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      In Australia, Hollywood Stars Have Found an Escape From the Virus. Who’s Jealous?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Australia, Hollywood Stars Have Found an Escape From the Virus. Who’s Jealous?Dozens of international film productions have been lured to the country, where cases of the coronavirus are few. In turn, actors have found almost paradise.Chris Hemsworth is filming “Thor: Love and Thunder” in Australia.Credit…Getty Images for The Critics Choice AssociationMarch 10, 2021Updated 4:52 a.m. ETMELBOURNE, Australia — In the photo posted to Instagram, the actors Chris Hemsworth, Idris Elba and Matt Damon, all wearing 1980s-style sweats, embrace. They are maskless. Touching. Happy, even. The caption reads: “A little 80s themed party never did any harm!”Their fans, indignant, peppered the post with comments. What of the pandemic? Social distancing? Masks? We are still, after all, suffering through a pandemic that has all but crippled the travel industry and blocked most people from casually taking off for vacation in paradise.But the Hollywood brigade was in Australia, a country that has effectively stamped out the coronavirus, allowing officials to ease restrictions for most gatherings, including parties (with dancing and finger food). As a result of the near-absence of the virus, plus generous subsidies from the Australian government, the country’s film industry has been humming along at an enviable pace for months compared to other locales.Australia has managed to lure several Hollywood directors and actors to continue film production. In effect, many celebrities, including Natalie Portman, Christian Bale and Melissa McCarthy, have found freedom from the pandemic there.As one person wrote on Mr. Hemsworth’s Instagram post: “Before you comment, remember that not everyone lives in America.”Though the quickened pace of vaccinations in the United States has raised hope of returning to some semblance of normalcy by the summer, the country still leads the world in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths. Movie theaters reopened only last week in New York City. Some fans are cautiously creeping back, while others are still wary of contracting the virus.But thousands of miles away, many stars who appear on the big screens can be seen frolicking, or filming, on location in Australia. (Mr. Hemsworth is himself a permanent fixture — he moved back to Australia in 2017 after several years of living in Los Angeles.) In the United States, where hundreds are still dying every day, some fans have looked on with envy.“These Hollywood stars have been transported to another world where the problems of this world aren’t,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in New York. He added that the temporary exodus from the United States revealed a further crumbling of the myth that Hollywood was the endgame for celebrities.Village Roadshow Studios in Gold Coast, Australia.Credit…Bradley Kanaris/Getty ImagesAustralia has become the “hip place” where “fabulous people want to go,” Professor Thompson said. “When you’re trying to be a star, you’ve got to go out to the West Coast to make your bones.” When you become “a really big star,” you buy property somewhere exotic, like Australia, he added.“It definitely feels like a time machine,” Ms. Portman, calling in from Sydney, told the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel in December. “It’s so different, all the animals are different, all the trees are different, I mean even the birds, like, there’s like multicolored parrots flying around like pigeons,” she added. “It’s wild.”A spokeswoman said the government had helped 22 international productions inject hundreds of millions into the local economy. Paul Fletcher, the federal minister for communications, said, “There’s no doubt it’s a very significant spike on previous levels of activity.”But even as celebrities preen and pose on social media, some Australians grumble that the country’s strategy for stamping out the virus has left tens of thousands of citizens stranded overseas. Several tennis players and 2021 Australian Open staff were allowed into the country for the tournament. And now, they say, Hollywood’s rich and famous are turning up during the pandemic, angering critics who see a clear bending of the rules for those with money and power.“Everyone knows there’s a separate set of rules, it seems, for everyone that’s a celebrity or has money,” said Daniel Tusia, an Australian who was stuck overseas with his family for several months last year. “There are still plenty of people who haven’t been able to get home, who don’t fall into that category, who are still stranded,” he added.In an emailed statement, the Australian Border Force said that travel exemptions for film and television productions were “considered where there is evidence of the economic benefit the production will bring to Australia and support from the relevant state authority.”A year ago, Tom Hanks, Hollywood’s everyman, made all-too-real the threat of the pandemic when he and his wife, Rita Wilson, tested positive for the coronavirus in Queensland, Australia, while he was filming an unnamed Elvis biopic. Their illness made personal a threat whose seriousness was only beginning to become crystallized at the time.The actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles last year. They tested positive for the coronavirus in Queensland, Australia, about a month later.Credit…Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut by May, Australia appeared to be on track to quashing the first wave of the virus, and the soap opera “Neighbors” became one of the world’s first scripted TV series to resume production. The federal government has committed more than $400 million to international productions, which, together with existing subsidies, provides film and television producers with a rebate of up to 30 percent to shoot in the country.More than 20 international productions, including “Thor: Love and Thunder,” a Marvel film starring Mr. Hemsworth, Mr. Damon, Ms. Portman, Taika Waititi, Tessa Thompson and Mr. Bale; “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” a fantasy romance starring Mr. Elba and Tilda Swinton; and “Joe Exotic,” a spinoff of the podcast made following the popular Netflix series “Tiger King,” starring the “Saturday Night Live” actress Kate McKinnon as the big-cat enthusiast Carole Baskin, are all either in production or set to be filmed in the coming year.Ron Howard is directing “Thirteen Lives,” a dramatization of the 2018 Thai rescue of a soccer team from a cave, in Queensland (the coast of Australia makes a good stand-in for the tropics). And later this year, Julia Roberts and George Clooney are set to arrive in the same state to shoot “Ticket to Paradise,” a romantic comedy.Though a number of American stars have landed in the country for temporary work, some like Ms. McCarthy, originally in Australia to work on “Nine Perfect Strangers,” have decided to stay on to shoot other projects, said those in the industry. “Oh, the birds!” she gushed in a YouTube video. “I love that I’ve seen a spider the size of my head.”Others, like Zac Efron, appear to have settled here permanently.Zac Efron has been spotted all over Australia.Credit…Lucy Nicholson/ReutersHis Instagram is flush with Australiana: Here he is in a hammock, in the red-earth desert, appearing to participate in an Indigenous ceremony or wearing the Australian cowboy hat, an Akubra. Last year, Mr. Efron even got what an Adelaide hairdresser described as a “mullet,” a much-maligned hairstyle popular in Australia.“Home sweet home,” he captioned one image of himself in front of a camper worth more than $100,000.Chances are the stars will keep showing up. They’ve been spotted camping under the stars, heading out to dinner sans masks, and partying (yes, like it’s 1989). Mr. Damon said in January that Australia was definitely a “lucky country.”But locals in Byron Bay — the seaside town that in recent years has been transformed from hippie to glittering — have complained that the influx of stars in the past year has irreparably changed the town.“The actors and the famous people are the tip of the iceberg,” said James McMillan, a local artist and the director of the Byron Bay Surf Festival. He added that the large cohort of production crew member from Melbourne and Sydney was pricing locals out of real estate.“It’s definitely changed more than I’ve ever seen it change in the past 12 months,” Mr. McMillan, who has lived in Byron Bay for two decades, added. “People have got stars in their eyes.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      She’s Starring Opposite Tom Hanks. She’d Never Heard of Him.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyShe’s Starring Opposite Tom Hanks. She’d Never Heard of Him.Helena Zengel is a giggly, chatty 12-year-old, whose movie roles take her into psychological territory that even adults would find tough.Helena Zengel in Berlin on Dec. 17. “I stand in front of the camera, I know what I want, and I do it,” she said.Credit…Katrin Streicher for The New York TimesDec. 30, 2020, 7:08 a.m. ETBERLIN — When the director Paul Greengrass was gearing up to make his new film, “News of the World,” about a Civil War veteran in 1870s Texas who escorts an orphaned girl to her relatives across the state, he was anticipating one major challenge. “This is the first film I made with a child actor at the heart of it,” he said recently by phone.The casting would be difficult on multiple levels, he realized. Although the character is onscreen for much of the movie, she has only a few lines of dialogue. Tom Hanks had already signed on as the lead, so she would have to go “toe to toe” with a superstar, Greengrass said. “It was a very, very hard ask.”One of the first children he saw during the casting in 2019, however, was Helena Zengel, a then 11-year-old from Berlin with a tomboyish energy and platinum hair. “She was the only person I really had to look at,” he said. “It was the easiest decision in the film.”Zengel on the set of “News of the World.”Credit…Bruce W. Talamon/Universal PicturesPaul Greengrass, center, the movie’s director.Credit…Bruce Talamon/Universal Pictures“News of the World,” which opened Dec. 25 in theaters in the United States and Canada, and will be available on Netflix in other countries from February, is an international breakthrough for Zengel, who has already become one of the most talked-about actors — let alone child actors — to emerge in Germany in recent years.She garnered widespread praise last year for her portrayal of a semi-feral 9-year-old in the movie “System Crasher,” which went on to be Germany’s official submission to the Academy Awards. That performance won her best actress this spring at the Lolas, Germany’s equivalent of the Oscars, making her the youngest recipient of that prize.In “News of the World,” Zengel’s character, Johanna Leonberger, is left orphaned after her German parents are violently murdered on their farm when she is four. Taken in and raised by the Kiowa tribe, she is later removed by soldiers, and a traveling veteran, played by Hanks, agrees to bring her to a surviving aunt and uncle.Zengel has received strong reviews for her performance, with critics praising her ability to imbue her defiant and alienated character with a sense of warmth and intelligence, and for channeling the emotional horrors of Johanna’s back story in near silence. Most of her lines are in Kiowa, a language she had to learn for the part.Zengel, left, and Tom Hanks in “News of the World.”Credit…Bruce Talamon/Universal PicturesSpeaking via Zoom recently, Ms. Zengel was far gigglier and chattier — which is to say, far more like a regular 12-year-old — than her recent roles might suggest. She said that, like most children in Germany, she had spent most of this year at home, and that she was currently quarantined because classmates had tested positive for the coronavirus.Before being cast in the film, she said, she had never heard of Hanks. “I think I’d seen the ‘Da Vinci Code’ before, but I didn’t know who he was,” she said. “I thought it was just some actor.”In an email, Hanks praised Zengel’s skill of performing “with no buildup, no apprehension and no self-consciousness,” and said he wished he had “her same ease, her simplicity.”Zengel said she had never taken an acting class, “because I’m not sure if there was much for me to learn.”“I stand in front of the camera, I know what I want, and I do it,” she said, matter-of-factly.This focus and willpower, her mother, Anne Zengel, explained, has been her daughter’s hallmark ever since she was a toddler. Her earliest forays into acting, at age 4, had emerged largely out of parental frustration, she said, because her daughter had “three times as much intensity” as other children and would act out if she was denied something she wanted.“She had to function in society, so we had to figure out how to redirect her energy,” she said.“The thing about acting is that you just need to do it, and as long as you’re happy with it, then you’re doing it right,” Zengel said.Credit…Katrin Streicher for The New York TimesShe enrolled Helena in ice-skating classes, and encouraged her to try acting. After a few small roles in German TV crime shows, as a bank robber’s daughter or a girl who falls from a bridge, she eventually landed a lead role in a German art-house film, “Dark Blue Girl,” at age 7.“At some point, the thing happened that I hoped would happen,” her mother said. “She was actually valued for being so intense.”In 2017, Zengel caught the attention of Nora Fingscheidt, the German director of “System Crasher,” a harrowing drama centered on a girl named Benni who is abused as a baby and abandoned by her mother, and who later lashes out at her caregivers and the society around her. The movie included a number of upsetting scenes, including of violence between children. In an interview, Fingscheidt said she needed a child actor who could convey Benni’s often terrifying physicality, while shouldering the psychological burden of the part.She was struck by Zengel’s “cinematographic quality, with almost translucent white skin, white hair that make her look like an angel, but with an ambivalence that is fascinating,” she said. During the child actor’s audition, in which she was asked to improvise a scene in which she “freaks out” by screaming and throwing things, Fingscheidt said that she was drawn in by the way her “eyes sparkled when I told her she could behave as badly as she wanted.”To help Zengel distinguish herself from her traumatized character, Fingscheidt said, the two would mime a little scene once shooting was over, with the director holding her hand like a shower head and the child actor pretending to wash underneath it, to indicate her transition back to herself. Zengel also wrote a journal, to help her process her feelings, the director added.Zengel said the experience of making “System Crasher” helped her prepare for her role as Johanna, which she conceded was “not as extreme.”“News of the World” was released in movie theaters in the United States and Canada on Dec. 25; it will be available on Netflix in other countries from February.Credit…Bruce Talamon/Universal PicturesNow Zengel is confronting the strange reality of international fame while being stuck at home, finishing seventh grade. This fall, Variety magazine selected her as one of its “actors to watch” and she said she had received offers for other roles in recent months, but that she was waiting until the pandemic subsided before making any decisions.She said she was open to moving to the United States, though her mother said she was intent on her daughter having a normal childhood, and that she was comforted by Germany’s comparatively low-key celebrity culture.“The thing about acting is that you just need to do it, and as long as you’re happy with it, then you’re doing it right,” Zengel said. “Also, it’s very fun to run around and scream.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More