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      There’s Always Been More to Kirsten Dunst

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      A former child star and ingénue, she has come into her own as a chronicler of despair. Will “The Power of the Dog” cap her career reinvention?The main things Kirsten Dunst wanted out of her trip to Italy were to sleep soundly on the plane and to drink a Bellini upon arrival. She would have considered anything else to be a bonus and, as it turned out, those bonuses were considerable.Dunst had gone to Italy for the Venice Film Festival, where she was premiering “The Power of the Dog,” a new Netflix movie directed by Jane Campion that features one of the 39-year-old actress’s best performances. She arrived on the last day of August, after months at home raising a newborn baby and a year before that stuck at home because, well, duh.So you can imagine how Dunst felt when she got off the plane, boarded a boat at sunset and sped toward her hotel with the lights of Venice twinkling on the horizon. As she took it all in, Dunst began to well up: A full day of air travel, four sleepless months of child-rearing and the most beautiful city you ever saw can do that to a person.The next 48 hours were a whirlwind. Dunst tried to overcome her jet lag and hung out at the hotel pool, where she sipped Bellinis with her brother and watched elderly, moneyed Italians swan about. The next day, Dunst donned an Armani Privé gown that made her feel bulletproof and accompanied Campion and the film’s lead, Benedict Cumberbatch, to the premiere at the Sala Grande.After the film ended, the audience gave “The Power of the Dog” a several-minute standing ovation, and Campion and her cast sported big grins. Things couldn’t have gone better. Was Dunst thrilled?“I was so high on the experience,” she told me afterward, “with crippling exhaustion inside.”Even when she’s smiling, Dunst can suggest something much more complicated going on beneath the surface. That gift serves her well in “The Power of the Dog,” based on the novel by Thomas Savage and starring Cumberbatch as Phil, a sadistic ranch owner in 1925 Montana. For all their lives, Phil has kept his younger brother, George (Jesse Plemons), under his thumb, but when George meets and impulsively marries the melancholy Rose (Dunst), Phil resents the intrusion of this woman and sets out to destroy her.Thus, a trap is set for poor Rose: George adores his new bride and encourages her to open up, but anything Rose exposes of herself is a point of vulnerability that Phil can use against her. Even as Rose turns to alcohol to cope with Phil’s domineering ways, we hear her mutter, “He’s just a man.” But the way Dunst delivers the line, as though she barely believes what she’s saying, suggests that Rose knows all too well the evil that men can do.In “The Power of the Dog,” Rose is reduced to questioning whether she has any worth at all. “I feel like that’s a part of a young Kirsten that I had to rehash again,” Dunst said.Kirsty Griffin/Netflix“The Power of the Dog” is the first feature Campion has made in more than a decade and is shaping up to be the director’s most acclaimed film since “The Piano” (1993), but it also serves as the latest example of one of Hollywood’s most remarkable career reinventions: After years of being called upon to project blond, sunny sweetness, Kirsten Dunst has somehow become one of our foremost chroniclers of finely etched despair.Think of “Melancholia,” in which Dunst’s depression reaches apocalyptic levels even before the world comes to a violent end; of the way her punch lines pack a bitter sting in the deceptively rom-com-shaped “Bachelorette”; or of Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled,” with Dunst nursing a loneliness so private that it feels like an intrusion just to behold her. Even in her TV work, on “Fargo” and “On Becoming a God in Central Florida,” Dunst takes characters with high comedic upside and makes sure they are always operating from a place of real, bone-deep disappointment. She’s felt those things before, and she makes you feel it, too.“She’s got depth: She knows it, she’s seen it,” Campion told me. “What I find so incredible is that she’s so in the emotion of the moment. She brings you to empathy immediately.”I asked Dunst how she manages to do that, and she thought about the question for a while.“I’m not afraid to share my pain,” she finally said. “I don’t have any walls up when it comes to sharing those parts of myself. And it’s my job to share all that stuff.”A FEW DAYS before Dunst flew to Italy, I visited her ranch-style Los Angeles home, where she answered the front door with her blond hair tucked behind her ears and a substantially sized baby on her arm.“This is the newest guy, the Big Kahuna,” she said, introducing me to her four-month-old, 18-pound son, James Robert. “He’s an angel, but he’s a hungry angel. And a heavy angel.”James is her second child with Plemons, her co-star in “The Power of the Dog”; the two actors met in 2015, when they were fatefully cast as husband and wife in the second season of “Fargo.” For the last few months, Plemons had been away filming the Martin Scorsese drama “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and Dunst had mostly handled wake-up duties by herself. “I’m so tired, I haven’t slept through the night in four months,” she said as we moved to the backyard. “I’ve developed an eye twitch, too.” Dunst let out a little chuckle. “Yeah, I’m in a really special place.”Of her work in Hollywood, Dunst said: “I’ve done a lot, and I like the movies that I’ve been in. That’s a really big accomplishment, I think.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesDunst has a one-to-one connection with the audience that proves just as direct with whomever she’s speaking to in real life. In conversation, she is candid and matter of fact, like the sort of friend who’d level with you if you were wearing something hideous. It’s been more than a year and a half since she last acted, and she’s honest about the allure of all that down time: “There’s a part of me that’s like, I’ve done this for so long. When can I just relax?”Then again, there’s not much time for relaxation when you’re raising two young children. As we talked, Dunst’s older son, the 3-year-old Ennis, stomped into the backyard. “Hi, Bubba,” Dunst cooed sweetly. “Oh no, are you mad?” Ennis was pouting: He didn’t want to go to swim class because the instructor had made him put his head underwater. Dunst turned to me, raising an eyebrow. “This is what doing an interview at home is like,” she said.By the time she was Ennis’s age, Dunst — born in Point Pleasant, N.J., to a medical services executive and a flight attendant — began modeling. And by 8, she had appeared in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and a short film directed by Woody Allen. “I clearly had something old inside of me that was a little bit more than your average commercial kid,” she said.At 10, that old soul helped her land the breakthrough role of a precocious bloodsucker in “Interview With the Vampire,” but afterward, while living in the Oakwood apartments in Los Angeles — an enclave of furnished units populated mostly by child actors and their stage parents — another little girl confronted her by the pool and announced that according to her agent, she’d be the next Kirsten Dunst.“I had the wherewithal to be like, This is nuts,” Dunst said. And over the next several years, even as she booked high-profile movies like “Little Women,” “Jumanji” and “Bring It On,” Dunst was determined to hold onto a normal life, a normal school experience, and normal friends. “I always felt it was lame to be into yourself,” she said. “I probably underplayed myself more in high school because I never wanted anyone to pick on me.”But nothing about Hollywood is normal, and if you’ve been working there since you were a child, it’s bound to worm into you in ways that can prove hard to untangle.In her mid-20s, as she came off three “Spider-Man” films, Dunst had begun to feel hollow. Though she had found an important collaborator in the director Sofia Coppola, who explored subversive strands in Dunst’s blonde-ingénue image with “The Virgin Suicides” and “Marie Antoinette,” movie shoots that really satisfied her were few and far between. Acting no longer brought her joy; too often, her life’s work had become a technical enterprise she felt no real connection to.In 2008, after checking into the Cirque Lodge rehab facility to treat her depression, Dunst came to some surprising realizations about the way being a child performer had affected her grown-up personality.“For a long time, I never got angry with anybody,” she said. “I just swallowed a lot down. When you’re on set, it’s performative, it’s pleasing. At a certain point, you’ve got to get angry, and I think that eventually builds up in someone. You can’t survive like that. Your body stops you.”That’s why, after entering her 30s and working for the last few years with the acting teacher Greta Seacat, Dunst has found a cathartic new connection with her work: She wants to take all the messy things that people bottle up and let us see them in her performances.“That’s what acting should be,” she said. “Those are the performances I love, that are the most revealing about human beings and the hardest things we go through in life.”It’s what she wanted to bring to Rose in “The Power of the Dog,” who is so gaslit by Phil that eventually, she can no longer tell if she has any worth at all. “I feel like that’s a part of a young Kirsten that I had to rehash again,” she said. “And that isn’t a place I really want to live in, but for the role, you have to.”Dunst would avoid Cumberbatch on the New Zealand set and often stayed silent in the hours before shooting. “It’s hard for Rose to vocalize,” she said. “I wouldn’t talk to anybody, just so that the first thing I uttered out of my mouth felt nervous and weird and gave me a sense of being a fish out of water.”But Dunst isn’t the sort of actor who likes to take that stuff home with her, especially since that home included her co-star. “Jesse and I were lucky we were doing a movie together,” she said. “We had each other through this whole thing, to laugh with, to bitch with.” And for an actress who’s so committed to chronicling a character’s low moments, it was important not to overthink the things that would be better if they were simply felt.“It’s nice to get older because you just care less about what people think of you,” she said. “I don’t have fear in my acting, and it’s the most freeing thing. That kind of happened after my first kid: You have this attitude where you’ll just lay all your chips on the table, because what’s the point of not?”That said, there remains a nagging sense that her recent accomplishments may have flown under the radar. Even Coppola thinks so, writing in an email: “She’s the top actress of her age (of course she’s my favorite!) but I do think she isn’t as recognized as she should be.”This may change with “The Power of the Dog,” which has been widely tipped to earn Dunst her first Oscar nomination. But whether that comes to pass, the actress told me she is finally at peace with her place in Hollywood.“I just feel like, You’ve worked long enough and hard enough, and it’s OK if people don’t like you,” she said. “I’ve done a lot, and I like the movies that I’ve been in. That’s a really big accomplishment, I think, to be able to like something you’ve been in. I don’t know if people feel that way very often.”HOURS AFTER THE Venice premiere of “The Power of the Dog,” Dunst, Campion and Cumberbatch flew to Colorado to tout their movie at the Telluride Film Festival. After that, she flew home to Los Angeles and went back to being a full-time mother.The day after she returned, we caught up on a video call. “When I stepped in the front door, I was like, This never happened,” she said. “That’s how it felt: I’m home again, and back to the reality of vomit on my shirt.”The Big Kahuna had slept in her bed the previous night and each of his little loving kicks administered something of a reality check. “You go from, ‘Woo, glamour, I’m getting my hair and makeup done,’ to ‘I haven’t brushed my teeth yet,’” she said. “Back to my grungy lifestyle!”As we spoke, Dunst was drinking from a coffee cup emblazoned with an illustration of the character Plemons played in “Fargo.” Her husband was returning home the next week, though not long after, the whole family would be packing up to head to Texas, where Plemons will spend several months shooting a limited series for HBO.Dunst calculated a mother’s mental math out loud: “I guess we’re going to have to drive to the airport, because we’ve got two car seats. Do we take a car seat on the plane? Do we ship one to Texas?” She rubbed her eyes. “The logistics of just car seats are stressing me out.”She studied my thumbnail in the call. “Where are you right now?” she then asked. I said that I was still in Italy at the festival, which delighted her. It was a little scrap, offered through a little screen, of the place where she’d had a whirlwind adventure.“Enjoy Venice,” Dunst said with a sigh, then a smile. “Have a Bellini for me.” More

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      Shooting ‘Scenes From a Marriage’: ‘I Cried Every Day’

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      Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac struggled to divorce themselves from their characters in this HBO remake of the Ingmar Bergman series.There were days on the shoot for “Scenes From a Marriage,” a five-episode limited series that premieres Sept. 12 on HBO, when Oscar Isaac resented the crew.The problem wasn’t the crew members themselves, he told me on a video call in March. But the work required of him and his co-star, Jessica Chastain, was so unsparingly intimate — “And difficult!” Chastain added from a neighboring Zoom window — that every time a camera operator or a makeup artist appeared, it felt like an intrusion.On his other projects, Isaac had felt comfortably distant from the characters and their circumstances — interplanetary intrigue, rogue A.I. But “Scenes” surveys monogamy and parenthood, familiar territory. Sometimes Isaac would film a bedtime scene with his onscreen child (Lily Jane) and then go home and tuck his own child into the same model of bed as the one used onset, accessorized with the same bunny lamp, and not know exactly where art ended and life began.“It was just a lot,” he said.Chastain agreed, though she put it more strongly. “I mean, I cried every day for four months,” she said.Isaac, 42, and Chastain, 44, have known each other since their days at the Juilliard School. And they have channeled two decades of friendship, admiration and a shared and obsessional devotion to craft into what Michael Ellenberg, one of the series’s executive producers, called “five hours of naked, raw performance.” (That nudity is metaphorical, mostly.)“For me it definitely felt incredibly personal,” Chastain said on the call in the spring, about a month after filming had ended. “That’s why I don’t know if I have another one like this in me. Yeah, I can’t decide that. I can’t even talk about it without. …” She turned away from the screen. (It was one of several times during the call that I felt as if I were intruding, too.)The original “Scenes From a Marriage,” created by Ingmar Bergman, debuted on Swedish television in 1973. Bergman’s first television series, its six episodes trace the dissolution of a middle-class marriage. Starring Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s ex, it drew on his own past relationships, though not always directly.Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson on the set of the original “Scenes From a Marriage.” Divorce rates in Sweden climbed after it aired.Cinematograph AB/Corbis, via Getty Images“When it comes to Bergman, the relationship between autobiography and fiction is extremely complicated,” said Jan Holmberg, the chief executive of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.A sensation in Sweden, it was seen by most of the adult population. And yes, sure, correlation does not imply causation, but after its debut, Swedish divorce were rumored to have doubled. Holmberg remembers watching a rerun as a 10-year-old.“It was a rude awakening to adult life,” he said.The writer and director Hagai Levi saw it as a teenager, on Israeli public television, during a stint on a kibbutz. “I was shocked,” he said. The series taught him that a television series could be radical, that it could be art. When he created “BeTipul,” the Israeli precursor to “In Treatment,” he used “Scenes” as proof of the concept “that two people can talk for an hour and it can work,” Levi said. (Strangely, “Scenes” also inspired the prime-time soap “Dallas.”)So when Daniel Bergman, Ingmar Bergman’s youngest son, approached Levi about a remake, he was immediately interested.But the project languished, in part because loving a show isn’t reason enough to adapt it. Divorce is common now — in Sweden, and elsewhere — and the relationship politics of the original series, in which the male character deserts his wife and young children for an academic post, haven’t aged particularly well.Then about two years ago, Levi had a revelation. He would swap the gender roles. A woman who leaves her marriage and child in pursuit of freedom (with a very hot Israeli entrepreneur in place of a visiting professorship) might still provoke conversation and interest.So the Marianne and Johan of the original became Mira and Jonathan, with a Boston suburb (re-created in a warehouse just north of New York City), stepping in for the Stockholm of the original. Jonathan remains an academic though Mira, a lawyer in the original, is now a businesswoman who out-earns him.Casting began in early 2020. After Isaac met with Levi, he wrote to Chastain to tell her about the project. She wasn’t available. The producers cast Michelle Williams. But the pandemic reshuffled everyone’s schedules. When production was ready to resume, Williams was no longer free. Chastain was. “That was for me the most amazing miracle,” Levi said.Isaac and Chastain met in the early 2000s at Juilliard. He was in his first year; she, in her third. He first saw her in a scene from a classical tragedy, slapping men in the face as Helen of Troy. He was friendly with her then-boyfriend, and they soon became friends themselves, bonding through the shared trauma of an acting curriculum designed to break its students down and then build them back up again. Isaac remembered her as “a real force of nature and solid, completely solid, with an incredible amount of integrity,” he said.In the next window, Chastain blushed. “He was super talented,” she said. “But talented in a way that wasn’t expected, that’s challenging and pushing against constructs and ideas.” She introduced him to her manager, and they celebrated each other’s early successes and went to each other’s premieres. (A few of those photos are used in “Scenes From a Marriage” as set dressing.)In 2013, Chastain was cast in J.C. Chandor’s “A Most Violent Year,” opposite Javier Bardem. When Bardem dropped out, Chastain campaigned for Isaac to have the role. Weeks before shooting, they began to meet, fleshing out the back story of their characters — a husband and wife trying to corner the heating oil market in 1981 New York — the details of the marriage, business, life.It was their first time working together, and each felt a bond that went deeper than a parallel education and approach. “Something connects us that’s stronger than any ideas of character or story or any of that,” Isaac said. “There’s something else that’s more about like, a shared existence.”Chandor noticed how they would support each other on set, and challenge each other, too, giving each other the freedom to take the characters’ relationship to dark and dangerous places. “They have this innate trust with each other,” Chandor said.That trust eliminated the need for actorly tricks or shortcuts, in part because they know each other’s tricks too well. Their motto, Isaac said, was, “Let’s figure this [expletive] out together and see what’s the most honest thing we can do.”Moni Yakim, Juilliard’s celebrated movement instructor, has followed their careers closely and he noted what he called the “magnetism and spiritual connection” that they suggested onscreen in the film.The actors were unprepared for the emotional intensity of filming the series. “I knew I was in trouble the very first week,” Chastain said.Jojo Whilden/HBO“It’s a kind of chemistry,” Yakim said. “They can read each other’s mind and you as an audience, you can sense it.”Telepathy takes work. When they knew that shooting “Scenes From a Marriage” could begin, Chastain bought a copy of “All About Us,” a guided journal for couples, and filled in her sections in character as Mira. Isaac brought it home and showed it to his wife, the filmmaker Elvira Lind.“She was like, ‘You finally found your match,’” Isaac recalled. “’Someone that is as big of a nerd as you are.’”The actors rehearsed, with Levi and on their own, talking their way through each long scene, helping each other through the anguished parts. When production had to halt for two weeks, they rehearsed then, too.Watching these actors work reminded Amy Herzog, a writer and executive producer on the series, of race horses in full gallop. “These are two people who have so much training and skill,” she said. “Because it’s an athletic feat, what they were being asked to do.”But training and skill and the “All About Us” book hadn’t really prepared them for the emotional impact of actually shooting “Scenes From a Marriage.” Both actors normally compartmentalize when they work, putting up psychic partitions between their roles and themselves. But this time, the partitions weren’t up to code.“I knew I was in trouble the very first week,” Chastain said.She couldn’t hide how the scripts affected her, especially from someone who knows her as well as Isaac does. “I just felt so exposed,” she said. “This to me, more than anything I’ve ever worked on, was definitely the most open I’ve ever been.”“It felt so dangerous,” she said.I visited the set in February (after multiple Covid-19 tests and health screenings) during a final day of filming. It was the quietest set I had ever seen: The atmosphere was subdued, reverent almost, a crew and a studio space stripped down to only what two actors would need to do the most passionate and demanding work of their careers.Isaac didn’t know if he would watch the completed series. “It really is the first time ever, where I’ve done something where I’m totally fine never seeing this thing,” he said. “Because I’ve really lived through it. And in some ways I don’t want whatever they decide to put together to change my experience of it, which was just so intense.”The cameras captured that intensity. Though Chastain isn’t Mira and Isaac isn’t Jonathan, each drew on personal experience — their parents’ marriages, past relationships — in ways they never had. Sometimes work on the show felt like acting, and sometimes the work wasn’t even conscious. There’s a scene in the harrowing fourth episode in which they both lie crumpled on the floor, an identical stress vein bulging in each forehead.“It’s my go-to move, the throbbing forehead vein,” Isaac said on a follow-up video call last month. Chastain riffed on the joke: “That was our third year at Juilliard, the throb.”By then, it had been five months since the shoot wrapped. Life had returned to something like normal. Jokes were possible again. Both of them seemed looser, more relaxed. (Isaac had already poured himself one tequila shot and was ready for another.) No one cried.Chastain had watched the show with her husband. And Isaac, despite his initial reluctance, had watched it, too. It didn’t seem to have changed his experience.“I’ve never done anything like it,” he said. “And I can’t imagine doing anything like it again.” More

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      Michael Constantine, Father in ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ Dies at 94

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      He won an Emmy for his role on the TV series “Room 222” and played other many characters over the years before becoming known as the hit film’s patriarch.Michael Constantine, an Emmy-winning character actor known as the genially dyspeptic school principal on the popular TV series “Room 222” and, 30 years later, as the genially dyspeptic patriarch in the hit film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” died on Aug. 31 at his home in Reading, Pa. He was 94.His agent, Julia Buchwald, confirmed the death.Mr. Constantine, who began his career on the Broadway stage, was endowed with fierce eyebrows, a personal warmth that belied his perennial hangdog look, and the command of a Babel of foreign accents. Of Greek extraction, he was routinely cast by Hollywood to portray a welter of ethnicities.He played several Jewish characters, winning an Emmy in 1970 for the role of Seymour Kaufman, who presided with grumpy humanity over a fictional Los Angeles school on “Room 222.” Broadcast on ABC from 1969 to 1974, the show centered on an idealistic Black history teacher, played by Lloyd Haynes, who contended with a variety of issues, social and otherwise, at the racially diverse Walt Whitman High School.He also played Italians, on shows including “The Untouchables” and “Kojak”; Russians, as in the 1980s series “Airwolf”; a Gypsy, in the 1996 horror film “Thinner,” adapted from a Stephen King novel; and, on occasion, even a Greek or two.Mr. Constantine was possessed of a gravitas that often led to him being cast as lawyers or heavies. He played the title role, the night-court judge Matthew Sirota, on “Sirota’s Court,” a short-lived sitcom shown on NBC in the 1976-77 season.Mr. Constantine with Lloyd Haynes in the TV series “Room 222,” seen on ABC from 1969 to 1974. He won an Emmy for his portrayal of a principal who presided over a high school with grumpy humanity.ABCHe had guest roles on scores of other shows, including “Naked City,” “Perry Mason,” “Ironside,” “Gunsmoke” and “Hey, Landlord” in the 1960s, and “Remington Steele,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Law & Order” in the ’80s and ’90s.On film, he appeared in “The Last Mile” (1959), a prison picture starring Mickey Rooney; “The Hustler” (1961), starring Paul Newman; the 1969 comedies “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” and “Don’t Drink the Water”; and “Voyage of the Damned” (1976).Mr. Constantine became known to an even wider, younger audience as Gus Portokalos, the combustible, tradition-bound father whose daughter is engaged to a patrician white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, in the hit 2002 comedy “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”An immigrant who made good as the owner of a Chicago diner, Gus is an ardent amateur etymologist who can trace any word to its putative Greek origin. (“Kimono,” he concludes after pondering the matter, surely comes from “cheimónas” — Greek for winter, since, he explains in his heavily accented English: “What do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe!”)Gus is also a fervent believer in the restorative power of Windex, applied directly to the skin, to heal a panoply of ailments, including rashes and boils.“He’s a man from a certain kind of background,” Mr. Constantine said of his character in a 2003 interview with The Indianapolis Star. “His saving grace is that he truly does love his daughter and want the best for her. He may not go about it in a very tactful way. So many people tell me, ‘My dad was just like that.’ And I thought, ‘And you don’t hate him?’”“My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” which was written by its star, Nia Vardalos, and also starred Lainie Kazan as Gus’s wife and John Corbett as the man she marries, was a surprise international hit. It took in more than $360 million worldwide, becoming one of the highest-grossing romantic comedies of all time.Mr. Constantine reprised the role on television in “My Big Fat Greek Life,” a sitcom that appeared briefly on CBS in 2003, and on the big screen in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” in 2016.The son of Andromache (Fotiadou) and Theoharis Ioannides Efstratiou, Mr. Constantine was born in Reading on May 22, 1927. His parents were Greek immigrants, and his father was a steelworker.He settled on an acting career early, an idea reinforced after a youthful visit to a friend who was studying acting in New York.“I just knew I belonged there,” Mr. Constantine told Odyssey, an English-language magazine about Greek life, in 2011. “They could make fun of this hick from Pennsylvania, but I just belong here — this is me.”The young Mr. Constantine studied acting with Howard da Silva while supporting himself with odd jobs, among them night watchman and shooting-gallery barker. He became an understudy to Paul Muni in the role of the character modeled on the famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow in “Inherit the Wind,” which opened on Broadway in 1955.In “Compulsion” — a 1957 Broadway dramatization of Meyer Levin’s novel about the Leopold and Loeb murder case — Mr. Constantine took over the role of another defense lawyer from Frank Conroy just before opening night. (Mr. Conroy withdrew after suffering a heart attack during previews.)“Michael Constantine gives an excellent performance,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “He avoids the sentimentality that the situations might easily evoke and plays with taste, deliberation, color and intelligence.”Mr. Constantine’s other Broadway credits include Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, in the original cast of “The Miracle Worker” (1959), and Dogsborough in Bertolt Brecht’s antifascist satire “Arturo Ui” (1963).Mr. Constantine’s first marriage, to the actress Julianna McCarthy, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Kathleen Christopher. His survivors include two sisters, Patricia Gordon and Chris Dobbs. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.For all Mr. Constantine’s credits, for all his critical acclaim, it was for a single role — and for a single prop wielded in the course of that role — that he seems destined to be remembered.“I can’t tell you,” he said in a 2014 interview with his hometown paper, The Reading Eagle, “how many times I’ve autographed a Windex bottle.”Alyssa Lukpat More

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      Michael Constantine, Dad in ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ Dies at 94

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      He won an Emmy for his role in the TV series “Room 222” and played many characters over the years before becoming known as the hit film’s patriarch.Michael Constantine, an Emmy-winning character actor known as the genially dyspeptic school principal on the popular TV series “Room 222” and, 30 years later, as the genially dyspeptic patriarch in the hit film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” died on Aug. 31 at his home in Reading, Pa. He was 94.His death was from natural causes, his agent, Julia Buchwald, said.Mr. Constantine, who began his career on the Broadway stage, was endowed with fierce eyebrows, a personal warmth that belied his perennial hangdog look, and the command of a babel of foreign accents. Of Greek American extraction, he was routinely cast by Hollywood to portray a welter of ethnicities.Over time, Mr. Constantine played several Jewish characters, winning an Emmy in 1970 for the role of Seymour Kaufman, who presided with grumpy humanity over Walt Whitman High School on “Room 222,” broadcast on ABC from 1969 to 1974.He also played Italians, on shows including “The Untouchables” and “Kojak”; Russians, as on the 1980s series “Airwolf”; a Gypsy in the 1996 horror film “Thinner,” adapted from Stephen King’s novel; and, on occasion, even a Greek or two.Mr. Constantine, possessed of a gravitas that often led to him being cast as lawyers or heavies, starred as the night-court judge Matthew Sirota on “Sirota’s Court,” a short-lived sitcom shown on NBC in the 1976-77 season.Michael Constantine, right, with Lloyd Hanes in the TV series Room 222, which ran from 1969 to 1974ABCHe had guest roles on scores of other shows, including “Naked City,” “Perry Mason,” “Ironside,” “Gunsmoke” and “Hey, Landlord” in the 1960s, and “Remington Steele,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Law & Order” in the ’80s and ’90s.On film, he appeared in “The Last Mile” (1959), a prison picture starring Mickey Rooney; “The Hustler” (1961), starring Paul Newman; “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969); “Don’t Drink the Water” (1969); and “Voyage of the Damned” (1976).Mr. Constantine became known to an even wider, younger audience as Gus Portokalos, the combustible, tradition-bound father whose daughter is engaged to a patrician white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the 2002 comedy “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”An immigrant who made good as the owner of a Chicago diner, Gus is an ardent amateur etymologist who can trace any word to its putative Greek origin. (“Kimono,” he concludes after pondering the matter, surely comes from “cheimónas” — Greek for winter, since, he explains in his heavily accented English: “What do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe!”)Gus is also a fervent believer in the restorative power of Windex, applied directly to the skin, to heal a panoply of ailments like rashes and boils.“He’s a man from a certain kind of background,” Mr. Constantine said of his character in a 2003 interview with The Indianapolis Star. “His saving grace is that he truly does love his daughter and want the best for her. He may not go about it in a very tactful way. So many people tell me, ‘My dad was just like that.’ And I thought, ‘And you don’t hate him?’”“My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” which also starred Lainie Kazan as Gus’s wife and Nia Vardalos and John Corbett as the young couple, was a surprise international hit. The film took in more than $360 million worldwide, becoming one of the highest-grossing romantic comedies of all time.Mr. Constantine reprised the role on television in “My Big Fat Greek Life,” a sitcom that appeared briefly on CBS in 2003, and on the big screen in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” in 2016.The son of Theoharis Ioannides, a steelworker, and Andromache Foteadou, Mr. Constantine was born Constantine Ioannides in Reading, Pa., on May 22, 1927. (The family name is sometimes Romanized Joanides.)He settled early on an acting career, an idea reinforced after a youthful visit to a friend who was studying acting in New York.“I just knew I belonged there,” Mr. Constantine told Odyssey, an English-language magazine about Greek life, in 2011. “They could make fun of this hick from Pennsylvania, but I just belong here — this is me.”The young Mr. Constantine studied acting with Howard da Silva, supporting himself with odd jobs, among them night watchman and shooting-gallery barker. He became an understudy to Paul Muni playing the character modeled on the famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow in “Inherit the Wind,” which opened on Broadway in 1955.In “Compulsion” — a 1957 Broadway dramatization of Meyer Levin’s novel about the Leopold and Loeb murder case — Mr. Constantine took over the role of the defense lawyer from Frank Conroy just before opening night. (Mr. Conroy withdrew after suffering a heart attack during previews.)“Michael Constantine gives an excellent performance as the prototype of Clarence Darrow,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “He avoids the sentimentality that the situations might easily evoke and plays with taste, deliberation, color and intelligence.”Mr. Constantine’s other Broadway credits include Anagnos, the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind in the original cast of “The Miracle Worker” (1959), and Dogsborough in Bertolt Brecht’s antifascist satire “Arturo Ui” (1963).Mr. Constantine’s first marriage, to the actress Julianna McCarthy, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Kathleen Christopher. His survivors include two sisters: Patricia Gordon and Chris Dobbs, his agent said. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.For all Mr. Constantine’s credits, for all his critical acclaim, it was for a single role — and for a single prop wielded in the course of that role — that he seems destined to be remembered.“I can’t tell you,” he said in a 2014 interview with his hometown paper, The Reading Eagle, “how many times I’ve autographed a Windex bottle.”Alyssa Lukpat More

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      Venice Film Festival: Tim Blake Nelson Gets the Lead. Someone Send Him a Tux.

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      The veteran character may have been featured in Coen brothers movies, but for a small western, he’s the one who is working hard to get it seen.VENICE — The first time Tim Blake Nelson went to the Venice Film Festival was three years ago, as one of the featured players in the western anthology “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. As Nelson soon learned, trailing those filmmakers around Venice can open an endless number of doors.“Traveling to a film festival with the Coens is a completely different experience than traveling with any other movie,” said Nelson, whose breakout role came in “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” also directed by the Coen brothers. “It’s like being associated with Picasso or Matisse.”This year, Nelson is at Venice to support “Old Henry,” a western he’s starring in. It’s a much smaller movie than “Buster Scruggs” — Nelson has even described “Old Henry” as a “micro western” — and it comes from Potsy Ponciroli, a young filmmaker who’s still earning his spurs. That means Nelson is shouldering a lot more responsibility than he did during his first trip to the festival.“We’re on a completely different stratum,” Nelson said. “I think this might be one of the lowest-budget movies ever to premiere in Venice! This is a very small movie, and it’s kind of extraordinary that we’re here next to ‘Dune.’”But modesty works in the movie’s favor: “Old Henry” is a solid-as-a-rock western that, as it goes on, gently suggests it’s about more than you’d anticipated. In a rare leading role, Nelson plays Henry, a widowed farmer living on a small patch of land in the Oklahoma territory. It’s 1906, and Henry’s teenage son, Wyatt (Gavin Lewis), is anxious to seek adventure, leave the farm, and wrest himself from the grip of his overprotective father.But adventure finds them instead when Henry and Wyatt happen upon a nearly dead cowboy and his pouch full of cash. When Henry brings both back to his farm, it isn’t long before a sinister gunslinger (Stephen Dorff) comes sniffing around for that bounty. And in the standoff that follows, maybe father and son will come to learn more about each other than either was expecting.“As an actor who’s 57 years old and has been doing this a long time, there’s something incredibly exciting about being associated with a younger filmmaker who’s created something very special,” Nelson said Monday night at da Ivo, a Venice restaurant that had been recommended to him by his “O Brother” co-star George Clooney, who held his bachelor party there.For a supporting player like Nelson, who recently appeared in HBO’s “Watchmen,” leading roles like the one in “Old Henry” are few and far between. Still, Nelson is humble about the promotion. If anything, it just means he’s taking on more responsibility to get the film seen.“It’s tricky because when you’re a character actor who’s been in a lot of movies, people tend to inflate your value,” said Nelson. “They think, ‘Oh, if he’s in my movie, then I can get financing or critical attention.’ They’re actually wrong, because there are a lot of character actors out there. I always say that I’m not some sort of magic bullet.”And though the films at Venice are dominated by stars like Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Penélope Cruz, who can earn headlines simply for what they wear on the red carpet, Nelson harbors no such illusions.“I’m wearing an outfit picked out by my wife,” Nelson told me, tugging at the lapel of his black jacket. “Because I forgot to pack two blazers, we actually bought this jacket today, two blocks away from here.”So, yes, Tim Blake Nelson is headlining a movie at one of the most glamorous film festivals on earth, but no, he does not return to his room at the Hotel Excelsior to find a free Tom Ford tuxedo sent over by a stylist.“I wish!” he said, laughing. “That’d be great. But you know, I don’t say this disingenuously: Nobody’s ever sent me any suits. And there were no offers for this. None.”Nelson grinned. “I’m not complaining,” he said. “It’s just, we’re a bit of a minnow.” More

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      Where to Stream Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Best Performances

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      Whether he was doing his own stunts in action films or being nonchalant in literary adaptations, the actor was magnetic.One word often comes up when reading about Jean-Paul Belmondo: cool. The French actor, who died on Monday at 88, never appeared to try hard, bringing a nonchalant effortlessness to all his roles. Belmondo did not look like a typical leading man — The New York Times described him as “hypnotically ugly” in 1961 — but he had charm and the unbothered casualness that the French call “désinvolture.”This son of artists had a taste for boxing, and swiftly eschewed being pigeonholed — he appeared in a high-minded literary adaptation one minute, performed his own stunts in a feisty caper the next. Through the 1960s and early ’70s, he alternated between art-house fare and quality commercial productions, then focused squarely on the latter, which might explain his often adversarial relationship with the French cinema establishment. When his performance in Claude Lelouch’s “Itinerary of a Spoiled Child” earned him a nomination for best actor at the 1989 César Awards, for example, he encouraged voters not to pick him; he won anyway and did not attend the ceremony.Luckily, a representative sample of Belmondo’s films is available for streaming. Here are 10 of them, in chronological order.‘Breathless’Stream it on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.This film, released in the United States in 1961, launched the careers of Belmondo and the director Jean-Luc Godard, and remains a formally thrilling pop-noir touchstone of the French new wave. Belmondo had a lower profile than his co-star, Jean Seberg, but his punk charisma burns the screen. A cigarette permanently dangling from his lips, he ambles along with the insolence of youth, his insouciant yet focused energy matching the jazzy, finger-snapping soundtrack. Many actors would have faded next to the vibrant modernity of Godard’s filmmaking; Belmondo fed on it.‘Le Doulos’Stream it on Plex TV; rent or buy it on iTunes.For many years, Belmondo’s rival as France’s sexy male lead was Alain Delon, whose tightly wound composure was a perfect fit for the director Jean-Pierre Melville’s cerebral, stylish movies. Yet Belmondo’s collaboration with the master filmmaker was just as fruitful. “Le Doulos,” from 1962, is Melville’s first great noir, and Belmondo is all contained brutality in it. A slightly raised eyebrow, the quirk of a mouth almost make you want to sympathize with his Silien, but menace is always there, the sense that this guy could shoot you at any time.‘That Man From Rio’Rent or buy on most major platforms.One of Belmondo’s frequent collaborators was Philippe de Broca, the director of fleet-footed, witty films. In this 1964 hit, his character travels all the way to Brazil to save his abducted girlfriend. The combination of comedy, adventure and romance is a perfect fit for Belmondo, and the wonderfully piquant Françoise Dorléac was among his best screen partners — their spiky screen chemistry is wonderful to behold.You can make it a double bill with de Broca’s zany Hong Kong-set “Up to His Ears,” from 1965, in which the actor plays a suicidal millionaire who decides life is worth living when mysterious henchmen try to kill him. Ursula Andress, with whom Belmondo then began a relationship, plays a fetching ethnologist earning spare change as an exotic dancer. Ah, the 1960s. …‘Pierrot le Fou’Rent or buy on most major platforms.In 1965, Godard gave Belmondo another superb role as an out-of-sorts man who escapes from his hohum life with Anna Karina (who wouldn’t?). This is one of Belmondo’s finest performances because he allows a poignant vulnerability to show, instead of hiding it behind a cocksure confidence. In a lovely scene, he and Karina speak-sing while dance-walking, and the craggy-faced young man with the squashed nose is pure poetry.‘Mississippi Mermaid’Stream it on Amazon.As the trailer to this 1969 film put it, “suddenly you realize two things: You’re in love, and you’re in danger.” Belmondo was cast against type as a man obsessed with — and manipulated by — a scheming Catherine Deneuve in François Truffaut’s adaptation of a William Irish novel. Alas the movie tanked, maybe because audiences were not ready to see Belmondo so blinded by passion that he came across as passive. “Mississippi Mermaid” was more subtle than that, though, and is worth rediscovering.‘Borsalino’Rent or buy it on Amazon and iTunes.Belmondo and Delon: the yin and yang of French cinema, muscular warmth versus icy distance. The pair had already appeared in “Is Paris Burning?” in 1966, but they were just two in a whole bunch of international marquee names. Four years later, they headlined a 1930s-set story as two Marseille gangsters who forge an alliance till death do them part. (Real life was more complicated, as Belmondo took Delon to court over who would be listed first in the credits.) Helmed by the genre craftsman Jacques Deray (“La Piscine”), “Borsalino” endures thanks to its ridiculously charismatic leads, with Belmondo as the very definition of raffish.‘The Scoundrel’Rent or buy it on Amazon and YouTube.Confusingly, this 1971 de Broca movie has different English titles, including the clunky literal translation “The Married Couple of the Year Two” and the fairly descriptive “The Scoundrel” and “Swashbuckler” — guess who that describes? No matter: This is a sterling example of a certain kind of period, well-made entertainment that has long been popular in France. The film is a high-spirited screwball comedy of marriage set during the French Revolution, in which Belmondo and Marlène Jobert (Eva Green’s mother) prove their love by constantly bickering. Both are marvelously at ease in that register, and Belmondo gets to indulge in stunt work, too.‘Stavisky …’Stream it on Kanopy.On the surface, Belmondo plays to type — albeit a rich criminal rather than a lowlife — in this 1974 film based on the true story of Alexandre Stavisky, a shady financier and swindler who became the linchpin of a huge scandal that rocked France in 1934. But the role and the performance are not cookie-cutter period biopic, because this is from the cerebral director Alain Resnais. “Stavisky …” emphasized mood over action (a fantastic score by Stephen Sondheim helped) and toyed with chronology, but its idiosyncratic approach to genre did not sell. Belmondo proceeded to turn his back on artier fare and unabashedly dedicated himself to selling the most tickets possible.‘The Professional’Rent or buy on most major platforms.In the late 1970s and the mid ’80s, Belmondo ruled the French box office with a string of action movies. Some of them had a comic bent, others were tough-guy noirs. This Georges Lautner smash from 1981 squarely belongs to the second type, with our star playing a leather-jacketed secret agent embroiled in a plot involving French interests in Africa. The best part of the movie is the face-off between Belmondo and his foil, terrifically portrayed by Robert Hossein (the two often worked together at the theater, with Hossein directing). Bonus: One of Ennio Morricone’s best scores of the 1980s.‘Half a Chance’Rent or buy on most major platforms.Belmondo and Delon joined forces again for this 1998 comic thriller in which Vanessa Paradis tries to find out which of them is her father. (Sound familiar?) The director Patrice Leconte (“Monsieur Hire”) enjoys playing with his aging male stars’ images: Belmondo gets to climb from a moving convertible to a helicopter, for example. His face an epic landscape of creases and furrows, he is simply irresistible as an extroverted, rambunctious fast-talker, and makes a meal out of the most innocuous scraps of dialogue. More

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      Meathead of ‘Ted Lasso’ Wanted to Play Rugby

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      Phil Dunster stars as the cocky soccer player Jaime Tart in the popular sitcom.Name: Phil DunsterAge: 29Hometown: Northampton, EnglandCurrently Lives: A terraced house located in the Hammersmith neighborhood of London that he shares with his girlfriend, the filmmaker Ellie Heydon, and two roommates.Claim to Fame: Mr. Dunster portrays the cocky soccer player, Jamie Tartt, on the hit Apple TV+ sitcom “Ted Lasso,” which recently received 20 Emmy nominations. But he has yet to bask in his newfound American stardom.“There hasn’t really been the same response to the show over here,” Mr. Dunster said by telephone from London. “I went into town the other day and I was jumping around and trying to be as conspicuous as possible, but nobody came over and said anything to me.”Mr. Dunster and Jason Sudeikis, right, in  “Ted Lasso.”Apple-TV+Big Break: “Drama was on my radar” as a young boy, Mr. Dunster said. At 9, he starred in his school’s production of “Olivier Twist,” and continued to perform in plays in secondary school. His budding stage talents earned him a slot at the highly selective Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in 2011.A year after graduating, ​​he played Arthur in the Bristol Old Vic production of “Pink Mist,” which earned him an Olivier Award nomination in 2016. “My coming-of-age was really learning to act,” he said.Latest Project: In the second season of “Ted Lasso,” which began at the end of July, Mr. Dunster’s character is struggling to sunder emotional walls he built as a top scorer for AFC Richmond, a fictional soccer club. “All of these people in Jamie’s life are now saying, ‘It’s OK to be scared or to be vulnerable, and to say sorry,’” he said. “In fact, it makes you a better player and member of the team.”Rosie Matheson for The New York TimesNext Thing: He is currently filming the witchy thriller “The Devil’s Hour,” an Amazon mini-series due next year. He also produced and stars in the upcoming short film “Pragma,” which he described as a “dystopian rom-com set in the near future” where there is a “steady decline in sustainable relationships.” Not that his own relationships are suffering. The movie is directed by Ms. Heydon, his girlfriend, and Jason Sudeikis, the star of “Ted Lasso,” is the executive producer.Vocational Training: Before becoming an actor, Mr. Dunster wanted to be a rugby player. But during a failed tryout for the London Irish Rugby Football Club at 15, he realized he “couldn’t hack it with the bigger boys,” he said.The training came in handy on “Ted Lasso.” “Jamie’s pout comes from a rugby player that I used to play with, who managed to make me feel very small by always sort of screwing up his face and pouting at me,” he said. More

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      Mark Duplass Can’t Get Enough of ‘Rocky II’

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      The filmmaker and star of “Language Lessons” discusses his teenage education in indie cinema and the screenwriting lessons in “Waiting For Godot.”It was May 2020, two months into lockdown, and Mark Duplass, an avowed workaholic, was getting itchy. So he took up some hobbies, one of which was conversational Spanish lessons with an online institute in Guatemala.Then a good friend, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton, died and Duplass wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Neither, it seemed, was his instructor, and their dialogues began to go deep.“I found it very interesting that this 2D-video chat thing that everyone was starting to complain about and fear was going to be the death of our personal connections was actually bringing us closer,” he said. “I was looking for that feeling of warmth and connection as we were losing it.”Sensing the kernel of a movie in those interactions, he called Natalie Morales, whom he’d known socially and had hired to direct a couple of episodes of his HBO show “Room 104,” and asked if she wanted to collaborate.The result was “Language Lessons,” in which Duplass plays Adam, whose husband surprises him with weekly online Spanish classes. Morales, in her feature directorial debut, is Cariño, his teacher, who becomes a confidant when he throws himself at her like a love bomb. The two built their characters independently and then let them “organically collide,” Duplass said, as each one’s drama played out on the other’s screen.“One of my ways to experience a sense — as someone who is and has been married for 20 years — of falling in love with a new person in your life is to do it through the making of art together,” he said. “I thought this would be such a great way to do this with Natalie, to tell this platonic love story of the two of us.”Duplass’s other onscreen relationship, on “The Morning Show” — as Chip Black, the TV producer to Alex Levy, Jennifer Aniston’s anchor — imploded last season, demoting him to local news as Season 2 begins. “They give me so much creative freedom and respect on that set,” he said. “Working with Jen Aniston has been one of the dreams of my life.”In a video call from his home in Los Angeles, which served as the setting for “Language Lessons,” Duplass discussed cultural touchstones like the New Orleans movie house where he absorbed indie cinema, the Austin music club that taught him about success and the insight he gleaned from reading “Infinite Jest.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. The Black Cat Lounge in Austin In 1991, my brother [Jay] went to college at the University of Texas, leaving me home alone without my soul mate and highly depressed. Then I went to visit him in Austin. He took me to the Black Cat Lounge, where there were dollar hot dogs and dollar PBR and these Texas funk-soul bands, and people were dancing and sweating. And I was like, what is happening here in this place? I had my mind absolutely blown.It was when it started to dawn on me that an artist can have a life that is not you’re either the Top 10 on the Billboard Charts or the Top 10 in the box office — or you’re not doing it. These bands were raking in a couple of hundred bucks a night. They were local-ish celebrities. They also had day jobs. And they were successful artists in that way.2. David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” I had made “Cyrus” and “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” my two studio movies, and they had not lit the world on fire. So I had convinced myself that if you’re going to tell these oddball characters and this level of specificity, it’s never going to be successful. Then I read “Infinite Jest” and was like, “Oh no, you just didn’t do it well enough.” And it gave me comfort. I realized I’m not going to be an auteur like David Foster Wallace. I don’t have that in me. What I do have in me is I’m an incredible collaborator. I’m a great first leg on a relay team.3. Tracy Chapman I was 12 and I was a skater punk with my snarky skater punk friends. We were watching “Saturday Night Live,” enjoying all the chopping broccoli jokes, and Tracy Chapman was the musical guest. She walked on and she played “Fast Car.” All my friends were like, “This sucks,” because we were Metallica fans. I was like, “Yeah, this sucks.” And I went into the bathroom and I sobbed my eyes out. I was like: “Well, I’m different than my friends. This is something else for me.” And that kicked me off into a singer-songwriter journey.4. Neutral Ground Coffee House in New Orleans I was obsessed with the Indigo Girls, obsessed with Shawn Colvin. So from when I was 14 or 15 years old on, I would go to the Neutral Ground Coffee House every Sunday and see their open mic nights. Eventually I worked up my courage to play my original three songs, which — no false modesty — they were terrible. The guy who ran the place, Les Jampole was his name, looked me in the eye afterward and was like, “Hey, Mark, I dig your stuff, man.” And it was everything to me to have someone validate me from the outside. So I kept writing songs, and by the time I was 17, they offered me my own gigs. It was this tiny enclave of confidence-building for me.5. Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” It was how I discovered independent film. I was 14 and I was a big fan of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” A big fan of “Stand by Me.” And I’m like: “Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix. Great. This’ll be a funny movie.” I went to go see it without reading anything, and that’s how I ended up at a Gus Van Sant art film.6. Movie Pitchers in New OrleansMovie’s was a second-run art house cinema, and they didn’t card very hard, God bless them. From ’92 to about ’95, when I graduated high school, that’s where I got my independent cinema education. And I could convince some of my friends to come with me because they would serve us pitchers of beer and we’d watch movies in recliners.7. Chris Smith’s “American Movie” I saw this in 1996 in Austin, and it changed my entire approach to filmmaking. I fell in love with [the filmmaker] Mark Borchardt. I couldn’t believe I loved him despite all his flaws. Also, I was struck in this screening that maybe my narrative films could look and feel like docs so they’d give the impression of feeling more natural and real. Odd zooms, out-of-focus moments left in the edit, important moments happening in poorly lit, canted frames. The offhandedness of it all inspired me to bring it to our narrative work in the years to come.8. Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” I saw a production in college that wasn’t very good. But it gave me the courage to focus on a two-hander and know that that could be entertaining, despite what my playwriting and screenwriting teachers were telling me. And you can draw a straight line from that to “Language Lessons.”9. John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” I don’t know if it holds up. I think it might be a little corny and a little schmaltzy, but the way it hit me when I was 17 was great because it was the first book where I saw the machinations of a detailed plot working. And I saw it coming before it came. It didn’t ruin it for me, but it made me realize the power of writing and how much I identified as a writer. Multiple plot lines, all converging for a satisfying ending.10. “Rocky II” I used to watch “Rocky II” as a kid because it had two fights in it. They showed you the end of “Rocky” at the beginning of “Rocky II.” I was a little bro who wanted to see as much fighting as possible. But what you forget is that, in between, “Rocky II” is a slow, depressing, late-’70s, Bob Rafelson-style drama about this guy realizing the death of his dream and coming to terms with himself being not what he thought he would be. So that was inadvertently soaking into me the whole time. I look back and I think that was maybe one of the most formative movies for me. As a 6-year-old, I was taking in all of this male ennui, slow withering drama, and I think it had a deep effect on who I am as a creator. More