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    “Harry Potter” Stuntman Tells His Story in a New Documentary

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    In a new documentary, David Holmes, a stunt performer in the ‘Harry Potter’ films, recalls his life before and after a harrowing accident on set that left him paralyzed.When David Holmes arrived at rehearsal to perfect a fight scene for the penultimate “Harry Potter” film, he was strapped into a harness that was supposed to send him flying backward.But Holmes was jerked back too fast, hitting a wall and breaking his neck, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down.His career as a stunt performer was over, at age 25. He had portrayed Daniel Radcliffe’s title character and others, including Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Draco Malfoy and Neville Longbottom, since the franchise’s first installment.After years behind the scenes, Holmes will now tell his story in a new documentary, “David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived,” which is streaming on Max and will air on HBO on Wednesday at 9 p.m. and on Sky Documentaries and NOW in Britain on Saturday.Holmes is teaming up again with Radcliffe, the executive producer on the project, which captures his life before and after his injury. Radcliffe and Holmes said they hoped to call attention to stunt performers, who often put their lives at risk with little recognition.“It’s nice to know my legacy in film is not just me hitting that wall,” Holmes said in an interview.Holmes hasn’t fully embraced the limelight, Radcliffe said, and “just wants to shine it onto other people.”Radcliffe and Holmes had known they wanted to work on a project together for a while, they said. Initially, though, Holmes didn’t want to be the focus.“You put on a costume, and you take on a character the same way an actor does. You have that safety net to live behind that character,” Holmes said. “It’s very different now because it’s me.”Radcliffe and Holmes had worked together on a podcast called Cunning Stunts, interviewing stunt performers and coordinators about their work. Radcliffe had also filmed some of the interviews and thought that he’d try his hand at directing a documentary. But he wasn’t quite satisfied with his work.“We started filming some stuff, and then after a while I thought, ‘I don’t think I’m very good at this,’” he said. “We should bring someone else in.”To direct, they landed on Dan Hartley, who had worked as a video assist operator among other roles in the “Harry Potter” films and recently directed “Lad: A Yorkshire Story,” a coming-of-age film about a 13-year-old boy befriending a park ranger after losing his father. The three eventually agreed to shift the focus of the film to Holmes.It wasn’t the plan to use someone from the “Harry Potter” crew, but Hartley seemed like a perfect fit, Radcliffe said.The cast and crew grew close on the film sets, and Radcliffe referred to Holmes as a “cool older brother.”“We wanted someone who has the same kind of connection to Dave that we do,” Radcliffe said. “Not someone from the outside who is going to shape Dave’s story into something else for the sake of making something more sensationalized.”As they started creating the film, they realized it was the first time they had all spoken together about Holmes’s accident.“No one wanted to be the first one to bring it up,” Radcliffe said, “but I definitely think there was something like quite cathartic for everybody on this film who got to talk about it with each other.”Holmes spoke about what life was like after the injury and the people he had met while he was hospitalized, including Will Pike, who was injured in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and was in the bed next to his.Hartley and Radcliffe said that seeing young men being emotional was moving, as was parting from traditional masculine stereotypes that can be prevalent in stunt culture.“What I think is really powerful is seeing these young, sensitive men talking,” Hartley said. “They were just so vulnerable and honest.”Above all, Holmes said he wants his story to bring hope.“We all experienced loss in our life. I learned that at the age of 25,” he said, “and it taught me to be present to appreciate the now.” More

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      ‘Ride On’ Review: Jackie Chan, Back on the Horse

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      Chan, playing a former stuntman, has a few good trademark fight scenes, but the film is too busy stuffing sentimental elements into its lowbrow comedy premise.One doesn’t necessarily expect much going into a slapstick stunt animal comedy, and yet even by these softened standards, the director Larry Yang’s “Ride On” cooks up an egregiously, almost comically bad movie. Starring Jackie Chan as Luo, a washed-up former stuntman who trains his horse, Red Hare, to become his partner, this film from China is a consistently awkward, over-the-top mess, attempting to infuse a cheaply written, sentimental father-daughter (and father-horse) story into its lowbrow laughs.After being out of work for years, Luo catches a lucky break that leads him back into the movie business, with Red Hare by his side. Yet, amid his newfound success, Luo finds himself in a legal battle over ownership of Red Hare, forcing him to go to his estranged daughter for help.As the two slowly reconcile their strained relationship, seemingly every other scene is populated by a new tear-jerker back story or moment of triumph, signaled by a maudlin score that relentlessly hammers away at the viewer. The film is so graceless and bizarre in its attempts at tugging at the viewer’s emotions that it often feels like a work of parody.Chan has a few trademark fight scenes, as a gang keeps chasing him down for money owed, though it’s clear that the 68-year-old actor naturally doesn’t bear the same kind of comic physicality he once did. In a way, one could see the film as both a potential tribute to his remarkable and decades-long career doing real, often dangerous stunt work and a consideration of his sunset years as a performer. But that hope is quickly buried underneath a cynical film that has nothing to offer by way of charisma, comedy or the like, outside of Chan’s name itself.Ride OnNot rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Florentina Holzinger Makes Everyone Uncomfortable

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      The Austrian choreographer’s shows blend dance, stunts and sideshow-inspired acts to explore lofty ideas about gender and art. She pushes performers to extremes — and audiences, too.BERLIN — In a rehearsal hall on the city’s outskirts, Xana Novais was hanging by her teeth. On a recent evening, the tattooed 27-year-old performer was suspended a few inches above the ground, biting down on a piece of leather hanging from a rope, perfecting a new skill called the “iron jaw.” It did not look easy.Novais was practicing for a sequence in “Ophelia’s Got Talent,” a new work by the Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger that premieres at the Berlin Volksbühne theater on Thursday. As part of the performance, which blends dance, stunts and sideshow-inspired acts, Novais was meant to dangle like a fish caught on a hook for about half a minute. But after 20 seconds, she let go, lowered herself down, and grimaced. “This is about learning to manage discomfort,” she said.Discomfort is central to the work of Holzinger, 36, who has recently become a star of the European dance and performance worlds by pushing the limits of what performers — and audiences — can endure. Holzinger, whose interest in bodily extremes dates back to her own training as a dancer, has drawn acclaim for works that feature large casts of nude female performers and explore lofty ideas about art and gender while showcasing acts, sometimes involving bodily fluids, that obliterate the boundaries of good taste.In “Apollon,” a 2017 piece exploring the work of the choreographer George Balanchine and notions of artist and muse, performers bled and defecated onstage. “A Divine Comedy,” a 2021 riff on Dante’s epic poem about the circles of hell, included a scene in which a woman ejaculates explosively while using a vibrator. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of her performances are punctuated by audience members walking out.“Ophelia’s Got Talent” — an exploration of myths and narratives about women and water, including mermaids, sirens and the tragic, drowning figure from “Hamlet” — is the first of several original works Holzinger is creating as part of a multiyear agreement with the Volksbühne, one of the most influential theaters in the German-speaking world.René Pollesch, the theater’s artistic director, said he was partly attracted to Holzinger’s work because of her interest in showcasing a variety of strong female performers, including older women and women with disabilities, doing daring and demanding acts onstage. “This is a radical feminism, not a reform feminism,” he said.A scene from “Ophelia’s Got Talent.” Holzinger said she drew inspiration from dance history, mythology and action films, including the James Bond franchise.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesHolzinger, who has a self-deprecating wit and the physical intensity of a boxer, explained in an interview that she and her cast would pull fish hooks through their skin and hold their breath underwater for up to five minutes during the show. At one point, she said, cast members would form the shape of a fountain and squirt water from their noses. “That will be a nice image,” she said.She added that she drew inspiration from dance history, mythology and action films, including the James Bond franchise, but that she viewed the stage as a “laboratory” where ostensibly taboo acts can be performed freely. “I can maybe teach people something about what forms of shame are necessary and which are not,” she said.Life under capitalism encouraged individuals to perfect themselves, Holzinger said, adding that her work delved into the ways this shaped women’s bodies. “We are in a society where you are able to purchase and create your own femininity, and optimize yourself in ways the system wants you to,” she said. In her work, she added, she tried to find “unexpected” ways of using the body, which has been conditioned to look and move a certain way by social pressures.Barbara Frey, the artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale, a prominent arts festival in Germany that commissioned “A Divine Comedy,” said Holzinger had created a “new form” of performance that combines “dance, exuberant wit, great tenderness” and “the Roman gladiatorial arena” while exploring “the male gaze — and the female gaze — on the female body.”Some have compared her work to the Viennese Actionists, an Austrian art movement in the 1960s and ’70s whose (largely male) adherents staged performances in which they carried out extreme acts, including self-mutilation, as a way of confronting spectators with what they saw as repressed elements of Austrian society. Although Holzinger has previously said she draws little inspiration from the movement, the association with the Actionists, who are now a revered part of Austria’s art history, helped her gain early respect in her native country, she explained.“If people come to me expecting an evening of abstract postmodern dance, I fully respect their decision to leave,” Holzinger said.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesBorn to a pharmacist and a lawyer in Vienna, Holzinger came late to dance. She said that soon after she began her training, at age 17, she realized it was too late for her to perfect the skills necessary for a classic career as a dancer, and that she was “too strong, too muscular for ballet.”After being rejected from several traditional European dance academies, she enrolled in the School for New Dance Development, an experimental school in Amsterdam, where she began exploring alternative ways of using her body as a vehicle for spectacle. “If I’m training my body to pee on cue, then I’m exerting control over my body,” she said. “It could be seen as a form of dance technique, even if it’s not a grand jeté or a tendu.”After several eyebrow-raising collaborations with Vincent Riebeek, a Dutch choreographer, Holzinger said she reached a turning point in her career after a near-death experience during a 2013 performance at an arts festival in Norway, in which she fell from a height of 16 feet while doing an aerial stunt. Although she survived with a concussion and a broken nose, the accident, caused by a screw holding her weight that came loose, led her to take a more meticulous approach to her work and safety.Since then, she has focused on creating her more elaborate works for all-female ensembles. Four years after the accident, she debuted “Apollon,” a piece that wrestled with what Holzinger described as the “lived experience of ballet” and the “overdone femininity of ballerinas.” The show was widely acclaimed and toured internationally. That piece, as well as her 2019 follow-up, “Tanz,” drew parallels between the suffering experienced by dancers — including via the ballet shoe, which she described as a “torture item” that often deforms and bloodies dancers’ feet — and the staged violence of less highbrow acts, such as sword swallowing, or body suspension shows.Holzinger’s casts include trained dancers as well as performers with circus and sideshow backgrounds, and sex workers.Nicole Marianna WytyczakFinding performers for her works, she admitted, hasn’t always been easy. Some, like Novais, have a background in theater, while others are sex workers or sideshow performers. As part of her recruitment efforts, she said, she once advertised for “women with special talents” on Craigslist.But her work has also attracted performers with more traditional dance backgrounds, including Trixie Cordua, 81, a former soloist with the Hamburg Ballet who has worked with John Cage. Cordua, who has Parkinson’s disease and sometimes moves onstage with the help of a motorized wheelchair, said in a phone interview that she was drawn to working with Holzinger because of her “ability to combine things that don’t usually fit together to form a fully new constellation,” and because of her willingness to go “very, very far.”Holzinger said she was comfortable with the fact that the extreme elements of her works often led people to walk out of her performances. “If people come to me expecting an evening of abstract postmodern dance, I fully respect their decision to leave,” she said. “I’d rather be left with 10 people in the audience who find it cool.”Ophelia’s Got TalentSept. 15 through Oct. 25 at the Berlin Volksbühne; volksbuehne.berlin. More

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      Gene LeBell, 89, Judo Champion, Wrestler and Star Stuntman, Dies

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      A tough guy who got beaten up by the likes of John Wayne, he had a bottom-line view of his job: “The more you get hit in the nose, the richer you are.”One day in 1966, the stuntman Gene LeBell was called to the set of the television series “The Green Hornet” to deal with Bruce Lee, the future martial arts superstar, who played Kato, the crime-fighting Hornet’s sidekick. Mr. Lee, it seems, was hurting the other stuntmen.The stunt coordinator asked Mr. LeBell — a former national judo champion and professional wrestler — to teach Mr. Lee a lesson, perhaps with a headlock.Mr. LeBell would later recall in many interviews that he went further: He picked Mr. Lee up, slung him over his back and ran around the set as Mr. Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you!” When Mr. LeBell relented, he was surprised that Mr. Lee didn’t attack him. Instead they came to appreciate their different skill sets, and Mr. LeBell became one of Mr. Lee’s favorite stuntmen.They also trained together, with Mr. LeBell’s expertise as a grappler meeting Mr. Lee’s fist-flashing kung fu brilliance.Mr. LeBell never became as famous as Mr. Lee, who died in 1973, but into his early 80s — when he played, among other roles, a corpse falling from a coffin in an episode of the TV series “Castle” — he remained busy as one of Hollywood’s most sought-after stuntmen.At 20, he was walloped by John Wayne in “Big Jim McLain” (1952).Nine years later, he was kicked by Elvis Presley in “Blue Hawaii.”And he was knocked around a few times by James Caan.Mr. LeBell, left, with George Reeves, who played the title role on the television series “Adventures of Superman,” and Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane. The three made a series of live appearances in the 1950s, with Mr. LeBell playing a villain.Gene LeBell’s personal collection“Every star in Hollywood has beaten me up,” Mr. LeBell told AARP magazine in 2015. “The more you get hit in the nose, the richer you are. The man who enjoys his work never goes to work. So I’ve had a lot of fun doing stunts.”Mr. LeBell died on Aug. 9 at his home in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 89. His death was announced by Kellie Cunningham, his trustee and business manager, who did not specify the cause.Ivan Gene LeBell was born on Oct. 9, 1932, in Los Angeles. His mother, Aileen (Moss) LeBell, promoted boxing and wrestling matches at the Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles; his father, Maurice, was an osteopath and diet doctor who died after being paralyzed in a swimming accident in 1941. His mother later married Cal Eaton, with whom she promoted fights.Gene started to learn to fight at 7, when his mother sent him to the Los Angeles Athletic Club.“I went up to Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis and said, ‘I want to be a wrestler,’” Mr. LeBell was quoted as saying by the Slam Wrestling website in 2005. Mr. Lewis, he recalled, asked him: “Do you want to roll? Do you want to do Greco-Roman? Do you want to do freestyle? Or do you want to grapple?”“What’s grappling?” Gene asked.“That’s a combination of everything,” Mr. Lewis said. “You can hit ’em, eye-gouge ’em.”He was sold.Mr. LeBell’s opponents in the wrestling ring included Victor, a 700-pound Canadian black bear.Gene LeBell’s personal collectionHe started learning judo at 12 (although his mother told The Los Angeles Times in 1955 that he had been inspired a little later, in high school, when he was beaten up by a smaller teenager who knew judo), and by 1954 his proficiency had grown to an elite level: He won both the heavyweight class and the overall title in that year’s national American Amateur Union championships. He successfully defended his title the next year at the Olympic Auditorium, in front of his mother.During one of the bouts, he said, he heard his mother’s voice above the din of the crowd shouting: “Gene! Watch out! Choke him!”“The announcer observed, ‘I think Gene LeBell’s mother is prejudiced,’” Mr. LeBell recalled to The Los Angeles Times. “Was I embarrassed!”His mother’s connections to Hollywood brought Mr. LeBell early stunt work with John Wayne and a friendship with George Reeves, the star of the television show “Adventures of Superman.”Realizing that judo was no way to make a living, he shifted to professional wrestling later in 1955.Mr. LeBell never became a big name in the ring or even a great wrestler, either under his own name or in a mask as “the Hangman.” But he gained notice in his role as an enforcer, in which he compelled other wrestlers to stick to the script, even when they didn’t want to.Mr. LeBell, right, wrestling Vic Christy, whom he considered a mentor, in Southern California in the mid-1950s.Gene LeBell’s personal collection“Gene would choke me out for saying wrestling was a performative art,” Bob Calhoun, who collaborated with Mr. LeBell on his autobiography, “The Godfather of Grappling” (2005), said in a phone interview. “But he was old school — he wouldn’t say wrestling wasn’t on the up and up.”While not a star, Mr. LeBell was nonetheless honored in 1995 by a fraternal organization of wrestlers, the Cauliflower Alley Club, with its Iron Mike Mazurki Award, for achieving success in a field beyond wrestling, as the award’s wrestler-turned-actor namesake did. Mr. LeBell was inducted into the National Wrestling Alliance’s Hall of Fame in 2011.His work as a stuntman began in earnest in the 1960s and continued on TV series like “Route 66,” “I Spy,” “The Incredible Hulk” and “The Fall Guy,” in which Lee Majors starred as a film stuntman. He also appeared in movies like “Planet of the Apes” (1968), “The Towering Inferno” (1974) and the Steven Seagal crime drama “Out for Justice” (1991).Mr. LeBell had a long list of acting credits as well, mostly in bit parts. He often played referees and sometimes a thug, a henchman, a bartender or, as in “Raging Bull” (1990), a ring announcer.Mr. LeBell with the wrestler-turned-movie-star Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. the Rock, in 1999. Gene LeBell’s personal collectionOutside of his film and television work, in 1963 he took part in a preview of today’s mixed martial arts fights when he faced a middleweight boxer, Milo Savage, and defeated him in the fourth round with a choke hold that rendered Savage unconscious. It took time to wake him up, and as the crowd grew angry, a spectator tried to stab Mr. LeBell.“It was a tough night, but ‘Judo’ Gene had defended the honor of his sport against the boxer,” Jonathan Snowden wrote in “Shooters: The Toughest Men in Professional Wrestling” (2012).In 1976, Mr. LeBell refereed a match in Tokyo between Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight boxing champion, and the wrestler Antonio Inoki. In what was billed a “world martial arts championship,” the two ended up kicking each other for 15 rounds — Ali landed only two punches — and the fight was ruled a draw.Mr. LeBell said Mr. Inoki would have won the bout had he not been penalized one point for a karate kick to Ali’s groin.In 1976, Mr. LeBell was the referee in a match between Muhammad Ali, then the heavyweight boxing champion, and the wrestler Antonio Inoki. It was declared a draw.Associated PRessLater that year, Mr. LeBell was arrested and charged with murder, along with a pornographer, Jack Ginsburgs, in the killing of a private detective. Mr. LeBell was acquitted of the murder charge but convicted of being an accessory, for driving Mr. Ginsburgs to and from the murder scene. His conviction was overturned by the California Court of Appeals.Mr. LeBell also worked over the years with many wrestlers, including Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ronda Rousey, and trained with Chuck Norris, the martial artist and actor.More recently the director Quentin Tarantino used Mr. LeBell’s initial encounter with Mr. Lee on the set of “The Green Hornet” as the basis for a scene in his 2019 film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” in which Brad Pitt, as a stuntman, threw the Lee character into a car.Mr. LeBell is survived by his wife, Eleanor (Martindale) LeBell, who is known as Midge and whom he married twice and divorced once; his son, David; his daughter, Monica Pandis; his stepson, Danny Martindale; his stepdaughter, Stacey Martindale; and four grandchildren. His brother, Mike, a wrestling promoter, died in 2009. His first marriage ended with his wife’s death; he also married and divorced two other women.Although Mr. Calhoun said that “in any situation, with Bruce Lee or anyone else, Gene was the toughest guy in the room,” Mr. LeBell offered a pragmatic view of his reputation.“People saying you’re the toughest guy is great,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1995, “but it still doesn’t add up to one car payment. Now I get beat up by every wimp in Hollywood and make thousands of dollars. You tell me which is better.” More

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      Inside the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Flying Sequences

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      The makers of the “Top Gun” sequel discuss the challenges of filming practical aerial stunts.Before Tom Cruise signed on to star in the original “Top Gun,” he asked to take a test flight in a jet. Cruise wasn’t yet world famous, so when he arrived at the hangar, his long hair still in a ponytail left over from “Legend,” the pilots, according to one of the film’s producers, Jerry Bruckheimer, decided to give this Hollywood hippie the ride of his life. Zipping at 6.5 G’s — more than twice the G-forces some astronauts endure during rocket launches — Cruise felt the blood drain from his head. He vomited in his fighter-pilot mask.He agreed to make the film.Cruise continued to fly so fast, and so frequently, that he learned to squeeze his thighs and abs to stay conscious. His stomach adjusted to the speed. When the director Tony Scott put a camera in the cockpit, Cruise could smile for his close-ups. His castmates weren’t as prepared.“They all threw up and their eyes rolled back in their heads,” Bruckheimer said in a phone interview. The original footage “was just a mess,” he admitted. “We couldn’t use any of it.”“Top Gun” made Cruise a superstar — and the experience of shooting it stuck with him so much, he was convinced he needed to lead a three-month flight course for the cast of “Top Gun: Maverick,” a sequel, now in theaters, that has had 35 years to build up suspense. In the new movie, Cruise’s Capt. Pete Mitchell (known as Maverick) readies a dozen young pilots for a dangerous mission to destroy an underground uranium plant in an enemy land. Behind the scenes, Cruise did roughly the same thing, gradually raising the actors’ aerial tolerance, and confidence, from small prop planes to F-18 fighter jets. “He’s got every kind of pilot’s license that you could possibly imagine — helicopters, jets, whatever,” Bruckheimer said.In essence, “Top Gun: Maverick” is a 450 mile-an-hour flying-heist caper. The mission leaders devise a difficult set of challenges for the pilots: zoom low and quick, vault a steep mountain, spin upside-down, plummet into a basin and survive a near-vertical climb at 9 G’s while dodging missiles.Cruise, a contender for the most daredevil actor since Buster Keaton, was adamant that every stunt be accomplished with practical effects. Each jet had a U.S. Navy pilot at the controls, while its actor spun like a leaf in a windstorm. The deserts and snow-capped peaks in the background are real, and so are many of the performers’ grimaces, squints, gasps and moans.“You can’t fake the forces that are put on your body during combat,” the director Joseph Kosinski said by phone. “You can’t do it on a sound stage, you can’t do it on a blue screen. You can’t do it with visual effects.”From the safety of theater seats, the audience faces its own challenge: unlearning the computer-generated complacency that’s turned modern blockbusters into bedazzled bores. The imagery of the sky and ground spiraling behind the actors’ heads in “Top Gun: Maverick” looks like it must be digital wizardry. It isn’t.Cast and crew members on the set of “Top Gun: Maverick.”Paramount PicturesThe movie’s aerial coordinator, Kevin LaRosa II, and its aerial unit director of photography, Michael FitzMaurice, filmed from above using three aircraft: two types of jets with exterior cameras mounted on wind-resistant gimbals, and a helicopter, which proved best at capturing the speed of actors whizzing by. One specialized jet could film the same scene using two different lens focal lengths to double the footage captured on a single flight. Once LaRosa heard that the long-anticipated sequel was finally going to become a reality, he also developed his own aircraft, a shiny black plane with cameras that can withstand up to 3 G’s.“That had never been done before,” LaRosa said in a video interview. As he flew next to the cast, LaRosa dodged trees while keeping an eye on the monitors to make sure FitzMaurice, controlling the cameras from the back of the plane, had gotten the shot.Kosinski, the director, also spent 15 months working with the Navy to develop and install six cameras in each F-18 cockpit, which meant passing rigorous safety tests and securing the military’s all-clear to remove its own equipment. Luckily, Kosinski said, there were “Top Gun” fans among the commanding officers. “All the admirals that are in charge right now were 21 in 1986, or around there when they signed up,” he said. “They supported us and let us do all this crazy stuff.”Usually, the Navy forbids pilots from flying below 200 feet during training. One of the film’s most staggering images is of Cruise in an F-18 whooshing just 50 feet above the ground, a height roughly equal to its wingspan. The plane flew so close to the earth that it kicked up dust and made the ground cameras shake. The pilot landed, turned to Cruise, and told the superstar that he’d never do that again.The actor Monica Barbaro didn’t know how nervous she should be when she agreed to play the pilot Natasha Trace (nickname: Phoenix).“When I met Joe in my callback, first thing he had me sign a waver saying that I didn’t have a fear of flying,” Barbaro said by phone. “I just got goose bumps. I was so excited.”Monica Barbaro as Natasha Trace (known as Phoenix) in the film.Paramount PicturesEach flight day kicked off with a two-hour briefing for the pilots and film crew to go over every upcoming shot, movement and line of dialogue. Next, that sequence’s actors and pilots would rehearse the maneuvers in a wooden mock-up of the jet cockpit until the motions were ingrained. Then, they took to the sky to film as many takes as possible before the jet, or the performers, ran out of fuel. In the afternoon, they did it again.Soaring above the crew, Barbaro and the rest of the cast took on a Swiss Army knife of skills. Instead of hitting her mark on the ground, she had to hit it in the air. The sun was her spotlight. A pilot’s kneeboard on her lap displayed her script, her movements and her necessary coordinates, plus reminders to check her parachute and shoulder straps, fix her hair and makeup, adjust her flight visor, flip on the bright red switch that controlled the cameras, and note down the time codes. Finally, Barbaro had to do her actual job: act.“Tom just really encouraged everybody, if you are going to throw up, just learn how to do it and move past,” Barbaro said. “We would applaud when anyone threw up, so it became celebrated.” Glen Powell (he plays the hot shot Lt. Jake Seresin, who is called Hangman) even brandished his barf bag while gliding upside-down and flashing a thumbs up.Barbaro held onto her lunch. But after her first dailies, she said, her face appeared so calm, it gave the impression that the clouds whooshing behind her were simply a green screen. Cruise’s training had prepared her too well.She was sent back into the sky for a retake. More

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      Jimmy Wang Yu, Seminal Figure in Kung Fu Films, Dies at 79

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      He changed the nature of Asian martial arts movies, which had been relying on sword fighting and fantasy, by bringing hand-to-hand combat to the fore.Jimmy Wang Yu, who in the 1960s, in movies like “The One-Armed Swordsman,” became the biggest star of Asian martial arts cinema until the emergence of Bruce Lee, died on April 5 in Taipei, Taiwan. He was 79.His daughter Linda Wong announced the death, in a hospital, but did not give the cause. Mr. Yu had reportedly had strokes in 2011 and 2016.As a seminal figure in martial arts, known for bringing hand-to-hand combat into the forefront, Mr. Yu paved the way for stars like Mr. Lee and Jackie Chan who found great success outside Asia. After Mr. Yu’s death, Mr. Chan said on Facebook, “The contributions you’ve made to kung fu movies, and the support and wisdom you’ve given to the younger generations, will always be remembered in the industry.”Mr. Yu worked in the 1960s for the major Hong Kong studio owned by the Shaw brothers, starring in their films “The One-Armed Swordsman” in 1967 and “Golden Swallow” and “The Sword of Swords” in 1968.In that period, Mr. Yu said in a 2014 interview with Easternkicks, a website devoted to Asian cinema, he was frequently in the news for getting into fights, often with police officers.“How did I get popular in Hong Kong?” he said. “I think one reason — it’s because I’m a street fighter.” He added, “I think maybe a lot of people say, ‘I see you fight in the movie, is he really a good fighter or not?’”Mr. Yu, left, played the title role in the hit 1967 Hong Kong movie “The One-Armed Swordsman.” Qiao Qiao played his master’s daughter.Film Society of Lincoln Center“The Chinese Boxer” (1970) — which Mr. Yu directed, and in which he starred as a man who takes revenge on Japanese thugs who have destroyed a Chinese kung fu school — was probably his most influential film. With its focus on hand-to-hand combat rather than the sword fighting and fantasy elements that were then commonplace in Hong Kong action movies, it helped transform the genre.In a 2020 essay on the website of the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, Quentin Tarantino, who directed the martial arts films “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” (2003) and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2” (2004), wrote that “The Chinese Boxer” was groundbreaking because it meant that “the hero taking on an entire room full of ruffians, whether it be in a teahouse, casino or dojo, would become as much a staple of the genre as the western barroom brawl or the fast-draw showdown.”“The Chinese Boxer” became a challenge to Mr. Lee, who had been working in Hollywood on “The Green Hornet” and other television series before moving back to Hong Kong, where he had been raised.“Jimmy Wang Yu was the biggest action star in Hong Kong, and Bruce had his sights on him,” Matthew Polly, the author of “Bruce Lee: A Life” (2018), said in a phone interview. “They didn’t like each other and had to be kept out of the same room.”He added, “In a way, Jimmy Wang Yu was responsible for Bruce Lee’s success, because ‘The Chinese Boxer’ established the template for the kung fu movie and Bruce used that as his model for ‘Fist of Fury,’ which is more or less a rip-off of ‘The Chinese Boxer.’” “Fist of Fury,” released in 1972, made Mr. Lee a major star in Hong Kong.Mr. Lee came out with only two more films before he died in 1973. His final movie, “Enter the Dragon” (1973), established him as an international star and secured his popularity to this day.Mr. Yu in the 1975 film “Master of the Flying Guillotine.”Pathfinder PicturesMr. Yu was born Wang Zhengquan on March 28, 1943, in Shanghai and moved with his family to Hong Kong when he was young. Before his movie career began, he was a swimming champion and served in the Chinese Army.After “The Chinese Boxer,” Mr. Yu tried to break his exclusive contract with the Shaw Brothers to make films elsewhere, but they sued him successfully, which effectively got him blacklisted in Hong Kong. He moved to Taiwan, where he resumed his career with Golden Harvest and other studios.In 1975, Mr. Yu starred in “The Man From Hong Kong,” also released in the United States as “The Dragon Flies,” in which he played a respected detective sent to Australia to extradite a dope smuggler.Reviewing “The Dragon Flies” in The Boston Globe, George McKinnon wrote that Chinese studio chiefs’ frantic search to find a successor to Mr. Lee might have ended with Mr. Yu, then 32. “Underneath that impeccable Hong Kong tailoring,” he wrote, “lies a ferocious dragon.” But unlike Mr. Lee and Mr. Chan, Mr. Wu did not become a star in the United States.George Lazenby, who co-starred with Mr. Yu in both “The Dragon Flies” and “International Assassin” (1976), had trained in martial arts for four months in anticipation of making a movie with Mr. Lee. After Mr. Lee died, Mr. Lazenby pivoted to working with Mr. Yu and performed his own stunts.“It was really more stunts than dialogue,” Mr. Lazenby, who is best known for playing James Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), said in a phone interview. “Jimmy was a genuine fighter — if he hit you, you’d feel it. You just had to trust that he wouldn’t hit you.”Mr. Yu continued to work regularly until the early 1990s and, after a long hiatus, appeared in four films between 2011 and 2013.Mr. Yu in “Dragon” (2011). After a long hiatus, he appeared in four films between 2011 and 2013.RADiUS-TWCComplete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Yu received lifetime achievement awards from the New York Asian Film Festival in 2014 and the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taiwan in 2019.After Mr. Yu’s death, the Academy Award-winning Taiwanese director Ang Lee told the China News Agency: “For many fans like me, he represents the vibe of a certain era. His films and his heroic spirit will be deeply missed.” More

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      Michelle Yeoh’s Quantum Leaps

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.In 1995, many years into working as an action star, Michelle Yeoh plummeted from an 18-foot overpass and nearly ended her career. It was her first role in a character-driven drama, playing the lead in “The Stunt Woman,” directed by Ann Hui, a prominent filmmaker of the Hong Kong New Wave. The script called for her to channel nearly a decade of experience as a martial artist into the character of Ah Kam, a stunt woman working her way into the film industry. This scene was crucial: As Ah Kam hesitated over the performance of a daunting on-camera stunt, the character played by Sammo Hung, a legend of kung fu cinema, would push her, and she would fall over the ledge onto the bed of a passing truck. “When it’s an easy stunt,” Yeoh says, “that’s when things can really go wrong.”There’s a certain way to protect yourself when doing a stunt fall: You remain aware of both your body and the layers of cushioning waiting to receive you below, planning your landing as you descend. Yeoh’s first attempt at the stunt went perfectly. But she had to shoot it again, so the moment could be captured from a different perspective, and this time, instead of readying herself for the impact, Yeoh was immersed in her character’s reluctance and uncertainty. In the United States, the scene might have been shot with large, puffy airbags to pad her fall, but in Hong Kong the norm was mattresses and cardboard. Yeoh took a nosedive into the assemblage below, where her head lodged between two mattresses and her legs carried the momentum past the axis of her spine. As her torso folded in half, she felt her own legs hit the back of her head.Yeoh in ‘‘The Stunt Woman’’ (1996).Alamy“I know I’m in serious trouble when Sammo calls me by my real name: It’s like, ‘Choo Kheng! Choo Kheng!”’ she recalls. “And I looked up and there was Ann Hui. She was right next to the boxes. And she was looking at me with tears just rolling down her face.” Yeoh worked to calm herself, concentrating on the fact that she could still feel her hands, as members of the crew placed the mattress (with her still on it) in a van, and drove her straight to the hospital, where she was placed in a body cast and treated for several cracked ribs. The accident illustrated the special risks involved in moving between different modes of filmmaking, from the slapdash and high-energy environment of Hong Kong action movies — often shot without a script and choreographed on set — to more staid, introspective films that prioritize psychological depth. Yeoh was being asked to consolidate all that she knew about falling into a character who knew much less — and bridging the difference required a new sort of agility.With Pierce Brosnan in “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997).PhotofestNow that Yeoh is 59, decades into a series of performances that have made her one of the most recognizable Asian actors in the world, it’s clear that what might have been a career-ending injury was, for her, just another obstacle to vault over. Since her first starring role as a high-kicking police inspector in “Yes Madam!” (1985), Yeoh has performed in dozens of other action films, from fast-paced Hong Kong martial-arts films to wuxia features — Chinese historical epics set in a time of warriors and warlords — to more contemporary Western fare. She fought alongside Jackie Chan in “Supercop” and took the nimble, lightning-quick combat style of Hong Kong cinema to the James Bond franchise in “Tomorrow Never Dies,” in which she rode a motorcycle through the streets of Bangkok while handcuffed to Pierce Brosnan.Over the years, Yeoh has cemented her image as a self-assured combat expert, the serious and confident counterpart to whoever is at her side. In Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000), she soared across courtyards and rooftops while subtly articulating the feeling roiling within the Qing dynasty warrior she played. As the star of more character-focused films like Luc Besson’s “The Lady” (2011) as well as international blockbusters like “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), she embodied refined self-containment. But in her latest turn — as the multifaceted star of this April’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film — Yeoh draws from previously unknown emotional and comedic reserves, bringing the full force of her physicality to the portrayal of a middle-aged woman whose ordinariness makes her the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown. “The work she does,” Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays a supporting role in the film, told me over the phone, “it shows her incredible facility as an actor, the delicacy of her work as an actor, and her absolute beastly work as a physical martial artist.” It’s also the first time audiences will see Yeoh play someone whose movements are uncertain, someone with abundant gray hairs, someone whose body struggles to do what she asks of it — and the first time she’s been called upon to loosen the elegance and poise that has defined her career so far and let her own electric, slightly neurotic personality slip through. The film follows Evelyn Wang, a Chinese American immigrant mother who made a key decision decades ago to leave her judgmental father behind and follow her boyfriend, Waymond, to America. Years later, Evelyn is living out the underwhelming consequences of that decision: an unexceptional life taking place above the laundromat they operate at the margin of financial failure; a strained marriage to Waymond; a daughter whose Americanized feelings are illegible to her. In “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022), a starring role written exclusively for Yeoh.A24On top of all that, their business is being audited. While Evelyn is at the I.R.S. with mounds of receipts, she is pulled aside by a dynamic, take-charge version of her husband, who tells her that he’s from a parallel universe under siege — and that she’s the only one who can save them all. What follows is a wild, absurd romp through alternate versions of Evelyn’s life, ranging from the glamorous (in one she’s a celebrated actress trained in martial arts — basically, Yeoh) to the hilarious (a hibachi chef) to the profane (an alternate path where people have hot dogs for fingers). Approaching a role that bounds gleefully across so many modes and genres put Yeoh to the test. She showed me a photo of her script, dutifully flagged with adhesive tabs that denoted the genre of each scene she appears in (action sequences, comedic scenes, heavy-duty drama): The stack of pages bristled with color, like a wildly blooming flower. She experimented with different kinds of sticky notes. “With the fat ones, they were overlapping so much. So, I had to get the skinny ones,” she told me. “Oh, my God, it was a whole creative process. And then when I finished, I looked at it and go, Oh, my God, I’m in serious trouble.”It was a quiet, blue-tinged morning in Paris, where Yeoh lives much of the year with her partner and fiancé, Jean Todt, a longtime motorsports executive. We were sitting at a large table in the penthouse suite of a hotel not far from her Eighth Arrondissement home; she divides her time among France, Switzerland and Malaysia. Yeoh wore a cream turtleneck sweater, and there was a refined quality to her high cheekbones and smooth brow that reminded me equally of the ancient Chinese lady warriors and ultrawealthy socialites she has played, though with her subtly cat-eyed glasses and the way she kept urging me to eat — the table was blanketed in breakfast pastries — she also reminded me of my most elegant auntie. Yeoh promised to take me through a bit of her daily fitness routine, so I had come to the hotel expecting to watch her do the elliptical, her favorite mode of exercise, in the guest gymnasium. Instead, she asked me to follow her to the hotel suite’s bedroom, where she took off her shoes and lay down on the pillowy bedding — then mimed waking up. (She had decided that a basic workout would be “too boring.”) She stretched her body as far out as it could go on the vertical axis, pointed her toes downward and let her fingertips brush the headboard of the oversize bed. Next, she shifted into a series of reaching, grasping movements, which she described as “climbing an invisible wall.” Her light, wiry body lengthened as she pulled against an imagined resistance. She softly chanted, Om mani padme hum, a Buddhist mantra that she invokes to keep herself safe and blessed. “And the other one I say to myself is: ‘Please forgive me. I’m sorry. Thank you, I love you,’” she said, closing her eyes for a long moment. “Because, you know, I hurt myself doing some things. So I say it to my own body before I do anything.” Yeoh struggles with jet lag, often finding herself alert at 3 a.m. Her waking routine is designed to create a bubble of mindfulness that she can transport wherever she goes. Still lying on her back, she showed me how she begins loosening her hips, swinging a leg in the air in large, graceful circles, first turning the hip inward and then shifting it out into a position used for ballet. She extended the leg in a lift, then ended with three small, controlled kicks. Common wisdom holds that the body can’t easily be conditioned for both ballet and martial arts at once: The physical orientation required of one would seem to be in direct opposition to the needs of the other. But Yeoh has defied this, cultivating a sort of full-body ambidexterity, shifting at will between modes of movement that have lived in her for years. Born into an upper-class family in Ipoh, a tin-mining city in Malaysia surrounded by limestone caves and steep mountains, Yeoh spent much of her childhood in motion. She took ballet; played basketball with her mother, brother and cousins; and boated and swam in the sea on weekends. Her father, a lawyer, spent his free time tending to his kelongs — traditional wooden structures used for fishing. When she was a teenager, her parents sent her to Britain, where she continued to pursue ballet in boarding school and college. But a back injury derailed her training. When she returned home after graduating, her mother entered her in the Miss Malaysia competition, which she won. It was a victory, but also a detour from a path that until that point pointed decisively toward dance. “My dream really, at that time, was to teach ballet,” she said. One day in Hong Kong, a friend was having dinner with the entrepreneur and film producer Dickson Poon, who told her that he was short on actresses. Her friend took a photo of Yeoh from her wallet and started singing her praises. Yeoh got on a plane to meet with Poon, and the next day she was shooting a wristwatch commercial with Jackie Chan, outbiking and outriding him through a lakeside landscape. In 1984, she was cast in an action film, “The Owl vs. Bumbo,” as a damsel in distress. As Yeoh watched the fight sequences, she recognized the underlying movements. “It’s rhythm,” she recalled thinking. “It’s choreography. It’s timing. But at the end of the day, it’s like a tango on steroids. You know, boom, boom, boom!” She was demure, longhaired, a more obvious candidate for a love interest, but the action attracted her. “So, I said, ‘I would love to try.’” The studio set her up in a gym frequented by stuntmen and action stars, where she trained with actors she would later go on to battle in-scene. Within a year, she was the lead in her own kung fu movie, “Yes, Madam!”Andre Morgan, an American film producer, recalls attending a dinner organized by Poon around that time and meeting Yeoh — a sweet, charming young actress who focused on strengthening both her acting and her martial arts. She was frequently covered in bruises but remained undaunted. Doing martial arts is one thing, he explains, but on camera you’re expected to pull your punches and subtly avoid other actors’ strikes, while making it all look real. “When you’re learning as a young trainee, as hard as you try, your timing isn’t perfect, so you get kicked, and you get punched, and you get hit,” Morgan says. “She was brave enough that she was willing to take the punches and the kicks while she was perfecting it. That was the definition of somebody that was really seriously devoted to mastering the skills of being an on-camera martial artist.”In 1988, after Yeoh starred in a half-dozen action films made with Poon’s studio, D&B Films, she married Poon and retired from acting to start a family; she didn’t think she could juggle being an actor, wife and mother. She wanted children badly but was unsuccessful. It was a heartbreak, for which she partly blames the shame and opacity that surrounded reproductive health at the time. Within four years, she and Poon divorced, though they remain friends, and Yeoh is godmother to Poon’s daughter. After the divorce, Yeoh was surprised to find that she was still in demand after several years away from the industry, and she leapt back into acting with renewed purpose. In 1992, she starred alongside Jackie Chan in the internationally distributed “Supercop” — a milestone in the mainstreaming of the martial-arts film in the West — followed by major roles in nearly a dozen other action-heavy titles. By the end of the decade, Yeoh had mastered Hong Kong cinema, in which quickness and precision blend with flashy, playful daring. But it was “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” that made her a superstar. In it, she had to achieve an ethereal, almost immaterial quality very different from the rough-and-tumble choreography of street fighting. Yeoh trades intricate volleys of strikes and blocks, at one point even running down and across a vertical courtyard wall in pursuit of her masked opponent. She does all this with an unfurrowed brow, giving the impression of a fighter immersed in a battle so demanding that it consumes her every movement, with nothing left over for theatrics — of a person who has sublimated her body into pure, almost transcendent gesture.“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000).AlamyYeoh helped to animate Lee’s vision of a graceful, aestheticized, classical kung fu, but the production was a much greater challenge for her than it may appear onscreen. Neither Yeoh nor her co-star Chow Yun-Fat spoke Mandarin fluently, and both, she recalls, had to learn the complex lines, written in a historical style, phonetically. Nor was Yeoh practiced in the traditional martial-arts style used in the film, combining influences from Peking Opera and acrobatics. Early into shooting, she tore a knee ligament while filming the pivotal courtyard scene. She had one shot remaining in the scene, in which she was supposed to be running toward the camera at high speed — so they placed her in a wheelbarrow and pushed her toward the camera, filming her from the waist up as she churned her arms furiously. Then she left for surgery and was off set for weeks as she recovered. “It was really tough,” Lee told me over the phone. “That was supposed to be her strength.” When Yeoh was able to walk, she returned and shot her remaining scenes while wearing a brace. But when it came time for the film’s emotional climax, with her character saying goodbye to her poisoned beloved, cradling him in her arms, she nailed it. “I knew those were real tears,” Lee remembered. “A lot of pressures gushing out, months of repression, and perhaps a lifetime of hopeful thinking. All that effort comes up.” After watching, he had to go off and cry for about 15 minutes. “In Chinese we call it xiang you xin sheng — your countenance, when the way you look comes from the heart.”With Zhang Ziyi in “Memoirs of a Geisha” (2005).Columbia, via Everett Collection“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” led to a new set of internationally minded dramatic roles, in which Yeoh tended to embody beautiful, polished women. She played the largehearted elite geisha Mameha in “Memoirs of a Geisha”; the now-fallen Burmese leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in Luc Besson’s biopic “The Lady”; a mystical warrior master in Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”; and the chilly Eleanor Young in “Crazy Rich Asians,” a future mother-in-law bound by custom and propriety, whose rigidity masks her own struggle with what’s expected of her. Yeoh continued to tell her characters’ stories through their physicality: There’s a hint of the grandmaster in the grace with which Mameha, the geisha, closes her umbrella, and in the matriarch Eleanor Young’s perfect posture. But in the more psychologically focused world of Western drama, she could delve into her characters’ psyches at an even deeper level, exploring the complex ramifications of their self-restraint. Yeoh won high acclaim for these performances, with the critic A.O. Scott calling her “one of the great international movie stars of the past quarter-century.” But bending her deeply ingrained poise into a more ungainly, everyday shape — while continuing to kick ass — may be Yeoh’s most complicated assignment yet. The flustered, disheveled, curmudgeonly heroine of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” would seem to bear little resemblance to the practiced martial artist from “Supercop” who can knock out two bad guys at once with a single airborne split-kick. But Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (the directing duo best known for their feature from 2016, “Swiss Army Man”) wrote the part of Evelyn exclusively for her — in the earliest version of the script, the lead character was even named Michelle. “Our producers were like, What do we do with it if Michelle can’t do it?” Kwan told me over the phone. “And we were like, I don’t know — maybe make a different movie?” Scheinert, also on the call, jumped in: “Yeah, who else can do the action? Who can nail the drama? There’s no one else who does what she has done and has that history and that experience. And that being said, even still, she surprised us.” Yeoh was open to the wide-ranging role and enthusiastically supported the movie after signing on; later, the Daniels learned that she had been very unsure, early on, about some of the crazier parts (the hot dog hands, for example), but that their confidence had persuaded her.“She’s the queen of martial-arts movies,” says Ke Huy Quan, Yeoh’s co-star in the film. A former child star who appeared in “The Goonies” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” Quan retired from acting for more than 20 years, working as an action choreographer behind the scenes, before returning to the screen just recently. Having once watched Yeoh act alongside other legends of Hong Kong cinema, he found himself looking to her for guidance as they filmed. “And she is just this amazing, generous, very giving, very patient person.”It was rigorous, nonstop work, filmed largely in an office building in California’s Simi Valley, leaving little time to rehearse. Yeoh had to improvise, testing out various approaches in real time. Embodying Evelyn also meant shedding a certain amount of hard-earned expertise. Back at the Paris suite’s dining room, Yeoh stood as she told me about figuring out how her character might inhabit her body — a slightly stooped shuffle with her hands held low but not hanging. From that off-kilter center of gravity came Evelyn’s way of scolding, fighting, even dancing: index fingers up, poking lightly at the air. Yeoh put her hands up in tight little fists, the wrists bent at an amateur’s angle. She had to relearn to fight in a way that showed Evelyn’s body language and inexperience, she told me. At first, she said, the Daniels kept telling her: “Don’t do it too well. That’s looking too good!”In one sense, the character was familiar to Yeoh. “If I go into Chinatown or whatever, you see these housewives or mothers who are there,” she said, “who are so frazzled because they’re trying to keep the family, and all they do is go and do the shopping, the grocery shopping, then they have to go home and clean.” After Yeoh played the matriarch in “Crazy Rich Asians,” people told her that her performance helped them better understand their own mothers-in-law; part of what drew her to “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is that she wanted to tell more stories about people the audience could feel for.What’s especially startling is the vulnerability Yeoh brings to off-kilter action sequences, with characters unused to combat. When Evelyn tries to fight for the first time, in the I.R.S. office, she has no special abilities: She punches a nemesis, and her fist crumples; she pulls her hand back and cradles it against her chest. But when, at last, she succeeds in employing a high-tech earpiece that lets her channel the martial-artist version of Evelyn, she is flooded with expertise. She turns toward the fight, her eyes expressing bewilderment but her body demonstrating honed skill. Her fingers extend toward the camera in an open-palmed, defensive position, their tips trembling. Having previously turned movement into an ideal, almost abstract form, Yeoh is now bringing it back to the specific — a particular aging, female, Asian body housing a human being with complex emotions.The effect is liberating, cathartic; it feels as if Yeoh, this Swiss Army knife of actors, has unleashed in herself the ability to inhabit each of her diverse modes of performance simultaneously — to be everything all at once — as she stakes claim over a space that has traditionally been designated for the celebration of young, muscular, male bodies. We feel her exhaustion in her shuffling gait, but also the thrill of that same body spinning sharply to block a strike. “There’s a calcification that takes place as we get older,” Jamie Lee Curtis says, “and I mean literally, you get your bones, your arthritis — it’s all calcification, all hardening. The hardening of the arteries, the heart.” Ideas, too, can harden — “binary, rigid, calcified imprints of our parents and our ancestors” — she continues. “Our jobs as human beings is to break free of them and create new ideas, and the Daniels, through the brilliance of Michelle Yeoh, have done so.”As she has grown older, Yeoh has given up doing some of the stunts that she blithely attempted when she was still proving herself — and when she watches her early films, she thinks of all that could have gone wrong. “We knew that we could do it, and we did it,” she said. “I swear, sometimes I look at a movie and go: Oh, my God. What the hell was I thinking then?” At one point, I asked whether she still remembered how to fight with the ancient weapons she used in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and she got to her feet and began lunging, thrusting an imaginary weapon. The key when mastering a new one, she said, is to spend time before the scene carrying it around everywhere, moving it constantly, making it an extension of your body. Wielding the pizzeria advertising sign she used for one of Evelyn’s alternate lives as a sign-spinner, for example, was “a little bit like using a spear, except it’s wider.” She had me follow her to the bathroom, where she did several pull-ups while gripping the overhanging edge of a marble doorway, transitioned to an ethereal sequence of tai-chi-inspired motions she learned for “Shang-Chi” and then moved into a series of deep squats while miming brushing her teeth in the bathroom’s mirror. “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” (2021).AlamyThe routine was a little bit daffy — a wuxia grandmaster with a hint of Lucille Ball. It was also strikingly original, a spontaneous yet fluid choreography that turned the surfaces of this fancy hotel room into a jungle gym. It showed how Yeoh’s body has stored all the different forms of expertise that it has absorbed, all the injuries and victories, and metabolized them into deep bodily wisdom. As she spoke, she casually executed a famous kick that I had seen her do countless times to knock out someone directly behind her — flinging her leg up until it was completely vertical. She repeated it again and again, switching from one leg to the other, until it seemed more like an ecstatic dance, light and free and frictionless.Alexandra Kleeman is a professor at the New School and the author of the novel “You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine.” Her newest novel is “Something New Under the Sun.” Djeneba Aduayom is a photographer in Los Angeles. Her work is inspired by her mix of French, Italian and African heritage. More

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      The Tao of Wee Man

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Some of the earliest hours of my life have been spent with Jason Acuña. The pattern of our days was established at our first meeting: I would contrive to arrive before him to whatever sunrise activity Acuña, better known as Wee Man, had planned for us, and he would already be there, shouting a greeting in his psyched-up Southern California drawl. The first time I was late to being early, he was going to teach me how to skateboard. I found him in the middle of a friendly conversation with a man who appeared to be living in a car. Acuña was giving him some free merchandise from his sock line.Thick light-compression socks occupy a larger share of Acuña’s attention and interest than that of the average American adult for the same reason that skull stickers do: He is a skateboarder. To spend a few days with Acuña, who is 48, is to inhabit a parallel version of California — seemingly even more densely populated than the real California — where everyone is a professional skateboarder, or works for a skateboard company, or works for a different skateboard company, or is a skateboard photographer, or is a pioneer of skateboarding, or invented some crucial component of skateboards, or ran a skateboarding magazine, or doesn’t do any of that but can still kickflip.All the people in the parallel California know one another, as well as 10 billion other people whose skateboarding-related activities (past, present, future) they spend a not-insignificant amount of time catching one another up on. Everyone is nice, or at least no one is not nice. This whole thing — skateboarding et cetera — absorbs a great deal of Acuña’s time but is (mostly) not really his job, and certainly not his primary source of income, though it is true that Acuña’s passion for skateboarding et cetera is directly responsible for the comfortable lifestyle he now leads, a lifestyle that affords him the ability to at “any moment” receive a phone call from a friend saying, “ ‘Hey, let’s go to Italy’” and immediately, or at the latest tomorrow, go, something he says he has done multiple times.On a gray Orange County morning, over chilaquiles, I asked Acuña, “What would you say is your job?”“Me?” he asked. And then said in a tone of genuine wondering, “I don’t know!” He owns businesses, he reasoned, which makes him a businessman. He amended this to “entrepreneur,” a title both grander and somehow less formal; Willy Wonka famously oversaw an industrial chocolate-manufacturing operation, but you wouldn’t call him a businessman. “I don’t have to be anywhere or anything,” Acuña said. “Obviously, we made four ‘Jackass’ movies. And we did pretty OK with those.”Tabling, for a moment, Acuña’s offscreen business ventures — which include the socks, a partnership in an international taco chain and owning an event space regularly rented out to film episodes of “Dateline NBC” — his job, on and off for the past 22 years, might be described as: enactor of hypotheticals. It has been his work both to learn and to demonstrate, on camera, what would happen if: he and his friend were glued together with powerful adhesive; he kicked himself in the head; he was slapped in the face with a humongous fish; a bull came charging at him and all he had to shield himself was a yoga ball; he had a parachute strapped to his back and there was a huge fan.“Jackass 2.5” (2007).Paramount Home EntertainmentAnswers are predominantly variations on the theme “It would be painful.” It is the métier of Acuña to convey on video, with bugged out or scrunched up eyes, doubled-over body, temporarily discolored skin, shrieks, moans and groans, the flash-quick process by which nerve endings, in response to what the body perceives as an intolerable degree of mechanical, chemical or thermal stimulus, telegraph frantic warnings of “danger” and “pain” to the spinal cord and, thence, to the brain. The work is compiled under the franchise name “Jackass.” For three seasons, from 2000 to 2002, it was a television series that aired on MTV. Beginning in 2002, it has also been, sporadically, a theatrical film. The first three “Jackass” movies have earned a reported lifetime gross of more than $300 million. A fourth movie, “Jackass Forever,” will be released in February, after 11 months of pandemic-related delays.Unlike some of the other “Jackass” players, Acuña has rarely made headlines over the past 20 years. He has not amassed (or squandered) the greatest fortune. But Acuña is the cast member for whom “Jackass” fame has been rendered most inescapable. He has a form of dwarfism known as achondroplasia; his distinct physical appearance — the “Jackass” team agrees he is by far the most recognized of any of them, even more than Johnny Knoxville — makes him the only member whose mere presence in the world in his off-hours instantly identifies him. He told me he has been recognized in public at least once every day, for decades. At 22 years, the boyish franchise is now older than some of its stars were for their TV debut. On the precipice of a fourth film, the bodies and faces on the posters having visibly entered middle age, it’s hard not to wonder: What has it been like to live as one of the guys from “Jackass”? Acuña knows best. No one has spent more time doing it.As we were leaving the skatepark, Acuña was approached by a stranger with a request. Within seconds, he was shouting into a man’s phone: “Hey, Natalie! What’s up? Wee Man here! I just wanted to tell you: Happy Wednesday WOOOO!”It is often said that jazz is the only true American art form. For roughly a century, this was true. Then, in the 1990s, in West Chester, Pa., a teenager named Brandon Margera, better known as Bam, began making and distributing videos of himself and his friends performing skateboarding tricks intercut with clips of them executing pranks and low-tech, high-risk stunts. At the same time, on the West Coast, a small crew of people associated with Big Brother magazine — a coarse, influential skateboard publication that also produced video compilations with similar antics — had the idea to package these bursts of mayhem into a TV show. It would be sort-of hosted by a charismatic Tennessean and aspiring actor working under the stage name Johnny Knoxville (who was not himself a skateboarder but who was willing to shoot himself in the chest with a gun on camera to “test” the functionality of a bulletproof vest, which was just as good). It would unite the combustible forces of the two daring groups into one explosive ensemble.“Jackass” needed the infrastructure of American suburbia to exist: well-kept supermarket parking lots as vast as oceans, abandoned at night but illuminated for safety, divided by neatly planted ornamental bushes, encircled by curbs — curbs into which shopping carts could be rammed as violently fast as possible, upending human cargo. It needed middle-class parents who could attend to their offspring’s first few rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, leaving those children nourished and carefree, with endless hours of empty time. It needed chain stores whose corporate anonymity made their property fair game for destruction. It needed camcorders to become so cheap and accessible to the average person that children could be given total unsupervised access to them. It needed skateboards, a terrifying American invention.The thing about skateboarding for a few seconds slowly in a straight line is that it requires you to overpower your body’s every screaming instinct, and lean forward, into apparent danger, rather than drawing backward, into presumed safety. Leaning back will cause the board to shoot out in front of you at supersonic speed, leaving you behind to crash thunderously to the ground — on your ass, if you’re lucky.“It’s the craziest thing,” Acuña said 20 minutes into my crack-of-dawn skateboard lesson. After starting me at Step 1, he moved me back to a step even earlier than 1; I was clinging to a wall while shakily propelling myself forward along level concrete. When dropping in on the enormous U-shaped structures called vert ramps, Acuña said, even seasoned skaters might impulsively rear backward, away from the sheer plunge. But this urge, bred in humans over the millenniums before skateboards existed, is their peril. “Even going into a ramp, you lean all the way forward, because the board is going to catch up with you, no matter what.”Acuña is a master of this counterinstinctual logic. He zoomed through the morning fog around the skatepark in long, confident loops, like a winning game piece being pushed across a board. Skateboarding is, essentially, a bad and dangerous idea that luck and determination can render mildly to moderately survivable. Of course it spawned “Jackass.” The franchise is broadly predicated on the belief that the human body, captured on video in unusual circumstances, is sufficiently entertaining to satisfy audiences for upward of 90 minutes, without the need for additional plot lines, back story or even much dialogue. Illustrating this theory required characters who were willing to do anything with their bodies (Steve-O, who once shot a bottle rocket out of his anus), or show a tremendous amount of their bodies (Chris Pontius, who is willing to be completely naked all the time), or who had bodies that were in some way different than average and were game to emphasize that difference onscreen.“Jackass: The Movie” (2002).Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection“Jackass Number Two” (2006).Paramount PicturesAcuña was born in a United States Army field hospital in Livorno, Italy, when his parents, George and Dagmar, were both 20. The doctor delivering him noticed that his head seemed big relative to his newborn body. He worried Jason had hydrocephalus — “water on the brain” — a serious, potentially fatal condition, and had him whisked away for two days of tests. The doctor knew George, who worked in the hospital as a cook. On the third day, the doctor called him with good news: Jason did not have hydrocephalus. But he did have a condition called achondroplasia, he explained, which affects the body’s cartilage. A mutation on one gene of the fourth chromosome slows the development of cartilage into bone, leading to shorter-than-average bones and, therefore, shorter-than-average people.George had known somebody with dwarfism, an old high school classmate named Kevin. One day when Jason was an infant, George happened to spot Kevin at a bus stop. George asked if he might come over for dinner, to speak with George and his wife “about what to expect.” Kevin agreed, and he and George have kept in touch for the rest of Jason’s life. He advised, as best George can recall, that Jason would turn out just fine. As Jason grew up, George admired his son’s natural ease with others. “He was never afraid to be around everybody,” he said. “He’s got a beautiful smile.”On a winter morning in California, sitting in a beachfront park between two faux-lighthouse edifices, Acuña recalled how, when he was a child, his mother learned of an annual conference held by Little People of America, a support organization for people with dwarfism. She thought he might enjoy the opportunity to meet other kids like him. The hypothesis proved incorrect.“I came back and I go, ‘Mom, I don’t want to go to these things anymore,’” he said. “I’m like: ‘That’s not what my life’s about. I have friends.’”“I don’t think anybody in the world needs to like — ” Acuña noticed a bald man jogging on the beach. “ ‘Well, I’m a bald guy so I need to go hang out with bald people.’ No, he doesn’t care. He’s a dude. He’s a jogger, he wants to hang out with more joggers. Skateboarder, hang out with skateboarders.”Acuña’s achondroplasia, coupled with his inclination to make himself ultravisible, helped him stand out as a skater. An inveterate disrupter in class, he always bloomed under attention. Earning notice for being famous, he said, “felt just the same as looked at for being little. So that feeling never changed.” He told me he began being sponsored by local skate shops when he was 14. At age 19, he appeared in the fifth issue of Big Brother in a feature that spotlit him for, he said, “being a little-person skateboarder” who was “very talente — or talented, you know. I don’t want to say ‘very talented.’” The article, which also contained an interview with Pancho Moler, another skateboarder with dwarfism, was titled “Wee Men.”Acuña’s “Wee Man” nickname was coined by a warehouse employee at World Industries, the skateboard company that produced Big Brother. Teenage Acuña and his friends were frequent visitors to the company’s factory and warehouse space for reasons obvious to skateboarders, but which are unable to be logically articulated to the wider world. Every time Acuña showed up, he said, the employee — whose brother owned World Industries — “would yell to everybody: ‘Hey, everybody, Wee Man’s here! Wee Man’s here!’” Acuña says he always loved the nickname. His family embraced it, too. George Acuña does home inspections, and sometimes when he completes a job, he’ll tell the prospective Arizona homeowner the house “was just inspected by Wee Man’s dad.” So shocked is the average person to receive this honor that George must pull up personal photos on his phone to prove he really does know his son.There is a comment on a 10-minute YouTube video titled “Best jackass compilation – PART 2 😜😜😜👍🏆” that poignantly elucidates the je ne sais quoi of “Jackass,” and that has been rewarded with more than 1,000 likes: “Really good friends getting paid to do the stuff you and your friends talk about doing while drunk. These guys deserved every dime they got. They don’t make things like this anymore.” They do still make things like this, of course: The fourth “Jackass” movie, for instance. But it is also true that the fourth film, while thematically identical to all “Jackass” that preceded it, is eons from the franchise’s early days in its production budget, filming conditions and cast demography.Initially, for the TV show, cast members were paid per segment. Acuña recalled the amount was in the arena of $500 to $700; Jeff Tremaine, a creator of “Jackass,” who has directed the franchise since the beginning, said he was pretty sure it was under $1,000, unless the stunt “was something life-threatening.” By the third season, Acuña said, “we knew we were pretty popular. We were hearing, like, Shaq was having ‘Jackass’ parties at his house.” A push for higher pay, and the freedom to execute ideas that were deemed too expensive or outrageous for television, resulted in “Jackass: The Movie.” Acuña’s first salary payment from the first film amounted to a figure he cited as “above $20,000, under $100,000” — enough, he said, that when he received the check, he was like: “Oh, my God. I’m OK now.” Earning a living as a professional haver of skateboard-adjacent fun was no longer a precarious dream.Jason Acuña in Newport Beach, Calif.Chris Buck for The New York TimesThe fourth film will be the first “Jackass” without two important onscreen presences: the valiantly jolly Ryan Dunn, who died in a car crash in 2011 — his bearded face is tattooed on Acuña’s calf in tribute — and Bam Margera, whom Paramount fired in August 2020. The studio claimed that Margera, who has struggled with addiction, was dismissed for breach of contract after he stopped complying with a sobriety-and-wellness program mandated in his employment agreement. Margera disputed this and filed a lawsuit claiming wrongful termination. The saga has been messy both in and out of court. In videos on his Instagram page and TMZ, Margera denounced his former co-workers and encouraged fans to boycott the movie.“Bam, just — he needs to take care of his health,” Acuña told me. “We’ve all tried for him.” We were sitting on a public bench, watching a sea lion surface and submerge in Newport Bay. A man had just asked Acuña to sign one of the $2 bills he carries around with him, for his celebrity-signed $2 bill collection. “He’s doing good from the last I’ve heard. Because he’s not on social media. He’s not doing anything crazy,” he said. “When he was on the phone more, and on social media, it wasn’t good for him.”The societal terrain over which “Jackass” gleefully rides roughshod has likewise been radically transformed in the 10 years since the last movie. The franchise has long outlived most contemporaries. Only a handful of the cultural phenomena that debuted at the same intersection of two centuries as “Jackass” still survive: “Survivor” is one, actually. “Law & Order: SVU.” “Rick Steves’ Europe.”The delights of “Jackass” have long derived from carte-blanche obnoxiousness — the enthusiastic ruination of a miniature-golf course, or a toilet in a hardware store, or a parent’s slumber, or a friend’s haircut, with no consequences. But while physical comedy is ageless, the context in which it occurs can make it fall rapidly out of fashion. It was never, for instance, socially acceptable to sneak up behind unsuspecting Japanese people and startle them by banging a tremendous gong — but it’s difficult to imagine this segment from the first movie being greenlit, or even pitched, 20 years later, for the fourth. The audience’s tolerance for Americans amusing themselves in this way has considerably diminished.But two qualities intrinsic to “Jackass” have facilitated its dependable profitability across two decades. First, it embraces the lighthearted, preposterous violence American audiences have enjoyed since the earliest “Looney Tunes” shorts; a trompe l’oeil bicycle-path gag in the new “Jackass” replicates nearly exactly a gag from Wile E. Coyote. But what keeps the brutality on “Jackass” from feeling sadistic is its emphasis on whole-group participation. Every member is both Coyote and Road Runner. Scenes of terror invariably end with good-natured laughter all around. The temporary nature of the suffering makes “Jackass” bearable. Consent makes it fun.“Jackass: The Movie” (2002).Paramount/Getty Images“Jackass Forever” (2022).Paramount PicturesIn December 2019, in anticipation of a fourth movie, the “Jackass” team began filming test shoots with potential new cast members to “see if they would fit with the group,” Acuña said. One of the primary concerns, he said, was that the advanced ages of what Paramount has branded the “legacy cast” — in their early 20s and 30s when the show premiered — would “have an effect” on their willingness and ability to pull off the signature stunts. One of the most jarring visual elements of the film is that Johnny Knoxville’s hair toggles between a fetching silver (now, according to Knoxville, its natural color) and an improbable jet-black dye job between scenes. Cast additions altered the appearance of “Jackass” in another, even more obvious way: Two of the five newcomers — Davon Wilson and Eric Manaka — are the first Black performers featured in the primary cast. Another, Rachel Wolfson, is the first woman.Testing out new members “was weird,” Acuña said from behind the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, a vast white luxury camper van, the tall clearance of which prevents Acuña from taking it through some drive-throughs. “At first,” he said, “the original of us were like, ‘We don’t need anybody else.’” He still feels this way to some degree but acknowledges that the world has changed. “Gender stuff and, you know, things like that.” He doubts the show as it existed in 2000 could debut now on television. “When we first started, there was never going to be a girl in it,” he said. “We didn’t think it was funny for girls to get hurt. For us, it was like, ‘That’s not funny’ — hurting a girl.” Now, paradoxically, it would be in poor taste to not hurt a girl on “Jackass” — and so they do.Acuña skates early in the morning; sometimes after dark. Otherwise, he is hindered by all manner of questions and requests. (In the hours I spent with him, fans initiated interactions about a dozen times.) He appreciates the easy community of skateboarding. When he goes somewhere new, he pinpoints a local skate shop. At that store he will, inevitably, meet a person planning to skate at another location, if he’d like to come along — at which place he will meet more people planning to skate somewhere else, and so on forever.‘You could travel around the world and still not leave Costa Mesa!’Acuña enjoys being a cog in the perpetual motion machine of skateboard society because he is implacably antsy. He gets anxious, he said, if he does not launch himself into an activity after waking. The occasions when he must rest to recover from injuries (from skateboarding — or “Jackass”) torment him. To Acuña, waking hours constitute the period in which he must tire himself out before bedtime. He careers through the day like Animal the Muppet through a Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem drum solo.Acuña’s mission to burn off his energy is expedited by extreme organization. (“He is 1,000 times neater than the average person walking the earth,” says Preston Lacy, a “Jackass” co-star whose size discrepancy with Acuña is frequently employed to comedic effect.) Determined that I not experience one nanosecond of boredom during our time together, he mapped out complete days of activities for us and chauffeured me to most of them in his Sprinter. Most of the things I did in 2021 were accomplished in a three-day stretch with Jason Acuña. Engagements included: learning to skateboard; going to Starbucks, where he requested they make me a hot chocolate “with a little pizazz,” and they did; going to the beach; having lunch and making sure the music wasn’t too loud for customers at a branch of his restaurant, Chronic Tacos; embarking on a driving tour of his town that he loves, Costa Mesa (“You could travel around the world and still not leave Costa Mesa!”); one disgusting hour of hot yoga where the perfectly balanced Acuña flowed through poses like mercury in a maze; driving an hour to the Dogtown Skateboards warehouse to talk about skateboard colors; buying tacos for the Dogtown employees; driving back to Costa Mesa for “a fabulous doughnut”; looking at a Ferris wheel; taking a kickboxing class, during which Acuña executed burpees and star jumps at double the rate I could; visiting the workshop of the skateboard designer Paul Schmitt, who is known as the Professor and under whose supervision Acuña, standing on a bucket, cut out a new prototype for his upcoming special-edition deck; helping two strangers locate a table at In-N-Out; dropping off a sock donation at Two Felons skate shop, where Acuña exclaimed, “Oh, daaaaaaang!” after one of the proprietors demonstrated the zoom capability of his phone camera; and, of course, snapping dozens of pictures of various vanity plates we encountered.Taking pictures of vanity plates is one of Acuña’s joys in life. “I got it!” said Acuña, glancing at his phone screen after spotting a “GRINDER7” plate while driving. “Pretty pro at this,” he explained, and added, giggling: “This is what I do for a living! I drive around collecting private plates.”“I nailed it,” he said, after snapping a photo of a plate that read “BWAYNE.” “Nailed it!” he said, photographing a plate he guessed read either “Flippin’ John” or “Filipino John.” “Nice!” he said, appreciating a plate that read “MOMONLY.” “IMNUTS2!” he said, reading a plate that said, “IMNUTS2.”“Jackass” fans take a selfie with Acuña in Newport Beach, Calif.Chris Buck for The New York TimesOn one of our drives around Orange County, Acuña spotted a rare natural wonder of the California roadway. “Oh!” he gasped as he approached a stoplight. “We’re going” — his voice dropped to an awed whisper — “side by side to another Sprinter!” Acuña peered, beaming, into the window of the gunmetal van alongside us.In his Sprinter, Acuña uses detachable pedal extenders to operate the gas and brakes. It’s estimated that 90 percent of children with achondroplasia in Italy, his birth country, take surgical means to acquire extra height. The method is arduous: a yearslong series of procedures in which children’s bones are systematically broken, and then pulled apart, typically at a rate of one millimeter per day, for several months. The process is controversial and unpopular in the United States. Acuña’s mother learned of the technique when he was a child, he said, and because their relationship was “very open,” shared the information with him. He thought it sounded “torturous.” Not to mention all that downtime.The most scared Acuña remembers ever being was in 2005, when he spiral fractured his right femur while skateboarding. “My whole life just flew right in front of me,” he said. He didn’t have time to foresee his death as he was plummeting through the air — the fall wasn’t that high. But lying at the bottom of the ramp with his foot facing the wrong direction, Acuña became “very panicked.” Terror-stricken. Brief, far-spaced work commitments on “Jackass” were what afforded him the freedom to spend most of his life doing whatever he wanted, i.e., skateboarding et cetera — exactly this. He was due to begin shooting the second “Jackass” movie in three months. If he got hurt while having fun, he couldn’t get paid to get hurt for work. “I was like, ‘I just royally effed this up,’” he said.Doctors put a titanium rod in his leg, and Acuña threw himself into physical therapy. He was on set in time. And on time. He’s the most on-time person people who meet him will ever meet.Easing the Sprinter down a picturesque residential street, Acuña told me that skateboarders “very literally” see the world differently. He was hunting for a parking spot but also, in the back of his mind, deconstructing the block into an arrangement of angles, curves and curbs. “That’s not just a set of stairs, to walk up into the house to me,” he said, indicating paved steps. “That’s where I can go up and down on my skateboard.”“I always do it,” he said.Analyzing his environment for reservoirs of fun is second nature to Acuña, who, seeking a good time, always finds it. Anywhere he goes, people are happy to see him. He can go to Italy whenever he wants, and he can travel the world without leaving Costa Mesa. He loves being Wee Man.I asked what his job would have been if he hadn’t managed to make a career out of “Jackass.” He stopped what he was doing — which was whistling — and thought for a few seconds. “I think I would have just been a guy that grew old and worked at a skate shop,” he said. His tone suggested this was an almost equally desirable outcome. It’s sort of already what he does, for no pay. He threw back his head and boomed in an old-timey prospector voice: “ ‘Wee Man,’ they called him!”Caity Weaver is a writer at large for the magazine and a writer for The New York Times’s Styles section. She last wrote about Cher and “Moonstruck” for the magazine. Chris Buck is a photographer known for his distinctive portraits. His sittings include Jay-Z, four presidents and Grumpy Cat. He last photographed Seth Rogen for the magazine’s cover. More

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      Zazie Beetz and Regina King on Their Big Battle in ‘The Harder They Fall’

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      In the Netflix western, the two actresses, playing members of rival cowboy gangs, engage in an epic fight. Here, they break down the scene.“Trudy’s mine,” hisses Stagecoach Mary Fields (played by Zazie Beetz), her eyes blazing.Trudy Smith (Regina King) ducks into a dye barn, its rafters hung with swatches of color.Their eyes lock, Mary empties her shotgun onto the floor. Trudy tosses her pistol to the side.“Let’s go,” Mary spits out. A wild fight scene ensues between the two members of rival cowboy gangs: bodies hit windows, teeth crunch into hands and horseshoes hurl toward heads.Toward the end of the new Netflix western “The Harder They Fall” — a reminder that Black cowboys should be as much a part of the genre as anyone else — Mary and Trudy duke it out in an epic fight that nearly ends in death.Although the director, Jeymes Samuel, is a singer-songwriter known as the Bullitts, he has dabbled in filmmaking, and “The Harder They Fall” is his first feature. In a video interview, he clarified that he wasn’t reimagining the western — he was “replacing” it.“What I was doing with that fight, I’ve done it the whole film,” he said. “The whole film is reverse psychology on what we know as the western and puts up a mirror.”Historians estimate that one in four cowboys were Black, a fact that was hardly reflected in the conventional westerns popular in the 20th century, which were largely devoid of people of color.In creating the film, his aim was to counter two tropes of traditional westerns: people of color shown as less than human; and women appearing subservient and less than men. “Westerns have never given light to women and their power in that period,” he said. That’s why Samuel, who wrote the screenplay with Boaz Yakin, inverted gender roles in the Mary-Trudy battle.“All the men in the film, when they have conflict, they pick up guns,” Samuel said, adding, “It takes the two women to literally throw away their guns and duke it out.”Regina King as Trudy Smith. She, Beetz and their stunt doubles practiced the fight in their off hours.David Lee/NetflixAlthough the actresses, part of a star-studded cast, worked closely with their stunt doubles, Nikkilette Wright and Sadiqua Bynum, most of the final cut features the actresses themselves — because the stunt doubles were simply too good at their jobs. The stand-ins’ work “was too clean,” Samuel said. “In that particular scene, it was perfect and neat, whereas I needed the urgency. When you put Zazie and Regina together, neat went out the window.”Beetz, King, Wright and Bynum practiced the fight on their own time in a hotel conference room in Santa Fe, N.M., where much of the movie was shot. As rough and tumble as the scene may look onscreen, Beetz said in a phone interview that it was all very carefully choreographed.“We also wanted the fight to look scrappy, because we wanted it to look real and intense and how people really would potentially fight,” she said. “I think it’s just a testament in general to the shift in film and the shift in how we see women and their physical abilities.”As part of her preparation, the actress read about Stagecoach Mary Fields, the first African American woman in the United States to be a mail carrier on star routes — routes handled by contractors who were not employed by the Postal Service. (Many of the main characters are based on real historical figures, but Samuel fictionalized the vast majority of the plot.) Fields was enslaved until she was around 30 years old, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Then she went on to live a whole new life.“There was a lot of formerly enslaved people who moved to the West, and the culture of the United States wasn’t as established in the West,” Beetz said. “So there was more mobility for Black people. And there really were towns that were all Black, and they were self-sustaining, and it was an interesting place where Black people could thrive.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More