McCormack, Daryl (Actor)

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    In ‘The Lesson,’ With Richard E. Grant, It’s a Bad Writer Who Steals

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    Richard E. Grant and Daryl McCormack star as writers with similar source material in a feature tracing the limits of literary authorship.In “The Lesson,” an amusingly taut British thriller playing now in American movie theaters, two novels result from the same events at an opulent country estate.This chamber piece — a debut feature from both the director Alice Troughton, a regular of episodic television, and the comedian turned screenwriter Alex MacKeith — asks, both tacitly and explicitly: Can any creative endeavor be honestly attributed to a single source?One of the film’s writers, J.M. Sinclair (a ferocious Richard E. Grant) is a consummate literary star, who hasn’t published a novel since his firstborn son’s suicide. The unscrupulous Sinclair, however, is about to write the final chapter in a new novel, “Rose Tree,” while staying true to his favorite aphorism, “Great writers steal.”J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) is a celebrated, and ruthless writer, willing to betray anyone in his life for his own success.Anna Patarakina/Bleecker StreetThe other scribe, Liam Somers (the Irish actor Daryl McCormack), is a young upstart with writing ambitions of his own. Hired as a live-in tutor to Sinclair’s youngest child, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), to help him gain admission to Oxford University, Somers soon begins taking copious notes on the family, and becomes entangled with their secrets.The larger narrative we witness — of a monstrous father willing to betray anyone in his life for a self-aggrandizing pursuit, and a stranger entering this isolated family unit to solve the central mystery around the elder son’s death — will eventually become Liam’s first book.“I’d never been offered a part quite like that before,” Grant said recently by phone. “Playing anybody who has that amount of entitlement and monstrous ego, you long for them to fall apart.”Given Sinclair’s twisted sense of ownership over his children, Troughton, the director, described the character as a toxic parent certain that “there’s nothing that your children can do that doesn’t belong to you, or come from you.” Francisco Goya’s graphic painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” served as the director’s key reference for understanding Sinclair’s behavior, she said in a video interview.Yet the most influential scribe may be one who never puts pen to paper, nor fingers to keyboard, but orchestrates the events that help both the movie’s literary works come to fruition: Hélène Sinclair, a curator and wife to the overbearing patriarch, played by the French actress Julie Delpy. Hélène’s objective in allowing Liam inside the home is to unveil her husband’s secrets.“She essentially functions as the detective with Liam operating as a vector for her,” MacKeith said. “When you underlay that with her motive of discovery, but also vengeance, her agency in the film and her orchestration does make her the author.”For Delpy, who described her character as a “mother fatale,” answering the question of who deserves credit when a writer creates a story from actual events is less clear-cut.Hélène Sinclair (Julie Delpy) uses Liam unveil her husband’s secrets.Gordon Timpen/Bleecker Street“When you tell stories about people around you, are you using them, or are they partly authors, since you’re telling their story?” she asked in a recent phone interview. “Is the story solely the writer’s writing, even if based on someone else? What’s the limit between inspiration and coauthorship?”Delpy, a writer-director herself, said she believed that the need for attribution depends on what’s being borrowed. She admitted to having stolen single lines, or small situations from strangers’ conversations she overhead in restaurants, which she then has transformed into stories.The kind of intellectual theft Sinclair is happy to engage in, on the other hand, is far more insidious. Even his repeated aphorism is purloined from T.S. Eliot.Inspiration for Sinclair’s ruthless appropriation of others’ writing, MacKeith said, came from the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which a writer plagiarizes Miguel de Cervantes’ masterwork word for word, and then claims it as his own.The taut thriller asks, both tacitly and explicitly, can any creative endeavor be honestly attributed to a single source?Anna Patarakina/Bleecker StreetOver the course of the film, it becomes hard to decipher precisely who is responsible for each story within the story. Liam’s novel is only possible as a side effect of Hélène’s machinations, and, early on, Sinclair decides to enlist Liam in his writing process for “Rose Tree.”As for whose work “The Lesson” itself is, MacKeith said that after their close five-year collaboration to bring the film to screen, he and Troughton were joint authors. The seasoned director brought touches of horror, as well as the idea of redemption, to the piece, MacKeith said, which were in turn elevated by the ensemble cast and crew in every tense scene.“As an actor, you have to create something beyond the script itself,” McCormack said. “I always hope that when I’m working alongside other people, that I can have a sense of being a co-author to the story in what I can do.”For MacKeith, this idea of collective ownership of the movie extended to the viewers, who must draw their own conclusions from “The Lesson,” especially after an unsettling plot twist.“The product itself is picture-locked,” he said, “but our discussion about it means that we as the audience can also have authorship of it in our interpretation.” More

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      ‘The Lesson’ Review: Carefully Taut

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      A tense standoff between two writers kindles familial fireworks in this wittily self-aware melodrama.No one is quite what they seem in “The Lesson,” Alice Troughton’s winking literary mystery whose languid summer setting — a swanky estate in the English countryside — hides coldly destructive secrets.The seemingly innocent arrival of Liam (Daryl McCormack), a hunky recent graduate hired as a live-in tutor to the son of the celebrated author J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant), almost immediately causes ripples in the family’s strained dynamic.Sinclair, a pompous control freak, is struggling to finish a novel so long delayed that his fans fear he has retired. His son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), is smart and snotty, jaggedly rebuffing Liam’s patient attempts to coach him to take the entrance exams for Oxford University. (Honestly, he should fit right in.) Then there’s Sinclair’s wife, Hélène (Julie Delpy), an art curator so coolly, seductively enigmatic that at least one of Liam’s assignments is immediately predictable.Unfolding with a tonic intelligence and a slow accretion of menace, Alex MacKeith’s screenplay is smoothly in sync with the specific skills of each performer. Grant is magnificent as a cruel, past-his-prime genius burdened by terrible guilt over an earlier family tragedy, and Delpy — well, can any actor express so much with a single, withering look? Or persuade us that experiencing cunnilingus is no more exciting than having a pedicure?Yet in an atmosphere as chilly as the lake that lurks on the property, it is Liam — played by McCormack with open-faced guile — who intrigues. Drinking heavily and scribbling in a notebook when everyone’s asleep, spying on the family while concealing his long obsession with Sinclair, Liam gains a trust he doesn’t deserve. In this den of deceit and desperation, it’s never quite clear who is manipulating whom.The LessonRated R for Delpy en déshabillé and Grant on his knees. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Why Oscar Attendees Were Wearing Blue Ribbons

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      The Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro and the nominated actress Cate Blanchett were among several participants at the Academy Awards on Sunday who donned blue ribbons in support of refugees who fled their homes to escape war, conflict and persecution.As part of the #WithRefugees initiative, the United Nations Refugee Agency invited del Toro, Blanchett, best actor nominee Bill Nighy, “All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger and “Triangle of Sadness” star Dolly de Leon to wear the ribbons.Blanchett, one of the agency’s Goodwill ambassador, said that when she met with refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Bangladesh and Britain, she was struck by the similarities she shared with them rather than their differences.“What I love about film is the way it draws us into compelling human themes to uncover the connective tissue that binds us all,” Blanchett said in a statement.The pins were also present at the BAFTAs, where Colin Farrell, Daryl McCormack and Paul Mescal, among others, sported the ribbons. More

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      ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Leads BAFTA Nominees

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      The German-language movie received 14 nods and will compete for best film against the likes of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”“All Quiet on the Western Front,” a German-language movie set on the battlefields of World War I, emerged on Thursday as the surprise front-runner for this year’s British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.“All Quiet,” a Netflix-backed movie about the futility of war, secured 14 nominations for the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs. Those included best film, where it is up against four higher-profile titles including “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a sci-fi adventure starring Michelle Yeoh as a laundromat owner who traverses universes; and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy about two friends who fall out while living on a small island, both of which received a total of 10 nominations.Also competing for the main BAFTA prize is Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” biopic and “Tár,” Todd Field’s drama starring Cate Blanchett as a conductor accused of sexual harassment.On its release in Britain, critics gave the Edward Berger-directed “All Quiet” rave reviews. Kevin Maher, writing in The Times of London, said that the movie was “more visceral, more spectacular and certainly more harrowing” than any previous adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same title. “See it on the biggest screen possible. Then watch it again on Netflix,” Mr. Maher added.American critics were less effusive. Ben Kenigsberg, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, said that it “aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.”Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’The director’s latest movie, starring Michelle Williams, focuses on Sammy Fabelman, a budding filmmaker who is a lot like Spielberg himself.Review: “The Fabelmans” is “wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges,” our critic writes.Michelle Williams: With her portrayal of Mitzi, Sammy’s mother, the actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances.Judd Hirsch: The actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in the film. It’s the latest chapter in a career full of anecdotes.Making ‘The Fabelmans’: In working on this semi-autobiographical movie, Spielberg confronted painful family secrets and what it means to be Jewish in America today.The 14 nods for “All Quiet” is the highest number of BAFTA nominations for a movie not in the English language, tied with Ang Lee’s 2000 action film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” according to BAFTA officials.Michelle Yeoh, left, and Jing Li in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.Allyson Riggs/A24Most of the nominations for “All Quiet” are in technical categories. But Berger also secured a best director nomination. He will compete for that award against the directors of “Banshees of Inisherin” (McDonagh), “Tár”(Field) and “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Park Chan-wook, the director of “Decision to Leave,” about a policeman who falls in love with a suspect, also secured a best director nod, as did Gina Prince-Bythewood for “The Woman King,” about the women soldiers of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. Prince-Bythewood is the only female director among the nominees.There was one upset among the best director nominees: Steven Spielberg didn’t get a nod for “The Fabelmans,” his semi-autobiographical tale of a budding filmmaker coping with a fractious home life, which won him best director at last week’s Golden Globes.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, have long been seen as a bellwether for the Oscars because there is overlap between their voting bodies. Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are scheduled to be unveiled on Tuesday and “All Quiet on the Western Front” has been tipped as a potential nominee in the best picture category.In recent years, the BAFTA organizers has made efforts to widen the diversity of nominees, including requiring voters to watch a variety of movies before they can make their selections.Last year, that led to several unexpected nominees in the best acting categories, many from low-budget British movies. But there are fewer upsets this year. The best actress nominees include Blanchett for “Tár,” Viola Davis for “The Woman King,” Yeoh for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and Emma Thompson for her role in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” in which she plays a widow who hires a prostitute.They will compete for that prize against Danielle Deadwyler for her role as Emmett Till’s mother in “Till” and Ana de Armas for “Blonde,” in which she plays Marilyn Monroe.The best actor category sees Austin Butler, the Golden Globe-winning star of “Elvis,” up against Colin Farrell, for his role in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” and Brendan Fraser, for his transformation into an obese, grief-stricken writing instructor in “The Whale.” Also nominated are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal, for his role as a young father taking his daughter on holiday in “Aftersun,” Daryl McCormack, for playing the prostitute in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” and Bill Nighy, for “Living,” about a bureaucrat given a life-changing medical diagnosis.Whether the nominations for “All Quiet” translate into trophies will be revealed on Feb. 19, when the BAFTA winners are scheduled to be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London. 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      Daryl McCormack Has More Than Luck on His Side

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      The Irish actor’s performance as a sympathetic sex worker in “Good Luck, Leo Grande” this summer “has definitely opened up doors for me,” he said. Next up is the Apple TV+ series “Bad Sisters.”Early last year, Daryl McCormack’s East London neighbors seemed determined to do some matchmaking: “Oh, you should meet Sharon,” they said. “My friend is writing a show; I’ll make sure to say that I know you.”“People do that all the time,” the Irish actor explained in a recent video interview from Melbourne, Australia, his arresting green eyes making it hard not to stare. “They’re like, ‘Let me tell my friend,’ and nothing comes of it.”Sharon — as in the writer and actor Horgan, who has lacerated motherhood and marriage in “Catastrophe” and “Divorce” — had been getting an earful, too.“He lived above my friend’s jewelry shop just around the corner from where I live, and most of the female-owned stores along the street were pretty excited about him,” she said, laughing. “I told them I was making this Irish thing and I was looking for a youngish leading man. And they were like, ‘Well, what about Daryl?’”That Irish thing was “Bad Sisters,” a darkly comic thriller debuting Friday on Apple TV+, about the five inseparable Garvey women, one of whom is married to a man so misogynistic and nefarious that the other four would do almost anything to boot him from their lives.The youngish leading man was needed to play a handsome, heartbroken insurance agent who gets dragged into a convoluted policy investigation when the Garveys’ loathsome brother-in-law turns up dead.Lo and behold, McCormack’s name was already on the casting director’s list of contenders.“I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s the guy that all the women in Hackney fancy,’” Horgan said.McCormack stars as a heartbroken insurance agent in “Bad Sisters.” (With Eve Hewson.)Liam Daniel/Apple TV+McCormack, who eventually got the job, of course, has been the object of a great deal of fancying since the June release of the British dramedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which stars Emma Thompson as Nancy, a widow in her 60s, and McCormack as Leo, a sex worker she hires to guide her through an erotic awakening.Critics praised the film for its sexual positivity, authenticity and zing, as well as Thompson’s daring performance. But just as remarkable was the relatively inexperienced McCormack’s ability to match the virtuosic Thompson quip for quip. “McCormack moves between wit, compassion and vulnerability with grace,” The New York Times wrote in its review of the film.Given the abundant physical and emotional nakedness Thompson’s role required, she held considerable sway in the casting of her co-star. She had seen McCormack’s audition tape, but before making a final decision, she asked him to take a walk with her.“Knowing where these two characters go and how vulnerable the film can get, I think it was important for her to really feel a sense of safety with me and a sense of trust,” McCormack said.As they strolled, Thompson found him instantly calming, she wrote in an email — “gentle and curious and apparently unsaddled with too much in the way of personal ambition. Somehow he was going to be able to relax Nancy, who is in a state of tension comparable to a first-time bungee jumper.“He was the right person to step off the bridge with,” she continued, “and fly down hoping the cord won’t break but knowing if it does, it was all worth the effort.”When Thompson texted “I’ll see you on set” the next morning, McCormack, stunned to learn he’d been cast, checked to make sure that she hadn’t notified him by mistake.“It was quite life-changing, that moment,” he said. “My world just did a somersault.”After taking a walk with McCormack, Emma Thompson concluded that “he was the right person to step off the bridge with” in “Good Luck, Leo Grande.”Searchlight PicturesCalling from Australia, where he and Thompson were promoting the movie, McCormack, 29 and laid back in a gray hoodie, looked more like the ace athlete he was as a schoolboy (in the Irish sport of hurling) than the seductive, silky-voiced fantasy man he conjured in “Leo Grande.” He knows the sex comedy, considered an Oscar contender, has changed his career.“The film has definitely opened up doors for me in a big way,” he said, “like just even speaking to people that I’ve admired for a long time, work finding me a lot quicker, having a bit more of a selection to do work that I really want to do.”He was still in the midst of shooting the movie when Horgan reached out about “Bad Sisters.”McCormack may have been consumed by Leo at the time, but Horgan could see Matthew Claffin, the insurance agent, in his magnetism, his nimble acting chops and, when needed, his goofiness. And in the audition process, his chemistry with Brian Gleeson, who plays his half-brother, as well as Eve Hewson, who plays the youngest Garvey and a potential romantic interest, was undeniable.In fact, McCormack initially found it nearly impossible to keep it together through scenes with Gleeson because of the desperation Gleeson brought to his version of a bad cop.“Daryl is a giggler all right, but obviously a consummate professional,” Gleeson said. “I tend to over-worry things, and that has the weird effect of trying to do too much acting, basically. At one point, Daryl just kind of burst out laughing. But it had a great effect of relaxing everybody.“He’s got a lovely gentle sort of disposition,” he added, “but there’s a lot of steel in him.”McCormack grew up in Nenagh, in County Tipperary, the son of a white Irish mother and a Black American father he rarely saw. But his paternal grandfather, Percy Thomas, who runs a theater company in Maryland, helped fill that void.“The second he heard of himself having a grandson, he instantly made his way over to Ireland and connected with my family,” McCormack said. “Our relationship is so special. I think because we both had such an interest and connection to the performing arts, he just loved me because I was someone he could speak to about acting all the time and I’d never get bored, never get sick of it.”When McCormack was 17, Thomas took him to see “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, England.“That was actually quite fundamental to me in terms of wanting to pursue acting,” McCormack said. “It just blew my mind, completely moved me. I really saw the power of storytelling in that night.”Thomas has been a sounding board for McCormack throughout his studies at the Conservatory of Music and Drama at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and later at the Gaiety School of Acting, and his work: a post-drama school soap opera part, two seasons as a gangster in “Peaky Blinders” and his breakout as a leading man in “Leo Grande.”McCormack said that, throughout his career, he had given up parts that were easy in favor of ones that left him feeling daunted.“I want to pick roles that scare me a little,” he said. “It’s probably my main antenna in terms of trying to find the next job.”“I don’t want this ever to become a job,” McCormack said. “I want this always to be an experience.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesHe was drawn to “Bad Sisters” by Horgan’s sharp-fanged writing and the chance to work with many actors he admires, most of them Irish, including Eva Birthistle and Sarah Greene along with Gleeson, Hewson and Horgan.Other films and series are on the horizon. He recently wrapped Alice Troughton’s psychological thriller “The Tutor,” alongside Richard E. Grant and Julie Delpy, playing an ambitious writer hired to tutor the son of a famous author with whom he is obsessed.“Daryl is an incredibly gifted young actor,” Grant wrote in an email. “Seemingly without any neurosis and as collaborative as one could wish for.”And it was announced on Wednesday that McCormack would star opposite Ruth Wilson in “The Woman in the Wall,” a BBC and Showtime thriller inspired by Ireland’s infamously abusive Magdalene Laundries, where “fallen women,” orphans and abandoned children were forced to perform unpaid labor by Roman Catholic nuns.It will be yet another performance opposite a formidable female lead, a situation McCormack has repeatedly sought out in his still-burgeoning career. For instance, in late 2019, when McCormack learned that Ruth Negga would be doing “Portia Coughlan” at the Young Vic in London, he made it his mission to play the role of her lover.“She was such an inspiration,” he said. “As a biracial Irish actor, there’s not many people you can look up to that have the same experience as you.”He hounded his team to get him an audition, and after being told that the production team was looking for someone older, he hounded them some more. Finally, he was asked to read for the part.“I’m about to go in, and it was around late February, March 2020, and we all know what happened then,” he said, referring to having his dreams dashed by Covid.Working with Negga remains on his bucket list. He also hopes to one day write a movie or a series inspired by his mother and her efforts to protect him against the struggles that sometimes came with being biracial and, in the eyes of others, different.“I keep chasing that feeling of not feeling comfortable,” McCormack said before pulling on a baseball cap and heading out into a world that is increasingly aware of him. “If I continue to take roles where I feel like my back is up against the wall, that makes me excited — because I don’t want this ever to become a job. I want this always to be an experience.” More