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    How Christian Slater Went From Bad Boy to Good Dad

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    On a July morning, the actor Christian Slater sat on a bench at the Long Beach marina, grimacing in the California sunshine. Slater sighed, he scowled, he groaned. He looked like a man facing some terrible moral quandary. Or like a man with severe indigestion.Slater, 55, was filming a scene for “Dexter: Original Sin,” the latest brand extension of the florid Showtime serial killer series, which premiered in 2006. (“Dexter: New Blood” debuted in 2021; “Dexter: Resurrection” will air next year.) Premiering Friday on Paramount+, “Original Sin,” set mostly in the early 1990s, describes the early career of Dexter Morgan, a forensic analyst in Miami who offs serial killers that the police can’t corral.It features the same central characters as the original show, though they are now played by different, younger actors, Slater among them.That Slater should join the “Dexter” universe is no surprise. His résumé includes several killers, some accidental and some absolutely psycho. In the late 1980s and 1990s, he specialized in dark matter, playing anarchic, irresistible characters in movies like “Heathers” (directed by Michael Lehmann, a producing director of “Original Sin”), “True Romance” and “Pump of the Volume.”Slater with Patrick Gibson in “Dexter: Original Sin.” “He was definitely more gregarious and friendly and kind than I was expecting,” Gibson, who plays young Dexter, said of Slater. Patrick Wymore/Paramount+ with ShowtimeBack then, Slater didn’t know how to separate himself from his characters. “I didn’t have an identity enough of my own to really be able to separate or differentiate between the two,” he said. “I was latching onto any sort of personality that I could find.” So that darkness impinged on his personal life, too. There were arrests on charges of assault, drunken driving, attempting to board a flight with a gun in his luggage. Interview magazine once called him “the last analog bad boy.”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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      ‘The Agency’ and ‘Black Doves’: Spy Dramas in Touch With Their Feelings

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      ‘The Agency’ and ‘Black Doves’ are part of a new crop of espionage series whose biggest battles take place within the hearts and minds of their agents.Ukraine and Russia are at war. Political instability and civil war rage in Sudan. Iran is ramping up its nuclear capabilities. The world is basically a mess in “The Agency,” the new espionage series that inundates the viewer with rapidly intersecting story lines set on an increasingly complicated geopolitical playing field.The series, which premiered last week on Paramount+ (with the Showtime tier), is part of a surge in spy shows that also includes “The Day of the Jackal,” on Peacock; “Black Doves,” premiering Dec. 5 on Netflix; and “Slow Horses,” which wrapped up its fourth season on Apple TV+ this fall.True to the genre, these series jet all over the globe (though mostly Europe) and unfold in high-tech command centers and in dark urban alleyways, via thrilling shootouts and furtive meetups. Some operatives pursue sanctioned missions as others go rogue. Multiple cats chase multiple mice, and it’s not always clear who is which.The most pitched battles, however, happen within the hearts and minds of the individual players. Even as the new spy shows reflect a fraught, tangled and mercenary post-Cold War world, the existential threats and conflicts are more interior, intimate and, in many ways, timeless.“It’s the agency,” a Central Intelligence Agency honcho (Jeffrey Wright) tells a field agent (Michael Fassbender) in “The Agency.” “Nothing is personal.” Nothing, that is, except everything.Jeffrey Wright, right, with John Magaro, plays a C.I.A. boss in “The Agency,” based on the French series “The Bureau.”Luke Varley/Paramount+ with ShowtimeWe 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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      ‘The Agency’ Is a Slick and Pleasing Spy Drama

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      Based on the French show “The Bureau,” the new Showtime series stars Michael Fassbender as a spy who must readjust to life after living undercover.Pity the C.I.A. agents deploying their enhanced interrogation techniques, beating hostages and meddling; truly it is they who suffer. It’s hard work being a spy — but the hardest work of all is loving yourself.“The Agency,” beginning Friday on Paramount+ (and debuting on Showtime at 9 p.m. Sunday), is set mostly within the London office of the C.I.A., where one of the primo dudes (Michael Fassbender), code name “Martian,” has been abruptly yanked back from a mission in Ethiopia. He was undercover there for six years, living as Paul and falling in love with Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), a Sudanese historian and political activist. He wasn’t ready for the mission to end, and he is definitely not ready for their relationship to end — but c’mon, what are a few bent rules in the interest of hot-people diplomacy?“This isn’t national security; this is personal,” Martian insists to his boss (Jeffrey Wright). “It’s the agency,” the boss bellows back. “Nothing is personal!” Ooooh!The series is based on the terrific French show “The Bureau,” and in the four episodes (of 10) made available for review, it deploys a lot of spy-show standards: the rookie to whom everything must be explained, the ambitious but naïve flunkies, the secretly cooperative foreign attaches, the higher-ups who seem institutional and out of touch until they drop some monologue wisdom on our heroes.Fassbender’s mesmerizing performance is the biggest draw here, giving viewers a real taste of what it’s like to love a liar. We’re never quite sure what his angle is, how much of his seemingly vulnerable moments are all part of the game. He finds an intriguing sparring partner in the agency’s therapist (Harriet Sansom Harris), with whom he is required to meet on account of how hard it is to reintegrate into real life after living undercover for so long. Other story lines for secondary and tertiary characters feel comparatively unmoored.But on the whole, it’s all very slick and overtly, pleasingly fancy-schmancy. The show’s reflective-surfaces budget alone puts some national G.D.P.s to shame. The London of “The Agency” is a pallid grayscape where even the mall is dreary, where real life is the same color as CCTV footage. Every move here is surveilled, and the show revels in that constant unease. As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. More

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      Billy Bob Thornton Reflects on Life and ‘Landman’

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      You would think a performing arts hall in Connecticut named after Katharine Hepburn, in a quiet seaside town like Old Saybrook would be safe. You would think a crowd of mostly ex-hippie gray-hairs, who had paid to sit in plush red chairs, hear you sing and have you sign their “Bad News Bears” posters, would be free of hecklers.You would be wrong. And now Billy Bob Thornton, on tour with his rock band the Boxmasters, was going to have to invite a man who had just called him a “condescending jerk” — except he hadn’t shouted “jerk” — to come up and sit on the edge of the stage with him and work this out, man to man. He was going to have to explain, as he has surely gotten tired of explaining, that he isn’t who you think he is.“I can tell you people that I know personally, who will walk by every fan and not even look at them,” he said from the stage. “I stand by the bus and I sign every person’s picture. I talk to everybody. I take a picture with everyone.”It was, in the end, a perfectly pleasant conversation, but one might assume that at 69, a man of Thornton’s acclaim and accomplishments wouldn’t feel the need to plead his case at all. Again wrong. While he was reluctant to talk about the incident when we caught up by phone a few weeks later, he is otherwise open about his insecurities and his feelings of being misunderstood, just as he is open about his disappointments — particularly his disappointments with Hollywood.If Thornton has appeared to pull back from Hollywood a bit in recent years, that is by design. The once up-and-coming filmmaker who wrote, directed and starred in the Oscar-winning “Sling Blade” had already given up writing and directing movies years ago because of how studios treated him just after that 1996 film — something he is “still pissed off” about, he said. He still loves acting but is increasingly selective: His role in the new Taylor Sheridan series “Landman,” premiering Sunday on Paramount+, is one of only a handful of major roles he has taken since “Bad Santa 2,” from 2016.In the new Taylor Sheridan series “Landman,” Thornton plays a guy who is basically Thornton if he had a job putting out fires, figurative and literal, on a West Texas oil field.Emerson Miller/Paramount+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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      ‘We Will Dance Again’ Review: Remembering Oct. 7

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      In this documentary by Yariv Mozer, Israelis who attended the Nova music festival near the Gaza border describe how they survived the attack last year.“We Will Dance Again” reconstructs the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 from the perspectives of attendees of the Nova music festival. At least 360 people were killed at the event that was near the border with Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. Directed by Yariv Mozer, this documentary opens with an acknowledgment of the fraught subject matter. “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the text says. Citing death tolls from both sides of the conflict, it adds, “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”That caveat also hints at why assessing “We Will Dance Again” as a movie is so difficult. Impassioned viewers will undoubtedly have their own opinions, and it would be disingenuous to say that a film released in advance of the attack’s anniversary — and in the middle of an active war — could somehow be seen apart from the divisive politics surrounding the region.Through phone videos, interviews with festivalgoers and, eventually, footage attributed to Hamas fighters, “We Will Dance Again” assembles a timeline of how the attack was experienced at the festival, where people had gathered to attend a multiday rave. Some remember spotting rocket fire as the sun rose on the morning of Oct. 7. “Wow, Lali, there’s fireworks!” one interviewee, Liel Shitrit, known as Lali, quotes a friend as saying. “They really went all out this year!” Soon after, over images of streaks in the sky, we hear an off-camera voice speculate that “the drugs are kicking in.”But the interviewees explain how the reality of the situation became clear. As the film’s narrative unfolds, we hear from witnesses like Noa Beer, who recounts a harrowing escape by car and a call to the police, who she says didn’t yet understand the situation. Elinor Gambarian, a single mother, hid inside a refrigerator.Two of the interviewees, Eitan Halley and Ziv Abud, recall a grenade attack on a roadside shelter where they had taken refuge; both commend efforts by Aner Shapira, who was killed, to toss back grenades before they exploded. Halley says he saw Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas and whose body was later recovered, in the immediate aftermath of the blast.While the fluid editing of such disparate source material is impressive, some of Mozer’s aesthetic choices tend to cheapen the testimonies. (The rave-like electronic scoring as Shitrit describes looking for circling birds to see where gunfire was coming from seems particularly unnecessary.) But if the shock of that day’s violence has faded after a year, “We Will Dance Again” aims to keep it visible, and to memorialize it viscerally.We Will Dance AgainNot rated. In Hebrew, English and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      Kelsey Grammer Analyzes 40 Years of Frasier: ‘I Have Nothing to Regret’

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      Kelsey Grammer likes his raw meat cut very fine. On a recent afternoon, at the restaurant of a Midtown hotel, he requested that his steak tartare be put through the grinder twice. He wanted it, he said, like velvet. The tartare, topped with its quail egg, was presented roughly chopped. “I’ll deal with it,” Grammer said uncomplainingly.Frasier Crane would never. On and off for 40 years on several different sitcoms, Grammer, 69, has played Frasier, a dyed-in-the-cashmere-wool snob and psychiatrist about town. The character is indelibly associated with Grammer. He can’t shake him, though Grammer mostly sees this as a boon.“It’s wonderful to spend your lifetime entertaining people,” he said.In 1984, Grammer, a stage actor who had studied at Juilliard, was cast on the sitcom “Cheers” as Frasier Crane, a love interest for Shelley Long’s waitress character, Diane Chambers. He stayed with the show until it ended in 1993.That same year, Grammer starred in a spinoff, “Frasier,” which saw the character move from Boston back to Seattle, where he lived with his father (John Mahoney) and brother (David Hyde Pierce). Grammer was often a tabloid fixture in those days, with an erratic personal life. Much married, he would eventually father seven children with four different women. He was arrested for drug possession and for driving under the influence. He now believes his chaotic behavior was a response to the trauma of his early life — in separate incidents, both his father and his sister were murdered.The revived “Frasier,” which premiered last year on Paramount+, has included other past characters like Frasier’s ex-wife Lilith, played by Bebe Neuwirth.Chris Haston/Paramount+But he stuck with the show until the 2004 finale. After that, Grammer moved on to other projects, but none lasted very long. And then in 2023, a “Frasier” reboot returned Frasier to Boston, reuniting him with his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), and his best friend, Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst). The second season premiered Thursday on Paramount+.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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      ‘Mafia Spies’ Recounts the C.I.A. Plot to Kill Castro

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      The docuseries tells the bizarre but true story of the C.I.A.’s various schemes to use the mob to assassinate the leader of Cuba.The stories have swirled around for years, often in the form of feverish conspiracy theories. The major players should ring familiar by now: John F. Kennedy. Fidel Castro. The C.I.A. The mob. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK” raised the delirium to operatic heights; Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel “Libra” gave it a jolt of postmodern cool.But “Mafia Spies,” the new docuseries now streaming on Paramount+, takes a different tack. Based on Thomas Maier’s nonfiction book of the same name, it lays out the true story of how the C.I.A. collaborated with the mafia to plot the assassination of Castro. Much of this is documented in files about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that were released in batches by the National Archives in 2017 and 2018, and which Maier used as the basis of his book.Maier — who is also a producer on the series — and the showrunners, Tom Donahue and Ilan Arboleda, turn the archive data into a narrative that prompts one double take after another and is often intentionally funny. But however improbable some of it seems, the guiding premise is that it all really happened. One goal of the show is to debunk the many conspiracy theories that swirl around this era of history.“If we had relied on conspiracy theories, you just wouldn’t believe it,” Donahue, who also directed the series, said in a video interview alongside Arboleda. “As they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.”The six episodes of “Mafia Spies” feature a labyrinth of plots and a sprawling cast of mobsters, spies, politicians, revolutionaries and entertainers. But the big picture is actually pretty simple.The C.I.A., led at the time by Allen Dulles, wanted to eliminate the new Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro — or, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it, he wanted Castro “sawed off,” according to the historian Stephen Kinzer, who is featured in the series. Through a “cutout” (or middle man), Robert Maheu, a businessman and lawyer, the C.I.A. enlisted organized crime leaders, chiefly the Chicago Outfit’s Sam Giancana and John Roselli, to assassinate Castro. (The mafia had its own reasons for wanting Castro dead: After he seized power in 1959, Havana’s casinos were no longer a cash-cow haven for them.)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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      ‘Evil’ Review: Is It Satan, or Is It Us? It’s Time to Find Out.

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      Michelle and Robert King’s macabre comedy about the possibility of demonic possession and the certainty of evil begins its final season.Season 3 of “Evil” ended on a typically funny but creepy, outlandish yet somehow understated note. With moments to go in the final episode, Kristen Bouchard, the show’s demon-investigating psychologist, found out that one of her eggs had been fertilized by the sperm of a possible demon. The last thing we saw was her dumbfounded face.Coming into Thursday’s premiere of the show’s fourth and final season on Paramount+, she and we have had nearly two years to think about how to respond. Kristen’s choice? To laugh, like an only slightly crazy person. “I giggle at the thought of you waking up at 3 a.m.,” she tells her nemesis and baby daddy, Leland Townsend, “because the Antichrist needs changing.”Like just about everything in “Evil,” her riposte works on both the human and the supernatural planes. (All babies can seem like the Antichrist, after all.) This is appropriate given that, with 14 episodes to go, the show’s central characters remain conflicted about whether the weird stuff they experience is a product of the devil or of human malevolence amplified by their own overactive imaginations.Their indecisiveness goes to the heart of the show, whose fundamental message is that supernatural evil abets, hides behind and jealously competes with everyday human evil. It’s a continuum. You can’t have one without the other.On the basis of the season’s first four episodes, “Evil” remains one of the smarter, more entertaining and more stylishly produced shows out there, and it continues to carry the hallmarks of its creators and showrunners, Michelle and Robert King.The music cues are refreshingly offbeat; a character whispers the “Green Acres” theme during a nighttime stakeout in a corn field, and the show reprises its fondness for the novelty songs of Roger Miller. There is the somewhat self-conscious engagement with and critique of digital technology, as characters try to blame social media or rogue hackers for what look like demonic possessions.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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      Michael Emerson Still Reigns as TV’s King of Creepy

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      The actor has played unsettling men on shows like “Lost” and “Fallout.” In the new season of “Evil,” he might be raising the Antichrist.On one wall of the actor Michael Emerson’s Manhattan apartment hangs a large self portrait he drew about 40 years ago. In the intentionally distorted image, Emerson peers out menacingly from behind his circular glasses. His wife, the actor Carrie Preston, thinks it serves as a fitting summation of his career.“You know, Carrie brought this up recently saying, ‘There’s the template for so much of what you have done as an actor,’” he said. “For me it was just a laugh. It’s still the same mix of having fun and yet being a little, what’s the word, terrifying.”It’s true: If you want someone to be creepy on television, you call Michael Emerson. The 69-year-old actor had his breakout role in 2000 playing a serial killer in “The Practice,” a performance so memorably distressing it won him a guest actor Emmy. He went on to unsettle viewers for years as the unpredictable Ben Linus in “Lost,” and as the computer wizard Harold Finch on “Person of Interest.” This year he showed up for one episode of the Prime Video series “Fallout,” from the “Person of Interest” creator Jonathan Nolan, as a quietly menacing scientist. They aren’t all bad guys, but you’re never quite sure.Emerson is currently inhabiting his most ghoulish role yet, in the aptly named Paramount+ show “Evil,” returning for its fourth and final season on May 23. Emerson plays Leland Townsend, a demonic emissary who constantly torments the heroes, a group of investigators played by Mike Colter, Katja Herbers and Aasif Mandvi. This trio works for the Roman Catholic Church to determine whether various strange goings-on are the result of satanic forces or more mundane phenomena. Leland’s main goal is to promote the forces of darkness by any means possible.In Emerson’s hands, Leland is a captivating, often frightening agent of chaos who is surprisingly goofy for someone who is OK with child murder. In the new season, he is raising his biological son — he nefariously arranged the baby’s conception earlier in the series — and believes the child is the Antichrist.“I don’t know anyone that does unsettling better than Michael Emerson,” Michelle King, who created “Evil” with her husband, Robert, said in a video interview.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