Station Eleven (TV Program)

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    Will Children Save Us at the End of the World?

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    A wave of recent and forthcoming TV series, books and movies meditate on how young people might fare during an apocalyptic event — with varying degrees of optimism.The noxious orange smoke that descended over New York this month reminded me of a parlor game I used to play with my husband: Would we have what it takes to survive the apocalypse? We abruptly stopped enjoying this thought experiment in March 2020 and when I had a child the next year, I became even less tolerant of blithely considering the end of the world. But now, suddenly, versions of our game are everywhere, in a new and near-unavoidable genre: stories that revisit our pandemic trauma via even worse — but plausible! — scenarios. Making these works doubly poignant, many of them have children at their center.Mackenzie Davis in the series “Station Eleven” (2021-22).Ian Watson/HBO MaxThere’s “Station Eleven,” the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel about the aftermath of a swine flu, which was turned into a much-discussed 2021 HBO Max series, in which an 8-year-old girl manages to survive with the help of a stranger turned surrogate parent. “The Last of Us,” HBO’s video game adaptation, which debuted in January, features a zombie-fungus pandemic; a seemingly immune teenage girl is humanity’s one hope. “Leave the World Behind,” Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel — soon to be a movie — about a bourgeois family vacation gone very bad, features a vague but menacing threat of apocalypse. Also loosely belonging to this category are the shows “Yellowjackets” (2021-present) — a girls’ soccer team turns to cannibalism after a plane crash — and “Class of ’07” (2023) — a school reunion coincides with a climate apocalypse — and the new-to-Netflix 2019 Icelandic movie “Woman at War” (a renegade activist tries to stop the destruction of the environment and adopt a child).These stories are, in various ways, about how and whether our children can survive the mess that we’ve left them — and what it will cost them to do so. In “Station Eleven,” post-pans (children who were born after the pandemic) are both beacons of optimism and conscripted killers deployed by a self-styled prophet who hopes to erase anyone who holds on to the trauma of the past. And in “The Last of Us,” Ellie, the young girl with possible immunity (played by the actor Bella Ramsey), is forced to kill to survive, and to grapple with whether it’s worth sacrificing her own life in the search for a cure.The anxieties that these works explore — about planetary destruction and what we did to enable it — are, evidence suggests, affecting the desire of some to have children at all, either because of fear for their future or a belief that not procreating will help stave off the worst. But following the children in these fictions, who didn’t create the conditions of their suffering, isn’t just a devastating guilt trip. Almost all these stories also frame children as our best hope, as we so often do in real life. Children, we need to believe, are resilient and ingenious in ways that adults aren’t. In these stories, when the phones stop working and Amazon stops delivering, it’s children, less set in their ways, who can rebuild and imagine something different. They’re our victims but also our saviors.W. W. Norton & Company, via Associated PressNowhere is this more explicit than in Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel, “A Children’s Bible,” in which a group of middle-aged college friends rent an old mansion for a summer reunion. When a superstorm sets off a chain of events that erodes society, the parents drink and take ecstasy but the kids — teens — remain clearheaded. They care for a baby, grow food and plan for an unrecognizable future. This fantasy of a youth-led solution is both hopeful, Millet implies, and a deplorable shirking of responsibility. (It recalls somewhat Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of grown-ups: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”) Its price, these works suggest, is a childhood robbed of innocence. In the rare moments when kids are allowed to be kids in these narratives, there is always a sense of foreboding; for every romp through an abandoned shopping mall, there’s a zombie lying in wait in a Halloween store. “Is this really all they had to worry about?” Ellie asks Joel, her companion in “The Last of Us” (played by Pedro Pascal), about the teenage girls who lived before the fungus hit. “Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt.”Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in the forthcoming movie “Leave the World Behind.”JoJo Whilden/NetflixThis current crop of postapocalyptic stories isn’t the first to feature children prominently. Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” published in 2006, early in the so-called war on terror, followed a father and son after civilization had been leveled by an unnamed flash from the sky. (“Are we still the good guys?” the son asks the father as they ignore others’ pain in their struggle to survive.) The movie “Children of Men,” released the same year, imagines a world so destroyed that most humans have lost the ability to reproduce — and hope lies with the only pregnant woman. Of course, one reason these fictions foreground children is that a world without them is the most doomed world of all. It’s no accident that some of the earliest near-apocalypse stories — the biblical flood, the one in the ancient Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh” — imagined that the world was saved by bringing the “seed of all living creatures,” as the latter work puts it, onto a boat.But maybe more than any particular fear of a civilization-ending calamity, these fictions are most useful for helping us work through an unavoidable, terrifying truth on an individual level. That the world, in whatever state it descends to or remains in, will go on without us after our death, and unless tragedy strikes, our children will live in it without us. It’s not comforting to imagine, but it can be illuminating. They will navigate things we can’t imagine, but — just maybe — they’ll do better than we did, even without our help. More

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      Best TV Episodes of 2022

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      TV in the streaming era is an endless feast. This year, series like “Barry,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Pachinko,” “Station Eleven” and “This Fool” offered some of the best bites.TV can be a lot of different things these days. So can a TV episode: It can be a “chapter” of a visual novel, a revelatory stand-up special or a straight-up sitcom installment.You’ll find all of those and more in our choices of some of the best individual pieces we’ve sampled this year. Television in 2022 may have been all about the binge, but sometimes what you remember most about a feast is simply that one perfect bite. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Amber Brown’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 3: ‘No Place Like Two Homes’Aw man, I loved this light tween drama about a sixth grader whose parents are newly divorced. In the show’s third episode, Amber (Carsyn Rose) is trying to build up the courage to audition for the school play — she hopes to follow in her father’s drama-club footsteps so they can bond more now that he’s moved back to town. “Do you think he likes me?” she asks her best friend. Of course, her friend says. He’s your father; he loves you. “Well, I know he loves me,” Amber replies. “I just wonder if he likes me.” It’s this kind of brutal, beautiful poignancy that makes the show so special. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) MARGARET LYONS“710N,” from the third season of “Barry,” included some of the year’s most thrilling action sequences.HBO‘Barry’ (HBO)Season 3, Episode 6: ‘710N’More than one scene from this stunner — a high-speed motorcycle chase through a traffic jam, a high-firepower shootout at a car dealership — would have been the high point of any other series. But there was more to “710N” than simply showing off Bill Hader’s directing chops. The action sequences, simultaneously thrilling, slapstick and bathetic, served the larger purpose of “Barry,” to tell the story of an antihero without celebrating his antiheroism. (Streaming on HBO Max.) PONIEWOZIK‘Black Bird’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 4: ‘WhatsHerName’Dennis Lehane’s mini-series was a showcase for the fine and distinctive actor Paul Walter Hauser, who plays Larry Hall, a convicted kidnapper and suspected serial killer who is close to having his convictions overturned and walking free. It is nominally the story (based on an autobiographical novel) of another convict, played by Taron Egerton, who makes a deal to befriend Hall and compromise him. But Hauser’s soft, sibilant, weirdly sexy performance is all that matters. In the fourth episode, Hall is put in charge of cleaning up after a prison riot (itself a shocking yet poetic spasm of violence, as directed by Jim McKay), and Hauser conveys a deep, narcissistic satisfaction that puts cleanliness next to beastliness. (Streaming on Apple TV+) MIKE HALEShauna Higgins, left, and Dearbhaile McKinney in “Derry Girls.” An episode this season flashed back to when the parents on the show were rebellious teens.Netflix‘Derry Girls’ (Netflix)Season 3, Episode 5Lisa McGee’s rowdy Northern Irish comedy used a high school reunion to turn its clock back from the 1990s to the 1970s, visiting the adolescence of its Derry Mums. The half-hour brought in a new cast to play its adult characters as punk-era teens, but McGee established such a voice and sense of character over three short seasons that you could instantly recognize the elders in their younger versions (and see their daughters in them as well). The tart, heartfelt episode underscored how teenage rebellions, like some political ones, cut across generations. PONIEWOZIK‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’ (FX on Hulu)Season 1, Episode 7: ‘Me-Time’This limited series worked hard to re-create the pyrotechnics of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel, from the upside-down shots that mimicked the topsy-turvy imagery of the book cover to a copious use of voice-over. (Brodesser-Akner, who created the series and wrote this episode, is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.) Here, it pulled off the novel’s signature reversal — telling the title character’s divorce story from the perspective of his wife — using the tools of the screen, in particular a wrenching performance by Claire Danes, an emotional volcano who has rarely erupted better. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK‘Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal’ (Adult Swim)Season 2, Episodes 7-9: ‘The Colossaeus’ (parts I, II and III)In its second season, “Primal” expanded its scope and time frame, dipping into 19th-century England for an episode and introducing various other clans to our cave man and dinosaur protagonists. But it was this three-part blood bath, culminating in a triumphant slave rebellion at sea, that exemplified the show’s tender nuance and also its unrelenting savagery. It was a reminder that while cartoon violence can be exhausting and meaningless in live-action shows, it can still be mesmerizing and meaningful when done where it belongs. “Primal” is almost entirely wordless, and its characters rarely rely on gesture; instead, their ideas are communicated through expression, breath and attention. And yet, few other shows are able to capture passion and pain with such precision, an entire life story told through one furrowed brow. (Streaming on HBO Max.) LYONSIman Vellani, right, with Aramis Knight, plays a teenager with superpowers in “Ms. Marvel.”Disney+‘Ms. Marvel’ (Disney+)Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Time and Again’This “Spider-Man”-like series about Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a Jersey City 16-year-old in a working-class immigrant family who discovers that she has superpowers, is the most charming and likable of the Marvel shows for Disney+ so far. The obligatory flashback episode revealing how Kamala came by her powers was set during the partition of India and Pakistan; the incorporation of that fraught history could easily have led to something labored and stiff, but in the hands of the writer Fatimah Asghar and the director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy it was ingenious and surprisingly moving. (Streaming on Disney+) HALE‘Pachinko’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 7The penultimate episode of this Min Jin Lee novel adaptation, set in and around the 1923 Yokohama earthquake, is staggering in its scope and rendering of cataclysm. But it’s equally, quietly devastating in how its expands the depiction of a key character: Koh Hansu (Lee Minho), introduced in the series as a menacing, charismatic gangster. Laying out how he began as a young math tutor with hopes for a legitimate life, then fell onto his path through disaster and circumstance, “Chapter 7” connects him to the series’s other Korean exiles making hard choices in an unwelcoming Japan. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) PONIEWOZIK‘Rothaniel’ (HBO)A lot of “confessional” comedy has ground itself into a rut in recent years. But the comedian Jerrod Carmichael breathes new life into the paradigm with this lyrical and restrained special, in which he comes out as gay and explores his fraught relationship with his family. Carmichael weaves together sorrow and humor, insight and fear, love and disappointment, unraveling family secrets and allowing for messy and unresolved truths to all exist at once. (Streaming on HBO Max.) LYONSAn episode of “The Simpsons,” seemingly about Lisa and Bart in the scouts, gave way to a rapid-fire series of gags.Fox‘The Simpsons’ (Fox)Season 34, Episode 3: ‘Lisa the Boy Scout’A seemingly routine episode of “The Simpsons” is hijacked by hackers (wearing masks that are a frightening combination of Guy Fawkes and Homer Simpson) who demand a $20 million ransom; until it is paid, they will broadcast a stream of “Simpsons” outtakes “so ill-conceived, so idiotic that their exposure would destroy the value of the very I.P. itself.” Luckily, no one pays, and we get to see a lovingly assembled panoply of blackout sketches, written by Dan Greaney and directed by Timothy Bailey, ranging across 34 seasons of characters and animation styles. One highlight: a two-hander for the Sea Captain and Groundskeeper Willie whose dialogue consists entirely of “Yar” and “Aye.” (Streaming on Hulu.) HALE‘Slow Horses’ (Apple TV+)Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Bad Tradecraft’Based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, “Slow Horses” — set in a fictional MI5 office where out-of-favor agents pass their time doing busy work — is in one sense a sendup of John le Carré’s moody, cerebral tales of the postwar British intelligence services. But it’s also a completely credible spy thriller, with complicated, believable twists and well executed action. The first season’s third episode, written by Will Smith and directed by James Hawes, best encapsulated the show’s seesawing mix of sardonic humor, deft characterization and sometimes brutal suspense. (Streaming on Apple TV+.) HALE‘Station Eleven’ (HBO Max)Season 1, Episode 9: ‘Dr. Chaudhary’TV’s sweetest apocalypse story began just before the holidays last year, so it was the gift that kept on giving in early 2022. The penultimate episode, which found Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) impersonating a doctor in a big-box-store-turned-birthing-center, was an inventive expression of the show’s oddly hopeful vision: the first sparks of humanity’s future being kindled amid the mundane ruins of its past. Like the traveling actors who make the backbone of this story, Jeevan puts on a performance that ends up becoming real and restorative. (Streaming on HBO Max.) PONIEWOZIKAn episode of “This Fool” used “Austin Powers” references to make a point about the importance of change.Hulu‘This Fool’ (Hulu)Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Sandy Says’The closing seconds of this episode-long homage to “Austin Powers” were perhaps the most satisfying payoff I saw this year. “Sandy Says” exemplifies the tricky tone “This Fool” is able to strike, combining the structure of traditional sitcoms with the style of auteur comedies, hitting a sweet spot of goofy and clever. Luis (Frankie Quinones), newly out of prison, is in annoying-eighth-grader mode with his constant “Austin Powers” references, and the episode is packed with shagadelic Easter eggs before Luis explains part of why the movie means so much to him. “I’m tired of wasting time living in the past,” he says. “Ideally, we’ll change. The world is ever-changing, homey. I gotta change with it. That’s what ‘Austin Powers’ is all about. You know, I used to think that movie was a comedy. But now I know, it’s a tragedy.” (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONS‘This Is Us’ (NBC)Season 6, Episode 4: ‘Don’t Let Me Keep You’“This Is Us” did a lot of traveling over its six-season run — through multiple family trees, across the divide of death, from the future to the deep past. But it was often at its best when focused on one story, here Jack’s (Milo Ventimiglia) trip to Ohio to attend his mother’s funeral and reckon with the legacy of his abusive father. It’s a showcase for Ventimiglia, who anchored a big-feeling show through his reserved portrayal of a father, husband and son driven to fix things. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK More

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      Danielle Deadwyler Is the Beating Heart of ‘Till’

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      After critically acclaimed turns in “Station Eleven” and “The Harder They Fall,” her latest role hit close to home. That’s why she was hesitant to take it on.Danielle Deadwyler’s eyes are an instrument that she can play with precise control.In HBO Max’s postapocalyptic drama “Station Eleven,” they stare into your soul as Deadwyler’s graphic novelist character, Miranda, soaks in the world around her. In Netflix’s all-Black western “The Harder They Fall,” they’re the last thing a baddie sees before he’s killed by Deadwyler’s quippy gunslinger, Cuffee.And in her latest film, Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped spark the civil rights movement, they often fill your entire screen, tortured and unblinking in shocked grief, eyelids fluttering in painful remembrance. Though the actress has been an outsize presence in smaller screen roles in recent years, “Till” is her first lead part in a feature film.“I’d been reared in the history, but I didn’t know the intimacy of it,” Deadwyler, 40, said of Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in a recent interview on a rainy evening at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “So this was a chance to show what it meant to be Mamie both in public and in private, and how she was intentional about and navigating those two identities.”Deadwyler’s expressive eyes are only the beginning of her critically acclaimed performance as Emmett’s doting mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Deadwyler’s range. “With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes,” she wrote, “Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence.”Deadwyler with Whoopi Goldberg in “Till.”Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion PicturesDEADWYLER GREW UP with three siblings in southwest Atlanta, the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor. Her mother, she said, was intent on giving the children a diverse cultural life.“My mom was like, ‘You can’t go to U.G.A,’” she said, referring to the University of Georgia. “She had intentions for us to get out of a certain comfort zone.”As a youngster, Deadwyler dabbled in theater and dance, taking her first dance class when she was just 4 after her mother saw her shimmying to “Soul Train,” and falling in love with theater in high school.But she didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, she said, nor did she even fathom becoming one.“It was just a part of my life since I was a kid,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a loose white button-up over black slacks and black crew socks. “It was lifeblood.”She stayed close to home for college, majoring in history at Spelman while continuing to perform in plays. She earned a master’s degree in American Studies from Columbia in New York, writing her thesis on sex-positive representations of women in hip-hop. (In 2017 she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.)Whoopi Goldberg, an Outspoken StarThe comedian and co-host of the ABC talk show “The View” is known for her provocative opinions — and controversies.‘The View’: Since 2007, Whoopi Goldberg has been the often-irascible moderator on the daytime talk show, helping it become one of the most important political TV shows in America.Holocaust Comments: Earlier this year, Goldberg was suspended for two weeks from “The View” after she said repeatedly that the Holocaust was not about race. She later apologized.On Living Alone: After three marriages, Goldberg told us in a 2016 interview that she knows she doesn’t “want somebody in my house.”A Decades-Long Career: In 2019, the Times podcast “Still Processing” discussed  Goldberg’s career, from her days as a boundary-pushing comedian to her role as professional curmudgeon on “The View.”When she was rejected for the women’s studies graduate program at Emory University in Atlanta — “I cried in the bathroom at the trust fund where I was interning,” she said — she turned to teaching at an elementary charter school for two years. But with her youthful looks and wiry frame, Deadwyler struggled to be taken seriously. “Quinta Brunson’s character on ‘Abbott Elementary’ looks young, but she has a teacherly presence,” Deadwyler said, clutching her knees to her chest. “I just looked young — I was fresh out of grad school. The kids were like, ‘What grade are you in?’”But then came her big break: a role as the Lady in Yellow in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” mounted by True Colors Theater in Atlanta in 2009.Screen work soon followed, including the lead in the 2012 TV drama “A Cross to Bear,” playing a homeless, alcoholic mother. She also began booking small television roles: the antagonist LaQuita Maxwell on Tyler Perry’s prime-time soap opera “The Haves and the Have Nots,” a recurring role as Yoli on the Starz drama “P-Valley,” and memorable parts in FX’s “Atlanta” and HBO’s “Watchmen.”The latter was the performance that came to mind when Patrick Somerville, creator of “Station Eleven,” was looking to cast his Miranda, the artist whose graphic novel drives the show’s narrative arc.“Her eyes can do anything,” he said. “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”He put her through a lot of last-minute rewrites, but “she was never concerned with change,” he said. “She was always her own center. I was always impressed by her unbelievable confidence.”Deadwyler in “Station Eleven.” The show’s creator, Patrick Somerville, said, “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”HBO MaxHER BIGGEST LEAP to date, “Till,” is one she almost didn’t take.Mamie Till-Mobley is best known for insisting on an open-casket viewing for her son’s corpse, to show the world what a mob of white men did to him, but the film focuses on her transformation from shellshocked parent to fervent activist. “My reps sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’” said Deadwyler, who is the single mother of a 12-year-old son, “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”In the end, the role of Mamie resonated in her bones.For her audition, she submitted a self-tape that included the scene in which she knots a tie around Emmett’s neck — using her son, Ezra, as a stand-in — as he prepares to go down to Mississippi, telling him to “be small.” Then, in a video call with Chukwu, she re-enacted the moment when Mamie sees Emmett’s corpse for the first time. (“I warned my son, ‘Hey, man, you might hear some weird noises,’” she said.)Chukwu, the director, said she knew immediately that she was watching something special.“When I’m casting, I look at whether actors can communicate a story with their eyes,” she said. “Are they able to get underneath the words in a nonverbal way? Are they willing and able to dive into the work in a way that demands a vulnerability and focusedness? I saw all of that in her audition tape.”Deadwyler’s wordless ability to act with her whole body informed how she shot the film, Chukwu said.“I knew that I wanted the audience to see this Black woman’s humanity and that faces would be important,” she said. “But when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Mamie’s testimony scene in the courtroom, for instance — a seven-page powder keg of grief, frustration and rage — is shot in one long take. Chukwu said she originally planned on eight or nine other setups, but when Deadwyler received a standing ovation from the cast and crew on the first take — a close-up on her face — Chukwu decided: She didn’t need any more.Deadwyler said the weight of Mamie’s suffering, her choice to fight battles for future generations even when she knows she cannot win in the present, settled into every part of her body on set. But the minute they wrapped for the day, a waiting car would take her home, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs on the stereo.“It’s a sonic shift,” she said. “It’s the same thing with Mamie: There’s a private self and a public self.”The director Chinonye Chukwu planned to focus on faces all along. But “when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesYet there were lighthearted moments on set that reflected Deadwyler’s sense of humor. “At first I thought she was very serious, and that she’d get very annoyed with me, because I’m not,” said Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Mamie’s mother and served as a producer of the film. “But she is also very silly.”Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception among both critics and audiences — it currently has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes — it was a project that took more than two decades to reach the big screen, Goldberg said.“People would say, ‘You know, nobody wants to see that story,’” she said. “You’d say, ‘No, people do want to see it.’ I guess it was the reckoning that happened that finally got people interested in telling these stories.” (“Till” is the second project focused on Mamie and Emmett’s story to be released this year, after the ABC mini-series “Women of the Movement.”)“It has modern-day resonance,” Deadwyler said, adding that she has discussed the story with her son because “it would be neglectful for me to not talk to him about the possibilities.”AFTER THE PUBLICITY TOUR for “Till,” Deadwyler plans to take a moment — just a moment — to soak it all in. She can also be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldaña in the new Netflix limited series “From Scratch,” based on Tembi Locke’s memoir about an American student who falls in love with an Italian chef. And she has a few film projects in the works, among them Kourosh Ahari’s sci-fi thriller “Parallel” and Netflix’s star-studded airport Christmas thriller “Carry On.”“I want to collaborate with people,” she said. “And I’m looking forward to being approached for more projects, vs. doing 80, 100 auditions per year.”In the meantime, after being told that her face can be seen in ads atop New York taxis, she marveled at her change in fortune, though she hadn’t seen one yet. “I would like to go quietly into the dark,” she said, laughing.Deadwyler’s laugh is a curious thing, a sound you haven’t heard much onscreen: It’s a deep, rumbling, full-bodied “HA HA HA” that you can hear echoing down the hall long after the door closes. “Me, a serious person?” she says, eyes twinkling. “No.”I ask what else people get wrong about her.There’s that laugh again.“Everything.” More

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      Himesh Patel on the Pandemic, Fatherhood and ‘Station Eleven’

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      Voting is underway for the 74th Primetime Emmys, and this week we’re talking to several acting nominees. The awards will be presented on Sept. 12 on NBC.“I’m a little bit of a nerd,” Himesh Patel warned.That was on a recent Tuesday evening, on a video call from a red-walled room in his London home. Dressed in a black Adidas T-shirt, with a pair of white stripes snaking down each shoulder, he looked less like a nerd than someone ready to take the field.That is, until he began breaking down strategies for hay and brick trade deals in the board game “Settlers of Catan.”“You’re all sort of trying to trick each other into trading the wrong thing,” said Patel, 31, in a British accent that would be shocking to anyone who had seen only his performance in the post-apocalyptic HBO Max drama “Station Eleven.” The role earned him his first Emmy nomination, for best lead actor in a limited series. His Chicago accent was flawless.Hay and brick trades … Sounds … riveting?“I know,” he said. “It sounds lame, but it’s really fun and there’s lots of strategy involved.”Patel played a different kind of settler on the HBO Max series “Station Eleven,” based on the book by Emily St. John Mandel, which follows the survivors of a devastating pandemic in their efforts to rebuild society — with art and community more than bricks and hay. When Patel’s character, a freelance writer named Jeevan, decides to take in an orphaned young actress, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), he must also navigate the challenges of becoming a de facto parent.Like Jeevan, Patel was an understated presence on the show, and his nomination — the show’s sole acting nod among the seven it earned overall, including for writing, direction and score — came as a surprise to many, himself included. (He found out on a train ride to visit his parents in London).“I like it that way,” said Patel, who, like Jeevan speaks softly and slowly, weighing every word. “I’m not very good at being on the red carpet.”Patel grew up in Cambridgeshire in eastern England, the child of Indian parents who were both born in Africa. (“I was a child of two worlds,” said Patel, who grew up speaking Gujarati.) He characterized his cultural upbringing as a cross between Bollywood films and fantasy blockbusters like “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings.” (If he had not become an actor, he said, he likely would have been a computer modeler.)After spending his teenage years doing plays with a local youth theater, he got his first big break when he was cast in “EastEnders,” the long-running British soap opera, when he was 16. He dropped out of school, then spent nine years playing the role of Tamwar Masood from 2007 to 2016.More on the 74th Emmy AwardsThe 2022 edition of the Emmys, which celebrate excellence in television, will take place on Sept. 12 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.‘The White Lotus’: Natasha Rothwell’s nomination for her portrayal of an underappreciated spa manager on the show is a pivotal moment for the actress, whose career began on the improv stage.‘Severance’: Christopher Walken and John Turturro, both nominated for best supporting actor in a drama, drew upon their years of friendship in the Apple TV+ techno-thriller.‘Dopesick’: Kaitlyn Dever is up for her first Emmy for her role as a young woman with an opioid addiction in the mini-series. As she prepared for the part, she sought to approach the role with the utmost sensitivity.Although “EastEnders” made him a star across the pond, American audiences began to notice him more when he landed the lead role in Danny Boyle’s 2019 musical romantic comedy “Yesterday,” in which he plays a struggling musician who suddenly becomes one of the few people in the world who remember the Beatles. Then he scored a role as the fixer Mahir in “Tenet” (2020), Christopher Nolan’s time-bending spy thriller.Even more recognize him now because of “Station Eleven” and his most recent film role: Playing the journalist love interest of Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) in Adam McKay’s star-studded 2021 disaster comedy “Don’t Look Up.”“If I’d told my 11-year-old self that, I think he would’ve been like, ‘Shut up, stop taking the piss out of me,’” he said, laughing.“Station Eleven” episodes did not begin airing until late last year, but Patel began work on the series in 2019, when the cast filmed the last shots of Episode 1, in which Jeevan and Kirsten leave the apartment and walk through the snow toward the lake, in Toronto, standing in for Lake Michigan, in Chicago. Then the pandemic sent them into lockdown. (They passed the time by playing board games over Zoom, with “Settlers of Catan” featuring heavily in the rotation.)“We didn’t change the story to try to make it feel more relevant,” Patel said. “But you could feel the influence of the pandemic creeping in.”Himesh Patel with Matilda Lawler in a scene from “Station Eleven.” Patel plays a freelance journalist who takes in an orphaned young girl as a pandemic rages.Parrish Lewis/HBO MaxThe show’s creator, Patrick Somerville, based the screen version of Jeevan on the character in Mandel’s novel, though he said he tailored the character to Patel’s acting style.“He has a stillness about him that was vital to the show actually working,” Somerville said in a video interview from outside the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, as Lake Michigan waves lapped in the background.“I’m the loudmouth of the group,” he added. But with Patel, he said, he learned that “one line — or no line — could carry the weight emotionally of a scene.”One particular scene in Episode 9, which wasn’t in the book, resonated deeply with Patel: A scene in a makeshift birth center, in which Jeevan becomes a birthing partner to a handful of women. The episode was filmed less than three months after Patel had watched his own wife give birth to their daughter.“I was in the early months of being a father and not knowing the ins and outs of how to do it when we shot that,” he said. “It was so easily accessible because I was going through it.”Lawler, who plays young Kirsten, said she saw a change in Patel after his daughter was born. “He had more of a fatherly presence” in their relationship, she said. (She had advice for him, too, she said: Learn how to braid hair, stat.)In a video interview from sleepaway camp in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, Lawler, who, as in the series, comes across as much older than her 13 years, said the bond between her and Patel was immediate and effortless — a chemistry that was reflected onscreen.“It’s a strange bond — we just naturally understood each other,” she said.She offered some other insights on Patel: He’s a great dancer. He’s fantastic at Ping-Pong. He’s “taller than I thought” and “absolutely not intimidating as a person.”“It’s disarming how inclusive he is,” she said. “He always made everyone feel really comfortable.”He is also, she confirmed, “kind of nerdy.”Hiro Murai, who was nominated for two directing Emmys this year — for the pilot of “Station Eleven” and for an episode of “Atlanta” — said he and Patel had a number of conversations about how to balance Jeevan’s emotional intimacy and the comedy, particularly in Jeevan’s relationship with Kirsten.“There’s something very funny about a guy who’s kind of a stunted adolescent trying to take care of this little girl who’s much older than him in spirit,” he said. “The humanity was the most important part, and the comedy had to come out of the character rather than leaning into situational jokes.”In the future, Patel, who recently wrapped shooting in Southport, N.C., on “Providence,” an indie murder-mystery comedy in which he stars alongside Lily James and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, would like to do more producing and potentially writing work, he said; one idea is for a series about the lives of the more than one million Indian soldiers who fought for the British Empire during World War I.“Those were a tumultuous few years in Britain in terms of identity and people understanding their cultural history,” he said, “There are lots of stories to help fill in.“What excites me,” he added, “is the opportunity to have so many brown actors in front of and behind the camera.” More

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      Finding Joy Through Art at the End of the World in ‘Station Eleven’

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      Emily St. John Mandel talks about the pandemic novel she wrote years before Covid-19 and the HBO Max adaptation that some viewers have found oddly life-affirming.There’s a scene in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 pandemic novel “Station Eleven” when people stranded inside a Midwestern airport realize that no one is coming to save them, because nearly everyone else is dead.One character, clinging to hope that the crisis will pass, says, “I can’t wait till things get back to normal,” a sentiment that feels depressingly familiar two years into the pandemic.One might imagine that a story about a devastating viral outbreak would be a hard sell right now. Instead, to Mandel’s surprise, readers — and more recently, viewers — seem to be finding solace in her post-apocalyptic world, where traumatized survivors take comfort from art, music and friendships with strangers.“There’s something inherently hopeful in that message, just that life goes on,” Mandel said in an interview on Wednesday.“Station Eleven” sales jumped in 2020 and 2021 and have now surpassed 1 million copies. Last month, HBO Max began airing a 10-episode limited series based on the novel, which was adapted by Patrick Somerville and concludes on Thursday. Some viewers have found the show to be oddly life-affirming, despite its premise that billions died from a respiratory illness with a 99 percent fatality rate. James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for the Times, called it “the most uplifting show about life after the end of the world that you are likely to see.”Like the novel, the TV series follows a Shakespearean troupe that travels the Great Lakes region performing for survivors, offering hope that art will endure in a world without electricity, plumbing, antibiotics or iPhones. It opens just before the virus sweeps across North America, at a performance where an actor playing King Lear (Gael García Bernal) collapses onstage and dies while a man from the audience, Jeevan Chaudhary, tries to revive him. In the series, Jeevan (Himesh Patel) ends up caring for Kirsten, a young actress in the play (Matilda Lawler), and they quarantine together with his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan) when society abruptly shuts down.The story jumps back and forth between the prepandemic era, the present day, the beginning of the end of the world, and 20 years after the crisis. Kirsten (played in her adult years by Mackenzie Davis) has joined the theater company, a touring caravan putting on productions of “Hamlet” and other Shakespeare plays. On the road, she meets a prophet she shares a strange connection with — an obsession with an obscure graphic novel about a spaceman named Dr. Eleven.Ahead of the series finale, Mandel spoke to the Times about why the story is resonating with Covid-weary audiences, her unease with being treated as a pandemic prophet and why she feels hope for a post-apocalyptic world. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Himesh Patel in “Station Eleven.”Ian Watson/HBO MaxIt must have been weird to publish a pandemic novel set in the near future and then see a pandemic arrive. What was it like watching this unfold?I really predicted nothing. When you research the history of pandemics, as I did for “Station Eleven,” what becomes really clear is that there will always be another pandemic. We didn’t see this one coming because it’s been about 100 years since the last one in this part of the world, but it was always going to happen.You were also in the odd position of being held up as a cultural expert on the meaning of pandemics. What was that like?It was incredibly disorienting and surreal. At the same time, that was everybody’s life in March 2020 when this thing hit. I don’t know if it was actually that much stranger for me. What did feel really kind of odd and uncomfortable was all of a sudden I started getting all of these invitations to write op-eds about the pandemic. It felt a little bit gross, like I was using the pandemic as a marketing opportunity. That was something that I pushed back on.One of the themes in “Station Eleven” is the idea that art can give life meaning in times of catastrophe. Has that been true for you and do you see evidence of it being true on a broader cultural scale?Yes, absolutely. That’s been really heartening. When I look back to the spring of 2020, when we didn’t really know that much about the virus, I just remember being scared to go anywhere or do anything. Books were a kind of transport in that period for me, just being able to escape from the confines of my apartment, basically, by reading. It really meant a lot to me, and I think that is something that the show captures really beautifully. There’s a traveling symphony, but then also there’s that incredible moment in episode seven where the Frank character breaks into a rap song.How did you feel about some of the changes the show made?The show deepened the story in a lot of really interesting ways. There are some things they did that I really love, that I felt took ideas that I suggested in the book and carried them further, like the importance of “Hamlet” in the story. In my book, it was important that they perform Shakespeare, but in the series, Shakespeare is integrated into the plot in this really deep way that I feel like I only scratched the surface of in the book.I love what the series did with the Jeevan character, where in the book I could never really figure out how to integrate him with the other characters without it seeming a little bit too forced, really coincidental. I love that they just have Kirsten go back to Frank’s place with him. That completely solved that problem. It’s just such a wonderful emotional architecture for the story.What they really did beautifully was capture the joy in the book. It is a post-apocalyptic world, but something that I thought about a lot when I was writing the book was how beautiful that world would be. I was just imagining trees and grass, and flowers overtaking our structures. I thought of the beauty of that world, but also the joy. This is a group of people who travel together because they love playing music together and doing Shakespeare, and there is real joy in that.Another significant change is the character of Tyler, the prophet, who has a totally different fate in the book. What did you make of how they developed that character?There’s something depressingly familiar about the prophet that I wrote, because that’s the only kind of prophet I’d really encountered, in news stories and reading. I based my prophet off David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Texas. There’s something really kind of original and interesting about the version of the prophet in the series. He’s a much more sympathetic character.Mackenzie Davis, center, stars in “Station Eleven” as an actor in a post-apocalyptic theater troupe.Ian Watson/HBO MaxHow involved were you with this show?I texted sometimes with Patrick Somerville. He cleared a lot of the major changes with me, which I really appreciated. I was not particularly involved once the show started shooting. I never visited the set because of Covid. So, I was kind of distant from the entire thing, which it’s unfortunate. I wish I could have gone there.The show was just beginning production when the pandemic hit. Was there ever a concern that viewers would balk at the premise?My assumption, and I’ve seen this play out on social media, was that some people would embrace it and some people are just too traumatized. I would say for anybody who’s on the fence about the show, that the first episode is the hardest to watch, or it was for me, anyway. That experience of dread as the pandemic washes over your entire society, that’s something that we’re just way too familiar with. It is also a brilliant episode. If you can get past your discomfort for that, I think it’s a more joyful show than people who are hesitant about it might imagine it to be.A lot of people are finding the show to be cathartic. Why do you think people are comforted by the novel and the show?There’s something in the idea that you can lose an entire world, but all of the society that you take for granted every day can disappear in the course of a pandemic. But there is life afterward, and there’s joy afterward, and a lot of things that are worth living for in the aftermath.In the novel and show, history is bifurcated into Before and After, and it’s interesting to think about what cultural shifts will endure from the pandemic.What’s weird is how quickly your boundaries fall. I had this wonderful experience last month. I got to meet all these “Station Eleven” actors and producers at a lunch, and then there was a screening later. It was my first time socializing indoors without masks in two years. I was like, OK, I’m going to do this. I’ve been PCR tested. I’m double-vaxxed, et cetera. It’s fine. I was like, but I’m not going to shake hands or hug anybody. I hugged everybody. More