Film

Warning: This article discusses spoilers for the twisty new horror film “Barbarian.” If you haven’t seen it yet, check out our nonspoilery review here and more with the cast and director here.

That one-word title looms large over “Barbarian,” one of the most delightfully twisted horror films of 2022, in which a woman named Tess (Georgina Campbell) stumbles into a nightmare when she finds her rental house already occupied by a stranger.

It’s a roller-coaster horror ride filled with suspense, scares, surprising laughs and some of the most delicious cinematic twists since last year’s “Malignant.”

What Tess discovers in the basement leads her into a labyrinth of unimaginable horrors — some closer than you might think. But who’s the real monster in filmmaker Zach Cregger’s Airbnb-of-horrors solo feature debut?

Bill Skarsgard stars in “Barbarian.”

(20th Century Studios)

The nice guy and the meet-cute from hell

At first, signs point to said handsome stranger, Keith (“It” star Bill Skarsgard, also an executive producer, cannily playing off his Pennywise persona), who turns up the charm to get Tess to lower her guard and spend the night, else brave the storm outside. After a few nice gestures and good conversation, she ignores her instincts and says yes — even as Cregger’s script and Skarsgard’s delivery create a sizzling ambiguity around Keith’s motivations.

“My only note to Bill [Skarsgard] was, ‘Don’t lean into creepy. Lean into nice,’” Cregger said. “The nicer you are and the more disarming and friendly and appealing and nonthreatening that you behave, the more the audience is going to be convinced that you’re bad.”

Inspired in part by security expert Gavin de Becker’s book “The Gift of Fear,” “Barbarian” conjures a minefield of misogynist red flags for its heroine to navigate even before she crosses paths with shouting local Andre (Jaymes Butler), sitcom actor AJ (Justin Long) and a violent tunnel dweller known as the Mother (played expressively by Matthew Patrick Davis).

“[Keith] insists on bringing her luggage in, he makes her tea that she said she didn’t want, he says, ‘Pretty name,’” said Cregger. “These are not appropriate things to be doing in this situation. But he’s not aware of it, because he thinks he’s being nice.”

Is there something more sinister about Keith that Tess can’t see? Does it have anything to do with the doors that open and close in the middle of the night? The question hangs in the air as Tess makes a series of chilling discoveries in the basement, where a hidden door leads to a shadowy hallway and a secret room where very bad things have clearly occurred.

Beyond lies yet another door leading to the subterranean lair of the film’s apparent titular monster — the volatile Mother.

A creepy basement, or bonus square footage? Hidden rooms lead to unexpected terrors in “Barbarian.”

(20th Century Studios)

The mother under the stairs

“She was described as being 7 feet tall, naked, her face looking like it was the product of inbreeding, and having an impossible strength,” said Davis, the 6-foot-8-inch actor and musician behind the most surprising character in “Barbarian.” He was cast after a Zoom audition in which he stripped to his underwear and mimicked biting the head off a rat with a pickle he found in his fridge.

“I was very aware that this could be funny in the right way or the wrong way,” Davis said of his “Barbarian” performance. “When you’re in it, you have no idea how it’s going to be perceived. You’re aware that it’s a big swing and that it is bonkers and that, you know, you’re sitting there naked in Bulgaria with boobs taped to your chest. Are people going to buy this?”

Before filming began last summer, he received advice from legendary creature performer Doug Jones, including the fine line between physical expression and nonverbal overacting and another handy pro tip: Get prescription creature contacts made, else risk biting it while chasing your co-stars through those dark tunnels.

But Mother’s backstory is also the film’s most tragic. To inform her emotional state, Davis studied profiles of feral children and adults, diving deep into “a dark, disturbing YouTube rabbit hole” of research. As he sat in a chair for three hours getting into prosthetics and makeup each day, he watched the videos to prepare.

“It opened me up to the reality of the lives of people that have been deeply abused, raised in cages, raised like animals, kept in the dark and never spoken to in their formative years,” he said. “It allowed me to have empathy for this character. This is not just a scary character for scariness’ sake. If you’ve seen the movie, you know that she’s a victim.”

“I think that she’s the most empathetic character in the movie. She has never had a chance,” echoes Cregger, who also credits Davis with inspiring him to write certain gestures into Mother’s well-worn maternity VHS tape, which come full circle in the film’s bittersweet final scene. “And Matthew plays it with such tenderness.”

The sins of the father

After introducing Mother, the textbook horror movie monster we expect, Cregger challenges us throughout the film to reconsider who the actual barbarian of the story is. First seen in a Reagan-era flashback, Frank (Richard Brake, who starred recently in Amazon’s “Bingo Hell” and killed Bruce Wayne’s parents in “Batman Begins”) is her inverse — an average suburban family man on the outside and a true monster within.

Borrowing from serial killer films “Angst” (1983) and “Elephant” (both Gus Van Sant’s 2003 feature and the 1983 Alan Clark short of the same name), Cregger builds unease as the camera follows Frank to the store, where he stocks up on a suspicious grocery list, and as he stalks a young woman to her home.

It is revealed that he has kidnapped, raped and impregnated several women in the secret chambers beneath his house without repercussions for decades, and that Mother is the daughter of another of his victims, born into miserable captivity.

But it’s telling that it’s not Tess who learns Frank’s horrible truth in the film. Instead, it’s AJ (Long, playing deftly against type) whoruns from Mother to a section of the tunnels where even she dares not follow.

Justin Long stars as AJ, the owner of the rental house, in “Barbarian.”

(20th Century Studios)

Enter the Hollywood actor

Introduced cruising carefree down Pacific Coast Highway singing along to Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi,” the narcissistic Hollywood star has recently stepped into his own version of a nightmare: an accusation of sexual assault that threatens to unravel his successful career.

“Because I’m an actor, and I know the world of actors very well, I was writing from an amalgam of people in my life,” Cregger said of conceiving the character of AJ. “I was trying to think of, ‘What’s this guy’s horror movie?’ Before he gets into the real horror movie — what’s the horror movie that he thinks he’s in? The collapse of your career and reputation due to your own bad behavior. This guy thinks his world is ending.”

AJ, who at first appears to be a ridiculous comedic figure, is revealed to be arguably the scariest character in the film. In Detroit to liquidate his rental home to cover his impending legal fees, he is the embodiment of male privilege and casual misogyny, his puffed-up bravado masking an inherent cowardice and refusal to take accountability for his actions. (Although not explicitly addressed in the film, Cregger says he deliberately wrote the men of “Barbarian” to be white males.)

When AJ discovers the ailing Frank and judges him by his brutal crimes, the audience is invited to wonder: Just how different is he from the monster staring back at him?

Frank, at least, seems to know he can’t escape what he’s done. AJ’s brief moment of clarity reverts to gaslighting self-preservation as he commits one final heinous act, attempting to hide his true nature behind a well-practiced nice guy veneer — a quality Long borrowed from watching men deliver empty apologies on “The Bachelorette.”

“There’s a glimmer of accountability,” said Long, “and I just love that Zach refuses to take the conventional way out.”

As for Tess, it’s her innate sense of empathy — the one that repeatedly sends her toward danger to help others, at her own peril — that helps her understand Mother before she sets them both free. “She’s someone that is used to traumatic situations and is able to understand how to survive in this situation,” said Campbell. “By the end of the film, I feel like she gets her own agency and is able to get out of the pattern she found herself in again and again and again.”

In the latest episode of The Envelope video podcast, Janelle James discusses her character’s arc on “Abbott Elementary,” and Aaron Pierre details the training required to master the “seamless” action of “Rebel Ridge.”

Kelvin Washington: Hey, everybody, and welcome to The Envelope. I’m Kelvin Washington alongside Yvonne Villarreal, also Mark Olsen. Great to have you two here this week, as usual.

Let’s get to it. Yvonne, someone I’ve never met, but I’m gonna be saddened if she’s not as pleasant or just as fun and hip as she seems: Janelle James. It just feels like I know her, even though I don’t. Tell me about your experience.

Villarreal: I have to tell you, I was super nervous that she was going to hit me with some one-liners about my appearance or something.

Washington: She’s got zingers.

Villarreal: No, but she was super lovely. She plays the blunt and hilarious principal, Ava Coleman, in “Abbott Elementary.” And she’s done an amazing job in that role, because she’s already been nominated three times for an Emmy. But Season 4 brought a lot of depth to this seemingly incompetent and uncaring character. We really see how she [goes] to bat for the students at the school, maybe in some unorthodox ways, but in ways that really help them. We also see a little bit of her relationship with her father. She also develops a relationship of her own, a romantic relationship. And — spoiler alert, I’m giving you guys time to dial down the volume —

Washington: Just hit the little 15-second thing or something.

Villarreal: Her character was fired this season. And I’ll just leave it at that. But we talked a little bit about all of that, all the development that we saw from her character this season.

Washington: Spoiler alert.

Villarreal: Sorry, I’m telling you, you gotta keep up, Kelvin.

Washington: Why is it me? I’m just saying it could be someone listening. Mark, I swing over to you and …

Olsen: I didn’t know she got fired.

Washington: Aaron Pierre. Let’s just say the three Washington girls in my household, my daughters, including my 3-year-old, “Aaron Pierre!” I mean, they had to do the whole, “That’s Mu-fa-sa!” for about a good month and a half.

Villarreal: Is that how you started the interview?

Olsen: I mean, we did talk about Mufasa, but I didn’t say it quite like that.

Washington: You didn’t do it? Oh, come on!

Olsen: Well, you know, the TV movie category in the streaming era has just really exploded. And it’s become a much more dynamic category than it had been in a few years previous. And “Rebel Ridge,” which stars Aaron Pierre, is really a great example of that. Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, the film stars Aaron as a man who comes to a small town. He wants to bail his cousin out of jail and he runs afoul of the crooked local sheriff. It just becomes this really muscular and exciting action thriller. Aaron brings a real gravitas and power to his role and has some very exciting fight scenes. And also it’s just such a great time for Aaron Pierre. As you said, he just was the voice of Mufasa in Barry Jenkins’ “Mufasa: The Lion King,” and then he also is gonna be seen in the next [season] of “The Morning Show,” and then is currently filming “Lanterns,” which is a DC Green Lantern property.

Washington: You can always kinda see certain folks have that moment where the boom happens, right? And then they just take off, and then someone’s gonna go, “Where’d this person come from?” Not knowing the whole, it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. He’s been putting in the work for years.

All right, well let’s get into Yvonne and Janelle James. Let’s start it now.

Janelle James in “Abbott Elementary.”

(Gilles Mingasson / Disney)

Villarreal: You’re in this big career moment. In what ways did you feel ready for it and in what ways has it just thrown you for a loop?

James: Ooh, I mean, I feel ready for this career moment — not only moment but this career from performing for 15 years prior to getting this role. I’ve been performing for a long time. What has thrown me for a loop is fame. I had no concept of what that meant. I had no concept of what being on a show that immediately takes off entails and what that feels like. That’s definitely been a surprise.

Villarreal: Can you break it down, what it does mean to be on a hit broadcast sitcom? How have you had to reconfigure your life?

James: Can’t go to Target — not that we are — can’t go to Target. I remember the first season, I was in Target and I was looking at doormats, as you do, and this guy comes up to me — I didn’t see him, I heard him say, “I got to hug you.” And I was like, “He’s not talking to me, because I don’t know this man.” And he picked me up. This huge guy picked me up off the ground and gave me a hug, which I’m sure was in love. But that had me shook. I remember I went to work the next day and it was on my face that I was shook, like, what just happened? And Tyler [James Williams], my co-star, was like, “What’s going on with you?” And I was like, “A stranger picked me up in Target to compliment the show.” He was like, ‘What are you doing in Target? You can’t go to Target anymore.” And that used to be my happy place. That was an adjustment, people knowing who I am when I’m in my jammies, trying to get some gummy bears.

Villarreal: I was with Chris Perfetti at a museum [for a story], and kids were on their field trips, coming up to him and ready to share what they’re learning in school.

James: And I’m way more famous than him. (That was a joke.)

Villarreal: What do you hear most often, and do you feel the need to be on as Ava because this is what people are expecting from you?

James: What do I hear most often? “I’m a principal.” “I know a principal like you.” “I also went to school.” I feel like that’s part of the reason why the show is a hit. Who hasn’t gone to school? It resonates with a lot of people because they’ve had the experience. And do I feel the need to [be like Ava]? Yes. You don’t want to disappoint people. I’ve learned to take people approaching me as Ava as a compliment, like, “Oh, I’m doing this character so well they think that it is me that they’re talking to.” They’re [thinking] I just stepped off the screen and now I’m in Ralphs for some reason — although she [Ava] would never be shopping for herself. I want to give them what they want and sometimes I don’t, so I just stay in the house.

Villarreal: Well, Ava Coleman, the character you play, has had so much character development this season and it was very earned too. She started out the series as this very polarizing character. She can be rude. She’s not politically correct. She really won over the audience over the run of the show. I’m curious what it felt like for you to really get in depth with her this season. We get more of her background. We see her open herself up to a relationship, and we see just how far she’s willing to go for the students.

James: I was really proud and honored that Quinta [Brunson, the show’s creator and star] and the writers trusted me with the material that they’re giving me. And, like you said, it’s earned. I feel like it was time. There’s been [a] little dribbling out of her character over the seasons, but this, to me, was an Ava season, basically. [I’m] happy that they trusted that I can bring these different flavors to her. And [it’s] just a testament to, like, the writing that this is a sitcom, it’s 22 minutes, and we’re doing so much story in such a short time; to be able to, for instance, reveal about her dad or have a dramatic moment and go right back into comedy [when] I’ve only been onscreen for maybe four minutes and you’ve already found out so much about her is amazing, and it makes me feel very talented.

Villarreal: What were your conversations like with Quinta?

James: I mind my business. I’ve been in a writers’ room before, and I know nobody cares what the actors think. I know we certainly didn’t when I was in one. I just try to let them do their gig, and because they have been doing such a good job, that’s why we’re a hit. They’ve been doing a great job with the show and developing the characters. I feel like each one of us gets a year. I feel first season was a Barbara [played by Sheryl Lee Ralph] year; second was Tyler [who plays Gregory]; then this one. I’m never worried or trying to involve myself. I’m so lucky that Quinta is like the coolest boss and that she gives me a heads-up for big stories, but I’m never like, “Whaaat?” or “Oh, I feel this …”

I know I have said things to her on the side that ended up happening. And then I’m just psyched that they decided to go with my idea. But I’m never like, “I have a pitch.” I would be annoyed with that. If it’s my show and I feel like I’m killing it, I don’t really want to hear a pitch from the actor. My job is to make those words feel real and convincing. And that’s it.

Villarreal: The father element [to Ava’s] story was a really a revelation for me. I’m curious what that unlocked for you. Ava’s father is played by Keith David. You were able to capture so much about the daddy issues that she has and where the maybe hardness or prickliness comes from.

James: Exactly what you said. It’s just more about her ethos and why she is like she is, why she’s so untrusting, why she’s short with people, doesn’t want to get close with anyone. Because she’s already been disappointed by somebody — as we find out in the date episode — that’s very important to her, and then abruptly went away to start another family. I thought that was a really great way to show that and to show her strength. He comes in, they have that moment, but then she’s back to Ava right away. I feel like Ava just like keeps it moving, to her detriment sometimes — like [she] doesn’t process. But it makes sense. That’s what I like about the writing for the characters on this show. Everything we do makes sense, it seems very real, it’s relatable. So many people wrote me and said, “I have this situation with a parent, and it struck me as real.” It also illuminated for me what I think is the most important relationship on the show is Janine and Ava and how we have similar backgrounds and parental issues, but we’re coming at it from different ways. She’s coming at it with endless optimism and nonpessimism. So we’re opposites sides of the personality spectrum, but I think as the show goes on, we’re moving closer and closer together. I think that’s so smart and [makes for] good story development.

Villarreal: We see that Ava gets fired at near the end of the season. Did Quinta or the writers prepare you that this was coming, or did you read it in the script?

James: So Quinta told me maybe a couple of days before, like, “You’re gonna get fired.” I was like, “OK.” I think I did say, like, “Oh, do I still get paid?” Which I meant. Do I still get paid? Because I thought that meant I wasn’t gonna be in the show at all. So I’m like, “Can I just pop in and get paid or…? Just let me know.” I wasn’t concerned about being off the show [permanently], because that didn’t make sense story-wise to me. I don’t know why they would have done that, and I don’t think she would have pitched it to me so casual if I was out of a job. But again, just trusting them, I was like, “Oh, if I’m getting fired, that means we about to shake something up, and I would love to see the reaction to it,” which was fabulous. That was one of the best days of my life.

Villarreal: It goes back to earning it. You’ve reached a point where the audience wants you back, wants to see Ava back. How do you think your background in stand-up and playing to either packed crowds or nearly empty venues and having to win over an audience, how did that prepare you for a character like Ava?

James: Exactly what you said! Exactly what you said. Even when it’s a packed house of people that love me, my stand-up is also very antagonistic, and that’s for my own pleasure because I do like that. I’m gonna say something that you might not agree with or you don’t find funny or touches you in a certain way, and you’re gonna love me by the end. Then I’m going to make you laugh. There’s a power in that. Stand-up has definitely prepared me for this whole Ava arc of people being like, “I don’t like her.” And I’m like, “Yeah, really? You don’t? OK, we’ll see Season 4.”

Villarreal: Can you tell me about a time where you just felt like you bombed [onstage] and how you turned it?

James: I thought you meant just bombed, because I have bombed and just went home and had this one tear. [But] bombed and came back … I feel like that’s every set, truly. I like to craft a set, especially if I’m doing an hour, where it has different levels. Of course, you want to crush the whole time, and I am, but I like my jokes to have downbeats and then ba-da-ba. I’m not really a one-liner, which is what Ava was for a long time, so that’s been a new muscle for me to do, where I’m just saying a line and have to hit those beats. But I like to do a joke that has different peaks and valleys to it and where people are like — you see them physically going back, then they’re like, “Ah, I love that.” That’s what I like about stand-up, that instant reaction and the feeling of winning.

Villarreal: Do you get the nerves doing “Abbott” the way you get the nerves of stand-up?

James: Yes. I feel like if you don’t get nerves, that means you don’t care. Did I say 15 years? Jesus. 15 years doing stand-up, I still get nervous beforehand. Four seasons doing “Abbott,” I still get nervous. It just means that I care about my performance.

Villarreal: “Abbott” is a single-camera show. You’re not filming in front of an audience. And you’re used to doing your stand-up in front of people. What is a signal to you that you’re delivering Ava the way you want? Is it hearing a cameraman, his laughter come through or breaking one of your scene mates?

James: All of that, but also I’m just confident in my comedic timing at this point. I don’t need a response. I love it. [But] I don’t need a response anymore to know that I’ve hit the beats. Comedic timing is a skill just like anything else.

Villarreal: I lack it, so I have no idea what that’s like.

James: Thank you for admitting, because everybody thinks they can do it. I’d like to hear a man say it — never will happen. I always say my confidence in myself and in what I’m doing is earned. I think that’s part of what some people don’t like in Ava. Some people don’t like confident people because it makes them think about themselves. I feel like it’s OK to be confident. There’s confidence and narcissism. My confidence comes from putting in the work. I have the respect of my peers, in comedy and now in acting. I know what I’m doing. And, so, I don’t really need the instant feedback, but it’s lovely to have it, which is why I’m back onstage.

Villarreal: Do you think she always had it?

James: Ava? Yeah. Especially like I said, the first season, I’m the joke machine. One-liners wasn’t my thing, but I know what the beats are. I know the jokes are supposed to sound like and how it’s supposed to hit and how we’re supposed to parry off of another statement. Can you say parry? Is that a word? I don’t know. Is that tennis? I might have made it up, but hey, confidence. It’s a word.

Villarreal: One of the great things about the show is how the writers build the characters with these seemingly small details that say so much about the characters. For Ava, she owns a party bus, or she dated Allen Iverson, or she hasn’t used capital letters in years. What are some of the details that you’ve loved learning about her?

James: One of my favorites is that her “Hello” sign [on her desk] is facing her and that was totally a mistake when we did that. I had turned it and props turned it back, and both me and Quinta was like, “No, that’s funny if it’s facing you,” and now that’s become a thing because that’s totally something she would do, like, “Don’t come in here.” Anybody that comes in, she’s like, “Don’t come in my office, I’m doing my side hustles; I’m not really trying to talk to you, so no hello. Hello to me. You’re doing a great job, Ava.” I love just the continuity of our props department is hilarious in that I think Season 1 we took the picture with Gritty and she says, “Oh, this is cute picture I’m gonna have to Photoshop Janine out.” Then behind me for the whole season [is the framed photo], not Photoshopped, [but what] I think is is is even more cutting: She literally cut her [Janine] out [of] the picture with scissors. That’s some real hate. I love that. And the fact that she does know all these people that she’s talking about. She’s popular outside the school. She has all these hookups. Just recently, she had her list of high-net-worth drug dealers that came in. But also, that rings true. That’s who she would know. And those are the high earners in a neighborhood like that. It’s just, again, excellent storytelling to remind people where we are. We’re in the inner city in Philly. That’s what she knows. She grew up in that neighborhood, she knows them. She know they got money. That’s her friends. But she just happens to be a principal.

Villarreal: As you mentioned earlier, you’ve been in writers’ rooms before — “The Rundown With Robin Thede,” “Black Monday.” How does being behind the scenes and knowing what goes into making the show inform you as a performer?

James: Well, like I mentioned earlier, I leave them alone. I know it’s a different process than what we’re doing. I know it’s difficult to craft out a whole season. I’ve never been on a show that’s done 22 episodes and we just [deliver] back-to-back bangers — that’s amazing [and] even more reason to leave them alone. They know what they’re doing; Quinta knows what she’s doing. I feel like Quinta has a vision, not only for each season but from the start of the show to when we eventually end it. And I know for me, as the seasons go on, I’ve become more comfortable with suggesting things and maybe improv-ing. But only when asked, and I always ask first. I always try to say what’s on the paper. I never try to be like, “Oh, what I think might be funnier…” or whatever, even though that’s what I believe. I always do what’s the paper first. And then I say, “Hey, I have a suggestion,” and then I get to find out if they chose mine or not, and they frequently did.

Villarreal: How were you in writers’ rooms?

James: How was I? I feel like you got inside information.

Villarreal: No, no, I don’t. I don’t. Please share with me that experience because it feels intimidating.

James: Nah — I mean, it depends. I guess for some people. I ain’t intimidated by much. I’m a joke machine. I’ve only written for comedies so far, so that’s my bag. Pitch, pitch. If you want a joke, I’m all day with it. I have a story. I thought you had inside information with “Black Monday.” When I first started — it’s usually men. Was I the only woman? No, there was two women in that writers’ room. One of my favorite jobs, by the way. Let me just say that before they think I’m talking s—. All the men are pitching, and I said, “Ugh, ugh.” And I had just gotten there because I came in, like, late to the season. And my boss, David Caspe, was like, “What’s going on with you?” And I was like, “None of this is funny. I’m just waiting to hear some funny s—” or something like that. He wrote it on the window, and it stayed there for the whole season. Seeing it written, I was like, “That’s outta line.” But I meant it.

Villarreal: How did your fellow writers feel about that?

James: They loved me. I just saw one just recently, hugged me and everything.

Villarreal: Would you ever want to write an episode of “Abbott”?

James: Yeah, I was just talking about that with someone. I don’t know if we’re allowed. I also don’t how it would work because I wouldn’t be in the room to build with them. They start way before we do, and I know each episode is assigned to a writer. But it’s already pretty formulated by then. I don’t know if I would write, like, a one-off type of situation, but however it would work out, I would love that.

Villarreal: I would love to see that. Which character would you be interested in writing for?

James: Ooh, I think Tyler’s character is so interesting and funny. Tyler’s comedic timing is so funny and underrated. Quinta too. I love the Janine character. And then myself, duh. Everybody. I feel like I know the least about Barb’s. I feel I would maybe write her too much as a caricature.

Villarreal: I can only imagine the lines.

James: Easter Sunday every line. Chris too. Just some real — ooh, I almost cursed. Some real high jinks for him.

Villarreal: Do what you want.

James: Some real f— high jinks. That was in me the whole time. I was like, “Oh, God, can I say one curse word?”

Villarreal: Let it out.

James: One of my favorite things to do as the cast is when we’re in a group in the kitchen, and we have like we’re all bouncing off of each other — those are my favorite scenes. So, yeah, anything.

Villarreal: What’s it like filming with the kids? You don’t do it as often as some of the other actors on the show.

James: It’s great. I’m just always constantly surprised and impressed with how chill they are. I know me, we do [a scene] three times, I’m like, “All right, I am done with that.” But they are engaged, and they’re doing it, and they’re good. And it’s so amazing because I know, especially first season, we had a lot of kids who had never acted before, who aren’t even professional actors. A lot of Black kids, which we want to represent where we are, it’s very hard to be a child actor. A lot of times, if you’re a professional child actor, your parent has quit their job because they’ve got to drive you around auditions, they’ve got to be on set with you. And a lot of Black kids don’t have that privilege. So to have all these Black kids there and it’s their first acting job, and they’re so good. And now they’ve grown with the show.

Villarreal: Do they call you Miss James?

James: No, they call me Ava. Which is fine. The kids are the least annoying as far as approaching me as a character. They can call me whatever. Of course, they think that’s who I am. And I don’t mind performing for them. You want me to do the TikTok dances with you and all that? I don’t want them to feel like they have a job. I think that’s lame. You’re a child, let’s have fun and reward them for being so chill.

Villarreal: When the show was entering its second season, you made the decision to move out here. I know Tyler had to persuade you not to buy a Mazda —

James: Oh, that story. I have regrets, actually. I love a Mazda.

Villarreal: I’m more curious what that transition was like, moving out here, that period of settling in.

James: I had lived in L.A. for short periods just for a job, and I would go back to New York. That’s what happened with the first season. I remember we did the pilot and I was like, “That was cool.” I went right back home. Then we got picked up. I truly didn’t even know what that meant. Then we like did 13 [episodes] in the middle of the pandemic, by the way — I feel like a lot of people, of course, have wiped that from their brain, but we did all of that with the masks and [personal protective equipment]. So that was just a whirlwind of things happening. Then all of a sudden it’s, “Oh, it’s a hit, 22 episodes next season.” So that’s nine months out of the year. I’m like, “Well, I guess I live in L.A. now.” It was a big transition. I’ve been in New York for a long time, and I am a New Yorker — you hear it? I’m a New Yorker. And my family is still on the East Coast and my friends and my nightlife and my community. So, yeah, it’s been a big transition and I’ve left all my comedians, and I hang with actors.

Villarreal: On the subject of the growth with Ava, is there a limit to the growth you would like to see with her? Is there something that you don’t want to see from Ava as the series progresses?

James: I’m not afraid that this is going to happen, because if it would have, it would’ve happened already, [but] one thing I’m very pleased with is, although we’re revealing more about her, her core personality stays the same. She’s still that b— I liked, especially when she got fired, it wasn’t this big [moment] — on her part — of like, “Woe is me! What am I going to do now?” She was instantly like, “Next.” Find out that wasn’t even her main job. I loved that. And the next time you see her, she’s rising from the audience for her speaking engagements. She had people picking up her checks. But that’s who she is. She’s a hustler. That’s what I really relate to with her. I get that, “Next. Let’s move.” And anyone who dares to let me go, that’s your loss because I’m killing it and doing multiple things, which is not only relating to being a hustler, at the core of that is relating to being poor. That’s what you got to do. You got to have multiple streams. That’s what all those lame guys are talking about. Multiple streams. I saw a couple people [say], “I hope that we find out she’s been like lying this whole time.” She’s too fab for that. It is very true that this person exists who is a hustler, who is as fly as she says she is and who has not only book smarts but street smarts, which I think is very underrated, or what’s the word I’m looking for, not valued as much as a book learning. She has both.

Villarreal: Before we wrap, what is it like to have your performance captured in meme form and live on in that way? Do you find yourself actively thinking about that now?

James: A lot of times, I’ll see a meme, and it’s not even me. I don’t see it as myself. Maybe the first season, I was like, “Oh, my God, I can’t open my phone without seeing myself.” I also was living in a place where the billboard was right across from my window. I’m like, “That’s weird.” It’s really been a real — they said I could curse — mindf— sometimes, seeing myself so much and not even just in the context of the show. That’s what a meme is. It’s in a thread about taxes and then it’s me. I’m like, “What does this have to do with it?” But now I’m taking it more like, “Oh, wow, this character is like iconic. Not like, is iconic.” She’s in the lexicon. She’s gonna be around forever. Anytime somebody plays [Juvenile’s] “Back That A— Up,” they think about me.

Villarreal: Talk about that moment.

James: It’s crazy. Everywhere I walk in — I walk into the Ralphs, “Back That A— Up” on there. Everybody like, “Hey, that’s for you.”

Villarreal: The way people like glommed onto it, like it was all over TikTok with captions like, “This is me in my kitchen.”

James: Again, excellent writing, excellent character development. Because that is the song. Nothing is written because we just want it to be. That is the jam that people such as Ava and people in that age group, you hear it, you on the dance floor, and it would make you act out at work. It’s true.

Villarreal: Was that so fun to do?

James: Man, I was so nervous.

Villarreal: Were you worried you were not backing it up right?

James: Not even backing it up right. I had to find a middle ground. Hit show, ABC. I feel like I could have went crazy and they would have cut it up. But I also wanted it to be — I know grandmas and kids are watching, and I wanted it to be funny too. So I was trying to do so much in that little time. We had Randall, he’s circling around. How that was shot, it was like cinematic.

Villarreal: The timing.

James: I had a silk blouse, I was like, “I can’t be sweaty, I still gotta look fly, the hair gotta flow, gotta be a little funny, gotta be little sexy, gotta be believable that I’m letting loose.” It was a lot. Again, we’re doing so much, and I’m doing so much, in a short amount of time. That scene was maybe 30 seconds. I had to convey all of that in a dance. I’m not even saying anything. I’m doing my little giggle because that’s what girls do. I had to make all of that and remember what that feels like to hear that song.

Villarreal: To go from something like that, which again, like the joy and fun of a scene like that to the depth we saw this season from her, like I said, with like the moments of vulnerability, it’s such a testament to you and what you’re delivering. So kudos to you. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead with Season 5.

James: Thank you so much.

Aaron Pierre in “Rebel Ridge.”

(Allyson Riggs / Netflix)

Mark Olsen: You’ve been so busy these past few years, I can imagine there are times when you’re like, “What am I here to talk about?” You have so many projects that you’ve been involved in.

Aaron Pierre: I’ve been very fortunate and very blessed on my journey. I’m just trying to keep it about a commitment to doing the best work I can. A commitment to evolution and growth and just enjoying the moment.

Olsen: When you came to “Rebel Ridge,” there initially was another actor in the project who left. I’m curious, for you did you feel like you were jumping onto a moving train? What was it like to get involved in a project that was already in motion?

Pierre: The first time I heard about this project was from [director] Jeremy [Saulnier] himself. My team had read this script, which we now know to be “Rebel Ridge,” and they were just really thrilled and excited to have something cross their desks that felt original, that felt exciting and that energized them in a way that perhaps they hadn’t been energized in a long time. So more or less immediately, I read the script, got onto a Zoom with Jeremy himself, and we just immediately connected. I think there is something to be said for instincts and something to be said for a gut feeling, and I think in both departments we had a positive experience of that with one another, and we felt as though this collaboration would only be conducive to an enjoyable time. And that’s certainly what was happening.

Olsen: Did you know Saulnier’s work from his other films, “Green Room” or “Hold the Dark,” were you familiar with him before this came to you?

Pierre: Yes, I was familiar. My favorite is “Blue Ruin.” I think that is a masterpiece. And I think that is Jeremy arguably at his happiest as a filmmaker and just getting to flex all of those different muscles and talents that he has. After seeing “Blue Ruin,” I always wanted to work with him. I didn’t know if it would ever come to fruition or if it would even be a possibility. And then “Rebel Ridge” came along, and we got rockin’ and rollin’.

Olsen: You mentioned instinct and how you have to learn to trust your gut working with someone like Jeremy, saying yes to a project. At the end of it, do you ever get some sense of what that instinct was? “That was what I was responding to, that’s why I wanted to do this”?

Pierre: I have this sort of checklist for myself, any project that I do, when I wrap. At the end of it, if I can say that I did my best to give my best, and also if I can say that I earned my own respect — which is a very challenging thing to do because I demand so much from myself and I’m hypercritical of myself — but if I can check those two boxes, then I feel satisfied. I don’t try and control or puppeteer anything beyond that because the space that I’m in, you’re in, we’re in, it is so subjective. But that’s why we love it. It’s art. And if I can have that peace in myself of, “I really gave everything I had,” then beyond that whatever happens is just additional blessings. And to have the response that “Rebel Ridge” received was beyond my wildest dreams, to be honest with you. Speaking candidly, I’m still processing it now. It was really moving. I think in part it was so moving because we poured so much into it. Everybody in every department. I’m not speaking exclusively about the cast. I’m not speaking exclusively about the director and the [producers]. I’m talking about everybody, from crafty to catering to transpo[rtation] to the teamsters to the crew. Everybody poured so much into it. We were all there every day from the beginning to the end. And I think there is something so beautiful about a project which is so physical and demands so much. That sort of brings you all together. So I’m just thrilled for everybody who poured themselves into this, and it really wouldn’t have been possible without everybody’s commitment to it and everybody’s commitment to excellence.

Olsen: When you say that you’re still processing your feelings about it, what’s changed for you? How do you feel your response to the movie has evolved?

Pierre: I think what I’m processing still is just the abundance of joy that it gave people and the reception it received. So many people have reached out to myself, to Jeremy, to others who were part of project and shared what it meant to them. And even requested a sequel. I just feel very grateful, and really the film wouldn’t be what it is today without the audience. And that really ties into why I do what I do — I don’t take myself seriously, but I do take what I do and my craft very seriously. And that is me attempting to honor the time and the energy that an audience gifts you with when they engage with a film, or they engage with a TV series, or they come to the theater and watch a play that you’re in. Life is busy. Life is hard. People have multiple things to juggle. So when people gift you with that time, I feel as though, as an artist, as an actor, whatever I want to describe myself as, I have a commitment to honor that. And that really just ties into the audience response. Just to get that, it feels really special.

Olsen: One of the things that’s so remarkable about your performance in the film is you remain so calm through the whole thing. No matter how wild the story and the action gets, you’re still very cool throughout. How did you come to that choice? Tell me a little bit about that essential nature of your performance.

Pierre: I arrived at the decision that I wanted Terry to feel like — I wanted his energy to be “loudest quietest person in the room.” And what I mean by that is, I wanted his silence to speak tremendous volumes. Somebody who steps into a room and they don’t say anything, but the fact that they don’t say anything is so loud. The fact that they are not demonstrative in their physicality is so loud, and almost their lack of emoting at times, their lack of being physical at times, is what indicates their capacity and is what tells you everything you need to know about them. That’s what I was playing with during the entire filming process. And it was a lot of fun to do so. That’s one of the beautiful things about a character that is so wonderfully written. Terry is written in such a dynamic way, in such a nuanced way and really such a generous way. And I have to credit that to Jeremy as the writer, he was so generous in how he created Terry, so that the individual that portrayed him had so much to work from.

Olsen: People often talk about Jeremy’s work as being slow-burn thrillers. That’s what they call them because they typically take a while to get to the action and to really pop off. Was pacing something that you talked about with Jeremy, both in how the story was going to be paced, but also how your performance was going to be paced? How do you capture that sense of the slow burn?

Pierre: As an actor, I think doing things in a slow pace is not something I have an issue with. If anything, directors have to say, “Hey, Aaron, let’s [pick it up]” because I like to enjoy moments in the context of portraying a character. So this was exactly the lane that I enjoy operating in, so far as action and thriller. I love enjoying those beats and enjoying those moments and really being unapologetic about it. So it was a lot of fun. The moment where, for example, Terry rides into where the sheriff’s office and he puts his pedal bike down and he just waits there calmly, and then Don Johnson comes out and he has this whole speech about P.A.C.E. and he breaks [the acroynm] down: I could be wrong, but I feel like a number of other action movies might have taken the route of, let’s just get straight to it. But I love that Jeremy had his character break down what was going to happen should this police department not adhere to his request. I love moments like that. I love that Jeremy was so unapologetic about it, and that gave me permission as his collaborator within this film to also be unapologetic.

Olsen: That is one of my favorite scenes in the movie as well, because it’s this very tense dialogue scene between you and Don Johnson, and then it suddenly erupts into a very physical, rough-and-tumble fight, a physical sequence between you, Don and another actor. I have to say, it sure looks like that’s really you in close combat with those two guys. What kind of training did you do for that? And what was it like to sort of go from paced, restrained dialogue to break into the action like that?

Pierre: Oh, it was so much fun. You’ll hear me commend and celebrate the crew a lot because they deserve it, they earned it, and they’re just phenomenal. I had a lot of help with the physicality of Terry, with the intellect of Terry, from the stunt department and from our advisors. [Marine Corps Martial Arts Program] instructors, for example. We really did a lot of physical training prior to production commencing. We did wrestling training, we did boxing training, we sparred. So I was really in my body. I’m already a student of martial arts, and I love it. It’s the most humbling thing in the world, and I just adore it. And I’ll always be a student of it. So that was really fun for me, to be able to do that for my job. By the time we got to choreography, it just felt somewhat fluid and easy because moving in that way was already in my body. That was how we warmed up, that’s how we would sometimes start days, that’s sometimes how we would end days. That’s sometimes how we would spend a day on the weekend. So it was really in me at that time. And again, it goes back to being the loudest quietest person in the room. I like that Terry goes from that speech to, “OK, you’ve now left me no option but to demonstrate everything I just told you I had the capacity to do, but I was hoping not to have to do.” There was sort of a running joke in the crew that Terry is there to teach manners.

Olsen: There also is a scene in the film where Terry, your character, is on a bicycle and he’s racing a bus. And I’ve seen some of the behind-the-scenes footage. You’re on this contraption that’s sort of a motorized cart that has a bicycle sticking off the front of it. But I have to say, I would 100% believe that you were, like, racing that bus.

Pierre: So here’s the thing. As you know, it takes a lot to make a film and it takes a lot to capture a scene like that. And all of these get cut together, and then it all just looks seamlessly like one take, or whatever it might be. But there was a version of that bus scene where I’m pursuing the bus on a pedal bike, just me. There’s a version of it where I’m pursuing the bus on a bike rig that is fueled by a motor, almost like a small go-kart. There’s a version of it where I’m quite literally attached to the bus and I am physically pedaling and exerting myself as hard as I can. And then [key grip] Big Bruce Lawson — who I love, by the way — he’s gently pushing me closer and closer to where the driver is, driving the bus. So all three of these versions require me to pedal, but not all of them am I making movement purely on my own accord. Then you put them all together and it looks seamless and wonderful.

Olsen: How surprised are you when you see the final product? Like, “Whoa, looks pretty good!”

Pierre: I have to be honest, with Jeremy, I wasn’t surprised. Jeremy’s Jeremy, he does wonderful work all the time as far as I’m concerned. I remember well before the film came out, he showed me an early cut, I think it was maybe like the first eighth of the film, and I was just really excited by it. And then to see the final product, I just commend him.

Olsen: There also are a number of scenes in the film where you disassemble a gun, a handgun, in your hands without really looking at it while you’re doing it, like you’re looking at another person while you are taking this gun apart. How hard is that? I don’t think I could ever manage that. Had you had any kind of weapons training from other projects?

Pierre: Not prior to “Rebel Ridge.” But I really had to immerse myself in that in order to achieve what I wanted to achieve, which was authenticity. And which was honoring Marines. That’s very important to me, as it’s very important to me with every role that I play to be authentic and to honor the individual and the history of that individual and their respective communities and units. So I really immersed myself in it, and even reflecting on it now, I’m surprised that I managed to even get to the level where I could do a scene and be looking you in the eye but [be] disassembling a gun or unloading a gun and unloading a magazine and putting that on the side. They really had me in sort of like a boot camp, and luckily I took to it. Because one thing about Jeremy is we will not move on from the scene until it’s seamless, and that’s what I love about him.

Olsen: Were there any other films that you and Jeremy would talk about or maybe that he showed you as a reference as you were working on this part?

Pierre: Actually, no. I mean, of course, he and I were aware of wonderful films that share similar themes. But for the whole maybe three-month shoot, we didn’t actually speak about any other action films. And I even remember Don, Jeremy and I one day, I think we were shooting the scene where Don’s character takes Terry with David Denman’s character to the hospital before they break the news to him. And Don actually doesn’t watch any films when he’s shooting a film. So that was kind of the energy, actually, while we were filming “Rebel Ridge”: Let’s just focus on creating this original film without influence or at least without any conscious influence. Of course, it’s art, so subconsciously you’re always going to be influenced; it’s going to be a version of [something]. And that’s inspiration. But we really just focused on “Rebel Ridge” and how do we want to tell the story of “Rebel Ridge.”

Olsen: Tell me more about working with Don Johnson. He seems like a super cool guy that it would be fun to meet and hang around with. But then it’s funny that he’s so good at playing this like really smug jerk of a crooked sheriff.

Pierre: Don and I get along really wonderfully. It’s so funny, I think actually the fact that we got along so well allowed us to create such tension and friction within the scenes because we were able to, outside of the context of the scenes, discuss what we wanted to achieve and how we wanted to achieve it. And then when the cameras started rolling, we had substance because we had everything we had discussed. And in those moments, it wasn’t Aaron and Don, it was really Terry and the sheriff. Jeremy creates this environment where it really is conducive to, I think, the best work, because he protects with everything the scene and the place where the scene is taking place. So you can have a laugh and a joke outside, because you know as soon as you step into that atmosphere, that arena, you’re in that world now.

Olsen: The story of the film is about a Black man coming into a Southern town. Race is a real undercurrent to the story, and yet it’s something that apart from one scene, where a Black female police officer calms down a group of white men, it’s never really explicit in the film. For you, what was it like to have that sort of bubbling underneath? Did you like the fact that there was never a big conversation about it, that’s not that scene in the movie. How did you feel about the way the story dealt with that?

Pierre: I think Jeremy did a brilliant job of navigating multiple important and pressing issues, all within one film. And I think he did it in a way that was not didactic. And I might even say that … allowed for it to resonate even deeper with audiences. Because versus the audience is feeling like they were being sat down, it was more of an invitation to come and engage in this conversation with us, within the context of the film.

Olsen: I want to go back to something you said earlier, that you feel on a project you have to earn your own respect. Can you talk a bit more about what means to you? What, in essence, does it take for you to earn your own respect?

Pierre: When an audience engages with your work in any capacity — theater, film, TV, radio, wherever it is — that’s them gifting you with their time. Time is precious. Time is valuable. I need to feel as though I’ve served the character. I need to feel as though I’ve served the story. I need to feel as though I’ve served the creative team. And I need to feel as though I’ve served the audience. Even if an audience walks away from something and they say, “That wasn’t for me,” that’s OK because the work is subjective. Just so long as the result of that wasn’t me not giving my all. If I don’t give my all, I’m not at peace. And I think that really just comes from gratitude for the opportunity. And that ferocity of work ethic that I have is just fueled by gratitude. I’m well aware that this is something that isn’t a given, to be blessed in a position where you can tell stories on this level with such wonderful creatives. I’ve been in a position where this is everything I wanted to do, all I could do, but I was unemployed and I was in a very financially challenging position and telling people I’m an actor, but I had nothing, nothing to show. So I think actually having all of those life experiences of those rough times, and those challenging times, when I am now in this position where I’m fortunate to have an abundance of options and things available for me to engage with, it’s just never missed on me. Ever. And it just would never feel right to take that for granted. What are we doing here? We have an opportunity, let’s give it our all. Maybe it lands flat, maybe it’s a major success, but whatever we’re doing, let’s not hold our punches, let’s give everything we’ve got.

Olsen: Last year, you were also in “Mufasa: The Lion King,” you did the voice of Mufasa. And as I understand it, you had previously worked with Barry Jenkins on “The Underground Railroad” —

Pierre: That’s big bro.

Olsen: And as I understand it, he initially reached out to you. He saw you onstage, and he sent you a DM.

Pierre: He did.

Olsen: As an actor, is that kind of what you’re hoping for? You can’t even really hope for that to happen, in a way.

Pierre: I thought somebody was messing with me, I promise you. We had just finished an evening performance at Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank, of “Othello.” Mark Rylance was playing Iago, Andre Holland was playing Othello. Phenomenal actors both. The whole team, phenomenal actors. And I just finished the evening show, and I think I was coming out of the underground at Earl’s Court Station and my phone pinged. And it was a DM from Barry, and I was like, “This has got to be a joke. Somebody has heard me talking about how much I want to collaborate with him, heard me talking extensively about what he achieved with ‘Moonlight.’” And then I opened it and it had the little verified blue tick, and I was like, “This is actually Barry Jenkins.” And he was just saying, “Hey, man, I really enjoyed your work on the stage as Cassio, I have this project upcoming. And I would like to engage in a conversation with you about it.” That was a really special moment for me.

Olsen: With “The Lion King” in particular, what was it like taking on the role of Mufasa, originally voiced by James Earl Jones? Was it a challenge for you to find your own way, essentially your own voice, for that character?

Pierre: First and foremost, James Earl Jones originated Mufasa and is and always will be synonymous with Mufasa, and his portrayal is just so beautiful and timeless. And it’s not only with me for the rest of my life but with all of us for the rest of our lives. And most importantly, it can never be matched. That actually brought me a lot of peace entering that conversation and entering that creative process. Knowing that is in its own stratosphere, and rightly so, it gave me a lot of peace and it gave me permission to find my own version. And I hope that he would be proud of the version that I discovered, and I hope that he would feel as though we did everything we could to uphold the legacy that he established and the legacy that he built. Because that was our intention and that was what we were striving for. And, just on a separate note, James Earl Jones, he’s the top of the mountain for me. I study him. He’s just the top of the mountain for me.

Olsen: As we’re having this conversation, you’re in the midst of production on “Lanterns,” which is a very different production from “The Lion King.” I’ve seen this iteration of the Green Lantern story described as a sci-fi “True Detective.” And I’m curious just how that project is going for you and what the experience so far of shooting that has been like?

Pierre: It’s been great. It’s been a really beautiful process and experience. Everybody is so close. Everybody is so tight and connected. And I think that is because we all love this project.

Olsen: You also are in the upcoming season of “The Morning Show,” again a very different project, and I’m curious, for you as an actor, do you feel like this has kind of become your moment? As an actor you work so long and so hard. What is it like for you when it seems like suddenly so many things are lining up for you?

Pierre: It’s very surreal. It’s very surreal. There was a time when there was nothing available to me, despite me trying to have things available to me. So it’s very surreal. Again, I’m abundantly grateful, and I think it’s about just utilizing these moments to learn, to grow, to evolve. And just to serve this space as best I can. It’s impossible not to have an amazing time on “The Morning Show.” All of those wonderful artists and creatives, we had a really great time.

There is no single figure in television history whose longevity and influence match Barbara Walters’.

She became a star on NBC’s “Today” in the early 1960s, raising the stature of the morning franchise. She opened doors for women as a network anchor and turned newsmaker interviews into major television events — 74 million tuned into her 1999 sit-down with Monica Lewinsky. She created one of daytime TV’s longest-running hits with “The View,” which evolved into a major forum for the country’s political discourse.

“The audience size that Barbara was able to capture and harness is unmatched in today’s world,” said Jackie Jesko, director of the new documentary “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything,” debuting Monday on Hulu after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month. “Everything she did sort of made a difference.”

Jesko’s feature — produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries and ABC News Studios — is the first in-depth look into Walters’ storied career. The film also serves as a sweeping historical review of the decades-long dominance of network news that made figures such as Walters a gatekeeper of the culture, as Jesko describes her.

Before the advent of social media and podcasts that allowed celebrities to control their messages, going through the X-ray machine of a Barbara Walters interview delivered exposure on a massive scale. David Sloan, a longtime ABC News producer who worked with Walters, recalls how the screen images of her specials flickered through the windows of Manhattan apartment towers.

“Tell Me Everything” came together not long after Walters died at the age of 93 in 2022. Sara Bernstein, president of Imagine Documentaries, approached Betsy West, executive producer and co-director of the Julia Child documentary “Julia,” about taking on a Walters project. Sloan, who oversaw an Emmy-winning tribute after Walters’ death, also wanted a deeper exploration into the impact of her career. West, also a former Walters colleague, and Sloan became executive producers on the film. “Tell Me Everything” taps deeply into the ABC News archives, which contain thousands of hours of interviews Walters conducted over her 40 years at the network.

Former President Richard M. Nixon during an interview with Barbara Walters in 1980 for ABC.

(Ray Stubblebine / AP)

Imagine not only gained access to program content but also outtakes that give parts of the film a cinema vérité-like look at Walters on the job. The newly unearthed footage provides some surreal moments, such as Walters — in a pink Chanel suit — exploring the damaged palace of Libya’s deposed leader Moammar Kadafi.

“The archive gave us a the perfect canvas to relive her scenes and her moments,” Bernstein said.

Walters’ story also gives a guided tour of the obstacle-ridden path women faced in the early days of TV news when it was dominated by patriarchy and self-importance. Female reporters were relegated to writing soft features and kept at a distance from hard news. But Walters shattered those barriers through her grit and wits. She toiled as a writer in local TV and a failed CBS morning program before landing at NBC’s “Today” in 1961. (“They needed someone they could hire cheap,” she said.)

Walters went from churning out copy for the program’s “Today Girl” to doing her own on-air segments, including a famously beguiling report on a Paris fashion show and a day-in-the-life look at being a Playboy bunny. More serious assignments came her way.

The morning viewing audience loved Walters even though she didn’t believe she was attractive enough to be on camera. Her career trajectory was slowed down only by male executives unwilling to embrace the idea that a woman could be the face of a network news operation.

Harry Reasoner with Barbara Walters during her first broadcast as co-anchor of ABC Evening News on Oct. 4, 1976.

(Associated Press)

By 1971, Walters was the main attraction on “Today” when she sat alongside host Frank McGee every morning. But she was denied equal status.

A respected journalist with the demeanor of an undertaker, McGee insisted to management that he ask the first three questions of any hard news subject who appeared on “Today” before Walters could have a chance.

The restriction led to Walters going outside the NBC studios to conduct interviews where her subjects lived or worked. The approach not only gave her control of the conversations but added a level of intimacy that audiences were not getting elsewhere on television.

Walters also had written into her contract that if McGee ever left “Today,” she would be promoted to the title of co-host. NBC brass agreed to the provision, believing McGee was not going anywhere.

But McGee was suffering from bone cancer, which he had kept secret. He died in 1974 and Walters was elevated to co-host, making her the first woman to lead a daily network news program. (Or as Katie Couric candidly puts it in the film, “She got it literally over Frank McGee’s dead body.”)

Walters made history again when she was poached by ABC News in 1976. She was given a record-high $1-million annual salary to be the first woman co-anchor of a network evening newscast, paired with Harry Reasoner, a crusty and unwelcoming veteran. Walters was mistreated by her colleague and roasted by critics and competitors such as CBS News commentator Eric Sevareid, who, with disgust in his voice, described her as “a lady reading the news.”

The evening news experiment with Reasoner was a short-lived disaster, but Walters found a supporter in Roone Arledge, the ABC Sports impresario who took over the news division and had an appreciation for showmanship. He recognized Walters’ strengths and made her a roving correspondent.

Barbara Walters arranged a joint interview with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977.

(ABC Photo Archives / Disney General Entertainment Con)

Walters scored a major coup in 1977 when she was the first TV journalist to speak jointly with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem.

“She was a household name in the Mideast,” Sloan said.

Over time, Walters would become known for her prime-time specials, where lengthy interviews with world leaders aired adjacent to conversations with movie stars. She could be a blunt questioner in both realms, asking Barbra Streisand why she chose not to get her nose fixed and former President Richard M. Nixon if he wished he had burned the White House tapes that undid his presidency (“I probably should have”).

News purists clutched their pearls, but the audience welcomed it. “She had a vision back then that celebrities are news,” said Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger in the film. “She was practicing the art of journalism when she was interviewing them.”

The film explains how Walters developed an understanding of celebrities after growing up around her father’s nightclub, the Latin Quarter, a hot spot in Boston. Sitting in the rafters above the floor show, she observed how audiences responded as well.

Barbara Walters with Barbra Streisand, whom the journalist interviewed for a special in 1976.

(ABC Photo Archives / Disney General Entertainment Con)

Even though Walters’ programs earned significant revenue for ABC News, she still had detractors, including the network’s star anchor Peter Jennings. A clip from the network’s political convention coverage in 1992 shows Jennings surreptitiously flipping his middle finger at her following an on-air exchange.

But Walters was unstoppable, and as the 1980s and 1990s progressed, she became a mother confessor for perpetrators and victims of scandal. During a memorable jailhouse meeting with the Menendez brothers in which Eric describes himself and Lyle as “normal kids,” a stunned Walters replies, “Eric, you’re a normal kid who murdered his parents!”

As always, she was speaking for the person watching at home.

“She always wanted to ask the question that was percolating in the brain of someone who didn’t have the opportunity or was too afraid to ask,” said Meredith Kaulfers, an executive vice president at Imagine Documentaries.

Walters became a pioneer for women broadcasters out of necessity. While in her 20s, her father’s nightclub business collapsed and she became the sole source of financial support for her family, which included her mentally disabled older sister. The terror of the insecurity she felt during that period never left.

President Barack Obama speaks to Barbara Walters during his guest appearance on ABC’s “The View” in 2010.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

“There was a survival instinct in her that drove her,” said Marcella Steingart, a producer on the film. “Not necessarily on purpose, but in her wake, she opened doors for people.”

“Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” is not a hagiography. The film explores her fraught relationship with her adopted daughter Jacqueline, who did not sit for an interview. Walters’ unhealthy obsession with colleague and rival Diane Sawyer is covered, too, as is her willingness to use the social connections she developed through her career, and not just to land big interviews.

Walters had a friendship with unsavory lawyer Roy Cohn, who pulled strings to make her father’s tax problems go away. She carried on a secret romance in the 1970s with a married U.S. senator — Edward Brooke — while she was a fixture in national political coverage.

While the film draws on interviews where Walters laments not being able to have both a successful career and a family life, Jesko sensed no regrets. “I think if she could live her life over again, she wouldn’t change anything,” Jesko said.

Yes, Tom Cruise will soon own an Oscar. But has he ever flown a Boeing 737 with 150 passengers on board?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, here to explain why Nathan Fielder should be the Top Gun of this Emmy season.

A show too singular to ignore

The second season of Nathan Fielder’s brilliantly bonkers “The Rehearsal” opens inside a commercial jet cockpit where the plane’s captain and first officer are having a tense exchange as they prepare to land at a fogged-in runway. The first officer suggests they’re off course. The captain disagrees but is soon proved wrong as the plane crashes. We see the pilots slumped in the cockpit, dead. Then the camera pans to Fielder, surveying the fiery aftermath, a disaster he just re-created in a simulator on a soundstage.

With that prelude, it may seem strange to tell you that I laughed out loud as many times watching “The Rehearsal” as I did any other TV series this season. Not during the simulated disasters, of course, which Fielder used to illustrate what he believes to be biggest issue in airline travel today — pilots failing to communicate during a crisis.

So, yes, “The Rehearsal” is about airline safety. Mostly. But Fielder is a master of misdirection. There is no way you can predict where he’ll direct his premise, and I found myself delighting in utter surprise at the tangents he took in “The Rehearsal” this season.

An alternate biopic of pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, with Fielder playing Sully from diapered baby to the Evanescence-loving hero landing in the Hudson River? Yes! Re-creating the German subsidiary of Paramount+ as a Nazi headquarters? OK! Vacuuming up air from San Jose to help train a cloned dog in Los Angeles while he attempts to understand how the nature-vs.-nurture dynamic might play out in human behavior? Ummmmm … sure. We’ll go with it!

Nathan Fielder takes the controls in “The Rehearsal.”

(John P. Johnson / HBO)

With Fielder’s incisive mind, the detours are everything. Even the destination this season came as a jolt. Yes, it involves that Boeing 737 I mentioned in the intro, and, no, I’m not going to elaborate because I still feel like not enough people have watched “The Rehearsal.” The series’ first two seasons are available on HBO, as are all four seasons of Fielder’s Comedy Central docuseries “Nathan for You,” which had Fielder “helping” small-business owners improve their sales. (Example: Pitching a Santa Clarita liquor store owner that he should sell booze to minors but just not let them take it home until they turned 21.)

The humor in “The Rehearsal” can be just as outrageous as “Nathan for You,” but the overall tone is more thoughtful, as it also explores loneliness and the masks we all wear at times to hide our alienation.

For the Emmys, HBO has submitted “The Rehearsal” in the comedy categories. Where else would they put it? But the show is so singular that I wonder if even its fans in the Television Academy will remember to vote for it. They should. It’s funny, insightful, occasionally terrifying, utterly unforgettable. And I hope Isabella Henao, the winner of the series’ reality show competition, goes places. She sure can sing!

Tom Cruise, Dolly Parton will have their Oscar moments

Meanwhile, that other pilot, Tom Cruise, will finally receive an Oscar, an honorary one, in November at the Governors Awards, alongside production designer Wynn Thomas and choreographer and actor Debbie Allen.

Dolly Parton, singer, actor and beloved icon, will be given the annual Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her charitable work.

Cruise has been nominated for three acting Oscars over the years — for playing Marine Corps Sgt. Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone’s 1989 antiwar movie “Born on the Fourth of July,” the sports agent who had Renée Zellweger at hello in Cameron Crowe’s 1996 classic “Jerry Maguire” and the chauvinistic motivational speaker in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 opus “Magnolia.” Cruise was also nominated as a producer for 2022’s dad cinema favorite “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Tom Cruise, left, and Paul Newman in “The Color of Money.”

(Fox Broadcasting Company)

Cruise should have won the supporting actor Oscar for “Magnolia,” a ferocious turn in which he harnessed his strutting brashness to play an odious character hiding a deep well of pain. It came the same year as his star turn opposite then-wife Nicole Kidman in “Eyes Wide Shut.” Not a bad double feature! Instead, Michael Caine won for “Cider House Rules” during an Oscar era in which there was seemingly no prize Harvey Weinstein couldn’t land. It wasn’t even Caine’s first Oscar; he had already won for “Hannah and Her Sisters.”

Cruise has devoted himself to commercial action movies, mostly of the “Mission: Impossible” variety, for the past two decades. He did recently complete filming a comedy with director Alejandro González Iñárritu, scheduled for release next year.

It’d be funny if Cruise wins a competitive Oscar after picking up an honorary one. It happened with Paul Newman, Cruise’s co-star in “The Color of Money.”

Read more of our Emmy coverage

Dispatches from northern China, Jia Zhangke’s movies constitute their own cinematic universe. Repeatedly returning to themes of globalization and alienation, the 55-year-old director has meticulously chronicled his country’s uneasy plunge into the 21st century as rampant industrialization risks deadening those left behind.

But his latest drama, “Caught by the Tides,” which opens at the Frida Cinema today, presents a bold, reflexive remix of his preoccupations. Drawing from nearly 25 years of footage, including images from his most acclaimed films, Jia has crafted a poignant new story with an assist from fragments of old tales. He has always been interested in how the weight of time bears down on his characters — now his actors age in front of our eyes.

When “Caught by the Tides” premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, critics leaned on a handy, if somewhat inaccurate, comparison to describe Jia’s achievement: “Boyhood,” which followed a young actor over the course of 12 years, a new segment of the picture shot annually. But Richard Linklater preplanned his magnum opus. Jia, on the other hand, approached his film more accidentally, using the pandemic shutdown as an excuse to revisit his own archives.

“It struck me that the footage had no linear, cause-and-effect pattern,” Jia explained in a director’s statement. “Instead, there was a more complex relationship, not unlike something from quantum physics, in which the direction of life is influenced and ultimately determined by variable factors that are hard to pinpoint.”

The result is a story in three chapters, each one subtly building emotionally from the last. In the first, it is 2001, as Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) lives in Datong, where she dates Bin (Li Zhubin). Early on, Qiaoqiao gleefully sings with friends, but it will be the last time we hear her voice. It’s a testament to Zhao’s arresting performance that many viewers may not notice her silence. She’s so present even without speaking, her alert eyes taking in everything, her understated reactions expressing plenty.

Young and with her whole life ahead of her, Qiaoqiao longs to be a singer, but her future is short-circuited by Bin’s text announcing that he’s leaving to seek better financial opportunities elsewhere. He promises to send word once he’s established himself, but we suspect she may never see this restless, callous schemer again. Not long after, Bin ghosts Qiaoqiao, prompting her to journey after him.

“Caught by the Tides” richly rewards viewers familiar with Jia’s filmography with scenes and outtakes from his earlier movies. Zhao, who in real life married Jia more than a decade ago, has been a highlight of his movies starting with his 2000 breakthrough “Platform,” and so when we see Qiaoqiao at the start of “Caught by the Tides,” we’re actually watching footage shot around that time. (Jia’s 2002 drama “Unknown Pleasures” starred Zhao as a budding singer named Qiaoqiao. Li also appeared in “Unknown Pleasures,” as well as subsequent Jia pictures.)

But the uninitiated shouldn’t feel intimidated to begin their Jia immersion here. Those new to his work will easily discern the film’s older footage, some of it captured on grainy DV cameras, while newer material boasts the elegant, widescreen compositions that have become his specialty. “Caught by the Tides” serves as a handy primer on Jia’s fascination with China’s political, cultural and economic evolution, amplifying those dependable themes with the benefit of working across a larger canvas of a quarter-century.

Still, by the time Qiaoqiao traverses the Yangtze River near the Three Gorges Dam — a controversial construction project that imperiled local small towns and provided the backdrop for Jia’s 2006 film “Still Life” — the director’s fans may feel a bittersweet sense of déjà vu. We have been here before, reminded of his earlier characters who similarly struggled to find love and purpose.

The film’s second chapter, which takes place during 2006, highlights Qiaoqiao’s romantic despair and, separately, Bin’s growing desperation to make a name for himself. (This isn’t the first Jia drama in which characters dabble in criminal activity.) By the time we arrive at the finale, set during the age of COVID anxiety, their inevitable reunion results in a moving resolution, one that suggests the ebb and flow of desire but, also, the passage of time’s inexorable erosion of individuals and nations.

Indeed, it’s not just Zhao and Li who look different by the end of “Caught by the Tides” but Shanxi Province itself — now a place of modern supermarkets, sculpted walkways and robots. Unchecked technological advancement is no longer a distant threat to China but a clear and present danger, dispassionately gobbling up communities, jobs and Qiaoqiao’s and Bin’s dreams. When these two former lovers see each other again, a lifetime having passed on screen, they don’t need words. In this beautiful summation work, Jia has said it all.

In the latest episode of The Envelope video podcast, we sit down with “Paradise” creator Dan Fogelman in front of a live audience at the Newport Beach TV Festival to hear what he has planned for Season 2 of Hulu’s buzzy dystopian drama and much more.

Kelvin Washington: Hey, everybody, welcome to this week’s episode of The Envelope. Kelvin Washington here alongside Yvonne Villarreal and Mark Olsen as usual. You two, we want to have a conversation about Emmy nominations. We know they’re gonna be coming up — this will be the last episode before we find out who is nominated — so you got some some bold takes? You got some things on your mind? Don’t roll your eyes!

Yvonne Villarreal: No, not rolling! I’m getting ready. You know, streaming obviously still dominates a lot of the conversation, whether it’s “Severance” or “The Studio.” But I’m going to say, I look forward to seeing my girl Kathy Bates get a nomination for “Matlock” on CBS. That is my prediction and I’m sticking with it.

Washington: All right, Mark, you got a bold one for us?

Olsen: I’m going to go with Matt Berry for “What We Do in the Shadows.” The show just wrapped up its sixth and final season. And he’s just been such a comedic powerhouse on that show. And season after season, he’s been so inventive, so fun. And I just think it’d be great to see him recognized for the totality of the work that he’s done there.

Washington: The person I’m gonna name is in this show you mentioned, “Severance.” Tramell Tillman. Milchick. There’s a moment on my other show that I do, I danced and everyone said, “Oh, you’re Milchick! What do you think, you’re Milchick?” Everyone’s just screaming — it was a whole thing. That was one of the signature moments of the season, I think.

Villarreal: Why don’t you ever do that here?

Washington: First off, it’s early. You don’t know what I’m gonna do the rest of this episode. You don’t know.

Villarreal: I don’t have a drumline here.

Olsen: He’s in the new “Mission: Impossible,” “The Final Reckoning,” and I saw that at a public [screening], and the moment he came onscreen, people cheered in the audience. Like he has such a fan base from the show.

Villarreal: Well earned.

Olsen: Beautiful thing for him! Let’s talk about, you had something cool you got to do, Yvonne, speaking with someone that you’re familiar with, Dan Fogelman, showrunner for “Paradise.” You got to this at the Newport Beach TV Festival, where you sat down and had this conversation in front of a live audience. He got a showrunner of the year award as well. It was really cool, right?

Villarreal: It was very scary. I do like audiences, but I do get a little nervous. Speaking with somebody that I’ve talked to many times helps ease the sort of stage fright there. Dan Fogelman is somebody that I have spoken to a lot of times over the years because I covered “This Is Us” from beginning to end.

And it’s funny because I remember, last year I was on the set of “Only Murders in the Building,” which he is a producer on, and they were filming on the Paramount lot for their sort of trip to L.A. last season. And he had just started production on “Paradise” on the same lot. And he took a break and headed over to our neck of the woods on the Paramount lot to show everybody a cut of a scene that they had just wrapped for “Paradise.” He was so excited to share that with everyone, and he’s like, “Yvonne, you gotta see this, you gotta see this,” and it’s Sterling K. Brown doing a scene and you’re just in awe of it. This show has political intrigue, there’s a murder mystery, there’s the destruction of the planet, and the premise is Sterling K. Brown plays a Secret Service agent who’s accused of killing the president and is sort of trying to unravel who was really at fault here, and that’s just on the surface. There’s a lot more to it than that because Dan Fogelman is known for his twists, and he didn’t disappoint here. So it was really fun to unpack that with him in front of an audience

Washington: A whole lot of twists in that show, for sure. All right, without further ado, let’s get to that chat with Dan Fogelman. Here’s Yvonne.

Sterling K. Brown in “Paradise.”

(Brian Roedel / Disney)

Villarreal: Dan and I go way back.

Fogelman: “This Is Us” days.

Villarreal: I had the great privilege of covering “This Is Us” from beginning to end. And that show, I would often come to you and say, “Why are you making me cry?” And “Can you make me cry some more?” This show, it was very much, “What is going on here?” Talk about the genesis of this show, because it actually predates “This Is Us,” the kernel of the idea.

Fogelman: I’d started thinking about this show long before “This Is Us.” When I was a young writer in Hollywood, they start sending you on all these “general” meetings, which is, basically, you go to meetings with important people with no agenda. And it can be a very awkward dance. You tell your same origin story a hundred times. At one of these meetings, I was meeting with a captain of industry, a very important person. As that person was speaking to me, I was not hearing anything he or she was saying. I was calculating how much money I thought they were worth. I was thinking, “Is this a billionaire? Am I in the room with a billionaire?” And on the way home — this was a long time ago — it was in the shadow of 9/11, and a nearby construction site dropped something, and it made a loud boom, one of those booms that shakes you for a second, and I thought to myself, “Wow, when the s— really hits the fan, that guy’s gonna be as screwed as all the rest of us, because all the people that must take care of him are going to run after taking care of their own people.”

I started thinking about that. I started to think about a Secret Service agent and a president, somebody whose job it is to take a bullet. And this idea of telling a murder mystery of an ex-president underground and learning later that the world has ended above. That was the impetus behind it. I kind of put it away. I wrote “This Is Us.” I talked with some big sci-fi writers about the idea, thinking maybe I could produce it for somebody better than me to make it. And then when “This Is Us” ended, I was like, “I’m gonna try and do that one.” And so it took like 15 years to come back around.

Villarreal: What do you remember about those conversations with the other sci-fi writers?

Fogelman: People thought, “Oh, that’s a cool idea.” But that’s as far as it goes because that’s lot of work to then figure out the cool idea. And that became the problem with this show. I wrote it and I had to sit down and figure out how we were going to do it, and what was the tone going to be, and what were the twists and turns. They all kind of said, “Thanks but no thanks,” because it seemed really hard, I think. I just waited and did it. It takes a while and it takes a village; it takes a lot of writers sitting with you and figuring out how to shape the world.

Villarreal: How much was it tugging at you during “This Is Us”?

Fogelman: During “This Is Us,” I was pretty in “This Is Us” and a couple of other projects at the time. The last two years were like fraught with COVID, and there was no more in-person stuff, and everybody was wearing masks on set. It was a really tough two years of a six-year show. At the end, in the final season, we did 18 episodes and I had 18 Post-it notes on my wall in my office, and each time I would finish a script, I would “X” it out. And each time I’d finish an edit, I’d “X” it out. Because that was how much left I had to do. They’re still on my wall in my office to this day because it was so exhausting and it was such a big accomplishment to just be done with that, when it was over, I was like, “Oh, now’s the part where I take the Post-it notes off the wall.” And I never did. They’re just still hanging on by a thread there. But then I took a break for six months, and I started getting the itch to write something. That idea kept poking through and poking through. I just wrote it without telling anybody first.

Villarreal: One of my favorite things about a creator like Dan, a writer like Dan, is you’re that person who likes to watch people watch something. During “This Is Us,” I remember you would be so excited about a scene or something, and you’d be like, “You gotta see this,” and you would screen it in the next room. “Paradise” too — when “Only Murders in the Building” was shooting on the Paramount lot for their trip to L.A., you were doing “Paradise” at the same time, and you took a break to sort of come see the set of “Only Murders,” which you’re an executive producer on. And you had this scene with Sterling and you wanted to show it.

But you were hesitant about pitching this to Sterling, which I’m sort of surprised by because I think you know when something’s good. Talk a little bit about what made you nervous about giving it to him and what he would say.

Fogelman: I’m a person who operates off of obligation. My best friend, [who] gave a speech at my wedding, said, “You can ask Dan for anything and he’ll feel too guilty not to do it.” He’s like, “He’s my ride home tonight” — that was his joke at my wedding. I felt worried that Sterling would feel obligated after “This Is Us.” When we ended “This Is Us,” I remember very vividly Sterling wrapping, and I did a little impromptu quick thing when he was wrapping and I was like, “Sterling, you go out in the world now and make us proud.” We could all see what’s coming for Sterling and what remains to be coming for him. I was like, “Go win your Oscars. Don’t forget us when you’re even more famous” — that kind of thing. To come back to him a year and a half later with a script for another TV show with the same guy, I wasn’t worried that he wouldn’t like it; I was worried that it would put him in a weird position. He was so gracious. I sent it to him. I had written it picturing Sterling but never vocalizing that to myself. Then I started letting friends read it to get their feedback, and they’re like, “Did you develop this with Sterling, or was it his idea?” And I was like, “No, I’ve never talked to Sterling about this.” And it started occurring to me that if I didn’t get Sterling, I had a huge problem because that is who I’ve been picturing. I sent it to him, and he read it that day and called me back and said, “Tell me where it goes” — because obviously if you watch the pilot, it doesn’t tell you a lot about where it’s going. I gave him the broad strokes of where it was going for three seasons. I said: “It’s three seasons, I want to shoot it in L.A. Here’s what the arc of it is. Here’s where it’s going. Here’s what happened in the world.” And he said, “I’m in.” We just kind of shook hands. And that day we were off to the races.

Villarreal: What did he think about the twists in that first episode?

Fogelman: Sterling emotes, right? Sterling will come into the writers’ room — he’s an executive producer on the show — and if you pitch him something surprising, he falls to the floor and rolls on his back like a golden retriever. He reacts and he emotes. So, he was really into it. He had the same question I think everybody had after the pilot, which is, “What happens now?” I kind of had the rough answers. As you know, he’s the best guy. I was just outside, and somebody was asking me, like, “How do you get Julianne Nicholson and James Marsden to do your show?” I’m like, “Well, it helps if you already have Sterling K. Brown because they all want to work with Sterling.” And hopefully they tolerate me and the script. It’s been a gift with him.

Villarreal: You said Sterling sort of became the person you were thinking about as it evolved. How did you decide who should be which characters? Why was Sterling right for Xavier? Why was Julianne right for this tech billionaire?

Fogelman: There’s not a lot of art to it. You just kind of see it in your brain a little bit. Sterling I’d worked with, I had known Julianne and James from their work, not personally. The other actors in the show, for the most part, I’d known of their work or whatnot. Most of them read, and when you’re doing this job, a big part of your job is you see a lot of really beautiful, talented people read the same lines of dialogue. And your job is to think, “Which person fits it? And which person makes it most interesting?” Jon Beavers, who plays Billy Pace, was an actor I didn’t know. And I really wanted him from the moment I saw him on tape. I was like, “This is the guy for that part.” But I knew, because it was only four episodes, that there might be a clamoring for a bigger name in the part. Because it would be possible. Because you could go cast anybody because it’s a month of work if they were willing to pay him. And so Jon came in and he read and he read again. And then you get to a part where it’s like chemistry tests. And he was reading with Nicole [Brydon Bloom] and a couple of other people who [were in the running to] play Jane. And I just loved him. He walked out of the room at the end of it, and I ran out after him and I said, “Jon, would you ever look at a new scene that I haven’t given you yet? It’s from the fourth episode, and you’ve only got the pilot to audition off of.” I knew the scene was big, and I wanted to have a piece of material that would be undeniable if I needed it to win with the powers that be. And Jon sat with the scene for three minutes and came in to me and said, “I’m ready.” And he came in, and it became his big scene right before his death in the show where he confronts Julianne’s character, Sinatra. And actually, when I first Zoomed with Julianne, I showed her the scene. I was like, you want to see something cool? This guy did this in three minutes without any preparation and look how good it is. And so part of it is just like a gut instinct or really liking somebody for it. And I had that with everybody in the cast on this one.

Should I be funnier? I feel like I should be funny.

Villarreal: Do you have a Sterling story?

Fogelman: What’s my best Sterling story…

Villarreal: He’s bare naked in this.

Fogelman: Oh, my God. When I first showed him — because Sterling takes eight years to watch or read anything, except for this pilot. And it drives me crazy because I want Sterling to like it, and I’m very excited. I’m like, “Have you seen the second episode?” He’s like, “I haven’t had time, man.” I’m like, “You haven’t had time to watch a 50-minute episode of television? It’s been a month!” And it drives you crazy. But then he finally saw that third episode and he was like, “Dan, all anyone’s going to talk about is my ass. Is it gonna be released in the first batch of episodes?” ’Cause he went a hundred years down the road and was seeing the press where they always wanted to ask a question about his ass. But he loves it. He’s so proud of it. And the first person to see “Paradise” was my mother-in-law [and wife]. I showed them the first three episodes at home before anyone had seen it. [My mother-in-law] had lived and breathed “This Is Us” with me; my wife was in the show. And when that part came on, the shower, she started fanning herself. And she said “Oh, Sterling!” That made him very happy. That was his proudest moment of the show, I think.

Villarreal: This show is marketed as a political thriller, and the question that looms over the season is, “Who killed the president?” But then you get to the final moments of that season opener and you realize, “OK, there’s a lot more to this. This seemingly all-American town is really this community carved under a Colorado mountain after an apocalyptic event.” What was going through your mind in terms of how to piece it out? How meticulous were you in the edit — like, is this is revealing too much too soon?

Fogelman: It’s less in the edit, because at the edit you’re already pretty bound to what you’ve scripted, but it was in the writing stages. My intent for the show was that in the first season of eight episodes, we were going to provide answers every week, ask new questions and hopefully have provided a complete meal by the end of the season where, for the most part, I think any question you’ve been asking in the course of the first series of the show is answered by the end of the season. I was very clinical about that. I get frustrated when shows give you too much too quickly but also when they withhold for too long. I thought, for this one, I wanted to be really calculated about it. In the second episode, you start learning, “Oh, wow, the world really did end, something catastrophic happened” and you’re learning more about Sinatra; in the opening sequence of [Episode] 2, Sinatra is telling all these other scientists that something imminent is coming for the world. We would constantly, in the writers’ room, put ourselves in the minds of the television audience. If I was watching at home, I’d say, “Oh, they’re all in the ‘Truman Show’; this is all fake, it’s a social experiment.” At what point do we get rid of that theory for the audience? At what point do we tell the audience and show the audience what actually happened on the day the world ended? And so that was really calculated with how we were gonna parse it out.

Villarreal: The press get episodes ahead of time. But it was interesting watching people watch it week to week and see their reactions on social media. The show launched with three episodes, then it switched to weekly. How much were you involved in those discussions about starting with three episodes at launch?

Fogelman: That was a big conversation. I’ve got a great studio and network who involve me in the conversations. I don’t know if I could move the needle if I disagreed strongly with anything, but they at least involve me. My first instinct had been, “Let’s let the pilot be the only thing that gets put out in the world and let people talk about it and what that ending says.” But then you have to acknowledge the fact that people are being served television in just a very different way these days. The whole point of the show is I wanted to make something that was hopefully artful and well done but also propulsive, and you don’t want to frustrate people. We’re accustomed to hitting that drip of next episode, next episode. So while I did want that week-to-week build and momentum, I was also aware we have to give them a little bit more to hook them in. And ultimately you trust the people that are like, “We know how things play.” I wanted this show to get seen. That was a big conversation: Was it one episode? Was it two? Or was it three? Ultimately, they decided three. The downside of that is you get less weeks to build the momentum of a television show that people are starting to talk about. It worked in our favor this time. I think it’s what we’re going to do this coming season, most likely. We do it on “Only Murders” as well — release two or three up top. I did “This Is Us” and other network television shows where it was like, you know when “This Is Us” launched, it had that big twist ending, and then people sat on it for a week and talked. But it was a different time. It was 2016, and we were not as on that Netflix kind of drip of just sitting like hamsters hitting the dopamine button. You have to weigh that. I love a weekly release. My whole goal with this show was to capture a small sliver of the zeitgeist where people could be talking about something, hypothesizing and talking, and I knew that required a weekly release. But how many [episodes to launch with] to get people like locked and loaded was a big debate.

Villarreal: What was the episode or the moment that you were most eager to see how people responded to?

Fogelman: So, my process always has been, I find strangers — I could pick out 20; I try and have them vetted by people who know them, so friends of my writers, friends of actors — and I start bringing them into my edit bay early and screen for them. There’s this old screening process that used to happen in television and film, which is really bad, because you just literally give people dials. You guys familiar with this? You give people dials and you say, “When are you liking something? Turn up your dial.” All you’ll hear is they don’t like that actor, they don’t like that moment. And I’m like, “Well, yeah, the grandfather was dying. I don’t expect them to be going, ‘Weeeee!’” It was a very broken system. But I do believe in screening stuff for people and seeing how they react, even if you’re not going to change it; even if you go, “Well, you’re stupid, you don’t get how brilliant I am.” I bring people into my edit bay all the time and strangers who sign [nondisclosure agreements] — I would do that on “This Is Us,” I did that here. I was very interested to see what happened at the end of the pilot to people. Are they following it? Are they following the ending the right way, the way I want them to? After that, you would start hearing murmurings in the room as the camera’s rising and as the guy’s going “the world’s ending” and they realize they’re underground. After, I will say things like, “When did you start realizing something was amiss? Did any of you get ahead of it?” I will get a little bit more granular. It was exciting in the fourth episode when we killed a character, watching an audience in my small little edit bay, watching them go with that episode, knowing we were about to pull the rug out from under them. And that they were going to have a reaction — that was exciting. It’s exciting when it goes the way you want it to go. They were turning to me going, “You motherf—, you can’t!” You’re like, “Oh, good. That’s good. That’s a good day at work!” Watching people watch that last episode and feeling them move with the explosions, that’s my most exciting thing. I started doing films, and this experience of communally watching stuff you don’t get in television. For me, you get limited opportunities to watch people react to the thing that you slave over every detail of as a group. I have 300 people making our TV show right now, and we never get to see people watch it. That’s a really exciting part.

Villarreal: Fans are so savvy — they can rewatch, they can zoom in, they can pause and really look at details. Are you ever worried they’re going to get to the mystery before you’ve gotten there?

Fogelman: I screen ad nauseam. As an example, in our premiere, there’s an assassination attempt of the president in the premiere, and the guy doing the assassination attempt is a character that hides in plain sight throughout the series; then we get to the end, and that’s the murderer.

Villarreal: Spoiler alert.

Fogelman: But that actor’s mother, or longtime manager, was at the premiere and said to the actor, “I wish I got to see an episode you were in.” And he was like, “I was in that episode.” And she said, “What?” We do that level of testing where we feel pretty confident when it’s going out in the world, it’s not gonna get spoiled. But we were locking our pilot, the first episode, before Christmas, to air in January, and the big expensive shot was the big final shot that goes up and reveals the inner workings of the dome. I showed my brother-in-law and my sister-in law. My brother-in-law had taken way too many weed gummies, so he wasn’t the best audience, but at the end, he’s like, “Are they in outer space?” I kind of was like, “You’re so stoned. You need to stop with the weed gummies.” But then somebody else in the room was like, “Oh, I thought that for a second.” I went back into my writers; I was like, “Go screen it for your families more.” And one out of every 20 persons was having a misunderstanding that they were in a space station. So we went back and we spent a fortune — I had people work over the holidays because I got more granular. I was like, “What is it that’s saying space station to people?” And it was these red lights we had combined with a couple of other different lighting choices, and we went to the drawing board with our visual effects to make sure there was no confusion about what was going on at the end of it. I’ve always said good television is made by people who take it way too seriously. And I have like 20 people in my writers’ room and 300 people on my crew that take it really seriously and that’s part of it.

Villarreal: How does it compare to sort of the secrecy that surrounded “This Is Us”? There were red scripts, there were NDAs.

Fogelman: The world has moved faster now, so I’m less worried about it. “This Is Us” was an anomaly because it was so in the zeitgeist for a moment — “How did he die? What were the secrets?” But it was also so early in this moment of the internet and spoilers and whatnot that now I’ve kind of chilled out a little bit. I do “Only Murders in the Building,” and the showrunner of that show, John Hoffman, is very frenetic all the time that if one little Easter egg is in a trailer, it’s going to ruin the surprise for everybody. And I worry a little bit less now, maybe because I’m old and lazy, but I worry a little less. I think the media is pretty forgiving. I watch “Survivor,” it’s my favorite show, and I’m so tired of those blurbs you see on your timeline that they show the face of the person who got voted out the night before; it drives me absolutely insane. I have to like blur my vision all the time. I hate it. But I think for the most part, the media’s done a better job [with] if there’s a spoiler, you’re going to have to dig for it as opposed to it being accidentally in your face. I thought “White Lotus,” did it [well]; everybody was really responsible with it this year.

Villarreal: Inherent to this apocalyptic event is this idea of starting over, starting fresh and trying to correct some of the mistakes or errors of the past. What intrigued you about those existential questions at play here?

Fogelman: I think we’re all there a little bit right now. I had this idea 15 years ago, and the idea that everything was changing and it was quicksand under our feet was a little less prevalent back then. I was very drawn into the early years of “The Walking Dead” — those early seasons of that show were so good because ultimately it wasn’t about zombies or apocalypse, it was about, “If the s— hits your fan, what levels will you go to to protect the people you love? How far would you break bad?” I was interested in that notion. I was interested in the notion of putting a really good man in the center of it as opposed to an antihero. Because Sterling exudes decency as a human being, and this character is so hard and quiet and [an] old-school action hero. I was curious about what it was like to put that guy in that world, so that appealed to me.

I went to a little carnival recently, and my little boy wanted to get a balloon animal. He was really patiently waiting in line for the balloon animal. And I was watching him, and he was really patiently just waiting and waiting, and this mother kept coming over and bringing multiple kids and cutting the line in front of him because her kid was in front him, and she kept bringing friends and other kids. And I was using it as a case study and I was watching my little boy; I’m like, “I wonder how he’s gonna react.” He stood there patiently, but the balloon animal guy said “five more minutes and I’m packing up.” I was like, “Oh, is he gonna run out of time?” I was originally watching it as a case study on my little boy. Then I started filling with rage. And I was like, “I’m going to kill this woman. I’m going to have to go over and be the parent who says, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, your children are not in line for the balloon animal. My son is.’” And I was like, “No, don’t do it, don’t do it.” It fascinated me what started happening in me as I held back and didn’t say anything. And he got his balloon animal. He’s a spoiled little brat. He’s fine. But that stuff really intrigues me, especially if you raise the stakes to end of the world and all of that.

Villarreal: What did it make you think about in terms of the lengths you’ll go to?

Fogelman: I think we’d all go to extraordinary lengths. And whereas “The Walking Dead” focused on that, this focuses a little bit more on what the people in power do. As you learn more about Julianne’s character, Sinatra, [the question becomes], “What length will you go to save not just your own family but a portion of humanity? What are the right things to do in these situations?” And so it takes my balloon animal story and puts it on steroids a little. And that was really interesting to me.

Villarreal: Speaking of case studies, I feel like we’re living a case study right now in terms of a president and the people around him and the influence or power that they have. And obviously [the show] predates some of the [recent] headlines — whether it’s Trump and Elon Musk or whomever. What was the research you were seeing about the power dynamics in a role like that that were interesting to you at the time?

Fogelman: That really caught us off guard, the Elon Musk-president relationship, because there was one point in our third episode where, in a flashback, Julianne [as Sinatra] walks into the Oval Office from a side room, and I remember having my bulls— meter going off on my own television show going like, “Is this realistic? She’s not the chief of staff of this guy. Could she really be walking in and out of the Oval Office?” And lo and behold, here we are, all this time later. So I was like, “I guess it’s realistic.” Our research was actually somewhat more focused on the logistics of building a bunker city, of governing in a bunker city, of, “What would the electric vehicles be like? How would they source food and clothing?” There are so many more answers hidden in the production design of the show than you actually see onscreen. We had a dissertation written by a professor of sociology on how the best way to govern would be. A benevolent dictatorship was deemed the best form of government for this particular situation by people who said, “How would you keep people alive and in a functional way?” I’m not talking in the United States, I’m talking about in this bunker city. That’s what we think in our mind’s eye Sinatra had the research to see and say, “I’m going to try and do the right thing for all these people down below as best I can and try and keep the people at bay.” We did a lot of research on governance, on infrastructure, on things about nuclear and thermal energy that I can’t fathom nor understand, but that my writers all understood — how the place was powered and all of that. A little less on power dynamics between billionaires and power just because I think you kinda know what that is. It’s a lot of people in a room who are used to being the only person who everybody listens to.

Villarreal: But also, who do you trust? Cal [the president, played by James Marsden] has Xavier, he’s got Sinatra. It’s interesting to see whose input he takes in.

Fogelman: And ultimately, we try and make everybody fallible, but also everybody kind of have a point of view and a place where they’re coming from. I think in the second season of the show, you’ll see where Sinatra was coming from on the big picture even more. You kind of know where Marsden’s coming from, you know where Sterling’s coming form, and those are all the people pushing against one another in the show.

Villarreal: No matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on, I feel like everybody feels like we’re in a doomsday situation at the moment and change is needed. How do you create escapist TV at a time like this where people have issues on either side?

Fogelman: I remember when the show was coming out, having a degree of concern about that, just based off the timing and things I couldn’t control. We’ve been here in different ways before. When you look at all the periods of history, it always felt at different points of our history, like, “Oh my, wow, the sky is really falling. This is for real this time. This isn’t like it was for our parents’ generation or the generation before; this is worse.” The X factor right now that’s making people say, “No, this is the one that’s the worst” is the technology has shifted so dramatically. When the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, it was with a single person. Now those single people have much more scary stuff. The technology and the AI is much scarier. I wanted to make something that had climate change as a factor, but I also wanted to create a scenario that wouldn’t be the one that would keep people up at night. This is an extreme kind of worst-case scenario fluke occurrence that could happen. It’s based in some science, but it’s not the most likely way the world is going to end. We were trying to find ways so it could be palatable.

Villarreal: Thanks for that assurance because that was my concern. How likely is this to happen?

Fogelman: We have a writer on our show who’s one of the foremost experts on climate change.

Villarreal: Please talk about that.

Fogelman: Stephen Markley. He wrote a novel recently — it’s a masterpiece of a novel. He was hired for the show because of it — called “The Deluge.” Part of entertainment is we created a big tsunami and a big crazy action-adventure episode of television. The reality of climate change will happen quickly, but in less world-encompassing kind of ways. And if we don’t get on top of it, it’s a huge, huge catastrophe waiting to happen. As an example, and Stephen covers this in his book: I’m by no means a climate-change expert, but a lot of us roll our eyes when we talk about six inches of sea-level rise because it doesn’t seem like the thing that’s going to necessarily end the world. But along with the many, many, many, things that come along with that, when that inevitably happens, if we don’t stop, when parts of Miami go underwater, it won’t be a drowning of a half of a state or a city necessarily, because it will happen slowly and then quickly. What will happen is, as we’ve seen out here in California with the fires, you’re talking about an economic and housing collapse that will dwarf anything we saw in 2008. If you think about how hard it is to get your home insured now in California, just wait. That’s the stuff that’s less sexy than a tsunami sweeping over a 400-story building. But unless we get our heads out of our asses, it’s coming. Our balancing act is, “How do we make something not pedantic, make it entertainment, make it so that you can do it, but also maybe shake people a little at the same time?”

Villarreal: The conversations in that writers’ room must be insane — just TED Talks all the time.

Fogelman: It’s also a lot of fart jokes. It’s a nice balance. But it’s a heady, heady place. Season 2 deals with a lot really heady stuff, and I try and understand it as best I can and then let the smart people battle it out.

Villarreal: I want to get into some of the details of the show because details make everything. Can you talk to me about why Wii?

Fogelman: We just thought it was funny. But also, in Season 2, you’ll learn the origin of the Wii for Jane. Our sixth episode that we’re shooting right now actually is called “Jane,” and it’s her backstory episode.

Villarreal: How about the fries? How did you land on the cashew cheese fries?

Fogelman: We landed on the fries primarily because we decided there would be no dairy down below because having real dairy would require so much maintenance of chickens and eggs and infrastructure and animals and cows that it wouldn’t be feasible. Cashew and nut cheese was the thing that they would put on cheese fries. We thought it was an interesting way of making it a key clue in the show, but that also tied into where they were and what they don’t have.

Villarreal: Are we going to learn any of the other songs on Cal’s mixtape? Are they important?

Fogelman: No, there is another song that plays heavily towards the end of our season from his oeuvre of music, but no. We’re actually getting very Elvis-heavy [in] Season 2, not related to Cal’s music. That’s a little bit of a spoiler.

Villarreal: Can you talk about Phil Collins of it all and finding that cover? Was it originally like, “We want the Phil Collins version”? Or “We want this really eerie, scary version”?

Fogelman: Originally, the show was called “Paradise City,” and the song at the end was Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” Then I soured on it as a title and it made the song being the song less important. When I got my first editor’s cut of the pilot, she had found that cover — Julia [Grove], our editor — and put it in. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s it. That’s the one.” In my mind, I always thought it would probably be a cover of one of those two songs. I don’t know why, because there’s something about ’80s music — you’re really on a fine line when you use it on a show or in a movie; it can get funny quickly, even if accidentally. Like, “We Built This City,” if you put that in without it being a cover, it makes you smile, but maybe in the wrong way in the genre of television. We felt that it would be good to use covers from the very beginning that could evoke the songs but kind of transform them a little bit.

Villarreal: This show has you thinking about budgets in a different way because you’re dealing with special effects or action scenes in a way you weren’t on “This Is Us.” What’s a scene from the series we’d be surprised got a lot of notes because you have to be like, “I don’t know if we can do it this grand because this is what we’re working with…”?

Fogelman: We never got that. We have a really great studio and network that work with us. We’re given the money we have, and then it’s how we choose to use it. We knew Episode 7 was going to be an expensive episode for us where you show the world actually ending. So what we would do is on Episodes 5 and 6, if we needed to cut a corner here or there, we would do that to save up the money for that. But we never really had that on this show. We also stayed on budget. I’m sure we would have had that if we were over budget, but we never really had that.

Villarreal: You’re about to get the showrunner of the year award, and as a fellow writer who’s very fearful of ever becoming management, I’m very interested to know how your creative process has changed since becoming a showrunner.

Fogelman: It’s a big job. I don’t always relish it. I was with a group of showrunners the other night for a different thing, and we were all just lamenting how exhausted and miserable we all were — in a funny way, because we also all love it. The management is tough. You’re the CEO of a large company. I say 200, 300 people, [but] it’s really 1,000 people when you talk about the people who day play and do special effects and visual effects and all of the stuff. It’s a lot of bodies, and you’re managing a lot of people, and managing people is the hardest part of your job. It takes up a lot time. I don’t go to set very much anymore. I did at the beginning of my showrunning career because I felt like I should and because I wanted to be there because I was the boss. And I started realizing it was just not a good use of my time. I mainly focus on writing, breaking the episodes, writing them and editing them, and that’s where my time goes. But you need to be there for people. On any given day, there’s somebody on your crew who’s not happy with something, and you’re putting out those fires. It’s a tremendous amount of work. One of the things that’s been striking to me, and I say this to people all the time, is, at the end of “This Is Us,” I would make gestures to people who worked on the show, whatever they were, but what would stand out more than anything, and I always felt like it was doing so little, [was] to write somebody a note on stationery. And I was constantly struck by how much it meant to people to be individually seen. People are really kind of lovely and great and don’t require that much. They just wanna be seen and they want their work to be seen. And it’s the difference between writing a little note to somebody that says, “You’re doing a great job” versus “I saw what you did on Tuesday, on Thursday, with that scene, and it’s not lost on me, and I see you, and I appreciate you.” It takes one minute of my time, but I’ve learned how meaningful it can be to people. You try to be better at it and then you inevitably fail. If you were a decent person, you go home and you’re scolding yourself, but it’s been an eye-opening, weird experience.

Villarreal: Well, before we wrap, I know we talked earlier backstage that you’re about halfway through shooting Season 2. What can you share?

Fogelman: I’m really excited about it. I just started editing. Like you said, I show people stuff all too much. And so I’ve just started editing the first two [episodes] and they’re really good.

Villarreal: How soon do things pick up?

Fogelman: Right after. It’s a slightly different show at times in the second season in that part of the season lives outside in the world. We’ve lived almost entirely claustrophobically inside the bunker [so far], and we do live there a lot in [Season 2] and pick up directly from where we left that world. But you’re also living in Sterling’s story and the story of the people he comes across, and those stories eventually collide. It’s a different, exciting show. Shailene Woodley joins the cast this year. I just wrote her a note. She’s extraordinary in the show. I’m really excited for people to see her in it. When you’re doing something different, it’s exciting and daunting, and that’s the best kind of feeling. You’re like, “Oh, I’m not dead inside. I’m very excited about this season.”

Villarreal: Is there something that won’t make sense now but will when we watch?

Fogelman: Elvis.

Villarreal: Any other people from “This Is Us” making an appearance?

Fogelman: Right now, yes, there’s a few. I’m careful about it because I don’t want it to get distracting with Sterling. I did a show called “Galavant,” and one of my actors in it, Tim Omundson, was one of my favorite actors ever, and he had a part in “This Is Us” and now is joining in a part here. There’s another one that I think they’ll yell at me if I announce it, but it’s smaller. I’m always looking at stuff to do with those guys. I just saw Mandy [Moore] and Chris Sullivan the other day, and I’m always looking for stuff for those guys; Milo [Ventimiglia] and Justin [Hartley] and all those guys.

How much can you strip away from the war film and still have a war film?

That question invigorates “The Damned,” the new movie from Roberto Minervini, an Italian-born director who has spent the last 25 years living in America, our worrying cultural undercurrents seeping into his portraits of the marginalized and the discontent, usually documentaries.

“The Damned” represents his first foray into more traditional narrative storytelling, yet this existential drama bears all the hallmarks of his earlier work, less concerned with incident than conjuring a sense of place, time and, most important, a state of being. In his latest, Minervini brings viewers into the thick of the Civil War, only to find the same dazed souls and gnawing uncertainties that have always been his focus. It’s a war film with very little combat, but it’s about a war that still rages today.

Minervini’s naturalistic, observational style is on display from the film’s first scene, which lingers on a pack of wolves meticulously digging into an animal carcass. “The Damned” stays on the images just long enough for them to grow discomforting — when will Minervini cut away? — before introducing us to his anonymous protagonists, a collection of volunteer soldiers in the U.S. Army who have been sent out west in the winter of 1862.

The specifics of the mission are as mysterious as these men’s names as we watch them carry out the minutiae of military busywork. They set up tents. They play cards. They do target practice. Are they meant to represent the hungry wolves from the movie’s opening? Or are they the prey?

To call “The Damned” an antiwar film would be to assign an arbitrary value to what is really a series of offhand episodes consisting of only modest activity. In Minervini’s recent stellar nonfiction projects “The Other Side” and “What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?,” the director collaborated with his subjects to create unvarnished glimpses of everyday lives, sometimes working from prearranged scenarios. Although Minervini is credited as “The Damned’s” screenwriter, his new film draws from a similarly close relationship with his cast, the actors drawing on aspects of their real lives to inform their roles, scenes developing from a loosely sketched-out plot.

In such an intimate, pensive atmosphere, characters emerge gradually out of the rugged landscape like windswept trees or weathered stones. The man identified in the end credits as the Sergeant (Tim Carlson, one of the subjects of Minervini’s 2013 documentary “Stop the Pounding Heart”) is ostensibly the leader, but as the untamed Montana wilderness goes from barren to snowy over an unspecified period of time, the more apparent it becomes that no commanding officer is necessary. The skeletal score by Carlos Alfonso Corral, who doubles as the film’s cinematographer, hints at an elemental menace just over the horizon. But real danger rarely occurs. Instead, these men are trapped in their own heads, their tender, confessional musings about God, war and manhood so rudimentary that they never aspire to the heights of folksy poetry. These soldiers are nothing special — as unimportant as their assignment.

Because Minervini avoids the tropes of the antiwar film — no big speeches, no ponderous metaphors — it’s almost a shock that he allows for one convention, an actual battle scene, which occurs about halfway through the 88-minute runtime. But even here, “The Damned” refuses to follow formula, resulting in an intentionally haphazard sequence as the soldiers are ambushed, the characters fleeing and shooting in every direction, the camera trailing behind them, desperate to keep them in frame. Whether it’s enemy forces or some random buffalo, the movie’s shallow depth of focus ensures that we only see our troops. Everything else resides in a permanently fuzzy, unsettled background, a constant middle distance that traps the characters in their spiritual purgatory.

There are limitations to Minervini’s spartan approach. Whereas his documentary films crackle thanks to his unpredictable interactions with his subjects, “The Damned” cannot help but feel slightly overdetermined, the outcomes predestined rather than organically unearthed. And yet, the concerns he brought to those earlier movies ripple here as well. “The Other Side,” his somber 2015 study of racist drug addicts and gun-toting militia members in rural Louisiana, remains the definitive warning of our modern MAGA age, while 2018’s “What You Gonna Do” prefigures the Black Lives Matter movement.

Now, for the first time, this prescient filmmaker visits America’s distant past, subtly pinpointing the economic inequalities, senseless brutality and thwarted masculinity that will bedevil the nation for the next 160 years. The Civil War is long over, but the country’s divisions remain, those core tensions naggingly unresolved.

Don’t think of “The Damned” as an antiwar film — consider it an origin story for Minervini’s perceptive, understated exploration of an America still in conflict.

For decades, Pixar could hardly miss with its original animated films.

Whether the subject was toys, fish or a cantankerous old man, the Emeryville-based computer animation studio churned out hit after hit.

But since the COVID-19 pandemic, Pixar and other animation studios have struggled to break through at the box office with the same kinds of original movies that defined the industry. Instead, sequels such as “Inside Out 2” have ruled the genre.

This weekend, Walt Disney Co.-owned Pixar will face its latest test with the release of “Elio,” an original film about a young boy who seeks connection with aliens to make up for his loneliness on Earth.

The movie is tracking to bring in $18 million to $25 million in ticket sales from the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend, according to box office analysis. (The film’s reported budget is in the range of $150 million to $200 million.)

That would be considered a soft debut by Pixar standards, indicating the dilemma the animation business — and the movie industry writ large — faces with original content. While audiences often say they want to see new stories, box office ticket sales show they gravitate toward sequels, reboots and other familiar fare.

“You need to be launching new franchises to keep the pipeline fresh,” said Doug Creutz, senior media and entertainment analyst at TD Cowen. “Since the pandemic ended, original animated films have just been getting killed at the box office … no matter how good they are.”

Pixar executives, nonetheless, say they’re committed to telling original stories, which are key to the future health of the industry.

“You wouldn’t have Pixar without ‘Toy Story,’ our first original film 30 years ago!” Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter wrote in an emailed statement. “And while we also love digging into new layers of familiar worlds and characters through our sequels, I’d say there’s a unique thrill in unearthing a new story.”

Disney and Pixar’s previous original movie “Elemental” made just $29.6 million in its opening weekend in 2023, causing many in the industry to write it off as a flop, before strong word-of-mouth reviews propelled the film to a solid worldwide gross of $496 million.

Sister studio Walt Disney Animation Studios has also recently struggled with originals, including 2022’s “Strange World” and 2023’s “Wish.”

The pandemic had a major effect on theatrical attendance for animated films. At the onset, studios including Pixar put their new animated movies on streaming services to give families something to watch during the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and keep people from spreading the disease.

Movies such as 2020’s “Soul,” 2021’s “Luca” and 2022’s “Turning Red” were all sent straight to the Disney+ streaming service. Despite critical acclaim — winning an Academy Award for animated feature — “Soul” grossed just $121.9 million in worldwide theatrical revenue.

Even when movie theaters started reopening, families were slow to return due to health concerns and familiarity with watching movies at home, which dented animated films’ box office potential. Pixar’s 2022 “Toy Story” spinoff “Lightyear” did poorly at the box office partially due to this timing, as well as quality issues, marketing challenges and right-wing backlash to an on-screen kiss between a same-sex couple.

Other studios, too, face challenges with originals.

Universal Pictures’ 2023 original animated movie “Migration” also saw a soft box office total. The same year, Universal grossed more than $1 billion from “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” based on the Nintendo game franchise.

Last year, Universal’s “The Wild Robot,” which is adapted from a 2016 children’s book, debuted to strong reviews, but grossed $333 million in box office revenue, compared with the $492 million reaped by Paramount Pictures’ “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.”

Now family films are ruling the box office.

So far this summer, many of the films that have propelled the box office are family-friendly — Warner Bros. Pictures’ “A Minecraft Movie,” and live-action remakes “Lilo & Stitch” from Disney and “How to Train Your Dragon” from Universal.

Last year, Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” hauled in nearly $1.7 billion in global box office revenue last year, while Universal and Illumination Entertainment’s “Despicable Me 4” grossed $969.6 million worldwide and Disney’s “Moana 2” made $1 billion.

The common denominator among these films? They’re all sequels, reboots or rely on known intellectual property.

But industry insiders and analysts say that simply focusing on new chapters of existing stories risks making the animation space stale.

“If you’re trying to grow the business, you need new content, you need new franchises, you need new things for people to be excited about,” said Creutz of TD Cowen.

But beyond the box office, Pixar original films can get exposure — and drive business — through other parts of the Disney empire. Movies eventually debut on Disney+ and characters will show up on merchandise or in the theme parks, which can expand a film’s reach.

“Pixar is in the long-term business,” said David A. Gross, who writes a movie industry newsletter. “They want to create stories that last, and if that works in bringing back a sequel, great, but there is enormous value for streaming for these pictures, whatever they do in theatrical. There are a lot of revenue streams.”

Pixar intends to release three movies every two years, and the company’s strategy is to make one original for every sequel, company sources said. For instance, “Elio” was intended for release in 2024, but was delayed by the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. Instead, it swapped with “Inside Out 2” since sequels can be easier to move through the production process due to existing assets.

“Pixar was really instrumental in defining the look and the feel and the tone of computer-animated films,” said Christopher Holliday, a senior lecturer in liberal arts and visual cultures education at King’s College London, who wrote a book about computer-animated films.

The company “is now at one of those crossroads where they are trying to balance films that have an audience built into them,” Holliday said. “And then they’re also balancing their identity as a studio of innovation that is pushing the boundaries and the limits of computer animation.”

Next year, Pixar plans to release “Toy Story 5” as well as an original film called “Hoppers” about a new technology that allows humans and animals to communicate. In 2027, Pixar said it will debut “Gatto,” an original movie about a cat with multiple lives.

“We think audiences love originals too,” Docter said. “Sure, it might be a bit harder nowadays to break through all the noise out there, but if we do our jobs, and create something that people will love, we trust that audiences will show up.”

Some of Blake Lively‘s text messages with friend Taylor Swift could be disclosed in court, in a recent development of the actor’s winding legal battle against her “It Ends With Us” co-star Justin Baldoni.

U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman on Wednesday filed an order denying the “Gossip Girl” alumna’s request to keep her messages with Swift out of litigation, according to legal documents reviewed by The Times. “Given that Lively has represented that Swift had knowledge of complaints or discussions about the working environment on the film, among other issues, the requests for messages with Swift regarding the film and this action are reasonably tailored to discover information that would prove or disprove Lively’s harassment and retaliation claims,” reads the order.

Baldoni and his Wayfarer Studios filed a request for production connected to the Lively-Swift texts in February, asking for “‘all documents and communications related to or reflecting Lively’s communications with Taylor Swift” about their 2024 romantic drama and subsequent legal proceedings.

The “It Ends With Us” co-stars have engaged in a legal back-and-forth for months after Lively accused director Baldoni of sexual harassment on the set of the film and accused his team of orchestrating a smear campaign against her in December. The allegations first surfaced in a report from the New York Times. She formally sued Baldoni in federal court on Dec. 31. Baldoni and nine other plaintiffs — including his crisis PR team and executives at Wayfarer Studios — hit back that same day with a $400-million countersuit against Lively and her husband, “Deadpool” star Ryan Reynolds, and a separate defamation complaint against the New York Times.

Liman dismissed Baldoni’s complaints, which failed to meet legal standards, earlier this month. The judge said in his Wednesday order that “Lively’s motion is rooted in the broader concern that the Wayfarer Parties are using demands for communications with Swift not ‘to obtain information relevant to claims and defenses in court, but to prop up a public relations narrative outside of court.’ ”

Wednesday’s order also denied Baldoni’s cross-motion to compel Lively to produce documents connected to the production.

Baldoni’s team subpoenaed Swift earlier this year but eventually withdrew it after the singer and her legal reps dismissed it as an “unwarranted fishing expedition,” according to Variety.

In a statement shared with multiple outlets, a representative for Lively reacted to this week’s order, claiming, “Baldoni’s desire to drag Taylor Swift into this has been constant dating back to August 2024” and is an effort to influence the singer’s fan base. In the past, the devoted league of Swift supporters known as Swifites have banded together to criticize the singer’s high-profile exes and in recent years, rallied against Ticketmaster over allegations of fraud, price-fixing and antitrust violations.

“We will continue to call out Baldoni’s relentless efforts to exploit Ms. Swift’s popularity, which from day one has been nothing more than a distraction from the serious sexual harassment and retaliation accusations he and the Wayfarer parties are facing,” the spokesperson added, according to People.

Representatives for Swift and Baldoni did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Zombies were dormant when screenwriter Alex Garland convinced director Danny Boyle to resurrect the undead — and make them run. The galloping ghouls in their low-budget 2002 thriller “28 Days Later” reinvigorated the genre. There’s now been so many of them that they’ve come to feel moldy. So Garland and Boyle have teamed up again to see if there’s life in these old bones.

There is, albeit sporadically and spasmodically. “28 Years Later,” the first entry of a promised trilogy, has a dull central plot beefed up by unusual ambition, quirky side characters and maniacal editing. It’s a kooky spectacle, a movie that aggressively cuts from moments of philosophy to violence, from pathos to comedy. Tonally, it’s an ungainly creature. From scene to scene, it lurches like the brain doesn’t know what the body is doing. Garland and Boyle don’t want the audience to know either, at least not yet.

The plot picks up nearly three decades into a viral “rage” pandemic that’s isolated the British Isles from the civilized world. A couple hundred people have settled into a safe-enough life on Lindisfarne, an island that’s less than a mile from shore. The tide recedes every day for a few hours, long enough to walk across a narrow strip of causeway to the mainland. Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Isla (Jodie Comer) were young when normality collapsed, roughly the same age as the kids in the film’s cheeky opening flashback who are watching a VHS tape of “Teletubbies” while hearing the screams of their babysitters getting bitten. But these survivors have managed to grow up and become parents themselves. Given their harsh circumstances, Jamie and Isla have called their son Spike.

Name notwithstanding, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) is a sweet kid. When his father slips him a precious ration of bacon, he gives his share to his mother, who now lies weak and confused in an upstairs bedroom. The script pushes too hard to make Spike naive — blank and moldable — instead of what narrative logic tells us he is, the hardscrabble child of two stunted children. His career paths are hunter, forager or watchtower guard, but he seems more like the product of a progressive Montessori school, even with his dad urging him to cackle at shredded deer intestines. When the boy’s not looking, Jamie’s shoulders sag as he trudges up the stairs to Isla’s sickbed, showing us a hint of adult complexities he alone understands.

Spike’s storyline is a fairly simple coming-of-age journey. Once he’s slayed his first infected (“The more you kill, the easier it gets,” his dad gloats), Spike decides to sneak his sick mother to the mainland in search of a mythological being: a general medical practitioner. But straightaway, the movie’s editing (by Jon Harris) starts having a fit, seizing our attention as it splices in herky-jerky black-and-white archival footage of earlier generations of kids marching to protect their homes, both in newsreels and classical retellings including Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of “Henry V.” The chilling electronic score by the Scottish group Young Fathers blurps and drones while an unseen voice recites Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots,” a poem about the grinding Boer War that was first published in 1903, but whose sense of slogging exhaustion sounds just as relevant to us as it would to Beowulf. These theatrics sound fancy, but they play deliberately abrasive and confounding. “28 Days Later” forced the audience to adapt to the ugliness of digital cameras, and despite the years and prestige that Garland and Boyle have accumulated since, they’ve still got a punk streak.

The filmmakers seem to be making the point that our own kinder, gentler idealism is the outlier. Humankind’s natural state is struggle and division. In this evocative setting, with its crumbling castle towers and tattered English flags, we’re elbowed to think of battles, from Brexit to the Vikings, who first attacked the British on this very same island in 793. A 9th century account describes the Lindisfarne massacre as nightmarish scenes of blood and trampling and terror, of “heathen men made lamentable havoc.” Those words could have been recycled into “28 Years Later’s” pitch deck.

As a side note, Lindisfarne remains so small and remote that it doesn’t even have any doctors today. The one we meet, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), doesn’t show up until the last act. But he’s worth the wait, as is the messianic Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), who appears three minutes before the end credits and successfully gets us excited for the sequel, which has already been shot. (Jimmy’s tracksuits and bleached hair are evidence that his understanding of pop culture really did stop at Eminem.) Their characters inject so much energy into the movie that Boyle and Garland seem to be rationing their best material as strictly as Spike denies himself that slice of pork.

This confounding and headstrong movie doesn’t reveal everything it’s after. But it’s an intriguing comment on human progress. The uninfected Brits have had to rewind their society back a millennium. When a Swedish sailor named Erik (Edvin Ryding, marvelous) is forced ashore, he talks down to all the Brits like they’re cavemen. They’ve never even seen an iPhone (although the movie was itself shot on them). Upon seeing a picture of a modern Instagram babe plumped to a Kardashian ripeness, Spike gasps, “What’s wrong with her face?”

The infected ones have regressed further still and they’ve split into two sub-species: the grub-like “slow-low” zombies, who suck up worms with a vile slurp, and the Neanderthalish sprinters who hunt in packs. The fast ones even have an alpha (Chi Lewis-Parry) who is hellbent on taking big strides forward. One funny way he shows it is he’s made a hobby of ripping off his prey’s heads to use their spines as tools, or maybe even as décor.

Dr. Kelson, a shaman, sculptor and anthropologist, insists that even the infected still share a common humanity. “Every skull has had a thought,” he says, stabbing a freshly decapitated one with his pitchfork. He’s made an art of honoring death over these decades and his occasionally hallucinatory sequence is truly emotional, even if Fiennes, smeared with iodine and resembling a jaundiced Colonel Kurtz, made me burst out into giggles at the way he says “placenta.” Yet, I think we’re meant to laugh — he’s the exact mix of smart and silly the film is chasing.

So who, then, are the savages? The infected or us? The film shifts alliances without taking sides (yet). I’m unconvinced that sweetie pie Spike is the protagonist I want to follow for two more movies. But whatever happens, it’s a given that humans will eventually, stubbornly, relentlessly find a way to tear other humans to pieces, as we do in every movie, and just as we’ve done since the first homo sapien went after his rival with a stick. That’s the zombie genre’s visceral power: It reveals that the things that make us feel safe — love, loyalty, civility — are also our weaknesses. “28 Years Later” dares us to devolve.

Millie Bobby Brown was known for her role as Eleven in Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things which aired in 2016 – but she didn’t make her film debut until 2019

Stranger Things fans can prepare to watch Millie Bobby Brown on screen tonight – in a role worlds away from her portrayal as Eleven on the hit Netflix show.

Millie Bobby Brown rose to fame when she starred in the Netflix phenomenon, although it wasn’t the star’s first TV role. Before that, she had minor roles in television series including Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. However, it was her portrayal of Eleven that significantly boosted her career.

A huge name on TV, Millie didn’t make her film debut until 2019, when she made her feature film debut in in the Godzilla sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Now, ITV is set to air the sequel to the film, Godzilla vs. Kong, which was released in 2021.

The movie will air on ITV tomorrow night – with a late start time of 11.45, wrapping up at 1:20am on Friday morning. The feature length film will air straight after the late debate. The film has a run time of 1 hour and 53 minutes, but this will be slightly longer due to the adverts on the channel.

Millie reprised her role as Madison Russell, the daughter of Monarch’s Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) and Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler).

Godzilla vs. Kong is the fourth instalment of the Monsterverse franchise, in which Millie’s character returned.

In the 2021 film, playing on ITV tonight, her character became the main human tied to the Godzilla storyline.

However, the Stranger Things star didn’t appear in the fifth instalment Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and her character is not mentioned in the film.

During filming of Godzilla Vs. Kong, Millie’s co-stars Brian Tyree Henry and Julian Dennison opened up about how much fun she was on set.

“In between takes, [we] would literally sing our hearts out. It was a lot of fun,” said Henry. “She also likes to bark,” he told Metro.

“I don’t know if that was like a moment for her, like a period of a time where she was just into barking,” Dennison added. “But she would just bark like before a take, if she needed energy, she would just go, ‘woof, woof, woof, woof,’” he continued, although he revealed he had “seen worse from actors.”

Millie has continued to star on the big screen, with her latest movie, The Electric State released on Netflix earlier this year.

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Threads.

The movie widely regarded as one of the best sci-fi films ever made and is an absolute must-watch for any fans of the dystopian genre

This year has seen a significant rise in dystopian thrillers, with series like The Last of Us gripping telly viewers and films such as 28 Years Later set to grace the big screen this June. With an abundance of options, it’s easy to feel swamped, but if you’re on the hunt for a true classic of the dystopian genre, I wholeheartedly suggest Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.

I only recently had the pleasure of viewing Children of Men and was riveted from the opening scene. It swiftly climbed the ranks to become one of my all-time favourite films, and I was particularly taken by its peculiar optimism amidst the bleak post-apocalyptic setting.

What Children of Men is about

The world has descended into utter chaos as humanity grapples with impending extinction. The United Kingdom stands as one of the few remaining countries still operational, albeit under an authoritarian regime.

Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a disenchanted former activist, has ceased his resistance and now meanders through life as a civil servant. He’s so disconnected from the world that he barely registers the bombings, caged refugees, and public executions he encounters on his commute.

One day, Theo is abducted by his ex-wife Julian, who heads a rebel faction known as The Fishes, battling against the government for refugee rights. Julian implores Theo to safeguard Kee, a young African refugee, and assist her in escaping the country safely.

However, Theo soon discovers that Kee is astonishingly pregnant, carrying the world’s sole known unborn child. Driven by the need to protect this miracle, he risks everything to keep Kee’s condition under wraps and get her safely to the enigmatic Human Project, scientists seeking a cure for the global fertility crisis.

So why should you watch Children of Men?

Despite its stark backdrop, the film’s protagonist embodies hopefulness in his unwavering dedication to the prospect of a rejuvenated world.

The outpouring of support for Kee amidst such turmoil underscores a compelling truth: even in the bleakest circumstances, human kindness endures, proving that we have not strayed from our compassionate nature.

One of the captivating aspects of Children of Men is how palpably real and weathered its universe feels, peppered with background information gleaned from transient news reports, advertisements, and leaflets—a testament to the environment’s rich storytelling texture.

Packed with nuances, Children of Men invites viewers to engage deeply, promising new discoveries upon every viewing.

What critics are saying about Children of Men

Boasting an impressive 92% Rotten Tomatoes rating from over 250 critic reviews, Children of Men was also in the Oscar race for three categories (Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing) back in 2007.

Brian Tallerico of UGO hailed it as “feels more relevant than almost every film set in the present day and is better than almost every other film made this year.”

Kathi Maio from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction remarked: “This is one movie that will have a lasting impact even if you are forced to watch it on a ten-inch black and white Zenith.”

Peter Travers, writing for Rolling Stone at the time, placed it as the runner-up in his best films of the 2000s list, commenting: “No movie this decade was more redolent of sorrowful beauty and exhilarating action. You don’t just watch the car ambush scene (pure camera wizardry)-you live inside it. That’s Cuarón’s magic: He makes you believe.”

Where to watch Children of Men

The film can be streamed on Apple TV’s £8.99 monthly subscription or via Now TV’s £9.99 a month Cinema membership. You can also purchase Children of Men on Amazon Prime for £5.99.

As Mayela got off the bus, she saw Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raiding the pupusería she worked at in Los Angeles. The undocumented transgender Salvadoran woman watched from behind a car as her co-workers — including another trans Central American woman — were handcuffed and taken away in broad daylight.

“I had so much hope when I arrived to this country,” Mayela, played by Fernanda Celarie, says in her prayers later on. “Now that I’ve begun to feel comfortable living here, this is a nightmare. Why so much pain and suffering?”

“Trans Los Angeles” director Kase Peña wrote that scene into her feature film well before the ongoing ICE raids and subsequent protests in L.A., but the harsh reality of fear for the many undocumented people of the city was something she knew she needed to include.

“When I wrote it in 2021, ICE was a hot subject, and then it died down,” Peña told said ahead of her film’s premiere at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival on May 30. “My film was always relevant and needed. The fact that who we have in the White House right now makes my film even more relevant, more needed now that he’s brought the ICE thing back. That part [of the movie] is not going to look old. It’s unfortunate, but that’s going on.”

This is what Peña set out to do with her feature-length movie, which is composed of three non-overlapping vignettes sharing a wide-ranging set of experiences that Angelenos face daily.

Born and raised in New York, the Dominican American director moved to L.A. nearly a decade ago and was inspired to make her film after noticing a lack of representation for trans stories that reflected the realities of her community.

“When I started hanging with my trans community here in Los Angeles, my intentions were not to tell those stories,” Peña said. “It was something that I felt like there’s a void here, and I’m the right person to tell it because I’m both a filmmaker and a trans person.”

While the storylines of “Trans Los Angeles” drew inspiration from Peña’s personal experiences and fellow members of the trans community‘s stories, the film’s format was influenced by global cinema.

The director pulled from the seminal Soviet/Cuban political work “Soy Cuba” to land on the vignette structure of her film. She had originally wanted to mirror the 1964 movie’s four episodes but was unable to secure funding — a common dilemma faced by truly independent filmmakers — for her fourth snippet, which centered on a transmasculine character.

“A lot of people ask you questions like, ‘Why don’t the stories intertwine?’ It’s because it makes my life more difficult as an independent filmmaker,” she noted. “If you give me a million dollars, I can make the stories intertwined, but I was only getting enough money to shoot one segment at a time. I didn’t have money to shoot all three segments.”

These restraints forced “Trans Los Angeles” to be filmed over the course of several years. The first vignette, “Period,” was shot in March 2021; “Feliz Cumpleaños” was filmed soon after in June; “Trans Day of Remembrance” had to be pushed due to finances and was eventually recorded in November 2023 on Peña’s iPhone. That last segment was shot using “stolen locations” for exterior scene — the crew showed up to a spot and recorded without having film permits or insurance.

“That’s one reason why I decided to shoot it with my iPhone,” she said of the guerrilla filmmaking strategy. “If somebody would have came to me and said, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing over there?’ [We’d say] we’re just shooting something for Instagram on my iPhone. They’d be like, ‘Oh, OK.’”

The vignette “Period” centers on Vergara, a formerly incarcerated trans Latinx woman played by actor and model Carmen Carrera. The character lands a job as a nanny to a preteen girl while doing sex work on the side.

Carrera says she was drawn to the project because Peña’s script allowed her to portray a three-dimensional character.

“That is valuable because oftentimes us trans people are told that we’re not valuable, or that we’re wrong for existing, or that we shouldn’t be around kids, or we shouldn’t have responsibility or be people who are a contributing factor to society,” Carrera told said. . “It’s a reflection of my own life too. I am an active girlfriend, I am an active daughter, I’m an active sister. The trans experience is just a small part of my life. It’s not the totality of my human experience. I was just happy I felt more related to Vergara because it’s how I have always felt as well. In my own life, people judge me all the time.”

Another aspect of “Period” that connected Carrera to Vergara was the character’s relationship with her mother.

“I think as a first-generation American, you have that extra layer of [thinking], ‘My parents came to this country and sacrificed so much, and if I don’t make them proud it’s gonna be a waste,’ ” she said.

Central to the plot of “Period” was the community that Vergara was able to tap into thanks to the TransLatin@ Coalition, a real-life advocacy group based out of L.A. that seeks to create safe spaces for transgender, gender expansive and intersex immigrant women in the city.

“The reason the TransLatin@ Coalition is in the film is because that came from me,” Peña said. “I in real life have gone to TransLatin@ to seek the services that they provide for trans people of color. Because I’m a writer and I go there, I see this place and I’m like, ‘I can tell the story and include them.’ ”

The second segment of the feature, “Trans Day of Remembrance,” is named after the annual day of observance on Nov. 20 of those whose lives were lost due to transphobia.

The story follows Phoebe (Austria Wang), a Taiwanese American transgender woman, as she maneuvers her romantic life and processes the death of one of her fellow trans friends. For this vignette, Peña intentionally cast transmasculine actor Jordan Gonzalez to play Phoebe’s cis boyfriend, Sam. .

“We’ve had cisgender people play trans roles, and it’s the first time [Gonzalez has played a cisgender role]. It was something that they’ve been wanting to do for a while, but this industry doesn’t see them as that, because they only see them as trans,” Peña said. “It was something that they yearned for and perhaps now, because they’ve done it, other people would consider casting them that way too.”

The final segment, “Feliz Cumpleaños,” portrays an ICE raid on a Salvadoran business while telling the story of Mayela’s hopes and aspirations for her life as she prepares for her baptism at an LGBTQ+ friendly church.

As an outsider to the Salvadoran experience, Peña leaned on actual members of the Central American country to adjust and approve of her script.

“I want to acknowledge that I’m not from El Salvador. As a person of color, as a Dominican filmmaker, as a transgender filmmaker, I have often seen filmmakers from other communities come and tell my story, and they don’t check in,” Peña explained. “They think they can just write it. They don’t get it right sometimes, and then they go win major awards. I didn’t want to disrespect the community like that.”

Peña emphasizes that the movie tells stories that get to the heart of the struggle and beauty of being human in L.A.

But ultimately her film is only a slice of the overall trans experience, she says, a unique series of stories informed by a writer whose ethos can be encapsulated in her own views on her own trans identity.

“For me, being transgender is not about passing. Being transgender is about having the freedom to be who you are,” Peña said. “I’m not trying to look like a woman. This is me. That’s it, whatever that means.”

Whether soaring through the sky or sharing a playful moment with his human bestie Hiccup, Toothless, the dark-hued dragon with a friendly face and an injured tail, disarms you with his endearing nature.

It’s no surprise that he’s become the emblem of the “How to Train Your Dragon” animated movies, the first of which arrived in 2010. (There have since been two sequels, three separate TV series and five shorts.) A fan favorite among Gen-Z viewers, Toothless now returns to the big screen in a new hyper-realist iteration for the live-action remake, now in theaters.

And in an unprecedented move, Dean DeBlois, who directed all three “Dragon” animated films — as well as 2002’s original “Lilo & Stitch,” along with Chris Sanders — was asked to helm the live-action reimagining. It was his priority to preserve Toothless’ essence.

“He is our most recognizable dragon within the entire assortment,” DeBlois says on the phone. “And he has a lot of sentience and personality that comes through. And so much of it is expressed in this face that’s quite Stitch-like with the big eyes, the ear plates and the broad mouth.”

In fact, the entire live-action endeavor hinged on whether Toothless could be properly translated as a photorealistic dragon among human actors and physical sets, while retaining the charm of the animated movies.

An image from the original 2010 animated “How to Train Your Dragon.”

(DreamWorks Animation LLC)

According to Christian Manz, the new film’s visual effects supervisor, when Peter Cramer, president of Universal Pictures, initially considered the project back in 2022, he wasn’t convinced Toothless would work. His touchstone for a fantastical creature that successfully achieved believability was the Hippogriff, a winged four-legged creature seen in 2004’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”

To test the viability of a new Toothless, DreamWorks enlisted British visual effects and computer animation outfit Framestore to spend three months trying to create a “realistic” version of Toothless. Framestore has had some popular successes to its name: Paddington Bear in the film series, Dobby from the “Harry Potter” universe and Groot and Rocket Raccoon from the Marvel movies.

“We always knew that we weren’t aiming for a real dragon, as in a ‘Game of Thrones’ dragon,” says Manz, via video call from the U.K.

Toothless’ design, particularly his facial features, presented a challenge for Manz and the team at Framestore. If they made his eyes or his mouth too small or if they tried to drastically reshape his head with more naturalism in mind, he quickly lost his personality.

“His big, expressive face with eyes that are larger than any animal in the animal kingdom, including the blue whale, had to remain because, without them, we felt like we were going to be delivering a lesser version of Toothless,” says DeBlois.

A stage show based on the first film called “How to Train Your Dragon: Live Spectacular,” which toured Australia and New Zealand in 2012, radically changed the design — to a mixed response. “Toothless was too creature-like and it just wasn’t as appealing and as charming,” says Simon Otto, head of character animation for all three animated movies, via Zoom.

While they may be too subtle for an untrained viewer to notice, certain design changes have been made that differentiate the live-action Toothless from his animated counterpart.

“He’s now bigger, his head’s smaller, his eyes are actually smaller,” says Manz. The nuanced reshaping of his head and his body was intentional: an effort to make him blend into a photorealistic world.

“The interesting thing is that when people see the live-action movie, they say, ‘Oh, it’s Toothless, like he stepped out of the animated movie,’” says DeBlois. “But in truth, if you put them side by side, you’ll see quite a few differences.”

The texture of Toothless’ body needed to be more intricate for the live-action version, so he would feel more convincingly integrated within the environments.

“In the animation, he’s quite smooth,” says Manz. “We tried very snake-like skin, but it just made him look very unfriendly. You wouldn’t want to put your hand on his forehead.”

Mason Thames in “How to Train Your Dragon.”

(Universal Pictures)

Both on-screen versions of Toothless were crafted using essentially the same digital technique: computer animation. The difference here is that the one meant to share space with a flesh-and-blood world, with distinct aesthetic concerns. Even if seeking realism in creatures that only exist in our imagination might seem counterintuitive, the goal is to make them feel palpable within their made-up realm.

“One of the things I don’t like about live-action remakes is they seem to try to want to replace the animated source, and I find myself very protective of it,” says DeBlois with refreshing candor. “We tried to create a version that lives alongside it. It follows the beats of that original story, but brings new depths and expanded mythology and more immersive action moments and flying. But it’s never trying to replace the animated movie because I’m very proud of that film.”

Toothless as we now know him originated expressly for the screen. The Toothless in Cressida Cowell’s originating book series is tiny and green (a design that can be seen in the first animated movie in the form of a minuscule dragon known as Terrible Terror).

But when DeBlois and Sanders came aboard, 15 months before the 2010 release, replacing the previous directors, their first major change was to make Toothless a dragon that could be ridden.

It was the screensaver of a black panther that first inspired the look of Toothless in the animated films. Otto, one of the designers who knows Toothless best (he drew the original back in 2008), recalls his real-world animal references.

“He is a mix between a bird of prey, like a peregrine falcon, with extremely streamlined shapes — of course a feline but also a Mexican salamander called an axolotl,” Otto says. Sanders’ design for Disney superstar Stitch, namely his large almond-shaped eyes, ears and pronounced mouth, also influenced the design.

“There’s a little bit of a design influence from Stitch in Toothless’ face that makes them feel like they’re distant cousins,” says DeBlois.

He believes that making Toothless more closely resemble a mammal, rather than a reptile, and giving him pet-like qualities were the keys for him becoming so memorable.

“[We] spent a lot of time on YouTube looking at videos of dogs and cats doing funny things,” he says. “And we would try to incorporate a lot of that behavior into Toothless with the hopes that when people watched the movie, they would say, ‘That’s just like my cat’ or ‘My dog does that.’ We wanted him to feel like a big pet. Ferocious and dangerous at first, but then a big cuddly cat after.”

Mason Thames interacts on set with the puppet version of Toothless.

(Helen Sloan)

On the set of the live-action movie, Toothless and the other dragons existed as large puppets with simple functions, operated by a team of master puppeteers led by Tom Wilton, a performer who had worked on the “War Horse” stage play.

Using puppets was meant to provide the actors, especially Mason Thames, who plays Hiccup, a real-world scene partner. The Toothless foam puppet had an articulated jaw and articulated ear plates that allowed for a subtle, interactive performance.

“There’s a performance that Dean can direct and that Mason and the other actors could act against, so that the interaction is utterly believable,” says Manz. “[The puppets] are obviously removed from the frame in the end, but it just means you believe that connection.”

As for the impressive flight sequences, in which Hiccup rides Toothless, the production created an animatronic dragon placed on a giant gimbal that moved on six different axes to simulate the physics of flying.

“If the dragon was diving or ascending or banking and rolling, Mason would be thrown around in the saddle, like a jockey on a racehorse,” says DeBlois. “And it married him to the animal in a way that felt really authentic.”

Mason Thames rides the flying Toothless on an animatronic model.

(Helen Sloan)

For all his success in the animated realm, DeBlois has never directed a live-action film until now.

“I do commend Universal for taking a risk on me knowing that I had not made a live-action film, but also recognizing that I knew where the heart and the wonder was, and I was determined to bring it to the screen,” he says.

Otto, the designer who trained Toothless before anybody else, candidly says he would have “peed his pants” if he knew the drawings he did back in 2008 would spawn a franchise and a theme-park attraction (a re-creation of the films’ Isle of Berk opened at Universal Studios Florida earlier this year).

“The most critical choice they made for the live-action was making sure the audience falls in love with Toothless,” he adds. “And that you understand that if you have a creature like that as your friend, you wouldn’t give up on it.”

Politicians typically don’t mind campaign documentaries, because a race is a road show and the camera is a practice run for the performance part of the gig. Having a lens on what postelection governance looks like, however, is a rarity in nonfiction, which makes “Prime Minister” something of a unicorn: an intimate view inside the consequential, galvanizing five-year administration of New Zealand’s progressive leader Jacinda Ardern, who also became a first-time mother simultaneous to taking her country’s highest seat of power.

Of course, partnering with someone who has behind-closed-doors access is a terrific asset, and co-directors Michelle Walshe and Lindsay Utz have a key one in Ardern’s partner and now husband Clarke Gayford, one of the film’s cinematographers (and sometimes its most humorously hesitant interviewer, especially when your formidable girlfriend has had a tough day). Despite the laughable scrutiny Ardern endured from critics about whether a new mom could govern (or whether a head of state should “mommy”), “Prime Minister” makes clear in its many relatable domestic scenes featuring new daughter Neve (who’s adorable) that such questions are ridiculous.

The point made by the filmmakers is that the job of looking after a country’s people — and the mix of love and steel required to personally care for a child — might just go hand in hand. We certainly know which looming responsibility triggered the most reluctance in Ardern, as early on we watch the special minority coalition circumstances in 2017 that thrust a then-37-year-old Ardern from opposition-party leader to prime minister in only two months.

For Ardern, an articulate spokesperson of heart and mind, it was an unexpected chance to effect change on a platform of issues that mattered to her. That opportunity was greater than any personal doubts she may have had, including a nagging sense of impostor syndrome. As she says, “I could only be myself.”

Which means: compassionate, wry and unbowed. Ardern was quick-witted enough to sparkle on Stephen Colbert and shrewd enough to pass effective climate change legislation and protect a woman’s right to choose. “Prime Minister” is not be that interested in wrangling, dealing and lawmaking, or even the nuts and bolts of her progressive views. (You crave more scenes of her debating — she seems especially strong at it.) But in the fleet, pacey manner of the editing, toggling between private and public moments with highlight-reel efficiency, the film is a stirring glimpse of top-down kindness as a winning leadership style. After the Christchurch tragedies, twin shootings that took 51 lives, she showed the most heartfelt empathy, then knuckled down and got assault weapons off the streets. Tears beget toughness.

Ardern is so appealing, her manner so purposeful despite her admitted anxieties, that her struggle to respond forcefully and humanely to the pandemic — then endure threatening protests fueled by American-grown disinformation — is hard to watch. She became a rageful minority’s easy target, exemplary COVID management statistics be damned. Stepping down in 2023, Ardern sacrificied power for her own sanity. (One wonders if 21st-century leadership is just too chaotic for thoughtful people — and only suited to megalomaniacs.)

“Prime Minister” is an essential political portrait in how it seeds optimism and concern, leaving you with hope that more Jacinda Arderns are in the wings ready to enshrine common sense, despite the risks. There’s no doubt that when it mattered most, her high-wattage sensitivity was a towering strength. As showcased in this film, it’s a precious resource we could use a lot more of.

“Hacks” won the comedy series Emmy last year on the strength of a campaign that proclaimed: Vote for us! We’re actually a comedy (unlike, you know, “The Bear”).

So what happens this year when the show stopped being funny?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter. There’s not much to laugh about these days, so let’s pick our spots and consider the TV series vying for television’s top award.

‘Hacks’ Season 4 leaves room for a new winner

Let me just say at the outset that I enjoy “Hacks.” And like everyone else on the planet, I adore Jean Smart and appreciate that Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky created a role worthy of her talents. Comparing notes with Smart on the best sad sing-along songs is a memory I’ll always treasure, and even inspired me for a time to dip back into listening to “love songs on the Coast.”

At its essence, “Hacks” is a love story between Smart’s stand-up legend Deborah Vance and Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), the young writer who helped Deborah reinvent her career. They come from different generations and possess distinct comic sensibilities. They fight, hurt each other, separate and ultimately reunite after realizing that they’re better together. They get each other. Or at least, Ava gets Deborah. And that’s enough because Deborah is the star and she doesn’t really need to bother understanding Ava’s Gen Z peculiarities. She can just roll her eyes.

Their mutual dependence is believable enough. They both live for work. So much so that at the end of “Hacks’” third season, Ava has blackmailed Deborah, an act that lands her the head writer job that Deborah had promised to give her on her late-night talk show. Ava was but the learner, now she’s the master. Well played, Dark Lady of the Sith.

It was, as our old friend Jeff Probst would say, an epic blindside, and you can understand why this current season would begin with bitter acrimony between the two women, a situation so toxic that the network brought in a human resources rep to keep them from harming each other.

The animosity wasn’t fun to watch. The tone was shrill and off-putting. Was there a joke that landed in the season’s first half? I don’t remember one, but maybe that’s because I was curled up in a fetal position watching the plot unfold.

At least amid the drama of “The Bear,” I could get some some inspiration for a good set of kitchen knives.

Julianne Nicholson’s “Dance Mom” was a bright spot of “Hacks” Season 4.

(Max)

Of course, Deborah and Ava got back together, which was a relief because that HR lady was annoying. The season’s penultimate episode was ridiculous, but in all the best ways, surprising and emotionally satisfying. Helen Hunt finally scored a big moment. And Julianne Nicholson showed some moves as Dance Mom that I never imagined her possessing. Get that character to rehab and into Season 5.

Yes, “Hacks” can still entertain. Even the anticlimactic final episode gave Smart the opportunity to play boozy and bored, showcasing her depth as a dramatic actor. One would think that after what transpired, Deborah would have more opportunities, even with a noncompete clause, to parlay her ethical stance into something more meaningful than a sad casino gig in Singapore. But the finale set up one final comeback — final because “Hacks” was pitched with a five-season arc. And we’re on the doorstep.

At least they won’t have to contrive to separate Ava and Deborah again.

So, by all means, nominate “Hacks” for comedy series again. I’d rather rewatch it than nod off during the tepid “Four Seasons.” And maybe since the show’s creators have known (since 2015) what the final scene will be, we’ll have a persuasive fifth season possessing the energy of a great Deborah Vance comeback.

In the meantime, keep last year’s mandate going and give the Emmy to a show that was consistently funny.

Give the Emmy to “The Studio.”

Read more coverage of the Emmy comedy race

For more than a quarter century, director Kevin Smith has tried to resurrect “Dogma,” his religious satire about two fallen angels looking to get back into heaven. Recently, his prayers for the 1999 comedy were finally answered.

On Thursday, the movie got a theatrical re-release across 1,500 AMC Theatres screens in honor of its 25th anniversary. Technically, the milestone was last year. But the second coming of a movie that brought us one of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s best on-screen collaborations and an A-list comedic ensemble — including George Carlin, Chris Rock, Janeane Garofalo and Alan Rickman — not to mention the meme-worthy, winking “Buddy Christ,” warrants a long-awaited hallelujah.

“It’s got a good legacy to it,” Smith said of the film. “It’s become the ‘umbrella film’ for me. The umbrella film is the movie that no matter what you do, even if you make s— that people don’t like, they won’t crucify you — pun intended — because you made a movie that they like.”

“To me, it plays like a kid really trying to celebrate his faith after having grown up in a church where every Sunday, everyone seemed to be mourning it. … It’s a love letter to spirituality,” Kevin Smith said about “Dogma.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Though the sparkling period of Smith’s career is largely defined by 1994’s “Clerks” and 1997’s “Chasing Amy,” his fourth film, “Dogma,” steeped in irreverence and hilarity centered around his former Catholic faith, is still considered one of his classics. The movie debuted at Cannes in 1999. He returned to the renowned film festival last month, when the comedy played in the Cannes Classics section, just days before sitting down with The Times on camera to discuss “Dogma’s” whirlwind re-release. In the interview, the director, writer and actor recounts how the movie was saved by filmmaker and actor Alessandra Williams, who raised money to buy the film from Miramax earlier this year, decades after it was acquired and shelved by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein sold Smith’s film, along with a trove of others, to Williams to help pay for his legal defense, Smith said.

In collaboration with Iconic Events, the film has since been remastered in 4K for its screening tour and is being shown in select AMC theaters. Smith is well-seasoned when it comes to touring his old films, pairing the screenings with Q&As and stand-up performances throughout the live presentations. It took little time for him to book a sold-out, 20-city tour aimed at getting fans fired up to come see “Dogma” once again under much different (and safer) circumstances.

“Even with getting people aware of the movie this time around, it’s not as fraught with peril as it was back in the day,” Smith said, referring to the death threats, protests and 400,000 pieces of hate mail he said the movie garnered from Christian extremists who denounced what they believed to be the film’s mockery of their faith.

“You Jews better take that money you stole from us and start investing in flak jackets,” Smith said while closing his eyes and reciting one of the letters from memory. “We’re coming because we’re coming in there with shotguns. Signed, Your Brothers in Christ.”

Though the controversy of the film has definitely waned, the inspiration behind the film remains steadfast, Smith said. “To me, it plays like a kid really trying to celebrate his faith after having grown up in a church where every Sunday, everyone seemed to be mourning it. So I think [people hopefully see it] for what it is. It’s a love letter to spirituality.”

When “Good Night, and Good Luck” arrived on Broadway this spring, it initially provoked a surprising amount of cynicism. There were complaints that the adaptation by George Clooney and Grant Heslov was basically a reproduction of the 2005 film, which chronicled CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s heroic crusade against Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.

The sky-high cost of tickets was another source of criticism. Was Broadway pricing itself beyond the reach of its core audience? Reports of “Good Night, and Good Luck” shattering box office records served to remind those who couldn’t afford a ticket that they were being left behind by a theater culture that was siding with the haves over the have-nots.

In a Broadway season that featured Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in a rudderless “Othello” and Kieran Culkin in a “Glengarry Glen Ross” revival that might have been stronger without him, “Good Night, and Good Luck” was a convenient target for anti-Hollywood sentiment.

When I arrived at the Winter Garden for a Saturday matinee in April, I can’t say my expectations were especially high. I admired the film but hadn’t seen it in nearly 20 years. The broodingly elegant production, sharply directed by David Cromer and starring a quietly committed Clooney in the role of Murrow (played in the film by David Strathairn), was not only one of the most stirring offerings of the Broadway season but also one of the most necessary.

I left the theater wishing I could buy tickets for my friends and family. That won’t be necessary — thankfully for my credit cards — because CNN will be broadcasting a live performance of “Good Night, and Good Luck” from the Winter Garden on Saturday (4 p.m. PDT). It’s apparently the first time a Broadway play will be shown live on television, and the timing could not be better.

As media companies face a campaign of intimidation from the Trump administration, the figure of Murrow, standing tall in the face of demagogic adversity, is the courageous example we need right now.

I don’t know how different the experience will be watching at home, but “Good Night, and Good Luck” made me reflect on what theatergoing might have been like in ancient Greece. Athenian citizens would gather at an open-air theater as a democratic privilege and responsibility. Playwrights addressed the polis not by dramatizing current events but by recasting tales from the mythological and historic past to sharpen critical thinking on contemporary concerns.

Clooney and Heslov aren’t writing dramatic poetry. Their more straightforward approach is closer to documentary drama, but the effect is not so disparate. We are affirmed in the knowledge that we are the body politic.

CNN will broadcast the penultimate performance of “Good Night, and Good Luck” on the eve of the Tony Awards. The production is up for five Tonys, including one for Clooney in the lead performance by an actor in a play category. But however the awards shake out, Clooney is already a winner. Like Murrow, he reminds us that conscience can still be a defining feature of the American character.

Saturday afternoon out west and evening back east, as citizens faced off against ICE agents in the streets of Los Angeles, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s 2005 dramatic film tribute to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, became a Major Television Event, broadcast live from Manhattan’s Winter Garden Theater, by CNN and Max. That it was made available free to anyone with an internet connection, via the CNN website, was a nice gesture to theater fans, Clooney stans and anyone interested to see how a movie about television translates into a play about television.

The broadcast is being ballyhooed as historic, the first time a play has been aired live from Broadway. And while there is no arguing with that fact, performances of plays have been recorded onstage before, and are being so now. It’s a great practice; I wish it were done more often. At the moment, PBS.org is streaming recent productions of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate!,” the Bob Dylan-scored “Girl From the North Country,” David Henry Hwang‘s “Yellow Face” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning mental health rock musical “Next to Normal.” Britain’s National Theater at Home subscription service offers a wealth of classical and modern plays, including Andrew Scott’s one-man “Vanya,” as hot a ticket in New York this spring as Clooney’s play. And the archives run deep; that a trip to YouTube can deliver you Richard Burton’s “Hamlet” or “Sunday in the Park With George” with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters is a gift not to be overlooked.

Clooney, with co-star Anthony Edwards, had earlier been behind a live broadcast of “Ambush,” the fourth season opener of “ER” as a throwback to the particular seat-of-your-pants, walking-on-a-wire energy of 1950s television. (It was performed twice, once for the East and once for the West Coast.) That it earned an audience of 42.71 million, breaking a couple of records in the bargain, suggests that, from a commercial perspective, it was not at all a bad idea. (Reviews were mixed, but critics don’t know everything.)

Like that episode, the “live” element of Saturday’s broadcast was essentially a stunt, though one that ensured, at least, that no post-production editing has been applied, and that if anyone blew a line, or the house was invaded by heckling MAGA hats, or simply disrupted by audience members who regarded the enormous price they paid for a ticket as a license to chatter through the show, it would presumably have been part of the broadcast. None of that happened — but, it could have! (Clooney did stumble over “simple,” but that’s all I caught.) And, it offered the groundlings at home the chance to see a much-discussed, well-reviewed production only a relatively few were able to see in person — which I applaud on principal and enjoyed in practice — and which will very probably not come again, not counting the next day’s final performance.

Glenn Fleshler, left, plays Fred Friendly in the stage production, a role that George Clooney performed in the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

(Emilio Madrid)

The film, directed by Clooney and co-written with Grant Heslov (who co-wrote the stage version as well), featured the actor as producer and ally Fred W. Friendly to David Strathairn’s memorable Murrow. Here, a more aggressive Clooney takes the Murrow role, while Glenn Fleshler plays Friendly. Released during the second term of the Bush administration, the movie was a meditation on the state of things through the prism of 1954 (and a famous framing speech from 1958 about the possibilities and potential failures of television), the fear-fueled demagoguery of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Murrow’s determination to take him on. (The 1954 “See It Now” episode, “A Report on Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” helped bring about his end.) As in the film, McCarthy is represented entirely through projected film clips, echoing the way that Murrow impeached the senator with his own words.

It’s a combination of political and backstage drama — with a soupcon of office romance, represented by the secretly married Wershbas (Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson) — even more hermetically set within the confines of CBS News than was the film. It felt relevant in 2005, before the influence of network news was dissolved in the acid of the internet and an administration began assaulting the legitimate press with threats and lawsuits; but the play’s discussions of habeas corpus, due process, self-censoring media and the both-sides-ism that seems increasingly to afflict modern media feel queasily contemporary. “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument,” says Clooney’s Murrow to his boss, William F. Paley (an excellent Paul Gross, from the great “Slings & Arrows”). As was shown here, Murrow offered McCarthy equal time on “See It Now” — which he hosted alongside the celebrity-focused “Person to Person,” represented by an interview with Liberace — but it proved largely a rope for the senator to hang himself.

Though modern stage productions, with their computer-controlled modular parts, can replicate the rhythms and scene changes of a film, there are obvious differences between a movie, where camera angles and editing drive the story. It’s an illusion of life, stitched together from bits and pieces. A stage play proceeds in real time and offers a single view (differing, of course, depending on where one sits), within which you direct your attention as you will. What illusions it offers are, as it were, stage magic. It’s choreographed, like a dance, which actors must repeat night after night, putting feeling into lines they may speak to one another, but send out to the farthest corners of the theater.

Clooney, whose furrowed brow is a good match for Murrow’s, did not attempt to imitate him, or perhaps did within the limits of theatrical delivery; he was serious and effective in the role if not achieving the quiet perfection of Strathairn’s performance. Scott Pask‘s set was an ingenious moving modular arrangement of office spaces, backed by a control room, highlighted or darkened as needs be; a raised platform stage left supported the jazz group and vocalist, which, as in the movie, performed songs whose lyrics at times commented slyly on the action. Though television squashed the production into two dimensions, the broadcast nevertheless felt real and exciting; director David Comer let the camera play on the players, rather than trying for a cinematic effect through an excess of close-ups and cutaways.

While the play generally followed the lines of the film, there was some rearrangement of scenes, reassignment of dialogue — it was a streamlined cast — and interpolations to make a point, or more directly pitch to 2025. New York news anchor Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg, very moving in the only role with an emotional arc) described feeling “hijacked … as if all the reasonable people went to Europe and left us behind,” getting a big reaction. One character wondered about opening “the door to news with a dash of commentary — what happens when it isn’t Edward R. Murrow minding the store?” A rapid montage of clips tracking the decay of TV news and politics — including Obama’s tan suit kerfuffle and the barring of AP for not bowing to Trump’s Gulf of America edit and ending with Elon Musk’s notorious straight-arm gesture, looking like nothing so much as a Nazi salute — was flown into Clooney’s final speech.

Last but not least, there is the audience, your stand-ins at the Winter Garden Theatre, which laughed at the jokes and applauded the big speeches, transcribed from Murrow’s own. And then, the curtain call, to remind you that whatever came before, the actors are fine, drinking in your appreciation and sending you out happy and exhilarated and perhaps full of hope.

A CNN roundtable followed to bring you back to Earth.

A Hugh Grant classic from the 1990s is now available

A beloved Hugh Grant rom-com has just become available on BBC iPlayer, offering viewers the chance to fall in love with the classic all over again for free, reports Surrey Live.

Released in 1994, amid the golden era of British romantic comedies, the film was penned by renowned screenwriter Richard Curtis.

Hugh Grant, who was a fresh-faced 32 year old teetering on the edge of quitting his acting career, found the script transformative and took on the leading role that would define his future.

His performance turned him into a household name in Hollywood and opened the door to an eclectic mix of roles ranging from the American horror flick Heretic to the family favourite Paddington.

One particularly impressed cinema-goer shared on Rotten Tomatoes: “This is absolutely the best film of Hugh Grant’s career.”

Another fan commented: “A Classic of 1990’s British cinema [sic].”

One viewer reflected: “Simply a charming movie. It gives you a slice of life about love and relationships and makes you realise that it is never too late to go for the person you love amidst all missed opportunities in the past.”

An additional admirer remarked: “This film still holds up. Grant is at his absolute peak of charm before he reinvented smarm, Scott Thomas is divine, as and MacDowell’s performance is surprisingly great on rewatch. And it includes one of the all time great gay moments in film history. No spoilers.

“Richard Curtis is a godsend to modern romantic comedy fans because he is one of the few artists still able to get films produced within this genre and to write pretty funny screenplays too,” praised another cinema-goer.

Four Weddings and a Funeral was an absolute smash when it hit cinemas, starring Hugh Grant as the bashful Charles who falls head over heels for the lively American Carrie, played by Andie MacDowell.

The film traced the tumultuous journey to love for Charles and Carrie, set against the backdrop of his friends’ own romantic escapades.

Boasting a stellar ensemble cast, Four Weddings and a Funeral featured the likes of Kristin Scott Thomas, Simon Callow, James Fleet, Rowan Atkinson, David Haig, and Anna Chancellor.

It’s rumoured that writer Richard Curtis drew inspiration for the screenplay from his personal encounters at weddings, including a proposition he declined, only to regret it later.

The partnership between Grant and Curtis on Four Weddings and a Funeral marked the start of a fruitful collaboration, which continued with hits like Notting Hill in 1999, Bridget Jones’s Diary in 2001, and Love Actually in 2003.

Their collective efforts helped catapult British romantic comedies onto the world stage, setting a high bar that many subsequent films have struggled to reach.

Just last year, Grant had the honour of presenting Curtis with an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards, a nod to the writer’s impressive body of work.

Before presenting the award, Grant quipped: “[My agent] sent me this very good script and it had a great part and it was called Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

I went to the audition and, frankly, I was rather good because the director Mike Newell liked me and wanted me and the producer liked me and wanted me and the money people wanted me. “”The only person who didn’t want me and, in fact, took such an instant violent dislike to me, that he did everything in his power to stop me getting the part, was the writer, and it is this a***hole who we are going to honour tonight.”

His joke had the audience, including Curtis, in fits of laughter.

Most recently, Grant reprised his iconic role as Daniel Cleaver for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, marking a return to romcoms.

Four Weddings and a Funeral is streaming on the BBC iPlayer now