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      Kate Winslet on ‘The Regime’ and Resilience In Hollywood

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      Kate Winslet was standing in front of a microphone, breathing hard. Sometimes she did it fast; sometimes she slowed it down. Sometimes the breathing sounded anxious; other times, it was clearly the gasping of someone who was winded. Before beginning a new take, Winslet stood stock still, hands opening and closing at her sides; she looked like a gymnast about to bound into a floor routine. Every breath seemed high-stakes, even though she was well into a long day of recording in a dim, windowless studio in London. Listen to this article, read by Kirsten PotterOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Winslet was adding grace notes to scenes of herself in “The Regime,” a dark satire created by Will Tracy, a writer and producer on “Succession,” that began airing on Max in early March. Winslet plays Elena Vernham, a dictator ruling precariously over an imaginary Central European country, and she was in the studio rerecording (as is common practice) lines that needed improving, including snippets of Elena’s propaganda: “Even if the protests happening in Westgate were real, which they are not” and “He’s still out there, working with the global elite to destroy everything we’ve built.” Sometimes Winslet laughed out loud after delivering a line, and sometimes she fell completely silent, absorbed in watching a scene of herself with her new recording looped in. “God, she’s such an awful, awful cow,” she said at one point, sounding appalled but also a little awed. The part of Elena, a despot on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is a departure for Winslet, who has chosen, over the course of her career, a wide range of characters who have in common an intrinsic power. Elena is erratic and grasping, with a facade of strength that covers up a sinkhole of oozing insecurity. Winslet gave a lot of thought to how Elena would sound: She chose a high, tight voice, the sound of someone disconnected from the feelings that reside deep in the body. Elena has the slightest of speech impediments, a strange move she makes with her mouth, a hand that flies to her cheek when she is under real stress — those tells are her answer to King Richard’s hump, the body politic deformed. Onscreen, as Elena, Winslet is coifed and practically corseted into form-fitting skirt suits, with lacquered fake nails. The day she was recording, in early January, Winslet might have been any woman at the office: blond hair, a hint of roots starting to show, jeans of no particular timely style that she occasionally tugged up from the waist, a black V-neck sweater she occasionally pulled down at the hem. It’s only when you look directly at her, face to face, that you see the extraordinary — the dark blue eyes, the beauty marks (not one, but two), the elaborately curved mouth.As Winslet recorded, Stephen Frears, one of the show’s two directors, guided Winslet with considerable understatement from his seat across the room: a half-nod here, a thumbs-up there. “Was that all right, Stephen?” Winslet called over after one take; she peered over in his direction, expectant, obedient, professional. Frears, who directed “The Queen” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” among others, was silent, with his eyes closed, his head back. Winslet and a few members of the production team waited for his approval. As the moment stretched on, it seemed that Frears was not deep in thought but deep in sleep. Winslet appeared to register a brief moment of surprise, then smiled and moved on — all right, no problem. 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

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Sarayu Blue Is Pristine on ‘Expats’ but ‘Such a Little Weirdo’ IRL

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      Blue performs alongside Nicole Kidman in the Prime Video series, but when she’s not working, she said, “I genuinely love just sitting somewhere and getting lost in a daydream.”Sarayu Blue describes Hilary Starr, the affluent professional she plays in the Prime Video series “Expats,” as sharp. Very sharp.“Hilary is somebody who presents herself in a very pristine manner,” Blue said of her character, who lives with her lawyer husband in Hong Kong. “She has a very specific and controlled way of handling her life. She likes her makeup put together, and her wardrobe is very neutral and tight and sleek.”“And then what’s really cool about the show is you get to see just how that sharpness starts to fragment and what happens as it falls apart,” she added.Set in 2014 amid pro-democracy protests in the city, “Expats” focuses on three American women, played by Blue, Ji-young Yoo and Nicole Kidman.“Before you get into it, you’re sort of like, ‘Oh my god, I’m about to work with Nicole [expletive] Kidman,’” Blue recalled. But she quickly got a grip, as Hilary would have.“What Nicole really brings to the table is she’s in it with you,” Blue said. “She doesn’t want to create any pomp and circumstance around the actual work.”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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      Josh Brolin Never Thought He’d End Up in Malibu

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      How the “Dune” actor made a home in a place he once resisted.IN HIS EARLY 20s, long before he became a leading man, Josh Brolin took a writing class taught by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. One of the assignments was to create an evocative phrase by combining two words. A fellow student came up with “Tylenol Christ”; Brolin, an enthusiastic storyteller, had trouble being that succinct. The experience has been on the actor’s mind recently as he finishes his forthcoming memoir, a mix of stories, anecdotes and poems scheduled to come out this fall. In a recently completed essay, he describes chasing a flock of sheep with two of his children when they were young on Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye. (His son, Trevor, and eldest daughter, Eden, both from his first marriage to the actress Alice Adair, are now 36 and 31.) To their horror, one of the fleeing animals broke its back. “It’s about what had to transpire for the next hour,” says Brolin, 56, from his writing hut in Malibu, Calif., a gift from his wife of nearly eight years, the photographer Kathryn Boyd Brolin, 37, who modeled it after ones used by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. “It’s the clearest, most emotional thing I’ve written.”The actor gives a tour of his guesthouse and Airstream trailer in Malibu, Calif.Megan LovalloBrolin looks and presents like a modern-day cowboy. He was raised 200 miles up the Pacific Coast on a horse ranch in Paso Robles and inherited that property (which he sold in 2004 and bought back in 2010) from his mother, the wildlife conservationist Jane Cameron Agee, who died in a car accident the day after his 27th birthday. Although his father, the actor James Brolin, relocated to Malibu, where he now lives with his wife, Barbra Streisand, Brolin had always rejected the seaside community as a place for, as he puts it, celebrities “trying not to be seen as they’re trying to be seen.” He prefers the lawless energy of nearby Venice, in Los Angeles, where he’s been renting a beachfront apartment for almost 15 years. But in 2011, Brolin, who frequently looks at online real estate listings in bed, came across a 2,400-square-foot bungalow on one and a half acres in a part of Malibu once known as Poor Point. With money he made from “Men in Black 3” (2012), he bought the charmingly rundown four-bedroom house, which spoke, he says, to his “misfit, outcast mentality,” from the musician Jakob Dylan. Brolin, who also has a home in Atlanta, rented it out for years.Brolin’s Airstream trailer is furnished with a trefoil table by Herman Studio for Form & Refine and decorated with wallpaper by Anna Hayman Designs and custom pillows by Pierce & Ward.Ryan James CaruthersIn the guesthouse’s kitchen, a custom range hood in unlacquered brass with walnut accents and a 1960s Bijou desk lamp by Louis Kalff for Philips.Ryan James CaruthersIn 2018, he and Kathryn, who once worked as his assistant, decided to fix up the place and live there themselves. When the minimalist style of the first designer they hired didn’t align with Brolin’s vision — “Neutral makes no sense to me at all,” he says — Kathryn suggested they reach out to Louisa Pierce and Emily Ward, known professionally as Pierce & Ward. (Coincidentally, it was Ward’s partner, the actor Giovanni Ribisi, who had nearly outbid Brolin to buy the house.) The duo understood Brolin’s taste for what he calls “nutty kaleidoscope” and “Old World European busyness”: The walls of the residence are painted or papered in powdery colors, floral motifs and stripes; a playroom for the couple’s two daughters — Westlyn, 5, and Chapel, 3 — has been made to resemble the berth of a ship; the living and dining rooms are decorated with worn leather armchairs, creaky wooden tables and sun-faded kilim rugs. Except for the fake Academy Award in a closet that they use as a wet bar — and Brolin’s casual mentions of “Clooney’s place in the South of France” and “Momoa’s hundred motorcycles” — there’s barely any suggestion of Hollywood. “I was so in their face in the beginning [of the renovation],” he says about Pierce and Ward. “I’d send them hundreds of photographs. And then I thought, ‘The more I try to affect this whole thing, the worse it’s going to get.’ So I backed off.”Jay Miriam’s “The French Girls” (2019) hangs in the guesthouse’s pool table room.Ryan James CaruthersIn the living room, Holmes’s “Behind Golden Bars 2” (2021).Ryan James CaruthersWe 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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Richard Lewis, Comedian and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Actor, Dies at 76

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      After rising to prominence for his stand-up act, he became a regular in movies and TV, most recently on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who first achieved fame in the 1970s and ’80s with his trademark acerbic, dark sense of humor, and who later parlayed that quality into an acting career that included movies like “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” and a recurring role as himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.His publicist, Jeff Abraham, said the cause was a heart attack. Mr. Lewis announced last year that he had Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Lewis was among the best-known names in a generation of comedians who came of age during the 1970s and ’80s, marked by a world-weary, sarcastic wit that mapped well onto the urban malaise in which many of them plied their trade.After finding success as a comedian in New York nightclubs, he became a regular on late-night talk shows, favored as much for his tight routine as for his casual, open affability as an interviewee. He appeared on “Late Night With David Letterman” 48 times.And he was at the forefront of the boom in stand-up comedy that came with the expansion of cable television in the late 1980s.Mr. Lewis performing as a standup in Las Vegas in 2005. He called himself “the Prince of Pain.” Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesWe 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

      Micheline Presle, Actress Known for ‘Devil in the Flesh,’ Dies at 101

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      A link to France’s first golden age of cinema, she drew international attention for a 1947 film that created a scandal in France and was banned in Britain for years.Micheline Presle, a subtle and elegant actress who was a last link to the first golden age of French cinema, died on Feb. 21 in Nogent-sur-Marne, a suburb of Paris. She was 101.Her death, at the Maison des Artistes, a retirement home for artists partly funded by the government, was confirmed by her son-in-law, Olivier Bomsel.Ms. Presle (pronounced prell) was the final survivor of a trio of actresses — Danièlle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan were the other two — who were already stars in France by the outbreak of World War II, and who defined a certain style of French femininity, both at home and abroad. Ms. Presle’s subtle facial expressions conjured a wide range of human emotions, particularly in two films that, by critical consent, she never surpassed, “Le Diable au Corps,” or “Devil in the Flesh” (1947), and “Boule de Suif” (1945).A poster for “Le Diable au Corps,” known in English as “Devil in The Flesh,” featuring Ms. Presle and Gerard Philipe. The film was, one critic said, “the major work of her career.”Everette CollectionBoth of those films were based on masterpieces of French literature: The first was adapted from a novel by the brilliant but short-lived author Raymond Radiguet; the second from two short stories by Guy de Maupassant. These subtle and complex tales drew on Ms. Presle’s versatility.“Le Diable au Corps” depicted the passionate affair between a young woman, played by Ms. Presle, whose husband was away fighting in the trenches in World War I, and a teenage schoolboy, played by the very young Gérard Philipe, who during his brief career was both France’s leading heartthrob and its greatest actor.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 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      In ‘Elsbeth,’ a Quirky Side Character Becomes a Quirky Lead

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      This CBS procedural is new, but its star, Carrie Preston, has been playing the central character for almost 14 years.While filming the new crime show “Elsbeth” in an Upper West Side apartment in January, Carrie Preston, playing the title character, tentatively patted the guest star Peter Grosz on the arm. The combination of the gesture and Elsbeth’s hesitant expression made the attempt at comfort come across as simultaneously awkward and funny — and unmistakably true to the consistently awkward, funny Elsbeth.Robert King, who created the series with his wife, Michelle, and was directing that particular episode, chuckled in delight as he watched on a monitor. Nearby the showrunner, Jonathan Tolins, said, “She always finds things like that,” referring to Preston’s flourish. “That was probably not in the script.”Premiering Thursday on CBS, “Elsbeth” is a new project but Elsbeth herself is not. One reason Preston inhabits her fully enough to improvise such small, telling gestures is because she has been playing her for almost 14 years.Fans of legal dramas have long been acquainted with Elsbeth Tascioni, a seemingly scatterbrained but diabolically effective redheaded lawyer who popped up toward the end of the first season of “The Good Wife” in May 2010. From the start, the Kings, who also created that hit show, thought of Elsbeth as an answer to Columbo, the Los Angeles homicide detective that Peter Falk played in a series, then specials, between 1968 and 2003.“I didn’t really watch ‘Columbo’ — it was a little before my time,” said Preston, 56. But “I knew he was a little unorthodox in the way he did things. I was like, ‘OK, I get it: They want people to not see her coming.’”The Kings kept bringing Elsbeth back for guest stints on both “The Good Wife” and its first spinoff, “The Good Fight.” Despite her relatively limited screen time, she became a fan favorite, and Preston landed two Emmy nominations and one win, in 2013, for playing her.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

      Chris Gauthier, ‘Once Upon a Time’ and Hallmark Movies Actor, Dies at 48

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      Mr. Gauthier appeared in dozens of television shows and films, including “Freddy vs. Jason” and “Watchmen.”Chris Gauthier, a prolific actor known for his roles in the television shows “Once Upon a Time” and “Eureka,” died on Friday. He was 48.Tristar Appearances/Event Horizon Talent, which represented Mr. Gauthier, said in a statement that he died “after a brief illness.” His representatives did not say where he died.Mr. Gauthier, who was born in Britain and grew up in Canada, had roles in more than 20 movies, including “Freddy vs. Jason” in 2003 and “Watchmen” in 2009. He also appeared in dozens of television shows, including “Smallville,” “Charmed” and “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” according to IMDb, and in several short films.He was best known for playing William Smee in “Once Upon A Time,” a series that blended real life and fantasy in the fictional town of Storybrooke, Maine, where storybook characters live, trapped by an evil queen. Mr. Gauthier appeared in 14 episodes as Smee, who is based on the “Peter Pan” character Mr. Smee, Captain Hook’s first mate.Mr. Gauthier also played Vincent, a cafe owner, on the science fiction TV series “Eureka.” He appeared in 67 episodes of that show, from the pilot episode and through Season 5, according to IMDb.In an interview in 2021, Mr. Gauthier said that he started acting in school plays and that he acted in amateur and professional theater during high school.“I was always a ham, trying to be a funny guy,” he said.Chris Gauthier was born on Jan. 27, 1976, in Luton, England. He said in an interview in 2020 that he moved to Canada when he was 5 and grew up in a small town in British Columbia.“There wasn’t a lot going on there in terms of film and television,” he said. “So for me, it was about just the love of acting. It wasn’t about money. It wasn’t about anything but the sheer love of acting.”His acting career onscreen began in 2000, when he appeared in an episode of the TV series “Cold Squad.” His first two film credits were in 2002 for small roles in “40 Days and 40 Nights” and “Insomnia.”His television roles were largely limited to appearances in one or a few episodes until “Eureka” premiered in 2006. The show takes place in the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Eureka, where many of the world’s brightest minds live in an odd collective that produces technological inventions the rest of the world does not know about.Among his more recent credits, Mr. Gauthier had appeared in seven episodes of the western drama “Joe Pickett.”Information about his survivors was not immediately available.He said in the 2021 interview, his partner encouraged him to move to Vancouver to pursue an acting career in television and film.“I wasn’t super-duper motivated because I was happy doing plays,” he said of the move. “But I was like ‘OK,’ and it worked out.” More

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      in Television

      ‘Abbott Elementary’ Teaches Reading, Writing and Roll Camera

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      Each season of the ABC sitcom employs about 150 children. Its core curriculum: schooling Hollywood in what a show with child actors can be.Willis Kwakye has attended the same school since 2021. He’s 13 now, an eighth grader, a veteran, someone who knows his way around the classrooms and the cafeteria. And sometimes, when he’s in his uniform with a math worksheet in front of him, “I can even think it’s real school for a little bit,” he said.His classmate Arianna White, also 13, knew just what he meant. “It feels a lot like school, except we’re just filming and there’s a lot of cuts,” she said.Kwakye and White were speaking, via video call, from a classroom on the set of “Abbott Elementary.” (They were in one of the real classrooms, where child actors complete their mandated three hours of instruction per work day.) The Emmy-winning ABC sitcom mockumentary has recently matriculated for a third season and already been renewed for a fourth. Set in a fictional K-8 school in Philadelphia — though actually filmed in Los Angeles — it requires the presence of about 150 school-age children each season.In any given episode, those kids can be seen raising their hands in class, scurrying past each other in the hallways, giggling at their teachers’ antics. But “Abbott Elementary” diverges from most scripted series involving children in two significant ways: The show uses its child actors sparingly, giving them a handful of lines per episode and only requiring their presence one or two days each week. And for the most part, it lets them be kids.“Having kids just be themselves actually looks really good in our world,” Quinta Brunson, the series creator and star, said in a recent phone interview.Willis Kwakye, center, in an episode of “Abbott Elementary.” Tyler James Williams, a star of the show, said, “Part of being a child actor comes with a certain amount of trauma,” and “Abbott” aims to avoid that.Gilles Mingasson/ABCWe 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