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    In ‘Deli Boys,’ Two Actors Find Dream Roles Playing No One’s Hero

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    It had happened to Saagar Shaikh many times: He would audition for a part, get a callback, then never hear from anyone again. Later, when he would watch the show, movie or commercial he had auditioned for, the same guy always seemed to fill the role he had wanted.So perhaps it shouldn’t have surprised Shaikh when he got the bad news about “Deli Boys,” a new Hulu series about two pampered Pakistani American brothers who become entangled in a convenience-store crime ring. Shaikh had auditioned to play Mir, the buttoned-up business-school grad, and had even tested for the character.But now his manager was calling to tell him that the role had been offered to someone else.Was it Asif Ali, Shaikh asked? The manager sighed.“And here we are today,” Shaikh said last month, sitting within arm’s reach of Ali at a photo studio in Burbank, Calif. It was just a few weeks before the premiere of “Deli Boys” — which now stars them both. Ali had indeed gotten the role of Mir. But Shaikh wound up landing the other lead: the lazy, entitled, hard-partying brother, Raj.Shaikh and Ali play Raj and Mir, two sons of a convenience store mogul who discover that their father was also running a criminal operation. James Washington/Disney“Now I completely understand why he gets all the jobs,” Shaikh said of Ali, “because I worked with him for a whole season.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Deli Boys,’ Plus 9 Things to Watch on TV this Week

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      A new Hulu comedy premieres, “The Righteous Gemstones” are back and “The Traitors” wraps up its third season.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, March 3-9. Details and times are subject to change.Things aren’t going as expected.On the Hulu thriller “Paradise,” things took an unexpected turn right from the beginning — and have only gotten more twisty from there. The show follows Xavier Collins, a secret service agent played by Sterling K. Brown who is in charge of protecting President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). Slight spoilers ahead: The end of the first episode showed that Xavier, Cal and a few lucky civilians have been living in an underground city after the world ended — and that the president is actually dead. In a series of flashbacks, the rest of the episodes have revealed how things got to where they are, and this week’s finale will reveal who killed the president. Streaming Tuesday on Hulu.Netflix’s lush historical drama “The Leopard” follows the Salina family, Sicilian aristocrats who are bracing for the Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Redshirt guerrillas to conquer the island in the 19th century. The 1958 book, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, became one of the highest selling novels in Italy. If not for a look at the history, tune in for the stunning location and enviable outfits. Streaming on Wednesday on Netflix.What happens when you have been raised in the cushy world of wealth but your father’s death has left nothing but his convenience store empire, which is actually a crime front? “Deli Boys,” a new comedy, answers that question. Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh star as brothers who are trying to maintain a deli counter while also dealing with a Peruvian cartel and the Italian mafia. Streaming Thursday on Hulu.An inside look at sports.It’s no secret that Boston takes their sports seriously. The new documentary series “Celtics City” transports viewers back to the founding of the Boston Celtics N.B.A. team in 1946 and forward to their championship win in 2024. The show features archival footage and interviews with past and present players, including Bob Cousy, Larry Bird, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Monday at 9 p.m. on HBO and streaming on Max.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Watch the Oscars 2025: Date, Time and Streaming

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      Conan O’Brien will host the annual awards, which will be available to watch live on a streaming service for the first time.It seems like a lifetime ago that Sean Baker’s screwball comedy “Anora” first emerged as the favorite in the best picture race (no one was yet even thinking about holding space for “Wicked”).But we’re now right back where we started in the fall with both math and our Projectionist columnist, Kyle Buchanan, predicting that “Anora” will emerge triumphant. It’s by no means a sure thing — last weekend’s big Screen Actors Guild Awards winner, the papal thriller “Conclave,” could play spoiler.In the acting races, Demi Moore appears to be the one to beat after notching another win at the SAGs (though Buchanan says not to count out Fernanda Torres, who delivers a tour de force performance in the quiet Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here”).But could Adrien Brody, who plays a Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust in “The Brutalist,” be in for an upset from the 29-year-old Timothée Chalamet, who has embarked on a decidedly unconventional — and very online — Oscar campaign for his lead role in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown”?Here’s everything you need to know.What time does the show start and where can I watch?This year’s show is again one for the early birds: The ceremony is set to begin at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles.On TV, ABC is the official broadcaster. Online, you can watch the show live on the ABC app, which is free to download, or at abc.com, though you’ll need to sign in using the credentials from your cable provider. There are also a number of live TV streaming services that offer access to ABC, including Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, AT&T TV and FuboTV, which all require subscriptions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘Interior Chinatown,’ the Sets Have Main Character Energy

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      The Hulu series unfolds in a Chinatown that “is both physical and psychological,” said Charles Yu, the creator. Here’s a look at how four key settings bring the story to life.Charles Yu’s novel “Interior Chinatown” is about stories. Stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell about others. Stories where only certain people get to be the main characters while others, like the protagonist Willis Wu, are relegated to playing bit parts.Yu structured the novel in the format of a screenplay. The title follows the scriptwriting convention of scene headings, which specify where the action is taking place (for example, INT. UNMARKED POLICE CAR). Scene headings are peppered throughout the book, and in Hulu’s series adaptation, which premiered on Tuesday, the settings are just as essential, and more tangible, to the overall concept.“Willis has this world that he lives in, this Chinatown which is both physical and psychological,” said Yu, the show’s creator and showrunner, in a video interview. “When you write a book, you get to use the reader as your ultimate collaborator. You’re leveraging off someone else’s imagination.”“You can’t really film that, unfortunately,” he added.So in constructing the sets of the show, he said, “it was like, how do you build a place that feels real and lived in — and at the same time can feel subjective and evocative of the Chinatown that comes from the novel, which is an interior Chinatown that functions as a place where people work and live but also as a mental space?”Here’s a look at four of the key settings in “Interior Chinatown” and how they bring the story to three-dimensional life.Int. Golden Palace RestaurantWillis Wu, the protagonist, spends much of his time waiting tables in the dining room of the Golden Palace Restaurant.Mine Taing/HuluWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Say Nothing’ Asks: What Would You Do?

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      The FX series strives to capture the complexity of its subject: the long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.The actor Anthony Boyle (“Manhunt,” “Masters of the Air”) grew up in West Belfast. On the way to school he would walk past murals of hunger strikers, of murdered children. He was a child, he said, during “the hangover” of the Troubles, the sectarian conflict between Protestant unionists, who were British loyalists, and Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland that lasted into the late 1990s.“The history is so recent,” he said. “You feel the pressure of it always.”So when the director Mike Lennox (“Derry Girls”) reached out to him about starring in the FX limited series “Say Nothing,” Boyle was hesitant. The nine-episode series is adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” which is set primarily in Belfast during and after the Troubles. Radden Keefe is American, as is Joshua Zetumer, the showrunner. FX, which produced the series, is a division of Disney Entertainment.All of this gave Boyle pause. In a recent interview, he described his thinking at the time: “When brothers have killed each other over which splinter group of the paramilitary they belong to, a show on Disney isn’t going to get this right.”But reading the scripts convinced Boyle to play Brendan Hughes, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In “Say Nothing,” which premieres Thursday on Hulu, he stars alongside Lola Petticrew, as Dolours Price; Hazel Doupe, as Marian Price; and Josh Finan, as Gerry Adams.The actors play young versions of these real-life figures, who engage in or sanction acts of violence in pursuit of a political goal. (Adams has consistently denied his involvement with the I.R.A., though Hughes, who died in 2008, and Dolours Price, who died in 2013, both disputed this.) The series captures both the youthful excitement that fighting for a cause can kindle and the devastating reverberations that come after.“It felt like a lot of the questions that were raised were questions that I, as a young adult, have about how we heal and move on from a traumatic recent past,” said Petticrew, who is also from West Belfast.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      New Horror TV Shows to Stream This Halloween: ‘Teacup,’ ‘Uzumaki’ and More

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      This year’s horror series take us to damned villages, cursed towns and countries fallen into anarchy.This selection of shows from October’s annual parade of horror series will take you on a tour of places where the world appears to be out of control: a South Korea going through a religious frenzy, a Georgia farm under attack, a bucolic English village visited by aliens, a Japanese seaside town haunted by spirals. Just keep telling yourself it’s fiction.‘Hellbound’Based on an online cartoon, this Korean series on Netflix has a comic-book hook, repeated a time or two per episode: A trio of towering, golem-like figures materialize, heralded by cracks of thunder, and roast a human who has been identified as a sinner. This usually involves a lot of smashing and tossing about of people and vehicles. These scenes are kinetically satisfying — it is a Korean production, after all — and there’s something counter-intuitively adorable about the silent, hulking reapers. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho of the “Train to Busan” zombie films, “Hellbound,” whose second season premiered last week, is a solidly constructed supernatural thriller, with well-choreographed action that often features a tight-lipped lawyer (Kim Hyun-joo) who gets more use out of her police baton than her legal training.The bam-pow does not dominate the show, however. The screenwriter Choi Gyu-seok, adapting Yeon’s 2002 webtoon, focuses less on explaining the supernatural happenings than on portraying a society’s reactions to a terrifying rip in reality. Those responses are bad and badder, running from coercive religious fanaticism to cathartic, mordant anarchy — parallels to current trends around the world are almost certainly intentional — while a few contrarians fight for rationality and free will.The drama of ideas is talky and pitched between comic book and Philosophy 101, but there is enough inventiveness and feeling in the storytelling to keep you attuned to the show’s evocation of a world quickly going mad.‘The Midwich Cuckoos: Village of the Damned’When this mini-series premiered in Britain two years ago, it had the same title as the John Wyndham novel on which it is loosely based, “The Midwich Cuckoos.” For its American release, Acorn TV and Sundance Now (both will have the third of seven episodes on Thursday) tacked on the name of the cult-favorite 1960 film adaptation, “Village of the Damned.” The series is a solid, watchable piece of work, though it might have been better if they hadn’t reminded us of the chilling, compact, highly satisfying movie.The story, if you are unfamiliar, begins with everyone in a British village blacking out; shortly after, every woman of childbearing age finds herself pregnant. The resulting children, as you might guess, are a scary bunch, with powers of mind control that represent an extinction-level threat. “The Midwich Cuckoos” handles the science-fiction aspects capably, and like the film, it has its share of quietly creepy moments. Filling out the expanded running time with a lot of agonizing about motherhood and parenting, though, feels a little precious when the story is about aliens getting Earth women pregnant. Focus!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Fantastical’ Is a Catfishing Horror Story About Toxic Fandom

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      “Fanatical,” an eye-popping film directed by Erin Lee Carr, details the bizarre 16-year ordeal that the duo and their fans endured.The turn-of-the-century internet was organized not around content selected for us by algorithms, but around shared interests that we sought out. Whether you loved a band or were devoutly religious or had questions about your sexuality, someone had made an AOL chatroom or a message board or a LiveJournal community where you could meet people like you. It was often invigorating and life-affirming, especially if you felt lonely in the real world. It seems like the exact opposite of today’s personality- and ad-driven internet.The new, eye-popping documentary “Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara” (Hulu), directed by Erin Lee Carr, is about that era and what became of it. But the lens through which it tells the story involves a truly bizarre series of events related to Tegan Quin, who with her twin sister, Sara Quin, formed an eponymous indie pop band that became huge right as the social internet was taking off. At the start of the film, Tegan says she’s never talked publicly about the situation before, which began 16 years ago. In fact, she admits to Carr, she already kind of regrets talking about it now.The duo started to become famous after their 2004 album, “So Jealous,” when the sisters realized their growing audiences skewed young, mostly female and mostly queer. Their concerts were safe spaces, and their fans often found one another through sites devoted to the band. Both women, but Tegan in particular, were active on the internet, and made a point of connecting with fans both online and at shows. They fostered a community.But “Fanatical” is not a profile of the band or its fans. It’s a horror story.In 2008, a fan named Julie contacted a Facebook profile that appeared to be Tegan’s. A yearslong messaging relationship ensued, one that turned close and even intimate. But then, in 2011, Tegan did something that felt off to Julie. So she contacted the band’s manager.From there emerged the kind of mystery that’s actually a nightmare, a story Carr tells through interviews with fans, the band’s former management, a few experts and both sisters. The user Julie had been talking to for years wasn’t Tegan at all — it was someone impersonating Tegan, a user they all started calling “Fake Tegan,” or “Fegan.” For Julie, this relationship had been deeply meaningful, especially since Tegan and Sara’s music was a way to process her fear when, as a college student, she began to question her own sexual orientation. When “Fegan” turned aggressive, even verbally abusive, she was wounded — and realizing that years of her life had been spent unburdening her secrets and her soul to someone who wasn’t Tegan was horrifying. As the band and their management discovered, these intimate messaging relationships went far, far beyond Julie — and so did the fallout.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      In ‘La Máquina,’ Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna Get a Rematch

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      Sitting cross-legged on the floor at the Château Marmont in Los Angeles, Gael García Bernal stared with admiration at his lifelong friend and fellow actor Diego Luna. Just the night before, they had walked onstage at the Peacock Theater and, as expected, presented the Emmy for best director of a limited or anthology series or TV movie.Less expected, in a move they said wasn’t preapproved, they had given the award in Spanish.“We were just told that the Emmys are losing a big chunk of its audience,” García Bernal told the crowd and the nearly 7 million live TV viewers. “So me and Diego decided to do something to push the limits, to erase the boundaries.”Luna saluted the United States’ more than 50 million Spanish speakers. Then the award went to Steven Zaillian of “Ripley” — for “mejor dirección” in a limited series.Whatever its provocative qualities — in our interview, García Bernal cited Donald Trump’s divisive immigration rhetoric as motivation — the speech was also a canny bit of promotion. As much of the ensuing coverage noted, the two actors have their own limited series coming on Oct. 9, “La Máquina,” Hulu’s first original Spanish-language production.In “La Máquina,” Luna, left, plays the spray-tanned, plastic-surgery obsessed manager of a boxer played by García Bernal (with Eiza González as the boxer’s ex-wife).Cristian Salvatierra/HuluFriends since they were children in Mexico City, García Bernal, 45, and Luna, 44, are indelibly linked, not least because of their breakout roles in Alfonso Cuarón’s breakout film, “Y Tu Mamá También” (2002), in which they played best pals from different social classes on a life-changing road trip.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      In ‘Only Murders in the Building,’ Michael Cyril Creighton Is Above Suspicion

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      For years, Michael Cyril Creighton hoped one of his small TV parts would evolve into something more. With “Only Murders,” it finally happened.On a rainy morning in early August, the actor Michael Cyril Creighton sat in a dog friendly cafe on the outskirts of Astoria, Queens. With him was Sharon, his seven-year-old rescue, who is part Chihuahua, part Jack Russell terrier, with a soupçon of haunted doll. Another dog scampered over to their table. Sharon growled low in her throat and bared her teeth.“She has a troubled past,” Creighton said, soothing her. “But she’s great.”Creighton — bespectacled, bearded, with a cuddlesome physique — is more reliably sociable. During a two-hour conversation that began with savory scones and included a damp walk at a nearby sculpture park, he growled not once, not even when interrupted, frequently, by fans of his work on “Only Murders in the Building.”In “Only Murders,” the Hulu series about occasional homicides in a luxury co-op on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Creighton, 45, plays Howard, a librarian and hobbyist yodeler with an impressive sweater game. A gossip and a noodge, keen to be accepted by the building’s amateur detectives, a trio played by Selena Gomez, Steve Martin and Martin Short, Howard is also capable of surprising vulnerability. So is Creighton, who combines a mordant wit and a clown’s broad instincts with deep feeling.A recurring actor in the show’s first two seasons, Creighton was made a series regular in its third. In Season 4, which premiered on Tuesday, his co-stars include a pig who urinated on his feet between takes.“Look, it’s ridiculous what we’ve got going on in his world,” John Hoffman, the “Only Murders” showrunner said in an interview. “I feel like I can throw him anything and he’ll sort it out. I can’t believe I got so lucky to find him.”In Season 4, Creighton’s character, Howard, owner of many (many) cats, adopts a retired working dog and starts his own podcast, called “Animals and Their Jobs.”Patrick Harbron/DisneyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More