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      ‘Hello Tomorrow!’ Review: It’s Only a Paper Moon

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      This comedy about hustlers selling lunar condos launches with visual pizazz. The emotions take longer to land.“The moon belongs to everyone,” declared “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” This was an easy enough sentiment to sing in 1927, before anybody planted a flag up there.In “Hello Tomorrow!,” a 10-episode comedy starting Friday on Apple TV+, Jack Billings (Billy Crudup), a traveling real-estate salesman, would like to offer you different terms. The moon, or at least a piece of it, can be yours for zero down and $150 a month, courtesy of Brightside Lunar Residences. Just don’t look too closely at the fine print.Is he selling a chance at a better life, or just a load of green cheese? What’s striking is not only how well Jack, with his spit-shined zeal, sells his earthbound customers on his blue-sky pitch; it’s how deeply he believes himself. “Hello Tomorrow!” spins out a galaxy of deceptions both personal and professional, devised by Jack and those around him, to show how the most powerful and important lies are the ones you tell yourself.The first thing that catches your eye about “Hello Tomorrow!” is, well, everything. While its conflicts are familiar — too much so, at times — it is visually unlike anything you’ve seen on TV outside “The Jetsons.” The creators, Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, have conceived an alternative, future-past Earth that looks like an illustrator was hired to design a space-themed malt-shop menu in 1955 and got hopped up on bennies.Tin-can robots in avocado green and goldenrod yellow float about serving drinks and spraying shrubbery. Deliveries arrive to ticky-tacky suburban houses in a hover-van “driven” by a cartoon-video bird. A paperboy pulls a wagon that shoots today’s news out of pneumatic cannons.Some things haven’t changed, however: Money is still green and foldable and the source of heartache. The rich still get richer, and now they also have the moon as a luxury playground. To everyone else it’s a taunt, one more shiny thing that someone else gets to touch.The opening scene plays like a Buck Rogers burlesque of the “Mad Men” pilot. Jack sidles up to a miserable barfly (Michael Harney) and fires up his pitch, producing a rock from his pocket that he says came all the way from the lunar Sea of Serenity. “Wow,” his mark says. “That,” answers Jack, “is the one word none of us can live without.”From left, Dewshane Williams, Nicholas Podany and Hank Azaria play Jack’s sales team.Apple TV+Jack himself leads a distinctly wow-less life, as do his sales associates. Eddie (Hank Azaria) is an unlucky gambler who believes that “desperation is a salesman’s greatest asset.” Herb (Dewshane Williams) is an anxious expectant father of twins. Shirley (Haneefah Wood), Jack’s right-hand woman, sees through his upbeat blarney but is herself cheating on her husband with Eddie.Jack’s own personal secret is Don Draper-sized: He abandoned his wife and baby years ago. When a tragedy brings Jack to his old hometown, he longs to reconnect with his now-grown son, Joey (Nicholas Podany), the only way he knows how: deceitfully, by offering Joey a sales job without identifying himself as Joey’s father. That lie, and the questionable machinations of the moon-condo business, are the twin nuclear reactors that power the first season.“Hello Tomorrow!” is a hell of a looker. Its midcentury-modern version of steampunk — chromepunk? — is packed with analog-tech wonders like self-popping popcorn buckets at a ballgame. But the early episodes left me wondering if there was anything behind its polished facade.“Pleasantville”-style spoofs of 1950s suburbia have been done to death. The society of “Hello Tomorrow!” is not exactly Eisenhower-era America; on the one hand, it’s casually racially integrated, but on the other, women still hold pre-Betty Friedan housewife roles. There are vague references to a past “war” and hints that automation has cost some people their jobs and purpose, but no explanation of how technology has made the world so small while leaving America so homogeneous.In general, “Hello Tomorrow!” breezes past the world-building, hoping, not unlike Jack, that you’ll get too caught up in the pretty pictures to worry about the details. And damned if it doesn’t work, some of the time.Crudup is marvelously cast, letting Jack’s inner aches occasionally slip past his practiced smile. (Among a slew of quirky supporting performances, Susan Heyward is an absolute pip as Herb’s shrewd wife, Betty.) The season builds screwball momentum as Jack and company try to outrun the consequences of their choices.But the series is so stylized, not just in the design but also in the performances and the “Guys and Dolls” dialogue, that the characters often feel cartoony and unconvincing. Alison Pill, as a customer determined to expose Jack as a fraud, is like a black-and-white floor-wax commercial come to life. The sales staff’s various personal conflicts are weightless and one-note.Alison Pill stars as a customer convinced that Jack is a fraud.Apple TV+What is thoroughly, achingly real is the pervasive theme of lies and why people tell them. Falsehoods are an effective plot engine, of course, but here they are also about character; they’re the sad, sleazy cousins of wishes.The deeper you get into Jack’s business and personal deceptions, the more you realize that every character here — even the most upright — is lying to someone, or to themselves, in the sad belief that voicing the lie can somehow make it true. Underneath the show’s sleek shine is a story of beat-up dreamers trying to convince themselves that, with one lucky break, they might lasso the moon.You could ask whether they might be better off being honest with themselves, just as you could ask whether Jack couldn’t make a simpler living by selling some nice encyclopedias. But “Hello Tomorrow!” suggests that deceptions, self- and otherwise, are the rocket fuel that keeps us moving through an otherwise indifferent universe. “What’s life without a dream to make it go down easy?” Jack asks. It’s the oldest story under the sun. More

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      in Theater

      Billy Crudup Makes the Sale in ‘Hello Tomorrow!’

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      Billy Crudup’s father, Thomas Henry Crudup III, was a gambler, a hustler, an occasional loan shark and a bookie of questionable gift. Sometimes on the way to his son’s weekend soccer practice, he would stop the car on an interstate shoulder and deal king crab out of the trunk. He sold red-and-white-striped umbrella hats, coffee additives, Farrah Fawcett posters, an inflatable ice chest.“Which is not a flotation device,” the younger Crudup clarified in a video call on a weekday afternoon in January.Despite two and a half decades in entertainment, this Crudup, 54, has lived a somewhat more conventional life governed by rigorous professional ethics. The risks he takes are mostly artistic. To watch his early films — “Stage Beauty,” “Without Limits,” “Almost Famous” among them — is to see a performer making audacious choices, executed with deep feeling and meticulous control.He’s an indifferent gambler. (The actor Hank Azaria, a poker buddy, confirmed this: Crudup, a performer who often trades in inscrutability, apparently has no poker face.) Then again, his whole career has been a kind of gamble, a long game. Though he has movie star looks, he bet that they wouldn’t last, and so the parts he took, often character parts, were designed to secure career longevity by demonstrating his aptitude and range.In one way, he lost that bet. As I broke it to him, his looks have held up very well. “I appreciate that,” he said, strong-jawed and elfin beneath a Yankees cap. “A lot of niacin and B-root.” (Niacin and B-root? “Those are the first two things that came into my head,” he said.)But in another way, it paid off: In his 50s, he is enjoying the best roles of his life. Since 2019, he has played Cory Ellison, a bright-eyed, coldblooded network news exec in the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show.” Now he has added Jack Billings, a fast-talking slickster who heads a lunar time-share concern in “Hello Tomorrow!,” another Apple TV+ show, which debuts on Feb. 17.In “Hello Tomorrow!,” Crudup’s character leads a team selling lunar properties in a development called Brightside. (With Haneefah Wood and Hank Azaria.)Apple TV+An evangelist, a huckster, a consummate salesman, Jack reminds Crudup of his father, who died in 2005. Traveling salesmen are akin to gamblers, Crudup argued, always playing the odds, always counting on the big win.“I get to be in some proximity to my dad, by playing a version of him,” Crudup said.There are two narratives that people like me tend to spin around Crudup: that fame has always eluded him and that he never wanted it anyway. He acknowledges that both are somewhat true. He didn’t avoid mainstream projects (see: “Watchmen”), as long as he could play flawed and fractured characters within them.But while acting is a kind of selling, Crudup has always resisted selling himself. For years, he wore his own clothes to award shows. He mostly skipped the talk show circuit. He has tried to keep his personal life private. (“Billy Crudup has a personal life?” his friend and “Morning Show” co-star Jennifer Aniston joked.) A decade or two ago, he would have submitted to an interview like this, if he submitted at all, only out of contractual obligation and under sufferance. A New York Times writer, interviewing him in 2004, wrote, “He shields his life from would-be inspectors as if it were a nuclear facility in North Korea.” This avoidance was partly in service of that gamble. He wagered that a public persona would make receding into roles more difficult. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said. Avoiding publicity was, he said, “a protective mechanism.”It was also a way to protect himself when the tabloids swarmed. In 2003, Crudup left his girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, to pursue a relationship with his “Stage Beauty” co-star, Claire Danes. He has not spoken publicly about this, just as he doesn’t speak about what seems to be his current relationship, with the actress Naomi Watts. He could set a few records and Wikipedia pages straight, he said. But he prefers not to.“Because that’s a lifelong pursuit, constantly trying to manage how people think about me as opposed to thinking about my work,” he said.The work has been consistent, but in the 2010s it became less visible. In films like “Jackie,” “20th Century Woman” and “Spotlight,” he inhabited characters so fully that he didn’t seem to be acting at all. It was easy to admire his performances without thinking much about them. That changed with “Harry Clarke,” a 2017 Off-Broadway play about a diffident, pansexual con artist. The play has a dozen roles. Crudup played all of them.Leigh Silverman, who directed the play, was surprised at how much Crudup struggled during rehearsals. In his films, he had made it look so easy. “I was so captivated, really, by his suffering, and his continuing to show up every day,” Silverman said in an interview. But during previews, Crudup began to suffer less, abandoning himself to the various roles, switching fluently between them. To anyone watching him alone onstage, his reach and capacity were irrefutable, as was his charisma.“He’s both holding you at a distance and beckoning you forward, which is so sexy,” Silverman said.In “The Morning Show,” Crudup (with Jennifer Aniston) plays a charismatic news executive. “Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, said.Apple TV+One of those watchers was Aniston, who immediately turned to her producing partner, Kristin Hahn, and told her that Crudup had to be in “The Morning Show.” Cory had been originally envisioned as a 30-year-old villain. But when Crudup flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, she was quickly convinced.“Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Ehrin said.Cory is staunch in his determination to win the ratings game. But there’s a volatility to the man, an unpredictability. “The Morning Show,” like “Harry Clarke” before it, allows Crudup to live in the contradictions that have made him a thrilling performer: his boldness and precision, his childlike enthusiasm married to a coolness that borders on opacity. Crudup enjoys these tensions. His co-stars do, too.“It’s electric,” Aniston said of acting opposite him. “Every time, I’m going, Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen next?”This electricity impressed Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, the creators and showrunners of “Hello Tomorrow!” Set in a retrofuturist world in which hovercrafts are a given and travel to the moon commonplace, the show centers on a group of salesmen hawking lunar properties in a development called Brightside. They’re led by Crudup’s Jack, who attacks the project with missionary zeal. Other actors had shown interest in the role. They’d seen Jack as a smoothie, a charmer. Jansen recalled Crudup’s take: “He said, ‘Oh, this guy isn’t a salesman; he’s a priest.’”The truth about those lunar properties remains elusive though much of the season. What’s important is that Jack believes in them, and his belief is so unswerving and sincere that it has a way of inspiring those around him.“Jack’s a genuine believer that providing somebody with a little bit of hope during the day is a true commodity worth valuing,” Crudup said.Here are some of the things that make Jack a good salesman: his energy, his flexibility, his superlative people skills. These are qualities Crudup’s father shared. They are also among the abilities that make Crudup a great actor. Like an actor, Jack is selling people on a story. He believes in the dream so that others can believe it, too.Crudup has generally sought to avoid publicity. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Good salesmanship is truly believing what you’re saying,” Crudup said. And Crudup has that belief. It’s why he can deliver a line like “Chaos, it’s the new cocaine” in “The Morning Show” with absolute conviction. It’s why his Jack can conjure intimacy even when surrounded by computer-generated automatons.“Sometimes giving folks a new dream to dream can make all the difference,” Jack says. And in Crudup’s mouth it sounds just about plausible.His co-stars Azaria and Haneefah Wood noticed this early in the shoot, during a scene in which Jack delivers a seminar-style version of his moonage daydream. Even having read the script, Azaria found himself weeping during the performance. His character, an insider on Jack’s team, would not have wept.“I had to hide from the camera that he had made me cry,” Azaria said.After the director called cut, Wood, who plays the team’s savvy accounts manager, approached Crudup. “And I was like, ‘[Expletive] you, Billy,’” she recalled. “‘Now my game has to step up so far, to be on just the same level.’”“But he gives you that energy,” she added. “He gives you the desire to just want to go all the way.”Whether or not Crudup has gone all the way, he has come pretty far. His career has been the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: He put the work in early on and he kept working. It’s only now, in these rich continuous roles, that he is seeing the return on his investment. And knowing he has made good has allowed him to hold himself a little more lightly. He’ll wear anyone’s shirt to an awards show now, he told me.“I feel less protective because I’ve been able to establish the career that I hoped to,” he said. Raking in the chips feels good. Maybe not as good as cornering the highway king crab market, but pretty good all the same.“It is miraculous to me,” he said. More

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      in Television

      In ‘Shrinking,’ Jason Segel Does the Work

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      Jason Segel knows that you like him.It’s the sad eyes. The pained smile. The shambling 6-foot-4-inch frame that he diminishes by caving in his chest. It’s his single season on the critics’ darling “Freaks and Geeks,” playing a puppyish high schooler; his nine seasons on the audience favorite “How I Met Your Mother,” as a loving, excitable husband and dad; his slate of rom-coms. If you saw the 2008 film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which he also wrote, you spent 73 frames opposite his exposed penis during a mortifying breakup scene. And, most likely, you came out still liking him.“I’ve built up some currency, some good will,” Segel said. “Like, ‘Oh, he’s a good guy; he wouldn’t do anything intentionally mean.’” This was on a January video call, and Segel was recounting an early conversation he’d had with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein about their Apple TV+ sitcom “Shrinking.” The first two episodes premiere on Friday; eight more follow weekly.Segel, 43, who joined the series as a writer, executive producer and star, opposite Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, plays Jimmy, a cognitive behavioral therapist crushed by personal grief. A year after the sudden death of his wife, Jimmy self-medicates with pills, booze and some very polite sex workers. He is a neglectful father and a bad neighbor. His approach to patient care would make an ethics panel weep. Another comic actor might have tried to protect his likability. Segel, in this role, wanted to squander it.“We have to use that for evil,” he recalled telling Lawrence and Goldstein. “We should spend that currency.”Segel, who grew up in a comfortable, beach-adjacent neighborhood of Los Angeles, became a professional actor by inclination and deceit. He was an anxious kid, burdened from an early age, he said, by “a sense of impending doom.” Acting classes were a rare space in which he felt comfortable. By high school, though, his basketball schedule (he was, as his height suggests, a star) kept him from auditioning for most school plays. His theater teacher persuaded him to star in a three-night run of Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story.” Without telling Segel, that teacher invited a leading casting director from Paramount, who liked what she saw.“I’m baffled by people who take the bus to L.A. and say, ‘I’m gonna make it,’” Segel said, moving his thickly stubbled face closer to the camera. He wore a gray plaid shirt, his brown hair cresting high above his forehead, a wave that never broke. “That’s bravery. Me, I got really lucky.”Segel and Linda Cardellini in “Freaks and Geeks,” which only lasted one season but remains a critical favorite.Chris Haston/NBCHe landed a role on “Freaks and Geeks” not long after. Precocious, he had a quarter-life crisis at 20, when that series ended after 18 episodes. He was too old and too tall to play more high schoolers and too young for anything else. Judd Apatow, the executive producer of “Freaks and Geeks,” encouraged him to write. A few years later, just after he was cast in “How I Met Your Mother,” he had begun “Sarah Marshall.”Nicholas Stoller, who directed that movie, admired the script’s sweetness and Segel’s sweetness, too. The character Segel played, like many he had played and would play, verged on creepy and pathetic without tumbling over. “He’s willing to have his characters do bad stuff because it’s human, it’s relatable,” Stoller said. “But he just grounds it in kindness.”That movie set the template for the next six years: Film the sitcom for eight months and then make a movie during the hiatus, often one that he had written or co-written. But when “How I Met Your Mother” ended in 2014, Segel, then 34 and still precocious, had his midlife crisis. This one felt more existential. He’d been acting for half of his life and figured he was good at it. And he’d written films he was proud of, like “Sarah Marshall” and the 2011 Muppets movie. But was this his purpose? Writing and delivering joke after joke after joke?Segel explored the alternatives. Newly sober, he left Los Angeles, moving several hours north, to a property with orange groves. He chose projects more sparingly. To begin, he signed on to star in “The End of the Tour,” a movie about the writer David Foster Wallace. He hadn’t really done a drama since “The Zoo Story.” But he recognized parallels between himself and the film’s version of Wallace, who has just published his masterwork, “Infinite Jest.”“It’s this moment where everyone is saying, ‘You’ve won life,’” Segel said. “And you are feeling so scared. Like, Oh, no. What’s next?”“An audience will follow Jason Segel very far before they turn on him, and that’s a gift,” said Brett Goldstein, one of the “Shrinking” creators.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesHe didn’t know. He wasn’t writing, and he didn’t find anything funny. But maybe he just didn’t want to write comedy, he realized, which led him to create “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” a 2020 limited series about four adrift souls ensnared by an alternative reality game.“While it wasn’t the most commercial thing I’ve ever written, it was maybe the most meaningful,” Segel said. “I proved I could make something again.” He began to theorize that maybe he needed to make work that let him use more of himself — the comedy stuff and the not-so-comic stuff. He sought projects that encouraged him to be what a therapist might describe as “integrated.”“Like, let’s make this one weird guy,” he said. “That’s maybe what the point of all of this has been about.”That revelation led him first to “Winning Time,” the flashy drama about the Los Angeles Lakers (Segel plays an unflashy, melancholic coach), and then to “Shrinking.” Lawrence and Goldstein, who met on “Ted Lasso,” had each been roughing out separate shows about grief and therapy before deciding that they should make a show together. Segel was their first choice to lead it.“Because he has that thing: He’s funny, he’s a great actor, inherently likable,” Goldstein said, adding a few expletives. “An audience will follow Jason Segel very far before they turn on him, and that’s a gift.”Lawrence, on a separate video call, agreed. “He’s got this underlying vulnerability and it makes him so empathetic,” Lawrence said. “Even when he does something lousy, as his character, you go, ‘Oh, I wonder why he did that. Is he OK?’” Lawrence, who has multiple projects in the works, also liked the idea of an actor who could do some heavy lifting in the writers’ room.Segel and Harrison Ford on the set of “Shrinking.” The show’s creators valued Segel’s ability to write as well as act.Apple TV+In the series, Segel wanted to subvert his inherent likability. (With Luke Tennie.)Apple TV+They pitched him the show. Segel was quiet on the call, so quiet that Goldstein worried that he didn’t like the idea. After a day or two, Segel accepted. He explained this delay as the upside of that midlife crisis: Now he takes his time choosing his jobs. But he knew he would take the part as soon as he heard the pitch. “Shrinking,” he realized, would require both nanosecond comic timing and deep sensitivity. He would have to make an audience believe that this was a man overwhelmed by grief, and then make that grief funny without ever cheapening Jimmy’s pain.Pain interests him. It’s often the first question he asks himself about a character: How is this person suffering? And he figured that years into a pandemic, the audience for “Shrinking” might also be in pain. He has always seen himself as the kind of actor who functions as an audience surrogate — he mentioned Tom Hanks, Jimmy Stewart, Kermit the Frog. If a viewer could see Jimmy working through his pain, maybe that viewer could do some work, too.“What a crazy, sad couple of years,” he said. “To find a way to laugh about this together is really hard and potentially really special.”This is where the evil comes in — Segel didn’t want to make safe choices. The character had to feel volatile, even dangerous, if only to himself. Only by showing Jimmy at his absolute worst could he show the character starting to build himself back up again. On set, Segel leaned into this, so far that he sometimes fell over. Lawrence recalled shooting a scene in an early episode, in which Jimmy shouts at his next-door neighbor Liz (Christa Miller, Lawrence’s wife).“He was, like, ‘I feel like I can yell at her more here,’” Lawrence recalled.That antagonism was only for the camera. “I was surprised at how comfortable he is to act with,” Williams, his co-star, said. “There was nothing that I could do that he didn’t understand and that he wasn’t able to catch.”Segel has increasingly sought out projects that blended his comic and dramatic abilities. “Like, let’s make this one weird guy,” he said.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesNearly everyone I spoke to described Segel as a man who had “done the work”: who had become comfortable enough in his own skin, with or without professional help, that he could extend generosity and compassion to himself and others. He didn’t speak much about his personal experience of therapy (which suggests the kind of healthy boundaries that a good clinician would encourage), except to say that it had helped alleviate some of that existential dread and that he was thankful for it.James Ponsoldt directed Segel in “The End of the Tour” and in several episodes of “Shrinking.” Looking at Segel through the camera’s lens, he said, “I see someone who’s grateful to be alive, someone who has lived and knows that being alive is better than not being alive.”An actor is not necessarily the characters he plays, but Segel understands nearly all of his roles, Jimmy included, as versions of himself. He views his life (and this is arguably a little less healthy) as a series of minor and major embarrassments that he can funnel into art. The other day, he said, on vacation, he’d gone for a run on the beach and fallen on his face in front of several onlookers. Another man might have felt shame; Segel figured he could probably use it.Probably he will. The stage and the set are the places where he has always felt best able to transmute dread or low-key humiliation into something that might make someone else feel a little better. It makes him feel better, too.Williams recalled their first day of shooting. It was a tense scene and she felt nervous, awkward. But Segel reassured her. Soon they were riffing.When “cut” was called, she turned to him and said, “Acting is really fun.”He looked at her, she recalled, and thought about it for a while. And then he said, “Yeah, it really is. It’s like the funnest thing on earth.” More

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      in Television

      Gary Oldman Found James Dean and His Wife at a Gallery

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      The Oscar-winning star of “Slow Horses” on Apple TV+ likes comedians in dramas, makes photos the hard way and is still discovering the Beatles.The actor Gary Oldman knows a few things about playing spies.He picked up the first of his three Oscar nominations for his portrayal of George Smiley, the agent at the heart of the 2011 movie “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” which was adapted from John le Carré’s thriller by the same name. (He won in 2018, for “The Darkest Hour.”)In the Apple TV+ series “Slow Horses,” based on Mick Herron’s “Slough House” novels, Oldman is a similarly unglamorous spy, one of several dealing with divorce, alcoholism, gambling problems and other misfortunes. As Oldman said in a phone interview last month, they are far from “that rather sort of glossy world of Jason Bourne and James Bond.”There is certainly no gloss to Oldman’s character, Jackson Lamb, a perpetually rumpled and frequently drunk MI5 agent who oversees spies tucked away for being embarrassing or otherwise undesirable. But Oldman has decided to spend more time with him than with any other character in his more than 40-year career.“He publicly humiliates. He’s provocative. He’s deliberately confrontational. He’s all of those things,” he said. “And yet, he has an incredible sort of moral compass, and he’s very loyal, and I think that is sort of, if you like, redeeming.”Season 2 of “Slow Horses” premiered Friday, while the third season is in production. (A fourth has been ordered.) Oldman talked about the books he’s giving for Christmas, the music he makes on his iPhone and the plays he performs on Zoom. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Richard Miller I collect photographs. Once, I was looking for a print of a photograph of James Dean on a break during the shooting of “Giant,” sitting on a sofa, reading a Look magazine with Elizabeth Taylor on the cover. Next to him on the sofa is Elizabeth Taylor, with her head on his arm, asleep. I went over to the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles to see if they had a print. I described it but said I didn’t know who it was by. A voice behind me said, “Oh, that’s Richard Miller.” I turned around and met the gallery’s director, Gisele Schmidt, who is now my wife.2. “The Dumb Waiter” I’ve had a chance to work with a wonderful actor and a lovely man lately called Arliss Howard. We recently got onto Zoom and read “The Dumb Waiter,” a one-act play by Harold Pinter about a pair of hit men. We did it for ourselves — you know, just keeping your hand in the game. I don’t know if it’ll go anywhere. Maybe Arliss and I will do it one of these days.3. iPhone Music Recordings Again, purely for the hell of it, a friend in Canada and I have been recording songs by David Bowie, who was a very good friend of mine. We send tracks back and forth to each other by email and text. I’ll put down, say, the piano track, and he’ll put guitar on it. You’ll be amazed what you can do with an iPhone. When you hear these tracks put together, you would think they were recorded live in a studio with a band.4. London’s National Portrait Gallery The National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museums, the National Gallery — these are all places that are part of growing up in England. They’ve always been there. Always been accessible. Every time I go back to the National Portrait Gallery, I see new things.5. The Beatles A friend of mine, the painter George Blacklock, always says that if you could look at a painting and get it all in five minutes, then it wouldn’t be worth painting it. They reveal new things to you over time. I feel that way about the Beatles. My God, the artistry. I am constantly in awe and total admiration for what they achieved.6. John le Carré John le Carré had an eye for detail that I think is quite remarkable. “Tinker, Tailor,” for me, is the jewel in the crown of his writing. But I liked one of his next George Smiley novels, “Smiley’s People,” very much. We were going to do it. It never happened, for a variety of reasons, but I would’ve loved to have revisited George again.7. Stella Adler The other day, I was talking to Saskia Reeves — who plays Catherine Standish on “Slow Horses” — about the many methods and techniques of acting. She’s sort of from the Stanislavski school, as many of us are, and she was talking about Uta Hagen and, I think, Sanford Meisner, but she was sort of unfamiliar with the great actor and teacher Stella Adler. So I think the book “Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov” will be in Saskia’s Christmas stocking.8. Comedic Actors Working on Dramas I loved “The Patient” with Steve Carell and happen to think he’s a really wonderful dramatic actor. I also liked “Severance.” I was shocked to see that some episodes were directed by Ben Stiller. I knew he’d directed before, but it was really quite masterful. Sometimes we go: “Oh my God, this person can be funny and be dramatic!” And yet, for years, the wonderful Jack Lemmon bounced between the two.9. Family Christmas This year, we’re having Christmas at the house, and it’s our first big, big, big Christmas. We have 14 for Christmas Day and five dogs. So, it’s going to be a houseful. We’re going to try and coax my son Charlie into making his carbonara.10. Wet-Plate Photography I started learning about the wet-plate photography process when I was writing a script about the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. I made one good plate and thought, “I’ve been searching all my life for this — why haven’t I discovered it earlier?” I find it incredibly satisfying, and it takes me away from my main job. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me’ Review: An Honest Portrait of Stardom

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      Sincere and soul-baring, the documentary, directed by Alek Keshishian, captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame.“My Mind & Me,” a new documentary about Selena Gomez, doesn’t feel like a publicity device. Sincere and soul-baring, the film captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame. Watching it is like eavesdropping on a 95-minute therapy session with the artist.It opens with Gomez out of sorts. “I have to stop living like this,” she says, as we jump from 2019 back to 2016. Backstage at one of her concerts, she cries, yearning to shed her child-star image and stand on her own as a solo artist. She fears she’s a disappointment.The documentary doesn’t show her forgetting her past as much as confronting it. A road trip to Grand Prairie, Texas, where she reunites with old neighbors and visits her childhood home, is a turning point for Gomez. In contrast is a scene where she’s answering interviewers whose flippant questions leave her feeling, she says, like “a product.” She craves genuine connection, something fame hasn’t yet afforded her.As a subject, Gomez is in the trustworthy hands of the veteran director Alek Keshishian. In 1991, he worked the same kind of magic on Madonna for “Truth or Dare.” Capturing an artist’s fearlessness, as he does in both films, isn’t just up to him, of course; like Madonna, Gomez is boldly unguarded. But “My Mind & Me” also looks outward, framing struggle as the human condition. An honest portrait study of stardom and mental illness, the film offers a hopeful catharsis: How, when we reveal our hardest truths, we can heal together.Selena Gomez: My Mind and MeRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      Bursting Into Dance: Gentlemen, Assume the Superhero Stance!

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      “Spirited,” a revisionist “Christmas Carol,” leads with tap, thanks to the choreographer Chloé Arnold and her team, Ava Bernstine-Mitchell and Martha Nichols.The trailer for “Spirited” arrives feet first. Two silhouetted bodies trade syncopated riffs in a lively tap showdown. “It’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas,” the title cards announce, before the dancers are revealed to be the film’s stars: Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds.“How did you know all that?” Ferrell’s character exclaims, panting slightly, as the dancing concludes. “I didn’t! I was just following you!” Reynolds’ character shoots back. “Tap is new for me. It’s a very expressive medium.”It’s rare, these days, for a major motion picture to lead with dance. But the dancing in “Spirited” — a revisionist take on “A Christmas Carol,” in theaters Nov. 11 (and streaming Nov. 18 on Apple TV+) — is more than holiday window dressing. A self-aware musical in the vein of “Spamalot” and “Schmigadoon!,” “Spirited” aims to charm musical theater skeptics by poking gentle fun at the genre’s oddities. The film’s elaborately choreographed production numbers offer a new way for Ferrell and Reynolds, neither of whom had previous dance experience, to explore the winkingly self-referential humor they’re known for as actors. They are constantly bursting into dance, and constantly cracking jokes about how strange it is for people to burst into dance.That they’re often in tap shoes can be credited to Chloé Arnold, the extraordinary tap dancer who led the film’s choreographic team. The director and co-writer Sean Anders fell for Arnold’s work after watching videos of her Syncopated Ladies ensemble online. They featured “some of the most intense, badass tap dancing I’d ever seen,” Anders said in an email. “I knew she was the secret weapon I was looking for.”To help manage an ensemble cast that featured several dozen dancers, Arnold brought in two associate choreographers, Ava Bernstine-Mitchell and Martha Nichols, entertainment-industry standouts with backgrounds in an array of dance styles. Together, they created pull-out-all-the-stops numbers of ebullient variety: If a crew of tappers is dancing atop tables, aerialists might be spinning in hoops above them while a ballet group whips through a pirouette sequence on the floor below.Tap it out: Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell in “Spirited.”Claire Folger/Apple TV+They also helped coach the top-billed actors, working for several months with Ferrell, Reynolds and their co-star and fellow dance newbie Octavia Spencer. “I’ve already asked this incredible choreography team to be best friends,” Reynolds wrote on Instagram during filming. “Just filed the paperwork and I’m excited for our new life together.”The resulting film brims with dance. Nearly every extra is a dancer, even in nonmusical scenes — look for the three choreographers in bit parts — and dance spills over into the film’s marketing. “Tap! In the trailer!” Arnold said. “When I saw that, I cried.”The significance of a trio of Black women leading a creative department on a big-budget movie has not been lost on Arnold, Bernstine-Mitchell and Nichols, all of whom are making their choreographic feature film debuts.“In the art of dance and the art of tap in particular, Black women have almost never had a position of leadership, proper recognition or proper compensation,” Arnold said. “There are so many times when, you know, your spirit is challenged. So for this creative group to bring us in, and not try to silence our voices, that trust was so beautiful.”Arnold, Bernstine-Mitchell and Nichols gathered on Zoom to talk about to talk about the dancing in “Spirited,” diversity in musical theater and choreographing for the stars. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.This is the first time the three of you have worked together. What was the chemistry like?CHLOÉ ARNOLD Ava and I both come from the school of Debbie Allen, and we’ve worked together in TV a lot, on James Corden’s show. We have a very symbiotic work flow, so I knew she had to be part of this. And Martha and I know each other from teaching at [the dance convention and competition] New York City Dance Alliance — whenever I had a free moment, I’d take her class.AVA BERNSTINE-MITCHELL Our three personalities are the perfect balance. Chloé wants to move fast, she jumps first and thinks later. Martha moves very slow, like a scientist, she wants to look carefully at every piece. And I’m the organizer, trying to keep everybody on track.There were a lot of dancers to keep track of. How did you approach casting?ARNOLD That was wild, because it was during the pandemic, so we had to do it virtually. And we had 1,000 submissions. 1,000! Unreal. We had Zoom callbacks for 400, and then deliberated and got it down to an initial core 30 — later that went up to 90. We called upon our old friends, people we trusted. And we met new friends.I’m very thankful that I was able to bring all of the Syncopated Ladies into the movie. Because they’re a backbone for me. Having your people with you, that’s one of the best gifts of life.MARTHA NICHOLS Watching Chloé and her heavy hitters — Pam Yasutake, Anissa Lee, Gisele [Silva], Maud [Arnold, Chloé’s sister], the whole crew — to see tap done at such a high level on a film, with this many individuals, was super, super special. Because when you have something as specialized as tap, it’s much more common for the number of participants to shrink. And in this, it didn’t shrink. It was magnified.Chloé, were you brought in because the team wanted a tap movie? Or did it become a tap movie because you were brought in?ARNOLD It definitely wasn’t a tap movie to start! [laughter] It was going to be, like, Will and Ryan would do a little tap number, we’ll have a bit of dance here and a bit of dance there. But it ended up being eight or nine full-throttle dance numbers.And you know, having this big-movie budget, we kept asking for more. “Could you build a two-story scaffold that we could tap on?” “Can we cover the floor with water?” And Sean would always say, “Let’s go!”The choreographers on the “Spirited” set.Claire Folger/Apple TV +Of course, dancers want more dance everywhere. But why was dance important to this particular project?BERNSTINE-MITCHELL What’s great about the script is that dancers, our role in the movie was very integral. We weren’t “added happiness.” We were part of the storytelling.A lot of dancers ended up with speaking parts too, right?ARNOLD All the dancers were allowed to audition for acting roles, which is really special and really unusual.BERNSTINE-MITCHELL And all of the dancers got to name their characters — like, with a name that shows up in the credits. We all had a purpose for being in this world.The film tries to strike a balance between earnestness and we’re-in-on-the-joke nods to the audience. How do you do that in dance?BERNSTINE-MITCHELL I think that’s something dance can actually do pretty naturally.ARNOLD If you take it seriously, but it’s absurd, it works. And Will and Ryan are obviously great at being silly, but they were also like, “All right, if we’re not supposed to look silly, and we do, you’re going to tell us, right?” There was a lot of trust there.How do you teach actors — who happen to be big stars — to dance?NICHOLS It was about speaking to them in a way that bridged the gap between dance and the physical vocabulary that they already have, to make it seem less daunting. Like, we don’t need to say “stand in jazz second position” to Ryan Reynolds. Superhero stance! He knows what that is.BERNSTINE-MITCHELL Ryan wasn’t able to touch his toes at the beginning, but we got him there.ARNOLD That was a milestone day! Their willingness to be beginners, as these masters of their craft, was great.They were also really good at disarming everyone on set. Will started his rehearsal period right around National Tap Dance Day, which, you know, he hadn’t known there was such a thing as National Tap Dance Day, but as soon as he found out, he was walking around going, “Hey, guys, happy National Tap Dance Day!” “Did you know it’s National Tap Dance Day?” [laughter]When Octavia Spencer first met us over FaceTime, she cried. Because she didn’t know we were going to be Black women. She was like, “I’m so proud of you. I know I’m in good hands.” That’s a beautiful thing to feel — knowing we’ve got to lead her through this journey, that we’re starting from a place where she already sees us, she’s already connected.How did your perspectives as Black women shape the film?ARNOLD I think that you won’t see, generally speaking, a lot of African dance influence in traditional musical theater. But that’s the crux of my movement, my natural movement, coming out of the land of tap dance, which has the African influence in it.BERNSTINE-MITCHELL The way we heard the music was very different than how I think other people would hear the music. We found funk in all the songs.NICHOLS There’s always a pocket.ARNOLD And we created a cast that is diverse in every way, shape and form — the cast we want to see in musical theater in the future. Because growing up, our reality was not seeing that. So in this film you’re going to see dancers from ages, I think, 7 to 74. You’re going to see people from all types of cultures. You’re going to see all different body types in all their glory. And I hope that unlocks more possibilities, more ways to expand how films present work and how they hire. More

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      Will Smith’s ‘Emancipation’: What Will Apple Do?

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      The Civil War drama “Emancipation” finished filming early this year. Now, Apple faces a quandary on what to do with the movie.Apple has a Will Smith problem.Mr. Smith is the star of “Emancipation,” a film set during the Civil War era that Apple envisioned as a surefire Oscar contender when it wrapped filming earlier this year. But that was before Mr. Smith strode onto the stage at the Academy Awards in March and slapped the comedian Chris Rock, who had made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.Mr. Smith, who also won best actor that night, has since surrendered his membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and has been banned from attending any Academy-related events, including the Oscar telecast, for the next decade.Now Apple finds itself left with a $120 million unreleased awards-style movie featuring a star no longer welcome at the biggest award show of them all, and a big question: Can the film, even if it succeeds artistically, overcome the baggage that now accompanies Mr. Smith?The sensitivity of the situation is apparent. According to three people involved with the film who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the company’s planning, there have been discussions inside Apple to release “Emancipation” by the end of the year, which would make it eligible for awards consideration. Variety reported in May, however, that the film’s release would be pushed into 2023.When asked for this article how and when it planned to release “Emancipation,” Apple declined to comment on that or anything else about the film.The Race to Rule Streaming TVCable Cowboy: The media mogul John Malone opened up about the streaming wars, the fast-changing news business and the future of his own career.Warner Bros. Discovery: The recently formed media colossus announced plans for a free streaming service and a paid subscription streaming service combining HBO Max and Discovery+.Turmoil at Netflix: Despite a loss of subscribers, job cuts and a steep stock drop, the streaming giant has said it is staying the course.Live Sports: Apple and Amazon are eager to expand their streaming audiences. They increasingly see live sports as a way to do it.e.There is no easy answer. Should the company postpone a film based on an important historical subject because its leading man is too toxic? Or does Apple release the movie and watch the outcome unfold? Audiences could be turned off by Mr. Smith’s presence, perhaps taking some gloss off the well-polished Apple brand. Or they could respond positively to the film, prompting an Oscar campaign, which could then upset members of the academy. And the question of how to publicize “Emancipation” will bring scrutiny to a film marketing unit that has already drawn grumbles of dissatisfaction in Hollywood for skimpy ad spends and disjointed communication — and parted ways with its head of video marketing this month.“If they shelve the movie, does that tarnish Apple’s reputation? If they release it, does it tarnish their reputation?” asked Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts and the former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “Hollywood likes a win-win situation. This one is lose-lose.”“Emancipation,” directed by Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) and with a script by William Collage, is based on the true story of a slave who escaped to the North and joined the Union army to fight against his former captors. Shot outside New Orleans and troubled by delays caused by hurricanes and Covid-19, the movie is about a man known as “Whipped Peter,” whose scarred back was photographed and became a rallying cry for abolition during the Civil War. It finished filming about a month before the 2022 Oscar telecast in March.“Emancipation” was already generating 2023 awards buzz, but plans for the film’s release were thrown into question when Mr. Smith rushed the stage and slapped Mr. Rock. Later in the show, Mr. Smith won the best actor award for his work in “King Richard.”Though Mr. Smith can still be nominated for his work, the reaction to the slap means the Oscar chances for “Emancipation” have dimmed exponentially..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Indeed, there are some in the film industry who believe that releasing “Emancipation” along with other Oscar contenders this year will only anger academy voters who were embarrassed by Mr. Smith’s actions.Bill Kramer, the newly installed chief executive of the film academy, said on a recent call with reporters that next year’s show will not dwell on the slap, even in joke form. “We want to move forward and to have an Oscars that celebrates cinema,” he said. “That’s our focus right now.”The presence of “Emancipation” would make that difficult. Stephen Gilula, the former co-chief executive of Fox Searchlight, the studio behind such Oscar winners as “12 Years a Slave” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” said releasing the film in the awards corridor between now and the end of the year, would put undue pressure on the movie and make the slap the center of the conversation.“Regardless of the quality of the movie, all of the press, all the reviewers, all of the feature writers, all the awards prognosticators are going to be looking at it and talking about the slap,” Mr. Gilula said in an interview. “There’s a very high risk that the film will not get judged on its pure merit. It puts it into a very untenable context.”To some, the film may be too good to keep quiet. Apple set up a general audience test screening of “Emancipation” in Chicago earlier this year, according to three people with knowledge of the event who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to discuss it publicly. They said it generated an overwhelmingly positive reaction, specifically for Mr. Smith’s performance, which one of the people called “volcanic.” Audience members, during the after-screening feedback, said they were not turned off by Mr. Smith’s recent public behavior.Mr. Smith largely disappeared from public view following the Oscars. But in July, he released a video on his YouTube channel in which he said he was “deeply remorseful” for his behavior and apologized directly to Mr. Rock and his family.The public mea culpa, which lasted a little more than five minutes and consisted of Mr. Smith sitting in a chair and speaking to the camera, had been viewed more than 3.8 million times since it was posted on July 29. Yet it is unclear whether it has improved the public’s perception of him. Mr. Smith’s Q score, a metric that measures celebrities’ appeal in the United States, plummeted after the Oscars. Before the slap, Mr. Smith consistently ranked among the top five celebrities in the country, alongside Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, according to data provided to Variety. When his appeal was measured again in July, (before he released his video apology) it dropped to a 24 from a 39, what Henry Schafer, executive vice president of the Q Scores Company, called a “precipitous decline.”Apple has delayed films before. In 2019, the company pushed back the release of one of its first feature films, “The Banker,” starring Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson, after a daughter of one of the men whose life served as a basis of the film raised allegations of sexual abuse involving her family. The film was ultimately released in March 2020 after Apple said it reviewed “the information available to us, including the filmmakers’ research.”Many in Hollywood are drawn to Apple for its willingness to spend handsomely to acquire prominent projects connected with established talent. But the company has also been criticized for its unwillingness to spend much to market those same projects. Two people who have worked with the company, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss dealings with Apple, said it usually created just one trailer for a film — a frustrating approach for those who are accustomed to the traditional Hollywood way of producing multiple trailers aimed at different audiences. Apple prefers to rely on its Apple TV+ app and in-store marketing to attract audiences.Yet those familiar with Apple’s thinking believe that even if it chooses to release “Emancipation” this year, it will not feature the film in its retail outlets like it did for “CODA,” which in March became the first movie from a streaming service to win best picture. That achievement, of course, was overshadowed by the controversy involving Mr. Smith. More