The sixth tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season formed on Saturday, according to the National Hurricane Center.Tropical Storm Fernand formed Saturday just before 5 p.m. The storm is located several hundred miles south-southeast of Bermuda, with maximum sustained winds of 40 mph, NHC says.Fernand is moving northward at about 15 mph.Some strengthening is forecast during the next 48 hours, and it is expected to be near hurricane strength on Monday.Weakening is expected to begin on Tuesday. The system poses no threat to Florida.Hurricane season 2025The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30. Stay with WESH 2 online and on air for the most accurate Central Florida weather forecast.>> More: 2025 Hurricane Survival GuideThe First Warning Weather team includes First Warning Chief Meteorologist Tony Mainolfi, Eric Burris, Kellianne Klass, Marquise Meda and Cam Tran.>> 2025 hurricane season | WESH long-range forecast
The sixth tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season formed on Saturday, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Tropical Storm Fernand formed Saturday just before 5 p.m. The storm is located several hundred miles south-southeast of Bermuda, with maximum sustained winds of 40 mph, NHC says.
Fernand is moving northward at about 15 mph.
Some strengthening is forecast during the next 48 hours, and it is expected to be near hurricane strength on Monday.
Weakening is expected to begin on Tuesday.
The system poses no threat to Florida.
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Hurricane season 2025
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30. Stay with WESH 2 online and on air for the most accurate Central Florida weather forecast.
Saltburn has the slick intrigue of a Gothic thriller and the icy wit of a comedy of manners. The eponymous estate at which bookish University of Oxford loner Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) works to ingratiate himself is a museum of decadence, its splendor concealing a depravity that only the wealthy can disregard. But the movie’s target isn’t straightforward. Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the bewitching classmate who invites Oliver home with him for a rambling summer, starts out as a token of desire but becomes a heedless lodestar. Felix inherited his savior complex from his mother, Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), a wannabe do-gooder with a vampy cruel streak. She’s married to a daffy lord (played by Richard E. Grant) whose lack of self-awareness rivals her own. As for Oliver, he spends his days at Saltburn currying favor among the Cattons, only to enact extravagant subterfuge.
Emerald Fennell, the writer and director of Saltburn, calls it a “vampire movie.” Oliver is the ultimate bloodsucker in question, yet his drive remains a sympathetic one. He wants what everyone wants: to belong. When Felix embraces Oliver, who talks of drug-addicted parents and a life without spoils, Oliver quickly leeches on to the most popular guy at school. Can you blame him? Grandeur is an aphrodisiac.
“It’s the same as constructing any love story. I mean, it is a love story,” Fennell tells The Ringer. “Can you completely believe why these two people would come together?”
Part of the seduction scheme that eventually leads Oliver to acquire Saltburn involves sex—the sex he witnesses, the sex he wants, the sex he initiates. If he has something to gain beyond corporeal pleasure, nothing is off-limits. That includes semen-streaked bathwater, menstrual blood, and grave fucking. With the movie hitting theaters, Fennell and Keoghan walked The Ringer through Saltburn’s three outré sex scenes, the ones meant to shock and titillate in near-equal measure.
The Bathwater
For the movie’s first kink to land, Fennell had to plant a few crucial seeds. Casting the right Felix was the first. Keoghan is well-known for playing shifty oddballs like Oliver (see: The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Green Knight, The Banshees of Inisherin), but Feilx is all about surface-level élan. Fennell needed an actor with a magnetism that leaps off the screen, someone so striking his mere presence can melt hearts—not unlike Bo Burnham in Promising Young Woman, her 2020 directorial debut. Felix, whom Fennell compares to Brideshead Revisited aristocrat Sebastian Flyte, doesn’t have a whole lot to offer beyond beauty, charm, and money.
Fennell was pleased to discover that Elordi, the Euphoria and Priscilla heartthrob, shared her take on the character. “Felix does something shitty in every scene,” Fennell says. “He’s casually misogynistic, he’s fickle, he’s snobbish. I was always saying to Jacob, ‘He’s not a good kisser. He’s not good in bed. He’s never had to be.’ When Jacob came in to audition, he [played Felix as] kind of a dope. The thing that’s important is that so much of what makes him interesting is Oliver looking at him.”
Oliver certainly can’t stop looking, first through a dormitory window where he watches Felix holding court amid a tribe of admirers. Felix’s poise screams privilege, which immediately beguiles Oliver. When he watches through another window at night while Felix has sex with a young woman, it’s blissfully unclear whether Oliver would rather swap places with Felix or the girl. (For whatever it’s worth, Fennell says Oliver is “absolutely bisexual.”) By the time he enters Saltburn’s imperial gates, he’s completely enthralled, only seldom betraying his underlying desperation. After growing acquainted with the family and their ostentatious house, which Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren (La La Land) sought to shoot “like a fetish object,” he spies Felix masturbating during a bath.
The camera, mirroring Oliver’s eyes, lingers on Felix’s long torso and aroused face. But it’s what follows this voyeurism that’s most erotic. When Felix leaves the bathroom, Oliver slinks into the tub and guzzles the last of the ejaculate water as it drains, as if he’s harvesting Felix’s fluids and social status at once.
“The moment where he rubs his face along the plughole and wants to be in it, it’s sort of like, ‘I want to feel it, I want it to be part of me, I want it to change me,’” Keoghan says. “It’s a total obsession. He’s confused and lost. I don’t think he knows what he’s actually chasing.”
Keoghan says he channeled some combination of fox and snake while descending into the tub, and the sound team blended his slurp with the effects of raw octopus sliding against oil. Oliver’s animalistic excess was one of the first images Fennell thought of while brainstorming Saltburn. “It’s the impulse,” she says. “The moment he does that, it imbues him with this kind of wicked power. It also just felt, to me, so profoundly true of vulnerability, desire, and class envy: All of us can only ever really hope to lick the bottom of a bathtub. So there’s something pathetic, funny, incredibly sexy, and incredibly real.”
The Garden
As the summer continues and his stature among the Cattons swells, Oliver starts to see everyone as a potential dupe. If he can embed himself in the fabric of Saltburn, maybe he’ll never have to leave. He gives Felix’s catty American cousin (Archie Madekwe) a hand job as a sort of vengeful come-on after the cousin embarrasses Oliver at a dinner party. He even flirts with Elspeth, attempting to appeal to her affinity for waifs. She sees him as a sapling to protect, so Oliver then directs his persuasions to Felix’s troubled sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), seizing on her fragility. As a self-conscious idler with an eating disorder, she’s anxious to find esteem within a family where Felix is the star.
Aware that she’s uncomfortable in her own body, Oliver uses lusting after Venetia as his ace card. Late one night, when he spots her stalking the garden, Oliver pounces. He treats her like a delicious talisman, fingering her on the fog-soaked lawn and smearing her menstrual blood across both of their faces. This act of demented flattery confirms Oliver’s mounting sense of power. Look at how far I’ll go for you.
“So much of the dom-sub thing is about taking care of the person,” Fennell says. “We see him giving people what they want, and that’s just being a good acolyte. What turns him on … is having control of the situation.”
Keoghan takes that sentiment a step further. “He’s abusing her, and he’s a master manipulator,” he says. “He wants to see how far he can take it: ‘I own you. You’re going to do what I say.’ He knows he wouldn’t get away with that with Felix.”
The Grave
Oliver’s quest to become an honorary Catton falls apart when Felix arranges to take him home to visit his parents on his birthday. Discovering that Oliver is nowhere near as Dickensian as he’s led on, Felix sours on his summer guest, sending Oliver into a spiral. If he can’t worm his way into Saltburn by feigning victimhood, he’ll go for the second-best option: killing the Cattons one by one and taking the whole thing for himself. Anything to avoid feeling once again like an outcast.
After poisoning Felix’s champagne during a blowout party, Oliver enacts a final act of longing: He leaves the funeral to return to the cemetery, pulls down his pants, and fucks the dude’s gravesite. For Fennell, the gesture is more about grief than sex—a visceral version of Heathcliff digging up Catherine’s body at the end of Wuthering Heights. It’s his last chance to touch Felix. Oliver can never have him back, and although he tells himself he wasn’t in love, the intensity of his sobs suggests otherwise.
Initially, Fennell imagined Keoghan rubbing his face in the grave and fondling the dirt, blending the bathtub scene and the garden scene into one showstopping desecration. But upon discussing it with the actor, they decided to be less coy. “I wanted to see what the next step was,” Keoghan says of Oliver’s farewell to Felix. “It wasn’t to get a wow factor. It was quite sad, because he’s lost at that moment.” Keoghan requested a closed set, meaning only essential people like Fennell and Sandgren were present. Shot from behind, he did the deed in one take, hoping to avoid the “sheer embarrassment” of needing to repeat it.
With the Catton clan eventually gone, Oliver is alone at Saltburn, having convinced Elspeth to will the property to him. He can dance naked through the house’s halls all he wants, but Oliver’s victory is hollow. After the movie fades to black, he’ll be left without companionship or a clear purpose. What was it all for? “I’ve always believed that what he wanted was very simple, which was just to be there with [the Cattons],” Fennell says. “The framing narrative makes it seem like he was always in pursuit of this specific end goal, but what he’s most interested in, even if he doesn’t know it himself, is the game of power. That’s why he’s interested in Felix from the beginning. It’s not just that he’s beautiful. It’s that he’s in the middle … That’s what Oliver’s preoccupation is: with being special. And aren’t we all preoccupied with being special?”
Matthew Jacobs is an Austin-based entertainment journalist who covers film and television. His work can be found at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, HuffPost, and beyond. Follow him on X @majacobs.
Unlike Panam, Judy, and Kerry, River is the one companion you have to go out of your way to meet. Finding the Night City cop and helping him sort through a local mystery that weaves in and out of his family life makes for one of the most interesting breaks in Cyberpunk 2077’s usual action. Expect a little combat and chatter, but also light adventure game mechanics and some pretty horrifying Night City lore.
This questline does, however, unmask Cyberpunk 2077’s weird, inconsistent framing of cops and law enforcement, even weaponizing the ACAB saying in a particularly tacky lift that I’m not wild about. But if nothing else, these quests offer, for your inspection, a layer of the game’s inherent worldview that’s worth examining and dissecting.
It’s been a great year for television, and the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards are celebrating a number of fan favourites, including HBO’s Succession and The Last of Us.
Actor Yvette Nicole Brown and Television Academy chairman Frank Scherma announced the Emmy nominations on Wednesday, though the mood was more sombre than usual amid the ongoing writers strike. An actors strike may also be looming, with Hollywood’s largest union representing about 160,000 actors currently demanding better compensation for streaming productions and protections from the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Succession, a satirical dramedy about a family of one-percenters fighting to control a media conglomerate, walked away with the most nominations for the show’s highly anticipated final season. Stars Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin scored Best Actor nods. Sarah Snook, who plays Shiv Roy, is already a well-positioned frontrunner to score the Best Actress win.
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The show leads all nominees with a whopping 27 in total. The Last of Us was close behind with 24, while The White Lotus received 23.
The Last of Us and The White Lotus, two additional HBO productions, received several nominations, proving once again that streaming remains king in the television space.
2023 Emmy Awards nominees for lead actor, actress in a drama series announced
Popular duo Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey of The Last of Us received Best Actor and Actress nominations for their emotional portrayal of trauma-bonded apocalypse survivors. (Ramsey identifies as nonbinary and uses any pronouns)
Jennifer Coolidge, who won the Emmy last year for Outstanding Actress in a Limited or Series or Movie, is nominated alongside The White Lotus co-stars Aubrey Plaza and Meghann Fahy.
Christina Applegate, who in February hinted she would retire from acting as a result of her multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis, received a nomination for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy for Dead to Me.
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Barry, The Bear, Ted Lasso, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Abbott Elementary all earned several nominations as well.
(Find a complete list of the nominees in the major categories, below.)
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Best Drama Series
Andor Better Call Saul The Crown House of the Dragon The Last of Us Succession The White Lotus Yellowjackets
Best Comedy Series
Abbott Elementary Barry The Bear Jury Duty The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Only Murders in the Building Ted Lasso Wednesday
Lead Actor, Drama
Jeff Bridges, The Old Man Brian Cox, Succession Kieran Culkin, Succession Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul Pedro Pascal, The Last of Us Jeremy Strong, Succession
Lead Actress, Drama
Sharon Horgan, Bad Sisters Melanie Lynskey, Yellowjackets Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaid’s Tale Bella Ramsey, The Last of Us Keri Russell, The Diplomat Sarah Snook, Succession
Lead Actor, Comedy
Bill Hader, Barry Jason Segel, Shrinking Martin Short, Only Murders in the Building Jason Sudeikis, Ted Lasso Jeremy Allen White, The Bear
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Lead Actress, Comedy
Christina Applegate, Dead to Me Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Quinta Brunson, Abbott Elementary Natasha Lyonne, Poker Face Jenna Ortega, Wednesday
Supporting Actor, Drama
F. Murray Abraham, The White Lotus Nicholas Braun, Succession Michael Imperioli, The White Lotus Theo James, The White Lotus Matthew Macfadyen, Succession Alan Ruck, Succession Will Sharpe, The White Lotus Alexander Skarsgård, Succession
Supporting Actress, Drama
J. Smith-Cameron, Succession Jennifer Coolidge, The White Lotus Elizabeth Debicki, The Crown Meghann Fahy, The White Lotus Sabrina Impacciatore, The White Lotus Aubrey Plaza, The White Lotus Rhea Seehorn, Better Call Saul Simona Tabasco, The White Lotus
Supporting Actor, Comedy
Anthony Carrigan, Barry Phil Dunster, Ted Lasso Brett Goldstein, Ted Lasso James Marsden, Jury Duty Ebon Moss-Bachrach, The Bear Tyler James Williams, Abbott Elementary Henry Winkler, Barry
Supporting Actress, Comedy
Alex Borstein, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Ayo Edebiri, The Bear Janelle James, Abbott Elementary Sheryl Lee Ralph, Abbott Elementary Juno Temple, Ted Lasso Hannah Waddingham, Ted Lasso Jessica Williams, Shrinking
Murray Bartlett, The Last of Us James Cromwell, Succession Lamar Johnson, The Last of Us Arian Moayed, Succession Nick Offerman, The Last of Us Keivonn Montreal Woodard, The Last of Us
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Guest Actress, Drama
Hiam Abbass, Succession Cherry Jones, Succession Melanie Lynskey, The Last of Us Storm Reid, The Last of Us Anna Torv, The Last of Us Harriet Walter, Succession
Guest Actor, Comedy
Jon Bernthal, The Bear Luke Kirby, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Nathan Lane, Only Murders in the Building Pedro Pascal, Saturday Night Live Oliver Platt, The Bear Sam Richardson, Ted Lasso
Guest Actress, Comedy
Becky Ann Baker, Ted Lasso Quinta Brunson, Saturday Night Live Taraji P. Henson, Abbott Elementary Judith Light, Poker Face Sarah Niles, Ted Lasso Harriet Walter, Ted Lasso
Variety Talk Series
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Jimmy Kimmel Live! Late Night with Seth Meyers The Late Show with Stephen Colbert The Problem With Jon Stewart
Best Competition Series
The Amazing Race Ru Paul’s Drag Race Survivor Top Chef The Voice
Best Limited or Anthology Series
Beef Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Daisy Jones and the Six Fleishman Is in Trouble Obi-Wan Kenobi
Lead Actor, Limited Series or Movie
Taron Egerton, Black Bird Kumail Nanjiani, Welcome the Chippendales Evan Peters, Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Daniel Radcliffe, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story Michael Shannon, George & Tammy Steven Yeun, Beef
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Lead Actress, Limited Series or Movie
Lizzy Caplan, Fleishman Is in Trouble Jessica Chastain, George & Tammy Dominique Fishback, Swarm Kathryn Hahn, Tiny Beautiful Things Riley Keough, Daisy Jones and the Six Ali Wong, Beef
Supporting Actor, Limited Series or Movie
Murray Bartlett, Welcome to Chippendales Paul Walter Hauser, Black Bird Richard Jenkins, Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Joseph Lee, Beef Ray Liotta, Black Bird Young Mazino, Beef Jesse Plemons, Love & Death
Supporting Actress, Limited Series or Movie
Annaleigh Ashford, Welcome to Chippendales Maria Bello, Beef Claire Danes, Fleishman Is in Trouble Juliette Lewis, Welcome to Chippendales Camila Morrone, Daisy Jones & The Six Nicey Nash-Betts, Dahmer—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story Merritt Wever, Tiny Beautiful Things
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The 75th Primetime Emmy Awards will be held in Los Angeles on Sept. 18, starting at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT.
This post contains spoilers about the series finale of Barry.
From the moment he stepped into Gene Cousineau’s acting class for the first time, Bill Hader’s Barry Berkman looked up to Henry Winkler’s self-involved teacher as a kind of father figure—a man with a method, helping him get in touch with his emotions, or maybe just find a safer place to put them. But that dynamic was never quite reciprocated. Over Barry’s four seasons, our deeply damaged hitman turned performer steadily, somewhat inadvertently ruined his mentor’s life: killing Gene’s girlfriend, effectively ending his class, and eventually sending him into exile. Following an audacious time jump and another plot to frame Gene for the death of his lover, it’s no wonder that when put in the same room with Barry again, Gene decided to shoot his former student dead, then and there.
In the scene, Barry only has time for two short words as he realizes what’s about to happen: “Oh, wow.” That’s more than Winkler could muster when Hader, who also cocreated the show and directed the final season, rather matter-of-factly pitched the idea to his costar. “I was speechless,” Winkler tells Vanity Fair. “I just made sounds.” Gene goes on to serve a lifetime prison sentence—not that we see this fate play out for ourselves. It’s revealed in the parodic film that fills Barry’s final scenes, recreating the events of Barry through a bizarro Hollywood lens. As to how Winkler is feeling about it all? We get into it.
Vanity Fair: Barryis officially finished. How are you feeling?
Henry Winkler: I’m now just sad. We finished in early December; we had some re-shoots. We’ve had the premiere party. Then I don’t see anybody anymore. Sarah is in England. Stephen is off shooting something. Everybody is everywhere. And I am sad.
Let’s get into this finale. What was your initial reaction, particularly to Gene’s ending?
Oh my God. So, halfway through the season, Bill said, “I think we finally broke the eighth episode, the end. You want to know how it ends?” And I went, “Sure.” And he said, “You shoot me.” [Pause] I’m a pretty verbal guy. I was speechless. I just made sounds. I didn’t even know how to react to that. I shoot you. Wow. Okay, that’s—okay. I went and had a burrito. And then we got there and we did it.
What did you make of Gene killing him? How did you play it?
That was scary. The moment really started when I was lured into the hotel room at the end of [episode] seven, and then they’re blaming me for everything. How did that happen? Then I had nowhere to turn, and I think at that moment I went insane. I literally—the switch flipped and led me to the point of no return.
Compare that to season one. Is there some reflection for you in the performance and just in the experience of making the show, of what Gene has been through? Of how this relationship between him and Barry led to this incredibly violent end?
You think about that first year, the teaching and buffoonery and charlatan, and how that led to this ending of the entire show—I never in my wildest actor’s imagination would have come up to this, would have figured that this was going to happen, no matter what this man put me through.
What was it like to actually film it? How did you block it out with Bill? How many takes did you do?
We did two takes. The first take I remember, I shot him in the shoulder. He sat down in the chair, he flopped down in the chair, and he said, “You don’t have to do this, Mr. Cousineau.” And I shot him twice. But then in the final, he just went, “Oh, wow.” It was like he was in disbelief. You could hear a pin drop [on set]. Our armorer and our prop people were extraordinary in how careful they were when we handled a gun on that set. That was my experience. And it still was so scary to think of holding a gun on this human being—my character who hates this character who loves me, who looks at me as his father figure. It is so complicated that I had no idea what I was doing.
You’ve had quite a long, distinguished career. Have you ever had to do something like that before on camera?
Do you know? Not that I can think of. I’ve handled a gun before, when I did a show called Numb3rs. I had to go to a shooting range. I had an FBI tech telling me how to hold the gun. But I never was in a situation that was so fraught that I literally took a human being’s life.
Did the transformation that came with the time jump help you get into that space?
The physicality for Gene was a costume. We stopped filming Gene [for awhile]. I grew a beard. I took a picture of the beard every week. I sent it to [production manager] Aida Rodgers and Bill. They said, “Keep growing. Nope, keep growing.” And then finally, it was long enough, they called me and we started filming again. And I had been on a kibbutz where I was helping people build their homes. I was learning to be a better human being. The only thing is, what they didn’t show you was that the homes fell down.
And the best performance by an actress who is married to a murderer and pretending to be a waitress named Emily goes to…Sally Reed!
After last Sunday’s Barry concluded by jumping ahead in time, the fifth installment of the final season, “tricky legacies,” officially catches up with the new lives of Barry (Bill Hader) and Sally (Sarah Goldberg). After escaping prison, Barry asked Sally to join him on the run. Having just unsuccessfully tried to steal a blockbuster role from her own student, a defeated Sally was immediately in.
Eight years later, the duo are now known as Clark and Emily, living in the middle of nowhere, and raising a young son. Barry spends his days at home, watching their boy, John, and teaching him a lot about Abraham Lincoln. Sally works at a diner, where she uses the bathroom to snort Xanax with one coworker and choke another. Her miserable reality is eventually upended when she learns that Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) has resurfaced in Los Angeles and will consult on a Barry biopic. “They’re making a movie about us,” she tells Barry. His reply? “I’m gonna have to kill Cousineau.”
To answer some burning Sally questions, we chatted with Goldberg about finding inspiration from another HBO series, why on Earth Sally feels safe with Barry, and going full Hader by creating her own starring vehicle: SisterS, coming to IFC May 17.
Vanity Fair:BetweenBarryending andSisterSbeginning, it’s surely a wild and emotional time right now.
Sarah Goldberg: My head’s spinning, for sure. It’s been seven years since I was hired for Barry, and it feels like a full-life cycle. That job meant so much to all of us, and we’ve made friends for life, and it feels like we left the story in the right place. So there’s a collective pride in releasing it out into the world and letting it go. But then it’s also mixed with huge nostalgia and just sadness that we’re not going to be on set together, huddled in dark corners, drinking cups of tea at all hours of the day. I’m Canadian, so they’ll never get rid of me. They’ll be hearing from me daily, but we won’t be together like that again.
I need to start with my most pressing question: Do we think that Sally actually sawCoda?
[Laughs.] That’s such a good question; nobody’s asked me that. I do think she saw Coda. In fact, I think she really, really, really loved it. It’s funny; I improvised that line. Ellyn Jameson, who plays the Mega Girl, and I were chatting about Coda in the trailer before meeting Sian [Heder, who plays herself on Barry], and we both were like, “I could cry just thinking about it.” So I threw it in. But yeah, I think Sally has seen it, and it’s maybe one of her favorite films.
Coming intoBarry’s swan song, what excited you about Sally’s arc?
Between the pilot and shooting the first season, we were sent four scripts to read, and then Bill called all of us for our notes. And we were shocked—like, who does that? As an actor, you don’t usually get that amount of creative license. And so all the way back then, I’d said to him, “I’d really love to push Sally into Gena Rowlands territory, A Woman Under the Influence or Opening Night. I want to go really far with this character.” And he was like, “Okay, I see that too.” He made me that promise all those years ago, and so, with the arc this season, we see a huge pivot from Sally, and I was thrilled at the challenge and chance to do something totally new. It’s pretty rare in TV that characters get to evolve the way they do on a show like Barry.
Carrigan: I love the misdirection. You think Hank is all stressed out because Barry is going to come kill him, but what he’s actually stressed out about is this plan to take out all of these guys in this really gruesome way. When I was reading it, I was genuinely just so shocked. I hope that people are going to get a kick out of it, even if it’s like, a kick in the nuts.
With the time jump revealed at episode’s end, we won’t be seeing the immediate grieving period for Hank, but how will this change him moving forward?
Carrigan: One of the key things that’ll clue audiences into where Hank goes from there is that very private moment with Hank after Cristobal makes his choice to leave, and Hank essentially gives the go ahead. He has this moment where the pain, which is so great in him, gets shoved down, and when you go down that path of repressing your emotions, you can’t stop doing that.
I was recently listening to Bill talk about the show, and here’s a direct quote that I wanted to pass along: “Michael Irby is just the fucking man.” Michael, you won’t be in the last couple episodes, but that’s not a bad way to go out.
Irby: Hey, man, that’s a great way to go out. I played so many tough guys in my career, and I’ve always just been a funny guy. When I was back in theater school, I really thought that was going to be what I was going to do. And, after 20 years, somebody saw it. Bill saw it, our lovely casting director saw it, and they’ve allowed me to stand in this other space now and take on this other light..
Any final words on CristoHo?
Carrigan: I need to echo what Bill said. Michael Irby, easily one of the most talented, incredible actors I’ve had the opportunity to work with and find this really magical thread between the two of us. After that scene, we were both pretty heartbroken from it, but we looked at each other and just had this kind of knowing, that this is why we do it.
Irby: Oh, brother, I’m blushing. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And you know that feeling is mutual. When you show up as a guest-star, you’re not sure what your place is on the show, and, from the minute I got there, it was open arms.
I did jump down the Reddit rabbit hole, and I said, “Oh my god.” I felt like Sally Field. Like, “They love us, they really love us.” [Laughs.] I didn’t know where that was coming from, and then I had to rewatch some of the episodes. It started at the volleyball game [in season two]. These little seeds were starting to plant, and then Bill would pour water on them, and we would shine light on them, and they were growing and we got all the way to here. So I think the fans also created this love story, because everyone believed in it, and it was just so much fun. And Anthony, god, you bring out the best. And I don’t know where, I don’t know how, but I really hope we get an opportunity to do this again.
Carrigan: Maybe an hour-long, standalone Dave & Buster’s TV special.
Irby: The bestest place on Earth! Let’s get them on the horn.
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.
Patrick Fischler jumped at the chance to play a role on the final season of Barry. “I got a call just from my rep saying, ‘Hey, do you want to do this arc on Barry?’ And my answer before I even saw what it was was yes, because it’s Barry,” he says. Little did he know at the time that he’d be playing the part of journalist Lon O’Neil, who works for a little magazine called Vanity Fair. Ever heard of it?
Over the course of three episodes, we see Lon track down Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler)—who, despite strict instructions to the contrary, can’t help but tell the twisted story of his relationship with Barry (Bill Hader) to Vanity Fair. Unfortunately for Lon, his dedication to the craft of journalism sends him right into the clutches of Detective Jim Moss (Robert Wisdom), who uses his powers of interrogation and intimidation to infiltrate Lon’s brain, effectively killing the Cousineau story and leaving Lon a German-speaking shell of a man. “Who the hell knows what Jim did in that garage to this guy?” Fischler says. “In my mind, he’s mush…. I think Lot O’Neil leaves that house and gets on a plane and goes to Germany, and goes and lives among what he thinks are his people.”
Fischler, a veteran actor who’s made memorable appearances on every show from Mad Men to Lost to Twin Peaks: The Return, says that Hader, who directed every episode of the final season of Barry, was one of the best he’s ever worked with. “I’ve worked with some incredibly prestigious, amazing directors that have been wonderful,” he said. “But Bill has just blown me away.”
In a somewhat meta moment, fictional Vanity Fair writer Fischler chats with actual Vanity Fair about the trials and tribulations of being a journeyman actor, and how Lon O’Neil could afford a house with a pool on a print journalist’s salary.
Vanity Fair:How did you prepare to take on this role of a lifetime?
Patrick Fischler: They sent me a little blurb of what it was. [It] didn’t even say Vanity Fair, it said a reporter who needs to speak another language. I said, sure. And then I found out it was Vanity Fair, which I loved because I felt like you’re kind of clear who this guy is. It made it very specific for me, and I didn’t really need to do much. I had to then quickly learn German.
How was that?
That was the most challenging part of this whole thing, actually. German is not an easy language to quickly learn. I learned a little improv in German, because Bill lets us play after we shoot it. He’s so collaborative and so open. So I learned a little bit of extra lines in German so I could make sure that I could improv the scene. And of course the other people have no idea what I’m saying, which is brilliant.
Do you know what you’re saying? Because I actually didn’t know what you’re saying either.
I think it’s literally “I have no idea who any of you are. I have to go back to my farm. I hope everyone’s okay.” It’s that kind of shit. He has no idea what’s going on. He has no idea any of these people are, and that’s what the lines are saying. I told Bill, “you guys should put subtitles.” He’s like, “nah.’ I think the whole idea is just that he’s just speaking German and they have no idea.
Obviously, we think it’s fun that Lon works forVanity Fair,but it seems to makes sense from a storytelling perspective as well.
Right away when we were rehearsing, I said, “I want him to be good at his job.” I think that’ll just make it more interesting. The fact that Bill picked Vanity Fair is…I mean, I think [Cousineau] is desperate for any spotlight he can find. But for a man like him, who’s always wanted to be on the cover, always wanted to be on that young Hollywood issue back in the ’90s—you know what I mean? That’s Cousineau.
What was it like watching Henry Winkler perform his one-man play?
It was amazing. Anyone you ever meet in your life will say this: Henry Winkler is the loveliest man in the world. He is a true mensch. On top of it, he’s so incredibly talented. So to have Bill write this amazing monologue for him, which, by the way, was much longer than they showed.
This show debuted during the pandemic at a time when everyone needed the warm embrace of its earnest, feel-good attitude, but Ted Lasso can’t maintain that affection unless it’s honest about the fact that not everyone approaches life with an open heart and good intentions. Sometimes people are cruel, operate in bad faith, or simply don’t care. Coach Ted and the characters who have been won over by him remain a type of antidote to that cynicism, but to avoid becoming a Hallmark card, this show is likely to get much more real, much more edgy, and maybe a little colder before it warms things up again. —A.B.
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Ahsoka(Disney+)
Premiere date TBD
The last time we visited Ted Lasso–land, we were left on a kind of cliff-hanger, a villain origin story, with former towel-boy Nate (Nick Mohammed) betraying Jason Sudeikis’s nice-guy coach by leaking details of his emotional breakdown to the press, then departing to work for a rival team.
This show debuted during the pandemic at a time when everyone needed the warm embrace of its earnest, feel-good attitude, but Ted Lasso can’t maintain that affection unless it’s honest about the fact that not everyone approaches life with an open heart and good intentions. Sometimes people are cruel, operate in bad faith, or simply don’t care. Coach Ted and the characters who have been won over by him remain a type of antidote to that cynicism, but to avoid becoming a Hallmark card, this show is likely to get much more real, much more edgy, and maybe a little colder before it warms things up again. —A.B.
All the Light We Cannot See(Netflix)
Premiere date TBD
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The Diplomat(Netflix)
Premiere date TBD
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Full Circle(HBO Max)
Limited series premiere date TBD
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The Full Monty(FX)
Premiere date TBD
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Premiere date TBD
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Premiere date TBD
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Lessons in Chemistry(Apple TV+)
Premiere date TBD
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Masters of the Air(Apple TV+)
Premiere date TBD
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Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story(Netflix)
Limited series premiere date TBD
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Secret Invasion(Disney+)
Premiere Date TBD
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Three-Body Problem(Netflix)
Premiere date TBD
Game of Thrones’ D.B.s return—David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are overseeing this sci-fi series about humanity’s first encounter with intelligent alien life. Cocreated with True Blood’s Alexander Woo, the show is based on a novel by Liu Cixin and will reportedly cover a vast span of time with an ensemble cast. Among the actors are Jess Hong of Inked,Liam Cunningham (a Thrones veteran), John Bradley (another), and Doctor Strange’s Benedict Wong and Jovan Adepo (Fences). The title refers to a type of physics equation that predicts the movements of three different objects in relation to each other. The notoriously difficult question focused on whether a repeating pattern could be discerned. With two objects—that’s no problem. But add the third, and the possibilities become much harder to predict. —A.B.
