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    Kevin Costner Couldn’t Get His Golden Globe Due to California Storms

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    When the Golden Globes returned to NBC on Tuesday night after last year’s telecast was canceled amid concerns about the organization that gives out the awards, it was an open question whether Hollywood’s biggest stars would come back. Plenty did, making the evening feel in many respects like a return to shows of the past.But a handful of winning actors and actresses were not there to collect their awards.Cate Blanchett, who won for her portrayal of a virtuosic conductor in “Tár,” was not on hand to accept her Globe for best actress in a motion picture drama; she was said to be filming in Britain. And Amanda Seyfried, who won for her portrayal of the failed biotech founder Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout,” was unable to accept her award; she was said to be working on a new musical.Kevin Costner could not pick up his statuette for best actor in a TV drama series for “Yellowstone” for another reason: he was prevented from driving to Beverly Hills from his home in Santa Barbara by the severe rainstorms and flooding that have hit California. Nearly 50,000 residents across California have received evacuation orders, and at least 17 people have died since December.“This is a sad story right now,” said Regina Hall, who accepted his award, as audience members laughed. “He’s stuck in Santa Barbara. Let’s pray, everyone.”Zendaya, who plays the troubled teen in “Euphoria,” won best actress in a TV drama series and was also absent from the award show. The actress apologized on Instagram for not being able to attend, thanked the Golden Globes and shared her admiration for her fellow nominees. More

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      Amanda Seyfried on Her Emmy Nomination for ‘The Dropout’

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      The actress received her first Emmy nomination for bringing nuance to her portrayal in “The Dropout” of the disgraced Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes.Even in a television season rife with grifters, poseurs and con artists, Amanda Seyfried was very good at being bad. In the Hulu mini-series “The Dropout,” she starred as Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder and former chief executive of Theranos, a once-hot health technology start-up that promised an easy method for testing blood with a single finger prick.Seyfried, a star of films like “Mank,” “Mamma Mia!” and “Mean Girls,” managed to fashion a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of Holmes, at least at the outset: She begins the series as an ambitious college student with dreams of becoming the next Steve Jobs, and we follow her on her journey as she becomes ever more ruthlessly determined to realize her all-consuming goal.When her downfall arrives, a viewer might almost — almost — feel sorry for Seyfried’s Holmes as her company collapses and she cuts herself off from former friends and colleagues. (A real-life jury, however, did not; Holmes was convicted in January on four counts of criminal fraud.)On Tuesday, Seyfried received an Emmy nomination as a lead actress in a limited or anthology series or movie, the first Emmy nod of her career. She spoke by phone from the set of “The Crowded Room,” an Apple TV+ anthology series in which she will star with Tom Holland, to talk about “The Dropout,” Holmes, bad dancing and primal screams. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.This was an almost eight-hour-long story that took several months to produce. How does it feel to receive an Emmy nomination for it?I’ve been making movies since I was 17, and this was different. I almost want to say, it’s different because it was seen. A lot of times, you do things and they don’t get seen, but it doesn’t take away from the experience of making it. With this, I was getting to explore a character in a way that I haven’t before. It’s a pretty insane true story, and it was pretty well-written. I’m glad it turned out the way it did and that people like it.Were you surprised by how sympathetic your Elizabeth was, at least in the pages of “The Dropout,” when compared with what events might have suggested?I wasn’t surprised at all. There’s no point in making this show if you’re not going to try to understand this person. In order to understand somebody, you need to have empathy. It doesn’t matter who it is. Everybody’s human. Everybody’s got layers.Few of us have been in such high-stakes situations, but Elizabeth’s desperation to keep papering over one failure after another, and the escalation of that, felt palpable.During shooting, the way I was able to justify the doubling-down that she did was that she really believed that she was sacrificing in order to actually find the answer. And, quote-unquote, save the world. People are willing to overlook many, many things for the sake of the bigger picture.On a lighter note, at least, you got some opportunities to do some really bad dancing. Is that a form of acting in itself?Well, no. Picture anybody alone in front of a mirror. And then start dancing. The intimacy of being alone and the possibility of what you’re not seeing — everybody’s a 13-year-old, trying on clothes. We can all relate to that. That dancing was a direct line into Elizabeth Holmes’s identity, and it was a genius way of getting into her.The final episode has an indelible moment in which Elizabeth is outside with her dog and lets out a primal scream. You must have had to shoot several takes of that — was it grueling to do over and over?Ugh. Uh-huh. There was even the question of, do we need her to scream? Is it more like an implosion? What would that desperation look like? It was so much pressure, and I tried the scream, and the dog cowered, so we took the dog out. It was not kind to the animal. So that was pretty much the only take where you see the dog, right off the bat — the animal caregivers came over, and I said, I get it. I didn’t know what I was going to do.You can’t really explain to the dog what you’re doing.“Oh, no, we’re just acting, man. Everything’s cool.” I also get really nervous about losing my voice because I’m a singer. I was always in touch with my voice coach for anything, especially the deeper speaking. The scream, I was just like, I don’t think I can do anymore.Since finishing the show, do you feel tempted to use The Voice in real-life situations?To me, it’s an accent. For a long time, I refused to do it. And then after the trial, a couple months later, one of the doormen at the building where I’m staying, they’re like, can you do the voice? And I did it. And I was like, Hmm, it feels good. It’s done me well. More

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      'The Dropout' Shows Elizabeth Holmes's Style Evolution

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      How the costume and makeup teams for “The Dropout,” a new Hulu series, transformed Amanda Seyfried into the disgraced Theranos founder.It started, inevitably, with the turtleneck.In Amanda Seyfried’s first fitting for her role as Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout,” Claire Parkinson, the show’s costume designer, focused on the disgraced Theranos founder’s trademark top: a black Issey Miyake turtleneck pulled from the uniform of her idol Steve Jobs. The shirt doesn’t appear until halfway through the Hulu series, set to premiere March 3, but, Ms. Parkinson said, “we needed to figure out what we were building toward.”She had found a vintage Miyake turtleneck and dupes from dozens of other brands. In the end, she went with a semi-synthetic number from Wolford.“It had the perfect stretchiness that she could play with,” Ms. Parkinson said, referring to the fiddling and finger-worrying that Ms. Seyfried performs throughout the series, her jaw flexed and eyes held wide. Even as her voice deepens and her posture straightens out, Hulu’s Elizabeth Holmes looks consistently awkward and maladroit.Claire Parkinson, the show’s costume designer, opted for a Wolford turtleneck, rather than the Issey Miyake version Ms. Holmes wore.Hulu“I’d make Amanda scrunch up her face when I was applying her makeup,” said Jorjee Douglass, the makeup artist who reinterpreted Ms. Holmes’s clumpy mascara and cakey foundation.Such details were essential to the construction of Ms. Holmes’s identity in Silicon Valley, from her initial investor meetings to her fraud trial, where she showed up with beach waves and a diaper bag. (Ms. Holmes was found guilty on one count of conspiracy and three counts of wire fraud, and will be sentenced in September.)“Elizabeth Holmes is costuming herself, and we are costuming her as she’s costuming herself,” said Elizabeth Meriwether, the creator and executive producer of “The Dropout,” adapted from the podcast of the same name. “There’s always a lot of emotional weight behind what she’s wearing.”Understand the Elizabeth Holmes TrialElizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, was found guilty of four counts of fraud in a case that came to symbolize the pitfalls of Silicon Valley’s culture of hustle, hype and greed. She is set to be sentenced on Sept. 26.Holmes’s Epic Rise and Fall: Silicon Valley’s philosophy of “fake it until you make it” finally got its comeuppance.Key Takeaways: Few tech executives are charged with fraud and even fewer are convicted. Here are five takeaways from the verdict.Analysis: Ms. Holmes wasn’t a creature of Silicon Valley, or so the refrain went. But her trial showed otherwise.What Happens Next: Ms. Holmes now awaits sentencing. She can appeal the conviction, her sentence or both.The costume team dressed Ms. Seyfried in versions of pieces that Ms. Holmes had been photographed in or that felt true to the story’s place and time period, from her 1990s Houston childhood up to 2015, when the Stanford dropout became a biotech titan worth billions.Her wardrobe is filled with ill-fitting and unflattering secondhand pieces that Ms. Parkinson, who was nominated for two Emmys for her work on “The Politician,” sourced from eBay, Etsy, Depop, Poshmark and costume warehouses in Los Angeles, where she and her wife live part-time. The items are drab, the labels practical: Banana Republic, J. Crew and the like.Ana Arriola, a former Apple designer who briefly worked at Theranos and staged an image intervention with Ms. Holmes when she was her boss, met with the show’s writers room. “She told us the story of how when she met Elizabeth, she was wearing Christmas sweaters,” Ms. Meriwether said. “We pressed her and we were like, ‘Actual reindeer sweaters?’”It turned out Ms. Arriola meant pullovers with fair-isle and snowflake patterns, which appear on the show, before they’re swapped out for a shiny black replica of a Patagonia vest that Ms. Parkinson’s team made by hand.As Elizabeth settles into the role of founder, she trades fair-isle sweaters for a Patagonia puffer vest (handmade by the show’s costume team).HuluWhile the overall look of the production is unflashy and heavy on earth tones, Ms. Parkinson let the surrounding cast stand in chic contrast to the central figure. Elizabeth’s mother wears Chanel and Tory Burch (Ms. Parkinson’s inspiration for her was Princess Diana), George Shultz (Sam Waterston) has “beautiful bespoke” suiting, and Ian Gibbons (the British chemist played by Stephen Fry) wears sweaters and trousers that telegraph taste and integrity. “Every single character had huge closets,” Ms. Parkinson said.In her fittings with Ms. Seyfried, Ms. Parkinson sought to render something askew about the fit. “Most people look good in black,” she said. “So how can we make it not look good?” Her solution was to play around with the bunching, billowing and wrinkling.Elizabeth’s wardrobe becomes more polished as the show progresses (out with the Gap, in with the Gucci!), but the pieces still sit oddly on Ms. Seyfried. “My goal here was to make it seem like it actually is a costume,” Ms. Parkinson said.She was hired to work in the show in March 2020. Because of the pandemic, filming didn’t begin for a year and a half, over which Kate McKinnon dropped out as the lead and Ms. Seyfried stepped in.Separately, Ms. Parkinson got married; bought an 1860s house in Litchfield County, Conn.; and dealt with a case of Covid-19 in March 2021, which forced her to pull out of a project that was shooting in Atlanta and send her sister, Lily Parkinson, also a costume designer and personal stylist, in her place.When “The Dropout” began shooting in June 2021, Ms. Parkinson had spent more than a year mulling the inner life and outer appearance of Ms. Holmes. Wearing a uniform as armor has long been a favored strategy of women seeking respect in the male-dominated preserve of Silicon Valley. While men are encouraged to telegraph their nonconformist credibility via sweatshirts and soccer slides, women face pressure to look pulled together yet fashion agnostic.Victoria Hitchcock, a Bay Area stylist, keeps a list of chic yet smart designers she suggests for female clients, including the Row, Stella McCartney and Saint Laurent. “I also have a list of designers I would not recommend my clients wear,” she said. “Things that are super-feminine and flowery” are big no-nos.While male founders are encouraged to telegraph their nonconformist credibility through clothes, women face pressure to look presentable yet fashion agnostic.Hulu“I’m wearing an Ulla Johnson blouse right now, but I wouldn’t put that on somebody who’s wanting to exude confidence and knowledge,” Ms. Hitchcock added.Ms. Holmes’s uniform of choice, which would become a punchline, started out as sartorial Soylent for someone who could not be bothered. Clothes were a nuisance to her, a point dramatized in a pre-turtleneck scene involving a pesky bra strap and a pair of scissors.“‘Why’ was a word I kept asking myself,” Ms. Parkinson said of her time researching Ms. Holmes. “I was always like: ‘Why is she wearing that?’ They were all befuddling choices.” But one image struck her as looking the most natural: Ms. Holmes at Burning Man, wearing a bulky coat with a furry collar and oversize pink sunglasses.“The thing I liked about that is that’s a costume, and it almost feels like she’s comfortable in it,” Ms. Parkinson said. “She’s completely happy and in her own world.” More

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      ‘A Mouthful of Air’ Review: Depression Clouds a Domestic Idyll

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      Amanda Seyfried stars as a young mother suffering from postpartum depression in Amy Koppelman’s weepy adaptation of her novel.A young mother battles postpartum depression in the arid melodrama “A Mouthful of Air.” Living in Manhattan in the ’90s, Julie (Amanda Seyfried) is a vision of bliss. Sunlight pours through the windows of her vibrantly colored apartment as she lays sprawled beside her cherubic infant son. But minutes later, the domestic idyll cracks when Julie settles on the floor to slit her wrists.Directed by Amy Koppelman and based on her novel of the same name, “A Mouthful of Air” aspires to show how depression can sully even the loveliest of scenes. The scenes the movie chooses, however, play like a parody of white privilege: Julie and her husband Ethan (Finn Wittrock) are an affluent, affectionate couple whose greatest concern is whether they should relocate to Westchester. Julie’s pampered lifestyle is even such that, upon her suicide attempt, she is carried to an ambulance by her doting doorman.In the months following her rehabilitation, Julie suffers ongoing anxiety. Grocery shopping is fraught with indecision over food brands, and later, a discussion about Julie’s second child spurs a panic attack over whether the baby will like her hair. Koppelman uses jump cuts, a hand-held camera and sound effects to sketch Julie’s distress, but absent a more penetrative window into her character, the movie’s portrait of depression often feels as facile as its opening image: Julie’s wide blue eyes with a single tear trailing down her cheek.A Mouthful of AirRated R for language and inner turmoil. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Things Heard & Seen’ Review: Another Real Estate Nightmare

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      Amanda Seyfried and James Norton move into a haunted house in this busy, creaky Netflix thriller.I’ll say this much for “Things Heard & Seen”: it absolutely lives up to its name. If, out of curiosity or inertia, you let your Netflix algorithm have its way for two hours, you will definitely hear and see some things, though you may have trouble afterward remembering just what those things were.The movie, directed by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, is based on a novel by Elizabeth Brundage called “All Things Cease to Appear,” which is a more intriguing title, though perhaps not as cinematic. In any case, the person doing most of the seeing and hearing is Catherine Claire (Amanda Seyfried), who has left New York City and moved into an old farmhouse in the Hudson Valley with her husband, George (James Norton), and their young daughter, Franny (Ana Sophia Heger).What happens up there might be taken as a cautionary tale for those who fled the city during the pandemic, or as an invitation to schadenfreude for those who didn’t. Not that “Things Heard & Seen” insists on relevance. It takes place in 1980, and as in many modern thrillers, the period setting seems mainly to be a matter of technology. Back then, there were no Google image searches, no weather apps and no Zillow listings. It was a good time to be a ghost.And, apparently, a bad time to be married to a professor of art history at a small liberal-arts college. George is a smug nugget of preppy pretension who has recently completed a dissertation on the painters of the Hudson River School. That lands him a gig at Saginaw College, and Catherine leaves behind her career as an art restorer to follow him there.The department chair (F. Murray Abraham) is a devotee of the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century Swedish mystic much admired by 19th-century American intellectuals. Among his followers was the landscape painter George Inness, a subject of George Claire’s research.These references add an overlay of cultural seriousness to an unsuspenseful and secondhand psychological haunted-house thriller. Shortly after their arrival, Catherine starts, well, hearing and seeing things. An old Bible appears on a shelf. The piano starts playing itself. Franny’s night light behaves strangely, and a spectral woman lurks in the shadows of her room. There’s also the smell of car exhaust in the middle of the night.The house, it turns out, had previously been the scene of marital unhappiness and possible murder, both in the 1800s and more recently. As George reveals himself to be a cheater, a gaslighter and an all-around sociopath, it looks as though the Claires might be headed in that direction, too.Which should be more interesting than it is. As should the college-town setting, which is a hive of badly kept secrets and barely controlled lust, with a population that includes some very fine character actors (Rhea Seehorn, James Urbaniak and Karen Allen in addition to Abraham). There are also two attractive targets for the Claires’ roving eyes: Alex Neustaedter, as a hunky handyman, and Natalia Dyer, as a Cornell student taking a leave of absence to train horses.But “Things Heard & Seen” is less than the sum of its potentially intriguing parts. Rather than interweaving domestic drama, supernatural mumbo-jumbo and campus naughtiness, Pulcini and Berman lurch from one scene to the next, squandering scares and undermining the momentum of the story. There should be more to see here.Things Heard & SeenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Best Performances of 2020

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      One day, we’ll look back on this year and bawl. But we should also remember that there were professionals out there who dared to bring joy to our screens. More