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      in Movies

      Before He Was Infamous, O.J. Simpson’s Acting Helped Make Him Famous

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      Simpson began acting while still a football star, appearing in titles as varied as “Roots,” “The Towering Inferno” and the “Naked Gun” films.Before O.J. Simpson became synonymous with the sensational murder trial that riveted the nation in the mid-1990s, he was a football star turned Hollywood fixture who played roles as varied as an astronaut, a comic detective and a fake priest.His acting career began while he was still a star running back. As Simpson, who died on Wednesday, told it, he was waiting out the best deal he could get in the N.F.L. when producers reached out to him asking if he could act. “Sure, I can try to act,” he replied.He scored bit parts in a medical series and a western, but the allure of an onscreen career didn’t grab him until his first major film, “The Klansman” (1974), in which he appeared alongside Richard Burton and Lee Marvin, playing a man seeking to avenge his friend’s death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.Simpson told Johnny Carson in an interview in 1979 on “The Tonight Show” that during the production, the actors were casually chatting about food when Elizabeth Taylor said the best chili she’d had was at a restaurant called Chasen’s in West Hollywood.Simpson with Richard Burton in “The Klansman.”Moviestore Collection Ltd, via Alamy“Somebody made a call, and in an hour and a half they had a private jet bring a pot of chili from Chasen’s to Oroville, Calif.,” Simpson said in the interview. “Two hours later we’re eating chili and I’m saying, ‘I like this life.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Rufus Sewell Plays a Gasping Prince Andrew in ‘Scoop’

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      In the feature “Scoop,” streaming on Netflix, Rufus Sewell plays the disgraced royal blundering through a 2019 BBC interview.Before filming started on “Scoop,” a Netflix feature about Prince Andrew’s notoriously misjudged 2019 interview on the BBC, the actor Rufus Sewell, who stars as the disgraced royal, turned up on set to shoot a few photographs that would appear in the background. Loaded with makeup and prosthetics, including false teeth and a feathery wig, Sewell felt leaden and self-conscious, he said, fearful that his impersonation would slip into parody.Then, he recalled, he sat down opposite an elderly man working as an extra. Had they worked together before, the man asked Sewell; he looked vaguely familiar. “No,” Sewell told him, “but obviously I wouldn’t have looked like this.” The man seemed confused, and was even more bewildered when Sewell explained, “This isn’t my real face.” The extra laughed: “What do you mean it’s not your face?”This interaction, though strange, was very helpful, Sewell said in a recent video interview. “I realized that it wasn’t about passing for Andrew,” he added. Instead, the man “hadn’t doubted for a second that I was a human — that I was a real person,” Sewell said. “That gave me a real freedom and a lease on life.”The right way of playing Prince Andrew, Sewell said, was in “the uncanny valley between me and him.”Eamonn M. Mccormack/Getty ImagesSewell’s performance as Prince Andrew, who is also known as the Duke of York, is impressive, not so much because of the resemblance (which is, at times, striking), but because he slyly channels the spirit of the man who so horrified the British public by seeming to justify his friendship with the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Sewell avoids the typical pitfalls of playing a real person as a broad, exaggerated impersonation. His duke is a spasm of nervous tics and shifty glances, of unctuous charm and feigned candor. Watching the journalist Emily Maitlis (an excellent Gillian Anderson) walk in to conduct the interview wearing pants, he gawks at her and shouts, “Trousers!” It feels true to the Prince Andrew the public knows, however little viewers may not believe what the character says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Cole Brings Plenty, ’1923’ Actor, Is Found Dead

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      Mr. Brings Plenty, 27, was found dead in Kansas days after his family reported him missing. Officials did not provide a cause of death.Cole Brings Plenty, an actor in the television series “1923,” was found dead on Friday in Kansas after his family reported him missing earlier in the week, officials said.The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that its deputies had found Mr. Brings Plenty, 27, in a wooded area in Johnson County, which borders Missouri.The deputies had been responding to a report of an unoccupied vehicle and found him dead in an area away from it, the statement said. The office did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Brings Plenty, who identified himself as Mnicoujou Lakota on Instagram, played Pete Plenty Clouds, a Native American sheepherder, in the television show “1923,” a prequel to “Yellowstone.” The show depicts abuse toward Native American children in boarding schools established or supported by the government.In May 2023, Mr. Brings Plenty and his uncle Mo Brings Plenty visited the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in Washington to talk about the boarding schools and other issues affecting Native Americans.Mr. Brings Plenty’s acting credits also include the Western television shows “Into the Wild Frontier” and “The Tall Tales of Jim Bridger,” according to IMDb, the entertainment database. He was a student at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan.Mr. Brings Plenty’s father, Joe Brings Plenty Sr., confirmed his son’s death in a statement shared by a family spokeswoman, Michelle Shining Elk.“We would also like to thank everyone who came to walk beside us as we searched for my son and provided the resources we needed to expand our search areas,” Mr. Brings Plenty Sr. said in the statement.Mo Brings Plenty shared a missing person’s poster on social media that said his nephew went missing on March 31 and had missed an appointment with his agent, which was “uncharacteristic.”The poster said that Mr. Brings Plenty had last been seen in Lawrence, Kan.The Lawrence Police Department said in a statement that it had submitted an affidavit for the arrest of Mr. Brings Plenty after the police identified him as a suspect in a case of domestic violence that happened on the morning of March 31.The police said that officers had responded to a woman screaming for help in an apartment in Lawrence and that the suspect had fled before officers arrived.“This incident involves allegations of domestic violence, which limits the amount of information we can share to protect the victim,” the statement said.The police said that Mr. Brings Plenty’s family had contacted them, expressed concern and reported him as a missing person. Mr. Brings Plenty was found about 28 miles southeast of Lawrence. More

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      in Theater

      Rachel McAdams Is Not Afraid of the Dark

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      The actress makes her Broadway debut in “Mary Jane” as the single mother of a seriously ill child. She views her acting choices as expanding her orbit.From the outside, you wouldn’t know that Rachel McAdams, the thoughtfully charming star of blockbuster rom-coms, rom-drams, a Marvel franchise and the Oscar-winning “Spotlight,” has been wondering about death.Maybe it has to do with the therapist who said that her indecisiveness and deep curiosity about seeing through someone else’s eyes, which she’s harbored since childhood, could be chalked up to something called “death anxiety.”McAdams had long viewed her acting choices as expanding her orbit. “It’s been a way to live a lot of lives in one,” she said. If that was about a fear of dying — well, it didn’t rattle her.Instead, characteristically, she embraced it. “We don’t have a lot of great coping mechanisms for death in our culture,” she said. “So, yeah, I kind of welcome the opportunity to lean into that — earlier rather than later. Let’s get cozy with it. Let’s get cozy with that next adventure.”Death hovers like a specter around her latest role, as the single mother of a seriously ill child, in the play “Mary Jane.” McAdams hasn’t done theater since college; she makes her Broadway debut as the title character in this Manhattan Theater Club production, which began previews April 2 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. It’s by the busy playwright Amy Herzog, who also adapted Broadway’s show of the moment, Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People.”“Mary Jane” is the first of her own deceptively spare plays to appear on Broadway, after a celebrated run in 2017 at New York Theater Workshop. Dotted (surprisingly) with laugh lines, it’s about the daily muck and lasting profundity of caregiving, a nitty-gritty subject that’s rarely dramatized. “A heartbreaker for anyone human,” Jesse Green wrote in his New York Times review.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      To Live Long and Prosper, Do What George Takei Does

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      For the “Star Trek” actor and author of the new children’s book “My Lost Freedom,” it’s all about green tea and antioxidants. “I drink it every day, all day. I am an addict,” he says.When George Takei talks about his childhood, he speaks of both anguish and beauty.The actor best known as Sulu from “Star Trek” was only 5 when he and his family — like thousands of Japanese American citizens during World War II — were relocated from their Los Angeles home to a string of incarceration camps.Takei captured some of his family’s wartime experiences — in a horse stall in Arcadia, Calif., a camp in Rohwer, Ark., another one in Northern California — in his picture book, “My Lost Freedom,” due out April 16. “This is an American story that Americans need to know about,” he said in a video call.The book continues his mission to shed light on a dark chapter in U.S. history. It follows his 1994 autobiography “To the Stars,” his 2019 graphic memoir “They Called Us Enemy” and the 2015 musical production “Allegiance,” which was inspired by his life.Takei, 86, discussed meeting dignitaries with his husband, Brad, as well as the keepsakes he treasures and his one healthy addiction. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Seeing Your Work in LightsI got a phone call that the marquee for “Allegiance” was going up at 8 a.m. Our apartment was so close to Longacre Theater, in Manhattan, we ran down there to see the letters being put there. It was thrilling — a life landmark experience! I wished both my parents could be there.2Big BandAt Rohwer, my father arranged to borrow a record player from the camp administration every couple of months, and after dinner, the tables were dragged away, the benches were put off to the side, and the teenagers got to have a dance. My bedtime music was the music from the mess hall. I still get a lump in my throat when I hear big band music from the 1940s.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      How Zach Cherry, Actor From ‘Severance,’ Spends His Sundays

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      Before he hits the stage for an improv show, Mr. Cherry cuddles with his rescue dog, Shrek, battles his wife in video games and heads to the movies.Zach Cherry warns that his Sundays are “pretty boring” — with the caveat that boring, for him, means a wild, 90-minute improv comedy extravaganza of nerdy jokes.“The most fun part is standing there while other people are performing and laughing really hard,” said Mr. Cherry, a 36-year-old actor and comedian who performs most Sunday nights in the fully improvised comedy show “Raaaatscraps” at Caveat on the Lower East Side. The show features a rotating cast of performers that also includes Jeff Hiller of the HBO comedy “Somebody Somewhere” and Connor Ratliff from “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Mr. Cherry is best known for his role as the snarky overachiever Dylan in the dystopian Apple TV+ workplace thriller series “Severance.” On Thursday, Amazon Prime Video is set to release his latest project, “Fallout,” a postapocalyptic series based on the popular role-playing video game franchise. Mr. Cherry, a self-identified gamer, said he has played many of the nine games in the franchise.“But I often get kind of overwhelmed and don’t finish them because they’re so gigantic and there’s so much going on,” he said.Mr. Cherry, who was born in Trenton, N.J., lives in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn with his wife of almost two years, Anabella Cherry, 30, who teaches English as a second language at Hunter College, and their newly adopted 2-year-old rescue dog, Shrek.A SUMMONS FROM NARNIA I have the Bedtime function on my iPhone set to wake me up at 7 a.m., but almost every day I click “change for one day only” and move it later. I actually wake up around 9 a.m. I use the generic “Early Riser” tone — I’ve never changed it — which starts soft then gets gradually louder. It sounds like something you’d wake up to very gently in Narnia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Willy Wonka’s Unknown Lands a New Acting Gig in London

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      The internet latched on to 16-year-old Felicia Dawkins’ performance as The Unknown at a shambolic Willy Wonka-inspired event. This weekend, she’s heading to a bigger and scarier stage in London.On one chilly evening in March, after the sun had set and when most school-aged children were begrudgingly starting their homework, Felicia Dawkins, 16, enthusiastically hopped on the phone from Scotland to share that her life had changed — for the better.She introduced herself with the kind of bubbly energy and giddiness that only a teenager can radiate. It is the same energy that drew millions of viewers to her TikTok account, where she unveiled herself as a key participant in a Willy Wonka-themed event that had gone so poorly that its memes briefly took over large portions of the internet and international news coverage went on for days.That event, in Glasgow in late February, failed to create the dazzling experience it promised. The fallout — in true internet fashion — was swift and brutal. Organizers quickly shut down the event and promised full refunds to disgruntled families.In the aftermath, the internet latched on to one of the event’s more inexplicable characters, known only as “The Unknown,” played by Felicia. Footage of her performance as an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls of the factory, which included emerging from behind a mirror to the cries of children, spread widely online, kicking off the teenager’s 15 minutes of fame.She’s capitalizing now, taking her scaring talents south for a guest appearance at the London Dungeon, a theatrical thrill attraction in the shadow of the city’s London Eye, this weekend. The company reached out to Felicia shortly after her viral moment to invite her to train with the performance team and appear in the attraction. “We could see she has a real passion and talent, for theater and interactions with guests,” Richard Quincey, the head of performance at London Dungeon and South Bank Attractions, said in a statement.Felicia’s mother, Janet Dawkins, said she had mixed emotions about the Wonka event failing so miserably, and so publicly. “Everything led to her getting all of this, all these opportunities,” Ms. Dawkins said. “So, I can’t really say that I’m mad about anything that went down, if I’m honest.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      #MeToo Stalled in France. Judith Godrèche Might Be Changing That.

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      Judith Godrèche did not set out to relaunch the #MeToo movement in France’s movie industry.She came back to Paris from Los Angeles in 2022 to work on “Icon of French Cinema,” a TV series she wrote, directed and starred in — a satirical poke at her acting career that also recounts how, at the age of 14, she entered into an abusive relationship with a film director 25 years older.Then, a week after the show aired, in late December, a viewer’s message alerted her to a 2011 documentary that she says made her throw up and start shaking as if she were “naked in the snow.”There was the same film director, admitting that their relationship had been a “transgression” but arguing that “making films is a kind of cover” for forms of “illicit traffic.”She went to the police unit specialized in crimes against children — its waiting room was filled with toys and a giant teddy bear, she recalls — to file a report for rape of a minor.“There I was,” said Ms. Godrèche, now 52, “at the right place, where I’ve been waiting to be since I was 14.”Since then, Ms. Godrèche has been on a campaign to expose the abuse of children and women that she believes is stitched into the fabric of French cinema. Barely a week has gone by without her appearance on television and radio, in magazines and newspapers, and even before the French Parliament, where she demanded an inquiry into sexual violence in the industry and protective measures for children.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More