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Guy Fieri, Elder Statesman of Flavortown
by Eliana Willis 23 May 2022, 09:00
MIDDLETOWN TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Guy Fieri looks as if he has prepared his whole life to be a middle-aged rock star.He has grays in the famous goatee now, a faint tan line beneath his chain necklace and a pair of hulking middle-finger rings that do not slow his incorrigible fist-bumping. He talks about the higher purpose of his “namaste” tattoo, and feigns outrage when no one recognizes his Dean Martin references. He revels, still, in conspicuous consumption, double-fisting naan and tandoori chicken during a recent television shoot here at a strip-mall Indian restaurant tucked between a nail salon and a wax center.“I want to chug the chutney!” Mr. Fieri said, daring someone to stop him. “One little bump.”It was 9:33 a.m.But somewhere on a rickety highway near the Jersey Shore that afternoon — past the Jon Bon Jovi restaurant he said he needs to come back and visit; beyond a seaside bar called the Chubby Pickle, where he congratulated himself for not making any R-rated puns, before making several — Mr. Fieri caught himself in a reflective mood.In the 15 years since he began “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” his Food Network flagship, Mr. Fieri, 54, has become perhaps the most powerful and bankable figure in food television, the éminence grise of the eminently greasy. And by dint of that show’s success — and Mr. Fieri’s runaway celebrity, and that golden porcupine of hair, and maybe that one review of his Times Square restaurant a while back — certain perceptions have attached to him through the years, perpetuating the caricature he still often seems eager to play.He would like a word about all that.“If you only hear Metallica as a heavy-metal band, then you are not hearing Metallica,” Mr. Fieri said, riding shotgun after a day of filming and charity work. “Now maybe you don’t like that style. But they’re real musicians.”Mr. Fieri’s red Camaro is a signature emblem of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” his flagship Food Network show.Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesFor nearly two decades, since before he mailed a reality-show audition tape to the network, Mr. Fieri has plainly believed he was a real musician, contributing worthy entries to the canon.What is striking now, long after the parody seemed to congeal, is that the wider food community stands ready to believe him.Mr. Fieri has emerged as one of the most influential food philanthropists of the Covid age, helping to raise more than $20 million for restaurant workers. He has established himself as an industry mentor among chefs who may or may not admire his cooking but recognize his gifts as a messenger, which have boosted business for the hundreds of restaurants featured on his show. He has won the blessing of the white-tablecloth set through sheer force of charisma and relentlessness, coaxing a reconsideration of how the food establishment treated him in the first place.“I don’t think he had the respect of people like me or people in the food industry,” said Traci Des Jardins, an acclaimed Bay Area chef who has become a friend. “He has earned that respect.”“An amazing individual,” said the philanthropic chef José Andrés, recalling how Mr. Fieri churned out plates of turkey for wildfire evacuees in 2018.At a recent shoot for “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” at Moo Yai Thai in Sea Bright, N.J.Timothy O’Connell for The New York Times“Whether he likes it or not,” said Andrew Zimmern, a fellow food-television veteran, “he has become an elder statesman.”In that case, Mr. Fieri said, he looks forward to the initiation ceremony.“Don’t you think there should be some kind of a cloak?” he asked, imagining luminaries fitting him for a tweed jacket with elbow pads over his tattoos. But, he added, “I guess I’m kind of becoming one of the guys now.”His point, as ever, was that people are complicated, including Guy Fieri, professional uncomplicated person. Maybe especially Guy Fieri, whose very surname (it is “fee-ED-ee,” he reminds audiences, nodding at his Italian roots) demands fussiness from a man who says things like “flavor jets, activate!” for a living.He is at once sensitive to the exaggerated persona he has embraced, challenging a reporter to name the last time his show recommended a hamburger, and acutely aware of his own ridiculousness. He calls himself semi-chunky as a matter of branding (“body by dumpling,” he said) but is actually quite trim in person, singing the praises of vegan food.The young, pregoatee Mr. Fieri showed an entrepreneurial instinct, selling pretzels from a cart in Ferndale, Calif.Courtesy of Guy FieriHe is a son of Northern California hippies, with superfans across MAGA nation and what can seem like a bespoke set of personal politics, often using his platform to tell stories celebrating immigrants while lamenting what he sees as the country’s overreliance on welfare programs.He can pass hours, by land or fishing boat, reflecting on life and family with a close friend, Rob Van Winkle, whom Mr. Fieri addresses as Ninja and most others know as Vanilla Ice.“Some of us never grow up,” said Mr. Van Winkle, who attributed Mr. Fieri’s nickname for him to his rap in the 1991 “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” sequel, adding that he has been renovating the chef’s new home in Palm Beach County, Fla., a short drive from his own. “When Guy and I are together, we’re like the oldest teenagers in town.”The tonal whiplash in Mr. Fieri’s company can be dizzying. He compares himself in one breath to Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler’s rampaging golf star of the 1990s (“He’s a hockey player that makes money playing golf, and I’m a cook that makes money doing television”) and speaks in the next of his “fiduciary responsibility” to continue showcasing local restaurants.Rob Van Winkle, better known as Vanilla Ice, has become a close friend. Courtesy of Food NetworkHe can edge toward profundity discussing the America he sees in his travels — comparing it to an overstuffed washing machine, clanking through its burdens — before defaulting to pablum about a national shortage of hugs.He has learned that moderation has its place, he suggests, but only in moderation — a principle best expressed, perhaps inevitably, through the Tao of Lars Ulrich, the Metallica drummer.Mr. Fieri was filming at the Chubby Pickle, in Highlands, N.J., when a chef preparing pork tacos seemed to skimp on the salsa. Mr. Fieri objected.When Metallica cuts an album, he asked, doesn’t the band go heavy on the high-hat? Don’t they give the people what they want?“You get as much Lars,” Mr. Fieri said, “as Lars wants to give you.”Riding the ‘Fame Rocket’The red bowling shirt was probably a giveaway.But for the first 25 seconds of his 2005 audition reel for “The Next Food Network Star,” Mr. Fieri presented himself as a proper snob. He welcomed viewers to Sonoma County and pledged to prepare a dish “not in fusion but in con-fusion” — a Gorgonzola tofu sausage terrine over a “mildly poached” ostrich egg, with Grape-Nuts (this was wine country, after all) and pickled herring mousse.Mr. Fieri as he won “The Next Food Network Star” competition in 2006 — a victory that propelled him to fame. At right is the chef Emeril Lagasse.Courtesy of Food NetworkMr. Fieri shivered at his own faux brilliance. He clasped his hands and stared, as if waiting for his audience to agree. And then: “Ha, ha, haaa. No, seriously, folks, real food for real people. That’s the idea.”Mr. Fieri proceeded to make something he calls the jackass roll — rice, pork butt, fries and avocado — so named, he said, because a friend told him he looked like a jackass preparing it. He described his parents’ macrobiotic diet in his youth, saddling him with “enough bulgur and steamed fish to kill a kid” and leaving him no choice but to cook up alternatives.He ticked through his well-curated biography — a year studying in France; a hospitality degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; a stab at his own casual restaurants back in California — with such conviction that it almost made sense watching a man lay fries and barbecue over sushi rice.Revisiting the video, what stands out is how fully formed Mr. Fieri’s public image was before a single television producer could think to meddle.His hairstylist friend gave him the bleached spikes on a lark one day, and they stuck. His buddies knew his talents for table-to-table rat-a-tat, and urged him to make a tape. The ethos was effectively airlifted to “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” shortly after he won the next-food-star competition, and has never much changed.Mr. Fieri, appearing here with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show,” was quick to embrace mainstream celebrity.NBC Photo / Paul Drinkwater“It’s been super-hard to rip off, and I’ve tried numerous times,” said Jordan Harman, who helped develop the show in 2007 and is now at A+E Networks. “You can redo the same beats, the same kind of places, the same kind of food. But there’s a magic that he brings that is really not replicable.”Mr. Fieri took to fame quickly, hustling as though the window might be brief. He appeared at local fairs and casino shows that seemed beneath him (Mr. Harman thought), because they invited him. He autographed spatulas and bell peppers because fans asked him to. He toured the country in a flame-painted bus stocked with Pabst Blue Ribbon because what better way to travel? He wore sunglasses on the back of his head because sure, why not?Friends say Mr. Fieri expanded his empire with almost clinical resolve, tending to a portfolio that came to include books, knives, a winery, a line of tequilas and several shows. Today, his name graces dozens of restaurants across six countries and more than a few cruise ships.“This guy don’t sit down,” said Mr. Van Winkle, who traced their friendship to a chance encounter years ago at an airport Starbucks in Charlotte, N.C. “I don’t sit down a lot, too, and I look at him and go, ‘Bro, you don’t sit down.’ ”Mr. Fieri remarked in 2010 that his “fame rocket” would shoot skyward for only so long, reasoning that he must “do what I can for the program while it lasts.” (By “the program,” he meant his wife, Lori, and two sons in Santa Rosa, Calif., along with his parents and a cast of tag-along pals with names like Gorilla and Dirty P.)Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, a 500-seat restaurant in Times Square that opened in 2012 and closed five years later.Casey Kelbaugh for The New York TimesHis Times Square restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, can feel in hindsight like an exercise in overextension, an assumption of manifest destiny powered by swagger and a signature Donkey Sauce.“Like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to do this, and it’s just going to be another big success for me,’” said Mr. Zimmern, summarizing Mr. Fieri’s confidence. “But you need to make sure that the food is absolutely perfect.”It was not.And that blazing New York Times review in 2012 (“Guy Fieri, have you eaten at your new restaurant?”) dovetailed with an already-rolling sendup of Mr. Fieri across the culture. He was skewered on “Saturday Night Live,” preparing Thanksgiving “turducken-rab-pig-cow-cow-horse-nish-game-hen” fried in Jägermeister. His likeness became fodder for undercooked Halloween costumes nationwide.He was invited to a Manhattan roast of Anthony Bourdain, a frequent antagonist who once said that Mr. Fieri appeared “designed by committee,” and often took more incoming than the honoree.“The guy who just dropped a 500-seat deuce into Times Square,” Mr. Bourdain called him. (The restaurant closed in 2017.)Lee Brian Schrager, the founder of the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, remembered the evening as “the single most uncomfortable night of my life” — and, looking back, a snapshot of a distant time.“He went through the war,” Mr. Schrager said of Mr. Fieri. “He won.”New Context, Same ShtickSo, has he changed, or have we?Mr. Fieri appraises himself now as “a little more mellow, a little more methodical” — and maybe a little likelier to prize mentorship of the next class of television chef, including his son Hunter, over his own celebrity.Mr. Fieri, filming at the Chubby Pickle in Highlands, N.J., often shoots at several restaurants in the same day. Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesThe moment has likewise tilted his way, at a time when there can seem to be less cultural currency in sarcastic detachment. “Can someone please explain to me what the hell Guy Fieri ever did to anyone?” the comedian Shane Torres asked, earnestly, in a 2017 routine. “As far as I can tell, all he ever did was follow his dreams.”It has helped that Mr. Fieri is well suited to the modern internet, a TikTok regular and walking meme who generates headlines that can register as Onion-ish absent close inspection.“Is Guy Fieri to blame for Dogecoin’s latest record high?” Fortune wondered last May.“Amid Ukraine-Russia war,” read a Fox News web piece in March, “Guy Fieri’s new season of ‘Tournament of Champions III’ provides comfort, unity.”Yet the likeliest explanation for his durability, for his heightened esteem among some peers, is deceptively simple.“He seeks to understand rather than be understood,” Mr. Zimmern said, “which I think is as high a compliment as I can give.”For all the tropes and totems on “Diners” — the loud shirts and little hoop earrings; the adult baby talk (“me likey wingy”); the red Camaro whose driver-side door he opens and shuts at every stop for the cameras, without necessarily hopping inside — he is, at core, hosting a travel show.Working the selfie circuit at a recent charity event for New Jersey veterans.Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesViewers see a culinary backpacker cosplaying as the ugly American, a man always seeking, even if all roads lead to ambient comfort. The episodes blur, their locations at once distinctive and indistinguishable. California and Wyoming and Maine do not seem so far apart.“He goes to all these diners, drive-ins and dives,” said one fan, Jim McGinnis, 77, explaining the show’s appeal as Mr. Fieri administered handshakes and how-ya-doing-brothers at a charity event for New Jersey veterans. “It’s just a pleasure.”It helps that no one wrings more theater from the preordained: Mr. Fieri arrives at a chosen spot. He seems excited. He riffs, a little uncomfortably, to make the jittery proprietors more comfortable. (The stop at the Indian restaurant, Haldi Chowk in Middletown Township, N.J., included nods to “Wheel of Fortune,” “Forrest Gump” and “My Cousin Vinny,” with a brief meditation on the differences between I.T., iced tea and Ice-T for reasons that eluded the room.)Eventually, a chef has walked Mr. Fieri through the preparation of a favored dish. The host takes a bite — in this scene, it is the tandoori chicken — and shifts his weight a bit. He stands back, silent. His eyes dart mischievously, as if he has just gotten away with something. He wanders off, pretending to collect himself. The chef smiles. The big reveal only ever goes one way.“Not good, chef. Not good at all,” Mr. Fieri says, the oldest left turn in the TV judge’s manual. “Fantastic.”Rachael Ray, a friend whom Mr. Fieri cites as an influence, compared his people skills to a game of tag: You will like him. Denying as much midpursuit only wastes everyone’s time. “He just keeps chasing you,” she said.Mr. Zimmern described him as a politician, “always talking to his base,” forever the person he told them he was.Mr. Fieri tends to be a generous reviewer, typically doling out on-camera raves.Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesAnd if Mr. Fieri has carefully avoided the public politics of some Trump-denouncing peers, a day on the road with him during filming can feel something like a campaign swing before the Iowa caucuses: an hour in each ZIP code, a quick check with an aide to make sure he knows what town he’s in, an inveterate fondness for name-dropping.“I learned this from Henry Winkler, one of my heroes …”“My buddy, Sammy Hagar, who’s my business partner …”That Mr. Fieri does not appear to have an off switch is consistent with the public record. Several friends compared him, warmly enough, to some natural disaster or another. “Hurricane Guy,” Mr. Harman said.Reminded of his 2010 line about capitalizing before his “fame rocket” crashed to earth, Mr. Fieri insisted he still viewed his celebrity horizon as finite.“There will be a time when the light doesn’t shine as bright on the golden locks,” he said. “Which is cool.”He was not entirely convincing on either score. But until that day comes, he suggested, he would keep up appearances, with one exception.“Everybody’s like, ‘You bleach your hair. Why don’t you dye your goatee?’ ” he said, rubbing at his grays. “I’m like, ‘You know what? Enough.’ ”He smirked a little, raising his head in concession to the moneymaker atop it.“This, I got stuck with,” he said. “This kind of happened.”Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More
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Michael Che Is Still Trying to Crack the Code
by Eliana Willis 13 May 2022, 12:00
As he readies a new season of his HBO Max series, “That Damn Michael Che,” the Weekend Update anchor contemplates his future at “Saturday Night Live.”Michael Che tries not to impose too many rules on his fellow writers when they’re creating sketches for his HBO Max comedy series, “That Damn Michael Che.”“We’ll write what we think would be the funniest chain of events,” he explained recently. Yet for all the paths this would seem to leave open, their sketches — about the tribulations faced by a fictionalized version of Che — inevitably end at a similar destination.“I always come out looking bad,” he said. “I’m never the winner.”With a chuckle, he added that he understood why having his own series required these outcomes. “When you invite people to your house, you always eat last,” he said.In the sketch that opens the second season (due May 26), our star tries to help a man getting beaten up on a subway platform. But when the victim starts spouting bizarre obscenities, Che becomes the target of an internet backlash that threatens to wreck his career.The episode that ensues is (among other things) a parody of the “John Wick” movies and a satire of now-familiar rituals of so-called cancel culture as Che fumbles to restore his reputation.In contrast to the rapid-fire, headline-driven setups and punch lines that Che has delivered for eight seasons as a Weekend Update anchor on “Saturday Night Live,” “That Damn Michael Che” offers a looser blend of standup and sketch that gradually becomes a story or riff on contemporary themes.Che said of his future on “Saturday Night Live” that “my head has been at leaving for the past five seasons.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesThat his streaming series has arrived at this broad formula — applied to quotidian annoyances, social injustices and high-class celebrity problems — was “not necessarily on purpose,” Che said.“I think that ended up being what happened,” he explained. “When you start a show, you’re looking to find its identity.”It’s a process that Che continues to navigate, not only on “That Damn Michael Che” but also in his standup and on “S.N.L.,” where he is learning to balance the demands of these intersecting assignments. He is still discovering the individual benefits of these formats, the best ways to work on them and even what he wants to say in them.While Che projects a certain unflappability in his live comedy, he can be self-scrutinizing offstage and openly unsure about his choices. If you squint a certain way, you might even see a guy at a crossroads, who has at least teased — then quickly laughed off — the idea of ending his productive “S.N.L.” tenure.As with developing a new series, Che suggested that figuring himself out professionally had also required trial and error. “Everything looks easy till you start doing it,” he said.On a Tuesday afternoon this month, Che, who turns 39 on May 19, was sitting in his “S.N.L.” dressing room, a darkened chamber lit by a TV silently playing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze.” He was initially quiet and hidden under a hoodie — still reacclimating after a trip back from the Netflix comedy festival in Los Angeles, he said — but he became more gregarious as the conversation turned to his work.Though the cycle of another week at “S.N.L.” was underway, Che said he wasn’t stressed. “I like the dirty part of the game,” he said, by which he meant composing material: “Trying to crack the code, solving the puzzle. The part nobody sees is what’s really interesting to me.”That work ethic caught the attention of his colleagues at “S.N.L.,” where Che started contributing as a guest writer in 2013 and joined Colin Jost on the Weekend Update desk in the fall of 2014.Jost, who helped bring him onto the show, said that Che quickly became one of its best writers despite his lack of previous sketch-writing experience.“He just worked at it and figured it out,” Jost said in an email.Che, with his fellow Weekend Update anchor Colin Jost. If an audience doesn’t like a Che joke, Lorne Michaels said, “you don’t get the sense that he’s not going to sleep that night.” Will Heath/NBCLorne Michaels, the creator and longtime executive producer of “S.N.L.,” said he didn’t see any neediness in Che’s coolly confident stage presence. For most performers, Michaels explained, “it’s all about being loved or wanted, and he doesn’t seem terribly interested in that.”He added, “If he believes in the joke, he’s doing it. And he’ll acknowledge the audience’s response, but you don’t get the sense that he’s not going to sleep that night.”Jost said that while working with Che on Weekend Update, it “definitely took a while for us to figure it out, individually and together, and that’s why it’s satisfying now to be out there and get to enjoy it after years where it felt like a struggle.”“Che’s thing was always that he didn’t want to tell a joke that someone else could tell,” Jost said, adding that he believes Che had accomplished this: “Even a random joke at the end of Update that anyone could technically tell, he finds a way to do it that’s unique to him.”From one perspective, Che’s ascent has been rapid: after playing his first open mics in 2009, he was performing on David Letterman’s “Late Show” in 2012 and working as a correspondent on Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” two years later.But for many years prior, Che cycled through other vocations: drawing and painting, designing T-shirts, working in customer service at a car dealership. All he wanted out of a career, he told me, was that it “wasn’t illegal or a gigolo.”His upbringing as the youngest of seven children raised in public housing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side is rarely far from his mind, and he frequently looks for ways to give back to the community that forged him.When I asked him, somewhat frivolously, what he’d do to keep pace with Jost’s recent investment in a retired Staten Island ferryboat, Che thought for a moment. Then he answered that he’d use a hypothetical windfall to renovate a community center at the Alfred E. Smith Houses that he frequented in his childhood.“Having more places and programs for kids to go would help them a lot,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t just go home. Sometimes there’s 12 people living in a three-bedroom apartment. Sometimes there’s bad things happening in your apartment.”He drew a breath and said to me, “That’s a very odd question.”When the opportunity arose for Che to create his own series with HBO in 2020, Michaels encouraged him to pursue it in tandem with his “S.N.L.” duties. “It’s in my interest for people to keep growing,” said Michaels, who is also an executive producer on “That Damn Michael Che.”But working out what the new show would be was a challenge. Che said he originally thought it would be an animated narrative — an idea he said he might still return to — then leaned back to sketch comedy, which is faster and more familiar to him.Che doesn’t buy into so-called cancel culture: “To me, there’s risk in everything you say and you have to take responsibility no matter what.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York Times“As the scripts started to come in, HBO started saying, it’d be great if you were on camera a lot more,” Che said. With his existing commitment to “S.N.L.,” Che said the questions he faced were, “What could we shoot? What could we do without having to miss work here?”Hiring a writing staff for “That Damn Michael Che” wasn’t difficult; the star just turned to the cadre of stand-ups he regularly hangs out with in comedy clubs.“Those late nights, talking about nothing, goofing off, turned into Mike getting his own show and saying, ‘Hey, come write,’” said Reggie Conquest, a comedian and actor (“Abbott Elementary,” “Scream”) who has written for both seasons of the series.As Conquest described them, those writing sessions “felt just like hanging out at a comedy club and talking like we normally do.”“It was very therapeutic,” he said, as they spoke “from real places, real experiences. And no matter how awful it might sound, you try to make it funny.”In Season 1, that strategy yielded sketches on topics like police violence and hesitancy around the Covid-19 vaccine. Reviewing the show for The Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon wrote, “The comedy and the intimacy of Che’s personal experience create a show that feels funnier, more resonant, and more current than he could ever hope to be on ‘S.N.L.’”Gary Richardson, the head writer of “That Damn Michael Che” and an “S.N.L.” veteran, said that the first season reflected the interests and preoccupations of its star. “He really wanted to make sure it was his show,” Richardson said. “It was a lot of pressure-testing his ideas.”On Season 2, Richardson said that Che “let other people cook more — he felt more comfortable opening it up and letting other folks add their flavor to the pot.”Che himself said his approach this season was to aim “more on the side of funny than on the side of making a point.” That has led to episodes where he tries to organize a brunch party honoring Black excellence and struggles in his shameless efforts to populate it with top celebrities; and where he confronts the repercussions of cancel culture, a phenomenon that Che said he doesn’t regard as meaningful or particularly new.“I don’t buy into it,” Che said. “To me, there’s risk in everything you say and you have to take responsibility no matter what. It’s funny for me to see people learn things that I had to know as a survival tactic my entire life.”In his own work, Che said, “I constantly think my career is over after a bad set or a bad Update. You always think, this is it, at any moment, I’ll be found out.” By having it happen to him in a sketch where an attempt at altruism leads to his downfall, he said, “I just thought it would be a very funny way to lose everything.”Not that Che expects to give up his habit of using social media to antagonize journalists who have criticized him or who he feels have misrepresented him or his friends.“I haven’t turned over a new leaf,” he said. “There is a power that I think writers know they have, that they won’t admit they have, in making perception a reality. I just like to make fun of that. It’s like, I see you — you see me.”Che admitted to a certain professional jealousy of peers like Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Michelle Wolf, whom he sees as especially polished stand-ups who can devote their time solely to honing their live acts.It would be understandable if Che were contemplating a life after “Saturday Night Live,” where he is the first Black person to become a head writer and the first to be an anchor on Weekend Update. He holds the second-longest tenure in the show’s history (behind his desk partner, Jost).When Che made a pop-up appearance at a Minneapolis hair salon in March, the Minneapolis Star Tribune quoted him as saying, “This is my last year.” But in comments he later posted to his Instagram account, Che said that he wasn’t leaving the show.(In the post, which he has since deleted, Che wrote: “to comedy fans; please stop telling reporters everything you hear at a comedy show. youre spoiling the trick.”)“There’s people who hate me who can tell me every joke I’ve ever done on the show,” he said, referring to “S.N.L.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesIn our conversation, Che continued to play his remarks off as a joke. “Who doesn’t say they’re going to quit their job when they’re at their other job?” he said. “I’m sure Biden says that twice a week.”In a more sincere tone, Che said, “My head has been at leaving for the past five seasons.”He added, “I do think that I’ve been here longer than I’ll be here. This show is built for younger voices and, at some point, there’ll be something more exciting to watch at the halfway mark of the show than me and dumb Jost.”(Jost said he construed that as a term of endearment. “Now I’m excited to pitch ‘Dumb Jost’ to Apple,” he responded.)Michaels said that “a year of change” was possible after the current season of “S.N.L.” but he hoped Che would not be part of that turnover.“If I had my way, he’ll be here,” Michaels said. “And I don’t always get my way. But when you have someone who’s the real thing, you want to hold on as long as you can.”Though the comedian hopes his work on “That Damn Michael Che” will stand on its own, Che recognized that his time at “S.N.L.” confers a unique status that no other program can duplicate.“There’s people who hate me who can tell me every joke I’ve ever done on the show,” he said.He added, “Even when it’s not exciting, people are like, when’s it going to be exciting? No one says it was never exciting. You understand that, at any moment, something cool could happen.”Speaking as a guy who already has two sketch shows and a standup act to choose from, Che said, “I got really lucky in my career. When I get bad stuff, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m due, I can’t complain.’ I didn’t complain when it was good.” More
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The Politics of Rihanna’s Pregnancy Style
by Aurelia Butler 7 April 2022, 07:00
When the right to control your own body and the right to dress how you like intersect.Ever since she announced her pregnancy in late January via Instagram and an artfully staged paparazzi shot of her and her partner ASAP Rocky strolling beneath the Riverside Drive viaduct, Rihanna’s maternity style has been marked more by what she has not worn than what she has.She has not worn tent dresses. She has not worn maternity jeans. In fact, she has barely worn much clothing at all.Instead she has bared her naked belly at seemingly every turn: in green draped fringe and ombré pants at a Fenty beauty event; in a bra, sheer blue top unbuttoned over her bump and low-slung gray jeans at the Super Bowl; in dragon-bedecked black pants, a vinyl bandeau and a crystal headdress at a Gucci show; in a sheer baby-doll dress over a lacy bra and panties at Dior; and, most recently, in a sheer organza Valentino turtleneck over a sequin skirt and bandeau at Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party.In the annals of public pregnancy, there has never been a display quite like it.Not surprisingly, the general reaction among celebrity watch sites has been a breathless swoon. “Rihanna Keeps Wearing the Hottest Maternity Looks Ever,” HighSnobiety crowed. “Rihanna Is Single-handedly Giving ‘Maternity Style’ a Rebrand,” Glamour U.K. sang.Rihanna at a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in February.Mike Coppola/Getty ImagesAt a Fenty Beauty event in Los Angeles in March.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Fenty Beauty by RihannaThey’re right, of course. But, really, the style choices are just the beginning. In dressing to confront the world with the physical reality of her pregnancy so consistently, Rihanna has gone way past just making a fashion statement. She’s making a “totally transgressive and highly political statement,” said Liza Tsaliki, a professor of media studies and popular culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece.It’s just all couched in the familiar trope of the “the celebrity bump watch.” Sneaky, right?The result is a dizzying swirl of contemporary phenomena, including: (1) celebrity culture, in which we increasingly take our consumer and behavioral cues from boldface names; (2) what Ms. Tsaliki calls “the aestheticization of the body and the monitoring of women’s waistlines”; and (3) modern politics.All of which take this particular pregnancy dress story far beyond mere “get the look” role modeling. (They also explain why this particular “get-the-look” role modeling has been so disproportionately exciting for so many.)After all, said Renée Ann Cramer, the deputy provost of Drake University and author of “Pregnant With the Stars: Watching and Wanting the Celebrity Baby Bump,” this is a time when “many people on the far right and even the mainstream right are promoting policies that challenge the continuing autonomy of women-identifying people over their bodies, lives and decision-making capacity.”At the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week in March.Jeremy Moeller/Getty ImagesBy dressing to showcase her pregnant belly, and in a way that has nothing to do with traditional maternity wear, Rihanna is modeling an entirely opposite reality. “She’s saying, ‘I’m a person still, and I’m my person.’” Ms. Cramer said. That she can be “autonomous, powerful and herself, even while carrying a life.” She’s connecting the right to dress how you like with all sorts of other, more constitutional rights.It’s a pretty radical move.The pregnant body, after all, has been celebrated, policed, hidden away and considered problematic for centuries.In ancient times, pregnancy was venerated and exhibited, seen as a physical embodiment of women’s connection to mother earth, but by the Middle Ages and medieval Christendom, Ms. Tsaliki said, it had been transformed into a shameful state, one connected not so much to the sacred as the profane.It had become a symbol of our base desires and a sign of female instability and lack of control and thus something best kept behind closed doors and (literally) under wraps. At least until the child emerged and the woman was transformed into a paragon of pure maternal selflessness.It was an evolution revealed in “Portraying Pregnancy,” a 2020 exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London that demonstrated how, since the 16th century, “the response to the unsettling physical reminder of mortality and sexuality engendered by pregnant bodies changed.” Or so wrote Helen Charman in a review of the show in the international art magazine Apollo.ASAP Rocky and Rihanna at the Gucci show during Milan Fashion Week in February.Victor Boyko/Getty Images For GucciAfter the Rams Super Bowl victory in February.Ab/BackgridIt revealed, she said, how paintings and other art forms moved from showing pregnant bodies “as affirmations of paternalistic structures of inheritance and power” to trying to pretend they didn’t actually exist (or the condition of being pregnant didn’t) to putting pregnancy front and center as an increasingly idealized state.That began in 1952, when Lucille Ball became pregnant during the filming of “I Love Lucy” and famously forced her producers to write her impossible-to-ignore condition into the script, and onto everyone’s screens (though they still couldn’t use the actual word “pregnant”), as dramatized in the recent film “Being the Ricardos.”That in turn gave way to the tent dress compromise. (Remember Princess Diana’s ruffled smocks and sailor dresses during her pregnancies in the early and mid-1980s?) At least until Demi Moore shocked the world by posing naked and heavily pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, inaugurating the age of the pregnancy art portrait.And that period extended through such belly-baring covers as Cindy Crawford, naked and pregnant on W; Britney Spears, naked and pregnant for Harper’s Bazaar in 2006; and Serena Williams, naked and pregnant on Vanity Fair in 2017. That phase reached its apogee with Beyoncé’s 2017 photo shoot/announcement that she was pregnant with twins, a heavily art-directed series of pictures that seemed to encompass such references as Botticelli’s Venus and a renaissance Madonna.As the pregnant body became valorized for its life-giving potential, it increasingly became “a place of safe transgression,” Ms. Cramer said. And that meant that “it’s one of the few times women-identifying people can safely disrupt some norms.”At Jay-Z’s Oscar after-party in Hollywood.Ngre/BackgridProgressive though they may seem, however, as Ms. Charman wrote in Apollo of such images, they nevertheless “conform to the glossy conventions.”Not so Rihanna. She has made confronting her pregnancy part of her every day. Or maybe more pertinently, our every day. “I was expecting the announcement,” Ms. Cramer said — perhaps even a few other, carefully calculated appearances. “But there has been no return to covering up.”Though it’s possible that this is a totally unconscious choice — maybe her skin is so sensitive that it’s uncomfortable to have anything on her belly — Rihanna herself has a history of consciously using her own physicality and profile to force reconsideration of old prejudices and social conventions about female agency and beauty. Most obviously in her Savage X Fenty lingerie brand, currently valued at around $3 billion.Indeed, her current approach may have been foreshadowed by her choice to have Slick Woods, at nine months pregnant, model in her first Savage X Fenty show in 2018 wearing only pasties and lacy lingerie. Famously, Ms. Woods went into labor on the runway, later posting “I’m here to say I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT WHENEVER I WANT AND SO CAN YOU.” (There were some additional words in there to emphasize her point, but they cannot be printed in this newspaper.)Change the date and those lines could easily be the motto of Rihanna’s maternity wear. She did characterize her own pregnancy style as “rebellious.”Now the question, said Ms. Cramer, is whether “an overt celebration of embodied power through pregnancy can make a difference.” Can the “performance of a powerful pregnancy by a wealthy woman at the top of her game filter down” to change how all pregnancies are perceived?If so, Rihanna will have done a lot more than influence how pregnant women dress. She’ll have influenced how we think about the rights of women. Pregnant or not. More
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Lizzo Makes Shapewear
by Aurelia Butler 30 March 2022, 09:00
The many, many people who have applauded, criticized and otherwise taken part in what often seems like an endless discussion around Lizzo’s naked form may be surprised to learn that she does not spend quite as much time undressed as they may think.“Sometimes when I look at the internet, I have an identity crisis because I’m, like, ‘Wait, who do these people think I am?’” Lizzo (birth name, Melissa Jefferson) said recently via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. Behind her were many awards, an amethyst crystal for good vibes, and her Baby Yoda collection. “Right now I think people just think I’m naked all the time,” she said. “That’s the one thing I see: ‘Ooohhh, there’s old Lizzo, she’s naked again, I’m shocked she got on clothes.’”Sure, she has posted some nudes online, using her own body to force a reassessment of prejudices around size and beauty. Sure, she has gone to events like Cardi B’s birthday in a sheer crystal dress over a thong and pasties and set off a viral debate.But actually she has spent a good chunk of her time in the last three years not just on her upcoming album, or her new Amazon Prime reality show, “Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” but also on an entirely different project. One that involves putting stuff on, rather than taking it off.It is, she teased recently on social media, “the biggest thing yet. Bigger than anything I’ve ever done.” It may also be the most controversial.Because Lizzo, champion of unfettered flesh, is making shapewear.You know, the type of underwear that traditionally has seemed the opposite of the message about loving yourself as you are, contained in such Lizzo songs as “Juice” and “Truth Hurts.” Not to mention her TV show.It’s the sort of potential contradiction that, in the social media echo chamber of personal sensitivities, can often end up viewed as a betrayal of the bond between fan and favorite. As Lizzo knows. Which is why she wants to be clear: She isn’t trying to change other people’s bodies. She’s trying to change the essence of shapewear itself.The line is called Yitty, after her childhood nickname, and it was created with Fabletics Inc., the parent company of Fabletics, the “active life wear brand” co-founded by Kate Hudson. It will be introduced this week with about 100 different pieces divided into three collections: Nearly Naked, Mesh Me and Major Label.Together, Lizzo said, they will “give everyone the opportunity to speak for themselves when it comes to how their body should look and how they should feel in their body.”“Shapewear was one of those untouched constructs in fashion people weren’t really messing with — or thinking about,” Lizzo said. ”At a certain point I started to make my own little pieces: little moments here, little moments there, little booty lift here. I wanted to share that.”YittyThe point is to do for the concept of so-called innerwear what Lizzo did for size in general, not to mention the flute, which she famously plays while twerking — what she has done for herself, really: break it out of the box where society and culture has stuck it. Get past body positive, which has become a sort of meaningless catchphrase for the mainstream, to body normative for everyone.“I’m selling that more than I’m selling thongs, more than I’m selling bodysuits or I’m selling shapewear,” Lizzo said. “I’m selling a mentality that ‘I can do what I want with my body, wear what I want and feel good while doing it.’” That whatever body you are showing off, it’s not, “‘Oh, how brave,’” she continued. “No. No more of that. Nothing to see here but a body, just like your body.”A Brief History of Shapewear“Shapewear” is a relatively new name for a very old concept (kind of like how “wellness” now encompasses “diet”) — that is, that a woman’s body should be altered via external means to make it more acceptable to the eyes of various beholders, most of them men. If that involved pain … well, such was the price of achieving society’s definition of beauty.What forms the alterations take have varied according to cultural norms; references to girdles can be found as far back as the “Iliad.” Panniers, those underskirt structures that exaggerated hips, were a 16th-century version of shapewear; so were steel or whalebone and canvas corsets. Come the mid-20th century, elasticated girdles were in vogue, which in turn gave way to pantyhose, which evolved, in 2000, into Spanx, which is what made shapewear modern-day famous.By swapping out cut-and-sew technology for Lycra knit, the Spanx founder Sara Blakely transformed Hollywood red carpets becoming a billionaire along the way.Still, Spanx, like all the corsets and girdles before it, was a kind of “foundation garment,” made to be hidden, its very existence suggesting that what was underneath was somehow not quite up to par, even as it acted as a secret weapon to allow bodies of all types access to clothes made for the few. Also, “comfort,” when it comes to shapewear, remained a relative term.In part to change that, lots of new players have entered the market, most notably, Yummie Tummie, founded in 2008 (and now rebranded as Yummie); Honeylove, created in 2016; and, above all, Skims, the Kim Kardashian brand, introduced in 2019, trumpeting comfort and a variety of skin color tones, and valued at $3.2 billion during a fund-raising round earlier this year.Allied Market Research recently issued a report predicting the global compression and shapewear market would be worth $6.95 billion by 2030.Lizzo: “The story goes that when I was born, my brother could not say ‘Melissa,’ so he would go, ‘Meyitta,’ and my Auntie Carmen would go, ‘Did he call her Yitty?’ From then on it was ‘Yitty, Yitty.’ Sadly, my auntie passed in May of 2020, and a few months later, I decided to call this Yitty in her honor. She would have loved this, she would have been so proud.”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesThough shapewear sales declined during the pandemic (who needs it when you are lounging around at home in your sweats?), Kristen Classi-Zummo, an apparel industry analyst for the NPD group, said that there has been an uptick in interest as Covid-19 protocols have relaxed and nightlife has returned.Comfort remains important, she said, but growth was most apparent in “innovation, and pieces worn to shape and be seen,” especially among consumers under 40. Cora Harrington, the founder and editor in chief of The Lingerie Addict blog and the author of “In Intimate Detail: How to Choose, Wear, and Love Lingerie,” pointed out that for younger people, “Spanx tend to be more associated with their mothers. They want something more fashionable.”“I think there is space for another brand to bubble up and control that narrative,” Ms. Harrington said. Perhaps because, despite all the advances in the sector, the overriding aesthetic has remained tied to the Barbification of the body.That’s where Yitty comes in.A Briefer History of YittyThough it may seem, in the wake of Fenty and Skims, that Lizzo, 33, is simply jumping on the celebrity shapewear bandwagon, she has actually been thinking about the sector since she was 12.That, she said, was when she was growing up in Houston (her family had moved from Detroit when she was 10) and, starting in middle school, learning to be “ashamed of my body.” Later, once she had begun to assert herself musically, she rejected that mind-set, and the undergarments that came with it, entirely. And it was only after that, when she finally started to “have fun with my body, creating shapes and allowing my body to be curvaceous, loving the rolls that you’re supposed to hide, and exploring through fashion,” that she started to think about shapewear again.“I went to a store — I won’t name the store — looking for something for a party,” she said. “And the shapewear aisle was in disarray, like someone went in there in a mad dash looking for something they couldn’t find. There were pieces on the floor, and there were only three colors — jet black, ivory white or pink, the color of my nails.”Lizzo waved her hand, with its long, pointy nails the color of ballet shoes. “No one is that color!” she said. She got serious about changing that around the time of “Truth Hurts,” when she had a handful of meetings with different brands. “I was like: ‘Guys, I’m telling you, I’m trying to revolutionize shapewear and our relationship with it and with our bodies,’ and they were like, ‘Well, you could do a capsule collection with us for X, Y and Z,’ and I was like, ‘They’re not getting the vision!’”“It was important for me when I wear it and model it, I am not looking different than I normally look,” Lizzo said. “You see my rolls and see a belly, and sometimes you see me in super-high compression. A lot of times I will do red carpets and not wear shapewear at all, or not wear a bra. It depends on how I feel. You see me as I want you to see me.”YittyShe wanted shapewear that announced itself with pride — and felt like a hug. The kind of shapewear that if you sat down and your shirt rode up or your pants pulled down, you’d be happy to show off. The kind of shapewear you could wear with nothing on top. She didn’t even want to call it “shapewear.” She wanted to call it “bodywear,” but no one knew what that meant.Then Kevin Beisler, her manager, told her he had met with the Fabletics team, who had been doing a lot of customer surveys.Those customers had said that “the No. 1 category they wanted us to start was shapewear,” said Don Ressler, who founded Fabletics Inc., along with Adam Goldenberg. Mr. Ressler had seen what can happen when you combine celebrity power and a clothing sector in which the celebrity has some personal authority. (Fabletics was previously named TechStyle Fashion Group and had produced Savage X Fenty, which it spun off in 2019.)“They get it,” Mr. Beisler told Lizzo.“Those words alone were so incredible, because I hadn’t heard them,” she said. “Nobody had believed in my wild dream.”Actually, Mr. Ressler said, “we think it’s a multibillion-dollar opportunity.”The Lizzo FactorLizzo does not think the market is saturated or that she missed the boat because there are other brands ahead of her. “There’s nothing like feeling like you’re in the right place at the right time,” she said.Yitty is “something personal to me, something for the baby version of me,” she continued. “I have been parallel with the body positive movement for a long time, and people have made my name synonymous with it, and I’m always like, body positivity belonged to the people who truly created it, the Black, brown, queer big women, my girls in the 16 plus.” As an indicator of intended audience, the ad campaign features models of all sizes, including Lizzo’s best friend, who is an extra-small, as well as Lizzo herself.Lizzo is the chief executive and co-founder of Yitty; Kristen Dykstra, the former chief marketing officer of Fabletics, is president. The lines took three years to develop and will range from XS to 6X (which is one size bigger than any of Skims’ current offerings). Prices for leggings are $69.95 to $74.95, and bras will be $49.95 to $59.95.There are two compression weights, antimicrobial fabrics so the shorts and thongs and leggings can be worn without extra underwear, bras that hold their shape without underwire, a print that looks like a butterfly wing, and recycled packaging. Lizzo named all the colors, though her favorite inventions — for a bright blue and a bright pink — are unprintable here.”I don’t want to be the only one who can enjoy autonomy with my body because I am now in privileged position where people want to make me stuff and I can afford it,” Lizzo said. “I want to help other people out in that way too, so they’re not just looking at me and thinking, ‘Damn, I wish I could afford custom thousand-dollar pieces.’”Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesShe also tried everything on. “I love a cheeky panty, I really do,” she said. “It can be tricky when you’re using compression fabric because if it’s too cheeky, it can roll up.” But, she said, many times “I’d put a panty on and say. ‘Can you slide the side up this way?’” — she mimed raising the cut of the leg — “because it makes the booty look good.”She has very strong opinions about what she likes. “I could not take off the Yitty convertible bandeau for a long time,” she said. “I’m a bandeau innovator.” As for the shaping thong: “I’m like: ‘Hello, big girls wear thongs. Let us wear thongs and give me that little love up top.’”Yitty will be sold on its own website and on the Fabletics website. It will also be sold in shop-in-shops in the 76 Fabletics stores and have its own pop-up in Los Angeles on April 12. And it will be front and center at Lizzo tours and in her videos and TV shows. As far as she’s concerned, it’s the beginning of her next stage.“I want to be a world changer,” she said. “I wasn’t just making cool music — my art always had a bigger purpose. Now I’m just taking that usefulness and making it tangible.”“This is something I’m building that can hopefully last for generations — not just the company or the product, but the mentality of Yitty,” she continued. “This idea of liberation with your body and being able to express it in different ways can go so, so far.” More
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Hollywood’s First Family of Putting It Out There
by Aurelia Butler 10 February 2022, 18:56
On the first page of Will Smith’s recent memoir “Will,” the global superstar recounts a gruesome story of watching his father strike his mother in the side of the head so hard that she spit up blood. The early chapters of the book continue in much the same way — a young Will, naturally charismatic and eccentric, takes on the role of family entertainer to save his mother, himself and everyone else.“I would be the golden child,” he writes. “My mother’s savior. My father’s usurper. It was going to be the performance of a lifetime. And over the next 40 years, I would never break character. Not once.”That he became a perpetual conqueror in his films starting in the mid-1990s — an alien-defeater in “Men in Black,” a robot-defeater in “I, Robot,” a mutant-defeater in “I Am Legend,” a druglord-defeater in “Bad Boys,” a George Foreman-defeater in “Ali” — might have been a trauma response, but it also turned him into one of the world’s most bankable actors. Off camera, he behaved much as he did on camera, revealing little: an unknowable person beloved by millions.Over the last couple of years, Smith’s muscles have slackened somewhat. He’s become a loose and only semi-rehearsed presence on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to his uncommonly vulnerable autobiography, he also recently appeared in a six-part YouTube Originals series, “Best Shape of My Life,” ostensibly about losing weight but more about the deepening fissures in the outer shell of his public-facing character. For decades, he became one with his hardened facade; now he’s melting it down.This pivot to transparency makes him the patriarch of a family that has lately made intimacy its stock in trade. The Smiths — Will, 53; his wife, Jada, 50; their children, Jaden, 23, and Willow, 21 — have become the first family of putting it all out there. Between Will’s newfound chill, Jada and Willow’s cut-to-the-quick chat show “Red Table Talk” and Willow and Jaden’s music, the Smiths have remade an elite old Hollywood unit for the new era of reality-driven celebrity.From left: Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Will Smith in an episode of “Red Table Talk.”Facebook WatchTheir path has been the opposite of, say, the Kardashians’, the platonic ideal of the reality-TV clan that willed itself into more traditional stardom (forever blurring the lines between old and new fame along the way). The Smiths, by contrast, have downshifted from a conventional style of celebrity into the more fraught and garish one, and, crucially, have done so with a kind of grace — shocking, especially given the intensity of some of the revelations at play.Inside Will Smith’s WorldFor decades, the global superstar has won over audiences with his charm and charisma. Now, he is showing his more vulnerable side.A Commanding Presence: In a Times interview, the movie star reflects on his career, being a parent and learning to let go of perfectionism. ‘King Richard’: Here is what Smith said after he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as the father of Venus and Serena Williams. His Memoir: “Will” is a fairy tale of dazzling good fortune told by an admittedly unreliable narrator, our book critic writes. Hollywood’s First Family: Among his various roles, Smith is also the patriarch of a family that has made intimacy its stock in trade.Theirs is a perfectly timed reframing for the age of online confessional and trauma-based personal brands, especially for a family in which the parents are receding from the camera eye, and the children were famous before they ever had a choice to opt out. It is also a profound validation of the power of emotional directness and its destigmatization for the famous, turning the sorts of revelations that would have been relegated to salacious tabloids and unauthorized biographies in earlier eras into the stuff of self-empowerment.Will might be the Smith family member with the highest public profile, but it is Jada who helped draft the template of the family reinvention with “Red Table Talk.” The show, which appears on Facebook Watch, began in mid-2018, and quickly became known for unexpectedly vulnerable conversations, both with celebrity guests, and also between the hosts: Jada, Willow and Jada’s mother, Adrienne. Each woman holds her ground — take, for example, the episode about polyamory, in which Willow seems to baffle her co-hosts — but the inter-family good will prevents the show from ever erupting into true tension.Reality programming has only become an alternate safe space for the most famous in the last couple of decades. Previously, behind-the-scenes confessionals were more the purview of tabloids, an unsavory side effect of fame to be avoided at all costs. But beginning in the early 2000s, the era of “The Osbournes” on MTV, reality programming began to provide an escape hatch in which the famous could leverage their renown before being nudged toward the offramp of career irrelevance.It was novel then, and it ended up fomenting an entire cottage industry of second-chance grasps for attention, typically for C- and D-listers, both family docu-soaps and also shows like “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” and “Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars.” Social media extended the available possibilities, granting new oxygen for the well known who were on their way to becoming less well known.For the Smith family, “Red Table Talk” provided proof of concept — it was acceptable, and even desirable, for the most prominent celebrities to make confessionals part of their brand.More than one episode delves into the challenges of Will and Jada’s marriage, offering small brushstrokes of revelation about an oft-gossiped-about couple. They insist they will never split, because after surmounting unspecified challenges, “We don’t have any dealbreakers.” (At the end of the chat, Will aims to dispel some frequent rumors: “We’ve never been Scientologists, we’ve never been swingers,” though Jada does point out that the second is a term for a “specific lifestyle.”)Watch enough “Red Table Talk” after reading Will’s book and absorbing his YouTube series and you might encounter the same tale told a few different ways — he’s been workshopping this unburdening for some time. Unlike Jada, who approaches the show and sharing her truths more casually, Will has fully embraced this shift and is treating it like he would a blockbuster film: rehearsal, polish, flawless delivery.Smith promoting “Will” with Queen Latifah last year. The actor’s memoir is surprisingly candid.Matt Rourke/Associated Press“Best Shape of My Life” begins as a weight-loss show — Will has a mild dad-bod paunch. To address it, he flies to Dubai to work with his personal trainer, as one does. He wants the process filmed, he says, because “the cameras act like my sponsor — they keep me accountable.” He partakes in intense physical challenges — walking to the top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on the planet, or navigating the Dubai Police Academy obstacle course — and is also working on his memoir.Soon, he begins to chafe at that accountability. Agonizing over the weight loss goal begins to feel like false tension. So does stress about the deadline for his book (underscored by what feel like staged voice mail messages from his assistant). Instead what unfolds is a tug of war between his compulsion to perform and his need to retreat. The fourth episode is titled “I Quit,” and then he continues for two more episodes — this is, after all, a Will Smith production. But seams are fraying: In the fifth episode, he crows, “[expletive] the budget, [expletive] the deadline — they’ll get what we give them.”Several segments of the show are given over to Will’s reading segments of his memoir to family members and friends. These moments limn vulnerability without ever detaching it from performance — Will cries about the challenges in his childhood home, and his onlookers, including his therapist, nod along. At least a few years past his box-office-domination peak, he has built a more scalable reward system.(And lest you forget that the family rebrand is in no small way a business venture, there are untold cross-promotional opportunities. On “Best Shape,” Will often wears clothes from his Bel-Air Athletics line. When the family gathers in Miami to hear Will read chapters about them, the table is stocked with the signature blue square bottles of Just Water, Jaden’s company.)Jaden Smith holding a bottle of his Just Water at a film premiere in New York.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesOnce the sort of superstar known for smooth maximalism, Will has experimented with this sort of behind-the-scenes content before: “Will Smith’s Bucket List,” a series on Facebook Watch, and “Will Smith: Off the Deep End,” a nature immersion doc. But the last year has constituted a multiplatform career rebrand in which Smith uses all the tools of celebrity in service of peeling back its layers.In his autobiography, he writes movingly of the tug of war he feels in regards to his father, who instilled in Will the discipline with which he would build his astronomically successful career but was also abusive. In one section, he suggests that he considered pushing his elderly father down a flight of stairs as retribution.But the real revelation about Will’s relationship to parental authority comes in “King Richard,” last year’s biopic about Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus. Richard Williams was often maligned for the single-minded way he raised his daughters, but Will plays him empathetically as a stubborn hero, leaning into his doggedness but never making him an object of derision. (He was nominated for an Oscar for the performance.) No means are beyond bounds when the ends are so enviable.It’s likely the role has double meaning for Will — on the one hand, it’s a celebration of the transformative discipline he learned from his own father (in a non-abusive context), and on the other, it’s an argument for his own style of parenting. In both the memoir and at the Red Table, he speaks openly of how his heavy-handed fathering of Jaden and Willow exploded in his face on multiple occasions. When Willow’s first single, “Whip My Hair,” became a hit, she rebelled against the pressures of touring by shaving her head. The action film he made with Jaden, “After Earth,” was a colossal flop. (Will has another son, Trey, from his first marriage, who is a sometime D.J. and occasionally appears on “Red Table Talk.”)And yet the levelheadedness of the younger Smiths is somewhat remarkable. They are untethered thinkers in the way that children of privilege can often be, but they are also curious and empathetic and, all things considered, decidedly warm. (Listen to Jaden talk about learning how to navigate paying for dinner and you’ll melt.) Given their parents’s full-circle journey to untouchable celebrity and back, and given that they were born into a far more transparent generation, it’s easy to adapt to their family’s newfound visibility.Jaden has largely retreated from the spotlight, though he did release an album last year, “CTV3: Day Tripper’s Edition,” full of spacey dream-pop. When he shows up on “Red Table Talk” or in the “Best Shape of My Life” series, he appears almost impossibly wise.Willow has, relatively quietly, released five albums, recently homing in on a wiry pop-punk style that’s both tart and fashionable. Last year’s “Lately I Feel Everything” is her best album, and it includes the scarred anthem about duplicity “Transparentsoul” and raw songs like “Xtra,” in which she seeks space for a deep exhale: “I don’t mean to break so easily under the pressure/Need some time alone to breathe, I need some tree and fresh air.” And the album she released in 2020 as part of the duo called the Anxiety (which also includes Tyler Cole) features “Meet Me at Our Spot,” which became a huge hit on TikTok last year as a soundtrack for young creators to shamanistically lose themselves in dance.At the Red Table, Willow is a beacon of earnestness and humanity. Feeling deeply is the center of her public presentation; her conversation with Paris Jackson was less interview than sympathetic embrace. (At one point, Willow suggested that she’d cut herself in her younger years.) In her music and in her Red Table conversations, she grasps the futility of hiding her feelings, so she doesn’t bother.For Will and Jada, though, the high wire act of confession is, naturally, a reassertion of power. To be this vulnerable, effectively without fear of reprisal or public collapse, is perhaps the ultimate test of celebrity. The only question that remains is what secrets still lurk behind all this transparency. More
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How Hillary Clinton's MasterClass Shows a Very 2021 Way to Be
by Aurelia Butler 22 December 2021, 14:21
Hillary Clinton delivered an unused election speech. Jennifer Aniston cried at Central Perk. It was a year for watching celebrities reinhabit their past selves.MasterClass, an online platform where you can watch famous people deliver video tutorials for $180 a year, recently debuted a course on the topic of resilience. It begins with a close-up shot of a weathered oval desk. We hear papers shuffling, birds chirping, the voices of an ethereal choir. A woman’s hands drift across a policy document. As white light flares through a garden window, Hillary Clinton appears. She wears a serene smile and a magenta blouse. It feels like she’s back from the dead.Clinton’s 16 video lessons in resilience are largely tedious (one is about binder organization), but the whole exercise builds to a rattling unease. The course culminates with Clinton reciting her unused presidential victory speech from 2016. Holding the text in her lap like a storybook, she seems to be impersonating a lost version of herself. She is accessing a faintly smug, terribly naïve Hillary Clinton, as if practicing in front of a mirror for a moment that would never arrive. It’s the kind of humiliating growth exercise you might spy through the keyhole of a therapist’s office. Even as Clinton has styled herself as an influencer on the subject of carrying on, it feels as if she is being held hostage by the past, compelled to relive her defeat again and again.This is, actually, a very 2021 way to be. Popular culture is saturated with famous figures playing their past selves, revisiting old haunts and resurrecting buried personal histories. This year, Taylor Swift began releasing note-for-note re-recordings of her early albums in a bid to reclaim control of her catalog after her adversary Scooter Braun assumed ownership of her masters and sold them to an investment fund. The cast of “Friends” reunited in an eerie replica of Central Perk, while the original “Real World” roommates returned to the Manhattan loft they shared in 1992. And celebrities have flooded TikTok, groveling to fans with corny re-enactments: Ryan Reynolds poorly lip-syncs a bit from his 2005 rom-com “Just Friends,” while Zooey Deschanel eagerly replicates her song and dance from the “New Girl” opening credits.I thought we had reached peak pop culture nostalgia a decade ago, when an endless buffet of 1990s-kid ephemera was rewarmed for digital consumption and a sepia Instagram filter could convert last night’s party photos into an instant retrospective. But there is something unexpectedly charged about this development, which invites us to watch a person squeeze back into her old skin. The literalness of the exercise emphasizes the slipperiness of time, shining a garish spotlight on mortality and lending a tragic depth to the most venal of reunion specials. Even the cringey TikToks have a measure of profundity, as aging celebrities play their younger selves to appeal to even younger audiences, all set on a perpetual loop.The imperative of the streaming boom is to turn the content spigot to full blast, but that makes content seem forgettable and cheap. So now producers are resurrecting properties from when content was scarce enough to feel precious, and inviting us to watch as the associated celebrities reinfuse them with their auras. Like the doomed characters on “Lost,” who manage to escape their spooky island only to feel compelled to return, the financial pull of existing I.P. is often too strong for famous people to resist. These re-enactments and self-impersonations represent the latest turn in the entertainment industry’s rapacious churn, as it mines psychodrama from the very process of rebooting culture.On “Real World: Homecoming,” the original roommates returned to the Manhattan loft they shared in 1992.Danielle Levitt/MTVIt all reminds me of a different kind of re-enactment: this year’s documentary “Procession,” which concerns six men who survived child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. With the help of a drama therapist and the documentarian Robert Greene, they revisit the scenes of the crimes, act out fictionalized versions of their memories and film them. One of the men recreates a priest’s quarters, paints it all white, then destroys it with a sledgehammer; another hunts down a priest’s old lake house and walks the overgrown path that led to his rape. Their hope is that by physicalizing these traumatic incidents, they can reinscribe their memories and dispel their power.These Hollywood re-enactments also have a sheen of exposure therapy, conjuring old dramas through sense memory. “Friends: The Reunion,” on HBO Max, emphasizes the production’s precise rebuilding of sets, and as soon as Jennifer Aniston crosses the threshold of the replicated apartment of her character, Rachel Green, tears are in her eyes. Later, she would say that she was so walloped by memories — the end of “Friends” overlapped with the dissolution of her marriage to Brad Pitt — that she paused filming to pull herself together. Aniston’s tabloid persona is haunted by her past romantic lives, and the scenario felt designed to rouse dormant narratives. Part of the lurid appeal of the reunion is watching the lightly debasing spectacle of the cast assembling around a table to re-enact old scripts, as if in a celebrity support group for exorcising classic roles. Of course, the actual purpose is to prime viewers to revisit their own ’90s memories, via “Friends” episodes, which are now exclusively streaming on HBO Max.On “The Real World: Homecoming,” on Paramount+, the frisson of the reunion springs from their reoccupation of the loft they shared nearly 30 years ago. The housemates have hardly popped a bottle of prosecco when a tense 1992 argument about racism between Becky, a white songwriter, and Kevin, a Black activist, is replayed for the group. The cast seems prepared to calmly reprocess this exchange with the exception of Becky (now an alternative healer who goes by Rebecca), who instantly springs back to her familiar defensive posture, protesting that she “lost” her “skin color” through her experience dancing with a multiethnic troupe. So strong is the psychological pull of this place, she becomes convinced that she was actively set up as the scapegoat for white privilege, and she scurries from the loft for good.This messy display stands in contrast to Taylor Swift’s tightly controlled nostalgic exercise. Her re-recordings are deliberately unrevealing — she sounds as if she is performing uncanny self-karaoke — but the story she has spun around them is captivating. In April, she released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2008 album. On it, we hear a 31-year-old woman impersonating her 19-year-old self reflecting on her 15-year-old self, and doing it all to smite the men who hoped to seize control of her songs.Part of the lurid appeal of “Friends: The Reunion” is watching the spectacle of the cast (including Jennifer Aniston) re-enacting old scripts, as if in a celebrity support group for exorcising their classic roles.HBO MaxFor a time, the most indelible cultural artifact of this moment was a parenthetical bit of metadata, “(Taylor’s Version),” which Swift appended to the titles of her newly recorded songs, and which became a meme anyone could use to signal a prideful ownership of their own cultural outputs, no matter how slight. But in November, Swift’s immersion in her past built to a breakthrough, as she released a 10-minute extension of her beloved 2012 breakup song “All Too Well.” With the new version, she interpolates the wistful original with starkly drawn scenes that play almost like recovered memories, recasting a romance as a site of trauma that so reduced her that she compares herself to “a soldier who’s returning half her weight.”Nostalgia is derived from the Greek words for “homecoming” and “pain,” and before it referred to a yearning for the past, it was a psychopathological disorder, describing a homesickness so severe it could actually kill. Nostalgia itself represented a form of traumatic stress, and now pseudo-therapeutic treatments have made their way into our cultural retrospectives. So while Serena Williams appears on MasterClass to teach tennis, and Ringo Starr to teach drumming, Clinton arrives to school us on “the power of resilience.”Resilience suggests elasticity, and there is something morbidly fascinating about watching Clinton revert to her pre-Trump form. The victory speech itself reads like centrist Mad Libs — a meditation on “E Pluribus Unum,” nods to both Black Lives Matter and the bravery of police, an Abraham Lincoln quote — but at its end it veers into complex emotional territory. Clinton recalls her mother, Dorothy Rodham, who died in 2011, and as she describes a dream about her, her voice shakes and warps in pitch. Dorothy Rodham had a bleak upbringing, and Clinton wishes she could visit her mother’s childhood self and assure her that despite all the suffering she would endure, her daughter would go on to become the president of the United States.As Clinton plays her former self comforting her mother’s former self with the idea of a future Clinton who will never exist, we finally glimpse a loss that cannot be negotiated, optimized or monetized: She can never speak to her mother again. Soon, Clinton’s MasterClass has reverted back to its banal messaging — she instructs us to dust ourselves off, take a walk, make our beds — but for a few seconds, she could be seen not as a windup historical figure but as a person, like the rest of us, who cannot beat time. More
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Paul Newman Will Tell His Own Story, 14 Years After His Death
by Aurelia Butler 3 November 2021, 08:00
Knopf plans to publish a book next year based on hours of recordings the movie star left behind, as well as interviews with family, friends and associates.Decades ago, the actor and philanthropist Paul Newman, frustrated by all the unauthorized biographies and coverage of his life, recorded his own oral history, leaving behind transcripts that for years were forgotten in the basement laundry room of his house in Connecticut.Now his family has decided to turn those transcripts into a memoir, which will be published by Knopf next fall.“What he recorded, and in essence what he wrote, was so honest and revealing,” said Peter Gethers, an editor-at-large at Knopf who will edit the book, which does not yet have a title. “It showed this extraordinary arc, a guy who was very, very flawed at the beginning of his life and as a young man, but who, as he got older, turned into the Paul Newman we want him to be.”Newman — known for his blue eyes and 50-year acting career in movies such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Hud” and “Cool Hand Luke” — died in 2008 at age 83.The book began more than 30 years ago as an oral history project put together by one of Newman’s closest friends, the screenwriter Stewart Stern. Stern, whose 1968 film “Rachel, Rachel,” was directed by Newman and starred his wife, Joanne Woodward, spent several years interviewing people from all corners of Newman’s life, including his children, his ex-wife Jacqueline Witte, close friends, and actors and directors who worked with him. This produced thousands of pages of transcripts and convinced Newman he should do his own version. Stern peppered him with questions, Gethers said, and they created recordings that are a mix of interview and Newman speaking without prompts..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The recordings, completed about 10 years before his death, describe Newman’s early life, including his difficult relationship with his parents, as well as his troubles with drinking, his shortcomings as a husband in his first marriage, and his flaws as a parent. It is candid about his sorrow when his son, Scott, died of a drug and alcohol overdose at 28.One of several photos of Newman and his family that will appear in his forthcoming memoir.via KnopfThe book also delves into Newman’s insecurity in his younger years, exploring his jealousy of peers like James Dean and Marlon Brando when they were all working in Hollywood.“He said that his mother did not so much think of him as flesh and blood, but as a decoration,” Gethers said. “He says that if he was not a pretty child, she never would have paid attention to him at all. It’s a devastating thing to read, and clearly forms so much of his life and his insecurity about being an actor.”The memoir will also cover his marriage to Woodward, which Gethers called “remarkably loving, affectionate and sexy,” as well as his acting career and racecar driving.The book was purchased at auction this spring, Gethers said. It will be about 80 percent memoir, with the remaining part based on the recordings Stern made with people close to Newman. It will also include previously unreleased family photographs.The transcripts were given to Knopf, which was then charged with turning it into a book. (After the publisher bought it, more transcripts were found in a storage unit in Connecticut, in a banker’s box marked “PLN / HISTORY,” Gethers said.) Stern died in 2015, so Newman’s daughters are participating in the editing process, in essence as an author would, approving changes and drafts.Gethers himself is the author of 13 books and several screenplays, and has produced movies and television shows. He said that while wooing the Newman family during the bidding process, he told them that his father, a TV writer and producer, wrote one of Newman’s earliest starring roles in 1956 on a show called “Rag Jungle.” Gethers also mentioned that he had two cats named for Newman roles: Harper and Hud. More
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‘Maybe I Do Have a Story to Tell’: Kal Penn on His Memoir
by Aurelia Butler 2 November 2021, 00:30
Starring in the buddy stoner comedy “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” is good material for a memoir. One might think that serving as a staffer in Barack Obama’s White House is good material for another memoir, by a different person. But the actor Kal Penn writes about both experiences in “You Can’t Be Serious,” which Gallery Books will publish on Tuesday.The book has attracted early attention for its most personal detail: Penn is gay, and engaged to Josh, his partner of 11 years. Their relationship is conveyed in one chapter that is mostly about their earliest dates, during which they seemed comically mismatched.Penn also writes about growing up in suburban New Jersey and fully catching the acting bug while performing in a middle-school staging of “The Wiz.” He is candid about his fight against the entertainment industry’s tendency to cast actors of color in stereotypical roles. And he recounts the “sabbatical” he took after establishing a Hollywood career to campaign for Obama and then serve in the public engagement arm of his administration.Below, Penn talks about finding the story he wanted to tell, the self-loathing he first felt while writing it and the filmmaker who inspired his career.When did you first get the idea to write this book?The first idea, which I rejected, came the day I left the White House. My manager called me. I describe him in the book as like every character from the TV show “Entourage” in one person. Heart of gold but also a lion..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}And he said, “You need to write a book. I’ll set you up with meetings.” I said, “Dan, what am I going to write a book about?” He said, “There aren’t many actors who have been in politics.” I said, “The governor is literally Arnold Schwarzenegger.” And the reason I took the sabbatical was not to write a book. I don’t like the optics of that and, more importantly, I don’t have a story to tell.Later I thought, maybe I do have a story to tell: I’d love to write a book for the 20-year-old version of me. There was never a book that said, “This is how you navigate the entertainment industry as a young man of color.” And I’ve met a lot of people who were told they’re crazy for having multiple passions. We’re in a society that just doesn’t encourage that kind of thing. So I thought maybe my experiences might make somebody smile or feel a little more connected, and I had a chance to put it together and write it during the pandemic.What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?There was a point three months into writing it when I felt the kind of self-loathing that I haven’t felt since middle school. I texted a bunch of my writer friends, and they all either said, “Yeah, buddy, welcome to being an author,” or “Why do you think so many of us drink so much Scotch?” Just a sea of those types of responses.Up until that point, I’d written fiction, essentially scripts and characters. It’s very different when you’re creating a character or a plotline: That’s not you, you can take a break from it. With this process, it’s “Oh my God, there’s no escaping my own brain.” I was not prepared for it.In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?I was sure that I wanted to share two stories: one about my parents and their upbringing; and the story of how Josh and I met. He showed up with an 18-pack of Coors and turned my TV from “SpongeBob” to NASCAR. I thought, “This guy’s leaving here in 40 minutes with 16 beers.” So the fact that we’re together 11 years later is funny because so many people have stories of dates that went awry but now they’re married and have kids.In the book’s outline, there was no ending. I always struggled with that. I thought there was going to have to be some kind of a positive wrap-up, a story of triumph after years of typecasting and racism. And then “Sunnyside” happened. I sold this show after I had already started writing the book. There’s a chapter I write about how it’s truly my dream show: a big network [NBC], a diverse, patriotic comedy that would hopefully bring people together and make them laugh.And then it slowly unraveled. With everything else in the book, I have the perspective of time. This was still raw. I ended up putting it as the last real chapter because it’s a perfect example of how much has changed and how much has yet to change.We often think of goals as: Everything has now been fixed, so end of story. In reality, everything is a constant mess of back and forth.What creative person who isn’t a writer has influenced you and your work?I always say Mira Nair, and I would have said this years ago, before this book was ever on the table. Her second film, “Mississippi Masala,” came out when I was in eighth grade. It was the first time I’d seen South Asian characters onscreen that weren’t stereotypes or cartoon characters.They were deeply flawed, deeply interesting humans. They make love, they have financial problems. And that happened around the time “The Wiz” happened, so she was one of the people who inspired me to pursue a career in the arts.So when I got a chance to work with her on “The Namesake,” it meant a lot to me. And “The Namesake,” the novel — Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing was introduced to me by John Cho, from “Harold & Kumar.” All of those influences intersecting are very meaningful to me.Persuade someone to read “You Can’t Be Serious” in 50 words or fewer.If you want to feel like you’re having a beer with somebody who smoked weed with a fake president and served a real one, whose grandparents marched with Gandhi and whose parents certainly didn’t move to America for him to slide off a naked woman’s back in his first film. More

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