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      The Gag Is: Keke Palmer Is a Movie Star

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      The roads of Universal Studios’ backlots are named for exemplars of the company’s old star system: Kirk Douglas, Jimmy Stewart, Nat King Cole, Gregory Peck. One road is called Louise Beavers Avenue, after the character actor best known for her role in 1934’s racial-passing melodrama “Imitation of Life.” Her first onscreen performance was in the 1927 Universal production “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in which she made an uncredited appearance as an enslaved person at a wedding. When Beavers died in 1962 in her early 60s (her birth year is in question), she had played more than 150 roles, most of them maids, servants, slaves and mammies. At some point, as a show of appreciation, Universal Studios named one of its streets after her.At the corner of Canopy Street and Louise Beavers, Keke Palmer relinquished her head to the hair and makeup artists who rotated around her. Her hairstylist, Ann Jones, tweaked the curls in her short Afro. Assistants and publicists darted in and out of the room. Palmer was enthusiastic yet ambivalent about the hoopla surrounding “Nope,” the writer-director Jordan Peele’s latest film. She was at Universal Studios for the film’s “content day,” doing interviews and filming a behind-the-scenes featurette. “This is probably one of the craziest next-evolution points of my career, doing this movie,” she told me. “And all I want to do is submerge into the wind. You know?” she chuckled. “Because, I don’t even know what could or couldn’t happen after this — what the vibe would be. I ain’t never had that many people look at my work at once.”Keke Palmer with Daniel Kaluuya (left) and Brandon Perea in “Nope.”Universal PicturesShe spoke with rhythmic razzle-dazzle, emphasizing certain words and rendering them magical. To her makeup artist, Jordana David, Palmer said, “I want bold brows, a big lash and a soft lip,” in a stage whisper. She’s like a millennial vaudevillian, right down to her speaking cadence. When she’s excited, she sounds like someone in an old tale about Hollywood who just got off a bus in the big city.But Palmer, 28, is a consummate entertainment veteran. This year marks her 20th year in show business. She was recruited for the 2003 “American Idol” spinoff “American Juniors” — Palmer, cast as an alternate, never made it to air. She went on to a career as a child actor on Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel, starring in three seasons of “True Jackson, VP,” a show about a kid boss, and “Jump In!” a beloved TV movie about hopefuls in a jump-rope tournament. Since then she has done every kind of entertainment job you can imagine: appearing in “Hustlers” (2019) and Ryan Murphy’s camp horror series “Scream Queens”; a stint as a co-host on ABC’s “Good Morning America”; starring on Broadway in “Cinderella”; and recording her own pop/R.&B. albums. Despite her success in adulthood, to some viewers, she is frozen as a child star. Palmer’s leading role in “Nope,” with its auteur director, ambitious narrative and blockbuster projections, seems poised to shift her story.“Nope” is a mystery-thriller starring Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya as sibling horse trainers who are the fictional descendants of the real Black jockey who appears in Eadweard Muybridge’s late-19th-century photos of horses in motion. These photographs, once traced by hand onto glass discs, could be viewed in a device called a “zoopraxiscope” that gave the quickly spinning frames the illusion of motion. The resulting sequences were an early form of moving pictures. The real-life jockey in the photos has never been identified; he and the horse go on galloping, anonymously, forever. His anonymity inaugurates a lasting tension between Black people and the movies: To be in front of the camera means to risk, at worst, cruel caricature and anonymity. “Nope” feels like a refusal of that fate and an elaborate tribute to an enigmatic man Emerald describes as “the very first stuntman, animal wrangler and movie star all rolled into one.”Palmer with Jordan Peele on the set of “Nope.”Glen Wilson/Universal PicturesIn “Nope,” he’s given a name, Alasdair Haywood. His descendants, including Emerald, her older brother, O.J., and their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), run a horse-wrangling operation and train horses for Hollywood productions on the desert outskirts of Los Angeles. From their ranch, they want to reclaim their family’s centrality to the history of the movies. After Otis dies in a mysterious incident, the siblings discover what they believe is a U.F.O. and decide to film it with a makeshift crew that includes the tech wiz Angel (Brandon Perea). As they try to capture the spectacle on camera — they’re looking for what Emerald calls “the Oprah Shot” that will make them famous — they start to wonder: What is the value of attention?Amid all this, Palmer’s brash Emerald swaggers through the film. In a scene in which Em and O.J. are wrangling on the set of a commercial and she’s giving a safety talk, she digresses and begins advertising her own skills, playing up the fact that she “directs, acts, produces, sings and does craft services on the side.” Palmer improvised that line, showcasing her effortless creativity and indefatigable hustle. “Emerald is a lot like Keke if Keke had never broken through and found so much success when she was younger,” Peele told me. That difference highlights the tightrope so many Black performers — like Muybridge’s Black jockey, like Beavers — walk between renown and oblivion, work and exploitation.“We like to say since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game,” Emerald says on the set of the commercial. Both meanings of Emerald’s phrase could apply to Palmer; her 20-year investment in showbiz means she has lots of skin in the game, even if people haven’t always noticed the sly virtuosity she has been developing. “I’ve been acting all the years leading up, you know, whether someone watched or not. So it’s interesting, which is also what this movie is about as well — how people are so attracted to a spectacle.”Palmer with William H. Macy in the television movie “The Wool Cap” (2004). At 10 years old, she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance.TNT, via Everett CollectionPalmer was born in Harvey, Ill., and raised in nearby Robbins, a small community 30 minutes south of Chicago that was one of the earliest all-Black enclaves incorporated in the state; a 1918 article in The Denver Star heralded Robbins as “the first and only village which will be controlled entirely by Negroes.”Her parents, Sharon and Lawrence Palmer, were actors who met in a drama class at Chicago’s Kennedy-King College in the summer of 1986. Sharon worked on the Kennedy-King drama school’s lighting crew and acted in “The Wiz.” Lawrence appeared in a production of Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger,” a play that was first performed by the legendary Negro Ensemble Company. Later, when the Palmers were newly married, the couple worked as professional actors. Eventually, though, they had a small family to raise and put their dreams aside. Sharon Palmer taught drama in high schools and after-school programs. Her husband worked at a polyurethane company.Naturally, Palmer grew up loving show business. At 3, her parents took her to see the musical “The Jackie Wilson Story” at the Black Ensemble Theater, and that show mesmerized her. She would watch her mom sing in church and remix what she’d heard into performances in kindergarten plays. In her book for young adults, “I Don’t Belong to You,” she describes her family watching and studying movies at home (“Claudine,” from 1974, with Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, and “Let’s Do It Again,” from 1975, with Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby, for example), essentially providing their own DVD commentary by tracing the trajectory of different actors and directors. Soon Palmer was singing and acting in school productions and auditioning for “The Lion King.” “When we noticed she had talent, then we both were able to help her to learn lines and to understand scripts,” Sharon Palmer told me. “When I would get tired, he would do it, and vice versa. That was a huge advantage for her, that both of her parents were actors.”Palmer and Laurence Fishburne in “Akeelah and the Bee” (2006).Lions Gate, via Everett CollectionPalmer’s steadfastness — she would rehearse lines by herself for hours — signaled to her parents that her dream was worth investing in. Then came the “American Juniors” audition and a role in the 2004 movie “Barbershop 2.” Later that year, Palmer appeared as a neglected child in a television movie, “The Wool Cap,” with William H. Macy. At 10, she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for that performance, losing out to Glenn Close. To support Palmer’s career, her parents sold their new house, took leave from their jobs and moved the family to Pasadena, Calif. Her breakout role was in “Akeelah and the Bee” in 2006, alongside Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, in which Palmer played the titular character, an 11-year-old from South Los Angeles who hopes to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Akeelah’s intelligence and moxie amid limited circumstances sealed Palmer’s popularity.Palmer told me that ever since she was a child working in the ecosystems of Nickelodeon and Disney, she observed how those networks took the “MGM standard” in finding talent they could use across the board, from sitcoms to movies to music to touring shows. Palmer cultivated her singing and dancing alongside her acting, co-writing and singing the “True Jackson, VP” theme song for Nickelodeon and making singles and music videos for Disney’s “Jump In!” soundtrack. “And so for me, also working in those spaces, that taught me to keep things very business and to just show up, do the job, do the thing, you know, be professional, and go home and then have a life,” she said.Historically, Black Hollywood pioneers found it difficult to leave a set and then have a life. The light of fame also generated the shadow of racial clichés that stalked them. They were given roles that turned their talents into mere content: stereotypical images, like Beavers’s beatific and smiling maids, that circulated outside the theater, long after the projectors went quiet.Palmer with Jamie Lee Curtis in Season 1 of “Scream Queens” (2015).Patti Perret/Fox, via Everett CollectionIn “Nope,” Palmer plays up her unabashed joviality but avoids the specter of minstrel imagery. She plays Emerald as a woman searching for something: In her name, there’s a hint of the colorful capital city in “The Wizard of Oz,” a home for seeking souls; and in the flavor of her portrayal, a glint of “The Wiz.” If Kaluuya is Peele’s Robert De Niro, as the director has said in a recent interview that likened their partnership to that between Martin Scorsese and De Niro, then Palmer, in this first collaboration, might be his Joe Pesci. She brings to her part an emotional maximalism that distills the too-muchness of mundane feelings.Palmer admires multitalented performers like Carol Burnett, Eddie Murphy and Elaine May, whose acts call back to American vaudeville. At their worst, vaudevillians and minstrel performers reinforced anti-Black iconography. At their best, they manipulated stereotypes — the straight man, the fool, the punchline artist — reinhabiting stock characters in order to make us see them anew. You can trace their influence in Palmer’s acting. A scene in which Emerald dances at the Haywood homestead epitomizes her onscreen charm. She cranks up the music on the family’s record player and quite literally tunes out despair, pop-locking with goofiness and fluidity. Emerald’s dancing is juxtaposed with shots of a sinister force skulking outside the house: Emerald is oblivious, and Palmer grounds the moment by performing the opposite of gravitas, endowing her body with a blithe buoyancy.Pop-locking is the perfect move for an actor like Palmer: It simulates a human body’s attempt to function within restraints, and the restraint is what produces the dance’s elegance. If Emerald dancing amid disaster is not a snapshot of the function of Black art in America, I don’t know what is. Close-ups on Palmer’s face show her mix of Kabuki theatricality and understated grace. This is her trademark. “She’s able to capture joy in a really natural way,” Kaluuya told me.Palmer (second from right) with Lili Reinhart, Jennifer Lopez, and Constance Wu in “Hustlers” (2019).Barbara Nitke/STX Entertainment, via Everett CollectionHer effervescence is straightforward and contagious: You smile when she does. That’s not to say that she lacks subtlety; Palmer, who likens dialogue to music, infuses her lines with rhythm and verve and the delicacy required of a great jazz scatter riffing on — and stylistically ripping up — the American songbook. “Keke is a brilliant improviser,” Peele said. Kaluuya concurred: “She’s amazing off-top.” In “Nope,” she swings and swerves.Back on Beavers Avenue, it was lunch time in Palmer’s dressing room. We sat on the floor and took our high heels off, getting comfortable for the first time all day. Before we started the interview, Palmer turned to me and apologized, because she needed to send an email before we began our chat. As we sat in silence, the din of the lot sometimes filtered in, and then, distracted by a production assistant’s or publicist’s voice, I chanced a glance Palmer’s way. Her face was illuminated by the glow of her laptop screen, and I saw her adjust her expressions subtly, from sweet mien to the mean mug of deep concentration, as she typed. She had the elegance, flip-book flamboyance and heightened physicality of a silent-film star. Then, Palmer finished her email, turned to me with GIFy ebullience and began the performance of being famous again. She told me: “I’m usually, more often than not, around energy that needs me to sustain it. Like, not needs me, but expects it. That’s maybe the better word.”With some of the characters she has been given — including a hackneyed character in Peele’s “Key and Peele” sketch show known as Malia Obama’s “Anger Translator” — it’s possible to think of Palmer as a version of vaudeville-era performers like Nina Mae McKinney or Ethel Waters, upgrading thin material. I have a feeling that Palmer’s pop-lock will be turned into a GIF, like many bits from Palmer’s public performances. In a viral one, she is a guest on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” Palmer turns to the audience, contorts her mouth stagily and says her famous tagline, “But the gag is …” She states a premise and then comically refutes it with a haughty-voiced explanation: “I just sent my ex-boyfriend 100 text messages and he didn’t reply,” she said, “but the gag is he still loves me.”In a way, Palmer’s appearances in popular memes and funny GIFs makes her a kind of descendant of the unnamed jockey in the Muybridge photos or of Beavers. GIFs encapsulate emotional reactions, broadening and flattening real feelings and impulses so that others can make use of them. Pluck a GIF of the “Real Housewife” NeNe Leakes and you are momentarily manipulating her image, along with all the racist assumptions (sassiness, bullying, sexual availability) that accrue to a Black woman’s body. Some critics have asserted that they allow Black women’s likenesses to become too easily appropriated and used as shorthand — even calling it “digital blackface.” But Palmer embeds her caricature with awareness of how it will be used. She injects some knowingness into the image, winking at those who would pass it around in God-knows-what fashion. She pushes up against the limits of images from the inside, resisting exploitation, digital and otherwise.Djeneba Aduayom for The New York TimesPalmer has written about choosing her roles carefully, not taking everything offered to her despite her ambition. I wonder if this factored into her decision to appear in “Nope,” which is a movie partly about refusal. It will not let the Black jockey become a footnote, a trivial presence in photographic history, without commenting on the loss and attempting to reclaim him. The film puts her in a lineage of Black actors and filmmakers who have done their own version of this kind of work. Think of Oscar Micheaux’s melodramas featuring middle-class strivers, which were meant to counteract minstrel characters; the Blaxpoitation films that turned stereotypes of violent, oversexualized Blackness on their heads; or the filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion who made poetic departures from traditional depictions of Black people.Palmer’s performance in “Nope” is its own act of resistance, casting a different light on how her likeness and expressivity might circulate in our culture. She enlivens the screen, exuding a deep sensitivity. Playing against Kaluuya’s stoic, quietly grieving O.J., Palmer evokes other ways to register grief. She bargains with her brooding brother and herself, joking and glad-handing through scenes. She grooves and puffs a vape pen to get through her depression. She moves on, and on, and you get whipped up in the tornado of her personality just as storm clouds drift on the ranch’s horizon. Like an outstanding improviser, Palmer says both “yes, and” (the improv credo) by bustling with a trouper’s brio, and “no,” resisting the blotting of Black subtlety and subjectivity. In this movie, when her character says, “Yeah, nah,” and runs away, that negative response works on multiple levels. Her role in “Nope” allows her to be what Louise Beavers couldn’t be: a Black woman in Hollywood whose skin is not mere spectacle.At the end of her work day, on another stage, Palmer recorded ads for Universal Studios theme-park rides, networks like E! and foreign markets. The sound bell rang one final time, and black-clad crew members dispersed. “All right, that is a cut, and that is a wrap on Keke Palmer,” the stage manager said, and everyone cheered. Palmer shimmied in place, doing air guns with her hands, eventually blowing one out and finally breaking character.Niela Orr is a story producer for Pop-Up Magazine and a contributing editor at The Paris Review. She will be a story editor for the magazine starting in August. Djeneba Aduayom is a photographer whose work is informed by her various cultural backgrounds and her past work as a performer. She is based in Southern California. More

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      in Television

      Taurean Blacque, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 82

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      He received an Emmy nomination for his work as Detective Neal Washington, a character he strove to portray as something other than “that hip, jive Black man.”Taurean Blacque, the actor best known for his Emmy-nominated performance as a detective on the critically acclaimed NBC drama series “Hill Street Blues,” died on Thursday in Atlanta. He was 82.His family announced the death in a statement. It did not specify a cause, saying only that he died after a brief illness.Mr. Blacque, who began his career as a stage actor in New York, had several television appearances under his belt when, in 1981, he landed his breakthrough role: the street-smart Detective Neal Washington on “Hill Street Blues,” which drew praise for its realistic portrayal of the day-to-day reality of police work and was nominated for 98 Emmy Awards in its seven seasons, winning 26.The part of Washington, Mr. Blacque later recalled, was sketchily written, and it was his choice to play the character as quiet and reflective. “I think the original concept was that hip, jive Black man, you know,” he told TV Guide. “But I wanted to turn it around a little, give him some depth, not get into that stereotype.”Mr. Blacque was nominated for a 1982 Primetime Emmy for best supporting actor in a drama series, but he lost to his fellow cast member Michael Conrad. (All the nominees in the category that year — the others were Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — were members of the “Hill Street Blues” cast.)“Hill Street Blues” ended its run in 1987, and two years later Mr. Blacque starred with Vivica A. Fox and others on the NBC soap opera “Generations.” Probably the most racially diverse daytime drama of its era, “Generations” dealt with the relationship over the years between two Chicago families, one white and one Black. Mr. Blacque played the owner of a chain of ice cream parlors.He later moved to Atlanta, where he was active on the local theater scene, appearing in productions of August Wilson’s “Jitney,” James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” and other plays. He was also involved in the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C.Taurean Blacque was born Herbert Middleton Jr. on May 10, 1940, in Newark. His father was a dry cleaner, his mother a nurse.He graduated from Arts High School in Newark but did not decide to pursue an acting career until he was almost 30 and working as a mail carrier. He enrolled at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 1969 and, he told USA Today, “Once I found out that acting was my niche, I poured all my energies into it.”He said he chose the stage name Taurean Blacque (Taurus was his astrological sign) in part as a way to get casting directors’ attention. Eventually, after several years of paying dues, he did.Work in community theater in New York led to roles with the Negro Ensemble Company and eventually to Hollywood, where he landed guest roles on “Sanford and Son,” “Taxi,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and other TV series before being cast on “Hill Street Blues.”In addition to being an actor, Mr. Blacque, who had two biological sons and adopted 11 other children, was an adoption advocate. He was the spokesman for the Los Angeles County adoption service. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him the national spokesman for adoption.Mr. Blacque’s survivors include 12 children, 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      An ‘Impossible Dream’ Comes True, Again, for Marylouise Burke in ‘Epiphany’

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      The 81-year-old actress stars as an eccentric dinner party host. When she was a teenager, though, wanting to act was a secret she didn’t dare tell.The staircase in Brian Watkins’s play “Epiphany,” at Lincoln Center Theater, goes up and up. Tall and imposing, it’s the kind of centerpiece to a set that makes you wonder, when you arrive for a performance, who is going to be climbing and descending it.The actor Marylouise Burke, for one, spends considerable time dashing up and down those steps, which she knew from the script would be in the show. So when her agent got a call asking her to play the lead role of Morkan, the warmly eccentric host of a dinner party fueled by existential desperation and touched with spiritual longing, she asked him to inquire: Was it going to be “a normal staircase or a crazy staircase?”Not that she wasn’t tempted by the part, with which she had felt immediately simpatico since performing it in a prepandemic reading. But Burke, who is 81, diminutive and a longtime favorite of the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, shattered both wrists and her left kneecap two years ago when she tripped on a pothole in front of the West Village building where she has lived in a studio apartment since 1977.And sometimes, she said the other afternoon, sitting a bit shyly for an interview in the theater’s glass-walled lobby, “you have a designer who decides that the floor is going to be absurd because the script is absurd or something like that. I just knew I needed it to be even steps going up. You know, they can’t all be different heights, or tilted.”Burke, seated at center left, with her fellow castmates at the dinner party table in the Lincoln Center Theater production of “Epiphany.”Jeremy DanielIn John Lee Beatty’s design, they are neither. Burke is on perfectly solid ground, which leaves her free to do the destabilizing. That is something of a specialty of hers: luring an audience in with a portrayal that on its surface is so instantly fascinating that we never think to expect that there’s more underneath. And there is always, always more underneath — comic, tragic or very possibly both.To Tyne Rafaeli, the director of “Epiphany,” Burke’s “particular brand of humor” and “ability to mask a simmering fragility” made her the ideal match for Morkan, a character who draws even new acquaintances toward her and elicits from them the impulse to help her.“Marylouise is that,” Rafaeli said. “She has that effect on other artists. People who are around Marylouise, they want to collaborate with her. They want to lean toward her. She just has that kind of energetic pull. So the line between her and the character is very thin, obviously.”Morkan is for Burke a rare starring part. Another was Kimberly, the teenager with the rapid-aging disease in Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” a role she originated in 2001, long before the play morphed into a musical. A character actor, Burke has been performing on New York stages since she arrived in the city in 1973, when she was 32 and eager “to have more opportunities to act for free,” she said, kidding but not. “It never occurred to me that I would ever in my whole life get paid to act.”Burke with John Gallagher Jr. in David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” at City Center’s Stage I.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was another eight years before she got her Actors’ Equity card, in a tiny part in an Off Broadway production of Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Broken Pitcher,” starring Larry Pine. By now she has amassed nearly 50 years of New York theater credits — many in the strange downtown productions she loves, among them the title role in the Mabou Mines-Trick Saddle show “Imagining the Imaginary Invalid,” at La MaMa in 2016.Her screen credits include movies like “Sideways,” in which she played the sprightly broken mother to Paul Giamatti’s middle-aged wreck, and television series like Netflix’s “Ozark,” in which she had a darkly delightful, Season 3 arc as the marriage therapist to Laura Linney and Jason Bateman’s extremely crimey central couple.“I actually knew probably from the time I was 13 or 14 that I wanted to act,” Burke said from behind a white KN95 mask that engulfed her lower face. “But it seemed like such an impossible dream. And I never admitted that to anybody.”She spent her childhood in Steelton, Pa., a Bethlehem Steel company town where her father owned a grocery store and her mother was a homemaker with comic timing that Burke inherited. The town was proud of its high school football team, and she played fight songs on clarinet in the school band at their games. But she didn’t know anyone who acted.Her adolescence coincided with the cookie-cutter conservative age of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and her family’s expectation — “once they found out that I was smart” — was that she would become a teacher. Off at college, though, in what she called “a major rebellion,” she swiftly changed her major from education to English, with a philosophy minor, and started acting in school plays.“I just always felt better when I was in a play,” she said, wrapping her arms protectively around her body, making herself even smaller. “I just always felt more who I was.”Hang on, what is that arm-wrapping gesture about? Burke hesitated, considered. Then: “I’d like to be nice to that girl back there,” she said, meaning her young self, the one with the “incongruous dream.”Burke at Lincoln Center. When it comes to acting in his new play “Epiphany,” the playwright Brian Watkins said her “level of specificity is just a gift to a writer.”Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesAfter college she earned a master’s degree in English literature, and discovered as a teaching assistant that she hated getting up in front of a class to speak. Floundering after a brief marriage in her mid-20s, she found herself living with a sympathetic aunt in suburban Philadelphia, holding down day jobs and taking classes at night at the nearby Hedgerow Theater Company.For years after she moved to New York, office jobs — copy editing, proofreading, word processing — kept her afloat. When “Kimberly Akimbo” opened Off Broadway in 2003, she said, five of her ex-bosses came to see it with their wives.She first worked with Lindsay-Abaire on his play “A Devil Inside” at Soho Rep in 1997; his “Fuddy Meers,” two years later at Manhattan Theater Club, was a career turning point, because casting directors started to notice her.When Watkins asked Lindsay-Abaire about casting Burke for “Epiphany,” Lindsay-Abaire thought it would make perfect sense. While their plays are very different, he said, “there is that dual tone of funny grief that runs under both of our works.”He told Watkins of Burke’s extraordinary devotion to playwrights, which Watkins marveled at nonetheless when she questioned him closely on the pronunciation he intended for the exclamation “Agh,” which appears repeatedly in her lines.“That level of specificity is just a gift to a writer,” he said.Even more strikingly, Burke was fighting through brain fog and physical fatigue to learn her lines, having had Covid just before rehearsals started.But Morkan is in her bones now — and Burke does, as Lindsay-Abaire said, come “bounding down those stairs like she was a 14-year-old.”At a time when, she said, theater is still “not the same” as it was prepandemic, she feels grateful for Lincoln Center Theater’s caution about Covid protocols, and grateful that its audience is masked. She is also happy to be back onstage, alongside eight fellow actors, telling her character’s story.“It’s very precious to be going out there,” she said. “Going out there together.” More

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      ‘Heart’ Review: First a Starter Marriage, Then Real Love

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      In her new autobiographical solo play, the actress Jade Anouka recounts the joys and fears of falling for a woman after her marriage to a man ends.At 24, the actress and writer Jade Anouka got married. Had it been a movie, the first dance would have been set ominously to the theme from “Jaws.” Before the wedding, Anouka dismissed the fact that her fiancé had bought her a ring that did not fit. At 28, she got divorced.That relationship sounds like it had its share of drama — “he’s visited by the Beast,” Anouka says of her then-husband — but she evokes it only in passing in her new autobiographical solo play, “Heart,” which is presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan. The brief marriage was only a preamble to what really matters: Anouka then fell in love with a woman. It was easy at first, even though she had never been in a lesbian relationship. Then it was hard. Then it was easy, or easier, again.The director Ola Ince’s production can be oddly heavy-handed at times, as when Anouka must climb up and down a very tall chair, perhaps meant to symbolize her being thrown back into romantic infancy, or love as a precarious balancing act. Mostly it is distracting. Jen Schriever’s expressive lighting design, on the other hand, does an incredible amount of effective work.Anouka occupies the stage with confident grace, despite the heavy-handed production.Trévon JamesIn truth, Anouka needs little, occupying the stage with confident grace as she toggles between naturalistic storytelling and a more rhythmic and poetic spoken-word flow.Obviously her love life’s unexpected turn has been a paradigm shift for her. But at this point, the coming-out tale is a well-trodden genre. Over the past decades, checkpoints have emerged, and obligatory scenes have surfaced, so venturing onto this familiar terrain in 2022 is tricky.“Heart” feels disconcertingly generic at times: Anouka, perhaps in an attempt to make the show feel more “universal,” tends to prefer bromides like “love is love” over the details that would have grounded the play.This starts with her job as an actress. She relates how she couldn’t bring herself to be open about her new relationship with a woman, fearing that it might impact her career. “I wanna stay working, and not just in gay roles,” she tells herself. “I don’t wanna be seen as different.”Putting aside the fact that nowadays stars as big as Kristen Stewart and Tessa Thompson can be openly queer and get cast as Princess Diana and Valkyrie in high-profile films, the complex relationship between an actor and an audience’s gaze deserves more scrutiny than Anouka gives it here.Oddly, this casually charismatic, effortlessly charming performer does not even reflect on her past roles that have scrambled gender expectations, like the powerful witch queen Ruta Skadi in the series “His Dark Materials.” Of her starring in Phyllida Lloyd’s hit Shakespeare trilogy, which was set in a women’s prison, Anouka simply says she lands “a good job, a dream role in a company I already love.” She accompanies those words with some brief shadowboxing, a reference to her Hotspur in “Henry IV.”Information about Anouka’s family is not forthcoming, either, which is especially frustrating since she demonstrates a quicksilver ability to bring her parents to life in a couple of brief scenes — in a classic move, for instance, her mother brings out the Bible when told of the new affair.As for the love interest, she remains frustratingly devoid of identifying details, as if she were in a witness protection program. Those who would like to know more are better off heading to YouTube to watch “Her & Her,” a lovely short film Anouka made on a smartphone in 2020, for the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine project. It is anchored in all the quotidian minutiae we so miss in the play.HeartThrough Aug. 14 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; hearttheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Medieval Times Employees Vote to Unionize in New Jersey

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      The horsemen, courtiers, stablehands and other performers at ye olde New Jersey tourist attraction formed a new kind of medieval guild when they voted to unionize.LYNDHURST, N.J. — In 11th-century Spain, a nobleman trying to put his hand up the queen’s skirt after a royal feast might be subjected to medieval torture methods.But at the Medieval Times just off Route 3, dealing with that kind of behavior has been accepted as part of the job for too long, said Monica Garza, one of several actresses who plays the queen at the dinner-and-a-tournament attraction.Garza said management made her feel like a “diva” for requesting additional security protocols after she pointed out increasingly bold behavior from guests. It was only after an incident in which a rowdy ticket holder got close to her throne and tried to shout into her microphone, Garza said, that management installed a chain to block access to her.The desire for bolstered security and other safety measures at the castle — where falling off horses can be part of the job description — was one reason that queens, knights, squires and stablehands at the Lyndhurst castle voted on Friday to unionize.The unionization effort, first reported by The Huffington Post, prevailed on Friday, when the employees voted, 26 to 11, to join the American Guild of Variety Artists. The medievalists will join a wide array of performers represented by the guild, including the Radio City Rockettes, some circus performers, and the character actors who perform at Disneyland — including Mulan and Aladdin, for example — in California.The employees are also seeking higher pay (Garza receives $20 per hour, and squires start at about $14 per hour), and for higher-ups to treat them more like skilled workers — trained stuntmen who perform intricate fights with lances, swords and axes, and experienced actors who do more than just read lines. Medieval Times management did not respond to requests for comment.A knight, Sinan Logan, with one of the horses backstage in 2007. Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Times“A huge point of the union is just basic respect,” said Garza, 25, a trained actor and self-described history nerd. “People will always exploit you when it’s something you love, because they know you’ll do it for nothing.”Many performers ultimately fall in love with the job, even if they didn’t initially dream of working at the concrete castle, with its vast hall of arms and seemingly endless supply of tomato bisque. The two-hour shows are staffed by a motley crew that includes an ex-Marine, an erstwhile Elton John backup singer, a musical theater student turned stuntman, a former zookeeper and an actor known for his voice work on the video game “Grand Theft Auto.”“We are a bunch of misfits,” laughs Sean Quigley, 33, the backup singer who is also a classically trained actor from London, giving him no need to fake a British accent. (The show is technically set in Spain, but New Jersey audiences aren’t picky.)Read More on Organized Labor in the U.S.Apple: Employees at a Baltimore-area Apple store voted to unionize, making it the first of the company’s 270-plus U.S. stores to do so. The result provides a foothold for a budding movement among Apple retail employees.Starbucks: When a Rhodes scholar joined Starbucks in 2020, none of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union. She hoped to change that by helping to unionize its stores in Buffalo. Improbably, she and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal.Amazon: A little-known independent union scored a stunning victory at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. But unlike at Starbucks, where organizing efforts spread in a matter of weeks, unionizing workers at Amazon has been a longer, messier slog.A Shrinking Movement: Although high-profile unionization efforts have dominated headlines recently, union membership has seen a decades-long decline in the United States.Taking orders from their corporate headquarters in Texas, the Lyndhurst shows are engineered to follow the same structure each night. Visitors here put on the same paper crowns and eat the same four-course meal as in Atlanta and Baltimore. The queens are paid to say the same lines as in the company’s other nine castles, where a reported 1.5 million guests visited last year.“Good nobles, welcome to the hall of my forefathers,” Garza says as she rides atop a white Andalusian into an arena of shrieking children wielding light-up swords.The queen hasn’t been in charge of the realm for long. The show had always cast a king as the lead, but about five years ago the company rewrote the script, putting a queen on the throne to accommodate requests for more substantive roles for women.The new story goes something like this: After inheriting the realm, the queen stages a tournament in which six knights on horseback compete for a vaunted title, but her power is threatened by a sleazy adviser who plots to marry her off. The dialogue is often drowned out by the aforementioned shrieks and the bustle of the “serfs and wenches” (Medieval Times-speak for waiters), who are known to end the evening with, “Cash or card, milady?”For the actors, who can perform the same script several times a week, year after year, the lines start to feel tattooed on their brains — so they find ways to entertain themselves.Paper crowns have long been de rigueur at the castle, as seen in 2007. Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Time“I’ll do a show where I’m pretending I’m secretly in love with the queen; I’ll do a show where I’m secretly in love with one of the knights,” said Quigley, who plays Lord Marshal, the show’s emcee. “In order to keep it fresh, you can tell a different story in your head.”Quigley, who auditioned for a job at Medieval Times after struggling to make a smooth transition between London’s West End and New York’s theater scene, also amuses himself by assuming various accents. He’s tried a cockney drawl, performed the whole show as if he were Sean Connery and put on a voice like Jon Snow from “Games of Thrones” — it was only when he tried doing the entire performance with a lisp that the sound department sent a runner to tell him to cut it out.For Christopher Lucas, the video-game voice actor who has also appeared in daytime soap operas, his improvisational frisson comes during a scene where, as the queen’s slimy adviser, he goes on and on about his adoration for oranges from Valencia in an oration that verges on the unhinged. For reasons that even Lucas can’t quite understand, the audience loves it, sometimes starting a chant — “Oranges! Oranges! Oranges!” — and bringing him fresh fruit on their next visit.“As a performer, these are the types of things you live for,” Lucas said.Ultimately, the enterprise of Medieval Times, which started in Spain and came to the United States in 1983, revolves around the knights, who parade around the arena on horseback before jousting and dueling for the queen.One of New Jersey’s most veteran knights, Antonio Sanchez, 31, had grown disillusioned with the idea of a long-term career in the U.S. Marines when he saw on Facebook that Medieval Times was hiring. On a whim in 2014, he drove to the Lyndhurst castle, walked into the horse stables, and soon, he was mucking out stalls and saddling up the steeds before showtime.“From the back of the stables, you could hear the crowd roaring,” Sanchez said, recalling the moment he started dreaming of becoming a knight.To get the job, no experience with horses is required. As knights’ apprentices, the men undergo hundreds of hours of training, learning both how to ride and how to roll off into the sand safely when rival knights “knock” them off.Employees at the castle in Lyndhurst, N.J., are now unionized.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“I don’t think I had ever been face to face with a horse before,” said Joe Devlin, 28, who started as a squire after he returned home from a stint as a touring musician and was in desperate need of a job.Protecting themselves with aluminum shields, the apprentices learn fight choreography that will gradually become committed to muscle memory.Still, accidents happen. The fact that the show is dependent on a stable of about two dozen horses adds an element of constant danger, said Purnell Thompson, a stablehand who was hired after losing his job taking care of farm animals at a local zoo. In an arena of boisterous revelers, there are many potential triggers for a horse to spook, including if audience members flout the rules and bang their metal plates and bowls onto the tables.Once, when Devlin was in training, he fractured his ankle learning how to jump off a horse. And Jonathan Beckas, a knight of two years, has dealt with an injured knee and two head injuries, including one that involved taking a wooden lance to the head. (Full-time workers receive health insurance.)One reason the knights are unionizing, said Beckas — a 27-year-old trained stuntman who is paid $21.50 per hour, up from $12 when he started working as a squire — is that they feel acutely underpaid considering the risks they take at work. “I am a knight, but I’m also a human,” he said.This isn’t the first time a union vote was held at this castle. There was a similar effort in 2006, where complaints largely centered around a lack of job security and fears that squires were becoming knights too quickly. That vote narrowly went against forming a union.Even before the vote on Friday’, employees said, they were seeing changes. After news of the unionization effort went public, garnering support from Gov. Phil Murphy, management installed a more robust barrier to her throne, Garza said.Now, the knights have bargaining power, and they plan on using it.“Being a knight is every little kid’s dream,” Sanchez said. “But I got older, and fun doesn’t pay the bills.” More

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      L.Q. Jones, Who Played Heavies With a Light Touch, Dies at 94

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      His face was familiar, mostly in westerns, during a career that spanned five decades. He also directed the cult film “A Boy and His Dog.”L.Q. Jones, a hirsute, craggy-faced, swaggering Texan who guilelessly played the antihero in some 60 films and dozens of television series, died on Saturday at his home in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his grandson Erté deGarces.A former stand-up comic, Mr. Jones also tried his hand as a bean, corn and dairy rancher in Nicaragua and once described himself as “but several hours away from three degrees — one in law, one in business, one in journalism” at the University of Texas.But he was lured to the Warner Bros. studios when a college roommate, Fess Parker, the actor who later played both Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, persuaded him to audition for a minor role in the 1955 film “Battle Cry,” directed by Raoul Walsh and adapted from Leon Uris’s novel.Mr. Parker sent him a copy of the book and a map with directions to the Warner lot. Mr. Jones was cast in two days.Billed as Justus E. McQueen (his birth name), he made his first appearance onscreen as the movie’s narrator introduced a group of all-American Army recruits being shipped by train to boot camp. The camera then panned to a character named L.Q. Jones.“Then, abruptly, the narrator’s voice drops to the scornful tone of a 10th-grade math teacher doling out detention,” Justin Humphreys wrote in “Names You Never Remember, With Faces You Never Forget” (2006).“‘There’s one in every group,’ he tells us, as we see L.Q. mischievously giving one of the other soldiers-to-be a hotfoot,” Mr. Humphrey added. “There could have been no more perfect beginning to L.Q. Jones’s career in the movies. The word that best sums up his overriding screen persona is hellion.”The actor pirated the character’s name for his own subsequent screen credits. From then on, Justus McQueen was L.Q. Jones.Mr. Jones joined the director Sam Peckinpah’s stable of actors, appearing in “Ride the High Country” (1962), “Major Dundee” (1965) and “The Wild Bunch” (1969), in which he and his fellow character actor Strother Martin play rival bounty hunters and, as the studio described their manic competition for the highest body count, “bring their depraved characters to life with a childish energy.”Mr. Jones was also frequently seen in the stampede of westerns that arrived on TV in the 1950s and ’60s, including “Cheyenne,” “Gunsmoke,” “Wagon Train” and “Rawhide.” His films included the 1968 westerns “Hang ’em High,” in which he slipped a noose around Clint Eastwood’s neck, and “Stay Away, Joe,” with Elvis Presley. Among his other screen credits were Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” (1995) and Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006), his last film.Don Johnson and friend in “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), which Mr. Jones directed. “I hope he goes on directing,” one reviewer wrote. But he didn’t.LQ/JAFMr. Jones directed, produced and helped write “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), a dark post-apocalyptic comedy starring Don Johnson and Jason Robards, based on the book of the same name by Harlan Ellison.“‘A Boy and His Dog,’ a fantasy about the world after a future holocaust, is, more or less, a beginner’s movie. It has some good ideas and some terrible ones,” Richard Eder wrote in his New York Times review.“This is the second film directed by L.Q. Jones, better known as an actor,” Mr. Eder continued. “It is not really a success, but I hope he goes on directing.”He didn’t. “A Boy and His Dog” acquired a cult following, but Mr. Jones returned to what he did best. He preferred the independence of choosing the villainous roles that appealed to him, and that measured his success, to the prospect of directing someone else’s script and wrangling larger-than-life egos.“Different parts call for different heavies,” Mr. Jones told William R. Horner for his book “Bad at the Bijou” (1982).“I have a certain presence,” he explained. “I play against that presence a lot of times, and that’s of a heavy that is not crazy or deranged — although we play those, of course — but rather someone who is a heavy because he enjoys being a heavy.”“It’s really hard to say what they’re looking for when they pick me,” Mr. Jones said. “A lot of times your heavy is not that well presented in the script. Most times he’s too one-sided. So we look for things to bring to being a heavy: a certain softness; a vulnerability that makes him human; a quiet moment when he’s a screamer most of the time; a look; the way he dresses; the way he walks into a room.”Mr. Jones was born Justus Ellis McQueen Jr. on Aug. 19, 1927, in Beaumont, Texas. His father was a railroad worker; his mother, Jessie Paralee (Stephens) McQueen, died in a car accident when he was a child. He learned to ride a horse when he was 8.After graduating from high school, he served in the Navy, attended Lamar Junior College and Lon Morris College in Texas, and briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin. His marriage to Sue Lewis ended in divorce. In addition to his grandson, his survivors include his sons, Randy McQueen and Steve Marshall, and his daughter, Mindy McQueen.Mr. Jones seemed to measure success less by his bank account (he once described himself as “independently poor”) than by professional gratification. But he had a sense of humor about it.“I’m around somewhere, probably just counting my money,” the message on his telephone answering machine said. “When I get through, if I’m not too tired, I’ll return your call.” More

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones Would Like the Ingénue Phase of Her Career to End Now

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones bravely walked onstage, her face a ghastly white. Under her arm, a human head.“How could you do this to me!” she bellowed at Henry VIII.As the ghost of Anne Boleyn, Edgar-Jones, the hitherto quiet child, now slathered in face paint and clutching a homemade severed body part, found herself suddenly enamored with the spotlight.“That was the first time I remember being aware of the joy of departing from yourself,” Edgar-Jones said.She recounted this pivotal school-play memory on a breezy June afternoon, perched on a cream-colored couch in a cream-colored luxury hotel suite in West Hollywood. The cream-colored dress she’d been wearing for a series of engagements earlier that day had begun to unravel, prompting a change into an oversize black blazer, T-shirt, shorts and chunky G.H. Bass loafers, all of which now stood in cool contrast to the generic palette around her.At 24, the British actress is proving a reliable standout. In a string of major roles over the past two years, she’s morphed from brooding lover (“Normal People”) to cannibal-horror heroine (“Fresh”) to defiant Mormon (“Under the Banner of Heaven”). Her latest venture, the lead in the movie adaptation of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” arrives in theaters on July 15.In the romantic drama based on the best-selling novel by Delia Owens, Edgar-Jones play Kya, an abandoned girl who raised herself in the marshes of North Carolina and eventually lands in court, accused of murder.Clockwise from top left: “Where the Crawdads Sing,” “Normal People,” “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “Fresh.”Clockwise from top left: Michele K. Short/Sony Pictures, via Associated Press; Enda Bowe/Hulu; Michelle Faye/FX; Searchlight PicturesDuring her audition for the part via video, in 2020, Edgar-Jones brought the director Olivia Newman to tears and hooked one of the producers, Reese Witherspoon.“From her first screen test, she felt every moment of abandonment and loneliness that was written on the page,” Witherspoon wrote in an email. “Her work is so honest, it breaks my heart every time I watch it.”The film, shot in Louisiana, required Edgar-Jones to take boating and drawing lessons, and work with a dialect coach to hone a Carolina drawl. Her own accent is a soft-spoken mash-up of vernaculars, thanks to her Northern Irish mother and Scottish father.She was raised in the north London suburb of Muswell Hill, the only child of Wendy, a film and TV editor, and Philip, the head of entertainment at Sky, the British TV broadcaster. A few years after her Boleyn awakening, Edgar-Jones auditioned at age 15 for the National Youth Theater with a monologue from “Romeo and Juliet” — a loving tribute to Claire Danes’s performance in the Baz Luhrmann iteration.A perk of the prestigious program, which counts Helen Mirren and Daniel Day-Lewis among its alumni, was the members-only open casting calls, including one for Sofia Coppola’s planned adaptation of “The Little Mermaid.” While the project fizzled before Edgar-Jones got very far, the casting director introduced her to the talent agent Christopher Farrar, thus giving her representation and the confidence to continue. She considered college but ultimately turned down several universities, instead taking odd jobs as a barista and a waiter while she soldiered on with auditions.“I give Daisy a hell of a lot more credit than I’d give myself at 24,” said her “Fresh” co-star Sebastian Stan. “There’s an awareness to her that I think, at that age, is hard to find.”Chantal Anderson for The New York Times“I had some income and some semblance of hope,” she said. “It was, at first, a gap year, and then it became a gap life.”After a string of smaller roles in British productions, her big break came playing Marianne opposite Paul Mescal’s Connell in “Normal People.” When the series premiered in April 2020, it was the early days of the pandemic, and the Sally Rooney adaptation provided an intimate escape for viewers muddling their way through a shutdown world. Mescal’s chain necklace and Edgar-Jones’s bangs — an impulsive salon decision after a string of failed auditions — became overnight sensations.“I watched Daisy in ‘Normal People’ and was blown away by the subtlety of her performance and the impact of her choices,” Witherspoon wrote, praising “the most utterly honest performance that made me lean in and say, ‘Who is that?’”But as enthralled as viewers were with the actors playing the show’s laconic lovers, the fanfare was kept at a literal distance from Edgar-Jones, locked down in London.“I was being told that things were significant or changing, but I was just in my bedroom,” she said. “I was having this odd experience of being on Zoom the whole time having interviews, and then I’d go on my once-daily walk and someone would stare at me, but I didn’t know if it was just because they hadn’t seen another human being or if they had seen me in a show. It was really strange.”She garnered Critics Choice and Golden Globe nominations while spending the next year and a half isolated on sets in Calgary, Vancouver and New Orleans. Then, this past spring, she went through what she terms a “baptism of fire,” bouncing from her first red-carpet premiere (for “Fresh”) to her first Vanity Fair Oscar party and her first Met Gala in quick succession.“You know how a swan, when they’re on the river, they’re floating along really gracefully but underneath their legs are ——” she mimicked paddling furiously. Her crescendo on the Met steps wearing Oscar de la Renta “was like that,” she said. “Perhaps I looked calm, but I was terrified.”Her de facto societal debut coincided with the release of “Under the Banner of Heaven,” a true-crime drama series in which she played Brenda Lafferty, a Mormon woman who, along with her 15-month-old baby, was brutally murdered by religious extremists in 1984.In flashbacks, we see Brenda perform “The Rose,” pursue a broadcast journalism career and embolden other Mormon wives. But despite the heinous crimes at the show’s center, we never see Brenda’s actual killing or her lifeless visage onscreen. Compare that with, say, “The Staircase,” which took every opportunity to show Toni Collette meeting a graphic end.“That was something I felt was really important,” Edgar-Jones said of the omission. “Why would you want to capture the worst thing that could happen to somebody? Instead, you let their life be what’s defining.”Edgar-Jones is aiming for the career of a Jamie Lee Curtis, a Tilda Swinton or a Frances McDormand, women with an “unconventional idea of what a lead female should be.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesShe took the responsibility of playing a real person “incredibly seriously,” her co-star Andrew Garfield said, noting a certain “brilliance and joy” that he sees emanating from Edgar-Jones, onscreen and off.“There’s something unnameable that certain people have,” he said. “And, yeah, it’s talent. But it’s also a charisma and the kind of instant identification that you feel as an audience member where you go, Oh, I know this person, and I love this person. Even without them saying anything, you can feel their soul moving in a certain way and you want to follow whatever journey they’re on.”The two actors became fast friends while shooting in Canada. Off the clock, Edgar-Jones took a particular liking to electric bike and scooter rentals. “She would ride those scooters into the bitter winter months in Calgary until her hair started to freeze,” Garfield said. “She’s all about fun.”That includes routinely importing her own DJ equipment to spin house and disco tracks for her co-stars after work. Edgar-Jones is blissfully passionate about music in general: She often makes playlists for her characters (Kya’s involved a lot of Bat for Lashes and Blood Orange’s “Coastal Grooves” album) and plays guitar. She’s also developed a bond with the singer Phoebe Bridgers, who is in a relationship with Mescal of “Normal People.” Despite having, as Bridgers put it, “every opportunity to have the world’s craziest ego,” Edgar-Jones exudes wide-eyed enthusiasm. She is exceedingly polite — and perhaps a gentle liar — cheerfully telling the waiter who brought her a Pepsi instead of her requested Coke during our talk, “That’s fine. They taste the same.” And although she describes herself as shy, those who know her say she can also be uproariously off-color.In the past, her fair skin and brunette bangs have led some to describe her as the love child of Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson. More recently, “Stranger Things” fans have delighted in her perceived resemblance to Eddie Munson, the beloved Season 4 character played by Joseph Quinn. “I do see it,” she said, adding that she and Quinn once met by chance at a “Soul Train”-themed club night in London. “I think I now know what I’m wearing for Halloween.”During off-hours on the “Heaven” shoot, Edgar-Jones rode electric scooters and bonded with her co-star Andrew Garfield, who said: “She would ride those scooters into the bitter winter months in Calgary until her hair started to freeze. She’s all about fun.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut career-wise, she hopes to emulate Jamie Lee Curtis, Tilda Swinton or Frances McDormand: women who have forged careers in Hollywood built on longevity and who found some of their greatest successes once they’d shed any trace of the ingénue.“These women are able to really transform,” she said, “and also play characters that are funny and complicated and, at times, the unconventional idea of what a lead female should be.”Sebastian Stan, who co-starred with Edgar-Jones in the twisty comedy-thriller “Fresh,” sees echoes of another screen legend in her work.“I give Daisy a hell of a lot more credit than I’d give myself at 24. There’s an awareness to her that, I think at that age, is hard to find,” he said and compared her to a young Meryl Streep. “I’d like to think that as she gets older, her performances are only going to get more and more rich.”Edgar-Jones has a plan to make that happen. Her bucket list includes working with Wes Anderson, Barry Jenkins, the Coen brothers, the Daniels and Greta Gerwig. And she hopes to stretch herself into the unexpected, perhaps by playing “someone really evil,” doing more comedy or directing.“I really want to just learn and learn and learn and make mistakes and learn from them,” she said, “and be free to play and ride the journey wherever it goes.” More

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      Janeane Garofalo Never Sold Out. What a Relief.

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      That concept might be the reason her trailblazing stand-up career has been overshadowed; it may also be the reason she’s still so sharp, our critic argues.On a rainy Wednesday night in Brooklyn, after an introduction with a minimum of fanfare, Janeane Garofalo walked onstage at the Eastville Comedy Club and looked out at a dozen people so scattered that calling them a crowd seems like a stretch. She spotted one man by himself who had attended a show of hers a few days earlier and happily pointed him out.Third on a bill filled with young unknowns, Garofalo, 57, settled into her set with supreme comfort, wandering into multiple tangents and digging into self-deprecation. “When someone tells me I can’t do something,” she said, holding the pause with precision timing honed over three and half decades of telling jokes, “I’m grateful.”It was a humble setting to see one of the most consequential comics of the past half century. Garofalo is a pioneer and Generation X icon who for a few years, it was reasonable to argue, meant for stand-up what Kurt Cobain did for music. The only moment during the set that hinted at her legacy came when Garofalo walked out of the spotlight and into the audience. The couple in the front row, already laughing, sat up a little straighter.Later in the set, she turned to her career. “The ’90s were good, but then it dipped,” Garofalo said, adding dryly that she now realized that comedy was not her forte. “You know what is? Filibustering.”Janeane Garofalo performs constantly in New York on bills with other comics, though you might not know it because she has little to no public profile. She’s not on Twitter, Instagram or any social media. She has no website or podcast, hasn’t done a special in years and doesn’t even have a computer, smartphone or email address. She turned down interviews with me twice. If you want to see her perform — and I recommend it — you have to search her out and sit in the room with her. I periodically stumble across her in a show and it always comes as a happy surprise from another time, like discovering a storied zine that only a few people still knew existed.As she made jokes about refusing to go to the doctor and her inability to apply herself, a cringeworthy thought occurred to me: Is this what not selling out looks like?I always found that pejorative phrase ridiculous: Selling out. Isn’t that the goal? It never made sense to me that a band stunk as soon as it signed with a major label. Or that artists should be shamed for making money to pay the rent. But as the stigmatization of selling out has faded over the past few decades, so vanished from the conversation that you rarely hear it used without sarcasm, I confess that I miss it. Something useful has been lost.In his shrewd new book “The Nineties,” Chuck Klosterman argues that nothing defined that decade more than the concept of selling out. To illustrate, he focuses on “Reality Bites,” now considered the quintessential Generation X movie. It also happens to feature Janeane Garofalo as a jaded eye-roller who delivers quips like “Evian is naïve spelled backwards.”The movie centers on an aspiring filmmaker played by Winona Ryder who is pursued by a responsible corporate striver (Ben Stiller, the film’s director) and a caddish poet who hates the right things (Ethan Hawke). She chooses Hawke. Klosterman writes that while Hawke’s character seems irresponsible to boomers and toxic to millennials, he was the right choice for Generation X. For them, and only them, Klosterman argues, “an authentic jerk was preferable to a likable sellout.”“Reality Bites” was released when I was in college, and most people I knew didn’t root for either of Winona Ryder’s options so much as against the movie, sensing a cynical attempt to capture the youth market, a major studio romanticizing indie credibility. Stiller screened it on campuses across the country, and at my school, he was received with hostility at the postshow Q. and A. One student questioned the filmmakers for mocking corporate greed while taking product-placement money from the Gap and R.J. Reynolds. Stiller bristled, saying it cost money to make a movie.In promoting “Reality Bites,” Garofalo took a cannier approach. Appearing on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” she short-circuited complaints about hypocrisy by criticizing Universal Pictures for trying to market “Reality Bites” as a Generation X story. It’s not, she said, dismissing the term as a buzzword, which was how I saw it at the time, too, and telling the flummoxed Letterman that she was uncomfortable following the script mapped out with his producers for their conversation. She sold the movie perfectly by performing contempt for selling a movie.The partnership between Stiller and Garofalo is an even better representation of the 1990s divide on selling out than “Reality Bites.” They dated briefly and worked together throughout the decade, starring on TV shows and appearing in movies, co-hosting the MTV Movie Awards and co-writing a self-help spoof, “Feel This Book.” Stiller was a bigger star, but Garofalo had more cachet. (On Entertainment Weekly’s 1997 list of the 50 Funniest People Alive, she came in 39th, five spots ahead of him.) While his fame has grown, her seismic significance to comedy has been forgotten enough to make a refresher necessary.Just as the 1980s comedy boom was going bust, Garofalo — along with Colin Quinn, Dana Gould and Alan Gelfant — put on a show at a bookstore in Hollywood that became a weekly magnet for talented young stand-ups looking beyond conventional club comedy. Stiller performed there and used some of the comics on his breakthrough television series, “The Ben Stiller Show.” So did David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, who met through Garofalo and went on to make another sketch comedy landmark, “Mr. Show.”This bookstore was one of the centers of a blossoming new comedy scene. Some called it alternative comedy, others balked at that term. The cool move was to embrace it ironically as Garofalo did in one of her early television appearances. When the host of “The Dennis Miller Show” made a joke about her Doc Martens, she deadpanned: “I’m the alternative queen.”Garofalo didn’t just help shift the comedy scene away from clubs. Her style represented a sea change from the polished, tight and desperately relatable bits ready-made to translate into a sitcom or a late-night appearance. In jean shorts and tights, she inched stand-up closer to the eccentric solo show, where a sharply honed point of view mattered more than accessible setups and hard punch lines. Her humor leaned on stories and a political sensibility, refracted through a culturally savvy lens. She fiercely skewered the fashion industry for giving women body image issues and fashionistas later pushed back by putting her on worst-dressed lists. Her jokes scoffed at cliché (“I don’t even speak during sex for fear of sounding trite”), and she dropped references in televised sets that not everyone would get (Antigone, Sub Pop Records) and continually teased the crowd.On her 1995 HBO half-hour, she walked onstage to applause that she immediately mocked: “You just did that because this is on television.” In the beloved “Larry Sanders Show” and the cult movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” she played sarcastic (and now very meme-able) misanthropes, becoming the rare comic who represented something larger in the culture. Original writers for “Friends” and MTV’s “Daria” have cited Garofalo as an inspiration for characters for their shows. In his recent memoir “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” Odenkirk argues that Garofalo’s early stand-up anticipated much of the ambitious work in our current scene. “Janeane was the spark of the big bang, of a comedy reinvention that still resonates.”Garofalo, with Chris Farley, left, and George Clooney, during her short tenure on “Saturday Night Live.”Alan Singer/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesWhereas Stiller shifted into blockbuster movies in the 1990s, Garofalo ran into choppier waters in the mainstream in ways that now seem clearly sexist. Her stint at “Saturday Night Live” was chronicled in an infamous New York magazine piece that included scenes of Al Franken yelling at her, Adam Sandler giving her the silent treatment and a writer unleashing his wrath after she called a sketch sexist. She compared her treatment there to “fraternity hazing” and didn’t last a full season. When it came to the big screen, she dismissed her one major leading role, a female Cyrano in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs,” as “not my kind of movie.”It’s hard to say if these experiences changed her view on establishment success or confirmed it. But at the end of the decade, in her book with Stiller, she gave this advice: “Being popular and well liked is not in your best interest,” before adding, “If you behave in a manner pleasing to most, then you are probably doing something wrong. The masses have never been arbiters of the sublime, and they often fail to recognize the truly great individual. Taking into account the public’s regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent on you to not fit in.”When The Times did a story on the new generation of alt comics in 1997, Stiller recalled that when Garofalo had a bit that killed, she would not repeat it out of fear of being hack. “It’s almost like she was going too far the other way, because she didn’t want to be accepted,” he said. Odenkirk hit similar notes discussing her in “We Killed,” an oral history about women in comedy: “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in,” he said. “That’s not a good thing in the long run.”That may be true if the goal is conventional Hollywood success. But what if you actually believed the 1990s discourse about selling out? Or short of that, just internalized it? Then some skepticism about success makes sense. And why not? Only a fool thinks the funniest comics are the most popular or that deeply respected ones don’t remain obscure. Moreover, it’s entirely reasonable to look at the state of popular culture and just roll your eyes.There has always been something off-putting about self-righteousness over selling out. Indie music snobs are easy to parody. And obsession with credibility can paralyze artists. “Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche” than anxiety over selling out, Klosterman wrote, expressing a view darker than my own, so alert to cost that it gives short shrift to the benefits.Though it can seem otherwise, the ’90s critique of selling out was not only used to sneer. Besides directing a bit of shame at product placement, the most valuable thing it did was provide a powerful vision of making it that didn’t rely on money and popularity. A close read of early issues of The Baffler, a small, influential journal that at its inception that decade was something of a think tank for the dangers of selling out, offered hints at a positive ideal. It could be found in zines, indie music labels, offline.This utopian view of a culture independent of corporate interference was defiantly local, uncompromising and wary of fame. Today, when everyone is trying to go viral and artists are judged by the most soulless Internet metrics, the value of an alternative seems more important than ever. The current stand-up of Janeane Garofalo fits in nicely.Speaking of Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk once explained, “Anything successful is something she’s not interested in.”Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesThat doesn’t mean she sees it that way. Her current comedy is filled with self-deprecating jokes about her failures, flaws, projects that didn’t get picked up. After the ’90s, she helped start Air America, the influential liberal radio station that collapsed but not before giving early platforms to Rachel Maddow and Marc Maron. She has taken scores of acting jobs in film and television, but they have little bearing on the one constant: her stand-up, the rare form where you can have near total control over your art.We live in an age of dumb demographic stereotypes. Millennials, we’re told, are entitled snowflakes and boomers are selfish egotists. Describing huge groups of people in a few traits is absurd, but that doesn’t mean those reductionist ideas don’t shape us. The water in which you swim matters. I was reminded of this at a birthday party for my daughter’s friend. A dad my age told me of being in a band in the ’90s that signed to a major label and how he still talks to his therapist about selling out. Back then I never identified with Generation X, but now I do. When I watch “Reality Bites” today, not only do I like it more, but I can find something to relate to in every character, too.In movies and plays from the 1990s (“Clerks,” Eric Bogosian’s “subUrbia”), the slacker could be a goofy kind of hero. Compare that with the ethos today summed up by Bo Burnham in his special “Inside,” which features his song “Welcome to the Internet.” The refrain goes: “Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime/anything and everything all of the time.”Garofalo’s stand-up always made apathy and boredom look cool, glamorous and, most important, sensible. About boomers, she joked: “They got married and worked hard so their kids didn’t have to, and guess what, we don’t.” There’s a performance in this, of course, since she has always worked hard, but the hustle and grind has never been her brand, to use a word she probably wouldn’t.Garofalo isn’t that different today than she was three decades ago, less likely to skewer those who promulgate unrealistic body standards than to confess her own. Her hair is longer, more tangled, but her clothes remain darkly colored, rumpled. “I’m not ready for Eileen Fisher,” she said in characteristic deadpan. “I can’t cross that Rubicon.”Her affect remains wry, offhanded; she walks onstage holding papers and uses references more highbrow than your typical joke slinger, but she is also often disarmingly personal and self-loathing.The main impression you get from her act is of a restlessness that is physical, as she roams into the crowd, but also intellectual, as she repeatedly entertains new ideas, following them down rabbit holes even at the expense of the joke. There is a real excitement and unpredictability about her sets that can be captured only in live performance. She never tells a joke the same way twice. Her comedy always seems resolutely present, frequently vulnerable, challenging and delighting her audience in equal measure.It would be easy to see Garofalo performing with comics half her age to a sparse Brooklyn crowd as a portrait of decline. But to my Generation X eyes, it looks like a kind of triumph. More