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      Sterling K. Brown Is on His Best Behavior, Just in Case

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      The Emmy-winning actor and star of the new movie “Biosphere” is sweet on vegan cookies, his Audi e-Tron and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”The first time Sterling K. Brown read the script for “Biosphere,” his new sci-fi movie with Mark Duplass, he thought, “‘This is very non-Randall-esque,’ which is always one of the criteria that I’m looking for in the next project.”He was referring, of course, to his beloved character in “This Is Us,” which aired for six seasons on NBC and snagged Brown an Emmy, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award.“But being known for a character and being known for a body of work are two different things,” he added.In a video call from Los Angeles — during which one of his sons lugged in a Harry Potter book for his dad to read to him — Brown talked about some of his coming projects in addition to “Biosphere,” which opens July 7: Cord Jefferson’s untitled adaptation of the Percival Everett novel “Erasure”; and “Washington Black,” Brown’s debut as a TV producer.He’ll also reunite with Dan Fogelman, the creator of “This Is Us,” in a Hulu series about a Secret Service agent.“I have a secret man crush on Dan Fogelman, I think because of what he was able to do for me for six years,” Brown said before revealing a few other things he’s been crushing on, like the relationship expert Esther Perel and the Tony-nominated play “Fat Ham.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Trader Joe’s Vegan Oatmeal Chocolate Chip CookiesIs it sugar? Yeah. Is it health food? Not by any stretch of the imagination. But I have a sweet tooth, and it’s vicious. If I have two to three of these cookies, my sweet tooth is sated and I get a chance to go on with the rest of my day.2PelotonI find the instructors on this medium to be exceptional. The level of positivity that they have and the things that they share with you are the kinds of voices that you want reverberating in your head as you take on physical challenges. One of my favorite instructors is Jess Sims.3Audi e-TronIt’s nice to know that you’re not putting anything into the air. And nobody hears you coming. I’m not a flossy man, so I don’t need a car that peacocks too loudly. But I do enjoy comfort. I do enjoy a few bells and whistles. And as far as a luxury vehicle is concerned, I feel it blends in in a pretty nondescript way. I like to flash, but in the least flashy way possible.4Cocoa ButterBeing African American, something happens when you don’t moisturize your skin. You get what we call in the community “ashy,” where you can draw “D-R-Y” across your skin and it just stands out (#notagoodlook). So I drink a lot of water and I moisturize. I keep my skin as supple as I possibly can. Because the alternative for someone with a deeper shade of soul is you look like you’ve been walking around kicking flour.5Esther PerelMy wife and I have been married 17 years, and we’ve known each other since we were 18. The love that you have deepens over time with your partner. But what can suffer is the spontaneity and that spark that you had in the beginning. Esther has given us a couple of tools and insights. Just because we’ve been together this long doesn’t mean that passion has to die.6AlexaAlexa is Encyclopaedia Britannica, basically. If you want something quick-quick, Alexa gives you a fast answer, and then will ask you, “Did that help?” And you’ll be like, “Yes, Alexa, that did. Thank you very much.” I try to be polite. Listen, as A.I. is continuing to develop, and we don’t know if we’re making ourselves extinct to any potential sentient being, Brown is on his best behavior.7‘The Bluest Eye’There can be an inferiority complex that becomes internalized when you don’t get a chance to see yourself presented to the world as beautiful. In “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison encapsulates that internalization in the most profound, poetic and incredible way.8‘Fat Ham’You’re taking the story of Hamlet, you’re putting it in a backyard barbecue in the South with a young, queer, Black male protagonist. It is such a faithful following of Hamlet until it’s not. Then it’s such a delightful departure.9My Children PlayingI played basketball, football, soccer, track, a little bit of Ultimate Frisbee. The joy of watching your children accrue skills and be able to engage with you in something that was such a big part of your own childhood is great.10Crying in the TheaterThe first Broadway show that I ever saw, in 1998, was “Ragtime.” Audra McDonald came out and sang “You have your daddy’s hands.” And I was like, “Is this woman an angel? Is she a real human being?” You want to see Sterling cry? Then I had the privilege of working with Renée Elise Goldsberry. If she sings “It’s Quiet Uptown” [from “Hamilton”] — child, please. I am a mess. More

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      ‘The Bear’ Season 2 Puts a Little Optimism on the Menu

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      With a gentler tone and reverence for hospitality, the Hulu show reaches beyond the chef to give other workers the spotlight.This article contains spoilers for the Hulu series “The Bear.”Even before the bump in Italian beef sandwich sales last year, you could sense an immediate, almost feverish enthusiasm for “The Bear.” You could measure it, not in actual views (Hulu doesn’t release streaming data), but in thirsty memes of Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto, the broken chef with a wavy jumble of unwashed hair and a startled, pink face that always seemed recently slapped.Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, is the tortured chef at the center of “The Bear,” determined to, though not always capable of, doing things differently.Chuck Hodes/FXCarmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, became the patron saint of obsessive chefs, their personal lives obliterated by a dedication to restaurant work. After his brother’s death, Carmy was determined to get his family’s ancient, grimy, lawless sandwich shop into shape while also, somehow, being a good guy — a dilemma he tackled between exploding toilets, fights, Al-Anon meetings and panic attacks.“I’m fine, really,” Carmy told his sister over the phone, “I just have trouble breathing sometimes and wake up screaming.”The breakout show’s portrayal of the anxiety and tension that rule restaurant kitchens was darkly realistic. And while the second season, which premiered Thursday on Hulu, doesn’t completely leave those pressures behind, it conveys an unexpected optimism about the restaurant industry and the people who make it run.The new season of “The Bear” follows its workers on their various adventures as the restaurant closes for renovations.Chuck Hodes/FXSeason 2 of “The Bear” swivels attention away from the chef and his trauma to spend time with other characters and, in the process, does something that TV and movies about restaurants hardly ever do: It subverts the power structure of the brigade system and invites more workers into the center of the story, where they belong.Though it never feels instructive or moralizing, there’s a sense of hopefulness as “The Bear” wrestles with larger themes of hospitality. Each member of the kitchen crew finds moments of joy and deep meaning in their work, whether they’re drawn to it by devotion or dysfunction (or a broken emulsion of both).In its second season, “The Bear” sends two of its characters on transformational internships, or stages, at other restaurants. Lionel Boyce, left, is Marcus, a pastry chef who finds inspiration on a gentle internship in Copenhagen.Chuck Hodes/FXOne episode focuses on Marcus, the young pastry cook who’s a sponge for new techniques and ingredients, played by Lionel Boyce. In Copenhagen, he interns with a brilliant pastry chef played by Will Poulter.It doesn’t matter that recent reporting on the stage economy of Copenhagen, one of the world’s fine-dining capitals, has revealed a pattern of abuse and dangerous working conditions for unpaid interns. In “The Bear,” the stage is a dream: Marcus’s tasks are simply to learn from a skilled but kind and patient mentor, to get out and about and feel inspired, and to come up with some new dishes of his own.A stage at a fine-dining restaurant transforms Richie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach.Chuck Hodes/FXNo one was more suspicious of the fussy quirks of fine-dining kitchens than Richie, the fragile chaos machine played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. But after a stage of his own in a Chicago fine-dining restaurant, Richie is completely transformed. He cares about organizing pens and polishing silverware. He wears suits now.In an arc that made me weep, Richie learns that he has the aptitude and composure for expediting, for being in the eye of the storm, for channeling all of his pettiness and intensity into fixing problems and making diners happy.There were flashbacks, in the first season of “The Bear,” of a toxic chef who trashed cooks on the line, telling them they’d be better off dead. But here the show seems keen to remind us that fine dining can work differently, and that wonderful people are still scattered throughout it.“The Bear” always blurred the lines between family and workplace in ways that felt both tender and menacing, and the most nightmarish kitchen scene takes place not in a professional kitchen, but at a Berzatto family Christmas at home a few years back, when Carmy’s brother Michael was still alive.Jamie Lee Curtis is devastating as their alcoholic mother who can’t get through cooking and serving a beautiful holiday dinner — an elaborate Feast of the Seven Fishes — without wringing guilt and shame from her children. Her inability to host offers a glimpse at what shaped the siblings and warped their relationships to cooking, but it’s also a razor-edged contrast to the cooks’ growing sense of hospitality as instinctual and deeply fulfilling.Sydney, played by Ayo Edebiri, is the enterprising stagiaire who quickly turned her internship into a serious job.Chuck Hodes/FXSydney (Ayo Edebiri) is crushed by her anxiety about the restaurant opening and herself as a leader. She worries about failure, but also about not having a financial stake in the business.Despite all of that, she’s delighted and re-energized after making a simple omelet for Carmy’s woozy, hungry sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott). She tops it with chives and crushed potato chips, plating it beautifully on a tray, as if she were carrying it to her own mother on a holiday morning. As she stands behind Natalie, watching her eat, Sydney looks happier than she’s been in ages.It’s a beautiful and agonizing scene that compounds the hospitality industry’s complications, and the ways a calling to it can both hurt and heal. Sure, Sydney deserves more than the pleasure of watching someone fill with happiness when they eat her food. But also, that pleasure is real and, sometimes, there isn’t anything else.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Is Back. Here’s What to Remember.

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      The new season, premiering Thursday on Max, promises the return of beloved figures from the franchise’s past. Here’s a quick primer on who’s who and how they all fit together.“Sex and the City” premiered just over 25 years ago, on June 6, 1998, and since then much has been lost in a franchise that now includes six seasons of the original HBO show, two films and the Max follow-up series, “And Just Like That …”The formerly carefree Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) still mourns the death of her husband, John (played by Chris Noth and known to all as Mr. Big). Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is nostalgic for the art career she gave up in order to raise children. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) perhaps misses her past consistency of character. And then there’s Samantha (Kim Cattrall), always a reliable source of wit and wisdom, who appeared only by text message in Season 1 because Cattrall declined to participate.Season 2, however, which premieres on Thursday and picks up a few weeks after the events of Season 1, promises a Samantha cameo and the return of several other beloved figures from the franchise’s past. How do all the characters fit together? And what do you need to remember before dipping into the new episodes? Read on.Aidan returnsMr. Big wasn’t Carrie’s only big love. She was also once engaged to Aidan (John Corbett), who returns to the extended story this season. It’s worth remembering how things went the first time around. And the second.“Sex and the City” presented Aidan as Mr. Nice Guy, and Carrie might still blame herself for their breakup. After all, she cheated on him. (Big time, you could say.) And then Aidan punished her with passive aggression, even letting her know he was contemplating cheating on her in retaliation. Later, when Carrie freaked out about their impending nuptials (to the point where she developed a rash) and requested more time, Aidan pressured her to get married right away. So maybe Aidan wasn’t the Good Boyfriend who got away but rather a dodged bullet.Aidan subsequently married a fellow furniture designer and had three sons. This didn’t stop him from kissing Carrie during their rendezvous in Abu Dhabi in the second film. Carrie was quick to tell Big about this, but did Aidan do the same with his wife? Whatever trust issues he had before, he would have to accept that he is just as flawed as Carrie if not more so. Should he and Carrie ignore all this history to get together one more time? If so, they would need a memory-free environment: Carrie’s old apartment, despite its renovations, contains their past, not their future.Carrie’s careerCarrie Bradshaw, sexual anthropologist, has written a long-running newspaper column, a number of pieces for Vogue and several books. The latest of these, “Loved & Lost,” is a weepy grief memoir with an optimistic epilogue.That upbeat ending was added at the behest of Carrie’s editor Amanda (Ashlie Atkinson), who pushed the author to re-enter the dating pool to offer readers a taste of hope. This led her to dip her toes in with the widower Peter (Jon Tenney) — no oomph — and with her podcast producer, Franklyn (Ivan Hernandez), who definitely has potential. More research may be required.Amanda is prepping next steps: setting up readings, interviews, audiobook recordings. None of these things will give Carrie what she still needs, which is time to reboot more fully after Big’s death.For that, Carrie will have to turn to other projects and other editors — perhaps even her role model and mentor, the Vogue editor Enid Frick (Candice Bergen), who also returns this season. When we first met Enid, in Season 4 of the original series, she was ripping Carrie to shreds for not completing an assignment to her liking; the last time we saw her, she was trying to talk Carrie into posing for a photo shoot in wedding couture, in the first film.Carrie’s career at Vogue had a bumpy start, but as she came to appreciate Enid’s style, their relationship deepened into both a friendship and an odd romantic rivalry. When Enid was 50-something, she rightfully resented younger women who were dating older men. (“Why are you swimming in my wading pool?” she asked Carrie back then.) Now that Carrie is 50-something herself, she might understand that predicament better.Pod peopleIf it’s diversion she wants, Carrie can always concentrate on her podcast. This isn’t the insufferable “X, Y and Me,” which appears to be dead, as her comedian co-host, Che Diaz (Sara Ramirez), has relocated to Los Angeles for pilot season.In the new season, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Che (Sara Ramirez) relocate to Los Angeles.Craig Blankenhorn/MaxCarrie’s retooled pod is called “Sex and the City” (why not?), and if she wants it to continue, she will to have to sort out some important questions. Like why, after years as a sex columnist, is she still uncomfortable talking about sex and body parts? Who owns the podcast and the studio, and what do they want from Carrie? Also, as stimulating as romantic attention from Franklyn may be, won’t it complicate their working relationship?Arty aspirationsCharlotte York Goldenblatt gave up her career as an art dealer and gallery director and her dream of one day owning a gallery in order to start a family. Her family — her husband, Harry (Evan Handler); her musical prodigy daughter, Lily (Cathy Ang); and her nonbinary child, Rock (Alexa Swinton) — still needs her but what she needs is a more tangible sense of accomplishment.As a more woke Charlotte reminded everyone last season, her eye for art is as keen as ever. She defended her friend Lisa Todd Wexley’s art collection against the criticisms of a judgmental mother-in-law, identifying the value of works by Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Roberts and Mickalene Thomas and others. Could Lisa (Nicole Ari Parker) repay the favor and jump-start Charlotte’s re-entry into the art world, maybe by introducing her to a few key gallerists?What about Che?The polarizing Che is definitely back in Season 2, with Miranda in tow. A Harvard-educated lawyer who has never devoted herself so completely to her significant other, Miranda forgoes a prestigious internship in order to follow Che to Los Angeles. (This is probably not the wisest move for an alcoholic in early recovery.) It remains to be seen how Miranda’s husband and son will handle the divorce.Other characters are less certain about their romantic prospects. Dr. Nya Wallace (Karen Pittman), Miranda’s professor friend, still has unresolved issues with her musician husband, Andre Rashad (LeRoy McClain), regarding parenthood. Seema (Sarita Choudhury), last seen having a steamy fling with a club owner, might not yet be ready to book a table at “Relationship Place” (a term coined on Carrie’s podcast). But she is ready to become a bigger part of the show’s ensemble, if the writers and producers will only give her better material.Finally, Stanford Blatch (the late Willie Garson) is presumably still in Japan. And Samantha is still in London — although because she and Carrie met for offscreen drinks last season, the door is open for her cameo comeback. Whatever happens, it is sure to be fabulous. More

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      Producer Ryan Murphy Is Expected to Move to Disney

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      Mr. Murphy, the force behind hits like “American Horror Story” and “The Watcher,” is coming to the end of his $300 million Netflix deal.Ryan Murphy, the television megaproducer behind hits like “American Horror Story” and “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” is poised to move his operation to the Walt Disney Company, five years after he stunned Hollywood by decamping to Netflix for a $300 million deal.The contract talks with Disney are not finished, according to three people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. No deal is expected to be completed until after the screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood is resolved, one of the people said. (Unionized film and television writers have been on strike since May 1.)But the talks between Mr. Murphy and Disney are advanced, the people said. Mr. Murphy’s contract with Netflix expires at the end of the month. Renewal talks with Netflix never got off the ground.Representatives for Mr. Murphy, Disney and Netflix either declined to comment or did not return calls. Bloomberg reported Mr. Murphy’s likely move to Disney earlier on Tuesday.A deal with Disney would formally reunite Mr. Murphy with executives he worked closely with for more than a decade. Disney owns the FX cable channel, which is home to his “American Horror Story” franchise, which started in 2011. (The series also runs on Hulu, which Disney controls.) ABC, the Disney-owned broadcast network, recently bought the rights to “9-1-1,” a drama that Mr. Murphy created for Fox in 2018.When Mr. Murphy signed his Netflix deal, in February 2018, it was just six months after another star producer, Shonda Rhimes, had signed her own nine-figure contract with the streaming company. The back-to-back signings were an emphatic statement by Netflix that it was in the business of paying any price for big-name writers. In the process, it set off a Hollywood arms race (which, amid broader concerns about the streaming business and the writers’ strike, has mostly cooled off).Mr. Murphy’s tenure at Netflix got off to a bumpy start. Misfires included “The Politician” and “Hollywood.” It was not until last September that Mr. Murphy served up bona fide hits in “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and “The Watcher.” Both series are among the 10 most-watched Netflix originals ever, according to the streaming service.Mr. Murphy, who continued making shows for Disney even though he was under contract with Netflix — new seasons of “9-1-1” and “American Crime Story” continued apace — would likewise continue to make shows for Netflix after a move to Disney. The next edition of “Monster” will focus on Erik and Lyle Menéndez, the brothers serving life sentences for killing their wealthy parents in 1989, and “The Watcher” has been renewed for another season. More

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      in Theater

      Paxton Whitehead, Actor Who Found Humor in the Stodgy, Dies at 85

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      An Englishman with a deep, cultured voice, he played uptight snobs in films like “Back to School” and on shows like “Friends” and “Mad About You.”Paxton Whitehead, a comic actor who earned a Tony nomination for his role in a revival of “Camelot” and played the starchiest of stuffed shirts in films like the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” and on hit 1990s sitcoms like “Friends” and “Mad About You,” died on Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.His daughter, Alex Whitehead-Gordon, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of a fall.Mr. Whitehead, an Englishman with a modulated baritone voice, often coaxed humor from his sharp features and dignified bearing. His comic characters typically displayed subtly exaggerated versions of his own traits, which he executed with seeming ease.“He couldn’t help but be funny,” the critic Terry Doran wrote in The Buffalo News in 1997 of Mr. Whitehead’s time at the George Bernard Shaw Festival in Ontario, adding: “He didn’t sweat buckets striving to make us laugh. He just was amusing. It came naturally.”For Mr. Whitehead, finding the comedy was the key that unlocked a role.“You always have to find the core of humor in a character — at least I like to, the same way some people will say, ‘I like to find the good in him, even though he is a villain,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997.One such character was Philip Barbay, the uptight dean of a business school and the nemesis of Thornton Melon, Mr. Dangerfield’s character, in “Back to School” (1986). Melon, a crass but successful businessman, comes to Grand Lakes University to visit his struggling son and winds up enrolling at the school after making a sizable donation.Barbay hates Melon on sight and does his best to get him expelled, to little effect. Early in the movie he and his girlfriend, Diane, a literature professor played by Sally Kellerman, see Melon buying books for students at the university bookstore, and Barbay describes him as “the world’s oldest living freshman, and the walking epitome of the decline in modern education.”Melon goes on to disrupt Barbay’s class and date Diane. Mr. Whitehead infused Barbay with some pathos — the character seemed unable to keep himself from being a killjoy — which added another layer to the humor. While out with the free-spirited, poetry-loving Diane, Barbay proposes that they take their relationship to the next level through “a merger,” adding that they would become “incorporated, if you will.”From left, Rodney Dangerfield, Mr. Whitehead and Ned Beatty in the 1986 movie “Back to School.”Orion, via ShutterstockMr. Whitehead’s stodgy figure in “Back to School” was the archetype for many of his later sitcom roles. He played a stuffy neighbor on “Mad About You,” a stuffy boss on “Friends” and the stuffy headmaster of a prestigious school on “Frasier.”He was also a prolific theater actor. He appeared in more than a dozen Broadway productions, including the revue “Beyond the Fringe” (1962-64) and the 1980 revival of “Camelot,” in which his portrayal of King Pellinore earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical. He played Sherlock Holmes opposite Glenn Close in “The Crucifer of Blood,” which ran for 236 performances at the Helen Hayes Theater in 1978 and 1979.Mr. Whitehead’s roles, especially onstage, were not always comic. One departure was his portrayal of the ambition-crazed lead in a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at the Old Globe in San Diego in 1985.“Comedy, tragedy, pathos, spectacle — everything is swept along before the raging kinetic power of this Richard,” the theater critic Welton Jones wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1985.Francis Edward Paxton Whitehead was born in Kent, England, on Oct. 17, 1937. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise (Hunt) Whitehead, was a homemaker. His daughter said that his family and friends had called him Paxton since he was a child.He graduated from the Rugby School in Warwickshire before studying acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His early work was with touring companies, sometimes performing a new play every week. In the late 1950s he earned a stint with the New Shakespeare Memorial Theater, which is now called the Royal Shakespeare Theater and is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.“But I was the lowest of lows,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, and after playing Shakespearean extras for a while, he decided to move to New York City. (His mother was American, so he was allowed to work in the States.)His Broadway career soon took off, and it continued into recent decades. He appeared in the original productions of the comedies “Noises Off” (1983-85) and “Lettice and Lovage” (1990) and in revivals of “My Fair Lady” (1993), as Colonel Pickering and later Henry Higgins, and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2011), as the Rev. Canon Chasuble.In 1967, Mr. Whitehead became the artistic director of the Shaw Festival. He produced, acted in or directed most of Shaw’s plays, attracting actors like Jessica Tandy to the festival’s productions, before deciding to return to acting in 1977.His other films include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), which starred Whoopi Goldberg; “Baby Boom” (1987) which starred Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard; and “The Adventures of Huck Finn” (1993), which starred Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance. His other television appearances include “Murder, She Wrote,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “The West Wing,” “Hart to Hart” and “Caroline in the City.”His marriage to the actress Patricia Gage ended in divorce in 1986. The next year he married Katherine Robertson, who died in 2009.In addition to his daughter, with whom he lived in Arlington, he is survived by a son, Charles; a stepdaughter from his first marriage, Heather Whitehead; and four grandchildren.Mr. Whitehead told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1986 that he usually preferred to act in comedy, because “it interests me more, and actually I take it a great deal more seriously than I do tragedy.”“The last time I did a tragic role,” he added, “they laughed.” More

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      John Corbett on His Arrival in ‘And Just Like That …’

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      He was defined by his role in “Sex and the City,” not always comfortably. He’s reprising it in “And Just Like That …” because “I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do.”John Corbett at his ranch in California. He returns to his old TV Manhattan stamping grounds in the new season of “And Just Like That …”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesOver the years, people have cornered John Corbett on the street, at the grocery store, in coffee shops, to swear fealty. “Every [expletive] person I meet is just, ‘I was Team Aidan!’” he said. He assumes that those people are lying.“People don’t want to hurt my feelings,” he said. “They’re really careful with me.”In two seasons of “Sex and the City” and in brief cameos later, including in the improvident Arabian fantasia “Sex and the City 2,” Corbett, 62, played Aidan Shaw, a hunky furniture maker and the on-again, off-again, engaged to, off-again, still mostly off-again love interest of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw.“He was warm, masculine and classic American, just like his furniture,” Carrie says of Aidan in voice-over.Aidan, a character designed to contrast Chris Noth’s withholding Mr. Big and originally scheduled for just three episodes, was also, like much classic American furniture, stolid and unyielding. He wouldn’t let Carrie smoke. He demeaned her interests. When she cheated on him, he punished her. Controlling, judgmental, manipulative — who wants a bedroom set like that?Carrie, apparently. Because as trailers have revealed, Corbett’s Aidan will return to the second season of the well-heeled “Sex and the City” revival, “And Just Like That …,” which premieres on Max on Thursday. And this time around, when people chase him down to declare loyalty to Aidan, Corbett thinks that they just might mean it.“Those fans that didn’t like Aidan — and I know exactly why they didn’t, he was wrong for her — there’s going to be no [expletive] help for those people,” he said.Corbett was speaking late last month, by telephone, from his home in a sleepy town about three hours north of Los Angeles. Actually it was “the wife’s” phone, the wife being the actress and model Bo Derek, as Corbett’s wasn’t working. A request for a video interview had been denied.“I can’t be myself because I’m performing,” he said. “An hour plus is a long time to suck your gut back.”This suggests that Corbett, who came to acting late and more or less by accident, has complicated feelings about performance even as he maintains, he said, a hands-off attitude to his career. To talk to him is to feel not only his shirttails-out, expletive-heavy intimacy, but also his deep ambivalence about his calling, his craft and the show that made him famous.Corbett didn’t always appreciate the way he was typecast by playing Aidan in “Sex and the City,” but he was happy to play the character again.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCorbett grew up in Wheeling, W.Va., with his mother. After high school, he moved to Southern California to be near his father, a welder, taking a job at a steel plant. Sidelined at 22 by an injury, he enrolled in community college, which mostly bored him. But about a month in, he met some guys in the cafeteria who invited him to their improv class.“I’ve always been a guy that made my friends laugh, a class clown,” he said. “I saw 30 other people just like me in there.” That same day, he dropped his other classes and re-enrolled as an acting student. He took sword fighting; he took ballet. He has never felt that same excitement or that same freedom again.“It’s kind of like drugs,” he said. “You’re chasing that first high.”His transition into professional acting was wobblier. He posed for cheap headshots, whipped up a résumé full of fake credits and supported himself as a hairdresser while he botched almost every audition that came his way, hands shaking, scripts shaking. He had two goals: He wanted to be on television and he wanted to be famous.In 1990, he was cast as the serene, groovy Alaskan radio D.J. in the CBS comedy “Northern Exposure.” “Northern Exposure” ran for five seasons and 110 episodes. It didn’t pay much. But it gave him his first bittersweet taste of celebrity, and it taught him that while fans loved him, they loved him not for any histrionic skill but rather for his rumbling voice, sleepy smile and 6-foot-5-inch frame.“I was the hunky guy and women would gush,” he said. “I don’t think one person has ever come up to me and said, ‘Hey, I think you’re a good actor.’”He had a type, he discovered — handsome, sensitive, not quite a himbo. And in the years after “Northern Exposure,” he didn’t fight it. “You’ve got to go where the money is, right?” he said. The money back then came mostly from TV movies he described as “not great.”He had some standards, though. And in 2000, when he was first offered a role in the third season of “Sex and the City,” he turned it down. He saw himself as more than a guest star. But the showrunner Michael Patrick King, now the creator of “And Just Like That …,” tried to convince him otherwise, intuiting that Corbett could supply the affection and warmth so lacking in Noth’s Big.As one of the main love interests of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, Aidan was a nice guy with a manipulative side.Craig Blankenhorn/HBOCorbett and Parker insist the characters’ revived relationship will be healthier. “He’s really, really listening to her now,” he said.Craig Blankenhorn/Max“There’s so few actors that have a relaxed, strong sex appeal,” King said in an interview. “He also has that thing that some of the great male movie stars have, a really low vibration of confidence.”Since Corbett didn’t have HBO, he was sent episodes on VHS. He watched them, and he was still a no. (For one thing, the script required nudity, “and my sweet little mom watched everything I did.”) Eventually he agreed to a meeting with Parker and King, mostly for the free trip to New York. They met at King’s West Village apartment.“I fell in love with both of those cats,” Corbett recalled. “After that hour, I wanted to be around them some more.”Parker also remembered an immediate bond. “I opened the door for him,” she said in a recent phone interview. “He did some sort of gallant, old-fashioned bow. I don’t remember the conversation, except that it was really pleasant and happy.”Once he was on set, she realized that the camera only magnified that charm. “It’s like he wrapped his arms around the camera and merged it into his body,” she said. “He absorbed it.”Three episodes became four. Then five. Then more. When Carrie and Aidan broke up at the end of Season 3, fans sent HBO Popsicle-stick furniture demanding that Corbett be brought back, and he was.He had what he wanted: He was on TV. He was famous. But the fame, more intense than what he’d experienced in “Northern Exposure,” changed his life, and “not in the way that I wanted it to, work wise,” he said.Corbett initially declined “Sex and the City” but changed his mind after meeting with Parker and Michael Patrick King. “I fell in love with both of those cats,” he said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThere were such strong associations between Corbett and the role that he struggled to be seen in any other way. He recalled being turned down for other roles he wanted, told that he would be too distracting. His work on “Sex and the City” and in the “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” movies, the first of which was released in 2002, affirmed and limited his type: the nice boyfriend. Then he became the nice husband. Lately, in projects like the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies and their recent spinoff series, “XO, Kitty,” he has charmed a new generation of viewers as the nice dad.“I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do,” he said. “When the phone rings and it feels like the money’s right and the place is right and the time is right, I’ll go be this guy that these people want.”Colleagues who speak about Corbett tend to overlap him and his characters. “He is a very fun rapscallion who likes to have a good time,” said Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of the “Greek Wedding” films, which seemed to refer equally to actor and role.“He’s a big puppy — how can you not adore a puppy?” said Toni Collette, his co-star in the Showtime series “The United States of Tara.”For Corbett, the boundaries are equally fuzzy, particularly when it comes to Aidan. “The line gets blurry because when they clap the action board, there’s not a change,” he said. “I’m still living the same life.”In “Sex and the City,” that life, for all of Corbett’s warmth, had its darkness. If fans saw Aidan as comfortable and loving, the character was also judgmental and angry. (For Corbett, the line gets blurry here, too: “I get upset. I want to send a [expletive] chair through plate glass windows a couple times a day.”)So why bring him back? Initially, King didn’t. Because he planned to kill off Big in the first season of “And Just Like That …,” he felt he couldn’t immediately summon Carrie’s other major love interest. In 2021, Corbett told a reporter that he would be a part of it, but that was just a prank. (“John’s antic,” King explained.)“I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do,” Corbett said of the decent, hunky characters he is asked to play.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut Corbett did want to come back. “Especially when some of the photos would pop up of them shooting in the streets,” he said. “I would get a little jealous that I wasn’t asked to come back and do a cameo.”By Season 2, enough time had elapsed. King called Corbett and soon he found himself back at Silvercup Studios, where the original “Sex and the City” had filmed. He even brought some of the same clothes.But there were differences, allegedly. Max shared only a few minutes of Aidan screen time, but Corbett and Parker said that Aidan and Carrie’s relationship has mellowed and deepened. Aidan no longer argues with Carrie in the same way, Corbett insisted. He no longer controls her.“He’s really, really listening to her now,” he said.Parker, in her separate call, agreed. “It’s not fevered; it’s not demanding,” she said of the characters’ romance. “There’s so much heat between them, but there isn’t that urgency from him.”So could there be justification for Team Aidan this time? King put it this way: “I didn’t bring Aidan back to fail.”Corbett seemed to want a win for Aidan, though not in any passionate way. Aidan gave him the career he has, even if it has been more narrowly defined than the career he once imagined. But he has made his peace with it. He will likely never be seen as a serious actor, but there are worse things than being a classic American dreamboat.“It’s given me such a wonderful life, and asked so very little in exchange for that big sack of money that I got,” he said of his career. And then, though it wasn’t entirely true, he added, “I’ve gotten everything out of this life that I wanted.”“When the phone rings and it feels like the money’s right and the place is right and the time is right, I’ll go be this guy that these people want,” Corbett said.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times More

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      Max Morath, Pianist Who Staged a One-Man Ragtime Revival, Dies at 96

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      A student of both music and history, he entertained audiences in the 1960s and beyond while educating them about a genre whose heyday had ended decades earlier.Max Morath, who stepped out of the 1890s only a lifetime late, and with syncopated piano rhythms and social commentary helped revive the ragtime age on educational television programs, in concert halls and in nightclubs for nearly a half-century, died on Monday at a care facility near his home in Duluth, Minn. He was 96.His wife, Diane Fay Skomars, confirmed the death.Having learned the rudiments of music from his mother, who played a tinkling piano in movie theaters for silent films, Mr. Morath — after false career starts as a radio announcer, newscaster and actor — found his calling in a fascination with ragtime, the uniquely syncopated, “ragged” style whose heyday spanned two decades, roughly from 1897 to 1917.A college-educated student of both music and history, Mr. Morath fell in love with ragtime’s dreamlike, bittersweet sounds. He researched the styles and repertoires of its era. He combed libraries, studied piano rolls and old sheet music, consulted historical societies, read antique magazines and talked to folks old enough to recall the work of the ragtime greats and the milestones of their age.What emerged was a new form of entertainment that combined showmanship with scholarly commentaries on ragtime itself, on its players and fans, and on the etiquette and tastes of a long-vanished age when horses pulled streetcars and women’s suffrage was still just a dream of the future.In a straw boater and sleeve garters, pounding an old upright with a cigar clenched in his teeth, Mr. Morath played Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “Tiger Rag” and Eubie Blake’s “Charleston Rag.” In those moments he might have been a vaudeville copycat trading on nostalgia. But his mood grew serious — and strangely more engaging — when he paused to tell audiences what they were hearing.“Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he would explain. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked.“Classic ragtime isn’t the honky-tonk music you hear today. That’s just a popular misconception. Nobody has paid the classic ragtime much attention, because of the attitude that folk music had to come from the hills. We were looking in the wrong direction.”Mr. Morath made ragtime come alive again. In the 1890s, he said, people heard it in vaudeville houses or just walking around town. There were newfangled inventions: player pianos, phonographs and nickelodeons. Middle-class homes had upright pianos. Sheet music was booming. Tin Pan Alley, the Manhattan home of the songwriters who dominated popular music, was flourishing.After a few years in clubs and on radio and television in the West and in his native Colorado, Mr. Morath broke through in 1960 at KRMA-TV, Denver’s educational TV station. He wrote and produced “The Ragtime Era,” a series of 12 half-hour shows on the music and history of ragtime and the blues, as well as the origins of musical comedy and Tin Pan Alley, for the 60-station National Educational Television network, the predecessor of PBS.Reviewing that series for The New York Times, Jack Gould wrote: “In an uncommon mixture of earthiness, emphasized by his chewing of a big cigar and wearing of loud vests, and erudition, reflected in his knowledgeable commentary on music and the social forces that influence its expression, he presides over a wonderful rag piano and lets go.”The series was bought by commercial stations, greatly expanding Mr. Morath’s audience. He was soon juggling recording dates, college gigs (some 50 a year), and concert and club bookings. He also crafted another NET series, “The Turn of the Century” (1962): 15 installments that related ragtime music to its social, economic and political period, using lantern slides, photographs and other props.Mr. Morath in 1969. “Ragtime is the folk music of the city,” he said. “It represents 25 years of a music that’s been overlooked.”via Colorado Music ExperienceWith its wider focus — on life in America from 1890 to the 1920s — “The Turn of the Century” was a runaway success. In addition to being seen in syndication on commercial television, it became a one-man theatrical show. Mr. Morath presented it at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard in New York, brought it to the Off Broadway Jan Hus Playhouse in 1969 and then toured nationally for many years.“In a two-hour jaunty excursion, Morath gives us a look at the 30-year period that spanned the time of McGuffey’s Reader, women’s suffrage, the grizzly bear dance, Prohibition, legal marijuana and Teddy Roosevelt,” The Washington Post said when Mr. Morath opened at Ford’s Theater in 1970. “It was a time of sweeping changes in the moral climate of our nation, and Morath uses popular music, chiefly ragtime, as the centrifugal force for sorting out the different phases.”As the ragtime revival surged into the 1970s, it was given momentum by the musicologist Joshua Rifkin, who recorded much of Scott Joplin’s work for the Nonesuch label in 1971, and by the success of George Roy Hill’s Oscar-winning film “The Sting” (1973), starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as con artists, which featured Joplin’s “The Entertainer” on the soundtrack.Mr. Morath appeared on “The Bell Telephone Hour,” “Kraft Music Hall,” “Today,” “The Tonight Show” and Arthur Godfrey’s radio and television programs. A series of Morath productions — “The Ragtime Years,” “Living the Ragtime Life,” “The Ragtime Man,” “Ragtime Revisited,” and “Ragtime and Again” — opened Off Broadway and were followed by national tours.“I must have played in 5,000 different places, and many of them were not all that classy,” Mr. Morath said in 2019 in an interview for this obituary. “Mostly they were saloons, and it wasn’t all ragtime either. Some of them were piano bars. When you work a piano bar, you’d better know 1,500 tunes. You’re playing requests. It was Gershwin. Cole Porter. Rodgers and Hart.”Mr. Morath continued touring until he retired in 2007. By then, he had long been known as “Mr. Ragtime,” the unofficial keeper of America’s ragtime legacy.Asked for a favorite memory from his life in music, he reached back to his childhood.“Actually,” he said after a moment’s thought, “it was when I was 7 and I heard my mother play something Joplin wrote, called ‘The Original Rag.’ It was published in Kansas City, and somehow my mother got ahold of it. We had a piano bench full of good stuff, mostly show tunes. But ‘Original Rag’ was my favorite.”Max Edward Morath was born in Colorado Springs on Oct. 1, 1926, the younger of two sons of Frederic Morath, a real estate broker, and Gladys (Ramsell) Morath. When Max was 4, his parents divorced. His mother became society editor of The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, and his father went to Europe, remarried and spent his days climbing in the Alps and the Pyrenees.Max and his brother, Frederic, attended local public schools. He was active in choir and theater at Colorado Springs High School and, in his senior year, got a job as a radio announcer with KVOR (the call letters stand for Voice of the Rockies). After he graduated in 1944, he paid his way through Colorado College as a pianist and newscaster for the station. He majored in English and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1948.In 1953, he married Norma Loy Tackitt. They had three children before divorcing in 1992. He married Ms. Skomars, an author and photographer, in 1993.In addition to his wife, Mr. Morath is survived by two daughters, Kathryn Morath and Christy Mainthow; a son, Frederic; a stepdaughter, Monette Fay Magrath; five grandchildren; and a great-grandson. His brother died in 2009.In a recording career that began in 1955, Mr. Morath made more than 30 albums, mostly of unaccompanied piano solos, for Epic, RCA Victor, Vanguard and other labels. His original compositions were recorded by the pianist and composer Aaron Robinson and released in 2015 as “Max Morath: The Complete Ragtime Works for Piano.”Mr. Morath wrote an illustrated memoir, “The Road to Ragtime” (1999), and “I Love You Truly: A Biographical Novel Based on the Life of Carrie Jacobs-Bond” (2008), about the first woman to establish a music publishing firm in America. She had been the subject of a paper Mr. Morath wrote for his master’s degree, which he earned at Columbia University in 1996.In 2016, Mr. Morath was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, along with the bandleaders Paul Whiteman and Glenn Miller. “It made me feel really great,” he said. “Of course, they’re both Colorado boys. I felt I was in very good company.”Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      ‘The Idol’ Season 1, Episode 3 Recap: Tedros Has Notes

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      Turns out that cult-leader types have a lot of opinions about how the women in their lives should look and behave.Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Daybreak’In her 2022 memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” the actress Jennette McCurdy wrote candidly about her troubled relationship with her nightmare of a stage mother, who wielded power over every aspect of her life and career. Talking to The New York Times, McCurdy explained the somewhat shocking title she chose for her book, saying, “I feel like I’ve done the processing and put in the work to earn a title or a thought that feels provocative.”“The Idol” may not have taken inspiration directly from McCurdy’s story, but the parallels are evident as we are offered more details about Jocelyn’s past in the most recent installment. Like McCurdy, Jocelyn was a child star whose mother abused her. Like McCurdy, Jocelyn also lost that mom to cancer.But instead of offering a nuanced look at an upsetting and complicated parental relationship, where love intermingled with pain, this week’s episode of “The Idol” uses the revelation of what happened to Jocelyn in her childhood to push her deeper into a new abusive relationship: The one she is entangled in with Tedros. It goes for provocation, yes, but it hasn’t done the work to earn it.Tedros has now fully taken hold of Jocelyn. He has moved in and is micromanaging every aspect of her life. He wakes her up and demands they go shopping, telling her she doesn’t have any taste as they try on clothes in a Beverly Hills Valentino store. He threatens to “curb stomp” an employee there whom he perceives to be looking at Jocelyn. Back at home, Tedros makes Jocelyn fire her personal chef, who flirts with her after asking how her probiotic diet is working.His entire entourage has also taken up residence in Jocelyn’s mansion. So it’s not only Tedros who is pushing his ideology onto Jocelyn but also his followers, who preach his ideas that good art comes out of pain. They espouse the idea that one is not allowed to say “no” to anything because every experience, even a bad one, could yield a great song. This results in an insipid discussion in which Chloe and Izaak argue that the death of Robert Plant’s son was necessary because it led him to write Led Zeppelin’s “All My Love.”No one can deny that wonderful art has come out of terrible events, but Tedros’s group believes in an extreme version of that where the art is worth any suffering. They argue that the death of one person may have saved the lives of many more because of the beauty of the song that came from it. The exploitation they are engaging in is obvious. Even the sweet-seeming Chloe pushes Jocelyn to evoke her mother in her music — and this is before Chloe learns the full extent of what Jocelyn’s mom did.Those details emerge during a dinner party, which opens with Jocelyn sweetly thanking those gathered for being there, but devolves into an awkward scene in which Tedros, whom she thanks for teaching her “how to have fun again,” pressures her into divulging her secrets. And that’s after he pushes Xander to share his idea for using the semen-face selfie as an album cover — an image that prompted internet discussions she found humiliating, as she ultimately admits.After berating her that “you make superficial music because you think about superficial things,” Tedros pushes Jocelyn to tell everyone just how her mother hurt her. Jocelyn solemnly describes how her mom used to beat her with a hairbrush, careful to hit her only in places where the camera wouldn’t see. It was a tool of motivation — Jocelyn’s mother used the hairbrush to keep her awake, or to make her learn her lines or dance moves. It was also a tool for control, emerging when Jocelyn was caught smiling to herself. Her mother sometimes hit her hard enough to break skin.Tedros feigns sympathy but also immediately identifies another way to control Jocelyn. He asks her if she misses the “motivation” being hit gave her. She replies, “Sometimes.” He has a retort at the ready: “If you loved the music you were making, would you have felt like it was worth it?” With tears streaming down her face she says, “yes.” He commands her to go get the hair brush.The episode ends with Jocelyn, on all fours, being beaten by Tedros as his followers watch. The shots of her face as he brutally hits her with the hairbrush are interspersed with images of him bathing her. During what appears to be a scene set the next morning, she looks up at him and says, “Thank you for taking care of me.” Then the credits roll.What we are witnessing is obviously the start of an abusive relationship, and yet this show can’t resist titillation. In this finale sequence, Jocelyn is clothed in a see-through lace dress where her thong is visible. The bits in the bathtub are peppered with the nudity that is de rigueur by now. “The Idol” is itself a little bit like Tedros. It is sympathetic to Jocelyn up until a point.Mostly, however, it just wants to use whatever pathos it occasionally generates in service of what it considers entertainment. Jocelyn’s lingering need for her mom, despite the long history of abuse, is worth exploring. It’s not explored here. Instead, Tedros takes over and uses it for his benefit.Liner notes:It’s so distracting to have The Weeknd singing over various scenes. I get that Tesfaye wants to make music for the show, but it is odd to hear his voice in that context when he’s also playing Tedros.Is there some kind of award we can give Rachel Sennott for Leia’s disgusted face?We see a glimpse of Jennie as Dyanne performing in the music video that was supposed to be Jocelyn’s. Is “World Class Sinner” her song now?I feel like there is a real misread of present day pop music dynamics going on here. The genre is more confessional than ever, and the reigning queens of the industry, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, have both used personal experiences in their music to great effect. It’s hard to imagine that record execs would be opposed to letting Jocelyn mine her sadness for her songs, or that Jocelyn would assume that fans wouldn’t find anything relatable about her life.If you want a show that (hilariously) addresses how the pop industry actually sees a star’s mental health crisis as a marketing tool, may I recommend “The Other Two” on Max? More