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      ‘House of the Dragon,’ Season 1, Episode 6 Recap: A Scandal Spills Over

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      This week’s episode kicks off the next phase of the story as a long-simmering status quo finally becomes untenable.Season 1, Episode 6: ‘The Princess and the Queen’This week on “House of the Dragon,” we were reminded that a lot can happen in 10 years.For one thing, Alicent and Rhaenyra now seem like completely different people. The young queen, a callow peacemaker as a girl, has grown angry and aggrieved. Meanwhile, the princess’ former rebellious streak has hardened into a kind of royal court realpolitik, even as she keeps having Harwin Strong’s children.Daemon, the former rogue prince, settled down and even managed to have a couple of kids of his own with Laena. Laenor, the former sensitive young warrior, is now a dissipated playboy looking to get unsettled any way he can. Elsewhere in the Red Keep, the next generation of Targaryen men are gallivanting about, looking just as ill-suited for leadership as their predecessors.At the same time, there is plenty that hasn’t changed. Ser Criston is still hanging around. (What does a Kingsguard have to do to get fired anyway?) The Stepstones are a mess again. Somehow Viserys, last seen hitting the deck at Rhaenyra’s terrible wedding, is still alive. (Those leeches have been working overtime.)As we picked up the action a decade after said wedding, we found an unhappy family enduring in a kind of uneasy equipoise. How did we get here?Well, you might recall that Harwin Strong (Ryan Corr) had a couple of interactions with young Rhaenyra, encountering her during her night on the town with Daemon and later hauling her out of the wedding brawl. Apparently somewhere along the way sparks flew and then kept flying, at least three more times.The additional heirs exacerbated Alicent’s intense resentment of Rhaenyra’s position — born partly of Alicent’s legitimate fear about her family’s future safety — leading her to lash out at everyone and make alliances with dubious characters. She’s almost convinced herself that she is motivated by a hope that “honor and decency will prevail,” even though she’s teamed with the dishonorable likes of Ser Criston and Larys Strong to make it happen.The simmering status quo finally becomes untenable when the royal cousins square off during their combat training, in the process becoming pawns within the larger drama. Because when a sparring exercise results in their trainer, Ser Criston, goading Harwin into giving him the beating he’s long deserved, the incident throws a harsh spotlight on the ongoing scandal.“People have eyes, boy!” Lyonel Strong later shouted at his brazenly virile son. Soon the Strongs and Rhaenyra were on their way out of town, leaving Alicent to plot how to get her ousted father, Otto, back in to even the playing field.The events kicked off the next phase of the story, as the rivals for the Iron Throne gather their supporters and retreat to their corners while everyone waits for Viserys — now looking like the Crypt Keeper as he wanders from chair to chair, ignoring the growing discord around him — to die.Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Ser Criston (Fabien Frankel), bonded in resentment.Ollie Upton/HBOAlicent and Rhaenyra literally are different people, of course, now played by Olivia Cooke and Emma D’Arcy. Other additions included Nanna Blondell (briefly) as Laena, John Macmillan as Laenor and Ty Tennant as Aegon, an enjoyably feckless twit who’s about as ambitious as a ham sandwich.Alicent: “As things stand, Rhaenyra will ascend the throne and Jacaerys will be her heir!”Aegon: “So?”This week also saw the emergence of other prominent players, most notably Harwin (also briefly) and Larys. Heinous Act of the Week honors go to Larys, who freed a few condemned men in exchange for 1.) them torching his family home, along with his father and brother, and 2.) their tongues.Larys seems to be filling the shifty manipulator role occupied by Littlefinger and Varys in “Game of Thrones” — his name is even a portmanteau of theirs — though so far he lacks their depth, subtlety and slippery charisma. The murder of his father cleared the way for Otto to return as Hand — things seem to be heading that way, at least — even as it revealed to Alicent the quality of the company she’s keeping these days. The elimination of Lyonel and Harwin also make Larys the lord of House Strong, a real victory.It isn’t clear what effect Harwin’s death will have on the issue of his royal issue — is it better or worse for Rhaenyra, from an optics standpoint, now that he’s out of the picture? Could part of Larys’s plan be to create suspicion that the princess or her supporters had him killed to keep him quiet? With Rhaenyra and friends on their way to Dragonstone, she won’t be around to defend herself.Maybe we’ll learn more about this next week. We’ll also see how Daemon adapts to being a widower twice over — at least he didn’t kill his latest wife himself.Laena was a tragic figure, another illustration of the constraints that even women of privilege face in this story. We met her at 12, being offered up as a political child bride. She died in anguish as a young woman, another victim of the birthing bed.“I’ve reached the limits of my art,” the obstetrician told Daemon. The fact that he then just let his patient stagger off to commit Dracaryside suggests that those limits are quite profound. I do realize that Laena assessed the situation and sought the dragonrider’s death she foreshadowed earlier, but the mechanics of the scene, with an exhausted, doubled-over Laena somehow outpacing Daemon to the beach, were odd.What’s next for the suddenly re-eligible bachelor prince? I don’t see him committing to life as a stay-at-home single dad — it wouldn’t seem to suit him any more than being a pet dragon for Prince Reggio (Dean Nolan) in Pentos would have, as Laena perceived. (Reminder: Pentos is one of the Free Cities in Essos.)The turbulent Stepstones, the site of Daemon’s only real glory, could be tempting. Or maybe he’ll head back to Dragonstone, too. Many things change over the course of a decade, but I’m guessing his and Rhaenyra’s twisted mutual attraction isn’t one of them.A tragedy in the making: Matt Smith and Nanna Blondell in “House of the Dragon.”Ollie Upton/HBOA few thoughts while we wince“The childbed is our battlefield,” the late Queen Aemma noted in the premiere, and “Dragon” remains determined to show as well as tell us this fact. Miguel Sapochnik, the outgoing showrunner who directed this episode, was known on “Thrones” primarily for big combat episodes, and he’s been the go-to director for these battles, too. (When the episode opened on Rhaenyra’s exertions, I knew it was one of his without looking at the credits.) These grueling birth scenes are significant narratively and for what they reveal about the harrowing precariousness and lack of autonomy a woman endures in this time and place. But all the unsparing close-ups and vivid detail can start to feel like the show is fetishizing women’s agony. I greatly admire Sapochnik’s talent, but I also wondered how a female director might have presented some of these sequences.I was sorry to see Laena go so soon — as portrayed by Blondell, she radiated intelligence and nerve. At least Laena got to bond with Vhagar, the enormous ancient dragon she seemed fascinated by, as a girl, in her awkward chat with Viserys a few weeks ago.I love a good entitled doofus character, and Ty Tennant made a strong debut as the adolescent Aegon. Fun fact: He is the son of Georgia Tennant, a veteran actor and producer, and David Tennant, the electric Scottish star of “Doctor Who,” “Broadchurch” and “Jessica Jones,” among others.Harrenhal, the House Strong castle, has a long, colorful history in the lore. It was also the site of one of my favorite random “Thrones” subplots, when Tywin Lannister was based there during the War of the Five Kings and Arya was undercover as his cupbearer. I’ve said it before but so far in “Dragon,” I miss those kinds of delightful side trips.“The Triarchy” is to this show what “Meereen” was to “Thrones,” in that every time someone mentions it, my eyes glaze over. On the bright side, you can’t bring up a giant Tyroshi general “who dyes his beard purple and wears woman’s frocks” and not show him at some point, right? So that’s something to look forward to.What do you think? Does Larys fill the Littlefinger-sized hole in your heart? Did Rhaenyra make a mistake by leaving King’s Landing? And what’s with all the Red Keep rats? I assume they have some greater significance but am at a loss. Any theories? More

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      Louise Fletcher, 88, Dies; Oscar Winner for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

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      She was largely unknown to the public when she was cast as what the American Film Institute called one of cinema’s most memorable villains.Louise Fletcher, the imposing, steely-eyed actress who won an Academy Award for her role as the tyrannical Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died on Friday at her home in the town of Montdurausse, in Southern France. She was 88.The death was confirmed by her agent, David Shaul, who did not cite a cause. Ms. Fletcher also had a home in Los Angeles.Ms. Fletcher was 40 and largely unknown to the public when she was cast as the head administrative nurse at an Oregon mental institution in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The film, directed by Milos Forman and based on a popular novel by Ken Kesey, won a best-actress trophy for Ms. Fletcher and four other Oscars: best picture, best director, best actor (Jack Nicholson, who starred as the rebellious mental patient McMurphy) and best adapted screenplay (Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauber).Ms. Fletcher’s acceptance speech stood out that night — not only because she teasingly thanked voters for hating her, but also because she used American Sign Language in thanking her parents, who were both deaf, for “teaching me to have a dream.”The American Film Institute later named Nurse Ratched one of the most memorable villains in film history and the second most notable female villain, surpassed only by the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.”But at the time “Cuckoo’s Nest” was released, Ms. Fletcher was frustrated by the buttoned-up nature of her character. “I envied the other actors tremendously,” she said in a 1975 interview with The New York Times, referring to her fellow cast members, most of whom were playing mental patients. “They were so free, and I had to be so controlled.”Estelle Louise Fletcher was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, Ala., one of four hearing children of Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopal minister, and Estelle (Caldwell) Fletcher; both her parents had been deaf since childhood. She studied drama at the University of North Carolina and moved to Los Angeles after graduation.She later told journalists that because she was so tall — 5 feet 10 inches — she had trouble finding work in anything but westerns, where her height was an advantage. Of her first 20 or so screen roles in the late 1950s and early ’60s, about half were in television westerns, including “Wagon Train,” “Maverick” and “Bat Masterson.”Ms. Fletcher married Jerry Bick, a film producer, in 1959. They had two sons, John and Andrew, and she retired from acting for more than a decade to raise them.Ms. Fletcher and Mr. Bick divorced in 1977. Her survivors include her sons; her sister, Roberta Ray; and a granddaughter.She returned to movies in 1974 in Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us,” as a woman who coldly turns in her brother to the police. It was her appearance in that film that led Mr. Forman to offer her the role in “Cuckoo’s Nest.”“I was caught by surprise when Louise came onscreen,” Mr. Forman recalled of watching “Thieves Like Us.” “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a certain mystery, which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Ms. Fletcher in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “She had a certain mystery,” said Milos Forman, the film’s director, “which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty ImagesReviewing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael declared Ms. Fletcher’s “a masterly performance.”“We can see the virginal expectancy — the purity — that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness,” Ms. Kael wrote. “She thinks she’s doing good for people, and she’s hurt — she feels abused — if her authority is questioned.”Ms. Fletcher is often cited as an example of the Oscar curse — the phenomenon that winning an Academy Award for acting does not always lead to sustained movie stardom — but she did maintain a busy career in films and on television into her late 70s.She had a lead role as the Linda Blair character’s soft-spoken psychiatrist in “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977) and was notable in the ensemble comedy “The Cheap Detective” (1978), riffing on Ingrid Bergman’s film persona. She also starred with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood as a workaholic scientist in “Brainstorm” (1983). But she was largely relegated to roles with limited screen time, especially when her character was very different from her Nurse Ratched persona.After a turn as an inscrutable U.F.O. bigwig in “Strange Invaders” (1983), she appeared in “Firestarter” (1984) as a fearful farm wife; the police drama “Blue Steel” (1990) as Jamie Lee Curtis’s drab mother; “2 Days in the Valley” (1996) as a compassionate Los Angeles landlady; and “Cruel Intentions” (1999) as Ryan Phillippe’s genteel aunt.Only when she played to villainous stereotype — as she did in “Flowers in the Attic” (1987), as an evil matriarch who sets out to poison her four inconvenient young grandchildren — did she find herself in starring roles again. And that film, she told a Dragoncon audience in 2009, was “the worst experience I’ve ever had making a movie.”Later in her career, she played recurring characters on several television series, including “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” (she was an alien cult leader from 1993 to 1999) and “Shameless” (as William H. Macy’s foulmouthed convict mother). She also made an appearance as Liev Schreiber’s affable mother in the romantic drama “A Perfect Man” (2013). She appeared most recently in two episodes of the Netflix comedy series “Girlboss.”Although Ms. Fletcher’s most famous character was a portrait of sternness, she often recalled smiling constantly and pretending that everything was perfect when she was growing up, in an effort to protect her non-hearing parents from bad news.“The price of it was very high for me,” she said in a 1977 interview with The Ladies’ Home Journal. “Because I not only pretended everything was all right. I came to feel it had to be.”Pretending wasn’t all bad, however, she acknowledged, at least in terms of her profession. That same year she told the journalist Rex Reed, “I feel like I know real joy from make-believe.”Mike Ives More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Jeers at Trump for Claiming to Declassify Documents With His Mind

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      “Like Harry Whodummy,” Jimmy Kimmel quipped on Thursday night.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.Magical ThinkingIn an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump said he could declassify documents with his mind.“Like Harry Whodummy,” Jimmy Kimmel joked in his Thursday night monologue.“He couldn’t even read documents with his brain — how does this happen?” — TREVOR NOAH“If Trump actually had the power to change things just by thinking about them, Don Jr. would have turned into a Big Mac 30 years ago.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I felt like he was this close to using the word ‘abracadabra.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump’s argument is that you can just declassify things in your mind, it’s officially declassified as long as you believe it’s declassified. That’s according to Trump’s newest legal adviser, Tinkerbell.” — SETH MEYERS“So Trump is saying that he declassified these documents just by thinking about it, which I don’t even believe, because that would be the first time in his life that Trump has thought something and not said it out loud. Think about it. This is a man who thought to himself, ‘Ooh, if I wasn’t related to my daughter, I would date her,’ and then he told everyone on TV. He said it out of his mouth!” — TREVOR NOAH“Hannity was like, ‘Oh, I get it, you’re going to plead insanity.’” — JIMMY FALLON“I really hope that ‘I can make things happen with my mind’ is going to be the actual argument at the trial. That would be great: ‘Your Honor, the defendant pleads Jedi.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (But Her Emails Edition)“The F.B.I. came to his house looking for Hillary Clinton’s emails that were deleted, which, how could there even be emails if they were deleted, and how would they get into his house? Did Hillary sneak in after midnight and stuff them under his pillow like the email fairy or something?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“So is Trump saying the F.B.I. raided his house to find Hillary’s emails? So they didn’t want the documents he declassified with his mind? No, they wanted the emails he couldn’t find but that he actually had the whole time at his house? Because Donald Trump is Hillary Clinton?” — TREVOR NOAH“That’s so crazy, he confused Sean Hannity — and Sean comes pre-confused.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“At that point, even QAnon people were like, ‘OK, that conspiracy seems a little nuts.’” — JIMMY FALLON“You’ve got to give Trump credit, though. He knows how to say something so crazy that it actually makes the last crazy thing he said seem normal.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingDulcé Sloan challenges New Yorkers on their beliefs about education on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutSinead O’Connor in the documentary “Nothing Compares,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson.Andrew Catlin/SHOWTIMEA new documentary about Sinead O’Connor highlights her career highs and lows as well as her genuinely incomparable voice. More

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      Trevor Noah Feels for Trump as He Sits on the Sidelines

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      Ron DeSantis is stealing the ex-president’s thunder, Noah says — “he’s slowly becoming the Republican Party now.” 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.Twice the TrumpFormer President Donald J. Trump is reported to have expressed anger over the attention Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is getting for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — because Trump claims it was his idea.Trevor Noah said the Republican Party had “two Donald Trumps now.”“Oh man, poor Donald Trump. He is just sitting at home like, ‘You stole my idea! And by the way, stealing stuff is also my idea. Read the news!’” — TREVOR NOAH“Can you imagine being such a despicable creep, you’re mad at someone for being a despicable creep sooner than you? That’s like taking credit for being the first guy to put pineapple on pizza.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But you know what’s really telling here is that, in a way, Trump has a point, all right? He is the guy who came up with the idea of turning all politics into a series of stunts. That is what he did — the Muslim ban, ‘build the wall.’ That [expletive] didn’t solve anything but got the people going, and now pulling stunts has become the driving force of the Republican Party, but Trump is stuck watching out on the sidelines.” — TREVOR NOAH“And I feel bad for you, Mr. Trump. But the fact is, Ron DeSantis, you see what he’s doing — he’s slowly becoming the Republican Party now, stealing your tricks, making it his own.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Just a Phase Edition)“Speaking of America, land that I love, President of America Joe Biden made big news on the ‘60 Minutes’ this weekend when he maybe kind of prematurely declared that the pandemic is over, which marks the first time that Joe Biden has ever moved too fast.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“President Biden claimed in a new interview that the coronavirus pandemic is over. Easy for him to say — he just had it. Of course it’s over when you’ve got the antibodies: ‘I’m off to Burning Man, then London for the Queen’s funeral. No masks, baby!’” — SETH MEYERS“Lawmakers and public health officials are concerned his comment could undermine the rollout of new booster shots, as well as funding from Congress. The White House says their Covid-19 policy is unchanged, despite Biden’s comments. It’s never a good sign when even the White House is trying to distance itself from the president, is it?” — JAMES CORDEN“Biden’s announcement took the White House by surprise, and they’re now trying to backpedal, saying ‘Sure, the president could have been more nuanced — he was simply saying we’ve hit a different phase.’ OK, saying something is over, kind of a misleading way to declare a new phase.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Late Night” writers Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel took on Black hobbits and lesbian rom-coms for Tuesday night’s “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightOlivia Wilde, the director of “Don’t Worry Darling,” will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutXavier Collin/Image Press Agency and Sipa USA, via AlamyColin Hanks is inspired by tacos, shaving his head and “What We Do in the Shadows.” More

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      in Theater

      Jack Charles, Grandfather of Aboriginal Theater, Dies at 79

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      One of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, he had a resonant voice, a charismatic personality and a troubled personal life that often landed him in jail.MELBOURNE, Australia — Jack Charles, one of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, who has been called the “grandfather of Aboriginal theater” but whose heroin addiction and penchant for burglary landed him in and out of jail throughout his life, died on Sept. 13 in Melbourne. He was 79.He died in a hospital after having a stroke, according to his publicist, Patrice Capogreco.Mr. Charles had a voice that made people stop and listen.Gravelly and majestic, with rounded vowels honed by elocution lessons in a rough-and-tumble boys’ home, it assured him an audience even over the scrum of the Australian prisons where he spent much of his life.“It’s very unusual for a crim or a screw to listen to a prisoner talk for very long,” he wrote in a memoir, using slang for fellow inmates and prison officers. “But for whatever reason, they’d let me run with whatever I was talking about and actually listen.”That voice catapulted Mr. Charles onto the stage, where he captivated Melbourne theatergoers, and helped make him one of Australia’s leading Aboriginal screen actors.He ascribed his talents to his Indigenous heritage. “We’re great orators,” he wrote in his memoir. “That is merely one element of our culture that white people never saw in our development.”Mr. Charles co-founded Australia’s first Indigenous theater company, Nindethana Theater, with the actor Bob Maza in 1971. He was known in Australia as Uncle Jack, an Aboriginal honorific denoting his status as an elder.His life was chronicled in an unsparing 2008 documentary, “Bastardy”; his memoir, “Born-again Blakfella”; and the 2010 one-man play “Jack Charles vs. the Crown,” which he co-wrote and performed around the world, despite multiple convictions that would ordinarily have limited his ability to travel.“Mr. Trump gave me a waiver to go to New York and perform ‘Jack Charles vs. the Crown,’” he said of the former president in an interview last year with the Australian news outlet The Saturday Paper. “That’s the ultimate for an old thief like me. I’m still thieving, stealing things. I’m stealing hearts and minds nowadays.”His road to stardom was a rocky one. Mr. Charles wrestled with heroin addiction, homelessness and an almost lifelong flirtation with burglary, for which he was incarcerated numerous times. He spent his 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays behind bars.It was also a journey of self-discovery: of who he really was, where he had come from, his homosexuality and what it meant to be an Aboriginal Australian and a member of the so-called Stolen Generation, Aboriginal people who for decades as children were removed from their families by the government and forcibly assimilated into white society.Raised in an almost entirely white home for boys, Mr. Charles had no knowledge of Aboriginal culture and did not even know he was Indigenous until other children bullied him for it.He would later use that self-knowledge to educate others about Australia’s history and race relations, whether from the back of a taxi cab or on the set of the 2015 Warner Bros. movie “Pan,” where he draped the Aboriginal flag over the back of his trailer. (He played a tribal chief in the film, alongside his fellow Australian Hugh Jackman.)“It became a talking point to discuss the social and political hopes for Aboriginal Australians,” Mr. Charles wrote, “as well as teaching people about the Dreaming,” an Aboriginal concept for the beginning of time.In his final years, after he had kicked his heroin addiction, he was a familiar and striking figure plying the streets of Melbourne atop a mobility scooter, an Aboriginal flag fluttering on the back.“He was someone that embraced everything, even the bad things,” said Wesley Enoch, an Australian theater director who had worked with Mr. Charles. “He embraced them so that he could understand them and incorporate them in who he was.”He added that to be embraced by Mr. Charles himself, who stood less than five feet tall and whose luxuriant white Afro and beard were perfumed with patchouli oil, was a memorable experience.Mr. Charles starred in the Australian superhero TV series “Cleverman.”Lisa Tomasetti/SundanceTVJack Charles was born in Melbourne on Sept. 5, 1943. He was one of 13 children born to Blanchie Muriel Charles, two of whom died at birth. The 11 survivors were seized from their mother in infancy. Mr. Charles was the only one of his siblings to meet her again.He was placed in his first children’s home at four months old. At his second, the Box Hill Boys’ Home in suburban Melbourne, he endured physical and sexual abuse, he said. The few Indigenous children there were forbidden to speak to one another.“I was whitewashed, if you will, by the system,” Mr. Charles told a state commission.At 14, he moved into a foster home and began a glass-beveling apprenticeship. But after a disagreement with his foster mother over a night out — when he met with other Indigenous Australians and learned his birth mother’s identity — he was removed from the home at 17 and taken into police custody.So began a troubled relationship with the law. Mr. Charles spent 22 years in prison, often on burglary charges. He favored homes in the wealthy Melbourne suburb of Kew, where his forebears had originated.Raised as a Christian, he had been taught that stealing was wrong, he told The Saturday Paper. But committing “burgs,” as he called them, on his ancestral homeland “felt great,” he said. “Very, very satisfying.”Incarceration was, for him, as productive as it was frequent: On behalf of fellow inmates, he wrote love letters to their wives in exchange for chocolate and tobacco. He read extensively, completed his high school education and learned and taught pottery.“You only lose your freedom in the nick,” he said in the documentary “Bastardy,” using a slang term for a jail. “You can’t go anywhere, but your mind can go wandering all over the place when you’re incarcerated. I might be locked up, but I’m free, still. Free inside.”Mr. Charles found his way onto the stage almost by accident. In 1964, representatives of Melbourne’s New Theater came to the Aboriginal youth hostel where he was living to cast an all-Indigenous production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” He was given a role as an understudy.It was a revelation. In the theater, Mr. Charles had found his people. “They threw great parties, and they didn’t seem to care about my sexuality or my Aboriginality,” he wrote in his memoir.For the next seven years he beveled glass in a factory by day and acted with the New Theater by night.But he slid deeper into addiction and ended up on the street. Stints in prison, he wrote, were a relief, as they offered stable housing and regular meals.From 1971 to 1974, he ran the Aboriginal theater group Nindenthana, whose first hit show, “Jack Charles Is Up and Fighting,” explored whether Indigenous Australians should assimilate or stand apart from the country’s white majority.He starred in plays across Australia, including “Cradle of Hercules,” “No Sugar” and, in 2020, “Black Ties,” at Melbourne’s largest theater, the Arts Center. He appeared in several Australian television series, including “Cleverman,” “Women of the Sun” and “Preppers,” and movies, including “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” “Blackfellas” and “Wolf Creek.”He was eventually reunited with four of his siblings: his brother Archie, and his sisters Esme, Eva-Jo and Christine. He did not learn the identity of his father, Hilton Hamilton Walsh, until last year, when he appeared on the reality genealogy television show “Who Do You Think You Are.”He is survived by Christine Zenip Charles, the only one of his 11 siblings he knew to be still alive.In his last years, Mr. Charles was able to look back at his life with magnanimity, moving from a place of deep anger to one of conciliation.“It’s important to keep in mind my story is also about healing,” he wrote in his memoir. “That’s how I’ve been able to keep going.” More

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      in Television

      ‘Andor’ Review: Star Wars Without the ‘Star Wars’

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      The franchise’s latest series on Disney+ sticks to the story but flushes a lot of the usual trappings out the airlock.As the big science-fiction and superhero franchises have proliferated, their mantra has been that television is a place for diversification and creative freedom — to do something different, within reason. Hence Marvel’s strenuously meta “WandaVision” or Paramount’s goofy, animated “Star Trek: Lower Decks.”“Andor,” the newest series in the “Star Wars” universe (premiering Wednesday on Disney+), doesn’t take one of those hard detours. But it’s different in its own way. In the four (of 12) episodes available for review, it continually feels as if the people who made it like a lot of things — “Blade Runner,” “Avatar,” “Casablanca,” Vietnam War metaphors — better than they like “Star Wars.”Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The defining feature of “Andor” is how it takes a “Star Wars” story and, without getting conceptual, transposes it in visual and tonal terms. Heavily latexed aliens, plastic-suited storm troopers and vast, exotic landscapes are, for the most part, out; humans (or humanoids) wearing nondescript uniforms in a battered, urban-industrial backdrop are in. Costume-heavy Saturday-serial space opera is replaced by straight-ahead sci-fi action with a real-world anti-corporate theme.And the good news about “Andor” is that the new look and feel are rendered meticulously and evocatively; a lot of effort, led by the creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, has been spent on giving the show a gritty and realistic texture. Moment to moment, it’s easy to just relax and enjoy the change. The opening scene, a “Blade Runner” homage that leads into a dark, seamy version of the typical “Star Wars” cantina, is a witty example of the show’s method.But making “Andor” less like “Star Wars” means, in this case, making it more like a lot of other science-fiction dramas. And while its surface attractions are significant, you may find yourself looking for things that other sci-fi stories supply, like compelling characters and a narrative pulse.Following the general pattern of serialized franchise extensions, “Andor” goes back in time, fleshing out and coloring in a small, retrospective piece of the overall story. (Advancing the narrative is still the province of films.) In this case it’s an even smaller piece than usual. Cassian Andor, played by Diego Luna, was a character created for a movie, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” that was a stand-alone time capsule in its own right. Giving him a back story in “Andor” is embroidering on an embroidery.Gilroy was brought in to do rewrites on “Rogue One,” and perhaps he had a sense of unfinished business, because the real challenge of putting Cassian at the center of a series is that he’s a cipher in that movie — a rebel operative with a ruthless streak and a shady past who’s just there as a foil for the film’s young heroine. When he joins her in a haze of self-sacrificial glory, his epiphany feels completely unearned.There’s no reason that such a character couldn’t be turned into something more interesting for the series, but through the early going, “Andor” doesn’t pull it off. Cassian’s antisocial tendencies, and his resourcefulness, are given a foundation in a childhood on a planet whose Indigenous people are exploited by an Empire-sanctioned mining company. (These forest-planet flashbacks are an unusually clear expression of the hoary colonialist clichés “Star Wars” falls back on when depicting the Empire’s reach.)Like many “Star Wars” projects, “Andor” includes a scene-stealing droid, named B2EMO.Lucasfilm/Disney+But that new information doesn’t make him any more interesting; neither does the attempt to make his adult character, a thief and black marketeer, into a Humphrey Bogart-style cynical romantic, declining to choose sides until his hand is forced. That’s the primary narrative thrust of the early season, as a covert rebel leader played by Stellan Skarsgard tracks down Cassian and enlists him in a dangerous mission against the corporation that ravaged his home planet.The scene in which Skarsgard’s character recruits Cassian while they’re pursued by corporate goons takes up much of the fourth episode, and it’s an exciting, well-executed action set piece. But the recruitment pitch is notably uninspiring, and that’s typical of “Andor,” in which action and design are more than satisfactory while the thinness of the characterizations leaves you unfulfilled. (The same could be said of old-school “Star Wars” films under George Lucas’s helm, of course, but they could make up some of the balance in emotion and sheer, propulsive entertainment value.)Luna, who shot to stardom in America with “Y Tu Mamá También,” in 2001, is a fine actor, but he’s still unable to bring much besides an air of juvenile grievance to Cassian, who’s just awfully hard to care about. Thin writing is an issue up and down the cast list; people seem less important than the depictions of political intrigue and corporate malfeasance, which are handled well but aren’t that different from any number of other dystopian dramas. Fiona Shaw stands out in a supporting role as Cassian’s rough-and-tumble mentor, and Adria Arjona is fun to watch as his sparring partner and probable love interest.It’s typical of “Star Wars” projects that the best performances tend to be given by robots. That was the case in “Rogue One,” where the hulking war droid voiced by Alan Tudyk was the best reason to watch. “Andor” has a small, decrepit, R2-D2-like figure named B2EMO, voiced by Dave Chapman and sort of a cross between a toolbox and a shop vac. He doesn’t have a lot to do in the early episodes, but he has signs of personality. Keep an eye on him when the fighting really breaks out. More

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      Colin Hanks Finds Perfection in ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ and Tacos at Every Meal

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      The actor, who moves out of his comfort zone in Peacock’s “A Friend of the Family,” talks about his love affair with soccer and the pleasure of a shaved head.When Colin Hanks learned that he was being considered for “A Friend of the Family,” he thought, “Awesome — it sounds fabulous.”Then the scripts arrived.“I went, ‘Oh, this is just the saddest show I’ve ever read, so I don’t know what to think if you’ve been thinking of me,’” he recalled. “It was one of those stories that was incredibly intimidating and my first instinct was just, ‘No, I can’t.’”But he couldn’t get the true-crime show out of his head. Debuting Oct. 6 on Peacock, Nick Antosca’s limited series is based on the real story of the Brobergs (who were also the subjects of the 2017 Netflix documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight”).Hanks plays Bob Broberg, a stalwart Mormon in bucolic Idaho whose family implodes when Robert Berchtold (Jake Lacy) — or Brother B, to his adoring neighbors — moves to town and perverts everything they thought they believed in. He also kidnaps the Brobergs’ eldest daughter, Jan. Twice.Before he took on the role, Hanks made it clear that he wasn’t interested in re-enacting a laundry list of all the bad decisions the Brobergs made while being emotionally and sexually manipulated by Berchtold, even as they questioned his growing fixation on their daughter. Rather, Hanks wanted to examine why they made these choices.The Vampire Antics of ‘What We Do in the Shadows’The FX series based on the 2015 film by the same name follows a crew of vampires and their struggles to settle down in Staten Island.The Movie: “At heart a dotty look at oldsters struggling to adapt to an unwelcoming modernity, ‘Shadows’ has the bones of an anarchic sitcom,” The Times wrote upon the film’s release.The Creators: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi wrote, directed and acted in the mockumentary. Here is why they decided to return to the vampire world with a show.Series Review: “If ‘Shadows’ doesn’t seem entirely necessary, it’s perfectly fun,” our critic wrote when the TV show debuted in 2019.Harvey Guillén: The actor plays Guillermo, a human in a house full of vampires. Though it was supposed to be a minor role, he quickly became a fan favorite.“And that was exactly what Nick was wanting to explore,” he said.It has been a hectic year for Hanks, who played an F.B.I. agent in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and a studio executive in “The Offer,” about the making of “The Godfather.” A San Francisco Giants fan, he has also produced a documentary about Willie Mays, out November on HBO.Calling from London, where he’s shooting an independent film, Hanks ticked off 10 things that have kept him grounded during the hustle, including “What We Do in the Shadows,” his cast-iron skillet and the Atlanta BeltLine.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Baseball 100” by Joe Posnanski I’ve been slowly reading this book because I don’t want it to end. They’re really more of a character study on players from all different points in baseball’s history, as well as players from Japan and players from the Negro leagues.2. My cast-iron skillet I’m not very skilled at cooking, not yet at least. But there’s something about the idea of using this one skillet and seasoning it and being able to cook almost anything in it and that’s all you need. In a strange way, it’s also a little bit like a baseball mitt. You’ve got to break it in. You’ve got to take care of it. You’ve got to clean it properly. It’s not something that you use and then throw in the sink and don’t think twice about.3. “Sunderland ’Til I Die” on Netflix I’ve made a bunch of documentaries. That’s sort of my show business side hustle. I did one about Tower Records. I did another about Eagles of Death Metal going back to Paris, playing after the Bataclan attack. Recently, I got obsessed with this fantastic sports doc called “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” about an English football team that’s been demoted. That’s just heartbreak, the likes of which I’ve not seen in sports in quite some time.4. Shaving my head I had to have a very specific hairstyle to play Bob Broberg. So half of my head has been shaved because I had a very serious wig process that I had to go through. I had to paint my head every morning and then do four layers of makeup and then put a wig on top. I’ve been wearing a hat every day since. I’m currently doing a job in which I had to have another wig made that looks like my normal hairstyle. I’m very much looking forward to about seven days from now, being able to shave my head and start all over again.5. Tacos The perfect food. Period. Exclamation point. They can be lunch, they can be dinner and, if you’re really lucky and you’ve got a good spot, they can also be breakfast as well.6. Discovering “new” music I find something really joyful in discovering music that’s new for you but might not necessarily be new for all. I found this record by this band called Jagwar Ma from 2013, and I’ve been listening to it nonstop walking around London. Wherever I travel, I go to local record stores, and I will label what city I’ve bought the records in. And so all of my records are sort of a memory, if you will, of where I was literally, physically, but also where I was in my life and what I was doing.7. Fall Fall is one of those moments that I really enjoy — you see the leaves change and you feel the temperature drop and everyone gets excited, for a little while at least, to button up their coats. It also means that the Fall Classic is right around the corner.8. The Atlanta BeltLine I live in Los Angeles, but I had to relocate to Atlanta for “A Friend of the Family.” It’s this fantastic walkway that circles the entire city. It is just this incredible conduit to Atlanta. Since I was staying right by it, I could throw some shoes on and go for a walk and see people and have dinner someplace and walk back. It’s not too dissimilar from the High Line in New York. It made me feel like I was part of the life there.9. Soccer They call it the beautiful game for a reason. The simplicity of it — a sport that is played everywhere around the world, and all you really need is a ball. I was actually supposed to see Liverpool play and it was going to be the first time I was going to see them live in person, and the match was postponed because of the Queen’s funeral. So it was very, very sad. Hence, now a Sunday spent at a pub drinking my sorrows away.10. FX’s “What We Do in the Shadows” It’s one of those shows where you might watch the first two episodes and your instinct is to say, “OK, I get it. They’re vampires. It’s a fake documentary. Everyone is speaking in funny accents.” Pardon the pun, but that show crept up on me in such a way that I am crying laughing practically every single episode. The concept of a vampire that sucks your energy by boring you to death, I thought that was so hilarious. Oddly, you wouldn’t necessarily think that a show that broad would be able to grip you and make you fall in love with the characters. But I absolutely have. More

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      In ‘Reboot,’ Everything Old Is New, to Streaming

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      This new Hulu comedy pokes fun at TV’s obsession with bringing back past shows.At a recent meeting at Hulu’s offices, over coffee and luxury bottled water, half a dozen executives entertained a pitch for a new series. Well, not exactly new. The idea: Reboot the beloved early ’00s comedy about a blended family, “Step Right Up.” Though it ended abruptly after its lead departed, the show has, surprisingly, found a robust audience on streaming, particularly among, an analytics specialist notes, the family and “live-to-laugh” quadrants.“Are we sure that’s not just people leaving it on for their dogs?” a colleague asks.Her boss voices a further concern: Are reboots still a thing? His team answers him with a very long list, which includes “Fuller House,” “How I Met Your Father,” “Veronica Mars,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Gossip Girls,” “The Wonder Years,” “Party of Five,” “Party Down” and on and on and on.“What the hell,” the boss says, convinced. “Let’s remake something original.”This is the opening scene of “Reboot,” a Hulu half-hour comedy from the showrunner Steven Levitan (“Modern Family,” “Just Shoot Me!”) with a premise so flawless it seems bananas that no one has thought of it before. A turducken of a show, it features a multicamera family comedy, nested inside a single camera workplace comedy, shoved into a behind-the-scenes Hollywood spoof. The series is also a referendum — a pretty fun one — on the way that the sitcom has advanced in the past several decades and its migration from network to cable and streaming.“This really is an affectionate look at our business,” Levitan said, speaking from a home office with “Modern Family” cutouts in the background. “The bizarre characters, the weird situations, the important meetings you have over something that’s unbelievably trivial and embarrassing. It’s really such great fodder for comedy.”Levitan first had the idea for “Reboot” several years ago when “Roseanne” returned and then disappeared, following a racist tweet posted by its star, Roseanne Barr, and then returned again, sans Barr, as “The Conners.” The presumed backstage drama intrigued him.“I remember thinking to myself, Well, that’s the show I want to watch,” he said. “Modern Family” still had a few seasons to go. He assumed that someone else would dream up the same idea in the meantime, but no one did. Or no one was greenlit, anyway. So he took his pitch to Hulu. (He has an overall deal with 20th Television, which is, like Hulu, part of the Walt Disney Company.)Rachel Bloom, left, and Krista Marie Yu in “Reboot,” a show about a show reviving an old show.Michael Desmond/HuluI asked Karey Burke, the president of 20th Television, who helped to develop “Reboot,” if Hulu’s real-life executives had ever expressed any qualms about the show’s satire. (There’s a dazzling swipe at “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the pilot, for example.)“They love it,” she said. “And I don’t know that other platforms would be able to handle the zingers as gracefully as they have.”Craig Erwich, the president of ABC Entertainment, Hulu and Disney branded television streaming originals, confirmed this, saying that he and his real colleagues enjoyed being in on the joke. “We loved it,” he said. “It’s funny. And it’s funny because it probably rings true.”Not all of these jokes target streaming services. A bunch take aim at networks, where Levitan spent most of his career. Others go after changes within the form of the sitcom itself. Many of these last are voiced in the form of arguments between Paul Reiser’s Gordon, who created “Step Right Up,” and Rachel Bloom’s Hannah, the millennial writer-director who pitched the reboot.“Comedy has evolved since you last wrote for television,” says Hannah, tartly. “I mean, honestly, whole species have evolved.”Some of that evolution has pushed sitcoms away from the live-audience multicamera style, the province of a studio comedy like “Step Right Up,” to more visually sophisticated single-camera formats. The move from network to streaming, a move that “Reboot” explores, has wrought other changes. This new “Step Right Up” no longer need to adhere to a 22-minute format with A, B and C story lines and pauses for commercial breaks. More sexually explicit material is now permissible, as are obscenities.“It’s the world of sitcom, but it’s streaming,” Reiser said in an interview, speaking of the move to streaming generally. “So you can say whatever you want, and you’re not going for the laugh, necessarily.”But old constraints die hard. Though “Step Right Up” has taken on a new look, most of the episodes of “Reboot” do still honor a three-act structure. And if the set-up-punchline, set-up-punchline form has given ground, A, B and C plots remain. “It’s inherent,” Levitan said. “It’s baked into my bones right now that shows will have a certain sense of structure and plot.”And yet, as “Reboot” demonstrates, and as a rewatch of most ’80s, ’90s and ’00s comedies will prove, content has changed. Jokes that punched down at women, queer people, disabled people, people of color — rarely make it to air now. Levitan framed this as a limitation, if a good one.“The whole #MeToo, woke culture, it has changed where you can go, and by and large, in a positive way,” he said. “Where it gets tricky is when everybody is so scared of offending somebody that you don’t even go anywhere near the line anymore.”Bloom, who cocreated the sitcom “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” sees this new sensibility as an opportunity rather than a curb or a cause for angst. “There’s a mindfulness that’s being asked of people now that wasn’t being asked of people before,” she said. “I think it’s making us all better people, better comedians.” And she enjoys playing Hannah, even in her occasional humorlessness.“A girl who wears baggy sweaters with anxiety?” Bloom said. “I know that person.” Reiser, who described himself as “a little bit more aware than Gordon” agreed with his co-star. “I never understand people who say, ‘You couldn’t make that joke anymore,’” he said. “I go, ‘Why would you want to? How much do you want to make a joke?’ It’s kind of not cool and insensitive.”Levitan first had the idea for “Reboot” during the controversy in which Roseanne Barr was fired from her own revived sitcom.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesSome of the strongest scenes of “Reboot” are the ones set in the writers’ room that dramatize this tension. The writers whom Hannah has hired — a queer man and two women of color — clash openly with the older Jewish writers of Gordon’s acquaintance. In one scene, a younger writer critiques a joke pitched by the TV veteran Selma (Rose Abdoo, the series’s stealth M.V.P.).“I thought gay people were supposed to be fun,” Selma snaps back. But eventually they find a joke everyone likes. It involves a pratfall. Pratfalls are funny no matter what.But “Reboot” isn’t only funny. There’s a persistent sweetness to it and a sense that people can change, usually for the better.“That’s something that’s quite thrilling about the show,” said Keegan-Michael Key, a “Step Right Up” star. “It’s a Steve Levitan hallmark, isn’t it, that sense of people being open?”“Step Right Up” is the reboot at the center, but nearly all of the characters are rebooting themselves in one way or another, recovering from divorce, addiction, regional theater. Levitan mentioned how fans had told him how “Modern Family” had helped them work through difficult moments in their own lives. He hopes that “Reboot,” a show about Hollywood elites with Bentleys and real estate portfolios and connections to Nordic royalty, can do the same.“Bringing a little laughter into people’s lives is a really joyous thing to do,” he said.“Reboot” remains agnostic on the question of the worth of reboots themselves. Many real-world ones seem like little more than cheap intellectual-property grabs, and few improve on the original. Some are so dismal that they actually poison their predecessors, retroactively. The creators and stars of “Reboot” had varying opinions on the form. Or no opinion at all.“I don’t think that’s for me to say,” Levitan said. “Yeah, I would rather not draw the ire of comedy writers.” Reiser survived the reboot of “Mad About You” pretty much intact and seemed optimistic about the form. Bloom was less so.“The most exciting part of a reboot for me is the headline of a reboot coming up,” she said. The reboot itself was usually a disappointment.Key sounded more hopeful. He thought that reboots might work, at least notionally, and could even be innovative if the animating idea were persuasive enough. “I really think that is possible,” he said. “It’s all about angles.”Until Hollywood figures out those angles, we’ll just have to make do with something original. Like “Reboot.” More