Television

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      ‘Dark Matter,’ Sci-Fi Thriller, Explores Alternative Realities

      by

      In this new Apple TV+ techno-thriller, a portal to parallel realities allows people to visit new worlds and revisit their own past decisions.In the new series “Dark Matter,” a physics professor (Joel Edgerton) is abducted off the streets of Chicago and replaced by an alternative version of himself. This version, instead of toiling away teaching distracted undergrads, is a prize-winning scientist who, among his various accomplishments, has invented a box that can superposition people into parallel worlds.This alternative Jason, despite his riches and renown in his own universe, covets the humbler Jason’s life and family — his loving wife (Jennifer Connelly) and son (Oakes Fegley). So he steals them, leaving the original Jason to negotiate a limbo of parallel realities, hopping from one to another as he tries to find his way home, like a sci-fi Odysseus.“Dark Matter,” which premieres May 8 on Apple TV+, was created by Blake Crouch, adapting his own 2016 novel of the same title. The series is part thriller, part family drama and part physics primer, enlisting heady concepts like quantum mechanics, superposition and, well, dark matter, to tell a story about longing, regret and desire.It is the latest project to depict physics as a vital, fraught and even sexy subject, joining the Oscar giant biopic “Oppenheimer” and the Netflix alien invasion series “3 Body Problem,” which is named for a classical mechanics problem. In these stories, physicists wrestle with matters of life and death that, as in reality, are intertwined with matters of love.They’re human tales about human dilemmas. But they’re also happy to throw some science into the equation.“More than anything, Blake and I wanted people to be excited in every episode, learn something in every episode, but also maybe cry in every episode,” Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry said in a video interview. She is a writer and producer on the series and has been Crouch’s developmental story editor since the publication of his 2012 novel “Pines” — she is also married to him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      The ‘Fall Guy’ Filmmakers Have a Cause: Give Stunts an Oscar

      by

      The academy is keeping mum about the prospect, but the movie is part of a renewed push for a new Academy Award first considered more than 30 years ago.The life of stuntmen and women is never glamorous. The job is to take the fall, endure the pain, break the bone, then walk away — unsung, battered and bruised. They usually move on to the next gig without ever seeing the finished product. They rarely get invited to the movie premiere. Oscars? Forget about it.That narrative seems to be changing with the new action-comedy-romance “The Fall Guy,” the loose film adaptation of the 1980s television show that opens Friday. The movie, directed by the former stuntman David Leitch, stars Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, a down-on-his-luck stuntman who returns to set after a nasty accident to solve the mystery of a missing leading man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and, more important, to get the girl (played by Emily Blunt).The director David Leitch and producer Kelly McCormick said they wanted to give stunt performers their due.Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNot only does the film give the best portrayal of the life of a stuntman since Burt Reynolds starred in the 1978 action comedy “Hooper,” directed by another ex-stuntman, Hal Needham, but so much of the promotional efforts have placed the stunt crew front and center, including the newly minted world-record holder Logan Holladay (he rolled a retrofitted Jeep Grand Cherokee eight and a half times) and the high-fall virtuoso Troy Lindsay Brown. They and two others served as Gosling’s doubles in the film.At the Berlin premiere, the team broke through a brick wall with another double, Ben Jenkin, riding on the hood of a truck. In London, Holladay wheelied in on a motorcycle and Jenkin crashed through some breakable glass.And on Tuesday at the Los Angeles premiere, Brown tumbled from a 45-foot-high scissor lift onto a blowup mattress and Justin Eaton, another Gosling stunt double, engaged in a three-way fistfight with all of the performers breaking through another sheet of faux glass. Then Jenkin flipped from the balcony of the Dolby Theater onto the stage moments before Gosling took the mic to declare, “This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar.”Gosling joked, “This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar.”87 NorthIndeed, putting the stunt performers on the very stage where the Oscars are held is all part of deliberate efforts by Leitch, his producing partner and wife, Kelly McCormick, and the marketers at Universal to give these action pros their due. “It’s an important part of why we made this,” Leitch said in an interview. “We wanted to humanize these people. It really does hurt. And yet, we don’t really know what they feel because they’re not supposed to be seen.”They may become more visible if the couple have their way. The push for an Oscar category is not the subtle subtext of “The Fall Guy”; it is the text. There’s even a moment in the movie when Gosling’s Seavers is asked if stunt performers receive Oscars for their work. “Stunts?” he replies. “No,” then raises his glass to the “unsung heroes.”“It’s baked into the film,” the screenwriter Drew Pearce said in an interview from his home office. “There are not that many members of the crew who can break their back by going into work that day. The idea that they wouldn’t be acknowledged but me sitting in here on a laptop is, obviously, doesn’t seem just in any way.”The hit television show “The Fall Guy” ran for five seasons in the early 1980s, and its epic action, including truck jumps and high-elevation falls, proved to be a source of inspiration for the many Gen Xers who now dominate the stunt community. It even inspired those who didn’t make it into that world but found their way to Hollywood, like Pearce (who, as a child, concocted a stuntman course in his backyard only to discover his crippling fear of heights) and another of the film’s producers, Guymon Casady.Casady first convinced the TV show’s creator, Glen A. Larson, to license the property to him some 20 years ago, only for it to languish in the studio development process, as various iterations, including one with Dwayne Johnson and another with Nicolas Cage, fell apart. In 2019, Casady tried again, reviving the project with Leitch, who was fresh off his success on “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” and about to start “Bullet Train.” Leitch had begun his career as Brad Pitt’s stunt double and worked as a director and producer on the “John Wick” series.“The big idea from the very beginning was to make a movie where we were honoring the stunt craft,” Casady said. “That was an important idea for David, obviously, given his background, but we thought it was also a really unique character.”Yet, Leitch and company’s efforts are not new.Stuntman-turned-second-unit-director Jack Gill joined the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in 1991, determined to get himself and his colleagues recognized. The academy told him it would take three to five years of hard work to add the category. Cut to 2024, and Gill, who has no affiliation with “Fall Guy,” is still holding out hope that this happens in his lifetime. The new movie has made him optimistic.“It is a great representation of what a stunt person actually has to put up with and what they go through,” he said in an interview from a set in Phuket, Thailand. “I think a lot of the academy members that vote on whether we get an Oscar category are still a little bit in the dark about what we do. I don’t think they realize that most of the action is designed by us. It’s not designed by the writer or the director.”Jack Gill, with his wife, the actress Morgan Brittany, in his stuntman days. He has been pushing for an Oscar for the profession since 1991.Parker/Hulton Archive Via Getty Images/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesTo drive that point home, Chris O’Hara, who orchestrated the action on “The Fall Guy,” is now the first professional to earn the title stunt designer — a new designation approved by the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of America — that establishes a benchmark for the work of a stunt coordinator and better aligns O’Hara’s work with other department heads on sets, including production and costume designers.O’Hara grew up in the business with Leitch, worked on “John Wick,” and served as his second-unit director and stunt coordinator on “Hobbs & Shaw.” For years he was content to stay in the shadows.“We knew what we did,” he said. “We weren’t out there to get recognition, accolades and attaboys.”But that changed when he started seeing his peers in visual effects ascend the Oscar stage. “They are amazing people at their craft, and visual effects are an essential part of filmmaking,” he said, but he pointed out that most of the effects being recognized involved action sequences with stunt performers. “I just think we need to be included. We are part of the film industry. We are part of cinema.”There are currently 101 stunt performers in the academy. They are part of the Production and Technology branch, which includes colorists, script supervisors and line producers, among others. Unlike other branches, which each have three governors to lobby on their behalf, this branch is headed by one.Yet Gill, Leitch and McCormick are encouraged by the progress the academy has made, including its decision to laud stunt work at the Oscars in March with a tribute that Gosling and Blunt introduced and that Leitch and McCormick produced.“I personally think that tribute is a huge step forward,” McCormick said. “If they didn’t want to recognize the stunt industry, they easily could have filled those two minutes with something else.”Gill is hopeful that the progress achieved by casting directors — who landed their own Oscar category beginning with the 2026 Academy Awards — can be replicated for stunt performers. Yet the academy is remaining mum on if or when this will happen. Its president, Janet Yang, attended the Los Angeles premiere of “The Fall Guy” on Tuesday, but a representative declined to comment on the status of a potential new Oscar.“Here I am, 33 years later, and we’re closer now because of the casting category,” Gill said. “They opened the door to the fact that, yes, we can create new branches and we can create new categories, which before they had told me was virtually impossible.”He added, “We’re trying to follow in their footsteps and jump right in behind them. With ‘Fall Guy’ coming out, I think we’ve got a good shot at it.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Jimmy Kimmel Wants to Testify at Donald Trump’s Criminal Trial

      by

      “I think I can keep Trump awake during the trial,” Kimmel said after learning that text messages about his talk show were entered as evidence in the case.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.Another Historic FirstDuring Donald Trump’s criminal trial on Thursday, a series of text messages between Michael Cohen and Keith Davidson was entered into evidence containing several references to “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Kimmel said he was excited, proud, and “exhilarated, even, because from here on, we aren’t just following the Donald Trump drama in New York, we are part of it now.”“It’s the first time — I don’t want to brag — but first time a late-night talk show has been introduced into evidence at the criminal trial for a president of the United States. Johnny Carson didn’t get that with Nixon — we got it here.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Suffice it to say that when Ryan Murphy makes the nine-part mini-series about this for Fubo, I will be in it. I would assume someone like George Clooney or maybe Chris Hemsworth will be playing me. Guillermo, you will be in it. You’ll be played by — you’ll be played by Pedro Pascal.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I’m sick of being out of the court — I want to be in it. Why was I not asked to testify? It’s outrageous! I’m going to start suing people!” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I think I can keep Trump awake during the trial.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (More Trump Takes Edition)“Yesterday was a day off from the trial, so Trump jetted off to Wisconsin and Michigan to perform his hit one-man show, ‘Complaining for Applause.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Prosecutors argued today that former President Trump should be sanctioned again for violating his gag order. Apparently, he talks in his sleep.” — SETH MEYERS“The courtroom sketch artist hates him. I mean, absolutely, she turned him into the hunchback of ‘Bloatra Dame.’ It’s like his tongue is about to shoot out and get a fly on it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Scientists in England recently revealed the facial reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman that was buried about 75,000 years ago in a cave. Or it might have just been another courtroom sketch.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingKate Hudson made her T.V. performance debut on Thursday’s “Tonight Show” with the song “Gonna Find Out” from her forthcoming album, “Glorious.”Also, Check This OutRichard Gadd and Jessica Gunning star in “Baby Reindeer,” a semi-autobiographical Netflix mini-series in which Gadd plays a version of himself.Ed Miller/NetflixThe Netflix hit “Baby Reindeer” is based on a true story from the life of creator and star Richard Gadd. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      What to Know About ‘Baby Reindeer,’ Netflix’s True-ish TV Hit

      by

      The mini-series, based on the star’s experiences, has viewers wondering how much of it is real. Here’s the back story.Some spoilers follow.“Baby Reindeer,” Netflix’s absorbing, claustrophobic seven-episode thriller, has been an unexpected global hit — a success made even more surprising given its intense themes. It is far and away the most-watched show on Netflix, according to the streamer’s publicly released numbers, dwarfing every other show on the platform.The mini-series follows the character of Donny Dunn, a bartender and floundering comedian trying to navigate the fog of trauma and cobble together a sense of self while being mercilessly stalked and tormented by a woman named Martha, with whom he maintains a codependent connection, despite the harassment. The title refers to one of Martha’s many nicknames for Donny.Here’s what’s real about “Baby Reindeer,” and what viewers seem most curious about.Yes, That Is the Real Guy“Baby Reindeer” is the work of Richard Gadd, 34, who plays Donny, a slightly fictionalized version of himself. And if you were wondering how a regular guy could be such a confident, complex actor, it’s because he is a seasoned, award-winning performer who parlayed his autobiographical one-man show, titled “Baby Reindeer,” into the series, for which he wrote every episode.But once upon a time, he was the self-loathing performer we see depicted. “Baby Reindeer” takes meta storytelling to new levels.Yes, It Is Based on His Real ExperiencesEarly in the first episode, a message across the screen reads, “This is a true story.” And it is.“It’s all emotionally 100 percent true,” Gadd, who was the real-life victim of the stalking, said in a recent interview with Variety. “It’s all borrowed from instances that happened to me and real people that I met.” True with the caveat that “for both legal and artistic reasons,” as he put it, details had to be changed. “You can’t just copy somebody else’s life and name and put it onto television,” he said. “We were very aware that some characters in it are vulnerable people,” he added, “so you don’t want to make their lives more difficult.”The series is largely punctuated by language from real messages sent by his stalker (played by Jessica Gunning), which we see typed out onscreen. In his one-man show, a 70-minute monologue that premiered at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and would go on to win an Olivier Award (Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys), Gadd played her voice mail messages to the audience, and projections of her emails scrolled across the venue’s ceiling.According to Gadd, she sent him over 41,000 emails, tweeted at him hundreds of times and left him 350 hours of voice mail over the course of a few years.For the series, certain timelines were moved around “to make them pay off a little better,” he said. Nonetheless, “it’s a very true story.”Gadd Has Asked Viewers Not to Dig …While the saga, at first glance, is one of stalking and obsession, it is equally about the life-shattering effects of sexual assault. In the fourth episode, Gadd’s character is repeatedly drugged, assaulted and raped by a powerful television writer named Darrien O’Connor (played by Tom Goodman-Hill) who’d made false promises to help catapult the comedian’s career. (The sexual assaults were explored in Gadd’s earlier solo show “Monkey See Monkey Do.”)“Abuse leaves an imprint,” Gadd recently told GQ magazine. “Especially abuse like this where it’s repeated with promises.”The depiction of the abuse is graphic and disturbing, and knowing that the characters were based on real people prompted great interest in the identities behind them. But Gadd was quick to urge viewers to stop investigating. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be,” he wrote on Instagram. “That’s not the point of our show.”… Yet Viewers Keep DiggingAs more and more people binge the show, social media platforms have become amateur detective rings, with viewers trying to suss out the identities of the characters. The British writer and director Sean Foley was the subject of online threats when some thought that he was the real-life Darrien character.“Police have been informed and are investigating all defamatory abusive and threatening posts against me,” Foley said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) in late April.On Instagram, Gadd defended Foley specifically, writing, “People I love, have worked with, and admire (including Sean Foley) are unfairly getting caught up in speculation.”In the first episode, Gadd’s character searches Martha’s name online and uncovers a trove of articles about her past stalking — “Serial Stalker Sentenced to Four and Half Years,” reads one headline — which led some online sleuths to try to find the actual versions of those same articles.The show has become such a phenomenon that The Daily Mail published an interview with a woman purporting to be the “real” Martha, lodging her complaints about the show, though her name was not disclosed.When GQ asked Gadd what the stalker might make of the show, he said, “I honestly couldn’t speak as to whether she would watch it,” calling her “an idiosyncratic person.”“We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognize herself,” he said. “What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone.” More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      What to Watch This Weekend: A Supernatural Dramedy

      by

      “The Big Door Prize” returns for another season of charming small-town folks grappling with their fates.Chris O’Dowd in a scene from Season 2 of “The Big Door Prize.”Apple TV+“The Big Door Prize,” on Apple TV+, is set among humble, fragile people, and it cradles them with gentle care. But the show itself is full of moxie — not defiant but confident that yes, it can blend “Gilmore Girls” with “The Leftovers.” Quirk and ache, baby! Come and get it.The show is set in the sweet small town of Deerfield, where everyone attends elaborate local festivals and enjoys the garish Italian restaurant where you can sit in a gondola. Then one day a fortunetelling machine called the Morpho appears in the general store, promising to reveal one’s true potential. In Season 1, the cards it spit out seemingly told characters what their true fate was: magician, royalty, or in the case of Chris O’Dowd’s repressed family man, “teacher/whistler.” In Season 2, the next level awaits. When the Deerfield denizens put their cards back into the machine’s slot, each sees a unique, personal 32-bit videogame on the screen, though one absorbs it more than plays it. For some, the interlude resolves their greatest regrets; for others, the action is too cryptic to understand at first glance.“Door” uses plenty of tricks from mystery-box shows and from, of course, its own literal mystery box. Little overlapping connections abound, and throwaway objects become significant totems. Like lots of high-end shows, it has departure episodes that focus more on side characters — but because the show features such a broad cast, almost every episode has that feel. “Door” avoids many of the frustrating aspects of its various predecessors by only glancingly investigating the Morpho’s origins. The show’s central question is not “Where did this come from?” but “What should I do?”Despite the woo-woo goings on, the folks here are not at much of an advantage. Being told exactly who they were didn’t liberate anyone per se, and living out one’s own little Greek myth is no great treat. Does being told you’re a liar make you more truthful? If a big ego is authentic, earned self-love and not just a cover for insecurity, might it be wonderful? If you regret one big life decision, does that mean you regret all the decisions that followed it?All 10 episodes from Season 1 of “The Big Door Prize” are available along with the first four from Season 2, with new episodes arriving Wednesdays. Because they are each a blissful half-hour, they make for a superb binge. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      The Voice of a Hundred Faces: Dee Bradley Baker’s ‘Star Wars’ Journey

      by

      With “The Bad Batch” ending this week on Disney+, the man who has voiced hundreds of “Star Wars” characters over the past two decades looks back on his run.For “Star Wars” fans who have seen only the theatrical blockbusters, clone troopers are peripheral figures, at most recalled as the title menace in “Attack of the Clones,” from 2002. But over the past two decades they have become essential to the franchise, the pillar of animated “Star Wars” series including “The Clone Wars,” “Star Wars Rebels” and most recently, “The Bad Batch.”And in that time one man has been essential to the clones: Dee Bradley Baker, who has voiced them all.Not all of the shows — all of the clones, hundreds of them since getting cast for “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” which debuted in 2008 with a feature film and an animated series that lasted for seven seasons. Now Baker’s incredibly prolific gig, which also included plenty of non-clone roles, has finally come to an end: “The Bad Batch,” the “Clone Wars” sequel series, concludes its three-season run on Disney+ this week, and there are no plans for more clone shows.“It’s been wonderfully gratifying to go on this journey,” Baker said.Baker, 61, has been a voice actor for nearly 30 years, working on series like “Dexter’s Laboratory,” “American Dad,” “Codename: Kids Next Door” and “Space Jam.” Before “Star Wars,” he almost exclusively played funny parts: He voiced every animal in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” Perry the Platypus in “Phineas & Ferb” and creatures in live-action projects like Sebastian the rat in “The Suicide Squad.”“I would get cast as more young, energetic and comedic because that’s how I thought of myself,” Baker said. The “Star Wars” shows “pulled so much more from me as an actor because it asked things of me I wouldn’t even think of.”“Nothing can be more fun than to play in the universe that captured your imagination as a kid,” Baker said.Jesse Grant/Getty ImagesMany of the dramatic and emotional stories early on in “The Clone Wars” involved the clone troopers. After all, it is easier to kill a replaceable clone, one of millions, than a Jedi who also shows up in the theatrical movies.Though the series was on Cartoon Network and aimed at kids, the war stories were intense and put the increasingly hard-bitten clones through one wringer after another. One story arc channels the novella “Heart of Darkness”: The troopers are led by a ruthless Jedi General in a jungle planet, until the general’s constant sacrifice of lives leads to insurgency. One episode was directed by Walter Murch, the Oscar-winning sound designer behind the Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now,” itself inspired by “Heart of Darkness.”“Voice acting is acting, you need the same skill and the same talent,” said Ashley Eckstein who played Ahsoka Tano. (This central “Clone Wars” character last year became the center of a live-action show, “Ahsoka,” starring Rosario Dawson.)“It can even be harder and more difficult to do voice acting,” Eckstein continued. “Dee and I had to do some deeply emotional and action-packed scenes, and we had to stand still behind a microphone. You can’t act it out or move around. You have to convey all of it just through your voice.”“The Clone Wars” was followed by “Star Wars Rebels,” which follows a small Rebel crew that eventually includes a group of surviving clones, and “The Bad Batch,” centered on a squad of “defective” clones with even more distinct personalities.Baker voiced a menagerie of creatures in “The Clone Wars.” He said his improv background prepared him for the odd sounds “Star Wars” shows require and for moving quickly between characters.Lucasfilm/Disney+One obstacle to making clone troopers compelling is the challenge of differentiating them. (They are, after all, clones.) There were small attempts from the beginning to make them distinct from a design standpoint. The creators gave them colorful armor and insignia to contrast them with the Empire’s more well-known stormtroopers, according to Dave Filoni, who was supervising director and an executive producer of “The Clone Wars” and is now the chief creative officer of Lucasfilm.“They were able to express their individuality, where stormtroopers are individuals taken into service and stripped of their personality and identity,” Filoni wrote in an email. Still, a look is little without the voice and personality that goes with it, and Baker’s performance was a big reason the characters became so central.The first test to see if Baker voicing all the clones would work came in “Rookies,” the fifth episode of “The Clone Wars.” The episode came from an idea by George Lucas, who wanted to do an episode of just clones, and follows a group of cadets who come together as a squad and stave off a droid invasion.As Henry Gilroy, the show’s head writer, recalled, “That recording session was actually a revelation, for we realized that we could write anything for the clones to do with story and character and Dee would execute to perfection.”The clones soon went from being one-off characters with little personality to proper members of the expanded cast, with their own emotional and dramatic arcs that carried on throughout the show’s seven seasons and into “The Bad Batch.” (The character Echo is the last surviving member of that rookie squad.)Baker comes up with one or two defining qualities for each clone to help differentiate them.Lucasfilm/Disney+All the clones are based, fittingly, on the same voice: the one Baker created to play Captain Rex, the second-in-command to Anakin Skywalker and his closest friend in “The Clone Wars,” after Obi-Wan Kenobi. Baker would settle on one or two defining qualities for each clone — rank, age, attitude, quirk — to guide his performances. He used to record one clone at a time, going through an entire script with one and then doing the same with the next and so on until an episode was done.But as “The Clone Wars” developed more complex arcs, he took a faster, more daunting approach. “I would start to play all of them and just jump back and forth,” Baker said. “I just read through the scenes straight through as if they’re characters playing out a scene, but it’s just me going from one voice to the other.”Michelle Ang, who stars in “The Bad Batch” as Omega, is amazed by this process. “He can not only perform the different personalities, but hold five different viewpoints of all the ‘Bad Batch’ characters and argue for each one,” she said. “It feels like there are four distinct people I’m working with.”Eckstein called Baker a mentor, comparing their relationship to that of Ahsoka, her young Padawan character, and Baker’s seasoned Captain Rex. “He taught me the ways of the Force, the ways of voice acting,” she said. When she too was asked to play multiple characters in the same episodes, “I learned from Dee, who is brilliant at doing that.”Baker, who started out in comedy, said improv helped train him to embrace the odd vocalizations “Star Wars” shows can require and to move fluidly between characters.“I am not so much prepared as I’m ready,” he said. “You want to be open and available to steer this and configure that in a way that the writers you’re working with want things to go. You can’t prepare for it. You get that in the immediate human connection of now, and that is inherently improvisational.”The end of “The Bad Batch” is the end of an era, even if other “Star Wars” roles eventually come Baker’s way, like the upcoming video game “Star Wars Outlaws.” Though characters like Ahsoka Tano live on in live-action, and Captain Rex made a cameo in “Ahsoka,” “The Bad Batch” characters were the last characters that Lucas, the “Star Wars” mastermind who is no longer involved with the franchise, had direct input on. The significance of this isn’t lost on Baker.“I’ve loved ‘Star Wars’ since I was a kid,” he said. “Nothing can be more fun than to play in the universe that captured your imagination as a kid.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Kelli O’Hara’s Ties to Opera, From ‘The Gilded Age’ to the Met Stage

      by

      O’Hara is an unusual kind of triple threat: a star of Broadway and television who is appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of “The Hours.”On the HBO costume drama “The Gilded Age,” Kelli O’Hara plays a New York grande dame forced to choose sides in an opera war: remain at the old guard’s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being built by the nouveau riche they had excluded.When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the nearly completed Met, the camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.O’Hara herself is far more familiar with the Met, at least in its current incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing at the Met for nearly a decade, and is back now for a revival of “The Hours,” starring opposite Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends both.Still, the Met’s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 people, inspires the same wonder in O’Hara as it does in Aurora. Although Aurora never had to fill it. And O’Hara does.“Once I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing,” she said.This was on a recent morning during a break from rehearsals. O’Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would never.) Later she would return to the basement space where she is rehearsing “The Hours,” Kevin Puts’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s time-skipping novel, itself inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which opens May 5.On “The Gilded Age,” O’Hara, left, plays Aurora Fane, a wealthy socialite who is forced to choose sides in the opera war that created the Met. She is shown with Louisa Jacobson.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the Met’s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to show O’Hara a few items from the Met’s founding that would have been familiar to Aurora: a piece of its original stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a box seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the audience thronging the stage.“It was like a rock concert,” O’Hara marveled. “The passion people had.”Opera was not quite O’Hara’s first passion. She went to college intending to study musical theater, but was told that her voice wasn’t built for the pop and rock styles then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated in the Met’s National Council Auditions and made it to the finals at the regional level. But she missed the camaraderie she had experienced in musical theater, so she packed her bags and headed for Broadway.Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of classic musicals including “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” for which she won a Tony. Just this week she received her eighth Tony nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses.”While she did not regret leaving opera, she sometimes wondered how she might have fared on the Met’s stage. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.At the very end of 2014, she had her chance, in a new production of the operetta “The Merry Widow” directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had previously worked on Broadway. She followed that debut with a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was frightening, but O’Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn’t mind a certain amount of fright.“I had to put my backbone straight and have conversations with myself,” she said. “’You can do this. You’re fine. Just keep your nose to the ground and do your work.’”Even as she scaled the heights of Broadway, O’Hara recalled her opera training. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat work paid off. When she sang in “Così,” her “lovely soprano voice and quite good Italian diction” were praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.While opera singers occasionally make the move to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are recent examples), careers rarely flow the other way. And a performer who can do all this and television, too? That’s rarer still.“The Hours,” O’Hara’s first contemporary opera, which premiered in 2022, is a further challenge. O’Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a woman constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some ways, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the role O’Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Kirsten is another woman confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both find freedom where they can.“I’m coming off of over two years now of playing sad women, held women, even Aurora, held back, constricted,” O’Hara said.For O’Hara, opera is not exactly freeing. It’s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she’ll keep pursuing it — for the difficulty, for the terror, for the range of roles. (On TV, she said, she now plays grandmothers. Opera is rather more forgiving.)O’Hara knows that she could fail. Her voice could crack. She might flub a note. But Aurora is brave enough to join the new-money mavens at the Met’s opening. And O’Hara in her way is brave, too. Brave enough to send her bright, unamplified soprano out into thousands of ears each night.“I’m confident enough to want to try,” she said. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Katt Williams Wants to Show You the Receipts

      by

      After setting the internet aflame earlier this year when he slammed several other comedians in a viral interview, he plans to say more of what’s on his mind in a rare live special on Netflix.In the crowded landscape of athlete podcasts, “Club Shay Shay,” hosted by the retired N.F.L. star Shannon Sharpe, mostly served sports fans and observers of Black Hollywood since it started in 2020 with interviews with DaBaby and Deion Sanders.That was until Katt Williams appeared on the show in January and for nearly three hours delivered an incendiary, rollicking and, at points, curiously uplifting interview that pervaded the internet like nothing else this year. Williams accused other big-name comedians of stealing jokes and movie roles from him, riffed on why partying with Diddy (or Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein) is a bad idea, asserted that he read 3,000 books a year as a child and claimed that at 52, he was capable of running a 40-yard dash in less than 5 seconds.The interview has been viewed more than 67 million times on YouTube, numbers that put it on par with Joe Rogan’s blazing episode with Elon Musk, the industry high-water mark for video podcasts. Its most outrageous moments have been shared, excerpted and spoofed on so many other platforms that even that figure understates its impact. According to Williams, who said he wrote out his part of the dialogue in advance, it’s just what happens when he sets the record straight.“I’m quite likely to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God,” he said during the interview.Beyond raising Sharpe’s numbers, the spot helped Williams move tickets to his “Dark Matter” tour and got the PGA interested in hosting him at T.P.C. Sawgrass, the golf course that serves as a playground for pros and that most others will see only by plugging in “PGA Tour Golf” into their PlayStations. On the course, in between shots, he says he made his nuclear-option remarks carefully, responding to rumors — in some cases, told by people he spoke up about — that have dogged him for years about drug use, erratic behavior and arrests (though, he said, no convictions). “I thought that I had worked out a way of breaking the internet, and I felt pretty confident,” he said with a Mr. Rogers level of thoughtfulness. “So I wrote it kind of like a one-man movie, with the intention of its outcome. And — —”“You’re great, Katt,” a man trills as he passes in his golf cart.“Thank you so much,” Williams replies, then pulls to a stop.When Dave Chappelle responded to the “Club Shay Shay” podcast by saying, “Why are you drawing ugly pictures of us?” Williams said it stung.Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times“If I let it go at this point, they can actually rewrite history,” he says. Few things unnerve him more than a poor chronicling of facts. That’s probably because few people are better at weaving narratives that seem too incredible not to be true, like when he describes how he taught himself to fall asleep in exactly 59 seconds. (“It wasn’t something I knew I needed but it’s changed my [expletive] life!”)The things that make Katt Williams such a great raconteur — he is diligent about numbers, inexhaustible in his curiosity and meticulous about his delivery — have made him a persistent presence in comedy since he emerged from the standup world over 30 years ago, through regular appearances on the improv sketch show “Wild ’N Out” and as a scene-stealing dervish in movies like “Friday After Next.” That his improbable rise from homelessness to one of the most prolific, and profitable, comics of his generation isn’t looked on as a feat of craft and yeoman effort, well, that was a record that needed straightening. Williams grabbed even the furthest corners of the internet to do so, and now that he’s got everyone’s attention he is gearing up for the ultimate told-you-so — “Woke Foke,” set to air globally on Saturday. It’s Netflix’s second-ever live special after Chris Rock’s last year. Williams, who does not work his material in clubs partly because of the looming threat of joke-stealing, has been prepping his material on a 100-date arena tour where audiences were not asked to lock away their phones. It seems a sure way to spoil the act he and Netflix are banking big on. It’s also a show of extreme faith in his current set, and will make for a high-wire debut for the roughly 25 percent of new material he’ll deliver live in Los Angeles.“He’s one of the most exceptional improvisational comedians of our time,” says Robbie Praw, Netflix’s vice president of standup and comedy formats. “He does often change his material close to tapings, which is a key reason why he was the perfect person to be our second live special. Because there is something super exciting about that. When there’s no script, there’s no net.”Or as Williams himself puts it, “The benefit of Katt Williams live is that you don’t, in any way, know what he’s going to say.”THOUGH HE USUALLY PLAYS golf alongside the retired athletes he’s friends with or someone from the tour crew, today Williams plays this round effectively solo. An assistant named Rhonda trails him in a separate cart driven by a cigar-smoking bodyguard. Later, he calls out to Rhonda, who dutifully takes photos when Williams points up at the trees that rim a rippling green, where two bald eagles have alighted on branches near their nest. “Look at that,” Williams marvels through an open-mouthed grin.Over the round, he’ll point out a peregrine falcon swooping in to feed, stop in the middle of a fairway to show Rhonda and a caddie a woodpecker that has gotten thisclose to severing a branch, and sprint across one tee box to stand under a magnolia tree and catch its wafting perfume. He’s got dozens of them lining his 100-acre farm, he says.That sprint to the magnolia, and several more full-speed runs from fairway back to the golf cart, each have the same track-star form he showed in an Emmy-winning cameo on “Atlanta” that ended with his character bolting from the house where he’d kept both his girlfriend and an alligator illegally. Williams displayed that same running form when he showed up at the Dallas Cowboys’ facility in February and ran a 40-yard dash in 4.97 seconds. His claim on Sharpe’s podcast seemed suspect until Williams clocked the time in front of an audience, while wearing Dior sneakers.Williams left his home in Ohio at 13 over a religious dispute with his parents and landed in Miami, where he says he supported himself stealing car radios and cleaning restaurants. His stint in a homeless encampment introduced him to addicts, many of whom had once been high-functioning professionals. The extent to which those stories informed his reaction to the drug rumors is in the numbers, too. He still does 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups a day. That 40-yard-dash time, it’s denial through demonstration.To those who accuse him of using, he says, “at some point, even as an idiot, you’re going to have to acknowledge that these drugs should be taking some toll on me. At some point, I shouldn’t be better and faster and stronger because of them.”Williams has an allegiance to numbers typically reserved for athletes and actuaries, and it’s apparent in the quantifiable way he breaks down his sets. “I try to write the seven to 10 most [expletive] things that I think,” he says, “and I try to make that into the comedy show.” An hourlong special comprises 10 to 12 stand-alone pieces, which usually leaves him looking to add a bit or two as he’s writing. For this run, he says he’s needed to pare down what started as a 90-minute set.On the road, Williams hones an act by watching footage of the previous night for the first 30 or so dates. “My job is to let this guy know, ‘Hey, you’re looking old out there, like, you going to work this stage?’” he says, adding that he’s most often not refining the words but the delivery — a bigger gesture, a different tilt of his head.Williams has been writing and performing and refining in this way for 37 years, ever since he won a standup competition in Ruskin, Fla., at 16. The prize was a five-minute opening slot on a tour that featured Richard Jeni, Jeff Foxworthy and Dan Whitney, later known as Larry the Cable Guy.“He respects the craft,” says Mo’Nique, who is touring with Williams for the first time on “Dark Matter.” “He respects the ones that came before him. He respects those doors being open. He respects the obligation of, the craft of being a comedian.”HIS REVERENCE FOR JOURNEYMEN COMICS, those who prove their mettle on live stages night after night, fueled many of the shots Williams took during the Sharpe interview at funnymen who no longer work the circuit, or those who had gotten specials without a lengthy road history. He felt assured in his criticisms, and that there wouldn’t be effective retaliation, he says, “because there’s no big dogs for them to call other than Chappelle, and Chappelle would never cross me. Dun dun dun dun, and then he did!”Williams is referring to Dave Chappelle’s response to the beefs onstage, saying, “Katt is one of the best painters in the game. So why are you drawing ugly pictures of us?”Though the question stung (Williams referred to Chappelle as “the king”), Williams stood by his attack: “If I came to tell you a beautiful story, I would have painted you a beautiful picture. I was trying to paint a story of a group of ugly [expletive] that would do things that would hurt you and uplift them, even though they didn’t need to do that. And then instead of helping you or befriending you, that they would,” he pauses to let out a disbelieving sigh, “go so far as to steal from you if they couldn’t emulate you and then lie about you.”While waiting for the foursome ahead to finish a late-round hole, Williams entertains the question of whether art can be competitive. “History is just a collection of the people that did things the best,” he says between drags of a prerolled joint. Williams brings up Mozart and Chopin, masters who have been studied for centuries.“The benefit of Katt Williams live is that you don’t, in any way, know what he’s going to say,” Williams said.Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York TimesThat’s his aim in comedy, he says. “I will, without question, be one of the greatest comedians that ever lived just because of the body of work.”Williams means for his 12 specials to be assessed as a whole. It’s a yearslong conversation with an audience that began in 2006’s “Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1,” his electric big-league introduction that built to a flaming indictment of a different celebrity, Michael Jackson, two years before the pop star’s death and a decade before the “Leaving Neverland” documentary.His more recent specials have skewed toward topics that tend to send people down conspiracy rabbit holes. On a 2023 Marc Maron podcast episode, Williams said he swapped out about half of the material in his 2022 “World War III” special after touring and receiving notes from Netflix about the show’s darkness, which he said was “turned up viciously high” around race and religion. The set still hit one of its funniest peaks in a riff on how the Nazis became such a fearsome military — by producing and consuming methamphetamine. He told Maron he’d be happy if listeners Googled whether that was true.The night after his round of golf, Williams’s sold-out audience at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville looks perfect for national election polling. There are women in extended-size bodycon dresses, men in Tommy Bahama-esque shirts and couples in matching satin short sets, carrying yard dogs filled with frozen rum runners to their seats.Williams works through a brisk set, zipping darts at Diddy and Ron DeSantis, with a knockdown bit about white slavery. When it’s done, lounging in a locker room where Chet Baker’s version of “My Funny Valentine” rings out against the tiles, Williams suggests that the live Netflix show might delve into touchier topics, if they exist. “I can’t discuss, maybe, Israel and Palestine and Iran until live?”The key to skirting flammable topics and still landing a laugh, he says, is “no matter what joke I’m telling or who the focus of that joke is, the thing that you’re supposed to get from it is that my heart is in the right place. But I see what I see.” More