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      How Jodie Turner-Smith Is Reshaping Anne Boleyn's Story

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      Jodie Turner-Smith portrays the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII in a new mini-series. The show has stirred debate in Britain, which is sort of the point.LONDON — Britain’s most recent rendering of the story of Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, begins at the end. When the new mini-series “Anne Boleyn” opens, it’s 1536, the queen is pregnant and powerful — and has five months left to live.Anne’s story, which occupies a special place in the British collective imagination, has spawned an abundance of fictionalized depictions onscreen (“The Tudors”) and in literature (“Wolf Hall”). It is generally told as a morally dubious young woman seducing an older king into leaving his wife and his church, before she is executed for failing to give birth to a male heir.But the new mini-series, which premiered last week on Channel 5, one of Britain’s public service broadcasters, attempts to reframe Anne’s story, instead focusing on her final months and how she tried to maintain power in a system that guaranteed her very little.In the three episode-long series, Anne is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, best-known for her role in the film “Queen & Slim.” It is the first time a Black actress has portrayed the Tudor queen onscreen.“We wanted to find someone who could really inhabit her but also be surprising to an audience,” Faye Ward, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview. Since there were already so many depictions of Anne Boleyn, the show’s creators “wanted to reset people’s expectations of her,” Ward said.Turner-Smith’s Anne Boleyn, center, desperately tries to maintain power in a system that guarantees her very little.Sony Pictures TelevisionAnne (Turner-Smith) and her brother George (Paapa Essiedu).Sony Pictures TelevisionMadge Shelton (Thalissa Teixeira), Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Sony Pictures TelevisionThe series employs a diverse casting playbook, in a similar vein to the Regency-era Netflix drama “Bridgerton.” But whereas that show’s characters are fictional, in “Anne Boleyn” actors of color play several white historical figures: The British-Ghanian actor Paapa Essiedu plays Anne’s brother George Boleyn, and the British-Brazillian actress Thalissa Teixeira portrays Madge Shelton, Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Although race does not figure overtly in the show’s plot, the program makers adopted an approach known as “identity-conscious casting,” which allows actors to bring “all those factors of yourself to a role,” Ward said.For Turner-Smith, that meant connecting her experiences with the ways in which Anne, who was raised in the French court, was an outsider and suffered at Henry’s court.“As a Black woman, I can understand being marginalized. I have a lived experience of what limitation and marginalization feel like,” Turner-Smith, 34, said in an interview. “I thought it was interesting to bring the freshness of a Black body telling that story.”Casting Turner-Smith as one of Britain’s best-known royal consorts has caused debate in the press and particularly on social media in Britain, with “Anne Boleyn” trending on Twitter the day after the series premiere.In the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, the writer Marianka Swain called Turner-Smith’s casting “pretty cynical” and wrote that it was designed to have “Twitter frothing rather than adding anything to our understanding of an era.”Others, though, have welcomed the show’s perspective. Olivette Otele, a professor of the history of slavery and memory of enslavement at the University of Bristol, noted in The Independent newspaper that the series arrived at a time when Britain was “soul searching” about how to understand its colonial past. “The past is only a safe space if it becomes a learning space open to all,” she wrote in praise of the series.It was important to the show’s creators to center the narrative around Anne’s perspective, rather than Henry’s (played by Mark Stanley).Sony Pictures TelevisionDuring the show’s press run, Turner-Smith’s comments about the royal family’s treatment of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — including that having her in the family was “a missed opportunity” for the monarchy — made headlines in Britain.Meghan’s treatment by the palace — which she told Oprah Winfrey in a bombshell March interview had driven her to thoughts of suicide — is representative of “just how far we have not come with patriarchal values,” Turner-Smith said.“It represents how far we have not come in terms of the monarchy and in terms of somebody being an outsider and being different, and being able to navigate that space,” she said, adding that “you can draw so many parallels if you look for them” between Anne and Meghan’s attempts to figure out life within a British palace.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” said Turner-Smith — who, upon being cast as Anne, fully expected the move to draw criticism in the country.For the actress, that presented even more reason to push back against people’s assumptions about Anne. “Art is supposed to challenge you,” she said. “The whole point of making it this way was for a different perspective. What is going to resonate with somebody by putting a different face to this and seeing it in a different way?”Dr. Stephanie Russo, the author of “The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen,” said there were many reasons for Britain’s fascination with and attachment to the Tudors, and Anne specifically. The “soap opera” of a younger woman disrupting a long-term marriage remains fascinating, she said, as does the rise and fall of a powerful woman.There is also a patriotic element, Russo said: Anne’s daughter was Elizabeth I, the monarch who oversaw Britain’s “golden age,” when William Shakespeare was writing his plays and many historians credit the British Empire as having been born.The series was conceived as a feminist exercise, unpacking what Eve Hedderwick Turner, the show’s writer, called “those big, insulting and detrimental terms” attached to Anne, which at the time included accusations of treason, adultery and an incestuous relationship with her brother.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” Turner-Smith said.Sony Pictures TelevisionIn the mini-series, Anne falls out of favor with Henry after a stillbirth. No matter how nominally powerful or ambitious she is, she is no match for the forces that seek to extinguish her, which come to include her husband, his advisers and the country’s legal system. All the while, she tries not to show vulnerability in public.It was important, Hedderwick Turner said, for the creators to put “Anne back in the center of her story, making her the protagonist, seeing everything from her perspective.”The political machinations of Henry VIII and his advisers, his internal life and his motivations are largely obscured in the series. Instead, viewers are privy to Anne’s state of mind and her relationship with her household’s ladies-in-waiting.“Henry is spoken about as this great man, because he had all of these wives” and killed some of them, Turner-Smith said. “It’s just like: Actually, there’s a woman at the center of this story who is so dynamic and fascinating and interesting.”Hilary Mantel, the author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy charting Thomas Cromwell’s life serving Henry VIII, wrote in a 2013 piece for the London Review of Books about how fictionalized accounts of Anne’s life communicate society’s contemporary attitudes toward women.“Popular fiction about the Tudors has also been a form of moral teaching about women’s lives, though what is taught varies with moral fashion,” she said.What, then, does this “Anne Boleyn” say about today’s world?“We’re finally getting to a place where we’re allowing women to become more than just a trope,” Turner-Smith said.Traditionally, when playing a female character, “you’re either the Madonna or you’re the whore, right?” she said. But in this series, “We’re saying we’re unafraid to show different sides of a woman.” More

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      Chris Harrison Has Officially Left ‘The Bachelor’

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      The longtime host permanently parted ways with the reality franchise after stepping back in February.Chris Harrison, the longtime host of “The Bachelor,” “The Bachelorette” and “Bachelor in Paradise,” has parted ways with the reality TV franchise after nearly 20 years as its most constant presence.His departure, which was first reported by Deadline on Tuesday, comes several months after a much-criticized exchange with a previous Bachelorette about racism, which led Mr. Harrison to step back temporarily from his role as host. It also immediately follows Monday night’s premiere of the first season not hosted by Mr. Harrison since the series’ debut in 2002.Mr. Harrison was fundamental to the narrative arc of each season of “The Bachelor” and its spinoff shows, playing the role of M.C., conflict mediator and even onscreen dad to the contestants — all while talent scouting and orchestrating drama, with the help of producers, behind the scenes.“I’ve had a truly incredible run as host of The Bachelor franchise and now I’m excited to start a new chapter,” Mr. Harrison wrote on Instagram on Tuesday. “I’m so grateful to Bachelor Nation for all of the memories we’ve made together. While my two-decade journey is wrapping up, the friendships I’ve made will last a lifetime.”Warner Horizon and ABC Entertainment, which produce and distribute the series, wrote in an email statement: “Chris Harrison is stepping aside as host of ‘The Bachelor’ franchise. We are thankful for his many contributions over the past 20 years and wish him all the best on his new journey.”The Deadline story alluded to an eight-figure payout for Mr. Harrison, which The Times could not confirm.Mr. Harrison’s exit was prefigured in an announcement in February that he would be “stepping aside” from the show “for a period of time” after a heated conversation with Rachel Lindsay, the first Black Bachelorette, in which he downplayed her concerns about the past conduct of Rachael Kirkconnell, a contestant on this year’s season of “The Bachelor.”Before the series finale, a photo had surfaced of Ms. Kirkconnell attending an “Old South” antebellum-themed sorority party in 2018, where she and other attendees dressed in period attire. Ms. Kirkconnell, who is white, was a clear front-runner on Matt James’s season — the first with a Black male lead. (She eventually received the final rose.)Ms. Lindsay had expressed concerns about Ms. Kirkconnell’s attendance of such an event, as well as that she had not thought to tell Mr. James about it. Mr. Harrison vigorously and reflexively defended Ms. Kirkconnell, suggesting that she wouldn’t have known better in 2018.He assailed Ms. Kirkconnell’s critics as being “judge, jury, executioner.”“People are just tearing this girl’s life apart,” he said. “It’s just unbelievably alarming to watch this.”He later apologized on Instagram. “I invoked the term ‘woke police,’ which is unacceptable,” Mr. Harrison wrote, adding, using an abbreviation for Black and Indigenous people and people of color: “I am ashamed over how uninformed I was. I was so wrong. To the Black community, to the BIPOC community: I am so sorry. My words were harmful.”“This historic season of ‘The Bachelor’ should not be marred or overshadowed by my mistakes or diminished by my actions,” he wrote.Ms. Kirkconnell also posted an apology on Instagram. While she did not directly confirm the veracity of the party photos or other content posted online, she said her actions had been racist.“I’m here to say I was wrong,” she wrote in her post. “I was ignorant, but my ignorance was racist.”The interaction between Mr. Harrison and Ms. Lindsay was notable because the “Bachelor” franchise had long been criticized for its lack of diverse contestants. Before Ms. Lindsay’s season, nearly all of the previous 33 Bachelors and Bachelorettes had been white.And as the Bachelorette, Ms. Lindsay could not escape racism in the form of microaggressions and, seemingly, sabotage. One potential suitor greeted her by saying, “I’m ready to go Black and I’m never going to go back,” and another referred to her as “a girl from the hood.” A third contestant, Lee Garrett, bad-mouthed several Black contestants to Ms. Lindsay, using words including “aggressive,” “big,” “angry” and “violent.” (Tweets attributed to Mr. Garrett that surfaced during Ms. Lindsay’s season equated the NAACP with the KKK.)At the time of Mr. Harrison’s exchange with Ms. Lindsay over the “Old South” party in February, she was a correspondent on “Extra,” interviewing him for the show.After, Ms. Lindsay addressed the interaction on a podcast she co-hosts. She said Mr. Harrison had apologized to her but said she was “having a really, really hard time” accepting his apology.“I can’t take it anymore,” she said, speaking broadly about her frustration with the franchise’s handling of race. “I’m contractually bound in some ways, but when it’s up — I am so — I can’t, I can’t do it anymore.”Though the franchise has not named a permanent replacement host, there are some temporary ones lined up for the next few seasons. This season of “The Bachelorette” is hosted by Tayshia Adams and Kaitlyn Bristowe, two former Bachelorettes. When it airs this summer, “Bachelor in Paradise” will be guest-hosted by David Spade. More

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      in Theater

      A Writer’s One-Act Plays Debut, Continuing Her Resurrection

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      By staging Kathleen Collins’s rich psychological portraits of Black women, a theatrical group aims to enlighten, heal and inspire.“No one is going to mythologize my life,” the playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins said in 1984 to a group of film students at Howard University. “No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences.”Collins’s insistence on portraying the ordinariness of African American women’s lives rather than reproducing the Hollywood narratives that pathologized or mythologized them is resonating with a new generation of Black women artists who have recently discovered Collins and her work. Part of what makes Collins’s writing so appealing is her attention to the complex internal struggles and external journeys, of what Elizabeth Alexander calls those “Bohemian Black women” who often work as artists and academics, and have a robust intellectual life. Because she renders them with such care and imbues them with such vulnerability, her characters have heightened insights and are aware that they are both liberated and alienated by their knowledge of how others see and stereotype them.Such rich psychological portraits of Black women are what originally drew Afrofemononomy, a group of Black femme theater artists, to Collins’s plays. In addition to adapting that Howard University speech into a monologue, they are also performing “Begin the Beguine,” a quartet of Collins’s one-acts that have never been produced before.Over the past two weekends, under a program titled “Work the Roots,” Afrofemononomy performed the title play “Begin the Beguine,” about the actress Ruby Dee and her son, the blues guitarist Guy Davis, as well as “The Healing,” “The Reading” and “Remembrance” at various locations in New York City (from a lawn in Harlem to a park in Bedford-Stuyvesant). On Saturday, May 29, they will present the premiere of a mixed-media installation called “Gold Taste” that is a response to “The Essentialisn’t,” a theatrical work by one of the group’s members, Eisa Davis. The piece will be available for viewing until June 27 at Performance Space New York’s Keith Haring Theater.Jennifer Harrison Newman dances with audience members as part of the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe debut of Collins’s plays is part of a continuing resurrection of her works after her death from breast cancer in 1988 at the age of 46. Largely because of her daughter Nina Lorez Collins’s commitment to preserving her mother’s legacy, we are now able to access the gifts of Collins’s ambitions and archive, including the theatrical release in 2015 of her 1982 film, “Losing Ground”; the publication of her short story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” in 2016; and, in 2019, the arrival of “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” a mélange of her short stories, plays, diary entries and film scripts.Davis, an actress and playwright recently seen in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” first became acquainted with Collins’s writing when she was asked to do a public reading of Collins’s short stories at the Brooklyn Public Library in 2017. But, she now realizes, Collins has been with her a lot longer. “She is a literary foremother for me that has just been under my nose all this time,” Davis said. “When Nina first gave me these plays, I was like, ‘Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins,’ and then I looked at my bookshelf and I found ‘9 Plays by Black Women,’ an anthology from the 1980s, and her ‘The Brothers’ in there. It’s the only play of hers that was ever produced, [a production of the Women’s Project, now WP Theater] at American Place Theater.”A line from Collins’s play “Remembrance” on a wall at Performance Space New York reads, “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOnce she read Collins’s other plays, she immediately shared them with her friends and other Black female theater artists with whom she frequently collaborated in the most quotidian of ways: over dinner, on museum trips and visits to the beach, via texts, after seeing plays together, and, in the past year, over Zoom. By 2019, their casual interest in Collins’s plays turned into the more concrete idea of staging and sharing them with the broader public.“In a lot of ways, this was an attempt to take the model of our friendship and then apply it to the conditions under which we collaborate,” Davis said.The director Lileana Blain-Cruz (“Marys Seacole”) said learning about Collins’s plays enabled her to take different risks. For the project, she has thoughtfully transformed Collins’s “The Reading,” a 30-minute play that anticipated our conversations about racial microaggressions today. Set in a Black psychic’s waiting room, a tense conversation ensues between Marguerite (Kara Young), a Black fashion designer, and Helen (Amelia Workman), a white romance novelist. As Helen tries to assert her entitlement, Marguerite pushes back, and eventually denies Helen an opportunity to take up the space that she, as a white woman, feels obligated to inhabit.Amelia Workman in “The Reading.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAudience members at the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFood, books and more were on display.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“For me, the celebration and the exploration collectively around Kathleen Collins’s work is another way of seeing each other before we even knew how to see each other in existence and collectivity,” she said. “That, for me, is really moving because I was like, ‘Oh, this is somebody that I should have known.’” She added, “Now I get to discover, and I don’t have to discover alone.”In addition to the moving performance by individual actors, these plays, which were not open to critics to review, were made even more engaging because of the casting and staging. Collins wrote “The Healing” and “The Reading” with white characters but because Afrofemononomy cast from within their group, they provided a space in which Black actresses were always front and center. This gesture was intensified by the intimacy of their set. At the end of “The Reading,” the audience was led by the actress Jennifer Harrison Newman to dance with the cast, an invitation that turned the luminescent installation and graffiti scrawled wall that read “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God” (a line from another Collins play in the quartet) into a communal party celebrating Black women’s creativity.April Matthis, left, and Stacey Karen Robinson perform “Begin the Beguine,” by Kathleen Collins, at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy inviting us to these tender moments in which Collins’s Black female characters pull back their layers, the performances themselves transport both those fictional characters and this real-life Black cast far beyond the strict racial and gender categories that envelop them and us.“These are stories about the interior lives of Black women,” Nina Lorez Collins told me. “One of the reasons I like the “Begin the Beguine” is because it is about race, but it is also not. It’s really about the interior life of this artist, this young woman. And I just don’t think we’ve seen anything like it.” As avant-garde as Collins’s characters were in her time, they still remain singular today, giving us rare social insights into how we can navigate our unique moment of slowly returning to each other, to public spaces, and ultimately, live, in-person performances. In the foreword to “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” the fiction writer Danielle Evans described Collins as “a master of the moments when the interior becomes the exterior, when all pretense drops away.”This blurring between our inner selves and the identities projected back onto Black women was at the heart of Afrofemononomy’s take on “Remembrance,” described as “a kind of personal séance.” Under the directorial consultation of Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”) and featuring Davis as The Woman and Kaneza Schaal as Collins talking to the Howard students, this becomes a conversation between two Black women who, while each giving their own monologue — one taking place in a bathroom, the other at a lectern — end up, at times, dissolving into each other. All the while they demand the audience see Black women in public with the same clarity that we see ourselves in private.April Matthis and Stacey Karen Robinson performed “Begin the Beguine” at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut such revelations and reversal of gazes will also be critical to large swaths of the American theater community that is still grappling with debates about inclusion, equity and white gatekeepers as it seeks to attend to the harm of racism, and institutionalize the healing that Collins’s vision offers for her Black characters and for the Black female theater artists who embody them.After spending two weeks performing, and a couple of years studying Collins, Afrofemononomy decided to close with Davis’s music theater piece “The Essentialisn’t” in the group installation “Gold Taste,” and reimagine a much earlier moment when the Harlem Renaissance writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen debated racial representations in their era. It begins with the ever vexed question, “Can You Be Black and Not Perform?”Extending Collins’s legacy to Davis, the Afrofemononomy member Kaneza Schaal said, “Eisa is [also] sitting on a trove of plays she has written. And it is up to us, to see to it, that our own daughters are not the first people to produce that work.” She continued, “It is urgent to address Davis and Collins simultaneously. The intellectual harmony Eisa creates with her foremothers is astounding, and yet another extension of this fabric.”The Essentialisn’t: Gold Taste installationMay 29-June 27 at Performance Space New York, 150 First Avenue; performancespacenewyork.org. More

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      in Television

      That ‘Ziwe’ Look

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      On her new Showtime series, Ziwe Fumudoh’s feminine-with-a-wink style enables her sharp comedy.In the first episode of her new variety series on Showtime, the comedian Ziwe Fumudoh asks the writer Fran Lebowitz: “What bothers you more: slow walkers or racism?”“This character is hyperbolic,” Ms. Fumudoh said a few days before the premiere of “Ziwe.” “It’s only hyperbole that somebody would ask that question. And you see that reflected in how I dress.”Ms. Fumudoh was explaining how the wardrobe for the series came together: a tornado of pink that has sucked up a few feather boas, a mountain of crystal embellishments and an assortment of fuzzy hats, plastic visors, tiny sunglasses and opera gloves. When the costume designer Pamela Shepard-Hill would add a ring to an outfit, Ms. Fumudoh would ask for six more, “and then let’s do a cuff that’s entirely made of diamonds,” she said.On “Ziwe,” whether during a confrontational interview or parody music video, Ms. Fumudoh plays an audacious, quick-witted consumerist, whose attitude and armor is inspired by an unholy marriage of Dionne from “Clueless” and Paris Hilton in “The Simple Life,” along with a few other ultrafeminine pop culture figures of the 1990s and aughts. (In a sketch about plastic surgery, she wears matching pink sweatpants and a sleeveless crop top, wordlessly making a reference to Amy Poehler’s desperate mom from “Mean Girls.”)As a comedian who became famous for making people uncomfortable with questions about race and class, Ms. Fumudoh, 29, uses fashion like a weapon, creating an air of innocence with her Delia’s catalog looks, then slicing through it with the sharp heel of a Barbie stiletto.She is also an exceptionally physical performer, writhing and jumping through her musical numbers, whether channeling a jazzy “Chicago” siren or a girl-group member, circa 1999. Extensive legs-in-the-air choreography had to be taken into consideration when planning her ensembles, Ms. Shepard-Hill said.Ms. Fumudoh, in a LaQuan Smith catsuit, rose to prominence on Instagram Live, wearing equally bold outfits and makeup.Greg Endries/Showtime“We would have fittings, and I would be like, ‘OK, do your choreography,’” she said. “Then instantly: ‘That’s inappropriate. Take that off. That’s actually not OK for Showtime.”For the music videos in particular, hyperbolic Ziwe borrows from the real Ziwe’s closet. In a song called “Stop Being Poor” (a joke, in Episode 3, about people who believe being poor is a choice), Ms. Fumudoh wears a skintight all-crystal minidress by Aidan Euan of Akna.“How absurd is it to have a dress that luxurious in a time like this?” she said. “It so encapsulates the idea of ‘Stop Being Poor’ that I got it for ‘Stop Being Poor’ before we even wrote the song ‘Stop Being Poor,’ when I just knew that it was something I wanted to do.”In the 1920s-inspired number “Lisa Called the Cops on Black People,” she wears her own off-the-shoulder black velvet-and-mesh catsuit by LaQuan Smith.When putting together a mood board for the show, Ms. Shepard-Hill included iconic — a favorite “Ziwe” adjective — models like Donyale Luna and Naomi Campbell, as well as rappers like Rico Nasty and Saweetie. She included Josephine Baker, the music-hall star and World War II spy, too.“It was a real range of women that span time but are all iconic in their visuals, iconic in their style and sensibility,” said Ms. Shepard Hill, 37, who is also a stylist and instructor at Parsons School of Design.But in creating her wardrobe, Ms. Fumudoh was also thinking about the white comedians who dominate late-night TV and how to portray herself as the opposite of the suit-wearing men she calls “Jimmy, Jimmy, John, John,” whose wood-heavy sets are “really, really masculine — all blues and blacks and sharp images.”Ms. Fumudoh credits “Legally Blonde,” Rihanna and Lindsay Lohan (among others) as influences on her character’s style.Greg Endries/Showtime“If all of late night is painted with masculinity, my show is hyper-feminine,” she said. “I wear a lot of sparkles. You would never have seen John Oliver in a choker.“When I was growing up, and especially when I first started in media, the idea was to downplay your femininity. If a woman wants to be taken seriously, she wears glasses and pants and she talks with a lower voice like she works for Theranos.”On the wall of the set where Ms. Fumudoh conducts her interviews, there’s a large photo of a young Oprah Winfrey, who deeply influenced “Ziwe,” Ms. Fumudoh said. The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry interview was broadcast the night before the team began cutting the show, and the drama of it “really shaped the way we framed every episode.” It’s not a stretch to imagine Ziwe delivering the same scene-stealing “silent or silenced” line.There’s something else about the plastered photo of Ms. Winfrey that feels tied to “Ziwe”: In it, she’s wearing pink and pearls. Early in her career, Ms. Winfrey found a way to ask tough questions while communicating her femininity.In the first episode of “Ziwe,” when Ms. Fumudoh sits across from Ms. Lebowitz, Ms. Fumudoh wears a short black blazer dress with electric pink lapels, and her own thigh-high chunky-heel leather boots. It’s not a designer piece; it’s available at AD Los Angeles for $149.Despite the opulent aesthetic of “Ziwe,” the costume budget was somewhat limited, in part because it’s a new show, Ms. Shepard-Hill said. The dream, if there’s a second season? “A whole in-house team, where everything could be custom-built from head to toe,” she said.The blazer dress outfit was originally intended for a sketch in which Ziwe, channeling a billionaire Marilyn Monroe acolyte, announces her candidacy for New York City mayor. (“Gone are the days of old white men abusing the office of the mayor to do crooked favors for their ugly friends. Because I don’t have any friends, and I only do favors for myself.”)But Ms. Fumudoh felt strongly about wearing it for the first episode instead, using it to set that subversive anti-late-night host tone for the series.“That pink lapel is such a splash accent that it really captures what the show is,” she said. “All the outfits are telling a story in, like, 19 different ways, beyond the actual text that we write and say.” More

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      in Television

      How One Graphic Novel Looks at Anti-Asian Hate

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      In “Cyclopedia Exotica,” the artist and writer Aminder Dhaliwal created a fictitious community facing xenophobia, fetishization and media misrepresentation. It’s resonating with her thousands of Instagram followers.In the new graphic novel “Cyclopedia Exotica,” immigrants with one eye coexist uneasily with their two-eyed neighbors.Members of the cyclops community are targeted by curious online daters and porn addicts, as well as cosmetic surgeons eager to give them that desirable two-eyed look. They contend with xenophobes protesting mixed marriages, hateful comments from subway Karens and, in some cases, physical violence.In 2018, when the artist and author Aminder Dhaliwal began sharing pages with her nearly 250,000 Instagram followers, she was drawing from her experiences as a South Asian woman growing up in England and Canada, but she wondered if the topic was relevant.“I remember saying to a friend, I want to do a book on microaggressions, but that’s, like, so old. Is it even worth doing?” she said in a phone interview from Burbank, Calif., where she now lives.Three years on, Dhaliwal’s book seems particularly of the moment. It’s tough to miss the parallels between its characters, minorities singled out because of their eyes, and the spate of reported attacks on Asian people in the United States over the past months. “I could not imagine that this would be happening this year,” she said.The graphic novel begins with the story of Etna, the world’s first cyclops sex symbol. Her critically acclaimed 2018 debut, “Woman World,” imagined an idyllic, supremely chill future in which guys went extinct years ago. (Spoiler alert: They aren’t really missed.) Published by the Canadian comics house Drawn & Quarterly this month, “Cyclopedia Exotica” is her second book and has already connected with a diverse readership.“A lot of the microaggression stuff was specifically about Asians,” Dhaliwal, 32, said. “But I also get questions like, ‘Is this about queer people?’ Or, ‘I relate to this so much as a trans person.’”Born in Wembley, London, she moved when she was 11 to Brampton, Ontario, a predominantly South Asian suburb of Toronto. She loved to draw from an early age, tracing the covers of her brother’s video game cases and creating Harry Potter fan art. She knew she wanted to do something art-related but wasn’t sure what she could do or whom to even ask. “Being an Asian kid, I feel like my family had access to every doctor,” she said. “But I didn’t know anyone doing art.”Inspired by a presentation at Sheridan College given by a Disney “Beauty and the Beast” animator, Dhaliwal enrolled in the school’s animation department. “He was this larger guy with a big old beard, and he flips a switch and he’s Belle,” she said. “It was just bananas to me. I knew at that moment that I wanted to dedicate my life to this craft, because it just seemed so fun and silly.”After graduation, Dhaliwal found work in Los Angeles as a writer and artist on animated shows like “The Fairly OddParents” and “Sanjay and Craig.” The work was rewarding — in 2020, she earned a spot on Variety’s list of “Ten Animators to Watch” — but the secrecy and nondisclosure agreements involved wore her down. “So much of my day-to-day is hidden behind N.D.A.’s,” she said. “You get exhausted not getting to talk about the cool things you’re working on or getting to process the hard things you’re going through.”Aminder Dhaliwal began sharing pages on Instagram in 2018. “I remember saying to a friend, I want to do a book on microaggressions, but that’s, like, so old,” she said. “Is it even worth doing?”Joyce Kim for The New York TimesAfter working for four years on a pilot for an animated series that never got greenlit, she knew she had to create her own comics, things she could post online for immediate feedback. She started with a Harry Potter spoof, then a tongue-in-cheek comic based on the Japanese manga series “Death Note.”“Woman World” came to Dhaliwal after she participated in the 2017 Women’s March in Los Angeles and saw signs that read “the future is female.” What might that look like, she wondered? As with “Cyclopedia Exotica,” she questioned her idea early on. “I remember starting to write it and thinking like, ehhh, feminism is doing great,” she said. “And then the #MeToo movement happened, and I was like, oh yeah.”The animation industry had its own reckoning in 2018, dubbed the #MeToon movement. Dhaliwal and her fellow animator Megan Nicole Dong (“Pinky Malinky,” “How to Train Your Dragon 2”) joined others in creating an organization that led to changes in human-resources practices at several studios and the one-year suspension of the “Loud House” creator Chris Savino following sexual harassment allegations. “Initially, we were just trying to create a safe space to talk about things that had been happening in animation,” Dong said. “But it evolved into a much bigger movement within our industry.”The success of “Woman World” gave Dhaliwal new confidence. “I had been working as a comedy writer for years and didn’t know if I was funny,” she said. “I remember asking one of my office mates, ‘Am I funny?,’ which now seems like such a sad question. It’s like a teenager asking a friend, ‘Am I pretty?’ I didn’t realize how much I needed someone else to say yes, you’re funny.”Unlike “Woman World,” the inspiration for “Cyclopedia Exotica” didn’t come from a march or movement. “I wish I could tell you there was some really beautiful reason,” Dhaliwal said. “But truly, I just found cyclops so interesting. So often they just look like people, except for their one defining feature. The first thing I remember sketching were pinup drawings of cyclops, and it went from monsters in erotica to looking at how minorities find acceptance through being attractive.”Dhaliwal is among several artists who have showcased and serialized their work on Instagram, including Lucy Knisley (“Kid Gloves”), Shelby Lorman (“Awards for Good Boys”), and Liana Finck (“Passing for Human”). Like Dhaliwal, many use social-media platforms to show their work, describe their creative processes and discuss everything from depression to writer’s block.“Cyclopedia Exotica” begins with the story of Etna, the world’s first cyclops sex symbol. Later, other cyclops deal with being perceived as overly submissive, the lack of cyclops representation in Hollywood movies, and worries about whether mixed children will have one eye or two.“Aminder has always been so observant about everything,” Dong said. “She’s also friends with so many people, and so many different kinds of people, that all of these things in her book feel very authentic, because they’re either based on things she’s experienced or things her family and friends have gone through.”One cyclops goes to a cosmetic surgeon to get two eyes — a nod, Dhaliwal said, to double-eyelid surgeries targeted at Asians. The character’s surgery doesn’t take. “People die for beauty, because they feel they don’t look a certain way,” she said. “But so often people trivialize beauty, and say things like, you need to get over it, or you need to be OK with yourself.”“That’s the message animation shows always try to tell kids,” she continued. “Be true to yourself. But I think that can be really hard to swallow when the world has punished you so often for being who you are.”In many ways, the current climate of anti-Asian hate feels familiar to Dhaliwal. “I remember after 9/11, and for the next 10 or 15 years, it just sucked having brown skin. It seemed like every offhand joke was about being a terrorist. And then you get this odd experience where you’re like, finally, the Eye of Sauron turns to another group, and your first reaction is like, phew, we’re out of it, the eye’s not on us anymore! When instead, we should be thinking: No one should ever feel like this.”Dhaliwal is working on a new comic series that she hopes to begin posting on Instagram this month. She’s also written for the upcoming Netflix animated series “Centaurworld,” created by Dong, and was recently selected to serve as a mentor and consultant on the Creative Council of Cartoon Network’s shorts program, “Cartoon Cartoons,” which will showcase the work of diverse and up-and-coming animators.While Dhaliwal probably won’t be telling her mentees to just be true to themselves, she will be able to share what it means to be a working animator in an industry that’s gotten more inclusive but still has a ways to go. “I’m going to get to give creative feedback to all these people who are trying to make something and do something really creative,” she said. “It’s exciting to be in this position, because I’ve been in their position so often.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More

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      in Television

      Ziwe Endorses Box Braids and ‘Real Housewives’

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      The 29-year-old comedian brings her Instagram and YouTube antics to a prime time Showtime series, “Ziwe,” which premieres May 9.Ziwe, the mononymic master of the viral “gotcha!” moment, swears she isn’t out to get anyone.Sure, the 29-year-old Nigerian-American comedian’s largely white guests on her YouTube and Instagram Live show, “Baited With Ziwe,” have a proclivity to make cringe-worthy comments when it comes to race. (The Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway couldn’t correctly identify the Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, and the cookbook author Alison Roman was nearly stumped when asked to name five Asian people.)But Ziwe doesn’t set out to embarrass her guests. “The goal is not to hurt anyone or get them canceled,” explained the Northwestern University graduate, who cut her teeth working on “The Colbert Report.” “The goal is to have a really thoughtful, productive conversation.”The confrontational questions — often about race — and uncomfortable pauses are, she said, intended to be a learning experience. “They’re all willing,” she said of her guests, though even she isn’t exactly sure why they agree to come on the show. “They’re open to looking silly for a greater discourse beyond both of us.”Ziwe, who uses only her first name professionally — her last name, Fumudoh, proved too tricky for comedy club hosts to announce — will bring her punch lines to a bigger screen when her new late-night sketch comedy series, “Ziwe,” which rhymes with “freeway,” premieres on Showtime on May 9.With six episodes, the series will feature guest interviews, musical numbers and field pieces, and will draw from her go-to brand of humor, which she describes as “highly satirical” and “bombastic.” (Her dream guest? Kim Kardashian. “I’d love to get her perspective on race in America as one of the most famous women in world history,” she said.)In a phone conversation from her Brooklyn apartment, Ziwe shared her cultural essentials, including how watching “The Real Housewives” counts as homework (hear her out), the benefits of box braids and why fuzzy rugs are bringing her all kinds of joy amid her claustrophobic work-from-home existence.1. “The Real Housewives”At first, I looked down at “Real Housewives.” I was like, “I never watch reality TV, I read books.” And then, in college, I started watching “Beverly Hills,” which is like this horrid, dark underbelly of reality TV — I’d never seen this type of storytelling before. Like, on “Orange County,” pretending to have cancer on national television for attention — who does that? As a writer and performer I’m constantly engaging with different characters and I’ll rewatch episodes trying to figure them out. I’ve watched full seasons in a day, from eyes open to eyes shut.2. Emma Brewin HatsThese faux fur, fuzzy bucket hats are my emotional support animals. Rihanna wore a green one in 2017, and I always was thinking about it, but never took the dive to purchase one. But then the pandemic happened and I just needed something to make me feel anything, so I bought a blue hat, and then a green one and an orange one and a black one and a wide-brimmed dark red one … I wear them every day, in a different color to fit my mood. They’re also great for Zoom calls when I don’t want to do my hair. I’m wearing one right now, actually!3. Nicholas Britell SoundtracksI’m writing a book and can’t listen to songs with lyrics when I write, and so I often turn to Nicholas Britell soundtracks, whether it’s “Succession” or “If Beale Street Could Talk” or “The King,” with Timothée Chalamet and Robert Pattinson. I love the way he uses strings and piano chords. “Moonlight” was his breakout moment for me, but he’s a really good composer with a wide range of work. I’ve listened to his entire catalog.4. DocumentariesI like to learn passively, and documentaries are a perfect vehicle for that. “Varsity Blues” is fantastic. The lack of impulse control to photoshop your picture as a coxswain for crew is beyond comprehension. It’s like “Real Housewives” where it’s stranger than fiction you could ever imagine. And they affect me viscerally! After watching the James Baldwin and Toni Morrison documentaries, I go to my computer and start writing furiously because it’s like, “These are great American authors, OMG, I want to be just like them.”5. Blood Orange San PellegrinoI ordered San Pellegrino at the beginning of the pandemic thinking it was seltzer, but I was surprised — and delighted — to learn it was actually juice. I had to cut myself off at one point, though, because I was drinking a lot of these. My friend was like, “You know there’s sugar in that, right?” I was like, “Oh no, it’s just juice, it’s cool,” and then I checked the can and there was sugar. But it’s so delicious. I have one San Pellegrino blood orange left in my fridge — if it’s just a really bad day, I get to drink that.6. CandlesI think every woman hits a certain age and you’ve got to buy a couple of candles. Frères Branchiaux ones, which are made by three young brothers of color who also do sprays for your linens, are really nice, and the profits go to homeless shelters. There’s a candle for every occasion — lavender for the winter, citrus for the summer, or a smoggy oak wood for fall. I have three on my coffee table, multiple in my room and a drawer full of them.7. “Clueless”I would argue my entire personality is based on this film, which was written and directed by Amy Heckerling and should have been nominated for an Oscar. It’s one of the best American satires of the 21st century. I’m so influenced by the schoolgirl outfits, the matching plaid sets, the mixing patterns and textures, the box braids. The fur cuffs — I love a fur cuff. Mona May was the costume designer for “Clueless,” and she was so forward-thinking setting trends for this definitive ’90s girl style.8. Box BraidsWhen I was a kid, my mom made me get box braids, and I’d be like, “Oh, God” — what kid wants to sit for eight hours to get their hair braided? And then I saw Dionne, a character in “Clueless” who had box braids, and I was like, “OK wow, this wasn’t just my parents forcing their culture on me.” It really helped me come into myself. The nice thing about box braids is once you’ve sat down for eight hours to do them, you’re free. It’s like “I never have to brush my hair for eight weeks,” you just get to whip your hair back and forth like Willow Smith. I started wearing box braids again the past two years and every summer, I’m like, “It’s box braid season.” I get 34 inches and I’m walking around like I’m Nicki Minaj knocking things over with my braids like a whip.9. Fuzzy RugsI love to sit on the floor. Maybe it’s this infantile thing with fuzzy hats and fuzzy rugs, but I am moved by textures. On my set for my new show, I have a chair upholstered with a fuzzy rug that I do all my interviews out of. And at home, I have a white fuzzy rug. I haven’t been to a beach in years so I have to replace the idea of sand with a rug. It’s just how it feels on your toes.10. “Oceans” By Jay-Z Ft. Frank OceanI’m a huge fan of Jay-Z as a rapper and Frank Ocean’s musicality, so the song is a really good marriage of two things I love. The melody is really, really calming, but then it has lines like “Only Christopher we acknowledge is Wallace/I don’t even like Washingtons in my pocket.” It’s just really audacious and bold and counterculture. More

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      in Movies

      Behind ‘Strange Fruit,’ Billie Holiday’s Anti-Lynching Anthem

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      It helped make Holiday a star, but it was written by Abel Meeropol, a teacher in the Bronx. An Oscar nomination and a year of protests against racism have kept it in the conversation.When Billie Holiday first performed “Strange Fruit” in 1939, the song was so bold for the time that she could sing it only in certain places where it was safe to do so.The song likened the lynched bodies of Black people to “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary music executive, hailed it as “a declaration of war” and “the beginning of the civil rights movement.”The song has garnered renewed attention since Andra Day was nominated for an Oscar for best actress for playing Holiday in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.” The film, which debuted on Hulu in February, chronicles Holiday’s defiance in the face of the government’s efforts to suppress “Strange Fruit.” The Oscars air on Sunday evening.Holiday popularized the song, causing many to believe she was responsible for its chilling lyrics. That notion was reinforced by the 1972 film “Lady Sings the Blues,” which suggests that Holiday, played by Diana Ross, wrote the song after witnessing a lynching.In fact, the song was written by Abel Meeropol, a white Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx.Mr. Meeropol was moved to write it after seeing a photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Ind., in 1930. The photograph, by Lawrence Beitler, shows two bodies hanging from a tree as a crowd of white people look on, some grinning. Thousands of copies of the photo were printed and sold, according to National Public Radio.Abel Meeropol wrote the music and lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” using the pseudonym Lewis Allen.Boston University LibraryMr. Meeropol, using the pseudonym Lewis Allen, did not write the song for Holiday. It was first published as a poem in the New York teachers’ union magazine in 1937.He was known for his communist views, and for adopting the two sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were executed after being convicted on espionage charges. Mr. Meeropol’s wife, Anne, sang “Strange Fruit,” as did several others, before Holiday performed it at Café Society, an integrated nightclub in New York City, in 1939.At the time, the song’s message — conveyed with lines like, “Pastoral scene of the gallant South, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” — was immensely controversial.Yet in the 21st century, “Strange Fruit” has lived on, sampled in the 2000 song “What’s Really Going On,” in which the singer Dwayne Wiggins recounts an episode of racial profiling at the hands of the police in Oakland, Calif.And in 2021, as the nation continues to reckon with a series of killings of unarmed Black people by the police — often captured in gruesome footage of Black men being shot or, in the case of George Floyd, knelt on by white officers — “Strange Fruit” has maintained its place in the national conversation about racism.The song “is going to be relevant until cops start getting convicted for murdering Black people,” Michael Meeropol, one of Abel Meeropol’s sons, told “CBS This Morning” before Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, was convicted of murdering Mr. Floyd.“When that happens, maybe then ‘Strange Fruit’ will be a relic of a barbaric past,” he said. “But until then, it’s a mirror on a barbaric present.” More