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James Nachtwey, an eminent photojournalist known for his intimate depictions of the front lines in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, had never photographed a movie star before. So for this year’s Great Performers issue, we asked him to capture a dozen of the world’s best actors away from the red carpets and awards ceremonies […] More
A couple of years ago, Jeffrey Wright got an email from the screenwriter Cord Jefferson, who was preparing to direct his first film. Jefferson wanted Wright — a cerebral actor known for his commanding, indelible presence even in supporting roles — to star in “American Fiction,” his adaptation of Percival Everett’s mordant 2001 novel, “Erasure.”“In the letter, Cord described how immediate and personal he found ‘Erasure’ to be,” Wright recalled recently. “And he said that he had begun to hear my voice in his head as he read the book. And then he said, ‘I have no Plan B.’”Wright, who is 58, took the job. His exquisitely calibrated performance as the irascible novelist Thelonious Ellison, known as Monk, recently earned him his first Oscar nomination. It is a recognition, among other things, of his ability to elevate any movie or TV show simply by appearing in it. He has a way of burrowing so deeply into his characters that he seems almost to be hiding in plain sight.From the bracing opening scene of “American Fiction,” in which a slur appears on a blackboard as part of the title of a Flannery O’Connor short story Monk is teaching to a class of college students, the film wades into thorny issues of race, authenticity and what white audiences demand from Black artists — and has great satirical fun doing it.“It’s a conversation that’s at the center of the national dialogue right now, but we lack a fluency in how we discuss race — gasp! — and history and language and context and identity,” Wright said. He was being interviewed at the Four Seasons in Manhattan before flying to Britain to receive the London Film Critics’ Circle’s top award.While (obviously) the film doesn’t solve the problems it identifies, he said, at least it’s willing to engage with them.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
His charming memoir “What Have We Here?” traces the path from a Harlem childhood to “Star Wars,” while lamenting the roles that never came his way.WHAT HAVE WE HERE? Portraits of a Life, by Billy Dee WilliamsMy first awareness of Billy Dee Williams was the stuff of hushed beauty parlor conversation I was too young to appreciate. “After all these years he’s still fine,” elders whispered in my periphery as they flipped through an interview in an Ebony magazine that was treated as an heirloom. His piercing gaze leaped out across time. “That’s our Billy!” another giggled.As he tells it in “What Have We Here?,” his effortlessly charming new memoir, the actor’s only ambition was to be everyone’s Billy — a star to cross color lines. Modeling his life on visions of old Hollywood glamour, he wanted to be heralded not just by Black women fantasizing about their chance to be with him, but by teens, men, children, and people of all colors and circumstances.Playing Lando Calrissian in the “Star Wars” trilogy — the debonair, cape-wearing and bravado-filled hero of interstellar proportions — eventually granted Williams his wish, catapulting him into the public stratosphere. “He wasn’t written Black or white,” Williams points out. “He was beyond that. Bigger than that. … He was a star.”Williams was born in 1937 at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic and cultural movement of the 1920s and ’30s when Black possibility bloomed. Nina Mae McKinney, believed to be the first Black actress with a Hollywood contract, and Hulan Jack, Manhattan’s first Black borough president, lived on his block on West 110th Street.He and his twin sister, nicknamed Lady, were welcomed into a world stitched together with love he would spend his life emulating. Their grandmother Annette Lewis Bodkin, the “Queen Dowager” of the home, laid down the rule of law. Loretta Bodkin, their mother, was a trained opera singer and friend of Lena Horne who dreamed of fame and toiled to ensure her children could do what she was unable to. Their father, William December Williams, was a laborer who worked long hours to support his family — and helped his son develop a sense of style.“He taught me how to put a hat on,” Williams writes, “using two fingers and a thumb, grasping the brim in a way that prevented my fingerprints from smearing the crown.”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
Christopher Nolan and Robert Downey Jr. have each worked on some of the most lucrative and beloved superhero films of our time, many of them with enormous star-filled casts, so how is it that the two had never worked together on a movie before now, superhero or otherwise?Their paths crossed, sort of, on “Batman Begins” (more on that later). But it took a different kind of summer blockbuster, a three-hour biopic about the triumphs and travails of a theoretical physicist working in New Mexico in the 1940s, to finally bring them together.Since its release in July, “Oppenheimer” has amassed nearly $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales, earned critical raves and been nominated for scores of awards, including 13 Oscars. Among those nominations are three for Nolan, 53, for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay, and a best supporting actor one for Downey, 58, for his performance as Lewis Strauss, the title character’s Salieri-like nemesis. The nominations are hardly their first — counting “Oppenheimer,” Downey has received three, Nolan, eight — but neither has ever won before and now they’re both considered front-runners.The day after the Oscar nominations were announced, the two got together on the Universal studio lot to talk about how they first met, what winning an Oscar would mean to them, and why so many people didn’t notice that that balding, sweaty guy who had it in for Oppenheimer was actually Robert Downey Jr.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Nolan working with Downey on “Oppenheimer.”Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesThis is your first time working together. How did you two meet?ROBERT DOWNEY JR. Here’s what I never got to ask you. We met in a lobby somewhere. You were casting, was it “Batman Begins” or “The Dark Knight”?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
When the star of the film “Sometimes I Think About Dying” listens to “This Is What I Mean,” she says, “I don’t shuffle it, nothing. It’s perfect.”For her latest movie, “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” Daisy Ridley plays Fran, a drab, standoffish, occasionally obnoxious office worker. Strangely enough, she found it exciting.“Fran is a woman who loves her job; she loves her routine,” Ridley said in a video interview from London. “She thinks about dying, but she doesn’t want to die. She has just created this very rich inner world for herself because she struggles to connect with people in a real-life way.”Then a new guy moves into a cubicle near hers.“I would not say the film is one of fireworks,” she said. “I would describe it as embers of something being ignited.”Ridley is of course better known for her role as Rey in the “Star Wars” films. She will wield her lightsaber once again in the upcoming “Star Wars: New Jedi Order,” although she hadn’t yet read the script when we spoke.“What I know is the story is really cool, really exciting and very worthwhile,” she said, before explaining why hot baths and reality TV and “Small Worlds” by Caleb Azumah Nelson and Stormzy’s “This Is What I Mean” are among her cultural necessities. “I did not think I would be coming back, but when I was told the story, I was like, ‘OK, that’s [expletive] awesome.’”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Back RollersI did a film called “Young Woman and the Sea,” about the first woman to swim the [English] Channel, a German American called Trudy Ederle. I was doing an awful lot of swimming, and my body was pretty messed up afterward. My spine felt like it had been a bit compressed. So since that movie, whenever I roll, my back goes crrrkk the whole way. But there’s nothing nicer than the feeling.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
The actor denied physical abuse. Separately, he said he wasn’t told of accusations of misbehavior on the set of “Lovecraft Country.”Since the actor Jonathan Majors was found guilty in December of assaulting and harassing a girlfriend, he has maintained his innocence and his hope of reviving a once-skyrocketing career that disintegrated in the wake of his conviction. In a televised interview last month, he said that he had “never struck a woman.”But in pretrial statements to the prosecution in that assault case and, separately, in interviews with The New York Times, another former girlfriend, Emma Duncan, accused him of emotionally and physically abusing her — choking her, throwing her around and bruising her. A third, Maura Hooper, also said that he had emotionally abused her.Speaking publicly for the first time, Ms. Duncan and Ms. Hooper, actresses who dated Mr. Majors before he shot to fame as the supervillain Kang in Marvel projects, described him as a controlling, threatening figure who isolated them from friends and career pursuits. “You lose your sense of worth,” Ms. Duncan said.And in interviews with former colleagues, The Times found that Mr. Majors had a history of volatility on the set of the HBO series “Lovecraft Country” that included confrontations with female co-workers that led them to complain to the network.On Thursday afternoon, a lawyer for Mr. Majors, Priya Chaudhry, said that Mr. Majors had not physically abused Ms. Duncan. She described the relationships with both women as “toxic” and said that Mr. Majors was taking responsibility for his role in them. She added that “countless” women in the entertainment industry “can attest to his professionalism.”This article is based on interviews with 20 people, including some who requested anonymity for fear of career repercussions, and on statements submitted to the prosecution in the December case, in which Mr. Majors was found guilty of harassment and misdemeanor assault of Grace Jabbari, a former girlfriend. He is scheduled to be sentenced in April, though his lawyers asked on Tuesday that the judge throw out the jury’s guilty verdict.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
Delivering a deluge of hard jokes, this double act aims directly for the nostalgic pleasure centers of their fans.To hear them tell it, the origin story of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, one of our greatest comedy duos, hinges on a moment in 1994 on tour with Second City in Waco, Texas, when they met an Australian woman wearing a sling who spoke “lovingly” about the return of the dead cult leader David Koresh.The comedians turned to each other and mouthed in unison: “Let’s get out of here,” in coarser language.“I knew I had a partner for life,” Poehler said with feeling on their new Restless Leg Tour, which has set up shop at the Beacon Theater in New York through Feb 18. “And I knew,” Fey added in a drier, deeper register, “that we would be very evenly matched work friends.”The comedy double act has been making a comeback. Chris Rock and Kevin Hart just released a documentary about touring together, which ends with them onstage riffing off each other. Jim Gaffigan and Jerry Seinfeld have joined forces. But it was Steve Martin and Martin Short who kicked off this trend, with a long-running live show in which their love for each other comes through in bruising insult comedy.Poehler and Fey mount a similarly punchy, warmly hilarious variety act that aims directly for the nostalgic pleasure centers of their fans. When Fey asks if there are dads in the crowd who had either of the comics as hall passes two decades ago, many hands shoot up. If the phrase “mom jeans” makes you instantly crack up, you will love this show. Whereas Short and Martin built a roasting antagonistic relationship, this is a more affectionate and fleshed-out portrait of friendship, a study in contrasts (the musical “Wicked” is referenced more than once). Fey is all sharp edges and slashing wit, her deadpan unshakable, keeping the audience and her partner at a distance. Poehler is more vulnerable, even a bit fragile, discussing kids, trauma or aging. “My memory is like a cat: It will not come when called.”The show itself is a throw-everything-at-the-wall mess, a visually indifferent collection of parts, some that probably would have been cut or honed by a ruthless director. The stars begin in gowns and end in pajamas; they perform sharp, award show-style monologues, a freewheeling question-and-answer session and some disappointing improv, which is swallowed up in the vast theater.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
The “Holdovers” star Da’Vine Joy Randolph has had a charmed run through awards season so far: Considered the favorite for the supporting actress Oscar, she has already taken the Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award and prestigious trophies from both the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association.The 37-year-old actress is well-aware of the power of those prizes, and knows that even being in the Oscar conversation can change the course of a career. But does that mean her awards season has been easy to navigate?“It’s overwhelming, if I’m being really honest,” Randolph told me in a candid conversation last week. “You really do earn your stripes going through this awards-season thing.”A monthslong Oscar campaign can be more arduous than people realize: a pileup of Q. and A.s, wardrobe fittings, round tables, photo shoots, interviews, red carpets, ceremonies, movie premieres, cocktail parties and festival appearances that demand always-on levels of poise and adrenaline. Everyone you meet at these events wants something from you — a conversation, a selfie, an autograph, an acceptance speech — and at the end of these glitzy and exhausting nights, there’s not much left over for yourself.Randolph is no novice: Tony-nominated for her role in “Ghost the Musical” (2012), she earned Oscar chatter for her breakout film performance in “Dolemite Is His Name” (2019) and has worked steadily in films like “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (2021) and TV shows including “Only Murders in the Building,” “The Idol” and “High Fidelity.” Still, nothing she has experienced so far compares to the white-hot awards spotlight shone on her in the wake of “The Holdovers,” and Randolph is still figuring out how to adjust to its glare.Clockwise from top left, Randolph in “Ghost the Musical”; “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” with Andra Day; “The Holdovers,” opposite Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa; and “Dolemite Is His Name,” starring Eddie Murphy.Clockwise from top left: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; Takashi Seida/Paramount Pictures and Hulu; Seacia Pavao/Focus Features; François Duhamel/NetflixWe 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
