In this epic battle of nature versus nurture, nature has won.
The third season finale of FX’s vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows saw the death of energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) as well as his rebirth into a slimy, screaming, and time-consuming infant. The most recent fourth season saw him grow quickly from there, going from an energetic toddler to a tap-dancing tween to a sullen teen within a season.
All of this happened while his de facto parents, the more canonical blood-sucking vampire Laszlo (Matt Berry) and the vampires’ human bodyguard, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), tried to keep this version of their roommate from becoming like his annoying and frustrating predecessor: a supernatural being who gains energy by draining you of yours.
But that season finale, titled—what else for an episode about vampire parenting?—“Sunrise, Sunset,” saw Colin Robinson complete his metamorphosis into the grating-voiced and flatulent creature whom his housemates already knew. (The character is always referred to by both his first and last names; co-showrunner Paul Simms, who wrote this episode, has said that the fifth season, which premieres July 13, will get into whether these are even actually his names). To make that transformation complete, the team needed a Styrofoam wall, some “turn off that racket” music, and as little dialogue as possible.
Room Rager
Shadows has already established that these aren’t just vampires; they’re vampire hoarders. The characters’ dilapidated Staten Island Tudor is overcrowded with animals dead and alive, musty furniture, candelabras, and dusty books.
It’s hard to put a value on specific things when time has no meaning. And Colin Robinson’s quest will only reinforce this notion.
It begins as he’s banging holes in his bedroom wall whilst blasting death metal, a music choice that serves the dual purpose of covering up the first action and really irritating his roommates, (or, as episode director Kyle Newacheck puts it, is an example of how the character was “starting to learn how to feed in that state”).
The look of bewilderment when one of his holes uncovers a film canister suggests Colin Robinson is operating out of instinct rather than with a known purpose. As the show’s score quickens, he rushes through the house’s tight hallways to find a projector and lug it downstairs.
The found footage has more clues, pointing out where else Colin Robinson should hit and in what order. It’s then that he discovers energy vampire nirvana: a long hallway lit like a fluorescent-hued forgotten side room of a public library. There are meticulously hung beige and brown sweaters and slacks (some Proksch had actually worn on the show), and detailed diary entries that, among other things, suggest one of the character’s boring rants was the impetus for the events in the movie Se7en.
As he makes himself at home in an uncomfortable chair for innumerable hours of reading, teen Colin Robinson’s hair falls out and his posture changes. Behold: The energy vampire’s metaphorical butterfly wings begin to flap.
“The Color Within the Darkness”
Newacheck says he and the production team had about two weeks to build “the huge science project,” which was a wall of Styrofoam blocks that could smash open, plus the secret room, which had to be constructed so that it connected to the bedroom set. Audiences had already seen Colin Robinson’s room, which is tiny and sparse, with only two pieces of art that hang on separate walls. Newacheck decided that those paintings could be what he calls “visual coding” for the character to learn where to line up the projector. Music supervisor Nora Felder chose “Forbidden Lies” by A Creatures Cage and “Killing Engine” by Andy James, Jan Cyrka, and Christopher Clancy to play during the hammering, both of which exude a “turn off that racket” vibe.
ATLANTA—The heavily anticipated fight between the former U.S. president and the YouTube personality ended in a TKO Thursday night as Jimmy Carter won his debut boxing match against Jake Paul. The cruiserweight match, first announced in early April, pitted the 6-foot-1, 191-pound Paul against the 5-foot-10, 190-pound Carter in the the final fight on the evening’s card. The first two rounds featured even sparring, with the 26-year-old social media star and the 98-year-old known for his humanitarian work trading jabs and fighting conservatively as Carter made up for his shorter reach with quicker hand speed and better mobility. As the third round went on and Paul visibly tired, Carter gained the upper hand, viciously landing a flurry of blows on the influencer before the bell. The former Georgia governor’s reported nine months of 10-hour daily training sessions paid off when he landed a devastating right hook 12 seconds into the fourth round and knocked Paul to the ground, winning the match and along with it a $600,000 purse. Bloodied and grinning to show off a lost tooth as the referee raised his arm in victory, Carter repeatedly bellowed “Rosalynn” as the former first lady fought through the swarming crowd, climbed into the ring, and embrace her victorious husband.
The moment Marlene Dietrich arrived in Hollywood, she was crossing lines virtually no one else dared to. In her debut American feature, Morocco, released in 1930, she dressed in a tuxedo to perform the torch song “Give Me the Man Who Does Things,” pausing to kiss a woman in the nightclub crowd. Having come up in Berlin’s cabaret scene in the 1920s, Dietrich was a wife and a mother by the time she became a movie star—but also a “joyous bisexual with an appetite for many loves,” as Kenneth Anger described her in Hollywood Babylon.
Dietrich’s bisexuality was a key element of her explosive stardom in the early 1930s, even if it was not quite explicitly part of the text. The kiss in Morocco is more of a provocation than an expression of lust, the ’30s equivalent of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” But in the years just before the Production Code took hold of Hollywood—banishing even hints of non-hetero sexuality—Dietrich was a powerhouse, making several films with director Josef von Sternberg that established her as a uniquely alluring, rule-breaking, and even dangerous kind of star.
That persona was already firmly in place by 1932’s Shanghai Express, Dietrich and von Sternberg’s third Hollywood film together, in which Dietrich plays the mysterious but unapologetic courtesan Shanghai Lily. Set on a train from Peking to Shanghai in the midst of China’s civil war, the film starts by introducing a range of colorful characters as they board the train, including Dietrich in a dramatic veil, jet-black boa trailing behind her.
Watch Shanghai Express
But Shanghai Lily truly comes to life when we meet her in her compartment with her traveling companion, Hui Fei (Anna May Wong), a fellow courtesan—or, as a fellow passenger denigrates them, another “fallen woman.” A trailblazing Chinese American actress in the golden age of Hollywood, Wong was already a global star by the time of Shanghai Express. A famous photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt at a Berlin gala in 1928 finds Wong and Dietrich posing side by side with none other than Leni Riefenstahl.
Like so many of Dietrich’s costars, Wong is rumored to have had an affair with her—the excellent novel Delayed Rays of a Star, inspired by that Eisenstaedt photograph, imagines what might have been. But what we know for sure is what we can see between them in Shanghai Express, a dynamic so charged that they don’t have to say a word to send a would-be interloper scurrying away from their compartment. Later, the nosy landlady of a boardinghouse for only “respectable people” tries to recruit them before realizing “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
The romantic plot of Shanghai Express is between Shanghai Lily and her old flame Doc Harvey, played by Clive Brook; the queer themes, as they would be in Hollywood for decades more, remain expressly subtext. But Dietrich’s gender-bending confidence gets a moment to shine when she playfully wears Doc’s military hat while the pair revisit their lost love. And both Lily, who sacrifices herself so that Doc can be freed from the film’s villain, and Hui Fei, who eventually kills the bad guy, are women capable of taking action far more effectively than the men around them.
Shanghai Express, nominated for three Oscars including best picture, was a high-water mark for both Dietrich and Wong’s Hollywood careers. Dietrich’s performing career continued for more than four more decades, but Shanghai Express was the peak of her box-office powers. Wong, after lobbying hard for and losing the lead role in 1937’s The Good Earth, remained stuck with the kind of stereotypical roles she had spoken out against throughout her career. “Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain—murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass?” she told Film Weekly in 1933. “We are not like that.”
But Dietrich and Wong remain inextricably linked to this day. In last year’s Babylon,Li Jun Li plays Lady Fay Zhu, a character modeled closely on Anna May Wong—but who performs a provocative song in unmistakably Dietrich-ian style, tuxedo included.
This week’s Little Gold Men podcast, which you can listen to above, includes an in-depth conversation about Shanghai Express to kick off our monthlong Pride series of Oscar flashbacks. Next week we’ll tackle 1985’s Kiss of the Spider-Woman, for which William Hurt won the best-actor Oscar.
Magaro was born and raised in Ohio before moving East to study theater. He had no expectations for life as an actor, but made his way. He’s done the New York journeyman thing for over a decade now, particularly establishing himself in underdog indie darlings—small, personal movies like Past Lives and Kelly Reichardt’s 2020 masterpiece, First Cow. “Other actors want to do action scenes all the time and get a kick out of doing that—I like sitting there and connecting and talking,” he says. “Tom Cruise is jumping out of planes and shit. I don’t know if I could do that. Well, I can’t jump out of a plane to begin with. I’m petrified of flying. No way…. But I’ve got to pay bills, so maybe I should be jumping out of a plane.”
One thing’s for sure: In conversation, Magaro is unabashedly himself. He’s a little self-deprecating, very sharp, and open about his worries around everything from Hollywood’s brewing guild-strike crisis to watching himself onscreen to, indeed, flying. (In summary on that last point: “I’m an anxious person to begin with, and I take medicine for anxiety, and blah blah blah.”) He knows his taste, he knows what he’s best suited to as a performer, and—while bumping up against the economic realities of a working actor’s life—he knows how to marry those two strengths. He agrees that he’s in a pretty good spot, having shined in Reichardt’s latest film—this spring’s Showing Up—just as Past Lives, a likely Oscar contender, prepares for a long campaign.
Magaro will say he feels “lucky” a few times during our interview. This is partly because he looks around at the state of everything and wonders where he could’ve possibly fit in as a newcomer. “I am not a movie star…but the notion of a movie star isn’t what it was even 10 years ago, which is crazy to say,” he says. He sees those bigger names going out for the kinds of roles that he’s spent his career fighting for, and that also—were he not on the radar of Reichardt and Song and McKay and Todd Haynes and you get the idea—might now be out of his reach. “Because of the nature of the business and financing and getting eyes on movies, it helps to have someone with a social media presence of millions and millions of followers,” Magaro says. “I have none. I’m the schlub sitting at home and living his life. That’s who I am—and it’s really hard for me to be anything I’m not.”
That’s Magaro’s distinctive appeal as an actor—the gritty authenticity, the presence and care and unfiltered quality imbued into each of his characters. In 2015 alone, he played the New York Times journalist after Rooney Mara’s heart in Carol; stood out among The Big Short’s cadre of fast-talking, self-interested traders; and anchored an unexpected Orange Is the New Black love story as Yael Stone’s dreamy prison pen pal. It’s the kind of year that might have marked a turning point. For Magaro, the shape of offers didn’t change, but in holding his own opposite big directors and bigger stars, he realized he could do this. “Before that, I would step on a set and every time just be petrified that the words wouldn’t even come out of my mouth,” he says. Now, he just needed to adjust to his newfound onscreen ubiquity. People started coming up to Magaro, sure they saw him in something. “I can’t list my résumé—I feel like a schmuck doing that,” Magaro says. “The worst thing you can ever do is be like, ‘Yeah, I was in The Big Short,’ and they’re like, ‘Haven’t seen it.’ Or ‘I was in Carol.’ ‘Haven’t seen it.’ Then you just feel like a total asshole.”
The folks who are seeing these projects? Directors like Reichardt, who granted Magaro a rare—and great—leading role in First Cow, and Song, who’d told Magaro she was a fan of his work before casting him in Past Lives. “Through good fortune and relationships, I was able to start getting jobs with directors who I think are more than just directors, they’re auteurs and they’re offering something very unique to cinema and they’re doing something very special,” Magaro says. He admits to being nervous about the viability of this corner of filmmaking. “I watch these films that come out and they just don’t do the numbers that they did when you and I were kids,” he says. “I’m really worried about what’s going on, the future of films like this.”
What of Past Lives’ rock star bow in Park City, where it was the toast of Sundance? Magaro allows for a happy grin. “It was nice. Exciting,” he says. “But maybe we’re nerds. We come to these nerdy conventions of film and we all celebrate our nerdiness doing this thing, and then we take it out to the rest of the world, and they’re like, ‘What? Who cares?’”
V.F. has reached out to Fonda’s representatives for comment of her unorthodox scroll delivery method.
Okay, with that out of the way, we can take a look at what else won big prizes in anticipation of what will be coming to your local art house theater over the next 11 months.
Don’t feel like too much of a yutz if you’ve never heard of Justine Triet. Her movies have not made too much of a splash on these shores just yet. The good news is that her last two features, the dramedy Sibyl starring Virginie Efira and Adèle Exarchopoulos and rom com In Bed With Victoria, also starring Efira, are both streaming for free on Tubi and, if you’ve got a library card, Kanopy. Become the expert now before NEON releases Anatomy of a Fall in North America.
Reviews of the courtroom thriller, in which Toni Erdmann star Sandra Hüller may or may not have killed her husband, were positively giddy, with Filmmaker Magazine calling it “immaculate,” The Guardian cheering it for being “invigoratingly cerebral,” and The Playlist hailing the movie’s “self-imposed stylistic rules.”
With the win, Triet becomes just the third woman to with the Palme d’Or. She joins Julia Ducournau (who happened to be on this year’s jury) for Titane and Jane Campion for The Piano.
The second place prize, the Grand Prix, went to Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest. (Oddly enough, the movie had its premiere nearly simultaneously with the British author’s passing.) The film is a domestic drama, of sorts, at the home of an Auschwitz commandant. As with Glazer’s other films (Under the Skin, Birth, and Sexy Beast) many critics have noted its “formalist” qualities, which is another way of saying it looks, sounds, and feels strange, and may go out of its way to remind you you are watching a movie. V.F.’s critic likened the picture to a descent into hell, and wrote that “to be steeped so thoroughly in the everyday life of a mass murderer and his nattering family is to remember, quite crucially, that not all actors in the Final Solution were raving lunatics like their Führer.”
Though Glazer is British, The Zone of Interest is in German, and stars Christian Friedel and, what’s this?, Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Hüller. She’s having a great weekend. A24 has North American distribution rights.
A debate for the ages is trying to figure out what Cannes considers its third place award. Is it the Jury Prize or the Best Director prize? Either way, the Jury Prize went to the 66-year-old Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. Kaurismäki’s latest is in league with his typically deadpan style. (His previous efforts include The Other Side of Hope, Cannes Grand Prix-winner The Man Without a Past, and Leningrad Cowboys Go West.) Best Director went to Trần Anh Hùng, the Vietnamese-born French director, for The Pot-au-Feu, a 19th century-set romantic film starring Juliette Binoche that, as per Variety, “opens with a mouthwatering cooking sequence that runs nearly 40 minutes.” Anyone that’s seen the director’s 1993 debut The Scent of Green Papaya knows what’s up on the foodie front.
Adapted by Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) from Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, Fellow Travelers (premiering this fall on Paramount+ With Showtime) examines the volatile, passionate, deeply loving romance between Hawkins Fuller (Bomer), a charismatic if somewhat opaque war hero turned political staffer, and Tim Laughlin (Bailey), a religious idealist looking for his way into the DC grind. They meet at the dawn of the early-’50s Lavender Scare, in which Senator Joseph McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn purged whomever they deemed gay or lesbian from government roles—dubbing them communist sympathizers—and sparked a national moral panic around homosexuality. The series then builds into a kind of grand chronicle of queer American history, tracing the evolution of Hawk and Tim’s relationship through various eras before culminating in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
The project came to Bailey at a serendipitous moment. For the first time in his life, the breakout star of Bridgerton was in demand and being asked what he wanted to do next. “My answer was always, ‘Well, I’d love to do a sweeping gay love story,’ but my experience actually was that I’d never really seen them,” Bailey says. “Or if I had, I hadn’t seen actors like me and Matt play those roles.” (Both Bailey and Bomer identify as gay.) That dream opportunity abruptly presented itself in Fellow Travelers, which Bailey joined after Bomer had already signed on as both star and executive producer. “The story had been marinating with Ron for a solid decade before I ever came on board,” Bomer says. “Ron had an almost religious zeal about this project, this world, and these characters that just washed over everyone involved, and made it the profound experience that it was.”
Yea, and on a human level, the journey doesn’t stop there because you’ve come to some understanding. It is a continual practice to be alive. Maybe this is an origin story, who knows?
The three of youreleased a statementafter hearing the reaction to David Choe being a part of the series. What was that process like for you?
Personally for me, I don’t really care to go too much into that aspect of the show. Talking about the show is most important, but I think for us, we didn’t want to leave people in mystery. We wanted to say what we wanted to say and the statement was pretty complete for us.
I think you have incredible taste. In just the past few years you’ve been inSorry To Bother You, Okja, Burning,__Nope __and nowBeef. What is your secret to saying yes to a script?
I don’t have any secrets. I am incredibly fortunate that I find myself being in positions where scripts that I didn’t know existed, or stories that I didn’t know existed, or directors that I didn’t know knew me approach me. So, I have to lead with that I’ve had a lot of luck. But for me, the thing that I always gravitate towards is “is the story trying to say something?” I don’t even mean like, is it trying to teach something? I don’t really care to teach anything. Is it trying to reflect something off of our society or off of something that I believe. I think every script thus far that I’ve said yes to had something that deeply resonated with me.
You’re mentioning how people are coming to you now with their stories. When did it feel like that opportunity really opened up for you?
I think for me it was director Bong [Joon-ho]. He really took a chance on me with [his character in Okja] K and I feel so grateful to him because he saw me when a lot of people didn’t see me. Even myself, really.
I think there were people that maybe were open to me, but I had to also have space and openness for them by saying no to a couple of the things that came right after Walking Dead. Let’s be honest here: it wasn’t like 10, 15, 20 things. It was like, “do you want to play like a tech CIA agent on the run?” And I was like, “no. I don’t.” If anything, The Walking Dead afforded me the ultimate privilege in feeling financially secure, amongst many other things. I’m very grateful for that experience for sure.
Yeun with Wong in Beef
ANDREW COOPER/NETFLIX
Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.
At the SAG Awards in January, the triumphant cast of Everything Everywhere All at Once dedicated most of their ensemble award acceptance speech to a single person: 94-year-old James Hong, taking home his first major award after a 70-year Hollywood career. “My first movie was with Clark Gable,” he said onstage, referencing the 1955 war film Soldier of Fortune. “But back then the producers said the Asians were not good enough, and they are not box office. But look at us now!“
A Minnesota native and Korean War veteran, Hong entered the movie industry at a time when it was still common for Asian characters to be played by white actors in yellowface. But he was part of the era’s single, major exception, and what remains one of glaringly few Hollywood films led by an Asian cast. In 1961’s Flower Drum Song, Hong appears briefly as the maitre d at a San Francisco nightclub, one of many times he’d play staff at a Chinese restaurant. But this time, Hong was sharing the screen with major Asian stars of the moment—like Miyoshi Umeki, who had won an Oscar a few years earlier for Sayanora, or James Shigeta, whose career spanned from the original Perry Mason to Beverly Hills 90210. Adapted from the hit Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which itself was adapted from Chin Yang Lee‘s novel, Flower Drum Song was utterly unique for Hollywood at the time. As the enthusiasm about Everything Everywhere’s groundbreaking success reminds us, it remains unique today.
On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, in honor of AAPI Heritage Month, we look back at Flower Drum Song and its place in Hollywood, as the era of big-budget musicals neared its end. It was nominated for five Oscars but had the odd misfortune of being released the same year as West Side Story, which beat it in every category. Flower Drum Song feels dated in some ways, including the casting of Japanese actors as Chinese characters. But musical numbers like “Grant Avenue” and “Sunday” feel as lively now as they were then, and revelatory for anyone discovering talents like Nancy Kwan, a breakout star of the early 1960s who, like so many of her Flower Drum Song cast mates, didn’t find more opportunities in Hollywood that were commensurate to her talent.
A sidebar about Nancy Kwan: in the late 1960s she had a role in The Wrecking Crew, sharing a fight scene with Sharon Tate. It’s the scene you see Margot Robbie watching gleefully in the theater in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Kwan did have a long Hollywood career, though, including a role on ER as the mother of Ming-Na Wen’s character; our own Rebecca Fordreunited the pair in 2019. Wen spoke about the influence Kwan’s performance in Flower Drum Song had on her: “To see someone young and vibrant and sassy who’s an Asian American, it just really spoke to me.”
Listen to this week‘s Little Gold Men above, and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts.
The “Stranger Things” cast will be sitting this one out this year.
Actor Dacre Montogomery is the lone representative for “Stranger Things” at this year’s Emmys awards submissions due to restrictive guidelines for the award show voting period.
Despite the electrifying success of Season 4 Vol. 2 of the ’80s sci-fi adventure series last summer, which saw the “Stranger Things” cast fighting the sinister powers of dark entity Vecna, most of the show’s stand-out stars aren’t eligible for the ballot at this year’s awards ceremony.
The new rule occurred in June 2022 when the TV Academy eliminated the “hangover episode rule”, which gave grace to a series that premieres current-season episodes after the May 31 eligibility deadline but before the commencement of nomination round-voting.
The fourth season of the Netflix behemoth was divided into two parts. Vol 1, consisting of seven episodes, debuted on May 27, 2022, and was eligible for the 2022 Emmys, where it competed for 13 noms and took home five wins, most notably for stunt coordination, sound editing, and prosthetic makeup.
Vol. 2 dropped towards the beginning of this year’s eligibility period, beginning on June 1, 2022. The episodes, including the epic “Chapter Eight: Papa” and “Chapter Nine: The Piggyback”, were seen as orphan episodes by the Academy, which prevented the series from submitting nominations for the drama series category.
The new rule is a blow to actors Millie Bobby Brown and Joseph Quinn, who achieved rave reviews for their performances in the episodes.
Due to Montgomery’s appearance at the end of the “Piggyback” episode, the actor, who played the deceased Bobby Hargrove in the series, is the only star obtaining a nomination submission this year, where he’s competing against submissions from “The Last of Us” and “Succession”.
The remaining nomination slots for the series are for technical aspects, including period costumes and music composition.
By Zach Seemayer , ETOnline.com. Published: Last updated:
The biggest names in country music are coming together to celebrate the best and brightest stars of the genre on Thursday at the 2023 Academy of Country Music Awards!
Hardy leads the pack with seven nominations this year, including Song of the Year and Artist-Songwriter of the Year, sharing three of those noms with collaborator Lainey Wilson for their song, “wait in the truck.” For her part, Wilson received six nods — the most for a female artist this year — including Female Artist of the Year.
Meanwhile, Miranda Lambert was breaking records before the telecast even kicked off. The “If I Was a Cowboy” singer received her 17th Female Artist of the Year nomination, passing the record 16 nominations previously held by Reba McEntire. Lambert had five nominations total this year and the opportunity to shatter even more records as the trophies are doled out.
So who actually walked away with the night’s coveted trophies? Check out the full list of winners – marked in bold — below, which will be updated live throughout the night.
ENTERTAINER OF THE YEAR Jason Aldean Kane Brown Luke Combs Miranda Lambert Chris Stapleton –**WINNER! Carrie Underwood Morgan Wallen
FEMALE ARTIST OF THE YEAR Kelsea Ballerini Miranda Lambert Ashley McBryde Carly Pearce Lainey Wilson –**WINNER!
MALE ARTIST OF THE YEAR Kane Brown Luke Combs Jordan Davis Chris Stapleton Morgan Wallen –**WINNER!
DUO OF THE YEAR Brooks & Dunn Brothers Osborne — **WINNER! Dan + Shay Maddie & Tae The War and Treaty
GROUP OF THE YEAR LadyA Little Big Town Midland Old Dominion Zac Brown Band
NEW FEMALE ARTIST OF THE YEAR Priscilla Block Megan Moroney Caitlyn Smith Morgan Wade Hailey Whitters — **WINNER!
NEW MALE ARTIST OF THE YEAR Zach Bryan — **WINNER! Jackson Dean ERNEST Dylan Scott Nate Smith Bailey Zimmerman
ALBUM OF THE YEAR Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville – Ashley McBryde Bell Bottom Country – Lainey Wilson – **WINNER! Growin’ Up – Luke Combs Mr. Saturday Night – Jon Pardi Palomino – Miranda Lambert
SINGLE OF THE YEAR “Heart Like A Truck” – Lainey Wilson “Never Wanted To Be That Girl” – Carly Pearce & Ashley McBryde “She Had Me At Heads Carolina” – Cole Swindell — **WINNER! “Thank God” – Kane Brown with Katelyn Brown “‘Til You Can’t” – Cody Johnson
SONG OF THE YEAR “Sand In My Boots” – Morgan Wallen “She Had Me At Heads Carolina” – Cole Swindell — **WINNER! “‘Til You Can’t” – Cody Johnson “wait in the truck” – HARDY feat. Lainey Wilson “You Should Probably Leave” – Chris Stapleton
VISUAL MEDIA OF THE YEAR “HEARTFIRST” – Kelsea Ballerini “She Had Me At Heads Carolina” – Cole Swindell “Thank God” – Kane Brown with Katelyn Brown “‘Til You Can’t” – Cody Johnson “wait in the truck” – HARDY feat. Lainey Wilson — **WINNER! “What He Didn’t Do” – Carly Pearce
SONGWRITER OF THE YEAR Nicolle Galyon Ashley Gorley — **WINNER! Chase McGill Josh Osborne Hunter Phelps
ARTIST-SONGWRITER OF THE YEAR Luke Combs ERNEST HARDY — **WINNER! Miranda Lambert Morgan Wallen
MUSIC EVENT OF THE YEAR “At the End of a Bar” – Chris Young with Mitchell Tenpenny “She Had Me At Heads Carolina [Remix]” – Cole Swindell & Jo Dee Messina “Thank God” – Kane Brown with Katelyn Brown “Thinking ‘Bout You – Dustin Lynch feat. MacKenzie Porter “wait in the truck” – HARDY feat. Lainey Wilson
While walking through Borough Market one day, she ran into an old friend, Benedict Wong. He updated her on his life. “He said his old agents [weren’t] working for him as an East Asian actor—always being put in these boxes—and they just made one mistake too many so he had to let them go,” she says. “He could see I was [questioning] the business, and he said, ‘Just hold onto your art…. You need to come out of yourself and look at all the work you’ve done.’” Dumezweni found inspiration to persevere. So, jump-cut to a little over a year ago, when Dumezweni and Wong ran into each other again. “He said, ‘I’ve finally got agents again,’” she recalls. “I went, ‘Shut the fuck up.’… Watching his lovely gorgeousness in the Marvel world, I freaked out—like, ‘What? You’ve only just done it?’”
When Dumezweni got Cursed Child in 2016, her life changed. She had to navigate the exposure, initially quite ugly, of being a Black actress taking on a role previously cast as white. J.K. Rowling strongly defended the decision at the time on social media, a major show of support that Dumezweni felt from the author throughout. “I really like Jo, the person I’ve met a few times,” she says. When asked about Rowling’s more recent public comments about gender, widely criticized as transphobic, Dumezweni strongly defends queer rights, saying, “The trans conversation has now become the bogeyman for any [political] excuse,” but demurs beyond that: “I cannot speak to the trans conversation in relation to J.K. I can speak to my love for the stories.”
However, she says of Max’s upcoming HarryPotter series, “For me that’s too soon. It’s too soon! We need another generation. It’s almost like the kids have got to be grandparents for the TV series to come out again.” She has a burner Twitter account, through which she gauged reactions to the recent announcement of the show: “Looking at that conversation of ‘Is Hermione going to be Black? What’s canon?’—that’s why it’s too close. It’s all too close.”
As part of the Broadway transfer for Cursed Child, Hollywood discovered Dumezweni. Casting directors Tiffany Little Canfield and Bernard Telsey saw the show, then brought her in to read for Mary Poppins Returns, directed by Rob Marshall; she nabbed the role of Penny Farthing. (“Jump-cut”: Marshall then cast her in TheLittle Mermaid. More on that later.) As Cursed Child wrapped its run, she realized her child’s education was going well in New York, and considered staying. Then she booked the Manhattan-set The Undoing. “Well, look at the universe,” Dumezweni remembers thinking. “It wants us to stay.”
On David E. Kelley’s The Undoing, Dumezweni played Haley, the stern defense attorney for Hugh Grant’s Jonathan Fraser, an oncologist standing trial for murder. In every scene, she owned that courtroom: withering and persuasive and darkly, sometimes morbidly funny. Memes of the character dominated social media as the show gained steam. “It was such a shock,” Dumezweni says. “I was so fucking nervous. I thought I was going to be fired on that job, because I was so—I got into my head.” She looked around at people like Grant and Nicole Kidman and thought to herself, “I’m just an absolute minnow.” But she felt even greater pressure portraying an American, sensitive to the debate around Black British actors taking on US roles: “If I’m being honest, it was when the African American women said, ‘Yeah, we know Haley, we like her’…that I went, ‘I did okay.’”
The Undoing was, like The Watcher, a suspenseful story centered on rich white people. With The Watcher, though, she had more confidence, figuring P.I. Theodora Birch out as a kind of quasi-narrator, and running with that interpretation as she brilliantly charged through chunks of exposition. But once Hilton Als’s Instagram ode was posted, her mindset shifted. As Dumezweni describes it, “These opportunities are brilliant for work, but then you go, Oh, but now let’s start looking outside: How were the optics of that?”
Allow me a jump-cut to earlier in the conversation, when Dumezweni says to me, “This world of TV and film is gorgeous, money is lovely, but it’s quite lonely…. You go sit in your trailer, or maybe chat a little with people, but everyone’s on their phone and then you’re done. You’re done.” I wonder if this loneliness is related to Dumezweni’s conflicted feelings about making projects in which she plays the most notable, if not only, Black character—however sizable the part. “We have to be brave and say no to things sometimes,” she says. “There are still risks to be taken, and the risk is not working on something that you want.”
Which brings us, maybe, to the present. Later this month, The Little Mermaid will hit theaters, years after Dumezweni’s initial casting. She originated a new character, mother (as in, queen) to Jonah Hauer-King’s Prince Eric, and relished each day at work. “I can’t fucking believe that I’m in a Disney movie, because that’s not the narrative I told myself,” she says. “And I think it’s a thing of beauty.” She felt its bigness making it—the A-list craftspeople behind every element of production, the groundbreaking nature of Halle Bailey in the lead role.
While she waits for its release, she’s in production on another Kelley series, Presumed Innocent, toplined by Jake Gyllenhaal. When that script came her way, she balked. “I remember reading the word judge—and I was like, ‘Oh, judge.’ It’s always Black and brown people playing judges,” she says. Her manager convinced her to keep reading, and it hooked her. The role is “salty, slightly odd.” Fresh. Jump-cut to her post-Watcher epiphany. “There’s a little bit of a worry in me that Judge Lydia Lyttle is part of that,” she says. “But we’ve got Ruth Negga there, we’ve got O-T Fagbenle. There are enough of us—different versions of Blackness.”
Dumezweni says she doesn’t feel herself going “deeper” with this part—for her as an actor, “It feels lateral.” The other day, her mom texted, asking how things were going in LA. That may be the impetus for the question she keeps coming back to as we chat: “What’s it all about?” As Dumezweni has learned what is possible for herself—a trip to the Tonys, an HBO showcase, a Disney breakout—she has learned, perhaps, that making change for oneself is possible too. “I don’t want to get complacent about this gig, because it’s been hard-won,” she says. “But my choices will determine whether I do or not. That’s what I’m sitting in.”
By the time the creator of a hot new series sat down for an interview with Vanity Fair this week, picket lines were underway in New York and Los Angeles, and TV’s top writers had just declared themselves “more united than ever” with the WGA on strike. The guild released guidelines that prohibited public-facing, For Your Consideration–specific appearances—but press interviews remained on the table, at least in theory. Asked about the decision to promote their work, the creator demurred in time-honored Hollywood fashion by just focusing on the work—work that, for now, has halted entirely.
This is the difficult balance faced by a corner of Hollywood’s writing community—that is, the corner in serious contention for Emmy nominations this summer. With writers rooms disbanding and productions shutting down, Emmy campaigns may seem like a small part of the puzzle. But as one insider points out, that is where the WGA has the most leverage right now. “There’s still content on the air and there’s still content in the can,” this insider says. “Right now, telling everybody that they can’t go do FYC is disruptive, and it puts every single studio and network in the same position.”
That position seems to be a state of cloudy confusion, as studios and networks scramble to figure out how to pivot their awards seasons, while individual writers, showrunners, and their teams grapple with what they are and are not allowed to do for the remainder of an unprecedented Emmy season.
Events have always been a cornerstone of the FYC season, as hundreds of shows compete for the attention of voters. Vanity Fair has learned of a wide range of events canceling over the past week. John Mulaney was one of the first, canceling his Netflix event tied to his stand-up special, and soon after Jon Stewart nixed his showcase at the Apple TV+ FYC space. In just one week, we’ve also seen cancellations of a SAG-mounted career retrospective of a popular casting director, a crafts-driven conversation for a streaming series, and several standard FYC panels meant to primarily showcase showrunners and actors. Several actors have seemingly refused to participate out of solidarity, while thus far, writers have near-unanimously boycotted these events, which are typically buoyed by major studios. Now, even events that are further out—like Nicole Kidman’s AFI Life Achievement Award tribute previously slated for June 10—are being postponed. “Everyone’s feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment,” says an event coordinator.
Accordingly, campaigns are just trying to keep up with who will do what—and when. For a great number of contenders, their entire marketing apparatuses are based around awards, and their continued existence, to some extent, relies on this economy. But because the situations are so case-by-case, with some talent still unclear on what’s allowed and guidelines evolving, there has been little chance to plan for what this Emmy season would look like post-strike. “I’m sure everyone is in this madness right now,” says one studio strategist. “I need to redo a lot of things [based on] what’s changing and what’s not changing.” Multiple sources say the expectation is that more talent will shift toward stronger demonstrations of solidarity the longer the strike goes on—significant, since Emmy voting begins next month.
Panels and other public appearances as a part of an FYC campaign are officially against the WGA rules. In the WGA’s official “Strike Rules FAQ,” in response to a question about attending festivals or FYC events, the WGA states, “You should let the company know you are prohibited from making these promotional appearances about your work until the strike concludes.”
However, insiders say they’ve been getting mixed messages about doing press interviews for their projects, since those are not public-facing appearances. “They’re saying no panels, but discouraging press,” says one publicist. (Vanity Fair has reached out to the WGA for comment.) And rumors are swirling around that the WGA is taking note of showrunners or EPs who are in the WGA and are still participating in press interviews, even if it’s not explicitly against the rules. That alone has spooked some from participating.
Because all official FYC events must be booked through the TV Academy, it was quick to respond to the logistical issues of panels that rapidly fell apart after the first day of the strike. Hosts were informed that if they’d booked an FYC event they had the option to cancel the panel aspect (and continue with only a screening and reception). The studios could then “send an additional email communication with updated panel details for a $1,000 fee,” or could simply have the event updated on the Academy event page without paying a new fee. They were also presented with the option of canceling the event altogether, in which case the Academy would not reimburse the initial invite administration fees. But if invites had not been sent to members yet, the fee would be waived.
So why all this scramble, when rumors of a strike had been circling for months? The reality is that most FYC event spaces had to be booked—or built, in the case of several streamers that mounted entire activations from scratch in empty warehouses around Los Angeles—months in advance. Even up until the final tense days of negotiation, many hoped there would be resolution, as in 2017 when a strike was averted at the eleventh hour. “We weren’t preemptively canceling anything because we were all still very hopeful that something would happen and they’d be able to come and support their shows,” says a network publicist.
The most lively moments in an otherwise lethargic MTV Movie & TV Awards came early Sunday night, and featured ersatz host Drew Barrymore—who dropped out as live emcee in solidarity with the writers’ strike that began last week. Barrymore starred in a few pretaped—and, notably, prewritten—segments that proved exactly why awards shows require writers in the first place.
At the top of the show, Barrymore inserted her Josie Grossie character from Never Been Kissed into several of this year’s nominees, including Wednesday, M3GAN, and Cocaine Bear. In another, she played younger sister Skipper in an effort to cameo in the upcoming Barbie movie. She was otherwise largely missing from the broadcast, which was also devoid of a red carpet or any in-person speeches after Paramount announced Friday that the show would go completely virtual.
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The MTV Movie & TV Awards, a delightfully bizarre awards show with colorful category names (Stranger Things won “best kick-ass cast,” by the way) including a Cheetos-sponsored best kiss (“Cheetos popcorn congratulates Outer Banks for Best Kiss” a faceless announcer bellowed), felt subdued, even downright snoozy without any written sketches or star power. In fact, watching Sunday’s ceremony was a throwback to the pandemic-era awards show, complete with glitchy Zoom speeches and overstuffed clips packages. The only difference? It didn’t have to be this way, as multiple winners acknowledged in their speeches.
Although most of the year’s victors, including Adam Sandler,Elizabeth Olsen, and the Kardashians were no-shows, a few winners addressed the writers picketing for a new and fair contract with the industry’s major studios. While accepting best Ssow for HBO’s The Last Of Us,Pedro Pascal said he and the show’s creators were “standing in solidarity with the WGA that is fighting very hard for fair wages.” Drag performers from RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, which won best competition series, expressed similar support, as did Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn, who won best breakout performance.
Jennifer Coolidge, who received the Comedic Genius Award (and was set to host the Saturday Night Live finale before the strike forced the show to go dark) was perhaps the most effusive in her stance. “Almost all great comedy starts with great writers, and as a proud member of SAG, I stand here before you tonight side-by-side with my sisters and brothers from the WGA, who are fighting for the rights of artists everywhere,” she said. “I think of the words of Shakespeare where he once said, ‘The play is the thing.’ Well, I don’t want to put words in his mouth or anything, but I think what he really meant was it’s everything.”
Ke Huy Quan got used to giving acceptance speeches over the course of Everything Everywhere All at Once’s awards season run— and yet, at the Gold Gala in Los Angeles on Saturday night, he still found himself at a loss for words. “You’ve all made me feel so comfortable to share my feelings,” said the newly minted Oscar winner, accepting the evening’s Leading Man Award. “This past year so much has happened, especially the last few months. I’m still processing. I’m still trying to make sense of it.”
As he did often over awards season, Quan shared his feelings with defying expectations in Hollywood. “I guess what makes my story seem different is because I am not who you think of when you imagine a winner. I don’t fit the mold,” he said. “It took me a long time to understand this. I finally realized that winners don’t have to look the same. You can also win too, if you just believe in yourself. Dreams are something for you to keep, so please don’t let anyone take them away.”
The second annual event, held by Gold House to honor trailblazing Asian creators, paid tribute to both past and present. Quan joined the rest of the Everything Everywhere team to accept the Gold Icon award, and the film’s producer Jonathan Wang shared a story from his own upbringing about a Chinese New Year tradition of bowing to his elders. “We are united in our reverence and respect for you all in this room,” he said, looking around the room that featured some of the actors and filmmakers who had cleared the way for more diverse stories like theirs to make it to the screen.
But like many of the winners, Quan also had his eye on the future. “I’m so excited for you because there are now so many of us,” he said in his speech. The second annual gala brought out many of Hollywood’s biggest Asian American stars, including Daniel Dae Kim, Awkwafina, Randall Park, Ashley Park, Jamie Chung, Ming-Na Wen, Stephanie Hsu and Poorna Jagannathan, along with directors Celine Song and Destin Daniel Cretton. Other notable guests included athletes like snowboarder Chloe Kim and ice skaters Maia and Alex Shibutani and personalities like Queer Eye’s Tan France and YouTube star Eugene Lee Yang.
Sherry Cola, Ashley Park, Sabrina Wu, and Stephanie Hsu at the Gold Gala.
By Variety/Getty Images
The night’s honorees hailed from media, finance, and entertainment, including Netflix’s Bela Bajaria,Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief Radhika Jones, trans right activist Geena Rocero, Panda Express cco-founders Andrew Cherng and Peggy Cherng, East West Bank CEO Dominic Ng, Tony winner Lea Salonga, and Ms. Marvel star Iman Vellani. And Eva Longoria was honored with the first ever Gold Ally Award. “As I look at this room I can’t help but think about our ancestors. They must be so proud,” said Longoria.
Held at the Jerry Moss Plaza at the Music Center in Downtown Los Angeles, the gala also included a 30th anniversary tribute to The Joy Luck Club. The 1993 drama, the recipient of the evening’s Gold Generation Award, was mentioned throughout the night by the other honorees as the project that played a significant role in their own upbringing, and, for many, was the first film that allowed them to see themselves onscreen. When Joy Luck Club producer Janet Yang (who is currently president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) took the stage with the film’s stars Ming-Na Wen, Rosalind Chao, Lauren Tom, Tamlyn Tomita, Kieu Chinh and Lisa Lu, they were met with a standing ovation. “Among these women I am just a bit player but a very lucky one,” said Yang as she took the stage with some of her film’s stars. Chinh added that it felt very significant to be standing together after all this time: “After 30 years, the emotion is still there. Not just for making the film, but for this family.”
Sandra Oh, who was honored early in the night with the SeeHer award, was the first to give a shout out to The Joy Luck Club for its lasting effect on her. “Like many of us here, Joy Luck Club meant so much to me,” she said. “What I was experiencing when I was watching the film was grief. A profound grief for never having seen myself until that moment.”
In What’s Love Got to Do With It?, the new romantic comedy written and co-produced by Jemima Khan, the traditional fairy tale has become obsolete. The protagonist, Zoe Stevenson (Lily James), is a documentary filmmaker whose romantic failures and perennial singledom mean that she’s often being asked to babysit her friend’s children. To get them to sleep she tells them revamped fairy tales, which invariably become pessimistic commentaries on the failings of modern love. The princes in Zoe’s Cinderella are either boring or obnoxious; the beast in her Beauty is a sexual predator; and when the titular amphibian in Zoe’s The Princess and the Frog asks to be freed from his unfortunate state, the princess tells him she isn’t interested in fixing anyone but herself.
Though she doesn’t feel comfortable calling the film a critique of modernity, Khan admits that she doesn’t really know what “happily ever after” is supposed to mean in the modern world of dating apps and websites. “I think that having too many options is potentially as problematic as having too few,” she tells Vanity Fair. “[It] tends to make people feel that other human beings are disposable.”
While Zoe struggles to navigate the pitfalls of 21st-century dating, the story takes a subversive turn when her neighbor and childhood friend, Kazim (Shazad Latif), reveals to her that he’s delegated the business of finding a suitable spouse for him to his Pakistani parents. He’s looking for a girl modern enough for him to relate to and traditional enough for his parents to approve of, but beyond that he presents himself as open to suggestion. As a philosophy, this puts him firmly at odds with his childhood friend—for whom love can never be associated with compromise.
Khan wrote the film inspired by the decade she spent living in Pakistan as the wife of cricketer turned politician Imran Khan. While living in Lahore with Imran’s extended family, she was able to observe many successful arranged marriages at close quarters. “I don’t believe that there’s one right way to find love, but I do believe that it’s really easy to kind of demonize other people’s way of doing it,” she says. “I definitely do not subscribe to the idea that the arranged marriage candidate presented in most films that touch on this subject, particularly comedies, has to be the butt of the jokes.”
Khan, a journalist and film producer who describes herself as equal parts cynic and romantic, moved back to Britain in 2004, when her marriage ended. Still just 30, she found herself surrounded by friends her own age who were looking to settle down and find partners to have children with. “I kind of became the Pakistani auntie,” she says. “Who would your parents— imagine that you take away the component of lust and sexual chemistry and survey the options through the eyes of the people who know you best and love you most—who would they select? And would that work out?”
The answer is—as far as the film is concerned—that there’s no way of knowing what will work out. Indeed, in Khan’s cross-cultural romance, directed by Shekhar Kapur, the pursuit of love becomes something of an existential burden, an assignment so necessary and yet so fraught with danger that it has spawned an entire industry of clichés and matchmaking methodologies. Popular depictions, according to Khan, tend to elevate love into “this kind of almost transcendental kind of mystical thing that is going to complete us and give us everything…and then you expect that from one person. I’m not sure that that bodes well, because I don’t know who can ever live up to that…”
Shazad Latif and Lily James in What’s Love Got to Do With It?
By Robert Viglasky/Courtesy of Shout Studios
Muslims and non-Muslims; those with assisted marriages and those with love marriages; those who swipe right on dating apps and those who engage professional matchmakers—all are more similar than different in Khan’s simmering meditation on the universality of one of life’s most essential pursuits. “I don’t have any solutions, just reflections,” says Khan. “Ultimately, regardless of the route you take to find love and what form it takes, it remains a universal preoccupation and a conundrum [that] transcends culture and religion.”
Leading a TV series for the first time on a show she describes as “No Country for Old Looney Tunes,” Gilpin is somehow finding new ways to surprise audiences — and herself. She talks about it all on this week’s Little Gold Men.
Welcome toAlways Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Zahn McClarnon revisits his life across dozens of TV shows—leading to two of his biggest showcases yet, in Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs.
If three makes a trend, then how lucky are we to live in the time of the Zahn McClarnon Episode. The Denver-born actor has been a mainstay on the small screen ever since he moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s, but only recently did prestige TV seem to figure out just how good he was.
We can give some credit to Noah Hawley, who cast him for Fargo’s second season in an initially small role that turned pivotal at the story’s bloody climax. A few years later, McClarnon started recurring on Westworld before pulling off career-best work in his stunning season two showcase, “Kiksuya,” bringing knowledge of his Lakota heritage to the rich portrait of his mysterious character, Akecheta. This TV season then completed the trifecta in Reservation Dogs’ surrealist spectacular “This Is Where the Plot Thickens,” in which McClarnon’s Lighthorseman Big goes on a hell of a psychedelic trip.
“I’ve been on cloud nine for the last decade,” McClarnon tells me over Zoom, that iconic, evocative face of the small screen sneaking in a grin.
And that aforementioned trio doesn’t even take into account the biggest career leap McClarnon has taken of late: His first lead role, in AMC’s Dark Winds. The psychological thriller smartly embraces conventions of the cop drama while forging its own path in its focus on two Navajo police officers (McClarnon and Kiowa Gordon) investigating a murder in the ’70s Southwest. Putting a fresh spin on classic genre fare, the show is a great metaphor for how a perennial, oft underused scene-stealer has enhanced popular shows for decades. With pretty much every gripping hour of Dark Winds operating as its own kind of Zahn McClarnon Episode, it’s also the ultimate example of what happens when a Hollywood journeyman finally gets his due.
Dark Winds.
By Michael Moriatis/Stalwart Productions/AMC.
When McClarnon moved to Los Angeles, more than 30 years ago, he synced up with the American Indian Registry for the Performing Arts—a collective of Native American actors from tribes all over the country who’d meet up at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, go out on the same auditions, and lift each other up through disappointments and breakthroughs. McClarnon arrived with nearly nothing in his pockets; the roles for people who looked like him were limited, and of what was available, even less unique. “But immediately, because there’s such a small pool of Native talent, it wasn’t like I was going up against 150 people at an audition,” he says. “It was more like a half a dozen or a dozen depending on the age range…it wasn’t as tough as I think most people had [it]. I wasn’t going up against the Tom Cruises.”
For better and for worse, McClarnon filled a Hollywood niche. “I got typecast right away,” he says. “It was usually the bad kid or the gangbanger.” But he found some unusual opportunity within that. In 1992, he won a lead role in the Baywatch episode “Showdown at Malibu Beach High,” playing an activist student at the school where Pamela Anderson’s C.J. has just accepted a position, and which is planning to sell off sacred land. He says it was actually a backdoor pilot meant to spin off into a Malibu High series vehicle for Anderson, who’d joined Baywatch that season, but didn’t move forward.
The episode still marked a turning point. A few years later, McClarnon booked a recurring role on the Old West–set Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman as Walks on Cloud, the son of Cloud Dancing (Larry Sellers). “It was stereotypical Native stuff, but that’s all that we really had back then,” McClarnon says. “Unfortunately at that time, as a guest-star actor, you weren’t allowed to really voice your opinion on these things.” Still, he found a surprising mentor in Dr. Quinn star Jane Seymour. “She pulled me into her trailer once, sat me down, and talked to me about the business a little bit,” McClarnon says. “It inspired me so much that an actress of that stature, a number one on a TV show, would do that—pull me aside and talk to me about the pitfalls.” They recently saw each other for the first time in 30 years. “I thanked her for helping me jump-start my career,” he says.
Welcome toAlways Great, a new Awards Insider column in which we speak with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this entry, Stephen Root reflects on his journey from Broadway to Hollywood—and from silly sitcoms to gritty HBO hits, including Barry and the final season of Succession.
HBO has plenty of star power, but on one particular Sunday night this April, the network was ruled by a single character actor. We all expected to see Stephen Root as part of the final-season debut of Barry, in which he stars as the titular antihero’s mentor turned antagonist, Fuches. But an hour before that dark comedy’s season premiere got going, Root reprised another role in another beloved series on its way out, Succession. As political donor Ron Petkus, he returned to eulogize Logan Roy (Brian Cox) in exceedingly flattering terms at the late patriarch’s wake, to the great horror of his children. They’re wildly different roles, and Root, as ever, shines in both. “To be able to do all that in one night was pretty great,” he says with a smile over Zoom. “I think that’s the best it’ll ever get—don’t you?”
From our vantage point, it’s been pretty great for a while. This may not even be the first time Root has taken over a night of TV in such a manner. (One will have to check the TV Guide archives.) On HBO alone, of late he’s appeared in True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, The Newsroom, All the Way, Veep, and Perry Mason; within that 15-year timespan, he’s also done Fargo, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Big Bang Theory, The Good Wife, Raising Hope, Fringe, Justified, Californication, and many, many more. That’s to say nothing of the independent movie credits he’s racked up, or his beloved voice work on King of the Hill and other animated series. Root has acquired the reputation of a guy who can get just about any kind of job done; he’s proven equally adept and comfortable in the silliest of sitcoms and the gravest of dramas.
Still, with small roles come specific types on either end of those spectrums. In Barry, for the first time, Root has gotten a chance to use everything he’s got in one package—a layered, funny-scary performance that’s netted him his first (very overdue) Emmy nomination and the sort of character arc too rarely afforded to actors of his profile. “I feel like the luckiest guy ever, at this late in my career, to be able to have something that special,” Root says. Call it the happy result of 35 years of hustle.
Succession.
From the Everett Collection.
After attending college in Florida, Root came to New York in the mid-’80s with stage training, specifically Shakespeare, and an offer to do a whole bunch of plays on the road. He was known for playing the Bard’s clowns and jesters, and wound up touring for nine months with the National Shakespeare Company. After returning to New York, he nabbed back-to-back starring roles on Broadway, in So Long on Lonely Street and All My Sons; he later joined the national tour of Driving Miss Daisy opposite Julie Harris.
He moved to LA at the beginning of the ’90s; his mentality had shifted to the screen, to booking as many jobs as possible, given that he had a new child to take care of. In 1991 alone, he amassed eight screen credits, establishing a particular sitcom niche in series like Home Improvement and Davis Rules. “The mash-up of a sitcom, which is audience and camera—I felt comfortable in front of an audience, having done theater forever,” Root says. “I was doing so many auditions for sitcoms that I think all the casting directors around town saw me as a quirky guy. It’s a strength of mine to do quirky guys, but when you get put into that little slot for a year or two, then it becomes sedentary.”
That familiar, complex industry bargain was highlighted most by Root’s breakout turn in NewsRadio, the critical darling that ran from 1995–1999. Root’s chummy, conspiratorial, micromanaging billionaire boss Jimmy James dominates just about every scene he’s in—despite the killer ensemble, including Phil Hartman and Maura Tierney—and cemented him as a comedy pro and a brilliant blowhard. He now cites his favorite episode as “Super Karate Monkey Death Car,” in which James boldly reads from the very poorly translated Japanese rerelease of his memoir at an author event; Root sells every note of the book’s ingenious stupidity, and many critics now regard it as one of one of the great sitcom episodes ever. But the show never had much of a chance to break out. “The NBC programmer hated us for reasons we don’t know,” Root says. “We had seven [schedule] moves in all, so it really didn’t have a chance to become a staple like a regular Thursday night NBC show would’ve been able to do.” Keep in mind, the show aired on the same network as Friends and Seinfeld, in the same years both were on the air.
A few adjectives to describe Matthew Rhys’s portrayal of Perry Mason, the second season of which wrapped Monday night: Sad, tired, righteous, and certainly irascible—as Assistant DA Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk) wonders about our sour antihero in the season premiere, “Does everyone feel Mason hates them, or just his friends?” Throw each of these descriptors back at Rhys, though, and they’ll elicit a knowing giggle. “That’s my wheelhouse!” the Emmy winner says over Zoom. “It’s a state very close to my heart, that kind of melancholy sadness. I’m like, that’s how I live 24/7. It’s not a stretch to me!”
The big shift this year occurred as the HBO drama welcomed some heavy doses of acerbity too. “They did say, ‘In season two, we want to open up that humor in him a bit,’ which concerned me slightly,” Rhys says with a smirk. “But just to see the sarcasm that sits so easily on his shoulders—it’s how I live my life.”
The second season of Perry Mason, which HBO initially ordered as a limited series, emerged as an unlikely watercooler smash these past few months, its comfort-TV procedural stylings enhanced by rich noir atmosphere, nuanced characterizations, and a stacked ensemble of top-shelf character actors. As a followup to 2020’s debut season, which was a hit but met with more mixed reviews, season two is sunnier—both literally, in the expansive ’30s Los Angeles locations, and in its protagonist’s new outlook. As the season begins, Mason has a bona fide law practice and a case that takes him and partner Della Street (Juliet Rylance) through the depths of conspiracy and absurdity.
Rhys’s utter affinity with every aspect of this character is evident both in his performance and in our conversation about the surprising success of this encore season. (Warning: Spoilers about Monday’s finale follow.) “Matthew is so incredibly funny—he’s got that inside of him,” says Michael Begler, co-showrunner of season two with Jack Amiel (The Knick). “And I feel that a show needs to breathe—if you’re just pounding it into somebody all the time, it’s exhausting.”
The relatively upbeat season saw Perry, Della, and friends untangle the mysterious murder of Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey), an oil scion with a very bad rap around town. Our heroes wind up defending two Mexican American brothers, Rafael and Mateo Gallardo (Fabrizio Guido and Peter Mendoza), who’d irrefutably pulled the trigger on Brooks—the question is why, and who put them up to it. A chain of red herrings and conflicting motivations lead to baroness Camilla Nygaard (Hope Davis), a business rival, as the big bad. “One of the earliest photographs that I saw while doing the research was of a couple on Venice Beach with this forest of oil derricks in the background,” says Begler. “I was just so taken by that—like, holy shit, this is an oil town. Imagine the power and the wealth that’s behind that.”
Perry’s shady tactics are successful enough to get Camilla caught and one Gallardo brother off—and, uh, illegal enough to get himself thrown in jail for a bit, marking our final shot of the season. The mood is strangely, appropriately content; maybe even a little comic. “To get to that final image of a guy who is now probably at his best as a lawyer, and as a human being, having done right by his clients, sitting in a jail cell—we just love that irony,” says executive producer Susan Downey. “It feels so perfectly Perry Mason.”
This feels like the season that the show figured out exactly what that means. The initial run of episodes, developed by creators Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald (neither returned for season two), nicely set the case-a-season, noir-drenched template for Perry Mason, adapted from the character originally created by author Erle Stanley Gardner (and popularized in the 1957 series). Yet it also built toward Perry’s establishment from PI to lawyer, playing like a kind of prestige origin story. Here in season two, we got to see that legal operation in full effect, from the man himself leading the new firm to the vibrant worlds of those with whom he joins forces. Della begins a passionate affair with screenwriter Anita St. Pierre (Jen Tullock), while ex-cop Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) proves himself anew as he works alongside Perry for justice.
But of course, Rhys’s commanding, tragicomic turn remains the grounding force here. Nobody does downbeat crime-solver better. He rides his motorbike and endlessly chases down leads. He gets into the most gloriously pathetic fistfight with Shea Whigham’s frenemy, Pete. “Shea was smoking so hard,” Rhys recalls of that season highlight. “I was like, ‘Dude, stop smoking those cigarettes.’ It was, like, 97 degrees. It was so hot. We’re smoking and we’re fighting. At the end, we both wanted to puke.”
Into the wee hours of the night, Perry slumps around a whole lot too. “I worked on my body language to look kind of beaten,” Rhys says. “I wanted his shoulders to be slumped a little more, his heels dragged a little more. Just an overarching sense of defeated. That physical energy only changes really when the momentum gathers.” It’s no wonder, then, that Perry finds true peace only in that jail cell, after a job well-done-enough. Or why Rhys’s work builds to an unexpectedly rousing place in the finale’s closing arguments, as Perry orates the season’s themes concerning what justice actually looks like, between the “haves and the have-nots,” as Begler puts it. “He has a very basic but intense sense of right and wrong,” says Rhys, who’s also an executive producer. “There’s an unsentimentality to him.”
Rhys reveals that the closing-arguments courtroom scene went through “many, many different versions.” He and the producers would watch Paul Newman in The Verdict, which Rhys calls “the best version of Mason, right there.” The actor kept pushing for something a little smaller, subtler. “It was usually me going, ‘No, less, less. He can’t deliver some kind of dramatic number at the end,’” Rhys says. “It has to be true to who he is from episode one of season one. It was a lot of holding back.”
That balance—of honoring how Perry Mason began while pushing it in its second season—haunted Begler as he and Amiel got to taking over showrunning duties. “It was very intimidating,” he says. “It’s an aircraft carrier—there’s so much behind it.” The production is deceptively massive. Rhys remembers coming onto the show shortly after wrapping The Americans, the beloved FX drama on which he’d often film an episode within seven days. He learned that a Perry Mason episode takes three to four times that. “I was like, What the fuck are we waiting for? What the fuck is going on?” Rhys says with a laugh. “I was like, I’d have shot two, three scenes by now. I had to slow my own brain down and kind of go, Okay, this is the pace. It’s a big show.’”
Indeed, it’s an undertaking. You see that in the exacting cinematography and lighting, which not only recreates a period and a world, but an era of filmmaking; in Terence Blanchard’s gorgeously transporting score; in the remarkable company of actors, from Hope Davis’s imposing grandeur to Paul Raci’s ruthless tycoon; and in the range of story lines, which boldly explore racial and sexual tensions as a core part of the show’s tapestry of how intractable systems keep certain people down. The romance between Della and Anita marked a sweet, sexy highlight for viewers. “We won it in casting,” says Downey. “The minute we saw them together, we just knew it was perfect.”
Will the renewed word of mouth be enough to secure a third season for the HBO drama? While there’s some spilling on what would come next—don’t count out a Camilla return, but expect a new case to kickstart a new season and Perry to have finished out his brief sentence—Begler has some ideas to further build out the Perry Mason LA lore. “There are so many pockets of this city that have not been explored and go against expectation,” he says. And one senses, talking to Rhys, at least, that the feeling is they’re just hitting their stride. Or maybe that he’s just having too much fun to stop. “The motorbike was fun. The horses were fun. Fighting Shea, swimming in the ocean, being on boats—it was a lot of fun. Like a Boys’ Own adventure for six months.” All thanks to Perry Mason. Who knew?
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I had to act first. Well, I think I simultaneously had to send in an acting audition and also something of me singing. I sent like a little voice note, I think of me and my husband singing together. And my voice was very soft. It was by no means like a powerful singing video. And they kind of said, “This is great, but Daisy needs to be able to really sing.” I think at the time they were looking at professional singers. So I sent another video in, but I was kind of hitting this wall where I was thinking that I wasn’t capable of doing what they needed in terms of vocal performance. They said she needs to belt. I didn’t know, literally, how to do that with my voice. So, I was sitting in the car and my agent was like, “just try and sing the Lady Gaga song ‘Shallow.’” And I was like, “you don’t just, like, bust out Lady Gaga.” So I was sitting in the car and I pulled over and just tried, and it just sounded so bad. It just sounded so horrible. And I sat there and I started crying because I was just so frustrated. It wasn’t even just about getting the role. It was that I’m not gonna be able to do something that I had an idea that maybe I could do, if I put work in.
I sat there and I was just kind of feeling sorry for myself, and then I said I’m going to get a vocal coach and really give it a chance. So I went to a coach and I worked with him over the weekend. And then I went home and all of a sudden, “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd came into my head. I think in hindsight it was just in my key. So I went back again and I was able to belt for the first time.
Because of your performance in the show, I assumed that you had a long history with singing, obviously with your family legacy and music. Would you say that it’s because of your family’s legacy that music is something you shied away from on purpose, or was it just because acting was more of your interest?
I don’t think I shied away from it on purpose. From as far back as I can remember, I was just obsessed with movies and acting, and writing and I wanted to direct. I don’t think I really thought about it. I loved music, but it wasn’t something that I felt drawn to in the same way that I did with film.
Youtalked to my colleagueabout how when you were actually in production, it was sort of a really tough time for you personally and dealing with some autoimmune stuff. Did you ever think about backing out of the project?
I had lost my brother while we were sort of on pandemic hiatus. We were supposed to film a few months later, and at the time I was like, “I don’t think I’m able to perform well or give anything.” But then it pushed again, it pushed like six months. I kind of went, “okay, well maybe this happened for a reason.” And that push also really helped us with our music and our instruments and our singing because we ended up having a year to rehearse. So in many ways it felt like it came exactly when it was supposed to. I also have some autoimmune issues, so I was really struggling. But I just decided to do it. And I think there was something about this project that was really joyous and different. Typically, I’ve done darker, more serious work and, and I really felt like I needed to do something that felt like I needed to do something that felt like a fun experience at this point in my life.
