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    Ncuti Gatwa Is the New Doctor on ‘Doctor Who’

    Mr. Gatwa, a star of the Netflix series “Sex Education,” will be the first Black man to play the lead character in the enduring BBC science fiction franchise.Ncuti Gatwa, a star of the Netflix series “Sex Education,” will be the 14th actor and the first Black man to play the lead role of the Doctor in “Doctor Who,” the long-running British science fiction franchise about a time-traveling adventurer, the BBC announced on Sunday.He replaces Jodie Whittaker, who announced her departure last July after three seasons as the show’s first female doctor.Mr. Gatwa, 29, a Rwandan-Scottish actor, plays Eric Effiong, a gay man navigating his sexuality and identity in a religious Nigerian family, in “Sex Education,” the hit British teen comedy-drama series on Netflix.“It feels really amazing, it’s a true honor,” Mr. Gatwa told the BBC on Sunday as he arrived for the EE British Academy Film Awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, where he was nominated for best male performance in a comedy program for his work on “Sex Education.”“This role is an institution,” he said of the Doctor. “It’s so iconic and it means a lot to so many people, including myself, and so it makes everyone feel seen as well. It’s something that everyone can enjoy, so I feel very grateful to have had the baton handed over and I’m going to try to do my best.”“Doctor Who” fans celebrated the news on Twitter on Sunday, with many expressing their excitement to see a doctor who resembles them. Others noted the low-key nature of the announcement: a tweet followed by a news release that the BBC shared on social media. In July 2017, the BBC announced Ms. Whittaker’s selection in a commercial that aired after the Wimbledon men’s final.In a statement shared by the BBC, Mr. Gatwa noted the importance of “Doctor Who” to fans worldwide, and acknowledged feeling “a mix of deeply honored, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared.”“Unlike the Doctor,” he added, “I may only have one heart, but I am giving it all to this show.”The BBC has aired 39 seasons of “Doctor Who” over nearly 60 years. The show, about an alien known as the Doctor who travels through time and space in an old-fashioned British police telephone booth called the TARDIS, has cultivated a legion of dedicated fans who call themselves “Whovians.”The Doctor regenerates into new people, and in turn, the show replaces its lead actor every few years. Though transitions to new Doctors are expected and eagerly anticipated by fans, the show’s previous attempts to change and diversify have not been universally embraced. When Ms. Whittaker’s turn as the Doctor was announced in 2017, some fans adopted the hashtag #NotMyDoctor and questioned why the character had suddenly changed genders.Ms. Whittaker’s final episode is yet to come, Russell T. Davies, the series showrunner, said in a statement. It will air in the fall during the BBC’s centenary celebrations, according to a trailer previewing the episode.Mr. Gatwa will make his debut as the Time Lord in 2023. More

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    ‘Sex Education’ Gets More Inclusive in Its Intimacy

    With its new nonbinary characters and its scenes depicting chest binding and disabled intimacy, the British teen comedy-drama continues to widen its lens.Layla (Robyn Holdaway) slides a bin in front of the bedroom door, takes a small wicker box from its hiding place in a drawer full of clothes and opens it to reveal a roll of Ace bandages and a tin of safety pins.The scene that ensues, from Season 3 of “Sex Education,” depicts a routine that is all too familiar for many nonbinary and transgender youth. Layla — who, like Holdaway, uses they/them pronouns — proceeds to wrap the bandages tightly around their chest, which is already bruised and bloodied from unsafe chest binding.Later in the episode, Cal — another new and nonbinary character this season, played by the Sudanese American actor Dua Saleh — shows Layla a safer alternative: a chest binder, which is a compression undergarment often made of spandex and nylon.“I did it for a while with Ace bandages,” Cal tells Layla, who tries on a borrowed chest binder. “Until I nearly broke a rib.”Layla looks into the mirror, laughs incredulously and says with joy, “It feels so much better.”Laurie Nunn, the creator of this British dramedy, said that presenting such interactions, matter-of-factly with plenty of detail, is part of the show’s effort “to progress these conversations forward.”“It felt important to me that we see two nonbinary characters communicating with each other onscreen,” she said in a recent video interview. “It’s not just representation; it’s having as much of it as possible within the scope of the show.”Over two seasons, “Sex Education” has been widely praised for its frank but sensitive depictions of teen sexuality. In Season 3, now out on Netflix, the series has widened its lens to include more stories about queer relationships, gender presentation, intimacy with a disability and other experiences that rarely are explored on mainstream television.To do so in an authentic but respectful fashion, the producers use intimacy coordinators and a healthy dose of communication. “The show goes to great lengths to make sure that our actors are as protected as possible,” Nunn saidAt the same time, stars like George Robinson, who, like his character Isaac, uses a wheelchair, found themselves serving as both performers and de facto consultants, ensuring that the details and dynamics of their scenes were accurate. “Obviously, he’s playing a character, but it’s making sure that it feels authentic and true to his experience as a disabled actor,” Nunn said.George Robinson’s love scene was a rarity for a disabled actor, but everyone involved “stayed away from thinking too much about the significance of that scene,” he wrote in an email.Sam Taylor/NetflixOne such scene unfolds in Episode 4, when a dinner date between Isaac and Maeve (Emma Mackey) turns toward the intimate. Isaac is paralyzed from the chest down, like Robinson. Maeve starts kissing him, then pulls away. “Can …” she whispers, trailing off.“You want to know what I can feel?” Isaac asks.“Yeah,” Maeve replies.“Well, I can’t feel anything below my level of injury,” Isaac says. “If you put your hand on my chest, I’ll show you.”Isaac was originally conceived as an amputee, but the show’s producers decided to rewrite the role around the disability of whoever landed the part. Isaac is a painter, a brother, a lover and crucially, in Season 2, a jealous deleter of voice mail messages. His sense of humor is laced with cynicism, like Maeve’s.When asked how it felt to film the dinner date scene, Robinson responded in an email, “The easy and instinctive answer would be to think that in the moment, it felt like a real privilege to be a part of a ‘cultural moment’ type scene like that.“However, I have realized that in actual fact we (myself, Emma and the creative team) purposefully stayed away from thinking too much about the significance of that scene within the landscape of TV, film and media. We came to the conclusion that in order to make the scene successful, we had to make sure that it worked within the story and for the characters at that time in their relationship.”Kelly Gordon, a trainer at Enhance the UK, a charity run by disabled people, and Chris Yeates, an outreach and support coordinator at Back Up Trust, a charity that supports people affected by spinal cord injury, consulted on Isaac’s story line. The scene works because it’s not about the fact that Isaac uses a wheelchair. It’s a story about two awkward teenagers, an expression of affection and a burned lasagna.David Thackeray, an intimacy coordinator, worked on all eight episodes of Season 3, including this scene with Isaac and Maeve. Thackeray choreographs each take as if it were a dance sequence or a fight scene, mapping out physical boundaries with each actor beforehand.“We’re all sitting together, discussing the scene; we mark out where we’re happy to be touched,” Thackeray said. “Even to sit on George’s lap was like, ‘Are you happy with that?’ You keep that communication going.”Coordinators and consultants checked in constantly on the cast’s comfort levels. Jodie Mitchell, a consultant who advises productions about how to depict nonbinary characters and themes (and who also uses they/them pronouns), was initially brought on only to work on the script with the writers. Then one of the show’s directors, Runyararo Mapfumo, called, wanting to double check the details of scenes featuring nonbinary characters.“And then she really wanted me to come on set, which I think is indicative of how much this program really wants to get things right,” Mitchell said in an interview. “It’s not just about posturing for them or ticking the box of like, ‘Oh, we’ve checked it’s OK with someone.’ They really want to follow through to the highest level they can.”Mitchell worked on set for three days, focusing on nonbinary story lines, mostly consulting on those chest binding scenes involving Layla and Cal. Holdaway, who plays Layla, had the option of having an intimacy coordinator present for every scene.“But for a few of the scenes around bindings specifically, they were like, ‘Oh, actually, I just want someone who is trans and has lived experience with being trans in the room with me,’” Mitchell said. “So I was there.”Saleh, who plays Cal and also uses they/them pronouns, was a poet and musician before moving more seriously into acting (their third EP comes out Oct. 22). While Saleh has performed in some transgender- and queer-centric plays (“WAAFRIKA 1-2-3”) and theater groups (20% Theatre Company in Minneapolis), “Sex Education” was their TV debut.In a past theater production, “we had a lot of intimacy scenes, but we didn’t have a coordinator there,” Saleh said in a video interview last month. “So coming to ‘Sex Ed,’ it felt surprising how thoughtful and careful they were about our bodies, and about the ways that they helped us set boundaries with each other, and say what we weren’t and what we were comfortable with.”Like others on “Sex Education,” Saleh is a fan of the show as well as a star, and occasionally got caught up in resonant moments this season. Saleh was particularly moved by scenes portraying Eric Effiong (Ncuti Gatwa), a gay Ghanaian-Nigerian character who attends a family wedding in Nigeria. Eric sneaks out of the reception to go instead to an underground club pulsing with color, queerness and gender nonconformity.“When I was a teenager, if I had seen this show, I wouldn’t have held onto all of the gross feelings about myself, just in me being me,” Saleh said. “I wouldn’t have been as shameful about just existing.” More

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    How Nick Kroll Became the Picasso of Puberty

    Credit…Jeff Minton for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexFeatureHow Nick Kroll Became the Picasso of PubertyHis show “Big Mouth” is a seriously funny — and surprisingly mature — exploration of humanity’s most horrifying shared experience.Credit…Jeff Minton for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyVanessa Kroll walked into a writers’ room in Los Angeles on a Wednesday afternoon last year and smiled at the 14 people sprawled and seated and wedged inside it. One writer looked up and smiled back at her. “Oh, hi!” the writer said. “We were just talking about your brother’s dick.”Vanessa, who was stopping by to say hello while in town, made herself comfortable in a chair. Her younger brother, Nick Kroll, was seated at the far end of the room. Nick waved to his sister. The conversation continued. The room was not in fact talking about Kroll’s genitals, but about the genitals of a cartoon character codeveloped by him and named after him and based on a younger version of him who appears on the Netflix show “Big Mouth,” which has had three seasons and will have at least three more. It was a thin distinction but an important one, at least H.R.-wise. The discussion veered from individual penis specs to more abstract questioning and back again:Writer: Does small-dick porn exist?Writer: Yeah, I’ve seen a thing where a guy had a really small dick, and it was in a cage.Nick: What do you mean, in a cage?Writer: There was a cage around the dick, which was tiny.Nick: The dick was in prison for the greatest crime of all: being small.Writer: In a way, it’s his journey. Nick has dick-size insecurity. How does he come to terms with whatever his dick is?And so on, all day. If it was surreal to listen to 14 people talk in detail about the intimate anatomy of someone named Nick who was based on a real person named Nick who was sitting at the table and contributing to the discussion, surely it was weirder to be Nick himself. The more you thought about it, the more layers of peculiarity accrued. Here was a room of well-compensated and well-credentialed and — judging by the graveyard of Spindrift seltzer cans on the table — well-hydrated people going on for hours about the penises and vaginas and nipples of televised cartoon preteens with the focus and clarity of, I don’t know, Paul Volcker testifying before Congress. Some of them were doing it for the fifth year in a row. All of them would be coming back tomorrow to do it again, and from these conversations — and from animation, voicing and editing — would emerge another season of what I’m pretty sure is the greatest work of puberty-themed art ever created.It’s true that this is not a high bar to clear. Of all the traumas afflicting humans — betrayal, illness, death, war — puberty is the one that gets shortest shrift in representational form. There are countless books and films and graphic novels about coming of age, but it’s rare that they have such a singular focus on the biological mechanisms of the transformation. Maybe artists tend to avoid it because the experience is so grim that they can’t bear to revisit it or because much of it is about minors becoming sexual, which is (justifiably) difficult to depict in a palatable or legal form.And yet puberty is a worthy topic, rich in pathos and discovery and plot twists. Compared with aging, which happens over a long enough period that a person can become resigned to it, puberty is a drone strike of outrageous terror. I still remember the day I started sweating under my arms. (1998, seventh grade, Mr. Trapasso’s class.) The idea that I would spend the rest of my life attached to my own armpits — these moist and endlessly productive sites of pollution — seemed intolerable. Puberty is body horror in its purest form. It’s the menace that can’t be fled or destroyed; it’s the realization that your own self is the enemy at the gate. I am amazed that anyone gets through it. All of which is to say, it’s smart but also possibly inevitable that Kroll and his co-creators picked “animated series” as the format for “Big Mouth,” their puberty opus about a group of seventh graders in Westchester County.If puberty is eternal, ideas of what it means to enter young adulthood have changed. The new season of “Big Mouth,” which will be released Friday, introduces the character of Natalie, a transgender kid. When Natalie arrives at summer camp, she is met by a chorus of boys — bunkmates from before her transition — who pelt her with questions like “What does your crotch look like?” and “Do you pee standing up or lying down?” The girl campers offer an alternative reaction: “Yaas, queen! Go off, girlboss. Pussy hat. Slay.” The boys act like crude morons, which is dehumanizing to Natalie. The girls perform a well-intentioned but shallow cheerleading, which is also dehumanizing to Natalie. The joke, however fraught — however easy to simply not make — isn’t at her expense. Built into the scene is the touchy argument that contemporary life’s most sensitive issues deserve to be taken seriously but also joked about; that, in fact, license to do the second is contingent upon the first.Kroll grew up in Rye, N.Y., with three older siblings. In 1972 his father founded Kroll Inc., a lucrative corporate-intelligence firm that provided “risk solutions” to the financial sector (translation: a detective agency, but for businesses). Kroll didn’t lack much growing up, either materially or emotionally. He was close with his family. He had friends; his closest was Andrew Goldberg (one of the creators of “Big Mouth” and the basis of a character named, unsurprisingly, Andrew). He played sports. Everything was fine until high school, which he entered at barely five feet tall. By junior year he shot up about 10 inches and is now exactly the height of the average American man, but the chapter of time spent undersized among larger males affected Kroll’s psyche the way a can of Raid affects an ant.The problem wasn’t only that he was little for a freshman. The problem was also that by the time Kroll hit puberty, most of his peers had progressed through the initial stages of the disease and were in remission. “When you hit puberty in seventh or eighth grade and you’re superhorny all of a sudden, it’s not expected that you have an outlet for it,” Kroll told me. “But when you’re superhorny in high school, there’s the possibility that there’s an outcome with another person.” The possibility, but not the guarantee, or even the likelihood. “I spent a lot of high school having crushes on pretty girls who were my friends. Being like, ‘I really like you,’ and them being like: ‘That’s very sweet. I’m gonna go give that lacrosse player with multiple concussions a hand job.’” Kroll’s response took the form of repression: The next time he got a crush on someone, he rolled his feelings into a ball and buried it.Like many men who were rejected by girls in high school, Kroll turned to improv comedy, which he discovered while attending Georgetown. He moved to New York City in 2002 after graduating and got a job at a Gramercy public school, where he taught comedy to middle-school kids in an afternoon program. The job left his mornings and evenings free to do open mics and Upright Citizens Brigade classes and get an agent and start auditioning for voice-over work. In 2011 he released the comedy special on Comedy Central called “Thank You Very Cool,” which offers a useful data point for measuring the distance between Kroll’s Old Comedy (roughly, everything before “Big Mouth”) and his New Comedy (everything after).The Old Comedy was more abrasive and more childish, though not in an unfunny way. He played characters that could have plausibly been drawn from his own life, like a rich imbecile named Aspen Bruckenheimer who considers himself a martyr for having flown coach one time. But he also played a growling Mexican radio D.J. named El Chupacabra and a Pitbull-style pop star with a raspy Cuban accent. Then there’s the part in “Thank You Very Cool” in which Kroll plays Fabrice Fabrice, a seemingly gay and “possibly Blatino” craft-services worker. As Fabrice, he tells the following joke:“I’m not allowed to say ‘retarded’ on TV, so what I’m gonna say is ‘a frittata person.’ There’s not a big difference between celebrities and frittatas. They both get driven everywhere, people are always asking who dressed them, and if you make eye contact with them, they [expletive] flip out at you.”Credit…Jeff Minton for The New York TimesNow, this is not a joke Kroll would perform in 2020. It is almost a textbook example of a bit that would get a person in hot water today, not merely because it mocks three minority groups but also because many people just … don’t find jokes of this kind funny anymore. Like it or not, the political and the aesthetic have become inseparable in comedy these days. It would be understandable — not necessarily sympathetic, but understandable — if Kroll reacted with a sense of bitterness at being forced to rethink his comedy. But he hasn’t done that. His comedy is still his comedy, and he’s not aggrieved at the process of, as he calls it, “gaining perspective.”Take, for example, the first time the creators of “Big Mouth” really came under fire on Twitter. This was last fall. The outcry was against a scene that some viewers perceived as insensitive. It’s too long to summarize here, but basically, a character on the show differentiated pansexuality from bisexuality by implying that bisexuality was not inclusive of nonbinary people. There was a narrow but loud outcry. Perhaps surprising, it was the first time Kroll had gotten significant pushback on “Big Mouth,” and I was curious to know a few things about the incident. Starting with: How does a person in his position become aware of such things? Does a Netflix executive leave a menacing “We need to talk” voice mail message?“All of a sudden there was an email saying something like — not ‘The pansexuality crisis,’ but an email heading that was between us and Netflix and P.R. that was like, ‘Pansexuality controversy,’” Kroll said. He delved into the email and the tweets that sparked it. There were calls and meetings. The show’s co-creators drafted a letter of apology. Their respective teams weighed in on the letter, and the letter was posted to Twitter. This is how P.R. blunders are handled in the 21st century.As Kroll saw it, the bigger issue wasn’t about a vocal minority on Twitter policing comedy but about ego management. “The question is, Can you take the note?” he said. Can you unwind your defensive stance? Can you question your own judgment? And that of your best friend? In the pansexual case, yes.But, I asked him, what if you get a bad note? Not all notes are good notes, even if they go viral on Twitter. What do you do then?“Well,” he said, “you have to look at the note. And take an honest look at yourself. And when we honestly took a look at that scene, we can say we didn’t do it as well as we wanted to.” He shrugged. Naturally, the response to the response to the pansexual scene caused its own hand-wringing on Twitter; in this case, about the imposition of a very specific brand of progressive identity politics on comedy. But Kroll didn’t see it that way. The freedom to transgress had not been revoked; you just had to think a second longer about what you were transgressing. Also, comic talent has always encompassed an ability to self-adjust at lightning speed. It’s called reading the room. (“Big Mouth” adjusted again to the tenor of conversation this summer, when the actor Jenny Slate, who is white, resigned from her voice role as Missy, a half-Black character.)Kroll told a story by way of explanation. Last year, he and his extended family went on a trip to the Galápagos. As they traveled from island to island, observing the archipelago’s famously rich diversity of flora and fauna, he became especially interested in a species of marine iguana that can survive even if its tail is bitten off by a bird. The marine iguana was a metaphor, he felt: We all need to be the iguana. “The landscape is changing,” he said. “I can either dig my feet in and be like, ‘This isn’t fair!’ or I can be like: ‘OK! How do I adapt?’”Kroll suggested an uphill climb for our next interview. On the trail at Griffith Park, he explained his reasoning: Hiking put you in a situation where you weren’t using your phone, it prevented you from getting sleepy (which he often does) and it provided a scenic visual experience. Also, he added, “You’re walking straight forward and you don’t have to look at each other, and for guys that can be helpful.” For a winter outing in Los Angeles he wore an olive fleece vest, high-traction shoes and pants that looked antimicrobial. It was 8:15 a.m.The surrounding vegetation retained the rare smell of rain, which had come down the night before and subdued the path’s dust. This was where he’d come up with a lot of the ideas for “Big Mouth” — on strolls with collaborators, where they would work out beats and then carry the beats back to the writers’ room and merge them with ideas from the rest of the team, in a system that Kroll and the show’s co-creators had refined over time. The writers’ room had Rules. No phones or screens allowed. The hours — 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.-ish — were fairly consistent. “There are a lot of writers’ rooms that are there until 2 in the morning, and I’m like, ‘How is that possible?’” Kroll said. “And they’re like, ‘Well, we watched eight videos of people we hate.’ We don’t do that at all.”Keeping up an aerobic pace, we reached the summit quickly and looked out over Los Angeles. It was ravishing. He greeted a dog that reminded him of Freddie Mercury and remarked on the ubiquity of coyotes in the area. “I’m gonna be a real basic fella and take a panoramic,” Kroll said. As he panned, a faint smell of smoke arrived on the breeze.Left to right: Maya Rudolph as Connie the Hormone Monstress, Nick Kroll as Nick Birch and John Mulaney as Andrew Glouberman in “Big Mouth.”Credit…Netflix“Have you ever cooked or baked in a wood-fire oven?” he asked.Yes, I said, but it activates my rosacea.Kroll nodded. “I have that too.” Not rosacea, he clarified, but eczema — a similarly demonic skin condition. “From what I can tell, the Jews get eczema and the Irish get rosacea. Maybe if you did a 23andMe, you’d find out that you’re Irish.”Kroll covers skin problems extensively in his stand-up. He has had eczema since he was a kid, and it has gotten worse over time. “It sucks, it sucks,” he said. Before embarking on his most recent stand-up tour, Kroll went hiking with his friend and collaborator Jason Mantzoukas, running material past him — including the skin stuff — and Mantzoukas kept delivering the same note: “Dig deeper. You’re on the cusp of something interesting, but what was actually going on?”Kroll tracked the eczema thread back to puberty. It was maddening, he said, to be in your 40s and not know how to handle your skin. If not now, when? The eczema was a wormhole back into adolescence. On “Big Mouth,” this sense of helpless mortification is personified in the form of Hormone Monsters, which are literal monsters that are only visible to children in the throes of puberty. Maya Rudolph voices Connie, a confusingly sexy monster with cloven hooves and ripe thighs. Kroll voices Maury, the smuttiest monster, who does stuff like burst from a desk during Sex Ed class and hover behind a student as the kid struggles to suppress an erection. “Fallopian, what a savory word,” Maury murmurs into the boy’s ear. “Let’s go to the bathroom and climax into that thin toilet paper.” The personification of glandular secretions as chaotic beasts is so crystalline a metaphor that it’s almost not a metaphor.What had become clear in creating “Big Mouth” with a diverse roomful of writers, Kroll said, was that every version of personhood came with its own set of problems — its own Hormone Monster — and that nobody had it easy. Puberty was the mighty leveler. It spared no girl or boy or gender-nonconforming child. If Kroll could mine his own adolescence for laughs, imagine the possibilities lurking in the histories of comedy writers whose lives looked vastly different from his! For every eczema-riddled short guy, there was an acne-smothered wet-dreaming giant, or an asexual unwieldy-breasted loner, or a wispily-mustached smelly jock. Every adult on earth has a puberty story. The trick was to construct a room where those stories could be told.When I visited the writers’ room on a second afternoon, Kroll was eating a Sweetgreen salad and had time to give a tour of the premises, forking leaves as he walked. Here was his new office, which contained almost nothing except a computer and a view of the parking lot. Here was the kitchen, which featured a fridge crammed with alternative milks. Here was the wall filled with pictures of fans’ “Big Mouth” tattoos. One person had gotten a pubic hair inked on his foot. Someone else (I hope) had a line drawing of a unicorn having sex with Mr. Clean. And here, again, was the writer’s room, a too-small rectangle cluttered with water bottles, colored pencils and limp backpacks. Pinned to the wall were index cards scribbled with things like SOCIETAL BREAKDOWN and YOU ARE ALONE and POO-POO.The writers filtered back in after lunch and got to work. A few days earlier they had been dispatched on research assignments, each tackling a different topic — cystic acne, female friendship, revenge porn — to see whether it might qualify as a theme for Season 5. They had taken turns presenting their findings to the group; the research was now absorbed and being transformed into story lines. The numbers one through 10, for the season’s 10 episodes, were written on a whiteboard, and under the numbers were plot points on colored index cards. It looked like Tetris. As they shifted cards around, an assistant kept notes on a running doc projected onto a screen. Conversation veered from Large Questions (Why does trauma affect people differently? How do you know if your father loves you?) to minor tangents (meatball subs; something called Big Nipple Energy).The environment seemed terrifyingly unstructured. There were no assigned seats or hourly schedules, but people seemed to intuit their lanes. If you took the governing laws of the room and made them visible, it would look like one of those museum laser-security systems in a heist movie. In these ways it was like all writers’ rooms, but in other ways it was different. Kroll was constantly interrupted but did not himself interrupt, and there was no sneeze within five meters that did not receive his blessing — both minor, but detectable inversions of the customary alpha-male dynamic. The word “nut” was used as a verb 19 times. And the air seemed pumped with a kind of atomized truth serum, as writers spoke freely about their childhood weight problems, their family histories of abuse, their masturbation habits and the porn they watched. This, Goldberg later explained, was a reason they banned phones from the room. “We talk about vulnerable things,” he said, “and it would feel [expletive] to share something personal and have someone be checking their email.” The pandemic, of course, evaporated this and all the other rules. Ever since what Kroll called “the Tom Hanks Moment” — when the actor revealed that he and his wife had Covid-19 — the team has convened and written over Zoom.There’s one episode in particular that distills the show’s essence into a single story line. It’s about the day a girl named Jessi gets her first period. Jessi wakes up and pulls on a pair of white shorts for a class trip to the Statue of Liberty. (White shorts are the Chekhov’s gun of menstrual narratives.) On her way up the interior staircase, Jessi starts bleeding. She runs to the bathroom and looks for something to MacGyver a pad out of, but there’s no toilet paper or seat covers or other wadding material. Then she’s kidnapped by the Statue of Liberty, who has come alive as a cigarette-smoking Frenchwoman. In a heavy accent the statue conveys to Jessi that her period is a kind of synechdochal feminine hex. “Being a woman is misery,” the statue sighs, exhaling smoke.The Liberty Island gift shop sells 9/11 memorial beach towels, one of which Jessi obtains and fashions into an improvised diaper. When I watched the scene, I was flummoxed. It was the only time I’d seen a first period depicted onscreen as simultaneously gruesome, funny and heart-pinching. In other words, realistically. At some point in her life, every woman has fashioned a metaphorical 9/11 towel into a diaper. How could Nick Kroll — a compassionate human, sure, but a male one — grasp the psychedelic torment of this milestone? How could he know that menstruating can feel like a near-death experience for a kid? Maybe he could or maybe he couldn’t. But he knew people who did, and he got them to talk about it.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Gillian Anderson: 'Sex Education' Makes It Okay to Be Who You Are

    Netflix

    Thrilled to be part of the hit Netflix series, the actress playing sex therapist Jean Milburn expresses her appreciation over its diverse cast and discussions of sensitive and taboo subject matters.
    Jun 26, 2020
    AceShowbiz – Gillian Anderson is thrilled to be part of a series like “Sex Education” that allows those “questioning their sexuality” to express themselves.
    The actress, who plays a sex therapist on the hit Netflix program, was drawn to the show because of the boundaries it pushes when it comes to tackling sensitive and taboo subject matters.
    “It makes it okay to be who you are, however you are,” she tells Deadline. “The fact that kids who are questioning their sexuality, or have other questions they’re curious about, can watch it, often with their parents, is beautiful.”
    The 51-year-old adds that the diverse cast on the show has also resonated with viewers, which took her some time to appreciate.
    “I’m not even sure I realized the extent to which it does that until after I’d seen it,” she admits. “You can read so much on a page, and then the minute you start seeing all of the fabulously diverse faces, and really commit to all the different storylines and the diverse dilemmas, you realize how unique and embracing the show actually is.”

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