Actors and Actresses

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      10 Works and Performances That Helped Me Make Sense of 2023

      by

      Global conflict and personal loss encouraged our critic to seek out art that gave her a better understanding of grief and healing.“I hope you don’t mind if we carry on,” Juicy says at the end of “Fat Ham.” The other characters in the play then begin cleaning and clearing the stage, an act that affirms Juicy’s proposition and, in this work inspired by Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, suggests that there might be a way for them to work through their shared trauma together.Those words hit me hard when I heard them last spring. I was staving off my own mourning as my family prepared for the 10th anniversary of my brother Shaka’s death from cancer. That, coupled with political crises and global despair, pushed me to find film, television and performances that helped me make sense of my grief and, hopefully, find a release for it.‘Fat Ham’I almost didn’t see what ended up as one of my favorite plays of the year. I could not wrap my head around the story line of a Black, queer, “Hamlet”-like play, even after it had won over my fellow critics and earned the Pulitzer Prize for best drama. Then I saw it on Broadway. I was startled by its clever transformation of an Elizabethan-era depressive into Gen Z ennui through its main character Juicy (Marcel Spears), a 20-something mourning his father’s death as well as the hyper-masculinity that his family and society impose on him. Though Juicy sneaks glances and shares asides with the audience, “Fat Ham” truly breaks theater’s fourth wall when the cast stages a surreal group cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” and then again with its unexpectedly liberatory final scene that invites us to join them in a party filled with glitter, gender fluidity and Black joy. (Read our review of “Fat Ham.”)The Last Season of ‘Succession’Who knew that if you killed off Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the show’s most dynamic character, his children would easily make up for his lost charisma? The “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, that’s who knew. I can’t think of three more heart-wrenching performances of parental loss than Shiv (Sarah Snook), her voice breaking as she pleads, “Daddy? I love you. Don’t go, please. Not now,” on the phone; Roman (Kieran Culkin), breaking down during his eulogy; and Kendall (Jeremy Strong), the most tragic, as he loses his bid to replace his father as chief executive. In the end, Kendall simply stares out at the water rather than being buoyed up or submerged in it as he has been in the past. A man without a company, it is a fate that, for him, is far worse than death. (Read our review of the “Succession” finale.)‘A Thousand and One’In “A Thousand and One,” Teyana Taylor plays Inez, a mother scarred by her childhood in foster care. Aaron Kingsley Adetola plays Terry.Focus FeaturesWinner of a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, A.V. Rockwell’s debut feature, “A Thousand and One,” sensitively explores the failure of society’s safety nets to protect Black families and the lengths Black mothers will go to ensure their children’s future. But underneath that story is another: one about the personal voids we try to fill. Appearing in her first leading role, Teyana Taylor plays Inez, a mother scarred by her childhood in foster care. She infused this character with such electricity and vitality that I found myself championing her every move, even, or especially, her most morally ambiguous decisions. (Read our interview with the director.)‘Past Lives’What if someone you pined for turns out to be your soul mate, not in this life, but another? This tension drives Celine Song’s debut film “Past Lives,” a tender portrait of two adults, Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who forged a special bond as classmates in Seoul but lost touch over the years. Their poignant performances and Song’s intimate directing style make the chemistry between these two characters believable. But, we, and they, are left with the sense that the chasm caused by immigration (and the self-invention it requires) is insurmountable, making longing the most consistent emotion available to them. (Read our review of “Past Lives.”)‘Purlie Victorious’When he first conceived of writing a play based on his childhood in rural, segregated Georgia, Ossie Davis tried to write it straight. Once he realized that satire was better suited to capture the absurdity and tragedy of American racism, he premiered his first play, “Purlie Victorious.” Back on Broadway 62 years later, the play, directed by Kenny Leon, stars Leslie Odom Jr. as the ambitious preacher Purlie and Kara Young as Lutibelle, a naïve young woman he brings home to impersonate a dead cousin whose inheritance Purlie wants. The resulting ruckus undercuts an enduring racial stereotype — that all Black people look alike — while sharing a radical vision of Black pride and interracial solidarity. Odom is a mesmerizing triumph and Young a hilarious tour de force, while this is Leon (“Fences,” “Topdog/Underdog”) at his very best. (Read our interview with the cast and director.)Jeffrey Wright in ‘American Fiction’Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in “American Fiction.” Ellison is torn between staying true to his highbrow literary vision and caricaturing Black life to make money and take care of his mother. via TIFFJeffrey Wright is a consummate screen stealer — this year alone, I wanted more speeches from his General Gibson in “Asteroid City” and more shade from his Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in “Rustin.” But not since “Basquiat” in 1996 have I seen Wright as a lead in a feature-length film, and his performance in Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” reminds us what an actual loss this is for those of us who love watching movies. He wholly embodies Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a novelist who, in the process of mourning the death of his father and sister, is torn between staying true to his highbrow literary vision and caricaturing Black life to make money and take care of his mother. Wright gives a nuanced, captivating performance, punctuated with humor, anger, desire and vulnerability, while his character conveys the frustrations of Black artists who refuse to conform to the white gaze.‘The Last of Us’There are so many painful separations and sentimental reunions on “The Last of Us,” the dystopian HBO series based on the video game of the same name, that it is hard for me to pick the most affecting one. I am choosing the story in which Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a 14-year-old orphan who is immune to the brain infection that has decimated most of the world, reconnects with her former roommate Riley (Storm Reid), who left to join the resistance. When Riley takes Ellie on an overnight trip to an abandoned mall, we see how liberating their adolescent female desire for each other is, making this night of last memories even more apocalyptic. (Read our review of “The Last of Us.”)Jodie Comer in ‘Prima Facie’When Jodie Comer, best known as an assassin on “Killing Eve,” decided to do her first major stage role, she went big with “Prima Facie.” Alone on a Broadway stage for 100 minutes, Comer commands our attention as Tessa Ensler, a barrister who has moved up in the British class system only to be pulled back down as a victim of a sexual assault. Tessa finds herself in a paradox: In the past, she has defended male clients from assault accusations. Comer moves through the emotions of grief, shame, self-doubt, rage and hope with such intensity that it still seems impossible to me that this was her professional stage debut. (Read our review of “Prima Facie.”)‘Reservation Dogs’Graham Greene as Maximus, left, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Bear in “Reservation Dogs,” a show that redefined American television.Shane Brown/FXDespite its notable lack of Emmy nods, “Reservation Dogs,” the first television show where every writer, director and main character was Indigenous, redefined American television over three seasons. While it is primarily a coming-of-age story, this final season’s episodes veered thrillingly into family drama, horror, science fiction and comedy. I am sad to say goodbye to these characters, but I am grateful for its brilliant ensemble and its affirmation of community, and how a people who lived and grieved together can, through ritual and remembrance, find their way back to each other and teach themselves, and those watching them, how to heal. (Read our interview with the “Reservation Dogs” showrunner.)Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour“Uncle Jonny made my dress,” Beyoncé rhymes on “Heated,” a single from her 2022 album “Renaissance.” “That cheap spandex, she looks a mess.” That playful line reminds us that she dedicated this album to her maternal uncle Jonny, a Black gay man who helped raise her and died of H.I.V./AIDS-related causes. (She released her concert film on Friday, which was World AIDS Day.) The lyric also declares the political aesthetics of “Renaissance” and the house music and Black queer ballroom cultures that inspired its sound and her style on this year’s behemoth world tour. She encouraged us to wear our most fabulous silver fashions and become human disco balls that mirrored “each other’s joy.” And so we came, witnessed and participated in what was more like a Black church revival than just a stadium concert, in which we left feeling as beautiful in our skin (and our clothing) as she appeared to us onstage. (Read our review of Beyoncé’s tour.) More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Frances Sternhagen, ‘Sex and the City’ Actress and Tony Winner, Dies at 93

      by

      Her Tony-winning Broadway career included “Driving Miss Daisy,” “On Golden Pond” and “The Heiress.” On TV she had maternal roles in “Cheers” and “Sex and the City.”Frances Sternhagen, the Tony Award-winning actress who played leading roles in stage productions of “Driving Miss Daisy” and “On Golden Pond” as formidable older women when she was so young that she had to wear aging makeup, died on Monday at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 93.Her son Tony Carlin confirmed the death.Ms. Sternhagen won Tonys as featured actress in a play for her performances in two very different productions. In a 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress,” based on Henry James’s novel “Washington Square,” she was Cherry Jones’s well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia. In “The Good Doctor,” Neil Simon’s 1973 take on Chekhov, she played multiple roles in comedy sketches.Ms. Sternhagen came into her own in mature Off Broadway roles: as the strong-willed 70-something-and-up Southern widow in Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” in 1988, when she was still in her 50s, and the concerned retirement-age wife in Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond” in 1979, when she was 49.She received Tony nominations for her roles in the original productions of “On Golden Pond,” “Equus” and the musical “Angel” and in revivals of “Morning’s at Seven” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”People who never saw a Broadway show or even went to the movies may have known Ms. Sternhagen’s face from television. Beginning in the 1980s, when she played the controlling working-class mother of the oddball postal carrier Cliff Clavin on “Cheers,” she sailed through a period of playing maternal figures in memorable recurring roles in a number of hit series.Ms. Sternhagen in a 1990 episode of the sitcom “Cheers.” She played the controlling working-class mother of the oddball postal carrier Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger, right).Kim Gottlieb-Walker/NBC Universal, via Getty ImagesOn “ER,” she was Dr. John Carter’s aristocratic Chicago grandmother. On “Sex and the City,” she was Trey MacDougal’s rich but peculiar mom. Most recently she played the mother of Kyra Sedgwick’s Southern character on the police procedural “The Closer.” She received three Emmy Award nominations, two for “Cheers” and one for “Sex and the City.”Ms. Sternhagen was known to turn down movie roles because they would take her away from her family for too long, but over the years she did appear in some two dozen films. She was Burt Reynolds’s intensely caring sister-in-law in “Starting Over” (1979), a perfectionist magazine researcher in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), and the cookbook author Irma Rombauer in “Julie & Julia” (2009). Her other films included “The Hospital” (1971), “Independence Day” (1983) and “Misery” (1990).But stage was her first home, and her career flourished in Off Broadway productions. She made her New York stage debut at 25 in Jean Anouilh’s “Thieves’ Carnival” at the Cherry Lane Theater, and she won her first Obie Award the next year, for George Bernard Shaw’s “The Admirable Bashville” (1956). She won again in 1965 for two performances (“The Room” and “A Slight Ache”) and received a lifetime achievement Obie in 2013.Ms. Sternhagen, right, and Cherry Jones in the 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress.” In a Tony-winning performance, Ms. Sternhagen played the well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHer reviews were positive from the beginning. “When an intellectual comedy is about to be staged, it is always a wise notion to send for Frances Sternhagen,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in 1959, reviewing “The Saintliness of Margery Kempe,” an Off Broadway comedy. “She is the mistress of sardonic fooling.”Frances Hussey Sternhagen was born on Jan. 13, 1930, in Washington, D.C. She was the only child of John Meier Sternhagen, a United States tax court judge, and Gertrude (Hussey) Sternhagen, a World War I nurse who became a homemaker.Frances attended the Potomac School and the Madeira School, both in Virginia. At Vassar College, she originally studied history but was persuaded by an adviser to give drama a try.Ms. Sternhagen in 1999 at her home in New Rochelle. “It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate,” she said in 2001.Chris Maynard for The New York TimesAfter graduation in 1951, Ms. Sternhagen taught briefly at the Milton Academy in Milton, Mass. When she auditioned at the Brattle Street Theater in nearby Cambridge, she was rejected. “They said I read every part as if I was leading a troop of Girl Scouts out onto a hockey field,” she told The Toronto Star decades later.Returning to Washington, she took theater courses at the Catholic University of America and began appearing in Arena Stage productions.At the same time she began working in New York theater, Ms. Sternhagen also ventured into television work; she made her small-screen debut in 1955 in Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” alongside Helen Hayes, on the series “Producers’ Showcase.” But she didn’t make her feature film debut until a decade later, with a supporting role as a high school librarian in “Up the Down Staircase” (1967). Like many working actors, she appeared on soap operas, including “Love of Life,” and in television commercials.She continued working into her 80s. Her last Broadway appearance was in a 2005 production of Edward Albee’s “Seascape.” Her last New York stage appearance was Off Broadway in “The Madrid” (2013) at City Center, playing the mother of a kindergarten teacher, played by Edie Falco, who up and leaves her job and family.In Ms. Sternhagen’s final film, “And So It Goes” (2014), a comic drama with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, she played a wise, snarky and chain-smoking real estate agent.Ms. Sternhagen and Phoebe Strole in an Off Broadway production of “The Madrid,” at City Center in Manhattan in 2013. It was Ms. Sternhagen’s last stage performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMs. Sternhagen married Thomas Carlin, a fellow actor, in 1956, and they had six children. The couple had met briefly at Catholic University, acted together in “The Skin of Our Teeth” in Maryland and fell in love when both were in the cast of “Thieves’ Carnival” in New York. Mr. Carlin died in 1991.In addition to their son Tony, she is survived by three other sons, Paul, Peter and John; two daughters, Amanda Carlin Sanders and Sarah Carlin; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. She lived in New Rochelle for more than 60 years.In 2001, Ms. Sternhagen talked to drama students at Vassar and gave an interview to the college’s alumni publication. She revealed that as an actress she liked working from the outside in, starting with how a character speaks and walks rather than with her inner motivation. And she attributed a good deal of her personal emotional development to acting.“It’s through working on characters in plays that I’ve learned about myself, about how people operate,” she said.As for young aspiring actors who look down on paying their dues by appearing in commercials, Ms. Sternhagen suggested, “Think of it as children’s theater.”Alex Traub More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos on ‘Poor Things’

      by

      It’s one thing to cry while performing. Emma Stone can do that. What she doesn’t want to do, and what she found herself doing anyway, is to cry in the middle of an interview.“I’m such an actor, what is wrong with me?” she said, her eyes welling up with tears.It was mid-November in Los Angeles and we were out to lunch with Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director with whom Stone has made the cockeyed comedies “The Favourite” and now “Poor Things,” which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September and is tipped to be a major Oscar contender when it’s released Dec. 8. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, “Poor Things” casts Stone as Bella Baxter, who may have the cinematic year’s most outrageous origin story: Trapped in an unhappy marriage, she throws herself off a bridge and is resurrected by a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) who swaps her brain for that of her unborn baby.Stone gets plenty of comic mileage out of playing this full-grown woman with the mind of a child, but Bella’s eventual arc is breathtaking: As she gains sentience, embarks on a sexual and political awakening, and strives toward independence, Bella must navigate the hapless suitors (played by the likes of Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef) who are drawn to her maverick spirit but also seek to possess her. This is a character who has meant more to Stone than most — “I just love her so much,” she told me — though she tried to laugh off how talking about “Poor Things” sometimes moved her to tears.“I’m tired, that’s all it is,” Stone said.In addition to “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” Lanthimos, 50, and Stone, 35, have collaborated on the short film “Bleat” as well as “And,” a comic anthology due next year. “I obviously have full-blown, very intense trust in him,” she said, “and as an actor, it’s the best feeling ever, because it’s so rare that you feel like whatever you do, you’re protected by your director.”Scenes from a collaboration: Stone in Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” left, “The Favourite” and “Bleat.”Searchlight Pictures; Lanthimos facilitates that trust with a long rehearsal process that has more in common with improv comedy than you might expect: The actors recite their lines while doing log rolls, walking backward or closing their eyes. “We never rehearse as in, ‘OK, how are you going to do the scene and let’s just act it out,’” Lanthimos said. “It’s more about creating this atmosphere of camaraderie and having fun, getting to know each other so we can be comfortable with ridiculing ourselves.”Some actors forge long-term relationships with auteurs that require sacrificing what has made them into movie stars: To ascend to a more prestigious plane, comedians furrow their brows, beauties cake themselves in dirt and teen idols talk of torturing themselves in the name of their craft. But with Lanthimos, Stone has not had to give up the comic timing and innate empathy that are her greatest gifts as an actor. She instead puts those talents to use in new and daring ways under her director’s unique eye.Still, this fruitful partnership makes for an unusual duo in person: Where Lanthimos is impassive and a man of few words, his leading lady is wide-eyed, warm and eager to connect. Or, as Stone put it, “I’m a girl from Arizona and he’s a guy from Athens. I don’t know how this worked, because our personalities could not be more different, but it’s amazing.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.When did the two of you first meet?EMMA STONE It was June of 2015, in a cafe. I was in rehearsals for “La La Land,” and I met him to talk about “The Favourite.” I thought he was going to be really scary and twisted, and he isn’t. It was a very comfortable and easy conversation and we got along right away.You thought he might be a more intimidating presence?STONE Having seen the films that he had made up until that point, yeah.YORGOS LANTHIMOS What a cliché.STONE I was 26! I was but a child. But from then on, we kept in touch and got to know each other a little bit. By the time we were making “The Favourite,” we had a rapport and the beginning of our friendship, and then by the end of shooting it, we started talking about “Poor Things.”Stone says of her “Poor Things” role: “My God, she’s the greatest character I’ll probably ever get to play.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesYorgos, what was going on in your life when you first read “Poor Things”?LANTHIMOS I had just moved to London and started meeting people about English-language projects. It was after “Dogtooth” [2010] was nominated for an Oscar, and people started taking interest.STONE [teasing] Nominated for an Oscar. Everybody was like, “Whoa, this guy’s so great!”LANTHIMOS But when I started showing “Poor Things” to people, it was rejected many times for development.What reason did they give?LANTHIMOS “It’s too weird, too strange.” Back then, there was a notion of, “Oh, we’ll get a European or non-American filmmaker to do something conventional, they’ll just bring their own twist to it.”STONE That still happens.LANTHIMOS So that was quite a disappointment because I was very naïve in meeting people and them saying, “Oh my God, ‘Dogtooth’ is amazing, we want to do things with you.” And then I would produce “The Lobster” [2016] and they would go, “Oh, no, no, we’re not talking about something like this. Don’t you want to do something more normal?”Emma, how did Yorgos pitch this project to you?STONE He gave me sort of the brass-tacks overview of Bella, what she goes through and what the men in her life experience as a response to how she’s evolving. And I was just like, “Sign me up.” My God, she’s the greatest character I’ll probably ever get to play.What is it about this character that’s so beguiling?LANTHIMOS She’s unlike anyone.STONE She’s drinking up the world around her in such a unique and beautiful way that I just dream I could. I find her so inspiring, and living in that every day throughout that whole process was just the greatest gift — it’s the most joy I’ve ever gotten to have as a character. Every person that exists has so much that built them up to what they are in adulthood, and it was interesting to discover that if you strip all that away, all that’s left is joy and curiosity.We meet Bella when she’s not far into her brain swap: Formerly an adult woman named Victoria Blessington, she’s now like a full-grown baby, impulsive and childlike. What was it like to embody that phase?STONE Tough. That was the hardest stage for me, just because that’s where she’s at her most primitive. Acting is inherently embarrassing — this, as a job, is just silly and you can feel really stupid. Thankfully, with Yorgos, it’s much more freeing and I feel confident because we can quickly get to, “I guess this one’s not working, let’s go somewhere else.” Also, I can cry to him if I’m freaking out about something, which I have many times.We’d been working on this for so many years, and to actually commit it to film is always terrifying. I find the first two weeks of filming anything really difficult because you’re still finding your footing and the tone of what it actually is in practice, not just the idea of it. So the first week was really challenging to just give myself over to it and trust the process of it, and I think you felt the same way.LANTHIMOS Yeah.STONE We were talking about it every day, and I was like, “What am I doing?” You were like, “I don’t know.” We were both figuring out who she was.A scene from “Poor Things.” Stone and Lanthimos have been discussing the film since shooting “The Favourite” (2018).Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight PicturesHow does your trust in one another extend to how you filmed Bella’s sexual awakening?STONE It simplifies everything. Whenever there was a scene like that, it was only four people in the room, other than whatever actor might be in there. There was Yorgos and our [director of photography] Robbie Ryan, who looks at me like I am a lamp — he’s seen me naked so many times, it’s so beyond nothing — and then Hayley [Williams, the first assistant director], and Olga [Abramson], our focus puller. That was the room.LANTHIMOS Sometimes not even sound. We would rig mics when we could and we wouldn’t even have a boom operator there. So it’s just very intimate.STONE And also, an amazing intimacy coordinator [Elle McAlpine]. Stupidly, at the beginning, I was like, “It’s fine [without one], I’ve known you for so many years.” And then once it came to actually doing all those scenes, having her there was so wonderful — she really made the energy so calm and professional. But it was weird ultimately to see the movie because doing those scenes was such an intimate experience and then I was like, “Right, that’s in the movie!”But I mean, that’s Bella. She has no shame about her body and her sexuality and who she is, and I am so proud of that aspect of the film.Does it embolden you to stay in that space?STONE Just to stay naked all the time? Yeah. I’m going to be a nudist now, I’m emboldened!I meant Bella’s head space. Do you feel emboldened when you spend so much time in a character free from shame?STONE I wish I could say yes. It has stuck with me in some capacities, and if I could live as Bella, I would love to. It’s really hard when you have your own history to deal with, which seemingly everybody has except for her. But I find her so inspirational in general that I’m always trying to think if I could be a little bit more like her.Yorgos, you acted in the Greek film “Attenberg” earlier in your career, which required you to take part in some sex scenes. Did that give you a unique perspective on directing them?LANTHIMOS For me, that aspect was never an issue. Sex in movies, or nudity — I just never understood the prudishness around it. It always drives me mad how liberal people are about violence and how they allow minors to experience it in any way, and then we’re so prudish about sexuality. To me, what was difficult about being an actor was that there was a lot of waiting around, and that’s why, when I make films, I try to have the least amount of business possible: No lights, no gear, no nothing. Nobody goes anywhere, nobody leaves. There’s no time to smoke a cigarette, because we just keep on going.STONE That’s why you have to switch to vaping.Lanthimos has appeared as an actor in film with sex scenes. “Sex in movies, or nudity — I just never understood the prudishness around it,” he said.Thea Traff for The New York TimesEmma, do you want something different out of your projects now than you did in your 20s?STONE I hope that when it comes to projects or characters that it’ll always be a surprise and slightly scary. But also, how scary can it be? It’s acting, I’m not saving any lives. It’s such a lucky thing to be able to do, so to sit here as an actor and be like, “This was so hard,” is crazy.LANTHIMOS I think about that as well. “Oh, I’m making films, what’s so incredibly difficult about that?” But I do have a horrible time. The stress.STONE He’s really miserable while we’re filming.LANTHIMOS Yeah, it’s insane. It’s immense.And it hasn’t gone away over time?STONE It’s gotten worse.LANTHIMOS You try to rationalize it: “Why are you so upset? This is a movie.” Of course, when you compare it with other things that are happening in the world, it’s ridiculous. But for you, in that moment, it’s everything.STONE Also, a lot of times you’re on location. You’re away from your quote-unquote real life, you’re working so many hours a day, and it’s so consuming.So how did it feel to near the end of an all-consuming project like “Poor Things”?STONE I was a mess. Oh my God, I was devastated. I couldn’t even get through the scenes we were shooting on the last day because I was crying so much.You didn’t want to let go?STONE I wanted to be done because we were exhausted, but I really didn’t want to be done. It was such an important experience to me that it makes me sad now thinking about it.LANTHIMOS The last day was in the studio, and we did her jumping off the bridge.STONE I’m getting teary. I’m sorry, this is so stupid. Bizarre. That last day, I did the jump that Victoria does off the bridge when she’s pregnant, and I was so emotional. You can imagine, if I’m sitting here years later like this!I said to Hayley, our A.D., “Oh my God, this is so sad. I’m shooting a suicide, and it’s the end of the movie after this whole joyful experience.” And she said, “No, this is the birth of Bella.” I was like, “It is the birth of Bella! Because Victoria being gone is the birth of Bella.” It’s so nice to end on that.[Wiping her eyes.] Yeah. Anyway, it was cool. No big deal. Fun movie, we had a good time, it was just a paycheck. More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      How Jewish People Built the American Theater

      by

      HOW ARE THINGS in Glocca Morra?” is a song from the 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about, among other things, a leprechaun. Glocca Morra doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be in, say, Poland. The song is sung by a homesick Irish lass in the American South; like the show overall, it […] More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Charles Melton, ‘May December’ Breakout Star, Is Transformed

      by

      I’ll admit it took me a while to notice the blood, which was wet and daubed onto his right cheekbone like a birthmark. In my defense, Charles Melton hadn’t noticed it either, even though the blood happened to be his.It was an unseasonably rainy November day in Los Angeles — a place where any evidence of the seasons is considered unseasonable — and I had gone to Melton’s house with a dual mission. The first was to discuss the new drama “May December,” in which the 32-year-old actor does more than just hold his own opposite Oscar-winning co-stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore: He gives the movie its bruised, beating heart.And the second mission? Well, that was to make some truly excellent kimchi.“These, you have to cut really thin,” Melton said, handing me a bulbous radish. We were in the kitchen of his cozy home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, preparing to slice and flavor vegetables under the watchful eye of his mother, Sukyong, who was visiting from Kansas. The 32-year-old Melton keeps his fridge so well-stocked with kimchi that he often sends friends home with extra jars of it. “Just remember, kimchi is a probiotic,” he said, feeding me a piece of seasoned cabbage.Six-foot-one, shaggy-haired and easygoing, Melton has the warm glow of a Himalayan salt lamp. (He also has a Himalayan salt lamp.) Though he spent six years playing a conceited jock on the CW teen soap “Riverdale,” Melton wears his beauty and brawn as lightly as a nice jacket, and while we cut vegetables and discussed “May December,” he tried to encourage me by pointing out his own errors.With Julianne Moore in “May December.” Melton played the part as if “you were watching somebody learning how to see and how to speak and how to walk,” the director Todd Haynes said.Netflix“I’ve already messed up,” he said after one particularly inelegant radish slice. Across the kitchen, his mother turned to us, somehow able to sense the misaligned cut. “If you hear my mom saying things in Korean,” he told me, “just assume that it’s all good things.”In “May December,” Melton plays Joe, a diffident 36-year-old father married to the much older Gracie (Moore). The two have seemingly managed to fashion a picture-perfect life — three children, two dogs and a beautiful home by the water — though the original sin of their union provides an awfully shaky foundation: They met when Gracie was a married housewife and Joe was just a seventh grader. Tabloid infamy followed as Gracie was convicted of raping Joe, bore his baby in prison and, after serving a yearslong sentence, married him and had two more children.Enter Elizabeth (Portman), an ambitious actress poised to play Gracie in a movie that will exhume the scandal this couple has worked so hard to move past. In a bid to have the story told their way, Gracie and Joe agree to let Elizabeth shadow them, but as the actress peppers the couple with invasive questions, poor Joe is finally forced to confront the enormity of what he’s locked away for so long. Robbed of a normal childhood by Gracie, Joe can’t quite articulate his feelings — sentences often get lodged in his throat — but in Melton’s hands, Joe’s wounded attempt to make sense of his situation is shattering.In May, after the film premiered to raves at the Cannes Film Festival, Haynes told me that Melton was its linchpin. “It’s a consummate performance by somebody who doesn’t even realize how thorough an actor he is yet,” Haynes said. And as with “Elvis” star Austin Butler, another hunk from the CW turned serious thespian, Melton’s breakthrough role has been drawing plenty of Oscar chatter: He recently earned a nomination for outstanding supporting performance from the Gothams, heady stuff for a man whose most significant laurel until now was a nomination for best kiss at the MTV Movie & TV Awards.As we spoke, Melton met every question with enthusiastic openness; aside from the way he covers his mouth when he giggles, he’s appealingly unguarded for an actor. At 32, he’s been pondering big questions about self and purpose, and our conversation offered such a welcome opportunity to go deep that he often dropped into dreamy reveries.“I can talk to you for hours,” he said as we took a break from grating radishes to nibble on apple slices and Korean pears in his living room. “I’m looking into your eyes and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’”As he met my gaze, I looked at his cheek and noticed the blood. When did that get there? It wasn’t until he absently brushed his hand against his face that I put two and two together and looked down.“I think you might have cut yourself,” I told him.“Maybe,” he said, grinning. Then he glanced at his right hand, where a cut halfway up his middle finger had been gushing for who knows how long.“Oh my gosh,” he said, surprised. “There’s blood everywhere.”From the kitchen, his mother whipped her head around. “Blood?” she said. “I’m coming!”When he landed the role, “I definitely felt a pressure within myself: ‘Can I go there? Can I do this?’” Melton recalled. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSURE, SOME INTERVIEWS benefit from a little spilled blood, but that’s usually meant in the metaphoric sense; Melton was already so willing to be vulnerable that he hardly needed a grating accident to hasten things. He told me that last summer, when he received the audition pages for “May December,” he was similarly ready to go deep.It was not long after Melton had wrapped the sixth season of “Riverdale,” which found his mind-controlled character stabbing comic-book hero Archie Andrews with one of the ancient Daggers of Megiddo. (This is just what happens on “Riverdale.”)As he read the lines and character description for Joe, “There was this sense of repression and loneliness that I related to,” he said. Those wouldn’t necessarily be the first two qualities you’d associate with Melton, an outgoing athlete who loves to hold a game night, but Joe’s predicament reminded him of a pep talk he’d gotten when he was 11: His father, on the verge of a yearlong deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan, pressed Melton to step up and take care of his mother and younger sisters in the interim, effectively becoming the man of the house.“As an 11-year-old kid, you’re like, ‘I’ll do it!’” Melton recalled. “I would never change anything I experienced — no one did anything wrong — but in looking at that part of my own experience and then looking at Joe, it’s that similarity of the feeling of stepping into something whether you’re ready for it or not.”He kept rerecording his “May December” self-tape for six hours until he was satisfied, then sent it over. Though Haynes was unfamiliar with Melton’s work and nearly discounted him because of his model-handsome headshot — “I just didn’t see how he would fit into this world,” the filmmaker told me — once he pressed play, Haynes was intrigued by Melton’s unique take on the character.“Charles just brought this sense of somebody who was almost preverbal, who was almost prenatal, like you were watching somebody learning how to see and how to speak and how to walk,” Haynes said. “He was extremely restrained and subtle in what he did.”After another taped audition, Melton was asked to fly to New York for a chemistry read with Moore, with whom he found an unexpected connection: They were both Army brats who had spent formative chunks of their childhood living on a military base in Juneau, Alaska, a link that lent them an easy rapport and helped him secure the role.“I definitely felt a pressure within myself: ‘Can I go there? Can I do this?’” Melton recalled. “‘I believe I can, but I don’t know what it looks like, so let me do everything underneath the sun to try to figure out what that is.’”To prepare, Melton threw himself into the role in any way he could think of. He spent hours every day consulting with his acting coach and therapist, trying to figure out Joe’s tricky, tangled internal wiring. He rewatched “Brokeback Mountain,” studying the ways Heath Ledger expressed repression in his physical bearing, and “In the Mood for Love,” observing how Tony Leung conveyed so much inner turmoil without saying a thing. And after conferring with Haynes, Melton decided to gain 40 pounds for the role, smoothing out his sharp jawline and adding a suburban-dad paunch.“The reward was me discovering my process,” he said. At his dining-room table, Melton demonstrated by conjuring up Joe for me: He curled his lips inward, setting them in a tense horizontal line, then slumped forward, defeated and deflated. “His reality is so distorted by the projections of society, the last thing he wants to do is to show himself,” Melton said, letting the bright light behind his eyes go dim. “He protects himself, even in his body.”Melton in “Riverdale.” Haynes wasn’t familiar with his work when he auditioned for “May December.”CWThe only thing that threatened to undo him was a determination not to disappoint. It all came to a head in one of the film’s most affecting scenes, where Joe and his teenage son, Charlie, share a joint on their roof. Charlie and his twin sister are about to graduate from high school and after their parents become empty-nesters, Joe will have to confront the ugly reality of his marriage to Gracie in a way he has assiduously avoided. Alarmed, Charlie tells him not to worry. “That’s all I do,” Joe replies, teary and close to retching.After a few takes, Haynes felt they had what they needed, but Melton was unsure: Shouldn’t he take this moment to go bigger, to give more, to prove himself somehow? He kept asking for additional takes, but each iteration felt strained, bringing him further and further from Joe and closer to the pernicious fear that he was a terrible actor. Eventually, he came down from the roof to confer with Haynes and burst into tears.“I think those came from selfish ideas of wanting to be at a certain place, where I forgot at the moment, ‘Hey, your job is to tell the character’s story, not yours,’” he said. What had gotten in the way of that connection? “Maybe wanting to be seen,” he said, trying to parse what exactly he meant by that. “I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen, right? But being seen for what you do is still a part of you being seen.”Melton paused. “I don’t even know what I’m saying right now,” he admitted, laughing. “I’m just making kimchi.”LATER, WITH THE task at hand finished and his mother retired to the couch to watch Korean dramas on her phone, Melton gave me a tour of his house. Downstairs, in a low-lit room he nicknamed the “Pavilion of Dreams,” Melton put Radiohead’s “Kid A” on the record player, slid open the glass door to his rain-lashed backyard deck, and lit a cigarette. He wanted to talk more about the idea that had tripped him up earlier, the tension between wanting to be seen and, at other times, striving to disappear.“Sometimes I feel this push and pull of, am I white enough, am I American enough, am I Asian enough?” Melton said. Growing up in military bases all over the world with a white father and Korean mother, he felt a constant need to assimilate that often left him feeling unmoored: “I remember having a dream around that time, like if you cut two cars in half and put the front ends together and one is Korean and the other one is American. Which driver’s seat do you want to sit in?”After five years stationed in Korea when he was a young boy, Melton’s family moved to Texas, where his dyed-blond K-pop bangs and affinity for taekwondo went over less well. He soon adopted the uniform there — Vans, cargo shorts and oversized Hawaiian shirts — and even when his family packed up again and moved to a military base in Ansbach, Germany, Melton couldn’t quite let go of the American boy he’d worked so hard to become, continuing to wear a puka-shell necklace and Hollister shirts shipped overseas.“I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen, right?,” Melton said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesFor his last three years of high school, Melton’s family moved to Manhattan, Kan. “Being an Asian American kid and that not being a commonality, especially in Kansas, what was my bridge to assimilate?” he said. He found it in football: Though he began disastrously, finishing dead-last in every practice sprint and vomiting in front of teammates, he applied himself and worked his way up, eventually becoming an all-star and earning a slot as a defensive back at Kansas State University, where he was nicknamed “Kamikaze” for hitting harder than anyone else on the team.“I’m checking all the boxes, right? ‘American,’” he said. “But a big thing to process for me was, what is my identity outside of this?”Around that time, on the way to football practice, he heard a radio advertisement for a talent showcase that asked, “Do you want to be a star?” Melton had always dreamed of becoming an actor, but when he was a child, his father warned him that the only Asians who succeeded in Hollywood were martial artists like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Still, he drove 45 minutes to the open call in Salina, Kan., where he was asked to read ad copy for Twizzlers, model for talent scouts and perform Ben Stiller’s airplane freakout scene from “Meet the Parents” onstage.He came out of the showcase with 20 callbacks and a brand-new lease on life. “It was so exhilarating to be seen in a way that wasn’t me being seen, but what I was choosing to do,” he said. “It seemed like there were no boundaries.” Though he was used to toggling between different identities, acting offered something way beyond assimilation — it felt, if anything, more like expansion.The entirety of what he wanted out of life shifted very suddenly, and Melton dropped out of college, moved to Los Angeles, and spent the next few years modeling, walking dogs, delivering Chinese takeout and auditioning for anything he could. Eventually, he secured “Riverdale,” which led to roles in films like “The Sun Is Also a Star” and “Bad Boys for Life,” as well as a featured spot in Ariana Grande’s presciently titled music video, “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored.”But after leveling up as an actor with “May December,” Melton could be at a career crossroads: Will Marvel come calling, ready to poach a hot new name with superhero looks, or will Melton throw in with the likes of Butler and Jacob Elordi, who are using their heat to help finance auteur-driven projects? “All one hopes for with an actor like Charles is that he gets roles offered to him and projects coming to him that excite and continue to stretch him,” Haynes said.The monthslong awards gantlet will surely raise his profile even more, and Melton is excited to embark on all it has to offer, though he’s lately tried to ground himself in simpler pleasures, like family visits, camping trips and accepting licks to the face from his Siberian husky, Neya. “I have good people in my life, Kyle, really good people who know me and love me,” he said. “I don’t need any more love, but if I get it, it’s awesome.”At the very least, Melton is about be seen in a whole new way, and he’ll have to wrestle with all that entails. But as we parted ways — me, with several jars of take-home kimchi and him, with a bandaged middle finger — he promised that no matter what happens over the next few months, he’ll be ready for it.“I’ll still be me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll just have nicer shoes.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

      by

      One needn’t eat Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles to survive; advertising’s object is to muddle this truth. Of course, Hint of Lime Flavored Triangles have the advantage of being food, which humans do need to survive. Many commodities necessitated by modern life lack this selling point. Insurance, for example, is not only inedible but intangible. It is a resource that customers hope never to need, a product that functions somewhat like a tax on fear. The average person cannot identify which qualities, if any, distinguish one company’s insurance from another’s. For these reasons and more, selling insurance is tricksy business.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.In 2022, nearly half the active property- and casualty-insurance premiums in the United States and Canada were sold by just 11 companies. Increasingly, insurance corporations attract business not by building trust between their customers and local agents, but by successfully ascribing positive characteristics to the fictional characters who anthropomorphize the companies and products in ads. The first to arrive at the vigorous insurance-brand-character orgy was a gecko, created in 1999 to teach people how to pronounce the acronymic name of the Government Employees Insurance Company. (Conceived as a single spot, Geico’s Gecko campaign was extended the year a commercial-actors’ strike prohibited live humans from filming ads.) It has since been joined by the Aflac duck, Liberty Mutual’s LiMu Emu, Professor Burke (J.K. Simmons) from Farmer’s (bumbadumbumbumbumbum), Jake from State Farm (from State Farm) and Mayhem from Allstate. But all of these are subordinate to a moderately whimsical employee-character, who has been persuading Americans to purchase insurance (or in some commercials, reminding them that they already have), since the twilight of the George W. Bush administration: Flo from Progressive.According to Ad Age, in 2022 the Progressive Corporation spent more than $2 billion on advertising in the United States, pouring more money into the effort than McDonald’s, Toyota or Coca-Cola. (The insurance industry’s total annual media-ad spending is estimated to be just shy of $11 billion — more than was spent by all the top beer brands combined.) Progressive’s C-suite could justify the elaborate outlay as follows: A decade and a half ago, their executive ancestors stumbled upon advertising gold, in the form of a story that Americans could bear to be told over and over again — so far, forever. It is an interminable folk tale about buying insurance, propelled by the charisma, or connoted soothing attentiveness, or gently grating peskiness, or something, of Flo, its central character.Flo debuted in 2008, working the checkout of an eldritch white store uncannily devoid of shadows or edges. The original idea behind these ads, internally called the “Superstore” campaign, was to transform insurance from something people had to pay for into something people got to shop for. (In early ads, the store’s shelves were lined with packages of insurance — cornflakes boxes and tomato cans covered with Progressive branding.) In “Behind the Apron: The Story of Flo,” a Progressive-produced video, a company executive recalls that before “Superstore,” when asked to list car-insurance companies they had heard of, even Progressive’s own customers failed to name it. The extent to which Flo is responsible for the company’s subsequent surge in popularity is impossible to quantify; the character is so inextricably linked with the brand that the two can no longer be separated for measurement. If it could be represented photographically, though, the relationship would look something like the inverse of the famous image from the psychologist Harry Harlow’s experiment, in which a baby rhesus monkey cleaves to a wooden “mother” — with the insensate entity fiercely clinging to the flesh-and-blood woman. Courtney’s debut in 2008.Courtney in 2023.A pair of Flo’s blue high-tops are displayed at Progressive headquarters in Ohio. In the company’s online store, her likeness, in varying degrees of abstraction, adorns a lunch box, an air freshener, a puzzle, a pin, a dog toy, a bobblehead, a chia pet and the faces of multiple dolls of other nations (a Japanese kokeshi and a family of Russian matryoshkas). The only Flo paraphernalia that does not feature her visage subsumes the buyer into her likeness: the “Flo Costume,” with apron, name tag, pin, headband and chestnut-brown wig ($24.99; worn two Halloweens ago by Joe Jonas). The year the ads premiered, the company’s chief marketing officer, Remi Kent, told me, Progressive’s stock price was under $15. It recently closed at $157.67. “While I can’t give Flo all of the credit,” Kent said, “I think she has really become synonymous with the brand.”In fact, the human face, voice and bearing that constitute “Flo” are associated far more strongly with Progressive than with the 53-year-old woman who provides them: Stephanie Courtney. Courtney did not intend to sell insurance. She meant to star on Broadway and then, following wish revision, to support herself as a comedic actress. Instead, she has starred in the same role for 15 years and counting, becoming in the process a character recognizable to nearly every American — a feat so rare her peers in this category are mostly cartoon animals. Since appearing in the first Flo spot in January 2008, Courtney has never been absent from American TV, rematerializing incessantly in the same sugar-white apron and hoar-frost-white polo shirt and cocaine-white trousers that constitute the character’s unvarying wardrobe. It’s true that her career did not launch until she was 38; and most of her audience could not tell you her name or anything about her; and many of the attendees of the Groundlings improv show in Los Angeles, in which she still performs weekly, probably do not recognize her — set all that aside, though, and Stephanie Courtney is one of the most successful actors in the world. I found Courtney in head-to-toe black at the restaurant in Studio City where we had arranged to meet — a photo negative of Flo on a suede sofa. Her purse immediately caught my eye: It appeared to be an emerald green handbag version of the $388 “bubble clutch” made by Cult Gaia, the trendy label whose fanciful purses double as objets d’art. Courtney handed it to me while rattling off tips for extending the shelf life of fresh eggs. It was a plastic carrying case for eggs, it turned out — eggs she had brought me from her six backyard hens. “Did you think it was a purse?” she asked merrily.We were led to a small outdoor table abutting an immense dormant fire pit. “When they turn this on,” Courtney said in a conspiratorial whisper, setting her (actual) handbag upon its concrete ledge, “it’s going to be amazing to see this bag catch on fire.” (Indeed, it would prove exciting when, two and a half hours later, flames leaped out of the pit with no warning; Courtney rescued her pocketbook just before it was engulfed.) Over iced tap water, Courtney told me about the early days of her acting career, a carousel of enthusiastic rejection — “Everyone in New York is like: ‘You’re great! No.’” — subsidized by catering work. In 1998, she moved to Los Angeles and booked her first commercial: a 1999 Bud Light Super Bowl ad. “I was the girl in the back going like this,” Courtney said, making a face that a girl in the back might make as two guys in the checkout line, short on cash, debated whether to purchase toilet paper or Bud Light. To her eye, the Bud Light toilet-paper spot was suffused with a timeless quality — one that guaranteed it would “play forever,” she told herself, using the money it earned her to buy UGGs. It turned out to play closer to a month. This was significant because of how big broadcast commercials tend to pay: Actors receive one sum for their day of work on set and residuals in 13-week cycles as long as it plays thereafter.Commercial work was intended to tide Courtney over until her comedy career took off. At open mics, she performed alongside ascendant comedians like Tig Notaro, Maria Bamford and Retta. After years of classes, she was promoted to the upper echelons of the Groundlings improv troupe, a comedy mint that has pressed stars like Lisa Kudrow, Paul Reubens and Melissa McCarthy into wide circulation but is best known for stacking the cast of “Saturday Night Live” with performers who are not Stephanie Courtney. “S.N.L.” would come to watch Groundlings performances and, as Courtney recalled to me, “They were like, ‘Stop sending her stuff in.’ Like, ‘We’re not interested.’”“I remember feeling so terrible,” Courtney said. “And just embarrassed. Like a weird shame. Like, ‘I shouldn’t even walk around.’” It wasn’t as if “S.N.L.” had declared a moratorium on Groundlings hires. The show signed her friend Kristen from class — better known from 2005 to 2012 as “ ‘Saturday Night Live’ star Kristen Wiig.” Wiig described Courtney to me as “one of the funniest people I’ve ever known in my life” — supernaturally gifted at instantaneously inventing new characters; “a master improviser”; “effortless.” She remembered a sketch in which Courtney played an excited stand-up waiting in the wings, listening to a prolonged, fawning introduction before walking onstage to begin her set. “And as soon as she gets out, she falls really hard on her face,” Wiig said, laughing. “Just starts moaning and crying. And that was the sketch.” Stephanie Courtney performing with the Groundlings improv troupe in September.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThe problem in the early 2000s was that people didn’t love Courtney in a way that could be reliably monetized. She auditioned for the role of Joan on “Mad Men,” and the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, loved her, but not for Joan — for a character named Marge, a switchboard operator, with whom other characters had almost no interaction.“I was so stinkin’ broke,” Courtney said. Her car wouldn’t go in reverse, but the repair cost something like $2,500, so she just drove it forward. This complicated traveling between auditions, but she had a method. She would pull into a spot, roll down her windows and go inside. When she returned, she would give another performance: that of a woman discovering that her car would not start. “ ‘Oh, no!’” she would exclaim. “ ‘Oh, shoot! Oh, no! My car won’t start!’ And then I’d flag down someone and be like: ‘Oh, I have an idea! What if I put it in neutral, and you pushed it?’” People love being generous — someone always helped that poor woman. “And I’d go to the next one and do the whole thing all over again.” This act Courtney described as “much better than whatever I did” at the actual auditions, which didn’t lead to much. By 2007, Courtney’s life was all on credit cards, and her age was a number almost unheard-of in scenic Southern California. Even the commercial gigs were slowing when, that winter, she was cast in an ad for an insurance company, as a cashier. She arrived at 5:30 the morning of the shoot to have bangs cut into her hair (“I didn’t recognize myself”) and texted a photo of the finished look from her flip phone to the guy she was dating (now her husband, a lighting designer at the Groundlings theater). The first script ended with a customer, upon realizing the quality of deal he was receiving, saying, “Wow,” to which the cashier (name tag: “Flo”) was instructed only to have a funny reaction. Courtney’s knee-jerk response was to scream, “Wow!” back. “I say it louder,” she added under her breath. Years of Groundlings tuition paid off in this instant. Progressive loved the ad-lib. Within a couple of months of shooting the first ads, Courtney was asked to film more. The work eventually became so steady that she quit her day jobs. “I just remember getting the check for the year — which, never, ever in my life … ” she trailed off. The relief in her voice sounded as fresh as if this had only just happened. “I owed my manager money,” she said. “I owed family members money.” Her efforts to write sketches at home were constantly being interrupted by debt collectors. “And then I got that money, and I was just like: Here! Here! Here!” She mimed handing it out. “Just — here! — just get out of my life.” About three years into the ads, Courtney’s finances were evolving so rapidly that her manager advised her to get a business manager. “Which I did,” she said. “And it is the advice I give to any other person who is like: ‘I have a campaign. What do I do?’” It is the advice she gave to Kevin Miles when he came to her home to chat over lunch about becoming Jake from State Farm. (She also knows “Doug,” the guy in the Liberty Mutual emu commercials.)In the absent glow of the patio’s still-dormant fire pit, Courtney and I considered the dinner menu, which included a small quantity of caviar costing a sum of American dollars ominously, discreetly, vaguely, alarmingly, irresistibly and euphemistically specified as “market price.” Hours earlier, my supervisor had told me pre-emptively — and demonically — that I was not to order and expense the market-price caviar. Somehow, Courtney learned of this act of oppression, probably when I brought it up to her immediately upon being seated for dinner. To this, Courtney said, “I love caviar,” and added that my boss “can’t tell [her] what [she] can have,” because she doesn’t “answer to” him, “goddamn it.” She charged the caviar to her own personal credit card and encouraged me to eat it with her — even as I explained (weakly, for one second) that this is not allowed (lock me up!). Subsequently pinning down the exact hows and whys of my consuming a profile subject’s forbidden caviar took either several lively discussions with my supervisor (my guess) or about “1.5 hours” of “company time” (his calculation). In his opinion, this act could be seen as at odds with my employer’s policy precluding reporters from accepting favors and gifts from their subjects — the worry being that I might feel obligated to repay Courtney for caviar by describing her favorably in this article. Let me be clear: If the kind of person who purchases caviar and offers to share it with a dining companion who has been tyrannically deprived of it sounds like someone you would not like, you would hate Stephanie Courtney. In any event, to bring this interaction into line with company policy, we later reimbursed her for the full price of the caviar ($85 plus tip), so now she is, technically, indebted to me. Despite her face being central to the ad campaign, Courtney told me at dinner (where we otherwise dined with marvelous economy) that she is seldom recognized — “maybe once a month,” she estimated. She makes few in-person character appearances. “You might like Flo,” she said, “but do you want to deal with her now, against your will?” About a year into the campaign, she visited a friend who had informed her son that Flo would be stopping by. Courtney arrived as herself — no costume — but just the idea that the TV lady was suddenly in his home sent the child “sobbing” into his room. “It’s almost like Santa Claus getting in your face,” Courtney said. “And it’s like: ‘Ain’t no gifts! There’s no upside!’” She learned early that people enjoy spotting Flo in real life only if they realize who she is on their own. If, for instance, her mother-in-law excitedly informs a stranger that she is Flo, they do not like it. “They really don’t,” she said.According to Progressive, 99 percent of consumers — defined by Remi Kent as “everyone out there that has the potential to buy insurance from us” — “know Flo.” Kent told me that the character scores high on likability “not only with the general market” but also with “the Black community” and “the Hispanic community.” For years, Sean McBride, the chief creative officer of the Arnold Worldwide advertising agency (whose copywriters have written more than 200 TV spots for the “Superstore” campaign), received daily emails indicating that ads featuring Flo were “very, very directly tied to people calling” Progressive to inquire about switching insurance.Jumbling the puzzle of Flo’s likability, according to Cait Lamberton, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, is the possibility that what audiences enjoyed about Flo in 2008 is not what they enjoy — or think they enjoy — about her in 2023. It could be that American brains, exposed to so many years of this ad campaign, now confuse the “ease of processing” Flo content (a quality reinforced through repeated exposure) with actually liking it. Research shows, Lamberton said, that familiarity can overpower distaste.“Even if people find her annoying, they don’t find her objectionable,” Lamberton said. In fact, even people who don’t like Flo do like Flo, because any character trait they cite as a reason for disliking her “reflects that there’s a very strong memory trace.” For advertisers, a character that stimulates mild irritation with every appearance is preferable to one that is innocuous, so long as the benign annoyance does not mutate into a strong negative association. Complaining about something trivial, Lamberton said, “is a very comforting experience.”Courtney struggled as an actress for years before landing a lucrative role that has lasted for a decade and a half.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesOne possible secret to Flo’s appeal, suggested Lamberton, is that her appearance “both conforms to and pokes fun at gender stereotypes, because she’s a little bit exaggerated. She looks a little bit like a quirky Snow White.” The lightly retro hairdo may be “comforting” to people for whom feminine bouffants recall a halcyon social era; it can also be read as a wry visual gag juxtaposed against Flo’s sexless, shapeless uniform. What makes the “Superstore” campaign not just notable but virtuosic is its freakish longevity. To stave off what Lamberton called the “wear out” phase — when content becomes so familiar it is no longer effective — Arnold is perpetually altering the ads just enough to keep them novel. It has released “Superstore” spots shot in the style of a fuzzy 1970s after-school special, a 1990s sitcom and a “TMZ on TV”-style paparazzi show. It has introduced co-workers (“the squad”) not to supplant Flo but to further develop her character. (She can interact with her colleagues more brusquely than with customers.) Courtney has portrayed several members of Flo’s extended family, including her grandfather. If we can think of the campaign as a sentient being seeking to prolong its survival, its mission is to generate ceaseless low-grade curiosity about the familiar character of Flo. (“Is this a new ad?” constitutes sufficient interest.)McBride compared Flo’s effect on insurance advertising to the influence of “Iron Man” on cinema. Robert Downey Jr. is “so incredibly charming, fast-talking, but sort of self-effacing — whatever that is — and then every Marvel movie became that,” he said. “This is kind of the junior version of that.” Lamberton placed the campaign in the vanguard of now-ubiquitous trends like brand characters instantiating abstract concepts, and commercials that function as ersatz sitcoms with years of story lines. Flo’s surreal cheer, and the extent to which her enthusiasm for competitively priced insurance veers into pathological obsession, are winks at an old-fashioned idea of advertising; the implication, through exaggeration, is that today’s audiences are too sophisticated to be swayed by an unrealistic pitchman. Lamberton refers to this self-conscious style, endemic in the current proliferation of “funny” insurance commercials, as “ironic advertising” — ads that “recognize they are a little bit ridiculous.” When I told Remi Kent about online speculation that Progressive pays Courtney $1 million per year to star in commercials, Kent smiled silently at me for a few seconds without moving the muscles of her face one millimeter, like a buffering video of herself. It was only when I declared my own guess for Courtney’s annual salary — a figure much higher than $1 million — that she stopped buffering (but kept smiling). “Well,” Kent said, “that’s a wide range, isn’t it?”The second guess I put to Kent was a number hazarded by Phil Cassese, a commercial agent at Stewart Talent. Cassese’s clients have appeared in ads for brands like Olive Garden and Verizon. (One, a young redhead, served as the new face of Wendy’s after its 2012 rebrand.) By his estimation, the star of a “splashy campaign,” along the lines of “Superstore,” might reasonably expect to hit the $1 million mark after four or five years — around the time of the Cronut and “Blurred Lines,” in Courtney’s case. Fifteen years in, Cassese said, an annual figure “like $10 million” would be “in the fair ballpark.” You know how sometimes, in a commercial, there is a scene that takes place in a house? How many houses do you suppose the commercial auteurs need to borrow to pull that off? “Zero — that’s what movie magic is for”? Perhaps, “One”? In fact, on a gray morning this past spring, the people who make the Progressive commercials commandeered a whole block of houses, to shoot scenes inside one family’s appealingly nondescript home. “There are specific neighborhoods in L.A. that don’t look like L.A.,” Sean McBride told me. “If you start paying attention,” he said, you will notice the same homes reused “constantly.”To the tree-lined block, the “Superstore” team had trucked a quantity of equipment sufficient to stage a three-hour Beyoncé concert on the moon. There were lights, cameras, actors’ gleaming trailers and portable heaters — it was, after all, 62 degrees outside — but most of the equipment just looked like … equipment? Like: sturdy black tubs with lids, crates, clamps, poles, spaghetti heaps of power cords, racks of racks, extra-large folded-up things, rectangles and tubular items. Some of this arsenal had been used to transform the living room of one house into a Black person’s living room. Perhaps it already was one — but because regular people don’t naturally style their dwellings in commercially approved ways (literally, a representative from Progressive HQ must walk through the set and approve every single item that will appear on camera), because they have things like artwork (stupid), their own furniture (ugly), family photos (who is that?!) and Rubik’s cubes (forbidden, because Rubik’s Cubes® are trademarked), all the aforementioned must be temporarily disappeared and replaced with narratively appropriate, legally generic this and that. If cars are present, their manufacturer logos are covered with abstract shapes of similar dimensions, their license plates, upon inspection, cursively reading not “California” but “Drive Safely.” This obfuscation process is called “Greeking,” as in, “It’s all Greek to me” (as in, “I can’t tell what that says, but it definitely doesn’t say Kia Optima, for legal reasons”). If my visit to the “Superstore” set can be taken as representative, being closely involved with the production of popular TV commercials for large national brands is the best possible outcome for a human life. The scale and complexity of the operation at the center of Courtney’s work is eye-popping. Every fleeting football-game-interrupting Progressive ad is the product of hours of labor from more than a hundred people. On set, a cat wrangler stood just out of frame, ready to pounce with a backup cat if the primary cat failed. Trays of lickerish delights — crostini with prosciutto, cups of ethereal parfait — were discreetly proffered, at frequent intervals, to people scrutinizing monitors. Every lens, light and politely anxious face was turned heliotropically toward Courtney, in a rented living room, trying to remember, while delivering her line, that Progressive was offering deals “for new parents” rather than “to new parents” — a possibly meaningful distinction. This wasn’t a critically acclaimed Hulu series; there was actually a lot riding on this. It needed to be the same, but slightly different, and every bit as successful as the 200 that had come before it, so that everyone would be asked to return to this job — not necessarily, perhaps not exactly, the job of their dreams, but a better job than anyone could ever hope for, bolstered by friendly faces and fantastic catering and a sumptuous corporate budget — in perpetuity. Many entertainers progress from commercial work (young Leonardo DiCaprio for Bubble Yum) to critical acclaim; some later double back to endorsement work to cash in on their renown (less-young Leonardo DiCaprio for the Guangdong OPPO Mobile Telecommunications Corporation). Few, in either stage, find their likenesses permanently welded to a multibillion-dollar company. Courtney continued auditioning for other ads even after landing Progressive, but suspected that even casting directors who liked Stephanie Courtney refused to hire Flo. She could have avoided what has become an indelible association by abandoning the role early on. But she almost certainly could not have been as successful as an actor had she not played Flo for 15 years; few actors are.Backstage at The Groundlings.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesYet Courtney cannot but envy some of her peers, flourishing from projects they have written themselves. “I’m as competitive or hard on myself or ‘compare and despair’ as anybody,” she said. She feels pressure — self-inflicted — to pursue a creative endeavor that is solely hers. “I am writing something just for mys — I shouldn’t even say this, but I’m writing something for myself,” she said. It’s a comedic script, set in a high school, like the one where her father worked. “I don’t even think I should waste my time trying to pitch it to anybody,” Courtney told me. “Because I understand that it would be received politely. It would be a great meeting. We’d have water.” But, no matter how funny she is in real life, she knows people are not clamoring to hear more from the Progressive lady about her ideas for feature-length comedy films. If she ever did make a go of it, “I would probably finance it,” she said. “I will probably take my kid’s college money.” There are moments when Courtney’s everyday is disrupted by a flashing recollection of her good fortune. A while ago, she and her husband were discussing possible home improvements — some tedious projects they should get around to. “I remember thinking,” she said, “in an annoyed tone, Well, how can life be better than it is now?!” The idea made them laugh. “It’s worth more than money,” Courtney said, to feel like you have “enough.” But other things might be worth more than money, too — things like knowing you have told a story that inspired your fellow man to contemplate facets of life beyond switching insurance carriers. Is there a tasteful limit to how many things worth more than money a person should attempt to acquire? “Who has a better job than you?” I asked. “On that set?” Courtney asked. “In the world.”“There are times when I ask myself that,” Courtney said. “The miserable me who didn’t get to audition for ‘S.N.L.’ never would have known,” she said, how good life could be when she was denied what she wanted. “I hope that’s coming through,” she said. “I’m screaming it in your face.”What sane person would not make the most extreme version of this trade — tabling any and all creative aspirations, possibly forever, in exchange for free prosciutto; testing well with the general market, the Black and the Hispanic communities; delighted co-workers and employers; more than four million likes on Facebook; and, though tempered with the constant threat of being rendered obsolete by unseen corporate machinations, the peace of having “enough”? Do we deny ourselves the pleasure of happiness by conceiving of it as something necessarily total, connoting maximum satisfaction in every arena? For anyone with any agency over his or her life, existence takes the form of perpetual bartering. Perhaps we waive the freedom of endless, aimless travel for the safety of returning to a home. Perhaps willingly capping our creative potential secures access to a reliable paycheck. Forfeiting one thing for the promise of something else later is a sophisticated human idea. Our understanding of this concept enables us to sell one another insurance.Caity Weaver is a staff writer at the magazine. She has written about trying to find Tom Cruise, going on a package trip for youngish people and spending time in the “quietest place on Earth.” Sinna Nasseri is a first-generation American based in Los Angeles. He learned to take photographs on the streets of New York City after leaving a career as a lawyer. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Sebastian Maniscalco’s Toughest Audience Is His Kids

      by

      “When they laugh, it blows away the feeling of 20,000 people,” says the comedian, who stars in the new Max series “Bookie.”Sebastian Maniscalco sells out theaters riffing on his tight-knit Italian American family. Earlier this year, in the movie “About My Father,” Robert De Niro played his hairstylist dad — who tutored the actor in the art of applying highlights. He even pitched a series centered on his life to the sitcom creator Chuck Lorre.But Lorre had another idea. Would Maniscalco be game to portray a Los Angeles bookie adjusting his business plan as the legalization of sports gambling looms?“I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds like an interesting world to live in,’” he recalled. The clincher: “I liked not playing me.”“Bookie,” out Thursday on Max, caters to the antics that Maniscalco, with his elastic body and malleable face, excels in.“I love not only telling a story, but kind of acting it out,” he said in a video interview from Atlantic City, N.J., where he was wrapping up a residency.Onstage, Maniscalco is every bit the exasperated son, husband and father who finds even a trip to the grocery store a painful undertaking. But in real life, he revels in Sundays at the farmers’ market with his young daughter and son, admiring the art of his wife, Lana Gomez, and Whirley Pop movie nights with the whole family.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1My TheragunI love massage, and I try to get one once a week. But when I’m on the road it’s hit or miss. And I like a really, really deep-tissue massage. So that’s what the Theragun provides for me.2Farmers’ MarketsIt’s not necessarily shopping for fresh ingredients, but for me now with kids, to watch them walk around the farmers’ market and get excited about seeing that they’re making caramel corn, or you could feed the goat or the rabbits, or that there’s a whole pistachio stand. It’s a family tradition that we do on Sundays when I’m in town.3My Wife’s ArtMy wife is unbelievably positive and cheerful, and her art reflects her personality. It’s abstract, it’s colorful, it’s happy. I wasn’t a big art guy prior to meeting my wife, but I have a different appreciation now about what goes into creating a piece of art. We have this huge piece in the living room that she just put up, and it’s different shades of green. It reminds me of her every time I see it.4Megaformer PilatesI thought Pilates was on the floor. And then next thing you know, I’m strapped into a machine, and I’m doing these movements that I haven’t ever done before, and my body is becoming elongated. If you do it on a consistent basis, you really start to see the muscles that are being used.5Whirley Pop Movie NightsWe love making popcorn, and my wife turned me on to this machine, which has that crank on the side that stirs the kernels. Just canola oil and salt — that’s all you need. And we sit and watch movies. Now that the kids are getting older, they’re starting to get into movies that I grew up with, like “The Wizard of Oz” and “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.” My daughter is into doing all the songs from “Grease.”6EatalyThey have lobsters in an aquarium where the kids can look, and they have big whole fish with the eyeballs. They have a little pasta station, and I ask them, “OK, pick out the pasta that you want Daddy to make you tonight.” I feel like they have more of an appreciation of the food because they’re invested in it. I also want to open up their palates to different sauces on the pasta other than butter and cheese.7Cooking to Relax, Sort OfSome guys go golfing. I like cooking for people. It’s a little nerve-racking because something could go wrong and you’ve got 13 people over. The problem with me is I like to do too much. I like people to be full before they even start eating the entree.8Surprise Date NightsSometimes you become ships passing in the night, and you need that time together as a couple. So she picks a night and surprises me where we’re going to go. And then the next week I’ll pick a night and surprise her. I think it’s very important to have those date nights in a marriage that let you reconnect.9‘Succession’It is more of a comedy for me because I find myself laughing at a lot of the things they say, particularly Brian Cox, who was hysterical in this thing, and Kieran Culkin, the zingers that they throw out. I think I’ve got about four episodes left.10My Toughest AudienceThere was nothing better for me than making a room full of strangers laugh — until I had kids. When they laugh, it blows away the feeling of 20,000 people. If I get my daughter rolling on a laugh, for me it’s gold. They’re my toughest audience, but the most rewarding. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      ‘Doctor Who’ is Back. Here’s What You Need to Know.

      by

      The British sci-fi show is celebrating its 60th anniversary with three specials featuring some familiar faces.It’s rare for a television show to celebrate its 60th anniversary. It’s even rarer for a show to be entering a new era on its 60th anniversary.But “Doctor Who,” the British sci-fi show that began airing on the BBC in 1963, is in a period of expansion. Three upcoming specials, celebrating the show’s latest milestone, will arrive weekly on Disney+ in the United States from Saturday, as part of a deal between the streamer and the BBC.And then a new season, starring Ncuti Gatwa (“Sex Education”) in the title role, will arrive next year on Disney+ (and the BBC in Britain) following an extra Christmas Day episode. Russell T Davies, who relaunched the show in 2005, is the showrunner for them all.“Doctor Who” has decades of adventures, villains and complex story lines for dedicated fans to immerse themselves in. But if you’re new to the show, here’s what you need to know before tuning into the upcoming specials.A Quick RecapDavid Tennant, right, as the Doctor in Season 4 of “Doctor Who.” Tennant will rejoin the show for the 60th anniversary specials. Adrian Rogers/BBCThe Doctor is a Time Lord from a planet called Gallifrey, who travels across time and space in a Tardis, an unassuming spacecraft that looks like an old British police box, which members of the public used to call the authorities. His mission is to protect Earth, and the humans who live there, from a variety of threats.“The Doctor is the nerd, the well-read misfit, who isn’t particularly physical, who still wins the day,” said Toby Hadoke, an actor who hosts a podcast dedicated to the show. “The Doctor always offers hope for the person who feels slightly left out.”David Tennant, who played the Doctor between 2005 and 2010, and will be back as the star of the 60th anniversary specials, said that he thought the show’s appeal was “the way the domestic and the simplistic and everyday meets the fantastical and the absurd.” In the show’s world, “the most extraordinary things become very relatable,” he said.The show’s longevity is partly thanks to the fact the Doctor can “regenerate,” meaning a new actor can step into the role, but the show also experiments with genre, and the same season can include a historical drama one episode and a modern political satire the next.“Every time the Tardis door opens and the team steps out to a new planet, or a new time, or a new story, then it begins again,” Davies, the showrunner, said.The Doctor usually travels with a regular human companion, who in the 60th anniversary specials is played by the comedian Catherine Tate.Where Are We With the Plot?Jodie Whittaker became the first woman to play the Doctor in Season 13.BBCAt the end of the last season, Jodie Whittaker, the 13th incarnation of the Doctor, regenerated.Traditionally, a new actor plays each incarnation, and Gatwa is confirmed to be the 15th Doctor. But for the upcoming 60th anniversary episodes, Whittaker has turned back into Tennant, who was the 10th Doctor from 2005 to 2010, and then again for a 50th anniversary special in 2013.Rather than reprising the 10th Doctor, in the upcoming specials, Tennant will portray a 14th Doctor, the first time an actor has played two distinct Doctors. (Keeping up?)“Who is to say you can’t do this?” Davies said. “There’s absolutely no doubt that it can happen.”Tate will also reprise her role as Donna Noble, the Doctor’s companion. But in their last adventure together, which aired in 2008, the Doctor wiped Donna’s memory, and with it all recollection of their time together. If Donna remembers him, she will die. And yet they will reunite in the upcoming specials.“I had left our heroes in a tragic situation separated forever, unable to ever be happy again,” Davies said. “That’s begging for a final act, isn’t it?”How to Watch in the U.S.Ncuti Gatwa will star as the Doctor in the show’s upcoming season.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockWhile “Doctor Who” has aired in the United States for a number of years, including on PBS, the Sci Fi Channel and BBC America, the new international distribution deal with Disney+ could make the show more accessible to a casual audience. For new viewers, the 60th anniversary specials will begin with a prologue recapping the Doctor and Donna’s story.If you would like to dive deeper into the back catalog, older “Doctor Who” episodes are available to stream in the United States on Max or BritBox.An Inclusive Sci-Fi ShowYasmin Finney will join the cast of “Doctor Who” in the new season.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images“Doctor Who” has long been notable among sci-fi franchises for its onscreen diversity. Whittaker became the show’s first female Doctor in 2017, and in 2020, Jo Martin played an incarnation of the Doctor known as the Fugitive Doctor, the show’s first Black doctor. And Yasmin Finney, a trans actor who played Elle in the Netflix show “Heartstopper,” is also joining the cast.“The show has always been good at appreciating inclusivity, and cherishing the different,” said Tennant, who added that he grew up as a “skinny bloke with specs in Scotland, who didn’t feel like the coolest person in the room.”But “the Doctor celebrates uncoolness,” he added. “And that was something I appreciated.” More