn’t been fully unleashed yet.”Considine (center, with Rafe Spall, left, and Simon Pegg) tried to quit “Hot Fuzz” over a crisis of confidence about his comic chops. “This was, of course, ridiculous,” said Edgar Wright, the film’s director.Rogue Pictures, via Alamy“Hot Fuzz” was where Considine met Colman, a co-star, who went on to lead his first feature as a director, “Tyrannosaur.” The film, which he also wrote, tells a grueling but powerful story about a splenetic widower (Peter Mullan) who befriends a devout woman (Colman) trapped in an abusive marriage.For Colman, then known primarily for comedy and TV, the wrenching performance opened new dramatic opportunities that eventually led to an Oscar for the 2018 film “The Favourite.”“He sort of directly changed the trajectory of my career,” she said.For Considine, it offered a chance to revisit his upbringing via the means that had allowed him to escape it. As we drove around Winshill, he pointed out landmarks that had inspired scenes in the film.“I think ‘Tyrannosaur’ was just a love letter and an apology to my parents,” he told me. “It was me just trying to make sense of some of the things I grew up with.”CONSIDINE STARTED ACTING long before he became an actor.As an insecure kid cowed by a chaotic home and by other parents who “shut doors in my face” because of the sins of his father, he learned to perform confidence and swagger. “I had to create a sort of carapace to be able to protect myself,” he said.That armor never entirely went away — he still dusts it off for premieres and red carpets. Neither did the insecurity. As his career blossomed, it became both the thing that made acting a misery, at times, as well as a force pushing him to go deeper into performances that dazzled his contemporaries.“In England, I think a lot of actors feel the same way about Paddy,” Smith said. “We hold him in very high regard.”Tony Pitts (“All Creatures Great and Small”), a friend of Considine’s and past co-star, called him “the male actor that most male actors want to be.”Considine is choosy about his parts — it’s hard to find an outright stinker on his IMDb page. Friends say this derives from the fact that acting can take a profound psychic toll on him, so he has to be invested in a role to accept it.“Paddy’s not one to just pitch up and say the lines,” Pitts said. “I’ve seen him when he’s been at the point where he said, ‘I don’t think I want to act again.’”Wright calls Considine “Mr. 11th Hour” because that’s when he “had to be talked out of leaving” both “Hot Fuzz” and a later comedy, “The World’s End,” over a crisis of confidence about his comic chops. “This was, of course, ridiculous,” Wright said. “It just shows me he cares, maybe too much.”From left, Glenn Speers, Considine, Stuart Graham and Genevieve O’Reilly in “The Ferryman,” Considine’s first performance in a play. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesConsidine went through something similar in “The Ferryman,” Jez Butterworth’s 2017 drama set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It was Considine’s first play, and he took it on as a kind of trial-by-fire apprenticeship because he felt limited by his lack of formal acting training, even after numerous series and films. “I was running out of places to hide, and I was running out of enthusiasm for it, too,” he said.He found stage acting terrifying. His self-doubt reached a crisis point during the initial run, at London’s Royal Court Theater, and then again when “The Ferryman” moved to Broadway — both times Sam Mendes, the director, helped him through it. (Reviewing the Broadway production, The Times said Considine gave “a superb, anchoring performance.”) The actor now says “The Ferryman” was “a game-changer,” in terms of his comfort with his craft.That comfort wasn’t always apparent on “House of the Dragon,” however. Considine said he based the physically ailing Viserys partly on his mother, who went through multiple amputations resulting from diabetes before dying of a heart attack. Colleagues said watching him inhabit the role sometimes bordered on concerning.“He turns himself inside out in his performance, and that metamorphosis is sometimes really painful to watch,” said Olivia Cooke, who stars as Alicent Hightower, a woman close to Viserys. “We spoke about it, and the only way he can access his performance, sometimes, is to go to such a horrid and painful place.”Sapochnik said that when Considine struggles with material or anything else, “his default is anger.” Directing him involved “helping to work through that, being patient about it, sometimes saying to him, ‘Mate, calm down,’” he explained. “But also then seeing how he brought that into Viserys.”Considine brought fierceness to Viserys, but he also “wears his insecurities on his sleeve,” said Miguel Sapochnik (right, with Considine and the actress Milly Alcock), a “House of the Dragon” showrunner.Ollie Upton/HBOAt the same time, his co-stars, from old hands like Smith to relative newcomers like Emily Carey, who plays a younger version of Alicent, roundly praised Considine as a funny, warm and supportive colleague and collaborator. The person he is hardest on is himself.“It sounds like I’m a miserable sod, but I have a good time doing these things, as well,” Considine said. “It’s just that when I perform in any way, I have these challenges in front of me again.”What keeps him going are the flashes of transcendence. He mentioned one late-season monologue Viserys gives before his family that “touched a bit of old Hopkins,” as in Sir Anthony, one of his acting heroes.“The moments where you are fully in it, all that goes — all that awareness, all that self-observation, all that stuff, that inner critic,” Considine said. “That horrible stuff just falls off you. And that’s ultimately what I’m searching for.”And to the extent that any of that horrible stuff is linked to his past, he’s learning to let some of that fall off him, too, as achievements mount and the passing years bring distance and perspective.“That kid in the window, he hasn’t got to die, but it can’t keep dominating your life,” he said. “You’ve got to explore other things, and ‘Game of Thrones’ is part of that.”“Who would’ve thought that kid would end up playing a [expletive] king?” he added. “Who would’ve ever conceived that I would be a king in anything?” More

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      Clu Gulager, Rugged Character Actor of Film and TV, Dies at 93

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      On TV, he played Billy the Kid on the “The Tall Man” and was seen on the long-running “The Virginian.” His movies ranged from “The Killers” to “The Last Picture Show.” Clu Gulager, a rugged character actor who appeared in critically acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” as well as low-budget horror movies, and who memorably portrayed gunslingers on two television westerns, died on Friday at his son John’s home in Los Angeles. He was 93.John Gulager confirmed the death. He said his father’s health had been in decline since he suffered a back injury several years ago.Mr. Gulager’s rough-hewed good looks and Southwestern upbringing made him a natural for the westerns that proliferated on television in the 1950s and ’60s. He was seen regularly on “Wagon Train,” “Bonanza,” “Have Gun — Will Travel” and other shows.An appearance as the hit man Mad Dog Coll on “The Untouchables” in 1959 persuaded the writer and producer Sam Peeples to cast Mr. Gulager as the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid on “The Tall Man,” a television series he was planning about Billy’s friendship with Sheriff Pat Garrett. (By most accounts the title was a reference to Garrett’s honesty and rectitude, and to the show’s opening credits, in which Garrett’s long shadow stretches in front of him.)“He’s exactly what we were looking for, an actor with a flair for the unusual,” Mr. Peeples said in a TV Guide profile of Mr. Gulager shortly after the show first aired in 1960. “He lends a certain psychological depth to Billy.”The friendship between the lawman (played by Barry Sullivan) and the gun-toting rustler was fictionalized and greatly exaggerated over the show’s 75 episodes; many historians believe that Sheriff Garrett actually shot and killed Billy in 1881. Their fatal encounter never happened on the show, which ended abruptly in 1962.Mr. Gulager played a more lawful character on “The Virginian,” the first of three 1960s western series that ran for 90 minutes, which starred James Drury and Doug McClure. Mr. Gulager’s character on the show, Emmett Ryker, was introduced in the show’s third season when a rich man tried to hire him to murder a rancher. Although he refused to be a hired killer, he was framed for killing the man. After clearing his name, Ryker channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.On the series “The Virginian,” Mr. Gulager played a character who channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.NBC,via PhotofestIn Mr. Gulager’s first scene, Ryker was typically unflappable. He walked into a saloon and within moments angered a man playing cards. Ryker drew his gun on the card player before he could stand up, ending the conflict.Moments later a deputy sheriff asked Ryker where he learned to draw like that.“In the cradle,” he replied.Mr. Gulager’s acting career, which lasted well into the 21st century, was not relegated to the frontier. He appeared on non-western television shows including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Knight Rider” and “Murder, She Wrote,” and in several notable movies.Mr. Gulager, right, with Lee Marvin in “The Killers” (1964).The Criterion CollectionHe and Lee Marvin played hit men in “The Killers,” a 1964 film noir directed by Don Siegel and based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway that also starred Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and, in what turned out to be his last movie, Ronald Reagan.In 1969 he played a mechanic in “Winning,” a film about auto racing with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. He played an older man who has a fling with his lover’s beautiful daughter in “The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s celebrated 1971 study of a fading Texas town.He was also in more lowbrow fare, like the Keenen Ivory Wayans blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka” (1988) and the horror films “The Return of the Living Dead” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2” (both 1985).His movie work continued well into his later years, including roles in the independent productions “Tangerine” (2015) and “Blue Jay” (2016). His final screen appearance was as a bookstore clerk in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019).Mr. Gulager left the cast of “The Virginian” in 1968 to focus on directing and teaching. (The show remained on the air until 1971, becoming the third-longest-running western in television history, after “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.”) His directing career foundered after the short film “A Day With the Boys” in 1969, but he became a popular teacher, running a workshop that focused on horror film acting and directing.“I tell the young students in my class that what we do is as important as the work of a man who grows the wheat, the doctor who saves lives, the architect who builds homes,” he said in an ABC news release before he starred in the TV movie “Stickin’ Together” in 1978. “What we do, in our best moments, is provide humanity with food for the spirit.”William Martin Gulager was born in Holdenville, Okla., on Nov. 16, 1928. He often said that he was part Cherokee; the name Clu came from “clu-clu,” a Cherokee word for the birds, known in English as martins, that were nesting at the Gulager home.His father, John Delancy Gulager, was an actor and vaudevillian who became a county judge in Muskogee, Okla., and who taught him acting from a young age, well before he graduated from Muskogee Central High School. His mother, Hazel Opal (Griffin) Gulager, worked at the local V.A. Hospital for 35 years.Mr. Gulager served stateside in the Marines from 1946 to 1948 before studying drama at Northeastern State College in Oklahoma and Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He continued his education in Paris, where he studied with the actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the mime Etienne Decroux.He married Miriam Byrd-Nethery, and they acted in summer stock and university theater. In 1955 both were in a production of the play “A Different Drummer” on the television series “Omnibus.” He continued acting in New York until 1958, when the Gulagers and their infant son, John, moved to Hollywood.Mr. Gulager’s wife died in 2003. Besides his son John, survivors include another son, Tom, and a grandson.John Gulager is a director of horror movies, notably the gory “Feast” (2005), which starred Henry Rollins and Balthazar Getty. That film and its two tongue-in-cheek sequels also featured the older Mr. Gulager as a shotgun-toting bartender battling fanged monsters in a Midwestern tavern. The second “Feast” movie was even more of a family affair.“You know, there are three generations of Gulagers in this movie,” John Gulager told the blog horror-movies.ca in an interview. One of them, named after Clu the elder, was Clu Gulager’s infant grandson.“He was 11 months old when we filmed it,” John Gulager added. “My dad said, ‘We have to get Baby Clu’s career started now.’ ”Christine Chung contributed reporting. More

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      Clu Gulager, ‘The Tall Man’ and ‘The Virginian’ Actor, Dies at 93

      by

      On TV, he played Billy the Kid on the “The Tall Man” and was seen on the long-running “The Virginian.” His movies ranged from “The Killers” to “The Last Picture Show.” Clu Gulager, a rugged character actor who appeared in critically acclaimed films like “The Last Picture Show” as well as low-budget horror movies, and who memorably portrayed gunslingers on two television westerns, died on Friday at his son John’s home in Los Angeles. He was 93.John Gulager confirmed the death. He said his father’s health had been in decline since he suffered a back injury several years ago.Mr. Gulager’s rough-hewed good looks and Southwestern upbringing made him a natural for the westerns that proliferated on television in the 1950s and ’60s. He was seen regularly on “Wagon Train,” “Bonanza,” “Have Gun — Will Travel” and other shows.An appearance as the hit man Mad Dog Coll on “The Untouchables” in 1959 persuaded the writer and producer Sam Peeples to cast Mr. Gulager as the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid on “The Tall Man,” a television series he was planning about Billy’s friendship with Sheriff Pat Garrett. (By most accounts the title was a reference to Garrett’s honesty and rectitude, and to the show’s opening credits, in which Garrett’s long shadow stretches in front of him.)“He’s exactly what we were looking for, an actor with a flair for the unusual,” Mr. Peeples said in a TV Guide profile of Mr. Gulager shortly after the show first aired in 1960. “He lends a certain psychological depth to Billy.”The friendship between the lawman (played by Barry Sullivan) and the gun-toting rustler was fictionalized and greatly exaggerated over the show’s 75 episodes; many historians believe that Sheriff Garrett actually shot and killed Billy in 1881. Their fatal encounter never happened on the show, which ended abruptly in 1962.Mr. Gulager played a more lawful character on “The Virginian,” the first of three 1960s western series that ran for 90 minutes, which starred James Drury and Doug McClure. Mr. Gulager’s character on the show, Emmett Ryker, was introduced in the show’s third season when a rich man tried to hire him to murder a rancher. Although he refused to be a hired killer, he was framed for killing the man. After clearing his name, Ryker channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.On the series “The Virginian,” Mr. Gulager played a character who channeled his penchant for violence into the service of the law.NBC, via PhotofestIn Mr. Gulager’s first scene, Ryker was typically unflappable. He walked into a saloon and within moments angered a man playing cards. Ryker drew his gun on the card player before he could stand up, ending the conflict.Moments later a deputy sheriff asked Ryker where he learned to draw like that.“In the cradle,” he replied.Mr. Gulager’s acting career, which lasted well into the 21st century, was not relegated to the frontier. He appeared on non-western television shows including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “Knight Rider” and “Murder, She Wrote,” and in several notable movies.Mr. Gulager, right, with Lee Marvin in “The Killers” (1964).The Criterion CollectionHe and Lee Marvin played hit men in “The Killers,” a 1964 film noir directed by Don Siegel and based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway that also starred Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes and, in what turned out to be his last movie, Ronald Reagan.In 1969 he played a mechanic in “Winning,” a film about auto racing with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. He played an older man who has a fling with his lover’s beautiful daughter in “The Last Picture Show,” Peter Bogdanovich’s celebrated 1971 study of a fading Texas town.He was also in more lowbrow fare, like the Keenen Ivory Wayans blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You, Sucka” (1988) and the horror films “The Return of the Living Dead” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2” (both 1985).His movie work continued well into his later years, including roles in the independent productions “Tangerine” (2015) and “Blue Jay” (2016). His final screen appearance was as a bookstore clerk in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019).Mr. Gulager left the cast of “The Virginian” in 1968 to focus on directing and teaching. (The show remained on the air until 1971, becoming the third-longest-running western in television history, after “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.”) His directing career foundered after the short film “A Day With the Boys” in 1969, but he became a popular teacher, running a workshop that focused on horror film acting and directing.“I tell the young students in my class that what we do is as important as the work of a man who grows the wheat, the doctor who saves lives, the architect who builds homes,” he said in an ABC news release before he starred in the TV movie “Stickin’ Together” in 1978. “What we do, in our best moments, is provide humanity with food for the spirit.”William Martin Gulager was born in Holdenville, Okla., on Nov. 16, 1928. He often said that he was part Cherokee; the name Clu came from “clu-clu,” a Cherokee word for the birds, known in English as martins, that were nesting at the Gulager home.His father, John Delancy Gulager, was an actor and vaudevillian who became a county judge in Muskogee, Okla., and who taught him acting from a young age, well before he graduated from Muskogee Central High School. His mother, Hazel Opal (Griffin) Gulager, worked at the local V.A. Hospital for 35 years.Mr. Gulager served stateside in the Marines from 1946 to 1948 before studying drama at Northeastern State College in Oklahoma and Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He continued his education in Paris, where he studied with the actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the mime Etienne Decroux.He married Miriam Byrd-Nethery, and they acted in summer stock and university theater. In 1955 both were in a production of the play “A Different Drummer” on the television series “Omnibus.” He continued acting in New York until 1958, when the Gulagers and their infant son, John, moved to Hollywood.Mr. Gulager’s wife died in 2003. Besides his son John, survivors include another son, Tom, and a grandson.John Gulager is a director of horror movies, notably the gory “Feast” (2005), which starred Henry Rollins and Balthazar Getty. That film and its two tongue-in-cheek sequels also featured the older Mr. Gulager as a shotgun-toting bartender battling fanged monsters in a Midwestern tavern. The second “Feast” movie was even more of a family affair.“You know, there are three generations of Gulagers in this movie,” John Gulager told the blog horror-movies.ca in an interview. One of them, named after Clu the elder, was Clu Gulager’s infant grandson.“He was 11 months old when we filmed it,” John Gulager added. “My dad said, ‘We have to get Baby Clu’s career started now.’ ”Christine Chung contributed reporting. More