Actors and Actresses

Subterms

    More stories

    • 25 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Gotham Award

      by

      The Gothams will replace the best actress and best actor categories with a single category for “outstanding lead performance.”Should acting prizes be gender neutral? The question has been percolating for years, with zealous arguments for and against.But the biggest ceremonies that honor acting, aware that change would kick a cultural hornet’s nest, have adhered to tradition. Best actor. Best actress.On Thursday, a significant stop on the annual road to the Oscars broke ranks. The Gotham Awards said that, beginning with its November ceremony, prizes for acting would no longer be broken out by gender. The Gothams will replace its best actress and best actor categories with a single category for outstanding lead performance. For the first time, there will be a category for supporting roles: outstanding supporting performance.Each category can have up to 10 nominees, with the field chosen, per custom, by committees of film critics, festival programmers and film curators. Separate juries made up of writers, directors, actors, producers and other film professionals will determine the final recipients, the same as always. The acting categories at the Gothams previously had five nominees.“There are so many talented nonbinary individuals, and it’s not fair to force them into male and female boxes,” said Jeffrey Sharp, the executive director of the Gotham Film and Media Institute in New York. “We have a really proud history of inclusivity. It’s part of our DNA. But it was time for us to evolve, too.”Will other significant ceremonies follow?“We can only speak for ourselves, but we do have a history of leading the conversation,” Mr. Sharp said, referring to the position the Gotham Awards has as the first significant ceremony of Hollywood’s prize-collecting season.The influential Berlin Film Festival went gender neutral with its performance awards in the spring. Although not taken seriously as markers of artistic achievement, the MTV Movie & TV Awards stopped separating acting prizes by gender in 2017, along with MTV’s Video Music Awards. The Grammys did away with the division in 2012.But none of the organizations behind the most prestigious acting awards — Oscars, BAFTAs, Tonys and Emmys — have indicated that they will take the same action. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which manages the Oscars, has perhaps gone the furthest, telling The New York Times in 2019 that, while it planned to keep its current structure in place, it would “continue to be sensitive to the evolving conversation.” The Academy Awards for best actress and best actor were first presented in 1929.The Screen Actors Guild Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes also have male and female acting categories.The debate has roots in older conversations about whether carving out places in a male-dominated field for one group, in this case women, comes at the cost of excluding others.Those seeking change contend that, in addition to forcing nonbinary performers into boxes, gendered categories give the false appearance that prime roles for women are far more prevalent than they actually are.“We should be more afraid of upholding a discriminatory, sexist policy than we are of abolishing it,” the nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon, known for their role on Showtime’s “Billions,” wrote in an essay last year. They added, “There are ultimately, two tangible obstacles to abolishing the actress category at awards shows, and they are — to be blunt — money and feelings.”Supporters of gendered categories say that absent such distinctions, men would dominate the nominees and winners. There are also those who swat away potential change as an example of progressive ideology run amok.Mr. Sharp said that the concern about maintaining an equitable mix of nominees when doing away with gendered categories was “valid.”“In terms of the danger of being skewed one way or another, we have great faith in the individuals who make our nominations decisions,” he said, referring to the Gotham Awards’ committee system. (The New York Times is a corporate sponsor of the awards and had no role in the decision about the new categories.)Mr. Sharp noted that his organization’s longtime “breakthrough actor” award, which will be renamed “breakthrough performer,” has always been gender neutral, having been given to stars like Amy Adams (“Junebug”), Elliot Page (“Juno”), Michael B. Jordan (“Fruitvale Station”) and Mya Taylor (“Tangerine”).The most-recent Gotham Awards ceremony took place in January and was staged virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Nicole Beharie was named best actress for her performance in “Miss Juneteenth” and Riz Ahmed won the best actor prize for “Sound of Metal.”The Gotham Film and Media Institute (formerly the Independent Filmmaker Project) also said on Thursday that it had created two new television categories: breakthrough nonfiction series and outstanding performance in a new series.Cara Buckley More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Theater

      Ian McKellen Returns as Hamlet in U.K. Production

      by

      As England’s theaters welcome capacity audiences again, Ian McKellen is back in a role he first played a half-century ago.LONDON — If you’re going to fully reopen a theater in these edgy times, it helps to have an actor whose presence feels like an event. That’s absolutely the case at the elegant Theater Royal in Windsor, England, where Ian McKellen, 82, is currently playing Hamlet, of all roles, and will stay on into the fall in a new production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” (“Hamlet” runs through Sept. 25.)When the director Sean Mathias’s production started previews in June, coronavirus protocols in England required social distancing in playhouses, meaning numerous seats were left unsold. But those rules ended July 19, when the government rolled back restrictions on social contact. Theaters now have to choose for themselves whether to put their entire capacities on sale, and some smaller venues are still operating with caution by spacing seats out.At the “Hamlet” matinee I attended, this was not the case, and a full and expectant house had gathered to see McKellen return to a role he first played a half-century ago. The demographics of the Windsor playgoing public skew older, and during a post-show question-and-answer session with the cast, one man in the audience recalled seeing McKellen’s previous run as literature’s most famous Dane, in the early 1970s. (The actor tackled a more age-appropriate Shakespeare tragedy, “King Lear,” on the West End in 2018.)McKellen with Jenny Seagrove as Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.Marc BrennerYou might wonder how an octogenarian might inhabit the angst of a perpetual student who can’t shed the memory of his father or an unusual attachment to his mother. McKellen’s achievement is to render age irrelevant, so that we seem to be peering into the soul of a character this actor understands from the inside out. And as mortality rattles Hamlet more and more, it’s doubly moving to hear those lines spoken by an actor now in his ninth decade.The production belongs to the here and now, and is presented on a multitiered, industrial-looking set with the actors in modern dress: Alis Wyn Davies’s Ophelia strums a guitar, and Jonathan Hyde’s excellent Claudius suggests a corporate apparatchik with his eye on the prize.But it’s McKellen everyone has come to see, and the Tony-winning actor who found global renown in the “Lord of the Rings” and “X-Men” movies doesn’t disappoint. As if taking a leaf from his character’s instruction to the players in Act III’s play within a play, he speaks Shakespeare’s verse “trippingly on the tongue,” so that the time-honored soliloquies become extensions of thought, rather than set pieces. I’ve rarely heard “To be, or not to be” communicated as easefully as here.Not all the cast is at McKellen’s level, and there doesn’t appear to be much of an overarching vision. But whether riding an exercise bike or scaling the skeletal set, McKellen is always the nimblest presence; the actor’s the thing, and the audience made its appreciation thunderously clear.I witnessed a comparable ovation at another full house recently, this time in the 2,300-seat London Coliseum, where the star attraction is the return of the English musical theater veteran Michael Ball, playing Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” through Sept. 29. Ball won the 2008 Olivier Award for his performance as this demure, soft-spoken laundress when the Broadway hit first came to London, and his affection for the generous-hearted show seems only to have deepened since. A heartthrob back in the day, Ball dons Edna’s apron and slippers without any sidelong winks.Lizzie Bea as Tracy Turnblad, Michael Ball as Edna Turnblad and Les Dennis as Wilbur Turnblad in “Hairspray” at the London Coliseum.Tristram KentonIt is a gift of a part. Edna is a wife and mother in 1960s Baltimore who long ago made peace with the life she never got to lead. (“I wanted to be the biggest thing in brassieres,” she says, meaning designing, not washing and folding, them.) Imagine her surprise, then, when her feisty daughter, Tracy (a spirited Lizzie Bea), turns out to be a consciousness-raising rabble-rouser, railing against racial segregation.Tracy’s transformation prompts her mother to unleash a previously unknown energy, and a dimpled Ball is a riot emerging, eyes gleaming, for the final number in a glittering pink party frock.Addressing the audience after the curtain call, Ball sounded moved to see a near-capacity crowd again. No wonder he looked ready to shake and shimmy all night, or at least until Edna’s sequins fell off.Social distancing was still the order of the day when I caught the Joseph Charlton two-hander “ANNA X,” which has just finished its run at the Harold Pinter Theater but will have five performances next week at the Lowry in Salford, near Manchester.The director Daniel Raggett’s high-octane production showcases a 25-year-old talent, Emma Corrin, who has been lauded as Princess Diana in “The Crown” and is clearly due for a major career. “ANNA X” casts Corrin in a fictionalized version of a real-life Russian, Anna Sorokin, who cut a swath through New York society before serving time in prison for fraud.Appearing alongside the engaging Nabhaan Rizwan as the ambitious techie, Ariel, whom Anna pulls into her alluring orbit, Corrin is both charismatic and inscrutable, as befits Anna’s shifting, twisted psyche. Let’s wish Corrin a return to the West End at a time when she, too, is allowed a full house.Nabhaan Rizwan and Emma Corrin in “ANNA X.”Helen MurrayHamlet. Directed by Sean Mathias. Theater Royal Windsor, through Sept. 25.Hairspray. Directed by Jack O’Brien. London Coliseum, through Sept. 29.ANNA X. Directed by Daniel Raggett. The Lowry, Salford, Aug. 11-14. More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Cecily Strong Is Starting a New Conversation

      by

      The “Saturday Night Live” star shares the story of her pandemic experience and a life touched by grief in “This Will All Be Over Soon.”RHINEBECK, N.Y. — It’s hard to think of Cecily Strong and not be reminded of the effusive television characters she plays. If you’re a “Saturday Night Live” fan, you immediately conjure up her exuberant performance as a soused Jeanine Pirro crooning “My Way” while she dunks herself in a tank of wine. Or if you’ve been watching her on the Apple TV+ musical comedy “Schmigadoon!,” you think of her belting out modern-day show tunes praising the pleasures of corn pudding or smooching with a suitor. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Zazie Beetz Grew Up With Shel Silverstein and Nina Simone

      by

      The “Atlanta” actress talks about her latest film, “Nine Days,” her desire to become a doula, her love affair with all things French, and how Debussy and Lianne La Havas got her through some difficult times.In “Nine Days,” Zazie Beetz plays Emma, an unborn soul in an otherworldly limbo interviewing to inhabit a human body on Earth, or else vanish into oblivion. But unlike the other candidates in Edson Oda’s supernatural drama, Emma is seemingly unconcerned — she shows up late for her first appointment — with winning over Will (Winston Duke), who will decide her fate. Instead, she approaches the exercises to test her fitness with a guilelessness that at first confounds him — but that ultimately impels him to confront his own tumultuous existence.“I think that Emma is in some way what we all would hope to be in our purest sense of childhood wonder,” Beetz, who is German American, said. “She’s also somebody who’s very present. She might not have the opportunity to live, but there is something that is a semblance of life right there with her right now.”Conversing with Beetz, who speaks with an almost wide-eyed enthusiasm, you get the feeling that her onscreen outlook may not be too far from her real one.Still, the woman has range. An Emmy nominee for the role of Van, who shares a daughter with Earn (Donald Glover), in FX’s “Atlanta,” she will soon star alongside Jonathan Majors and Idris Elba in Jeymes Samuel’s western “The Harder They Fall,” and Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock in David Leitch’s assassin thriller “Bullet Train.”Beetz was taking a break from shooting the new seasons of “Atlanta” — she revealed no plot details, other than mentioning a foray to Paris, a city that made her list of cultural essentials — when she called from the Minnesota family home of her fiancé, the actor David Rysdahl (who also appears in “Nine Days”). These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy For a very long time after school, I would come home and listen to that every day as my wind-down. It was one of the pieces of music that guided me through my first experiences with anxiety and mood issues. And to this day I think of it as this meditation that guided me through one of my first emotionally very difficult times.2. Shel Silverstein As a child, I adored Shel Silverstein. I had many of his poetry books that I read over and over and over again. He had a very child-friendly playfulness in his work that also reflected very seriously on how we should engage with the world, a body of work that was philosophical and thoughtful and not condescending. It’s important to not condescend to children.3. “Fruits” by Shoichi Aoki My dad, when I was 11 or so, he gave me this book, just randomly came home with it one day. It’s photographs, one after another, of Japanese people of all ages dressed in Harajuku street fashion. It changed my point of view on how I could dress myself. My parents tell me from when I was very young, I was very clear that I wanted to clothe myself. And I’m still this way. I’ve always been like, “How do I create my own thing?” And “Fruits” — the colors and the combinations, and no rules around how you can express yourself — was positive and joyful and so unique. The next day, I came to school in this rainbow outfit. And then for years I was known as the Rainbow Girl.4. Doodling My entire life, all of my notebooks in school, constantly, constantly doodling, just an endless doodle of doodles. I couldn’t sit still without having a piece of paper and a pen with me. Even in note-taking, I was always very interested in making my notes look aesthetically pleasing. I think this is also partially a reason I’m still very analog. I can’t have an electronic planner.5. Nina Simone One of the first songs I consciously realized was hers that had a very profound impact on me was “Four Women.” I remember hearing that for the first time and I was dancing to it. It’s not just about music and it’s not just about sound. It is about truth. You feel her pain and her human self. That is also femininity and strength in womanhood and her unapologetic approach to her blackness and what she represented during her time. Of course, there are other artists that do a similar thing. But I don’t think Nina Simone makes it pretty, and that draws me in.6. “Zazie dans le Métro” My namesake is “Zazie dans le Métro,” which is a French book by Raymond Queneau, and [Louis Malle] made a movie of that. I grew up watching this movie. This film is about Paris relatively soon after World War II. The story is about a 10-year-old girl named Zazie who visits her uncle and her aunt in Paris for the weekend, and shenanigans ensue. Even though I would watch the German version, I always felt like I was her and this was me. I felt driven to be able to read my namesake and watch the film in its original language. So I was a French major in college and then I lived in Paris for a year.7. “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth” I am obsessed with midwifery, to the point where I looked into school. I wanted to be a doula. A few years ago, David gifted me for Christmas this book because I am so interested in this transition and in this complete surrender of power in a way. I think women are looking death squarely in the eye as you give birth to a little being who is still, in my point of view, attached to the universe. I’ve never given birth, so maybe I’m romanticizing it all, and it’s terrible. But I want to help women feel empowered on their journey.8. Knitting When I was 8, my mom taught me very basic stitches. For a long time I could knit in one style: rectangle. Then four years ago, I picked it up in a serious way. I devoured videos on YouTube and bought all these books and taught myself a craft and a trade. And now I’m like: “I’ve learned a skill. I can make things that are useful to people.” I’ve found great pride in that.9. Period Clothing One of my most transformative moments in acting is when I put the costume on. It informs the character so much. It changes how they move, it changes how they engage with the world and who they are. I am enamored with the Jane Austen world. One of my favorite movies is “Marie Antoinette” by Sofia Coppola. And a huge part of that is the costuming and the aesthetic of it all. On red carpets, my inspiration for hair is honestly Marie Antoinette, and in my head that’s what my hair looks like — though obviously not what it looks like in real life.10. Lianne La Havas I discovered her when I was in college, and I felt this immediate kinship. She’s around the same age as me. She is also mixed race and her hair was similar to mine. At the time, the natural hair movement in the U.S. was just getting its wings, and I identified so much with how she looked. Each album she comes out with, she’s grown up more, and I’ve grown up in this same way. I feel this quiet friend who I’m like, “I know you.” More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      'Wicked' Is First Broadway Tour Since Coronavirus Shutdown

      by

      DALLAS — Talia Suskauer knows what it’s like to be green. She remembers the feel of pigment and powder on her arms, neck, and face; how the color seemed to seep into her pores and linger behind her ears; what it was like to see a strange but familiar self staring back from a mirror.She didn’t know that, on a hot July afternoon in Dallas, getting painted once again would make her cry.Sixteen months after the touring production of “Wicked” in which Suskauer stars as the green-skinned witch Elphaba was forced to close, the cast and crew have reassembled in Dallas for a high-stakes effort to start again. The show’s first performance here on Tuesday, the first by any touring Broadway production since the coronavirus pandemic shut down shows across the nation, will be a sign of hope for a battered theater industry, but also a test at a time when the spread of the Delta variant has Americans once again on edge.Talia Suskauer is back as Elphaba, and she has two veterans to help her get into character: Joyce B. McGilberry, left, a makeup supervisor who has been with the show since 2006, and Andrea DiVincenzo Shairs, a hair supervisor, who joined in 2003.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“Each show is going to be someone’s first time back at the theater, so each show is going to be emotional,” Suskauer said. She had her own emotions to draw on, tearing up as she eased back into the makeup chair for the first time since the tour’s March 13, 2020, shutdown in Madison, Wis. “I felt like our purpose was being stripped away,” she said, “and now, to come back, it’s overwhelming.”Touring is a huge part of the commercial theater ecosystem. It’s big money — in the most recent full theater season, 18.5 million people attended touring shows in North America, and those productions grossed $1.6 billion.The resumption of touring will once again allow people who live far from New York to see Broadway titles. And it will provide much-needed income for actors, musicians and other theater workers left unemployed by the pandemic.“If anybody doesn’t love a national tour, there’s something they’re not getting,” said Cleavant Derricks, the Tony winner who is playing the Wizard in the “Wicked” tour.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“If anybody doesn’t love a national tour, there’s something they’re not getting,” said Cleavant Derricks, who in 1982 won a Tony Award for his role in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” and who now plays the Wizard in the “Wicked” tour. “You’re going from state to state, meeting different people, seeing different aspects of the country, and each night applause comes your way. How can you beat something like that?”A revisionist back story for “The Wizard of Oz,” “Wicked” is a musical theater juggernaut that opened on Broadway in 2003, has sold more than $5 billion worth of tickets and has been seen by more than 60 million people in 100 cities around the world. The show, which revolves around a fraught friendship between the witches Elphaba and Glinda, has been running so long that Suskauer and her co-star and fellow Floridian, Allison Bailey, both saw it as children..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“I saw it in New York when I was in seventh grade, and it was so magical,” said Bailey, who plays Glinda. “It’s why I wanted to do theater.”The show, which has been touring since 2005, travels from city to city with 13 trucks that carry the set, costumes and a lot of equipment and supplies.Cooper Neill for The New York Times“Wicked,” with songs by Stephen Schwartz, a book by Winnie Holzman and direction by Joe Mantello, has been touring North America since 2005. The tour now travels from city to city in 13 trucks that transport the set, the sound and light equipment, more than 300 costumes and about 100 wigs.The touring company includes 33 actors, an 18-person crew, six musicians, three stage managers, two company managers and a physical therapist, plus the 16 dogs, one cat and three ferrets brought along for companionship. The traveling company is then supplemented at each stop by 32 local crew members and nine local musicians, as well as dozens of stagehands to help load the set in and out.The resumption of the “Wicked” tour, which comes a month before the first musicals are scheduled to restart on Broadway, will soon be followed by others: Beginning in mid-August, touring productions of “Hamilton” will resume in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Tempe, Ariz., and in September tours of “Frozen” and “My Fair Lady,” as well as the play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” will hit the road.In New York, ticket holders to Broadway shows will be required to show proof of vaccination and wear masks, at least through October. In Dallas, the touring production of “Wicked” is requiring vaccines for cast and crew, but not for the audience, which will be instructed to wear masks. Actors will be barred from interacting with the audience, meaning no stage-door autographs or selfies, and no backstage tours.The cast was masked for rehearsals, except when singing or speaking. During performances, the actors will be unmasked.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesEarly indicators are that audiences are eager to return: The five-week Dallas run has sold strongly, and prices have held steady, ranging from $25 for a lottery ticket to $169 for the best seats.When the pandemic forced the tour to close last year, the crew packed the set and costumes into boxes and left them in the Madison theater, imagining they’d be back in a few weeks. Then, as the shutdown dragged on, the crew went back to load those boxes into trucks. Ten of the trucks spent nearly a year parked in a Wisconsin truck yard, while three, containing temperature-sensitive electronics, wigs and wardrobe, were sent to a climate-controlled warehouse in Pennsylvania.The crew was worried about how the show’s approximately 100 wigs, many of which are made of human hair, would fare during the lengthy shutdown, but they turned out to be in good condition.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesSome members of the company went home, but some had no homes — they are usually on the road so much, they don’t need them — so they stayed with family, or rented something somewhere.“Since I’ve been married, I’ve never been home this long, ever,” said the tour’s hair supervisor, Andrea DiVincenzo Shairs, who has been with “Wicked” off and on since 2003. “I went to Fort Lauderdale — my husband is there — and we actually still love each other, so it worked out!”“I saw it in New York when I was in seventh grade, and it was so magical,” Allison Bailey, the actress playing Glinda, said of “Wicked.” “It’s why I wanted to do theater.”Cooper Neill for The New York TimesReuniting was fun, but restarting was complicated, and the show set aside three weeks to get ready at Dallas’s Music Hall at Fair Park, the 3,420-seat venue “Wicked” was returning to for the sixth time. The cast was rusty, and needed to re-rehearse the show, while the crew needed to assess each piece of equipment for possible damage after months of disuse.“We were worried about what was going to come out of the trucks,” said David O’Brien, the tour’s production stage manager. “Opening these boxes of clothes, what are we going to find, and what’s it going to smell like?”There were minor problems — a dimmer rack that needed to be reprogrammed, and a warped board in the set floor that caused a sliding statue to jam — but for the most part, the crew was delighted with how well the equipment held up.While the crew reassembled the Tony-winning set, the cast rehearsed in the lobby, working on a sprung floor rented from the Texas Ballet Theater. “It’s been 16 months of singing in your shower, which is different than singing with multiple people,” said Evan Roider, the tour’s music director, “but they came back ready to go.”There were jokes about expanded waistlines and forgotten dance steps. “It’s a little more snug this time around!” Suskauer said of her costume when a button popped as she rehearsed.“Look, it’s Glinda!” Bailey rehearses her entrance in a floating bubble.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesBy the time they were working in the theater, underneath a proscenium featuring the show’s red-eyed dragon, the cast was polishing details. “Careful with your wand!” the associate director, Lisa Leguillou, instructed Bailey as she rehearsed her entrance in a floating bubble. “It’s covering your face!”Onstage, the show hasn’t changed. But backstage, there are many new precautions, including air scrubbers.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThere are, of course, new safety protocols, which the “Wicked” team is sharing in video meetings with crews from other tours as they, too, prepare to restart. Some measures are now familiar: plentiful hand sanitizer, plus masks and gloves and air scrubbers. But there are also more theater-specific strategies. Ultraviolet wands are being used to clean mask interiors, lest too much disinfectant give actors headaches. Actors now scan QR codes for their daily check-ins, in lieu of the traditional sign-in sheet on a clipboard. And partitions are being installed in the orchestra pit to try to contain any aerosols emitted by reed and brass instruments.“Our biggest concerns have been how to reinvent things we do in a Covid world,” said Steve Quinn, the tour’s company manager, who has been touring with “Wicked” for 16 years. “We’re the guinea pigs, and we’re just trying to navigate this.”Among the new safety measures: The cast’s daily sign-in is now digital, replacing the traditional pen-and-paper system. Marie Eife, a member of the ensemble, scanned the QR code as she arrived for rehearsal one morning.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThe company’s excitement about being back together, and making a show, is tempered by some anxiety, particularly among the crew. “I want to make sure I have covered all my bases, so not by my hands would anybody become sick or injured by something I didn’t think of,” said Joyce B. McGilberry, the tour’s makeup supervisor. “I wanted to come back, but I can’t deny my concerns.”The tour company has a wide range of experience. Rebecca Gans Reavis had been playing a flying monkey for just a week before the tour shut down, while Laurel Parrish, the advance wardrobe supervisor, has been with “Wicked” since it opened on Broadway.Reavis, heartbroken, spent the pandemic in Wichita, Kan., where she and her husband took jobs teaching at her mother’s dance studio; Parrish, in northern Manhattan, worked for a cheesemonger while taking on passion projects in embroidery and sewing.“I don’t think I knew how much I missed it until we started back,” Parris said. “Seeing the clothes was like seeing old friends.”When two of the show’s cast members opted not to return after the pandemic, that created openings for the return of an alumnus, Clifton Davis, who at 75 is the oldest member of the tour cast, and a newbie, Anthony Lee Bryant, a Los Angeles-based dancer who had auditioned for the show six times before landing a spot.“Theater is being resurrected, thank God,” said Davis, who is relishing a second go as Doctor Dillamond, an erudite goat who taught at Shiz University when Glinda (then known as Galinda) and Elphaba were students there. Davis previously played the same role in 2012.Anthony Lee Bryant, right, is the only brand-new member of the tour cast, and during rehearsals he took careful notes as he watched other ensemble members dance.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesAs Bryant scrupulously took notes on dance moves, and Davis practiced his bleat, some moments seemed sure to land differently, even though they were crafted years ago. Chief among them: Glinda’s opening line, which Bailey utters as she floats in on her bubble.“It’s good to see me, isn’t it?”“I think I’m going to say it the same, but it’s going to feel different,” Bailey said. “I feel like I’m saying it on behalf of theater itself.” More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      From ‘Call My Agent!’ to Hollywood Career

      by

      The French series was a pandemic hit in the United States. And now its star, Camille Cottin, is emerging to find herself in demand.At some point during the pandemic, perhaps between the debut of “Ted Lasso” last August and “Bridgerton” in December, you may have happened upon Netflix’s French import “Call My Agent!” (“Dix Pour Cent” in French), a sweet yet absurd sendup of the global entertainment complex as seen through the lens of a Parisian talent agency where the agents are mostly good-hearted lovers of cinema at the beck and call of their highly demanding clients.If so, you were one of millions who discovered Camille Cottin, the French actress who played Andrea Martel, the hard-nosed striver with the piercing green eyes who is trying to keep her agency afloat while her personal life falls apart.The show was one of the few joys of the pandemic, one that prompted viewers to sample additional international content like “Lupin” and “Money Heist,” overcoming “the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles” that the “Parasite” director, Bong Joon Ho, referred to during his 2020 Golden Globes speech. The success of “Call My Agent!” has prompted spinoffs in Britain, Quebec and Turkey. And there is now talk of a stand-alone movie that will see Andrea Martel headed to New York.But Cottin, 42, whose background includes theater and sketch comedy, completely missed the phenomenon that “Call My Agent!” became in the United States while she was in lockdown in Paris with her husband and two young children. Turns out, she was just as miserable as the rest of us.“I was quite worried in the pandemic and I was a bit paralyzed,” Cottin said in English during a recent video call. “I wanted to be creative, but I wasn’t at all. Also I had the feeling like I’m never going to work again. I was scared.”“Now you tell me during the pandemic everybody watched ‘Call My Agent!’ I was miles away, imagining that I was buried alive,” she added with a grim laugh.Cottin as a talent rep in Paris in “Call My Agent!” with Grégory Montel, left, and Assad Bouab.Christophe Brachet/NetflixCottin was conducting this interview in a car on her way home from a costume fitting for the Cannes Film Festival. (No “Call My Agent!” fans, the fitting did not involve a fussy feathered gown like the one Juliette Binoche awkwardly donned at the end of Season 2.) Cottin’s new film “Stillwater,” in which she plays Virginie, a working actress and single mother who guides Matt Damon’s remorseful father through an ill-conceived journey in Marseilles, has just debuted to mostly positive reviews. Manohla Dargis called her “electric” in The New York Times. Vanity Fair called her performance “bright and winsome.”But this moment in the car was far less glamorous. Her 6-year-old daughter was fast asleep, head in mom’s lap. And when the car stopped, I could see the multitasking Cottin at work, scooping up her groggy child, a poof of pink taffeta in one arm, her video call still on in the other, a bright Parisian sky in the background. She paused for a moment to put her daughter to bed before continuing the conversation on the floor of her bathroom, a compromise she made with her child, who asked her not to stray too far. Then her husband, Benjamin, came home. “The father is here!” she exclaimed. “Virginie would have had to handle that situation alone.”After a small role in the 2016 “Allied,” starring Brad Pitt, “Stillwater” represents Cottin’s biggest introduction yet to American audiences. It just may be the role that lets her officially cross over from obscure French actress to global sensation. Later this year she will star opposite Lady Gaga and Adam Driver in Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci,” playing Paola Franchi, the girlfriend of Maurizio Gucci (Driver). And she’s set to reprise her role as Hélène, a high-ranking member of the assassin organization the Twelve, in BBC’s “Killing Eve.”The international community awakened to Cottin’s charms far before all of us in the United States were stuck at home. When “Call My Agent!” showed up on British television, Cottin discovered the show had found an audience across the English Channel. It was 2019, and she was attending a casting director festival in Kilkenny, Ireland, with her own French agent. Suddenly she was the center of attention.“They were like, ‘Oh could I make a selfie with you?,’ and I was like, ‘What? You’re the James Bond casting director,’” she said, laughing.That trip and another to London led to her casting in “Gucci” and to her meeting the producer of “Killing Eve.”Cottin said she was much less assured than her agent character: “If I have to make a choice, it will take me too long, always too long. And I will ask everybody his opinion about it.”Tania Franco Klein for The New York TimesYet “Call My Agent!” had no bearing on the “Stillwater” director Tom McCarthy’s decision to cast Cottin. He hadn’t yet seen the show when he met her. Rather, he hired her based on an audition that he said astonished him and his co-writers, Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré.“You kind of can’t keep your eyes off her when she is on the screen,” he said in a recent interview from France. “She’s a bit scattered, a bit all over the place. She’s funny, she’s self-deprecating, she’s empathetic. She’s tough. She’s straightforward. And I feel like after watching her for a year and a half in the edit room, every moment with her is very lived.”To Cottin, Virginie, who is open and nurturing and always looking for something to fix (like Damon’s Oklahoman roughneck), is a near facsimile of herself.“Virginie is the closest character I’ve had to play to me,” she said even though it’s one of the few roles she’s played in English. “We have the same energy. And until now, I’ve mostly been counted for women with a lot of more tension. A bit more in control.”There is a disarming ease to Cottin that is evident on initial introduction and belies the icy veneer of her “Call My Agent!” character. She doesn’t take herself too seriously — McCarthy calls her “goofy” — and you realize quickly how great her potential for comedy is. It’s a skill she exhibited in her most well-known French role, playing the lead in the prank TV show “Connasse,” which means “bitch” in her native tongue. Her exploits included scaling Kensington Palace in search of an introduction to Prince Harry.Cottin with Matt Damon and Lilou Siauvaud in “Stillwater.” She won the role on the strength of her audition. The director hadn’t seen “Call My Agent!”Jessica Forde/Focus FeaturesA “Call My Agent!” producer, Dominique Besnehard, described Cottin as “the pretty, biting, bold one” who in the role of Andrea “is very good at going from harshness to fragility.”To Cottin, it’s a character she both admires and understands, yet still finds at a remove from her own personality.“I have much less assurance than Andrea. She is more self-confident and strategic and good at making decisions,” she said. “If I have to make a choice, it will take me too long, always too long. And I will ask everybody his opinion about it.”Cottin is decidedly not uncertain about her career, but as an actress in her 40s she is more aware that the highs she’s experiencing today may not predict the highs she will see in her future.“Maybe if I was 20, I would think, ‘Oh my God, maybe I’m going to have an Oscar,’” she said, laughing, in a mocking American accent. “It’s never vertical. You can make a step, you can consider that you’ve been up and then suddenly, you can go down. Nothing is a straight line. I see these projects as trips, great trips. I can’t say, ‘Oh, now that I’ve done that I can tell you what’s coming next,’ because I don’t know. And it doesn’t mean that it will happen again.”Besnehard suggested she could have a career like Binoche, taking roles both in France and the United States. “I hope the American people would not monopolize her,” he said.McCarthy sees a much clearer trajectory.“I predict great things for Cami and not just because of our movie, which I think she’s sensational in but it’s just her time,” he said. “You can feel it when someone’s earned a moment in their career, and put in the work, and they’re ready to take control of it.” More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      In ‘Mr. Corman,’ Joseph Gordon-Levitt Looks Inward and Asks, ‘What If?’

      by

      For his new Apple TV+ comedy series, Gordon-Levitt imagined what his life might have been like if he hadn’t been so lucky. “It’s probably the most me-ish thing I’ve ever made.”Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the first to admit he’s had it pretty good. He has had a wildly successful acting career on stages and screens spanning over three decades. He sings, dances, writes and directs, and he does a decent Nirvana cover. He has a wife and two kids and he hardly seems to age. More

    • 50 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Dev Patel, Starry Knight

      by

      “The Green Knight” offered the actor a movie-star moment unlike anything he’s done before. Could he conquer his insecurities and take the lead?Horses know, Dev Patel told me.“A horse can tell if you’ve only slept two hours the night before,” he said. “If you’re anxious, the horse can feel it. Armani definitely could.”Armani is one of Patel’s most significant co-stars in the new medieval fantasy “The Green Knight,” in which the 31-year-old actor plays Sir Gawain, a would-be warrior who embarks on something of a suicide mission. Parts of his quest take place on horseback and Patel, who’d never ridden before, tried to win Armani’s favor by sneaking him apples pilfered from the hotel lobby in Dublin.Still, appealing to a horse’s stomach can only do so much. If Patel couldn’t summon enough leading-man authority to embody Gawain, surely Armani would be the first to sense it. After all, they would spend their first shoot day together in an Irish wilderness where the wind blows so strong that Patel found himself gripping Armani tightly just to stay upright.As those gusts of cold air pierced the metal mesh of Patel’s chain mail in a way no sword could, did Armani know that his rider was more neophyte than knight? And could the horse sense some of the other things making Patel anxious, like his natural tendency to overthink his career — what Patel calls “paralysis by analysis” — or the way he wondered what people would make of a British-Indian actor playing King Arthur’s nephew?OK, maybe some of those concepts are a little too complicated for a horse to suss out. (Though Armani could not be reached for comment, so who’s to say?) But Patel still had a lot on his mind that first day, and I haven’t even gotten to the matter of his food poisoning yet.“All this talk of representation,” he groaned, “and I’m here on top of a horse in chain mail, in the freezing cold, hoping I don’t get diarrhea.’”Patel as Gawain in “The Green Knight.” His director, David Lowery, said, “From the moment I met him, I was very aware that he was going to be the thing that makes the film epic.” Eric Zachanowich/A24 FilmsPatel was video-chatting with me from Adelaide, South Australia, where he’s busy editing his directorial debut, a martial-arts movie called “Monkey Man,” as well as keeping an eye on the “The Green Knight,” which was originally meant to come out last summer and will now debut in theaters on July 30. Directed by David Lowery, “The Green Knight” adds a welcome swerve to Patel’s résumé of straightforward crowd-pleasers: Unlike “Slumdog Millionaire” or “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” Lowery’s film is artsy, mysterious and a little sexy.Or, let me put it more plainly: “The Green Knight” understands that Dev Patel is a heartthrob now.The once-gawky actor has grown into a leading man with romance-novel hair, empathetic eyes and a well-kept beard, and though photo shoots of Patel routinely earn big numbers on social media, no movie till this one has really capitalized on his status as an internet crush. Patel wasn’t even on Lowery’s initial casting list for “The Green Knight,” but after the director saw a Zegna fashion spread with Patel looking suave and regal, he found himself so taken with Patel’s potential that he started drawing a picture of the actor on horseback.“From the moment I met him, I was very aware that he was going to be the thing that makes the film epic,” Lowery said. “If we couldn’t move to an epic location, if we weren’t able to find the right vista, I could always fall back on him because he will give us that in a close-up.”Sir Gawain is a bit of a cad when we first meet him, a drunken layabout who’d rather woo than fight. Still, he feels that it’s his destiny to be known for something great, and when a treelike creature called the Green Knight issues a challenge to King Arthur’s court, Gawain too eagerly accepts, beheading the monstrous figure.Unfortunately, the Green Knight survives his own decapitation and promises to return the blow to Gawain in one year’s time. This means that though Patel is introduced as a romantic rogue — and Lowery steers into that idea, outfitting him in a series of low-cut blouses — it’s the rest of the movie, in which Gawain finds himself humbled by the Green Knight’s looming deadline, that is truly meant to test his mettle as a man.Patel could relate to Sir Gawain: “As a young actor in Hollywood, you’re dealing with issues of masculinity, ego, success and fame. That’s the same quest this young man goes on.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times“I’m certainly aware of all of the fans of Dev Patel’s hair and beard — I’ve seen those memes,” Lowery said. “But I don’t think people understand exactly what he’s going to be doing as an actor and ‘The Green Knight’ just scratches the surface of it.”Lowery’s film is enigmatic enough to mean different things to different viewers, and it’s sure to spawn a thousand subreddits devoted to decoding its dreamlike logic. But to Patel, the main point of “The Green Knight” is clear: Gawain thinks he is entitled to fame even when he has done nothing to prove it’s deserved. His quest, then, is a journey toward integrity that comes with some present-day parallels.“Whether you’re an Instagram model or a YouTuber, there’s this thirst to be recognized, to have your legend spoken about, to get the likes,” Patel said. “And for me as a young actor in Hollywood, you’re dealing with issues of masculinity, ego, success and fame. That’s the same quest this young man goes on to be a known knight. All of that, I related to.”NONE OF THIS was originally in the cards for Patel, who grew up in the London borough of Harrow as the younger of two children. Both his parents had emigrated from Nairobi in their teens. His father, Raju, is quiet and introverted, while his mother, Anita, is the family’s force of nature. “She’s a big personality, and she can have the whole room laughing,” Patel told me. “I think my love of playing all these characters came from her.”Patel was a hyperactive child, and his parents signed him up for years of martial-arts classes to channel that excess energy. Still, he always had something more to give, and when his mother saw a casting advertisement for “Skins,” a teen drama that would supercharge the careers of young actors like Nicholas Hoult and Daniel Kaluuya, she prodded him to audition for the role of sex-crazy Anwar.The show was a hit, but the neighbors were horrified. “It felt like suicide in the community to put your kid into a TV show and let him drop out of school at 16,” Patel said. “While everyone else’s kid is off becoming a doctor or a dentist, I’m here on this TV show,” he said, “simulating sex and taking drugs.”He had never acted on camera before, and “Skins” was a trial by fire. The money was good enough to improve his family’s situation — with his first paycheck, Patel bought his sister a new bed — but the show’s large online following cut both ways.Patel in “Skins” with, from left, Nicholas Hoult, Larissa Wilson and April Pearson.Company Pictures“I was a young kid going on these chat rooms and it was quite brutal,” Patel said. “There were all these lists of who’s the favorite character on the show or who was the best-looking character, and I was always the ugliest, the least attractive. No one liked Anwar. It really took a toll on me personally.”Maybe that’s why he still mistrusts compliments 15 years later, or why he makes fun of himself before anyone else might get the chance. When I bring up the fan base that’s rooting for him on social media, I can’t even finish the sentence before Patel interjects: “All three members of that fan base?” Even when “Slumdog Millionaire” won best picture at the Oscars in 2009 or when, eight years later, Patel himself received a supporting-actor nomination for the drama “Lion” (he lost to Mahershala Ali), all that attention made him uneasy.“I didn’t feel worthy,” he said. “That kind of speaks to my natural low self-esteem: You’re there with really impressive creatures, the best of the best, and you’re like, ‘I don’t know what I have to offer in this space.’”He said his agents still get frustrated with him for turning down major studio blockbusters. “Maybe it’s a fear of how I would fit into that world,” Patel said. Sheepishly, he begins to talk about “one of the worst movies I’ve ever done, and I shouldn’t even bring it up, but do a quick IMDb search and you’ll know what it is.” (He’s referring to M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Last Airbender,” the Razzie-winning adaptation of the animated action series.)On that production, he was surrounded by green screen and special effects, and the artifice proved too difficult to wrap his head around. “I didn’t really flourish in that position,” he said. “I take my hat off to all those incredible actors that do Marvel movies where it’s, like, big, noisy fans and green screen and tennis balls and whatnot.”Authenticity is Patel’s watchword; if he can’t make a movie feel real to him, it’s not worth doing. By way of explaining, Patel told me a story about landing the role of the teenage striver in “Slumdog Millionaire,” an audition he booked because the daughter of the director, Danny Boyle, was such a fan of “Skins.”Patel in the best-picture-winning “Slumdog Millionaire.” Ishika Mohan/Fox Searchlight PicturesPatel was full of manic energy during the audition, using every trick he could think of to earn laughs in the room. But afterward, Boyle took the young actor aside and told him that if he were hired to lead the movie, he’d have to learn to be still. Could he leave enough room for the audience to enter the film through his eyes?“At the time, I was 17,” Patel said, “and I was like, ‘Well, that’s not acting. That’s just lazy!’” But over the course of his career, he has begun to understand what Boyle meant: All you really have to do is be present. A movie star knows that’s enough.That’s why the most exciting thing for Patel now is when he plays a role that lets him simply be. With its long, meditative scenes set in real locations, “The Green Knight” delivered that feeling in spades: Even when he was astride Armani and the rain hurled by the wind felt like bullets hitting his skin, Patel wouldn’t have traded the truth of that moment for anything. It’s the reason he does what he does, when all that’s left is him, the camera, and something powerful and innate that commands attention. (Horses can sense that sort of thing. Maybe audiences can, too.)“There’s a moment between ‘action’ and ‘cut’ that is like a drug,” Patel told me. “If you’re with the right filmmaker on the right set with the right script, everything just dissolves away.” He likened it to the flow state reached by great athletes, or even to Kate Winslet on the prow of the Titanic: “And there’s a metaphorical DiCaprio behind me,” he said, extending his long arms and grinning. More