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    Has Scott Joplin’s ‘Thoroughly American’ Opera ‘Treemonisha’ Found Its Moment?

    “Treemonisha” — brilliant, flawed and unfinished — is ripe for creative reimagining at a time when opera houses are looking to diversify the canon.“He has created an entirely new phase of musical art and has produced a thoroughly American opera.”The anonymous critic who wrote these bold words didn’t have a performance of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” to evaluate, or a recording. In June 1911, all the reviewer had to go on was Joplin’s 230-page piano-vocal score.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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    Halle Bailey Makes a Splash in ‘The Little Mermaid’

    Emotions wash over Halle Bailey in waves.When a little girl embraced her at Disney World in March, Bailey, who has the plum role of Ariel in the live-action film of “The Little Mermaid,” fought hard to keep her composure. But when a box of sequined Little Mermaid dolls with auburn locs and cinnamon skin arrived on her doorstep, she couldn’t hold it in.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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    The Cathartic Value of Dame Edna’s Extravaganzas of Ego

    Audiences were eager to humbly suffer the stinging quips tossed out by the towering figure that was Barry Humphries’s creation.Listen to This ArticleShe was, lest we forget, the original Real Housewife. Or Surreal Housewife, if you prefer. Possessed of few obvious talents and a bottomless sense of entitlement, this expensively upholstered figure was the archetype for the ordinary middle-class matron who blossomed into improbable, overwhelming, gasp-inducing fame.Her name was Edna Everage (just one vowel away from “average”), and her advent in the mid-20th century anticipated a brash new age of undeserved celebrity. “Oh, my prophetic soul,” she might have said, contemplating the constellation of self-anointed stars who occupy our attention these days. The line comes from “Hamlet.” But Edna was the kind of gal who could convince you that she had coined it all by herself.Dame Edna, as she became known from the early 1970s, was the inspired alter-ego of the sui generis performer Barry Humphries, who died on Saturday in Sydney, Australia. Humphries was 89. Dame Edna, of course, is immortal.To become Edna, Humphries would put on a mauve wig, an increasingly rococo pair of eyeglasses and a glittering gown that screeched conspicuous consumption. Yet it would be a mistake to describe Dame Edna primarily as a drag act.This unfiltered, towering figure — who looked down on the world, in all senses, from a six-foot-plus linebacker’s frame atop stiletto heels — wasn’t a comment on gender. No, Dame Edna was all about blinkered, arrogant class and especially a breed of self-crowned royalty that had become our default deities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.That would be those who were defined by being famous, whether or not for any discernible reason beyond their willingness to become so. The genius of Humphries’s conceit was to translate the small-minded, unyielding smugness of the middle-class Australian suburbs in which he grew up into the even more invincible complacency of outrageous, drop-dead stardom.As for the rest of us — and that meant, in addition to us peons, her fellow celebrity chums, including the pope and Queen Elizabeth II — we existed to serve as her mirrors, reflecting her own fabulousness.During my tenure as a Times theater critic, there were few events I anticipated more avidly than Dame Edna’s extravaganzas of ego, where I would join the throngs of those she called “possums” and “paupers” to worship at her boat-size feet. Like so many of the greatest comics, she surgically tapped into the ruling obsession of her time.What Lenny Bruce was to the sexual hangups of the late ’50s and early ’60s and what Richard Pryor was to the racial anxieties of the ’70s and ’80s, Dame Edna was to the age of Olympian narcissism. As she said, graciously tossing her signature gladioli into the audience as she was magically lifted into the air at the end of a 1999 performance: “I have to rise above you. It’s the secret of my survival.”Dame Edna in her 2010 show “All About Me” at what is now the Stephen Sondheim Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMy years of reviewing Edna were years when the most commercially successful shows on Broadway were often those that featured faces found on the covers of People, Vanity Fair and supermarket tabloids. Audiences clamored to see Nicole Kidman in “The Blue Room” or Julia Roberts in “Three Days of Rain” not so much to watch a play as to participate in a sacred pilgrimage to the shrines of NICOLE and JULIA.Attending a Dame Edna show thus had its own special cathartic value, rooted in the openly sadomasochistic exchange of energy between her and her audience. She took it for granted that we were there because she was of an unapproachably higher order than we were, a holy order. In a riff that led to a reference to Jesus, she backtracked to say of course she wouldn’t compare herself to him, before pausing to add, “Although there are spooky similarities.”Naturally we humbly suffered the stinging quips she tossed in our direction, collectively and individually. (Pity — and envy — the chosen few she selected for audience participation.) Never mind that when she sang and danced, she sounded like a bullfrog on steroids and moved like a drunken stevedore.She was protected by her impregnable certainty that whatever she did was utterly beyond reproach. Reviewing her 2004 Broadway show “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance!,” I wrote, “Dame Edna, you see, knows better than anyone that fame means never having to say you’re sorry.”That attitude is less likely to fly in 2023, when being famous seems to mean you’re apologizing all the time. And in writings and interviews in their later years, both Edna and Humphries stumbled with comments that drew outcries from members of the Latino and trans communities and others.So allow me to return to an earlier moment in this century, when Edna was at the peak of her invulnerability, and I received a letter after raving about one of her shows. “I have to say,” the note read, “I almost deserved it.” It was signed Barry Humphries. Had the signature been Edna Everage there would have been no “almost” about it.Audio produced by More

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    The Poignant Music of Melting Ice: Have a Listen

    Listen to This ArticleAs soon as Martin Sharp opened the file, he knew the ice had been singing all summer.Several months earlier, Sharp — at that point, in 2009, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta for nearly two decades — had burrowed a cache of microphones into the Devon Ice Cap, a frozen mass in far northern Canada the size of Connecticut. Seven large microphones and GPS sensors monitored the rate of the melting ice atop the cap, while several seismic monitors sensed how the ice moved along the Earth, too. Almost as an afterthought, Sharp set up a little Sony hand-held recorder, hoping it might capture the essence of the frigid stillness where he often worked.The result teemed with surprises: A snow bunting perched on the rig and sang. Gulls circled above. And below, as deep ice gradually thawed, an unexpected symphony unspooled. Water trickled past the microphone, creating a vertiginous drone, while tiny bubbles — air trapped inside the ice, perhaps for centuries — exploded incessantly, creating an allegro of snaps and pops that conjured the electronic productions of Autechre and Aphex Twin. Sharp began playing a 20-minute tape during lectures. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asked for a copy, hoping to add sonic context to dry discussions about data and policy.“It gave people a different way into what I was talking about, other than just showing slides,” Sharp, 64, said with a chuckle by phone. “The sound conveyed what it was like to be there.”Between 1990 and 1993, Thomas Köner made a trilogy of lauded ambient albums that steadily evoked the awe and unease of being surrounded by ice that loomed, moved and cracked.Erinn SpringerIn recent years, the assorted and unexpected sounds of ice have periodically gone viral — the laserlike phenomenon of someone skating across thin ice, the shootout sensation of ice being dropped into a frozen hole, the meditative sighs of ice forming and popping inside a Swedish lake. But several scientists and musicians believe it all could have power beyond being mere online curios. Recordings of melting ice, splintering glaciers and cascading runoff could help predict the rate of climate change and sea-level rise; music made with such sounds, some hope, could lead listeners to rethink their relationship to nature. If more people can actually hear climate change through the once-unknown songs of failing ice, can they be inspired to help prevent it?“I’m privileged that I can go somewhere and study these glaciers, but what about people who have to use their imaginations?” asked Grant Deane, 61, a longtime researcher at the University of California‌‌, San Diego.Since 2009, he has plotted methods to use recordings of melting ice and calving glaciers — chunks splitting from the monolith’s edge above or below water — to document and predict the rate of loss and concomitant rise of sea levels. The planet is in a constant state of flux, of course, so melting ice and calving glaciers are natural processes, with changing seasons or epochs. But the glaciers Deane studies are receding at a rapid rate he attributes to greenhouse gases, and he believes it’s possible to hear that acceleration. He aims to build 12 substations along Greenland’s coast to chart the attrition of the island’s gargantuan ice sheet through sound.Such science, he warned, held only so much possible public sway. “When people like me start talking about melting ice, it seems so far-off and unconnected from our everyday lives,” continued Deane, who has contributed recordings to immersive installations by the Canadian artist Mia Feuer. “How can people care about that when they’re dealing with immediate problems? Music can make those connections.”“These recordings may not be scientifically sound,” said the Australian sound artist and researcher Philip Samartzis, “but it’s a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different aperture of experience.”Erinn SpringerFOR NEARLY TWO decades, the Norwegian musician Jana Winderen has been at the forefront of transforming her straightforward recordings of glaciers and the land and water surrounding them into emotional records, poignant musical postcards from melting and cracking masses of ice. During a 2006 family vacation in Iceland, Winderen dipped a hydrophone — a sealed microphone that detects pressure changes underwater — under a glacier’s edge. She shushed her daughters, sloshing in nearby mud, so she could tease out the source of some plangent rumble.“It sounded like a loud engine, so I started looking for a tractor,” Winderen, 57, said recently, speaking by video in her studio from her family’s farm outside Oslo. “But I realized for the first time that the glacier is gliding — really, really slowly — on this water underneath sediments. And the sound has presence, like a creature. I totally fell in love.”A former aspiring marine biologist whose mother was an early member of the Norwegian environmental advocacy group Future in Our Hands, Winderen soon realized the transformative capabilities of such sounds. A photo of an iceberg, she recognized, was gorgeous; the brutal noise it made while breaking free from a glacier, however, could be harrowing. Even fusillades of tiny pops from escaping air proved evocative, as the frozen world gave way to heat. “People could close their eyes and be there with the ice, be present,” she said. “It wasn’t like I had just recorded something and brought it there.”Every time Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside. But she has never hoped to be a mere stenographer, simply playing back what she heard while suspended precariously in glacial crevasses or trying not to capsize off the coast of Greenland after icebergs hit the water. She processes raw recordings, turning them into extended collages. Her albums — particularly “Energy Field” from 2010, which occasionally calls to mind drum-less heavy metal or an untuned violin — unfurl as tone poems, giving her changing surroundings a spiritual gravitas.“I am not archiving that sound or this sound — that’s not interesting to me,” Winderen said. “It’s more interesting to be out there and listen, to figure out what’s happening and have an awareness of how much we don’t know.”For the veteran Australian sound artist and researcher Philip Samartzis, it took an unprecedented Antarctic blizzard to accept the political potential of ice’s songs. Samartzis first visited the continent, through an arts fellowship in 2010, to map the acoustic environment of the Davis research station, one of Australia’s three outposts there. How, he wondered, did existence sound at this end of the earth?“I tried to render the experiences as authentically as possible,” Samartzis, 60, said by video during vacation in New Zealand. “So you have very detailed forensic recordings of the station — without wind, which I was very adept at removing.”But, as Samartzis admitted with a grin, bowdlerizing wind from the breeziest place in the world wasn’t very authentic. When he returned in February 2016, he intended to focus on wind itself, to log the ways it pulverized the place. He got his chance, during the strongest summertime blizzard ever witnessed there. As ice and snow pelted eight microphone stations through the 36-hour storm, the timbre of his work began shifting.Though Samartzis often talked with wonder about the way the Antarctic ice would “sing,” how dynamic and curious it always seemed, the roar he’d chronicled was terrifying, a bewildering testament to climate change’s ferocity. His “Atmospheres and Disturbances,” out in March, fastidiously presents the sounds of melting permafrost, contracting glaciers and human activity that seems to exacerbate both at a research outpost more than two miles above sea level in the Swiss Alps. Hearing the disappearance is haunting and hair-raising, like watching a television show about hunting ghosts.“When I talk to scientists about climate change, everyone’s all talked out. Essentially everyone knows, so it’s, ‘Why should I listen to you and your report?’” Samartzis said. “These recordings may not be scientifically sound, but it’s a whole other way of communicating knowledge, a different aperture of experience.”Still, at least one pioneer of portraying ice through music worries that all this work arrives too late — and that simply capturing these songs of surrender and playing them back through loudspeakers can never get to ice’s might or grandeur. More than three decades ago, the young German producer Thomas Köner sat at the foot of a Norwegian glacier and marveled as fog rose and fell above it, like enormous frozen lungs breathing deliberately.Between 1990 and 1993, Köner, who uses they/them pronouns, funneled such observations into a trilogy of lauded ambient albums that steadily evoked the awe and unease of being surrounded by ice that loomed, moved and cracked. But Köner believes that “Novaya Zemlya” — their 2012 album inspired in part by the glaciers of the Arctic archipelago of the same name — may be their final ice work. The Soviet Union tested the largest-ever atomic bomb there in 1961; for Köner, it represents humanity’s true relationship to nature.“This was the end of, if not the love affair, the loved object — the idea of this pristine world of ice,” Köner, 57, said by phone from an artist residency in Serbia. “It is very sad, like you lost somebody. But you keep going on.”Such presiding melancholy has motivated Eliza Bozek, 30, and a cadre of other young musicians to get to glaciers now, not later. An acolyte of the emotionally textured work of Winderen and Chris Watson (a prolific sound artist partly responsible for David Attenborough’s “Frozen Planet”), Bozek thinks that allowing people to hear ice creates an opportunity for awareness and, just maybe, altered behavior.“They’re beautiful, but there’s a slow violence to the sounds, too,” said Bozek, who makes music under the name moltamole, from her Copenhagen apartment. “The sounds are political statements that are not available to our ears unless they’re recorded. They create space for empathy.”Every time Jana Winderen wields a microphone, the sounds surprise her. She can hear differences between ice that’s old and young, inland or seaside.Erinn SpringerLATE LAST YEAR, Sharp’s 2009 recording atop the Devon Ice Cap, the one he played during lectures, enjoyed an unexpected reprise on an album called, simply, “Ice Records.” The London artist and filmmaker Susan Schuppli first encountered Sharp while making a documentary about the Canadian Ice Core Lab, where more than 1,300 samples pulled from glaciers shape a portrait of Earth’s climate history. He was the archive’s first director.Schuppli wove a portion of Sharp’s file into a 24-minute collage of ice recordings she and other researchers had made around the world by climbing into crevasses or sticking hydrophones beneath a glacier’s watery lips. The snippets are loud and vibrant, almost ecstatic, an atmosphere of ice offered with an exclamation mark. “I didn’t want to treat it as a mute witness,” Schuppli said by video from her home in London. “That sound gives us access to its change almost in real-time.”Toward the middle of “Ice Records,” as meltwater gurgles beneath India’s enormous Drang-Drung Glacier, several women laugh. In the village of Akshow, they’d depended on that water their entire lives; as the melting accelerates, however, they may be threatened by “outburst floods,” when the water overruns whatever reservoir previously held it. But these women had never visited Drang-Drung, let alone listened to it. Schuppli led them up the ice and handed them headphones, so they might hear it morph beneath their feet.“It was not about mourning this glacier but trying to understand what was going on,” Schuppli said. “How does science produce hospitality, so it’s not just scientists saying why their work is important? These women were enthralled. They didn’t want to stop listening.”Audio produced by More

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    Yo-Yo Ma Makes His Encore a Call for Peace, With a Nod to Casals

    The celebrated cellist capped a concert with the New York Philharmonic with a work that Pablo Casals often played to protest war and oppression.Listen to This ArticleAfter a rousing performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma returned to the stage for an encore.But rather than rush into a familiar crowd-pleaser, Ma began speaking from the stage of David Geffen Hall to the sold-out crowd. He explained the work he would play: “Song of the Birds,” a Catalonian folk song that was a favorite of the eminent cellist Pablo Casals, who performed it as a call for peace and to evoke his native Catalonia, which he had fled when he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Elgar Cello Concerto was written in 1919, right after the Great War — the Great War that we said would never happen again,” Ma told the audience of about 2,200 people, speaking without a microphone.Then he spoke of Casals who, after World War II, suspended his concert career to protest the decision of the Allies not to try to topple Franco in Spain. “And the only times he would play would be to play this piece,” Ma noted, “which is from his native Catalonia, a folk song that he thought symbolized freedom.”In a telephone interview, Ma said his aim was to remind people of their shared humanity at a time when there is so much strife and suffering in the world, including in Ukraine.“The question is, why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” he said.Ma said that music was a way of coping “in a world where we have both empathy deficit and empathy fatigue.”“How many of us think about World War I or World War II?” he said. “How many of us think about Rwanda or about the Rohingya? These all become distant very quickly in our first world. But for people in other parts of the world, it’s constant, it doesn’t go away.”“I don’t have an answer,” he added. “I’m trying to find a way of coping myself. And maybe at some level playing music is a way of engaging people in the common search of who we are, and who we want to be.”Ma has long been fond of “Song of the Birds,” which he has often performed in the past.In the interview, he said the piece was powerful in part because it highlighted the special abilities of birds.“They literally can have altitude and perspective on our world and have the freedom to cross all our boundaries and borders,” he said. “There is something just wondrous about that. And we’re part of the same world. Can we learn from that and hopefully not make the same sort of mistakes over and over again?”Since the Russian invasion last year, Ma has used music to show solidarity with Ukraine. He performed the Ukrainian national anthem last year with the pianist Emanuel Ax and the violinist Leonidas Kavakos before a concert at the Kennedy Center. He also played a Bach cello suite on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.Casals, regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time, fled Spain in the late 1930s, saying he would not return until democracy was restored. Living in the French border town of Prades, he worked to raise money for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, writing letters to officials, charities, journalists and others seeking support.He would perform “Song of the Birds,” or “El Cant dels Ocells,” at the end of his music festivals in Prades and the scattered concerts he played in exile. He played it in 1961 at the White House for President John F. Kennedy. And he performed it again when he visited the United Nations in 1971, two years before he died, to deliver an antiwar message.“The birds in the sky, in the space, in the space, sing ‘peace, peace, peace,’” Casals said. “The music is a music that Bach and Beethoven and all the greats would have loved and admired. It is so beautiful and it is also the soul of my country, Catalonia.”Ma has often paid tribute to Casals, calling him a hero. He played for the eminent cellist in 1962, when he was 7 and Casals was 85. Casals helped launch Ma’s career when he brought the prodigy to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who introduced Ma at a performance at the White House that same year before an audience that included President Kennedy.In the interview, Ma recalled visiting Casals’s summer home in Spain in 2019, which now houses a museum, where he saw his letters of protest and pleas to help refugees.“Casals showed me, even as a young boy, that he had his priorities,” he said. “He was a human being first, a musician second and a cellist third.”Audio produced by More

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    Why Willem Dafoe Can’t Slow Down

    Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.WILLEM DAFOE, DRESSED in a black leather jacket, enters the downtown Manhattan restaurant where we’d planned to meet. He has his phone up to his ear, a look that’s almost a parody: In walks a Very Busy Guy. He sees me at the table, gestures at the phone extravagantly, rolls his eyes and grimaces at the absurdity of it. As the seconds go by, his apologetic demeanor morphs into something more like comedy — his head shaking, his hand waving in a vaguely Italian-style telegraph of exasperation, all of it coalescing into a fascinating improvisational bit.He stood a few feet from our table as he finished the call, giving the staff at the Georgian cafe ample opportunity to take in the actor in their midst. Maybe the performance was for their benefit, too? Yet it didn’t feel showy: He was not too famous to hide, not too self-conscious to resist doing what he does almost unthinkingly, which is use his body to perform. Acting is not so much a job for Dafoe as a way of being in the world, a practice so essential he can’t go without it.The digital cover of T’s 2023 spring Men’s Fashion issue.Collier SchorrDafoe, 67, is an unusual celebrity, perhaps the world’s most famous character actor — one who came up through New York experimental theater, who never intended to appeal to the masses. Like a Christopher Walken or a Ralph Fiennes, he suggests in his choices of roles as much as his performances that he thrives on parts that other actors might find distasteful or unflattering; he differentiates himself by a certain lack of discrimination. He’s been in nearly 150 films since his first starring role, as a young but hardened biker in Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Loveless” (1981). Many of them have been blockbusters, but some have never played in the United States and many were made by young directors about whom he knew little more than, as he puts it, that they gave him “a good feeling.”This month, Dafoe stars in “Inside,” a debut feature by the Greek director Vasilis Katsoupis, 46, about an art thief trapped by an elaborate security system within a minimalist high-end apartment that’s dangerously low on life-sustaining necessities. For 90 minutes, the camera rarely strays from Dafoe, as his character, over the course of months, endures near-starvation, total isolation and the absence (no small thing) of a functioning toilet. Working on the project required the actor to live apart from his family and friends for six weeks, “like a monk,” he says, cooking for himself in a small rental in Cologne, Germany. In the film, he lays himself bare, physically and psychologically, burrowing deep into the humbling ugliness of true desperation. He was, Dafoe told me later, “in heaven.”The actor Willem Dafoe, photographed in New York City on Nov. 16, 2022, wears Bottega Veneta jacket and pants, price on request, bottegaveneta.com; and stylist’s own turtleneck.WILLEM DAFOE WAS born William Dafoe in Appleton, Wis., where he was drawn to community theater, the kid who’d do anything for a laugh. The second youngest of eight children, he made sure he would be seen, even amid the chaos of a home packed with older teenagers, their comings and goings barely monitored by his mother, a nurse, and his father, a surgeon (both now dead). “It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that when you’re in a big family, you gotta find your place,” he says. “I became the entertainer.” An extrovert with a transgressive streak, he dropped out of high school after being falsely accused, he says, of making a pornographic film for a communications class. He nonetheless briefly attended the University of Wisconsin and eventually joined an experimental troupe called Theatre X. (Along the way, the young man who’d been known as Billy decided to switch to Willem, a name a friend from college called him.)At 21, Dafoe arrived in 1970s-era downtown Manhattan, a creative playground for artists attracted to its cheap, empty lofts. Here, he came to admire the work of Elizabeth LeCompte, the pioneering director known for her role shaping the work of Spalding Gray, the polymathic performance artist. Dafoe began collaborating with both and then helped the couple form the theater troupe that would become the Wooster Group in 1980. But his integration into their world started with a major disruption: He fell in love with LeCompte, who left Gray to embark upon a 26-year relationship with Dafoe. (He and LeCompte have one son, Jack, who’s 40.) The three ended up subdividing the loft LeCompte had shared with Gray with a wall and separate entrances so no one had to move out. A hothouse of talent, tension and creativity, the Wooster Group soon became one of the most influential theatrical companies in New York, central to downtown culture, in conversation with the city’s emergent dance and performance art scenes. Their work wasn’t linear, but there was nothing haphazard about their highly stylized, carefully rehearsed projects, which often ran on tight clockwork choreographies, integrating video and complicating ideas of plot.Dior Men coat, $5,600, shirt, $950, and pants, $890, dior.com; Prada turtleneck, $1,890, and boots (worn throughout), $1,790, prada.com; stylist’s own socks; and Dafoe’s own ring (worn throughout).Dafoe fell naturally into work that demanded both a strong ego and a spirit of collaboration. But the actor Kate Valk, another founding member who still performs with the Wooster Group, recalls Dafoe as providing the kind of energy associated with the frontman in a band: captivating and telegenic. “He was an important part of the charisma of the group,” she says. “He had that impish impulse always. He very much represented the id in the room.” Both Valk, now 65, and LeCompte, now 78, remember Dafoe as hungry to be looked at. “He wants very much to be needed,” says LeCompte. “And if he’s needed, he’ll give everything. He has to work.” Wooster also made experimental movies, in which it became clear that Dafoe — his chiseled face teetering between beautiful and gaunt — might have a future on film. (“Who needs the American West when you have all the planes on that face?” asks Valk.) He became known for taking on dark roles: the soulless killer in “To Live and Die in L.A.,” the 1985 William Friedkin thriller; a maniac with a surprising underlying pathos in E. Elias Merhige’s “Shadow of the Vampire,” for which he earned his second of four Academy Award nominations in 2001. But for many years, he toggled between two extremes: heartless freaks (“Wild at Heart,” 1990) and the near-saintly (Sergeant Elias in “Platoon,” 1986; Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” 1988). “When I saw him as Jesus, I thought, ‘Oy — Jesus,’” says LeCompte. “I realized, ‘He can be on a very big screen.’”Prada coat, price on request, shirt, $4,600, and turtleneck.So much of Dafoe’s movie career reflects the expressionism he honed at Wooster, in performances that were highly physical. Those qualities endure in his depiction of the Green Goblin in Marvel’s “Spider-Man” films; he appears in four of them, but his operatic performance in the first one, from 2002, is considered essential to the success of the series. And yet, another of his most memorable performances is a study in understatement. In the 2017 independent film “The Florida Project,” he embodies a man who’s made many choices he regrets but is trying, nonetheless, to do right by those he can help, however modestly. The film relied on local Floridians without feature film experience; the director, Sean Baker, shot the ending on an iPhone. At this stage in his career, Dafoe says, he has the luxury of accepting assignments on instinct: “When you’re starting out, you feel like every film can ruin you. Now I can take more risks.”IN “INSIDE,” THE burden of carrying the movie rests squarely on Dafoe, and on what he can still do with his body. A former student of karate, a daily practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, a skilled tango dancer, Dafoe, in one of the film’s memorable scenes, constructs a 28-foot-high tower of furniture, his breath labored as he lugs tables and breaks down chairs. In attempting to escape through a skylight, he crawls to the top of the structure and nimbly stands up before stretching his arms overhead. The athleticism on display from an actor in his late 60s is so striking that it’s almost distracting.Collier SchorrWatching the movie, I told Dafoe, I had the sense of him as an actor who — but he cut me off before I could finish: “Who’s not even entertaining the question of ‘Who’s going to see this, and what’s it going to do for me?’” He smiled.I was going to say I had the sense of an actor who is intent on proving — to directors, but more so to himself — that he is still strong enough, still motivated enough psychologically, to do grueling work; who refuses to let age be an impediment. Dafoe’s longevity, says the director Abel Ferrara, 71, with whom he’s collaborated several times, reflects his two and a half decades with Wooster. The grounding with the theater meant he never left for Los Angeles, where so many actors hustle for the wrong things. And as long as he was with the company, he was acting most days, rather than waiting out empty stretches in between projects, as other stars do. “You can’t be an actor, not working,” says Ferrara. “He knows that.”“Inside” was the kind of project that Dafoe relishes, one in which the role itself is a work in progress. “We had a pact,” says Katsoupis, the director, “that although we had a beautiful script, we would be discovering this character day by day.” Dafoe’s input was essential, down to the drawing he made of the mural his character would eventually create as he grasped for his own humanity within the unrelentingly hostile apartment. Stories he told Katsoupis over dinner — about a tuneless nursery rhyme that an ill patient of his mother’s used to sing, or about a particular hilarious but repetitive joke that a Bulgarian translator once told him — ended up in the film.Emporio Armani jacket and pants, price on request, armani.com; and Sunspel T-shirt, $90, sunspel.com.“You throw yourself into it,” Dafoe says. “And you have a beautiful day full of adventure and impressions that you don’t always get — and then you feel turned on.” He likens the experience of working with a director to being in love. “You feel energized and like your best self — you’re so enamored of this person that you want to be the best person possible. That’s the proposal: ‘We need you to do this thing, to go on this mission.’” The waiter at the restaurant brought a plate of Georgian desserts, including a rich honey cake, and, over oat vodka, Dafoe showed me some recent images on his phone: an ice skater he enjoyed watching on television; a digital clock in a cab showing the time 4:44 (part of the name of a 2011 film he made with Ferrara); a photo of him near a painting by the Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre, a copy of which is featured in “Inside.” He had been stunned to see the original in the lobby of the Shed, a Manhattan arts space, earlier that week and had someone take a photo of him in front of it — with his pants around his ankles. (“I told you, I like transgression!” he explains.) For Dafoe, performing for an audience, even a personal one, often involves high jinks and spontaneity. At some level, he’s clearly still driven by the desire to entertain, to shock, that drove him as a young actor. But interwoven with that is another motivation that takes more commitment: wringing the most meaning possible from inhabiting someone else’s story. He may get immediate satisfaction from the big laugh, but the truly hard days are justified by something else — finding significance in an object as simple as a glass filled with water, an example he gives from his latest film, how much it changes depending on who’s poured it, who’s drinking it, with what experience behind it. “Your curiosity in that moment — it’s not normal,” Dafoe says. “It’s hyperawareness.”Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello coat, $7,000, and pants, $1,290, ysl.com; and Prada turtleneck.His intention is to try to bond with other confused humans, he says, by acting out versions of their stories. It’s an impulse, he adds, as old as dancing in front of the campfire: “I’m going to get up and do this for me and for you and for all of us.” Comfort, consolation, connection — what else matters? “Because really,” he says, “there’re only two events. There’s birth. And there’s death. And in between, it’s all —” Then Dafoe makes the kind of crazy eyes that render him riveting onscreen, and the spiral hand gesture for “nuts” with a hand on either side of his head, emitting the babbling sound — garbled, funny, unnerving — of a madman.DURING THE 26 years that Dafoe collaborated with the Wooster Group, film was always something he did privately, on his own. His Hollywood income helped keep the company afloat; his colleagues supported the movies without being particularly interested in them. Eventually, he says, his absences — and then the fame that came after “Spider-Man,” in the aughts — took a toll on the relationships he had with his fellow company members. “They were a family,” he says matter-of-factly. “And I was like a man with many families.” In 2003, Dafoe, who was filming in Italy, fell in love with Giada Colagrande, an Italian director who was 27 at the time. A mutual friend had introduced them not long after she directed and starred in “Open My Heart” (2002), an erotic noir that had been a sensation at the Venice Film Festival. In a painful break with LeCompte — and therefore the Wooster Group — Dafoe moved part time to Rome to be with Colagrande, whom he married in 2005. The dissolution of that relationship was a shock not just to LeCompte but to the whole group. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown,” Valk says. And yet it somehow came as a surprise to Dafoe that he was exiled from the troupe.“I was totally naïve,” he says now. Leaving LeCompte meant losing some of his closest friends — and it meant walking away from experimental theater. “I just took a different life,” he says. “I started seeking out other opportunities in the theater, but it was very difficult after working in the company.” This past decade, he performed in two Robert Wilson productions in New York City — “The Old Woman” (2014), opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov, and “The Life and Death of Marina Abramović” (2013) — and he continues to pursue ambitious avant-garde projects with the few well-known collaborators who can launch them on a prominent stage. But he has little interest in conventional theater, he says: “It has to be something that I’ve never done before.”Emporio Armani jacket (sold as part of a suit); and Sunspel T-shirt.Now, when he’s not filming, he spends whatever time he has with Colagrande in New York and in Italy. During the pandemic, her mother moved into a farmhouse an hour’s drive outside of Rome, where the couple frequently join her. Over time, they’ve built it into a working farm, with goats, alpacas, a renegade ram, some showy turkeys (“They think they’re peacocks,” Colagrande says) and a vegetable garden big enough that they supply a nearby restaurant with cauliflowers, eggplants, tomatoes and lettuces.The actor has discovered, relatively late in life, how much he loves animals — maybe even identifies with them. “Paul Schrader” — who directed him in “Light Sleeper” (1992) — “says that all actors are like farm animals,” Dafoe told me. “They like to work.” I had gone to see him in Italy, where we were now chatting in the house, over the din of a green monk parrot, Paco, whom Colagrande, now 47, had rescued off a Roman street. It seemed to me the farm is like one big ensemble group, a cast of characters — sacred, showy, chirpy, recalcitrant — who demand attention and time, and also, crucially, who need Dafoe.Dafoe, for his part, seems perennially drawn to new troupes. He frequently works with the American directors Wes Anderson (five films together) and Robert Eggers (three). More recently, he has been drafted into the group of actors who collaborate with the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. He just finished filming, in New Orleans, a Lanthimos project with Emma Stone called “And,” the details of which have not been revealed; the two actors also recently wrapped another Lanthimos movie, “Poor Things,” based on a novel with a Victorian setting and a “Frankenstein”-inspired theme.  On the CoversHermès jumpsuit, $6,150, hermes.com; Sunspel T-shirt; and stylist’s own turtleneck.Zegna polo, $4,700, zegna.com; and stylist’s own turtleneck.While making “And,” Stone was struck by how much Dafoe loved being on set. The actors, she recalls, would often hear one assistant director announcing to another, over a walkie-talkie, that Dafoe was “self-motivating to set” — meaning, showing up even though there was no official reason to be there. “That’s what you want from actors,” says Lanthimos, 49. “To want to be part of it in any way.” In one scene, Stone’s character is seen slapping Dafoe’s, who’s meant to be off camera; ordinarily, Stone would make the gesture without an actor present, but Dafoe insisted that the move would look more genuine if he were actually being slapped, and then took the (staged) blow some 20 times.“There’s this instinct to perform that many actors have — the ‘look at me, look at me!’ kind of performer,” says Stone. “He’s the opposite of that.” Her comment, notably, was the opposite of how LeCompte and Valk characterized his relationship to the audience — an apparent eagerness to delight the viewer. “Maybe it’s changed through the years,” Stone says. “A lot of actors I bond with have been doing this for a long time, and you know they’ve gone from ‘I’ to ‘We.’”Dafoe says he saw his relationship to acting shift in tandem with the stages of life. He started out an extrovert, performing for the attention. Then it turned into an adult affair: “Once you start working, you use that as a means to survive.” For those who stick with it, the study of the craft takes over; the extroversion turns inward. “And then,” he says, “it becomes like a spiritual thing — to find your connection with all things.” He seems, in one sense, to be racing against time — to be seizing on his hard-won status to work as often as possible, in roles that are as physical and challenging as possible, while he still can. Other actors slow down over the years; for Dafoe, a sense of mortality makes all the more compelling his desire to “melt into things,” as he says, choosing parts that connect him to something bigger than himself.At the farm, after bowls of pasta, I asked Colagrande what kind of role she’d like to see Dafoe try next. “The head of a cult,” she told me. They’re both fascinated by figures who could create an awakening in large groups of people — while using that talent possibly for evil. Dafoe was reluctant to answer the question himself — to him, it’s never about the role but the whole project. He acknowledged that he wanted to keep doing parts that were vital: physical ones, like being the captain of a ship, or performing love scenes or working with animals. Off the table are kindly or ailing grandfathers.Colagrande and I had been talking privately for almost half an hour; we realized it was time to call me a taxi. Dafoe was — understandably — getting restless after all the leisure, the long lunch, the chores that had been put off. He had Italian to study, he had animals to feed, he had scripts to read — there was work to do, thank God, and he wanted, he needed, to go do it.Hair by Adlena Dignam at Bryant Artists using Oribe. Grooming by Aya Iwakami. Set design by Robert Sumrell. Production: Hen’s Tooth. Digital tech: Jarrod Turner. Photo assistants: Ariel Sadok, Dylan Garcia, Terry Gifford. Set assistant: Erin Turner. Director of photography: Angel Zinovieff. Assistant camera: Erin Althaus. Tailor: Eugenio Solanillos. Stylist’s assistant: Verity Azario More

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    5 Russian Bullets Dashed an Opera Singer’s Dreams. Then He Reclaimed His Voice.

    While on a rescue mission in Ukraine, Sergiy Ivanchuk was shot in the lungs, apparently ending his chance at opera stardom. His recovery is a marvel of medicine, chance and his own spirit.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.ULM, Germany — It was the most pivotal performance of his 29 years. There were no costumes, no stage, no orchestra pit. Instead, a lone pianist hunched expectantly over her instrument. For an audience, a handful of doctors and nurses watched from a cool white hospital lobby.Sergiy Ivanchuk — his face patched with bandages, legs trembling beneath his trousers — began hesitantly. But as his deep baritone held, confidence grew. By the time he finished with a Ukrainian folk tune, his song soared with the passion of a man brought back from the dead, a man reveling in a voice reclaimed.

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    “For three months, I thought I would die,” he told those assembled. “And now, I can sing again.”Not long before, Mr. Ivanchuk had believed he was on his deathbed, his lungs punctured by bullets, his body attached to a tangle of tubes.On March 10, Mr. Ivanchuk, an aspiring opera singer, had been working with humanitarian volunteers helping civilians flee the besieged Ukrainian city of Kharkiv when Russian forces attacked, and he was shot.Even if he managed to survive, he remembered thinking, surely his singing days were over.But a string of chance encounters, committed doctors and the love of a mother all led to that unexpected performance in a German military hospital this summer, giving Mr. Ivanchuk a chance to transform a tragedy into an opportunity to salvage his longtime dream of opera stardom.“So many different circumstances had to happen,” said Mr. Ivanchuk, wondering if science and his own spirit were the only factors in his recovery. “There is something. God or an angel saved me. There is something there.”“For three months, I thought I would die,” said Mr. Ivanchuk, shown in his room at a military hospital in Ulm, Germany.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesIn 2020, Mr. Ivanchuk was studying opera in Italy, and he had big ambitions: to perform on the stages of the Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan.Then the pandemic closed borders around the globe. His music school was closed, and Mr. Ivanchuk was stuck in Ukraine, struggling with severe depression.Two years later, as the world began reopening, Russia invaded, and Mr. Ivanchuk found himself trapped in Ukraine once more: Men of fighting age were banned from leaving the country.His dream was rapidly fading — opera singers should complete their training by their early 30s. No one could guess when the war would end.The State of the WarDramatic Gains for Ukraine: After Ukraine’s offensive in its northeast drove Russian forces into a chaotic retreat, Ukrainian leaders face critical choices on how far to press the attack.How the Strategy Formed: The plan that allowed Ukraine’s recent gains began to take shape months ago during a series of intense conversations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials.Putin’s Struggles at Home: Russia’s setbacks in Ukraine have left President Vladimir V. Putin’s image weakened, his critics emboldened and his supporters looking for someone else to blame.Southern Counteroffensive: Military operations in the south have been a painstaking battle of river crossings, with pontoon bridges as prime targets for both sides. So far, it is Ukraine that has advanced.Yet like so many of his compatriots, Mr. Ivanchuk wanted to join the fight. Not on the front lines — “I’d be useless for that,” he joked — but by using his 30-year-old blue Lada sedan to drive civilians out of Kharkiv, the embattled city in eastern Ukraine, a few hours from his hometown, Poltava, where he had grown up in a musical family.It was a grueling routine. Every morning at 6, he drove to Kharkiv, laden with medicine and groceries for those still inside. Every night, he picked up residents fleeing the siege, who could not afford a taxi out. He slept a few hours at home with his parents, then started again.His mother, Olena Ivanchuk, awaited his return each night in silent torment. But on the morning of March 10, his mother had to speak: While dusting, she noticed the family’s religious icons had all fallen from the table, which she perceived as a dark omen.“When I told him, his face fell,” she said. “For the first time in my life, I told him: ‘My son, I fear maybe this time you won’t return.’”He left for Kharkiv anyway.Mr. Ivanchuk chose to aid the war effort by helping residents flee from Kharkiv. He was shot three weeks into the war.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesThat night, Mr. Ivanchuk and his passengers packed his Lada to the brim with suitcases and pets. It was pitch black as they made their way out of town. Through the darkness, bullets suddenly whizzed past.In a terrifying game of cat and mouse, Mr. Ivanchuk sped along, trying to find the protection of a Ukrainian military checkpoint. But the Russian forces soon found their mark: 30 bullets hit the car. Five hit Mr. Ivanchuk.“I felt each and every bullet. First it hit one leg, then the leg once more. Then I saw my fingers destroyed,” he said. “After that, I felt a bullet in my side and back.”Four people and two cats were inside the car. Yet only Mr. Ivanchuk had been shot.He likely would not have survived if not for one of his passengers, Viktoria Fostorina — a doctor. With the help of the others in the car, she bandaged the wounds on his chest and back, preventing a collapsed lung.“At first, I was the one saving them,” he said. “But as it turned out, in the end, they saved me.”Somehow, he managed to drive the car to a Ukrainian military checkpoint before collapsing.The war was three weeks old; Mr. Ivanchuk had already rescued 100 people. As he felt himself losing consciousness in the hospital later, he prayed to God, and prepared to die.“I was thinking, ‘You’re only 29, and you’re dying,” he said, recalling his thoughts. “‘I could have lived longer. But I tried to help people, so maybe it’s a good thing.’”After searching for Mr. Ivanchuk for nearly two days, his mother found him at the Kharkiv hospital, where doctors warned he might not survive. She forced back tears, entering the room of her unconscious son with a smile.“I said, ‘Please, son, open your eyes.’ I told him: ‘One hundred percent, you’ll survive. You will live.’ I told him that several times.”An X-ray showing Mr. Ivanchuk’s hand injuries.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesMr. Ivanchuk remembers awakening to her smiling face. But he couldn’t speak: Tubes were coming out of his mouth. His body was in such pain, he could communicate only by twitching one finger.Ms. Ivanchuk recalled her son’s crying from the pain of his early operations. Later, his tears came from his realization he might never perform again.But fate stepped in once more.Mr. Ivanchuk’s story spread on social media, and a prominent Ukrainian opera singer convinced a talented surgeon in the country to operate on him. His lungs and liver began to heal.Though his recovery had begun, a dark struggle was still ahead, one he almost lost.For weeks, he lay among shellshocked young soldiers who sometimes jumped out of bed at night, throwing imaginary grenades, screaming at comrades to take cover.Mr. Ivanchuk grew paranoid that Russian spies lurked behind every door. And he grappled with the idea that rescuing people had cost him his dream.“It was a marathon of pain and psychological torment,” he said.He faced down those thoughts, thanks in part by drawing on lessons from his past struggle with depression. Psychotherapy during the pandemic had taught him to see his thoughts as brain chemistry, not his inner self. And he began to accept that faith alone could not heal him: “I still believe in the Creator — but a lot depends on us.”Mr. Ivanchuk playing the organ in the church hospital. The movement helps exercise his injured fingers.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesKeeping his goals confined to his hospital room, Mr. Ivanchuk and his mother celebrated even the tiniest step toward recovery. Taking life day by day, and forgetting his big ambitions, he was surprised to discover he felt more content than before the attack.“I used to think that without a dream, it was impossible to be a happy person,” he said. “But now, I see that happiness is actually just to live.”Once stable enough for travel, Mr. Ivanchuk was sent to Ulm, Germany, for advanced surgeries at a German military hospital.As a musician, he wanted to restore as much dexterity as possible to his mutilated fingers — he has played the bandura, a Ukrainian stringed folk instrument, since childhood.He tried not to think about opera until one night, on his third week in Ulm, when he began to sing in the shower. He chose Valentin’s aria from “Faust” — and was astounded to hear his old voice.Mr. Ivanchuk soon realized that not only were his dreams still possible — but that, in a wholly unanticipated twist to his nearly fatal injury, he was now better placed to pursue them.If not for the attack, he would have remained stuck in Ukraine. Moreover, he had landed in Germany, the best place in the world for a budding opera singer. Thanks to its subsidies for the arts, Germany has over 80 full-time opera houses.By late June, he was well enough to perform for the hospital staff.Mr. Ivanchuk greeting the hospital staff after he performed for the first time since he was wounded.Lena Mucha for The New York TimesFirst, he sang “Ave Maria,” for its spirituality. Then, an aria from “The Magic Flute,” by Mozart, to honor his German caretakers. The third song could only be Ukrainian and a tribute to the woman devoted to his survival — “My Own Mother.”She cried as he began. “I did not expect he could sing that loudly,” she said. “It is because he was doing it with his heart.”That evening, he was discharged.“He was extremely positive, he didn’t complain at all about his situation,” said Dr. Benedikt Friemert, the head orthopedic surgeon at the hospital, describing his patient’s recovery. “Quite the opposite: He was convinced that what he had done was right. He was unlucky and got injured, but he said: ‘Never mind, I’ll get better so that I can do what’s important to me.’ In other words: singing.”Mr. Ivanchuk, with a slight limp, a missing finger and a body peppered with bullet fragments, still faces a difficult journey. He has more physiotherapy ahead.He now rents an apartment in Ulm with his mother, and he has started receiving lessons from a Ukrainian opera singer, Maryna Zubko, who works at the local theater. One day, they hope to sing together there.“He has a beautiful voice,” said Ms. Zubko, who first encountered her pupil when a heavily bandaged man threw flowers at her feet after a local performance.Her hope for Mr. Ivanchuk is to spend a year recovering with her help then use his talent, and his story, to earn a place at a prestigious program in Europe or the United States to finish his training.He is dreaming again of the Met and La Scala. “I think in five years, I could make it onto one of those stages,” Mr. Ivanchuk said. “As long as no one else shoots me.” More

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    When Weird Al Yankovic Met Daniel Radcliffe, Things Got … Well, You Know

    For their decidedly nonfactual rock biopic, the pop-music parodist and the “Harry Potter” star found themselves on the same wavelength.The real Weird Al Yankovic, left, and his movie double, Daniel Radcliffe. “I hope this confuses a lot of people,” the musician said of their biopic.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesListen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Generally speaking, Weird Al Yankovic and Daniel Radcliffe are never going to be mistaken for each other. Yankovic is the lanky, longhaired Southern California dude who became an accordion whiz and a master parodist of pop music. Radcliffe is the more compact, London-born wunderkind of the “Harry Potter” movies who has since graduated into an eclectic acting career.Still, this past winter, during the making of the new movie “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” their mutual presence on the set occasionally led to confusion. When crew members called for “Weird Al,” they wanted the actor playing him, which meant Radcliffe. Eventually, for maximum clarity, they began referring to the authentic Yankovic as “Real Al,” though some further disorientation was inevitable.As Yankovic explained in a recent conversation with Radcliffe, “Every time I would walk by the ‘Weird Al’ sign on your trailer, I’d be like” — he paused and acted out an exaggerated double take — “Oh, no, that’s not me.”This is the effect that the makers of “Weird” are hoping it will have on audiences when Roku releases the biopic on Nov. 4. It is a wildly satirical, highly nonfactual telling of Yankovic’s ascent from a geeky young accordionist to the beloved performer of hit songs like “My Bologna,” “Another One Rides the Bus” and “Eat It,” embellished with stories of sex, drugs and jungle combat that never really happened to him.“I hope this confuses a lot of people,” Yankovic said of “Weird,” which he wrote with the film’s director, Eric Appel. “We want to lead them down a path and think, Is this a real biopic? Is this the real story? The movie starts out pretty normal. Then it progressively goes way off the rails.”Central to fulfilling that premise is the casting of Radcliffe, an enthusiastic Yankovic fan who looks little like the musician and had no desire to impersonate him.Radcliffe was a longtime fan of comedy musicians like Tom Lehrer and Weird Al. In his first meeting with Yankovic, he remembers thinking, “If this happens, my girlfriend is going to be so thrilled.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesFor all the attention he brings to it, Radcliffe said, he appreciated “Weird” precisely because it allowed him to follow his post-“Potter” path into more unexpected roles. Playing Yankovic, at least as he’s depicted in the movie, was the exact assignment Radcliffe was looking for — even if the title put some constraints on how he could describe the film.Radcliffe started to say, “There was nothing weird — see, it makes the word ‘weird’ hard to use in other contexts — there was nothing unusual about it.” He added that even before he had read the script, and was simply asked about playing Yankovic, “I was very, very into the idea.”Over a breakfast interview last month at a downtown Manhattan restaurant, Yankovic, 62, and Radcliffe, 33, exhibited an adorkable affection for each other. There were a lot of “you go ahead,” “no, you continue” exchanges. It was as if neither man knew who was the celebrity and who was the admirer.They said there was a similar energy in their first video chat in the winter of 2020, when Yankovic was pitching Radcliffe on the idea of starring in the movie. “I have a real problem in meetings sometimes when I like something and I want to do it,” Radcliffe said. “I just gush in various ways. I get very, very repetitive.”“Weird” was very much a passion project for Yankovic, who has released 14 studio albums since 1983 but starred in just one movie, the 1989 cult comedy “UHF.”In 2010, Appel wrote and directed a tongue-in-cheek trailer for a nonexistent movie, also called “Weird.” Starring Aaron Paul (“Breaking Bad”) as a hard-partying version of Yankovic, the video was released on Funny or Die and became a viral success.Over the years, Yankovic showed the fake trailer at his concerts, where some fans believed it was advertising a real film.“People would be like, ‘You should make a whole movie,’” Yankovic said. “I was like, ‘Nah, it’s a trailer. It’s what it’s supposed to be — it’s a gag.’”But more recently, following the success of other rock biopics like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Rocketman,” Yankovic began to take seriously the idea of a feature-length version of “Weird.”The real Weird Al in concert in Chicago in 1985, above, and Radcliffe as the accordion slinger in the movie, right. The musician taught the actor enough of the instrument to fake it onscreen.Paul Natkin/Getty ImagesAaron Epstein/RokuHe was also annoyed at what he felt were unnecessary changes to the factual stories of the rock stars depicted in these other movies. He pointed to a scene in “Rocketman” when Elton John impulsively chooses his new surname after he spots a portrait of the Beatles and zeros in on John Lennon.“Everybody who’s an Elton John fan knows it was inspired by Long John Baldry,” Yankovic said, raising his voice just slightly. “I guess they thought nobody knows who Long John Baldry is.”An initial effort to pitch “Weird” around Hollywood was unsuccessful, and studios seemed to expect a movie that more directly lampooned existing biopics, in the same way Yankovic’s songs parodied other hit singles. “People thought it was going to be more spoofier — more ‘Naked Gun,’ more ‘Scary Movie’ — than it is,” Appel said.So he and Yankovic sat together in a coffee shop, watching the trailers for other biopics and looking for common storytelling tropes. Together they wrote a script in which, Yankovic said, “facts are changed arbitrarily, just to change them.”No matter what “Weird” may depict, Yankovic did not compose his song “My Bologna” in a spontaneous moment of out-of-body inspiration. Also, he said, “I did record it in a bathroom but not in a bus station. Why did we change it? Just ’cause that’s what biopics do.”Their movie still needed a leading man, and they thought of Radcliffe, who they knew appreciated comedy musicians like Tom Lehrer.Radcliffe, it turned out, liked Yankovic’s music also — and so, too, did his longtime girlfriend, the actress Erin Darke, who had been a fan for years and often played Yankovic’s albums on road trips.(Throughout their first video call about “Weird,” Radcliffe said in an excited whisper, “I was going, If this happens, my girlfriend is going to be so thrilled.”)More crucially, Radcliffe said he felt “Weird” offered the artistic liberty he has sought on films like the biographical drama “Kill Your Darlings,” which cast him as the poet Allen Ginsberg, or “Swiss Army Man,” a dark comedy in which he played a highly versatile corpse.“Whenever I get a chance to throw myself into something, I will,” Radcliffe said.Even before Radcliffe had seen a script, “I was very, very into the idea” of playing Yankovic, he said.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesCompared to a scene in “Weird” when the fictionalized Yankovic is on a psychedelic drug trip and hatches from a giant egg, Radcliffe said, “maybe only Paul Dano riding me like a Jet Ski in ‘Swiss Army Man’ comes close to the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.”He added, “There was definitely a freedom in the version of Al that is in the script. And it is so insane.” Turning to Yankovic, he said, “You didn’t murder many, many people.”“Not a lot,” Yankovic replied. “Very few.”With Radcliffe on board, Roku picked up the movie. But the company agreed to only 18 days of filming, which made for an incredibly tight schedule on a project in which he had to perform several musical numbers (lip-syncing Yankovic’s original vocals), as well as execute a couple of action sequences.“On ‘Potter,’ one of those scenes could take 16 days,” Radcliffe said.So he used his preproduction time to learn his lines and choreography and get into top physical shape. (“I did end up realizing I am shirtless in the Weird Al movie more than anything else I have done,” he said. “Most of it was scripted, but I hadn’t really taken it in.”)And once cameras started rolling, everyone held on tight. “The Covid of it all was terrifying, especially for me and Eric,” Radcliffe said. “There is no Plan B. We just have to not get sick.”Even before filming started, the comedian Patton Oswalt, who had been cast in a key role as Dr. Demento, the radio host who gave Yankovic some of his earliest airtime, broke his foot. Though there was some talk of whether Oswalt could play the part on crutches, Rainn Wilson (“The Office”) took over on short notice.The production was also buoyed by a committed performance from Evan Rachel Wood (“Westworld”), who plays Madonna — though in this story, the Material Girl is a sly, selfish seductress who is clearly only using Yankovic in hopes that he will parody one of her songs.“I’m amazed the lawyers let us get away with this movie, frankly,” Yankovic said. “But they’re like, Oh, yeah, all public figures — go for it.” (A representative for Madonna did not respond to a request for comment.)As in other rock biopics, Yankovic said, “facts are changed arbitrarily, just to change them” in “Weird.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAppel said Yankovic and Radcliffe were especially important for setting a professional tone while everyone worked at breakneck speed. And during postproduction, Appel continued to communicate closely with Yankovic while the musician has been on a North American concert tour.“When we were mixing the movie, he was on Zoom with us, all day long, from a different city every day,” Appel said. “He’d text me between songs: ‘I think the backing vocals on this song need to get bumped up a tiny bit.’ Then I’d start to respond and he’d say, ‘Oop, gotta go onstage.’”“Weird” is arriving at an awkward moment for the streaming industry, which is in a period of reassessment and retrenchment after years of expansion, and for Roku, whose stock took a beating after the company missed earnings goals this summer.While this might seem to put increased pressure on the movie to deliver an audience, the filmmakers could only shrug their shoulders and say they were just grateful to have made it at all.“This is a new thing for them,” Yankovic said of Roku. “Hopefully this will do well for them.” Radcliffe said he had encountered more curiosity about “Weird” than he did for the Harry Potter reunion special he appeared in for HBO Max this past January. “I still can’t believe people weren’t jumping at the chance to make your movie,” Radcliffe said to Yankovic. “They’ll regret it now.”The Weird Al of “Weird” and Real Al would now go their separate ways: Radcliffe was preparing for a revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” at New York Theater Workshop, and Yankovic was due in Toronto that evening to continue his concert tour. (“We’re in the homestretch now — just three more months,” he said wryly.)But they would always be united by their time together on “Weird” and the unique opportunity that Radcliffe had to learn the accordion from Yankovic — at least enough to make him look like a competent musician in a movie.“When you’re playing Al, to not give it a good, honest attempt seems a wasted opportunity,” Radcliffe said.Yankovic replied, “Every time I see somebody play the accordion on TV or film, it’s always a disappointment.” (As an exception, he singled out Mary Steenburgen, who he said “can actually play.”) “Dan put in the effort,” he said. “I don’t know if he could do a solo performance.”Radcliffe quickly responded, “No way, I could not. But I can do the left hand on ‘My Bologna’ pretty effectively. I learned the bits I needed for the songs, on one hand or the other.” He laughed and added, “Doing them both at the same time is a nonstarter.”Audio produced by More