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    Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Ava DuVernay on the Emotional Journey of ‘Origin’

    Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor were in the middle of shooting their new drama, “Origin,” when Ellis-Taylor gave the writer-director some last-minute homework.The two were hours away from filming a scene in which the actress’s character, Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” gets into an argument with her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), after a party. Ellis-Taylor felt the scene required a few extra beats of dialogue and asked DuVernay to write some.“She said, ‘I think we need something here,’” recalled DuVernay, who agreed to write the new material during her lunch break. “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about.”That level of trust, amid the daily high wire act of a modestly budgeted production — filmed at a brisk pace across three continents — was typical of a collaboration that DuVernay called her deepest with an actor since working with David Oyelowo on “Selma,” her breakout film released nearly 10 years ago.Jon Bernthal with Ellis-Taylor in a scene from “Origin.”NeonIn Ellis-Taylor, DuVernay saw an actor of “outsized power,” capable of giving her imaginative take on the making of Wilkerson’s book a vital emotional anchor. Ellis-Taylor, nominated for an Oscar in 2022 for “King Richard,” saw in DuVernay a “director of consequence,” perhaps the only person who could successfully adapt “Caste” — a best-selling, Big Idea book that links systems of oppression in the United States, Nazi Germany and India.“She is a freedom fighter,” Ellis-Taylor said. “There are consequences and repercussions because of the work that she does, and that separates her, I believe, from most artists.”In a joint interview last month in Manhattan, the actor and filmmaker discussed finding the heartbeat of the critically acclaimed drama in personal material not included in the book, the transformative influence of shooting in Berlin and Delhi and the importance of Bernthal’s swagger. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Ava, one of the fascinating things about this film is that it’s not a typical adaptation. It’s part adaptation and part bio-drama, tracking a harrowing period of Wilkerson’s life while she was researching and writing “Caste.” What led you to make that decision?AVA DUVERNAY I needed a character who could personalize the concepts — the psychology and the history and the legacy of caste. I didn’t know [Wilkerson], but I watched interviews with her and thought that she could be the one to take us on this journey. When I pitched her, I told her I would need to hear the stories that are behind the book, none of which are in the book, and she very generously shared them with me. As a writer, I think she instinctively knew that I would need freedom to interpret the story. And she gave me that.With DuVernay’s films, “There are consequences and repercussions because of the work that she does, and that separates her, I believe, from most artists,” Ellis-Taylor said.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesAunjanue, you didn’t meet Wilkerson before filming. What did you draw on to create your performance?AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR I watched her famous TED Talk about “The Warmth of Other Suns” [her award-winning 2010 book about the Great Migration] and her interviews with Bryan Stevenson and Michael Eric Dyson. But [“Caste”] was my bible. Her writing is so intimate and personal — you can feel her blood coursing through every sentence. Often, she’ll be talking about a subject, and she’ll say, “This happened to me, too.” I felt like I knew where she was coming from just by reading her words.The film is inventive in the way it turns the book’s ideas into visual entertainment. Scenes of Wilkerson honing her thesis with friends, family and colleagues alternate with dreamlike, historical re-enactments of some of the central stories she is citing. How did you figure out what was enough and what was too much when it came to unpacking the concepts and the history?DUVERNAY One thing that was really important was just to have people to talk about it with. I had a handful of people who were living inside the book with me and who were fluent in its ideas. Aunjanue; my producing partner, Paul Garnes; my cinematographer, Matt Lloyd; and my friend Guillermo del Toro. David Oyelowo read the script and was really helpful, too. They helped me figure out how to turn the book into a springboard to conversations about these things.Wilkerson’s husband, Brett, is mentioned only briefly in the book’s epigraph and acknowledgments, but he is central to the movie’s emotional arc. What made you think of Bernthal?DUVERNAY As soon as Aunjanue said yes, we had the challenge of who could hold the frame with her. Jon not only believed in the project, he was very interested in working with Aunjanue, specifically. [The two co-starred in “King Richard.”] He flew out to Savannah, where I was working, just to meet with me, on his own dime, which is something that doesn’t happen to me very often. Plus he had the appropriate swagger — that was important. I had to be able to look at this guy and think, “He can pull her.”ELLIS-TAYLOR He is just a lovely and generous human being. He supported me in a way that our performances felt lived in — they didn’t feel performed.Did filming on location — in Berlin and Delhi — influence the way you told the story, or even your understanding of the text?ELLIS-TAYLOR In every way. Because Isabel going to India, smelling things that she had never smelled before, learning things that she had only heard about, all of that stuff was happening to Aunjanue, to me personally. I’m not a scholar, but I was able to get a sense of what that experience was like. I’m so grateful to Ava for insisting that we go to these places.When Ellis-Taylor asked for a scene rewritten, “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about,” DuVernay said.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesDUVERNAY Paul Garnes and I, we always knew that, even though we were on this very finite independent budget, we needed to get to the real places. We needed to be in the real square of Bebelplatz [in Berlin], where the books were burned. [In 1933, a Nazi group and supporters burned more than 20,000 blacklisted books in the square.]Could I have found a square in Georgia to do it and enjoyed the tax credit? Probably. Would it have felt as emotionally resonant as it was for everyone when we were actually standing there in the place where it happened? Certainly not. Or to go to Delhi, in a country that is closely associated with caste, and to be there as an African American and just fall into a sea of beautiful Brown people. To understand that even as I look at them all and see them as one, they don’t see each other that way? That these divisions have been ingrained in their faith, culture and society?For me, coming from a society where it’s all about skin color, it helped me understand that we as human beings will always figure out how to bifurcate and categorize and create hierarchy. That’s the core of so many of our problems. If you don’t know that, then you’re treating the symptoms and not the disease.Ava, there’s a way in which this movie feels like a synthesis of all the work you’ve made since your narrative feature debut more than a decade ago. There’s a meditation on grief à la “I Will Follow,” an intimate love story like in “Middle of Nowhere,” and historical figures involved in the struggle for racial justice as in “Selma” and “13TH.” Were you conscious of that while you were making it?DUVERNAY I wasn’t. But my editor, Spencer Averick, who I’ve worked with since my first movie, said that to me at one point. I feel like everything I’ve done before, even shooting internationally for “A Wrinkle in Time,” which is a whole different discipline, prepared me for this film. I felt really in the pocket. There was nothing on set that was like, “I don’t know how to do this scene,” or, “I don’t know what’s next.” It was, “I got this,” which was an overwhelmingly fulfilling experience.I felt like, if tomorrow I decided I just was going to be a painter or, I don’t know, go back to being a publicist, I could, because making this movie was so satisfying. In the past, I would finish a movie and feel like, “I hope they like it!” But this time was different. I think a lot of that feeling comes from using their money — the Hollywood machine. This was made outside of the machine, and it felt very free and very liberating. More

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    Jon Bernthal’s Guide to Making It as a Supporting Actor

    For Jon Bernthal, the purest kind of acting happens as part of an ensemble.“It’s such a collaborative art,” he said. “The best thing you can do as an actor, whether you’re the lead of the show or you’re just coming in for a day, is to lift everybody up and try to be a great teammate.”That attitude served Bernthal well on the sports drama “King Richard,” in which he plays Rick Macci, the upbeat, mustachioed tennis coach who took the fledgling superstars Venus and Serena Williams under his wing while sometimes butting heads with their father, Richard (Will Smith). Though he comes into the film late, Bernthal proves so charming that he helped power “King Richard” to a recent Screen Actors Guild nomination for outstanding cast in a motion picture, and has even been the beneficiary of awards buzz himself.With his rough-hewed looks and eagerness to plunge deeply into character, Bernthal has become one of Hollywood’s busiest actors. In the last few months alone, the 45-year-old Bernthal has popped up in the Sandra Bullock drama “The Unforgivable,” the “Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark” and the Angelina Jolie firefighting film “Those Who Wish Me Dead”; he’ll next be seen in Lena Dunham’s Sundance movie “Sharp Stick,” and the series “We Own This City” on HBO and “American Gigolo” on Showtime.From left, Bernthal with Will Smith, Demi Singleton and Saniyya Sidney in “King Richard.” Bernthal auditioned for the part.Chiabella James/Warner Bros. Part of the reason Bernthal works so much is that he has no ego about whether he is No. 1 on the call sheet. Whether it’s a brief cameo in “Wind River,” a flashy supporting role in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Walking Dead,” or the lead in a series like “The Punisher,” Bernthal will still give his all, and he has a lot of hard-won wisdom about how to succeed as an ensemble player.“With a lot of the decisions I make, it’s never about the size of the role,” Bernthal told me recently over Zoom. “Does the script move me? Does it scare me? The people involved, are they people that have affected me?”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.When you show up on a movie and they’ve already been shooting for weeks, what is it like to find your place there as a supporting actor?Every set has its own culture and has its own methodology. If you’re there from the beginning, you get to be a real part of welcoming others in when those people come in on their first day. When I showed up on “Sicario,” Emily Blunt made me feel like she had been waiting for me to get there: “Oh my God, Jon Bernthal! I just saw you in ‘Wolf of Wall Street,’ I’m so glad you’re here.” Whether it was real or not, she made me feel 100 feet tall. DiCaprio does the same thing.On the other hand, I also love it when I come in and don’t know a soul and I don’t have to be a part of their culture at all. My friend James Badge Dale and I talk about it like we get to be hired assassins: We go in, throw down and walk away. There’s something unbelievably liberating in that. My favorite thing in movies is when you see a character come and go, and you’re so curious where they go next.How can you be sure that when you get on set with the lead actor — whether it’s Sandra Bullock in “The Unforgivable” or Will Smith in “King Richard” — you’re going to be able to find some chemistry?With Sandy, she could find chemistry with anyone. Again, she’s one of those people where you walk onto set and she’s so unbelievably welcoming and present — we just immediately started talking about our kids and connecting and laughing. But look, I’ve been with movie stars who are absolutely intent on letting you know that they’re movie stars, and when the scene cuts, everybody goes back to their trailers and it’s completely ridiculous. That’s when I know it’s all about those precious moments between “action” and “cut,” and I’ve got to get myself ready on my own.I assume you’re at the point now where you don’t always have to audition …But I did audition for “King Richard.” The director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, hadn’t seen me do anything like that and I really welcomed the opportunity. Man, for me, there’s nothing better than an audition. It’s the only time you get to put something down that’s totally yours and nobody gets to influence it. If I’m asked to be on set after I’ve auditioned, I know I’ve earned my way there.Jon Bernthal likes to remind himself how lucky he is now to be working: “I remember casting directors looking at my big nose and my giant ears and just being like, ‘What are you doing here?’”Pat Martin for The New York TimesSo how do you deal with it when those auditions don’t pay off?When you look at the entertainment industry, it’s amazing how doors are slammed in your face. I remember casting directors looking at my big nose and my giant ears and just being like, “What are you doing here?” Feeling like you don’t belong, agents never returning your phone calls. You get so much rejection and people make you feel so small, and the second that things start to change for you, those same people all want something.But you’ve got to remind yourself how lucky you are to be doing this, even when it’s not working out. Look, when I was starting out and I was going through really hard times, my wife was an I.C.U. trauma nurse, so there’d be plenty of times I would get home and I would have tears in my eyes of frustration and then my wife would talk about her day. The things she was encountering — holding somebody’s hand as they were passing, or letting somebody know that they weren’t going to ever see a family member again — just put it all in such clear perspective for me.Your first screen roles were guest-star spots on TV procedurals like “CSI,” “Without a Trace” and two different “Law and Order” spinoffs. What do you remember about that time?I remember being so wide-eyed and so naïve. One of the first TV sets I walked into, they told me to go to hair and makeup, and I didn’t know what hair and makeup was. So I just went into a trailer, and the lead of the show was changing in that trailer and she yelled, “Get out,” and threw a shoe right at my head. I had to do a scene with her that day!It took a real long time for me to feel comfortable on-set. I remember Vincent D’Onofrio talked to me after a take when I did his show [“Law and Order: Criminal Intent”], and he said, “Hey, what you did there was pretty good.” Something like that can carry you through months of rejection. I always try to remember that with young actors, because the littlest thing can keep you going.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    ‘The Unforgivable’ Review: Mirthless in Seattle

    Sandra Bullock plays a woman on parole in this Netflix film adaptation of a British mini-series.To forgive is divine. To forget is good enough in Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Unforgivable,” a tortured drama that tracks a half-dozen Seattleites grappling with — or oblivious to — decades-long traumas caused by the killing of a cop during a fraught eviction. After being convicted of that crime, Ruth (Sandra Bullock), did 20 years in prison. Now paroled, she telegraphs her angst with sunken eyes and chapped lips; the film’s sickly yellow lighting does the same, as does Ruth’s night-shift factory gig decapitating salmon. But the dead officer’s sons (Will Pullen and Tom Guiry) don’t think that Ruth has repented enough — a judgment shared by the adoptive parents (Richard Thomas and Linda Emond) who raised Ruth’s orphaned baby sister, Katherine, to forget her older sibling. The adult Katherine (Aisling Franciosi) is haunted by memories of a mysterious brunette. (Katherine crashes her car the moment Ruth is released from prison, giving the film a mystical spritz that evaporates immediately.)This is a glum show of flashbacks scored by strings that keen as though Ruth’s conscience is rubbing a wet finger on a glass of water. The screenplay, adapted by Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz and Courtenay Miles from a British mini-series, gifts Bullock a few big screaming scenes but mostly has her slouching around silently while it dithers over whether or not to root for Ruth to rebuild her life. (Symbolically, she has a second job in construction.)On Team Ruth is Jon Bernthal as a chatterbox who woos the secretive felon. Against her is Viola Davis as a mother raising two boys in Ruth’s former home who argues that, as miserable as Ruth is, if it were her Black sons in the system, “they would be dead.” In a role scarcely more than a cameo, Davis cuts through the film’s fog.The UnforgivableRated R for faces damaged by fists, feet and bullets. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Small Engine Repair’ Review: Of Mechanics and Men

    John Pollono directs and stars in an adaptation of his play that adds depth to the original text but also struggles in its translation from stage to screen.What happens in Manch-Vegas stays in Manch-Vegas. Just ask the men from “Small Engine Repair,” an adaptation of the play of the same name by the actor and playwright John Pollono. The film, which Pollono also directs, provides more depth than the original but still flounders in the translation from stage to screen.Frank (Pollono) calls together his longtime buds Swaino (Jon Bernthal) and Packie (Shea Whigham), middle-aged natives of Manchester, New Hampshire, who’ve fallen out because of a brawl. When a frat boy named Chad (Spencer House) joins what seems like a normal night of bro-ing, the darker intentions behind the gathering are revealed.Pollono’s film has the same grit as the play, which premiered Off Broadway in 2013. Pollono, Bernthal and Whigham deliver ace performances that humanize these puerile man-children without pardoning them. The dialogue is brutal: crass, racist, homophobic, misogynist. It’s The Testosterone Show. Though the play examined the men’s relationship to women, it lacked women characters; the film thankfully corrects that, introducing Frank’s ex Karen (Jordana Spiro) and daughter Crystal (Ciara Bravo).The film self-consciously cushions the trim content of the play, converting anecdotal moments in the dialogue into flashbacks. These additions more explicitly critique the characters for a 2021 audience with greater sensitivity to depictions of toxic men, but they’re largely distracting, highlighting how the film sits uneasily between the contained world of the play and the larger world the adaptation attempts to build. Ultimately, the story still feels unfinished, and Pollono’s direction falters in the film’s big twist, when it tries to balance horror and humor before its tidy resolution.Small Engine RepairRated R for gutter-mouth trash-talking. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Those Who Wish Me Dead’ Review: A Desperate Scramble to Survive

    This thriller starring Angelina Jolie takes its time but doesn’t waste any time.I’m not sure I believed the plot for a minute of “Those Who Wish Me Dead,” but as a means of pitting righteous characters against implacable assassins in a succession of abrupt, pitiless, life-or-death confrontations, the story has a terse effectiveness. The film, based on the 2014 novel by Michael Koryta, has been brought to the screen by the writer-director Taylor Sheridan. Although he isn’t the sole screenwriter here, the film paints in the bold, primal strokes of his scripts for “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” without getting bogged down in the sloggy self-seriousness of his previous directorial feature, “Wind River.”The movie takes its time, but it also doesn’t waste time. The main pair do not meet until almost 40 minutes in. Until then, “Those Who Wish Me Dead” patiently juggles different narrative lines. One, initially the least interesting, involves Hannah (Angelina Jolie), a daredevil smoke jumper who has had a barely veiled death wish ever since her poor judgment of forest fire winds led to the deaths of three children. (Only a movie would so quickly entrust another boy to her care, to offer a chance at redemption.) In an indication of how “Those Who Wish Me Dead” never asks to be judged on plausibility, the film twice puts Hannah in the path of lightning strikes. There is an almost comic casualness to the way she dumps antiseptic on each new wound.The movie also tracks Connor (Finn Little), the precocious son of a Florida forensic accountant, Owen (Jake Weber). Owen has discovered something that could get both of them killed. The nature of the discovery is the film’s MacGuffin — all we know is that governors and congressmen would be implicated by its disclosure, and that they are scared enough that the government (or someone government-adjacent) has hired two fixers (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) to kill anyone with the information. (Tyler Perry, who makes a deferred entrance and appears in only one scene, plays their boss.)The hit men are introduced faking a gas line explosion to murder a district attorney; they have few qualms about killing bystanders. They are also skilled investigators who deduce that Owen and Connor have run to Montana, where Owen’s former brother-in-law, Ethan (Jon Bernthal), and Ethan’s pregnant wife, Allison (Medina Senghore), run, yup, a survival school, and where Connor will eventually meet Hannah. It’s emblematic of Sheridan’s efficiency that when Ethan the uncle and Connor the nephew finally connect, the movie doesn’t pause to have them say hello.All of this is elemental stuff, a battle between unmitigated darkness (in the form of the fast-thinking killers) and total virtue, as Hannah and Connor struggle to reach safety, then retreat, then run again, all while outwitting a forest fire that Gillen’s character has set to the distract the locals. New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.Those Who Wish Me DeadRated R. Cruel and especially upsetting violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More