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      Cillian Murphy, Oscar Winner and ‘Oppenheimer’ Star: Get to Know His Work

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      “Oppenheimer” wasn’t the first time he’s played a physicist. In “Sunshine,” “28 Days Later” and more, you can get a sense of just how wide his range is.The first thing you notice about Cillian Murphy is his eyes. As a young filmgoer, I clocked them in the historical drama “Girl With a Pearl Earring” (2003), when he was romancing Scarlett Johansson. But over the years I came to find myself more and more taken by the rarity of Murphy’s transmutable talent as he tackled everything from horror movies to comic-book fare to war pictures.Even as he gained popularity as one of Christopher Nolan’s favorite actors and as the star of the television drama “Peaky Blinders,” somehow Murphy still felt underrated. Well, that was until last year, when “Oppenheimer” came out. In recent months more and more people have found themselves captivated by Murphy thanks to his now Oscar-winning performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb and the central force of Nolan’s best picture-winning film.“Oppenheimer” serves as an excellent overview of what Murphy is capable of onscreen — his take on the scientist is alternately seductive, cerebral and tortured. Still, it’s just his most recent triumph. If you’re now looking to expand your knowledge of Murphy’s work, here are some excellent options.2003‘28 Days Later’Stream on SlingIt’s frustrating for many cinephiles that Danny Boyle’s zombie masterpiece “28 Days Later” isn’t more easily available to stream. (Currently, it’s only on Sling.) Not only is this film one of the most haunting depictions of the way society quickly crumbles when faced with an apocalyptic scenario, it also offers a look at Murphy’s breakout moment, wandering through London’s ravaged streets in nothing but ill-fitting scrubs, a large scar across his head. Nolan uses the natural sunken quality of Murphy’s cheeks to great effect in “Oppenheimer,” where his gauntness also conveys a mind that cannot stop racing as he considers all the terrifying outcomes of his deeds. But Boyle employed Murphy’s physicality much earlier, casting him as Jim, a man who wakes up naked in a hospital bed 28 days after the onset of a monstrous virus known as the Rage. Jim is no one special, someone who survived by mere luck, but he wears that like a burden. Early on, you watch his newly revived brain process the horrors he is witnessing. Later, you see him fully embrace the fury this world requires. This is the film that demonstrated why Murphy is the actor to cast when you want someone to play haunted. There’s no one who does it like him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Missing the Gay Best Friend

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      In film and on TV, he was a sign of cultural progress. Then he was a tired stereotype. Then he disappeared. So why do we want him back?SOMETIMES, YOU DON’T know how much you’ve been missing something, or even that you’ve been missing it, until you have it back. That may explain the unexpected nostalgic pang I felt while watching Nathan Lane connive and conspire with an array of imperiously behatted women on the second season of Max’s real housewives of New York costume drama “The Gilded Age.” Or the similar pang I felt while watching Mario Cantone reprise his role as the embittered confidant Anthony Marentino on the second season of Max’s other real housewives of New York costume drama “And Just Like That …” In both instances, it seemed suddenly clear that, for a long time now, popular culture has been moving forward without a once-essential style accessory: the Gay Best Friend. We’re not supposed to mourn his absence; we’re not supposed to want him back. But I kind of do.Listen to this article, read by Ron ButlerOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Sardonic and supportive, caustic and self-deprecating, alternately the angel and the devil on the shoulders of countless heroines, the Gay Best Friend — always free, always available, there when he’s needed and invisible the minute he isn’t — had been a staple of women-driven, gay-friendly movies and television shows since I was a teenager in the early 1980s, at the dawn of the representation-matters era. As our designated representative, the homosexual confidant wasn’t ideal, but he was better than nothing. He could serve as a pet, a provocateur or a sob sister; a servile, wince-inducing stereotype or a sly underminer of various heterosexual norms. For gay audiences, his existence, rarely in the thick of the action but rather just next door to it, offered, at its best, a brief glimpse into a universe of possibilities — a universe that mainstream culture was still unwilling to enter more immersively. Over the next couple of decades, the Gay Best Friend’s development could be traced alongside the overall arc of gay culture as it bent toward justice.And then, seemingly without anybody noticing, he ghosted, disappearing from the scene with barely an acknowledgment that he’d been there at all. (The momentary appearance of Earring Magic Ken in 2023’s biggest film hit, “Barbie,” is the last known sighting.) Was the cultural demise of the Gay Best Friend a defeat, or was it a sign of progress? And either way, whatever happened to that guy? He was fun to have around and, all in all, good company.IT MAKES SENSE that, in the 2020s, the Gay Best Friend is not only virtually extinct but even frowned upon as démodé, a quaint form of minstrelsy. In an era in which everybody is determined to live life as the star of their own show, the G.B.F., a member of a sexual minority who accepts that his destiny is to serve as a tangential character rather than a central figure, feels self-abnegating in a way that renders him politically suspect. Why would any self-respecting gay man choose to define himself primarily as a woman’s ornamentation? The trope is by now so familiar that it can be spoofed: A 2023 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, “Straight Male Friend,” shrewdly posits that being the Gay Best Friend (as embodied by Bowen Yang) is essentially uncompensated emotional labor, and that after a long day (or at least a long brunch) of listening and supporting and encouraging, what gay men really need is a dude-bro buddy with virtually no emotional intelligence who just wants to hang.Has the character simply outlived its questionable-in-the-first-place value? The inverse of the Gay Best Friend is the Fag Hag, and the minefields of that particular stereotype announce themselves right in the label (twice in just six letters). Forever bemoaning her rejection by the straight world, often the first to announce that she considers herself overweight or unattractive and viewed by her gay friends as a kind of rescue case, the Fag Hag character can be predicated on affection, condescension or both, but the general sense is that her time has passed. The character has also come under fire for reasons that lie outside of popular culture, as frustration has increased over the minimization of the role of women, both straight and lesbian, in the struggles and movements that have defined the past 60 years of gay history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and 55th N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards

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      The 20th season of this medical drama airs on ABC. And CBS hosts the annual awards show honoring excellence in film and television.For TV viewers like me who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network shows, movies and specials broadcasting Monday through Sunday, March 11-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLAKEFRONT EMPIRE 10 p.m. on HGTV. This new real estate series takes viewers to Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks, a Midwestern vacation destination made famous by the Netflix show “Ozark.” This series follows a group of realtors, including Peggy Albers, who often talks about her remarkable turnaround from serving more than 15 years in federal prison for selling methamphetamine to becoming a successful agent at the lake.TuesdayIn a scene from “Lionheart,” Dan Wheldon with his son Sebastian.Michael Voorhees/HBOTHE LIONHEART 9 p.m. on HBO. Dan Wheldon was best known by his nickname, “The Lionheart,” and won the Indianapolis 500 twice. In a tragic accident, he died in a crash in 2011 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. This documentary blends archival and present-day footage to tell the story of Wheldon’s sons, Sebastian and Oliver, who have since followed their father’s footsteps and entered the world of racing.PASSWORD 10 p.m. on NBC. This game show, which originally aired in the 1960s on CBS, is coming back for its second season, with Keke Palmer as host and Jimmy Fallon as a panelist. This season will feature guest stars, including Chance the Rapper, Howie Mandel and Joe Manganiello, playing the game that is a mix between charades and telephone.WednesdayTHE AMAZING RACE 9:30 p.m. on CBS. It’s hard to believe that this reality competition series premiered in 2001, just as iPods and iTunes were introduced. As for 36 seasons now, teams of two will embark on heart-racing challenges around the world for a cash prize of $1 million.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Trump Aide Alyssa Farah Griffin Becomes a Liberal Favorite

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      Now and then during an election cycle, a Republican pundit becomes something of a hero to Democrats.Peggy Noonan, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, filled that role in the months leading up the 2008 election, after she had pilloried the second Bush administration over its invasion of Iraq and criticized Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.Nicolle Wallace and Steve Schmidt, veterans of John McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, reached pundit primacy on MSNBC excoriating the tea party activists then in ascendance.A rising star of the current season is Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former communications director for President Trump who is now a co-host of ABC’s “The View” and a regular commentator on CNN.Ms. Farah Griffin, who resigned from the Trump administration in December 2020, garnered wide attention with a tweet she posted on Jan. 6, 2021: “Dear MAGA — I am one of you. Before I worked for @realDonaldTrump, I worked for @MarkMeadows & @Jim_Jordan & the @freedomcaucus. I marched in the 2010 Tea Party rallies. I campaigned w/ Trump & voted for him. But I need you to hear me: the Election was NOT stolen. We lost.”Three years later, Ms. Farah Griffin, 34, spends many of her nights at the CNN headquarters in the Hudson Yards district of Manhattan, bantering with Van Jones, David Axelrod and other liberal commentators.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Free to Be … You and Me’ Took the Revolution to the Playground

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      Fifty years ago, the TV landmark showed Gen X kids that no one else has the right to tell you who you are.“Free to Be … You and Me,” the 1974 kids-TV special and feminist milestone, begins with footage of children riding a carousel. I was one of them. Not literally — I watched the show on TV like millions of other baby Gen X-ers. But these kids, laughing and spinning, were my cohort at a strange point in history.We were born at the tail end of one of the country’s great periods of social revolution. Our mothers were getting jobs outside the home, and so was Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Later in our childhoods would come the era of Phyllis Schlafly and He-Man, and things would jerk backward again for a while, maybe without our even being aware of it at the time.But on “Free to Be,” the future was baby steps away. The theme song, by the New Seekers, imagines a land “where the children are free” and says that “it ain’t far to this land from where we are.” The children transform into cartoons on lively horses. They leap out of the spinning wheel’s orbit, galloping through an animated desert, girls and boys side by side.In the show’s animated stories, chivalry doesn’t protect girls, self-reliance does: In “Ladies First,” a “tender, sweet young thing” who insists on special treatment ends up eaten by tigers.ABCMarlo Thomas, the former star of the sitcom “That Girl,” created “Free to Be” as an album in 1972, in collaboration with the Ms. Foundation for Women. She was inspired, she said in the introduction to a 2010 DVD of the TV special, by reading bedtime stories to her niece — books that “told girls and boys who they should be, who they ought to be, but seldom who they could be.”Through songs, skits and stories, “Free to Be” told them they could be, and do, anything. Girls could run races and grow up to be doctors; boys could play with dolls and grow up to push a stroller. A princess could decide not to marry a prince, or anybody. A man could cry.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lisa Ann Walter of ‘Abbott Elementary’ on the Show She’ll Never Forget

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      “I would challenge anybody to see Patti LuPone in her prime sing ‘Evita,’” the actress said, “and not say, ‘That was the best show I’ve ever seen in my life.’”It was a Monday morning in Los Angeles and Lisa Ann Walter had the day off from “Abbott Elementary,” the ABC sitcom about an underfunded public school in Philadelphia.But that didn’t mean she wasn’t working.The Season 3 premiere was a little more than a week away, and even though Walter knew where her character — the veteran second-grade teacher Melissa Schemmenti — was headed, she would divulge only that “there are changes. Big changes.”But there were plenty of other things to discuss: Her stand-up tour. A movie script she’d written during the pandemic. A project that’s an animated series about a single mom of teenage boys called “Bitter.” The $1 million she’d bagged for the Entertainment Community Fund on “Celebrity Jeopardy!” The playoff dinner the night before that began with a pot of chili and ended up a smorgasbord.“I go overboard,” she said in a video call.Then there’s the project she’s doing with her bestie Elaine Hendrix — she couldn’t talk about that either — who played Meredith to Walter’s Chessy on “The Parent Trap” some 25 years ago.“Elaine and I can’t go anywhere together without people losing their minds,” Walter said before talking about the origin story of “Outlander,” her fixation on muscle cars and kissing during bar trivia. “I always used to say I don’t really have to do anything else with my career.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Sense and Sensibility’ OnscreenI think Emma Thompson is a genius with the screenplay. It’s Alan Rickman at his finest. It evokes enough of that period, the lushness and quietness, that it’s genuinely that article. But it’s modern enough where it resonates — that need to find your person.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Melissa Benoist Hits the Campaign Trail in ‘The Girls on the Bus’

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      After six years on “Supergirl,” the actor and producer took a crash course in political journalism to prep for a new Max series.Melissa Benoist has made a habit of playing journalists on television.She spent six years as the hero of “Supergirl,” Kara Danvers, who works in media when she’s not saving the world. Now Benoist is taking on the role of a campaign reporter named Sadie McCarthy in the Max series “The Girls on the Bus,” a very loose adaptation of the former New York Times reporter Amy Chozick’s nonfiction book “Chasing Hillary.”But Benoist does not think she’d be a good fit for the profession. Asked about the choice of some political reporters to refrain from voting in the elections they cover, she explained in a phone interview that she would be a “terrible journalist.”“I’m too emotional,” she said. “I’d for sure be biased.”“The Girls on the Bus,” created by Chozick and Julie Plec (“The Vampire Diaries”), is a fictional and frothy account of the lives of women chronicling a series of Democratic presidential contenders on their way to the national convention. Benoist’s Sadie works for a New York Times stand-in called The New York Sentinel, and is given an opportunity to return to the road after being publicly embarrassed during the previous election cycle when a video of her crying after her candidate lost, a journalistic no-no, went viral.The show has a fantastical bent, and not just because Sadie has conversations with the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson (P.J. Sosko). Despite arriving in an election year and taking inspiration from Chozick’s book about covering Hillary Clinton, the political landscape of the show looks very different from our current one. Sadie and her cohorts grapple with familiar topics, but they do so in a sort of parallel universe where the bonds they form while tracking down sources is at the center of the tale.In the series, Benoist’s character, left, competes and bonds with other reporters on the campaign trail played by, from left, Carla Gugino, Christina Elmore and Natasha Behnam.Nicole Rivelli/MaxFor Benoist, the show is her first series regular role since “Supergirl” and her first venture as a producer. In an interview, she discussed her crash course in political reporting and why that word “girl” keeps following her around. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Late Show’ Goes Live to Recap the State of the Union

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      “Depending on what happens in November, next year might just be a Kid Rock concert and an immigrant catapult,” Stephen Colbert joked.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Biden State of Mind“The Late Show” went live on Thursday night, after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.Stephen Colbert said that the press had so far described Biden’s address as “feisty, fiery, heated, supreme, crunch wrap. I’m sorry. It’s really late and I’m hungry.”“It was kind of a tense night, because it feels like this might be the last time we get a State of the Union. Depending on what happens in November, next year might just be a Kid Rock concert and an immigrant catapult.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, coming into tonight’s speech, critics said Biden’s State of the Union challenge was to dispel ‘old-man vibes.’ Really? In Congress? Kinda hard to fight off the old-man vibe when you’re speaking to a room that looks like an open casket convention.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“On the Democratic side, they wore white. On the Republican side, they were white.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (State of the Union Edition)“Well, guys, if you’re watching at home, I assume you’re still cleaning up from your big State of the Union party. Yeah. What kind of wings do you want — right wing, left wing?” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, earlier tonight, President Biden delivered the annual State of the Union address, and Biden’s speech was historic. It was the first time that the font size on the teleprompter was 8,000.” — JIMMY FALLON“Biden looked out at the members of Congress and said, ‘Finally, a place where I seem pretty young.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Thanks to rules giving former members of Congress floor access, George Santos attended the State of the Union. Come on! You can’t just go back to your old job like you never left — unless you’re Jon Stewart. Keep it up, Jon! You’re crushing it.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Tonight, the room was filled with over 500 members of Congress, but Senator Mitch McConnell wasn’t there. Well, he attended, but he wasn’t there.” — JIMMY FALLON“Ahead of the president’s arrival there, members of the Supreme Court filed in. Interestingly, Justice Clarence Thomas did not attend. It’s nice to know he’s willing to recuse himself from something.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Thursday’s “Daily Show,” Ronny Chieng asked his “Kung Fu Panda 4” co-star Awkwafina to interview him about his role in the movie.Also, Check This OutKaty O’Brian and Kristen Stewart in “Love Lies Bleeding.”Anna Kooris/A24Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian find love in a hopeless place in Rose Glass’s new neo-noir thriller “Love Lies Bleeding.” More