Tag: exclusive

John Magaro Refuses to Play the Hollywood Schmuck

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?’”

David Canfield

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May 31, 2023
‘Fellow Travelers’: Inside Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey’s Epic, Sexy Romance

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.”

David Canfield

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May 25, 2023
Exclusive: Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina Confront a Serial Killer in ‘Based on a True Story’

Showrunner and creator Craig Rosenberg (The Boys) first had the idea for Based on a True Story years ago, inspired by true crime’s explosion in pop culture. “There’s been podcasts and docudramas and documentaries, murderers becoming celebrities, and celebrities becoming murderers,” he says. “I wanted to write something within that world—how can I really explore some of the more absurd places that this obsession takes people?” After bumping into his old friend Michael Costigan, Bateman’s producing partner under their Aggregate Films banner, Rosenberg pitched the Emmy-winning Ozark alum directly. “Jason’s very good, as you can imagine, with coming up with very specific character-based points of view on material, given his background as an actor,” Rosenberg says.

The tone evolved further with casting; at one point during production, Rosenberg told Cuoco he was surprised by just how funny the takes kept turning out. “They really let me be me,” Cuoco says. “They let me do my Kaley thing.” This is her first series since The Flight Attendant, which earned her Emmy nominations for both producing and acting, and it felt like a natural extension of that work. “I told Craig, ‘I feel like we did a lot of this in Flight Attendant, and I’m very comfortable in the genre,’” she says. “But this felt even stranger and a little quirkier…. All of it just felt like the right fit for me, and it ended up being one of the most enjoyable acting experiences I’ve ever had.”

Courtesy of Peacock.

David Canfield

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May 2, 2023
Matthew Rhys on Perry Mason’s Triumphant Season 2 Makeover

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?

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.

David Canfield

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April 24, 2023
How ‘Couples Therapy’ Will Take On Modern, Messy Love in Its Next Act

Couples Therapy finds authentic suspense in its structure—a credit to its cinematic bona fides. “We really don’t know what’s going to happen,” cocreator and executive producer Kriegman says. “There’s a formless reality to the process where we’re trusting our gut, and then really excited to see what comes of it. That’s the joy of this filmmaking.”

Having now gone through several seasons, Kriegman and his team have a better sense of what they need to work: They see hundreds of couples—the estimate in our interview for how many they saw and considered for this installment alone is 400—and rather than outsource the casting, do it all in-house themselves. Once the ensemble is finalized, the producers give Guralnik the space to conduct her sessions and progress the therapy without interference, but do speak with her regularly during production. She’s not isolated from the process.

As Kriegman puts it, “We have conversations about how the work is going, but very much through the lens of the therapy and less through the lens of the filmmaking.”

“Never in my life as a professional have I had such close scrutiny and supervision of my work as I’ve had in the last [several] years,” Guralnik says. “I did a PhD and then I did another 10 years of analytic training…. But in every [Couples Therapy] session I have people watching the session while I’m doing it, and I have then editors and directors peering over the material and trying to understand it—and talking to me about it later, both session by session and then period by period.”

This season, Couples Therapy brought on Joshua Altman, an award-winning documentary veteran (All These Sons, Minding the Gap), as a new director. He stepped into a well-oiled machine, but also imbued it with fresh perspective. “To find couples that I felt had this push and pull of genuine love for each other, and at the same time, this dynamic between them that as an audience you’re like, ‘Man, these two should split up’—those feelings are real things that all couples go through,” Altman says. “As I watched other seasons again, I was like, ‘Okay, yeah. How can we pull that out?’”

One way was through Guralnik directly. For the first time in the series, she’s confronted with a couple she believes, to some extent, she cannot work with, and agonizes over whether to terminate the treatment. The struggles between the pair resonate, initially, as a portrait of a couple in crisis. “But [Altman] was able to say, ‘Oh, no, the story here is as much Orna’s story as it is the couple’s story,’” Kriegman says. “That was a really great insight that took the season to a place that we’ve never been before.” Adds Altman: “We have the benefit of watching things and rewatching things and starting to look at patterns and offering those to her—not as a way to steer her, but to bring up questions and to raise ideas. Sometimes she shuts them down, and sometimes she’s like, ‘That’s really interesting.’”

David Canfield

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April 18, 2023
‘The Other Two’ Is Taking “Big Swings” in Season 3

Fans of The Other Two—the HBO Max comedy created, written, and executive produced by former SNL head writers Sarah Schneider and Chris Kelly—are used to a bit of jumping around. The critical darling, which follows Brooke and Cary Dubek (Heléne Yorke and Drew Tarver) in their quest to escape the shadow of their Justin Bieber–esque brother, ChaseDreams (Case Walker)—and, eventually, the shadow of their Ellen DeGeneres–adjacent talk show host mother, Pat (Molly Shannon)—premiered on Comedy Central in 2019 before getting scooped up by the streamer for its second season. Nearly two years after making the leap from cable to streaming, The Other Two returns to HBO Max on May 4 for its third season, where it will make its biggest leap yet.

After cruising through everything from a Hillsong-inspired baptism to an event dedicated to unveiling a secret Hadid’s face, season two ended on perhaps the best one-off pandemic joke we’ve seen on TV so far. Struggling actor Cary finally got a starring role in an indie film, with rehearsals set to begin—when else?—March 13, 2020. So, is season three all about the harrowing journey of making an indie film about essential workers amidst a global pandemic?

Yes, says Kelly. “All 10 episodes take place in real time on March 12, 2020.”

Molly Shannon in The Other Two.

Greg Endries/HBO Max

He’s joking. Instead, Kelly and Schneider wisely decided to jump three years into the future for season three. “We did just skip right the hell over that,” Kelly says. “Please make sure you print that this is not, like, a COVID show. We are not all about COVID now.”

But season three doesn’t pretend the pandemic didn’t happen, either. “Our show is so grounded in what feels real and current. We didn’t want to make a show that completely ignored our current situation and the ongoing effects of living through a global pandemic,” says Schneider. (Fittingly, we’re talking over Zoom.) “We are three years in the future, but all of our characters have been impacted in some way by what we’ve all gone through. And we just tried to explore different funny routes that that would take them.”

Season two ended with Cary and Brooke both finding success in their own right—with Cary’s acting career finally taking off and Brooke becoming manager for every other member of her family. But that doesn’t mean all their problems have gone away. If anything, the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Drew Tarver in The Other Two.

Greg Endries/HBO Max

“With the time jump, the family is years into being part of the public eye,” Tarver tells me in a separate Zoom call with Yorke. “I feel like they’ve settled into their fame, or their notoriety, and the issues that they were dealing with have become more commonplace. There’s maybe a deeper layer of, I guess, humiliation and sadness that comes along with that. The show continues to deliver in terms of the characters being humiliated—the ‘other two’ getting humiliated—in a very exciting, funny, new way.”

The intersection between humiliation and hilarity has always been The Other Two’s bread and butter, whether that’s involved Cary’s nude accidentally going “gay-viral” or Brooke inadvertently leading a “Women can suck!” chant at a panel. But season two proved that The Other Two also excels at pointed cultural satire, with sharp takes on everything from HGTV to Vogue. Cary’s season two dalliance with Dean, a straight actor who wanted to seem gay in public, predated proliferating discussions of “queerbaiting,” while Pat’s talk show, Pat!, arrived right around the morning talk show renaissance that also brought us The Drew Barrymore Show, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and The Jennifer Hudson Show. Clearly, “Pat’s influence knows no bounds,” Kelly jokes. “This is all because of Pat.”

Chris Murphy

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March 16, 2023
Claire Danes on Fighting and Screaming Through ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’

When Claire Danes first started filming Homeland, she did what many actors can’t help but do, and brought work home to her husband, Hugh Dancy—specifically, the Showtime drama’s liberal use of swear words. “The first season was littered with pretty foul language, and that bled into my personal life—I was talking like a sailor,” she tells Vanity Fair. “I remember Hugh being really grossed out by it and chastising me a little bit, like, ‘Claire!’” Cut to a decade later, with Danes deep into her new show, Fleishman Is in Trouble, FX on Hulu’s juicy and twisty tale of a bitter divorce. “Fighting in the way that I had been for 12 hours a day, for many consecutive days, just made me more inclined to pick fights with Hugh, who was entirely undeserving of it,” Danes says. “It was not at all his fault. But it’s hard to turn the spigot off because it feels good, in a perverse way.”

Danes commits every time—and it’s not that the Emmy winner goes full Method, exactly. The intensity and fullness with which she brings her richest characters to life translates into the kinds of performances that stick to viewers for days. No wonder the portrayer finds them a little hard to shake herself. And that goes especially for Fleishman. For much of the limited series’ run, Danes’s Rachel exists as a projection of her ex-husband, Toby (Jesse Eisenberg). His old college friend, Libby (Lizzy Caplan), listens to him unpack the breakdown of their marriage, from Rachel’s traumatic experience while giving birth, to her ruthless professional ambition, and her unwillingness to see him fully, as he (says he) saw her. One day, after dropping the kids off at Toby’s place, Rachel disappears; at the end of last week’s sixth episode, Libby finds Rachel sitting on a park bench, hiding in plain sight—and realizes that there’s far more to the story than Toby’s righteous version of events had perhaps implied. Rachel tells Libby everything that happened from her own perspective. The account is devastating—with Danes, emotionally and heartbreakingly raw, delivering career-best work in the process of explaining how a driven woman can crumble. (Already, she’s been nominated for a Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for her Fleishman performance.)

Due to some wonkiness in the production schedule, Danes filmed both this penultimate episode and the third episode—her other showcase, but told from Toby’s point of view—near-simultaneously. In other words, she and Eisenberg would be on the same sets, playing the same scenes, twice—through each other’s lens. “I’d never played a character as perceived by someone else, so to play a projection and then play a person, one after the other, took some coordination. I would lose track!” Danes says. “When we were shooting the scene at the therapist’s office, [our director] had to remind me that we were in what we called my episode. She’s like, ‘You’re right in this one.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m always right, but it’s a matter of how right: Am I episode three right, or am I episode seven right?’ These were the kind of deranged conversations that we found ourselves having.”

“Episode three right,” as they called it, carries a certain coldness—Rachel still reads her dynamics with Toby rather correctly in the latter’s memory of their marriage, but she lacks empathy and patience. Danes magnetically plays into Toby’s minimizing while hinting at the depth, history, and pain later fully revealed in Rachel’s own telling of events. Her story is that of one woman being pushed to the brink, the true and layered experience behind what would be dismissed by most as a mental breakdown. It’s the kind of arc Danes excels at delineating, never in judgment or hysterics but not shying away from the cry for help at its core. In fact, when she first encountered Rachel as her next potential role, Danes worried about repeating herself. “Obviously, I played an unhinged person in Carrie Mathison for many seasons, and I played Temple Grandin, who has a different kind of makeup and is a deeply sensitive person,” Danes says. “There was part of me that was like, Oh, gosh, am I the go-to girl for this kind of expression?”

But the difference is that Rachel is not a globetrotting, terrorist-hunting CIA agent. She’s not a hero of the American scientific community. She’s simply a working mom, someone many viewers know, or even are—and in Danes bringing her trademark, guttural power to that kind of everyday experience, she reaches a new sweet spot that hits hard, one rooted in the mundane. “I just find people who are in extreme states really, really fascinating—and I think that experience is probably more common than any of us would like to admit,” Danes says. “We all know what it is to be scared out of our minds, literally. It feels like a privilege to be able to communicate that.”

David Canfield

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December 21, 2022
Yvonne Strahovski Breaks Down That Shocking ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Finale Twist

I’m curious how that builds to, as you said, a very simple moment like this that’s also setting up a whole new avenue for these two characters who have been on these sort of parallel journeys until now.

I don’t know that we paid it too much thought. There was a line—is it there? I haven’t seen it, but do I ask her for a diaper in the scene?

Yes, you do. That’s the last line of the season.

Oh, my gosh. Okay. So they kept that. [Laughs] Yeah, we had honestly so much, the most discussion about the line. On paper it’s this big season finale, and here I am asking for a diaper. So it’s kind of like, That’s a bit weird! How do we make it so it’s not obviously about the diaper, but about what’s going on between these two women? We did many different takes of the ending. We did versions without the line. We did versions where I just said her name and she said mine. We did versions with the diaper line, then we changed up the diaper line. It was a whole different smorgasbord of potential endings with or without the diaper. Excited to see where they landed with that. [Laughs]

It’s kind of sweet in a weird way—whichever take they used, that was my takeaway.

There was also the practical conversation of, my baby’s much smaller than yours. Does it make sense to ask for a diaper? How many would I have already?

To me the line really spoke in a lot of ways just to the characters’ history. There’s a humor to the moment of them recognizing, well, here we are.

Yes. Maybe that’s why we didn’t talk too much about the scene itself, because I think we both felt like there was a lightness in this scene. We never kind of thought to lean into seriousness. The irony of it is what it felt like we should be leaning into. And therefore it was like, Oh, my gosh, of course, of course you are here.

In terms of the episode structure and really the whole season’s structure, this reveal is obviously a surprise for the audience. In those kinds of moments where we’re not with Serena for a chunk of time, do you fill in the gaps, just in terms of what happened that we don’t get to see, that’s not on the page?

Yeah, I thought about a lot of what might have happened to her. There was also that question of, Well, is she recognizable at this point? How expansive is that? Or how small is that kind of idea that she might be recognizable to some people? I was like, Well, what path would she have taken? In my mind, she would’ve ended up at some shelter where she could be anonymous and dressed down and receive aid of some kind, like clothing. She’s wearing super-normal stuff like jeans and somehow gets herself on that train, which I think would’ve been the biggest gamble. There was a discussion about how you’d have to receive a pass of some kind, a refugee pass, and be anonymous. I mean, she’s smart, so she would’ve had to figure it out.

David Canfield

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November 8, 2022
EXCLUSIVE: India’s Twitter alternative Koo now reaches 4,800 towns and cities

Serial entrepreneur Aprameya Radhakrishna, known for building ride-sharing company TaxiForSure (which was acquired by Ola for $200 million in 2015), started Koo — a language-focused microblogging platform — in early 2020. It was meant to be a homegrown, hyperlocal alternative to Twitter, and a step towards fulfilling the government’s grand ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ vision. Later that year, Koo went on to win MeitY’s Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge in the ‘Social’ category, and was also listed among Google Play Store’s “Everyday Essentials’ apps.

Within 20 months of its launch, Koo says it racked up 15 million downloads. “Our first 10 million downloads happened in about a year and a half, while the next five million users joined the platform in a quarter,” Koo Co-founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna tells Business Today. “Currently, we have over 45 million downloads with 7,500 eminent accounts.”

But what worked? How did Koo find its audience in a cluttered social media space where attention spans are diminishing by the day? Radhakrishna says Koo was the answer to India’s language diversity problem. “In a country like India, where more than 90 per cent of the population thinks and speaks in a regional language, the power of expression in one’s mother tongue is truly immense. We noticed that the majority of the conversations on existing global social media platforms were in English. The native language speakers needed an immersive experience in their mother tongue. Koo is a solution to that problem,” he explains.

This problem is not just India’s though. “80 per cent of the world doesn’t speak English either. They speak some native language,” he says.

Koo’s native language proposition managed to woo some of the top venture capitalists of the world. In a little over two years, the Bengaluru-based startup has raise $64.1 million in funding from the likes of Tiger Global, Mirae Asset Management, One4 Capital, Accel, Casper, and prominent angels, including Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Ashneer Grover, among others. Koo’s last funding round came in February this year, and its valuation stood at $263 million in June, according to Tracxn.

Radhakrishna says, “Running a language-based micro-blog is way more complex than a single language platform in multiple ways. Koo has built tech to support billions of interactions from millions of users. It has one of the most exhaustive and deep usage of language-based technologies. Right from translations to transliteration, context extraction, categorization to recommendations and personalization. The language dimension adds many complexities, apart from the fact that a lot of the language tech, especially Indian languages, is still nascent.”

Today, Koo enables interactions in Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati, and Punjabi, besides English. The platform allows creators to send their messages in real-time across languages while retaining the context and sentiment attached to the original text. “This enhances a user’s reach, as the message can be consumed by people across the country in a language of their choice,” says the founder.

As a result of its deep language penetration, Koo claims to be reaching users in 4,800 towns and cities of India, with over 60 per cent of those coming from Tier 2 and Tier 3 regions. With growing mobile internet usage, more and more first-time users are now taking to social apps. However, Koo stakes a claim to several seasoned netizens as well. “The average age of users on Koo is between 23 to 35 years. These are not necessarily first-time internet users, but language users who didn’t have a platform to express themselves earlier,” Radhakrishna reveals.

Despite the positive indicators, Koo — like most other social media platforms of the world — continues to battle charges of hate speech and discrimiation. Its content moderation policies have come under the scanner too. The company says it follows the laws of the land. “Our structured content moderation practice complies with Indian law and leverages the expertise of both humans and machines to curb online hatred and facilitate a cleaner ecosystem. We also have a ‘Voluntary Self-Verification’ feature on the Koo app which helps to curb anonymity and the presence of nuisance creators,” the founder explains.

Interestingly, self verification is something Elon Musk (who’s close to completing his Twitter buyout) has been pushing for a while. In April, the Tesla CEO and Twitter board member urged the social media platform to “authenticate all real humans”, which Koo claims it has already done. Radhakrishna, in fact, tweeted to Musk, asking him to try out the app. “Your specific point on democratized verification [is] already done btw,” he wrote.

But what really are the pros of self-verification? Is it effective enough?

He elaborates, “Self-verification empowers every user on Koo with the privilege of getting recognized as a genuine voice, something which is only available for eminent voices on other social media apps. Being a ‘genuine voice’ lends greater credibility to the thoughts and opinions that are shared. Profiles have witnessed a 75 per cent spike in followers and a 30 per cent increase in profile visits within a week of having self-verified themselves, says our analysis.”

When it comes to monetisation, however, Koo is yet to turn a corner. The platform’s annual revenues stood at $145,000 as on December 31, 2020, according to Tracxn. It reportedly incurred losses of over Rs 35 crore in FY21, and with funding drying up in 2022, operations have been crunched further. Koo also laid off nearly 5 per cent of its workforce in August.

“These colleagues were let go for a mix of reasons like performance issues and restructuring that made some of these roles redundant. This is a constant exercise at any company,” Radhakrishna asserts. “We are still aggressively hiring people in areas such as product, analytics, and engineering. Our current workforce has a strength of 300 employees.”

But is there a clear path to monetisation and profitability? Without divulging much, the founder says, “Koo is looking at sustained growth that will be backed by experiments related to driving value to brands, creators and other stakeholders linked to the Koo ecosystem.”

Also Read: Koo relies on library of 6,300 words and phrases to spot abusive content

Also Read: Koo signs MoU with Telangana govt, to open development centre in Hyderabad

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October 26, 2022
Pregnant south Omaha woman shares experience getting carjacked

A South Omaha woman who was carjacked this week at gunpoint tells KETV she is five months pregnant. Omaha police arrested four teenagers on Thursday and say they carried out the crime. Officers booked the teens on robbery and use of a weapon charges. They are all 13 to 17 years old. Police say the group carjacked the 27-year-old pregnant woman in a cul-de-sac at Spring Lake Park Wednesday afternoon. They say one of the teens shot a man in a separate vehicle as they were driving away. The soon-to-be mother, Perla, says she thought it was a joke at first because the carjackers were so young. Perla was just taking her dog out for a walk when a young man approached her and opened her passenger-side door pointing a gun. She did not want her face on camera, still recovering from the ordeal. “They told me ‘give me your money. I know you have money, give me your money.’ And like you said, they’re just kids so I was like is this a joke, is this, what?” Perla said.But it was no joke. Perla says the four carjackers took her keys and made a getaway. Police say they shot at another vehicle, striking the 32-year-old driver.”I started crying. I was at the park with my dog, I just took him out because he wasn’t feeling well. I just wanted to go on a walk with him,” Perla said.Omaha police eventually recovered Perla’s car in North Omaha along with another vehicle the suspects used in the carjacking. They say people commit this crime for a myriad of reasons: maybe it is on a dare, a challenge or for a joyride. It is much harder to sell a stolen vehicle or tear it down for scrap. Police say to lessen the chance of a carjacking, you have to be aware of your surroundings. “We always try to encourage people to look up while they’re walking to and from either a vehicle or into a business,” said Officer Chris Gordon, an Omaha police spokesperson. If someone aggressively approaches you to take your car, your well-being should come first. Use good judgement and be smart. Do not try to fight back if the robber is armed with something dangerous. It is also important to think like a witness: look for distinguishing features on the suspect and report the carjacking immediately to police. “If you walk out with your head up, looking around, making contact at people, making eye contact, that tends to minimize you as a perceived victim,” Gordon said.For Perla, the incident has left her shaken, but OK. She is looking forward to putting this behind her and being a mom. “She’s my first baby so I just don’t want anything to happen to her,” Perla said.Police also say it is best to park in well-seen areas, try to go in pairs to your car when possible and have your vehicle keys in hand ready to lock and unlock the doors quickly. The 32-year-old driver who was shot, Jorge Garcia, was rushed to the hospital with critical injuries, but authorities say those injuries are non-life-threatening.

OMAHA, Neb. —

A South Omaha woman who was carjacked this week at gunpoint tells KETV she is five months pregnant.

Omaha police arrested four teenagers on Thursday and say they carried out the crime. Officers booked the teens on robbery and use of a weapon charges. They are all 13 to 17 years old.

Police say the group carjacked the 27-year-old pregnant woman in a cul-de-sac at Spring Lake Park Wednesday afternoon. They say one of the teens shot a man in a separate vehicle as they were driving away.

The soon-to-be mother, Perla, says she thought it was a joke at first because the carjackers were so young.

Perla was just taking her dog out for a walk when a young man approached her and opened her passenger-side door pointing a gun. She did not want her face on camera, still recovering from the ordeal.

“They told me ‘give me your money. I know you have money, give me your money.’ And like you said, they’re just kids so I was like is this a joke, is this, what?” Perla said.

But it was no joke. Perla says the four carjackers took her keys and made a getaway. Police say they shot at another vehicle, striking the 32-year-old driver.

“I started crying. I was at the park with my dog, I just took him out because he wasn’t feeling well. I just wanted to go on a walk with him,” Perla said.

Omaha police eventually recovered Perla’s car in North Omaha along with another vehicle the suspects used in the carjacking. They say people commit this crime for a myriad of reasons: maybe it is on a dare, a challenge or for a joyride. It is much harder to sell a stolen vehicle or tear it down for scrap.

Police say to lessen the chance of a carjacking, you have to be aware of your surroundings.

“We always try to encourage people to look up while they’re walking to and from either a vehicle or into a business,” said Officer Chris Gordon, an Omaha police spokesperson.

If someone aggressively approaches you to take your car, your well-being should come first. Use good judgement and be smart. Do not try to fight back if the robber is armed with something dangerous.

It is also important to think like a witness: look for distinguishing features on the suspect and report the carjacking immediately to police.

“If you walk out with your head up, looking around, making contact at people, making eye contact, that tends to minimize you as a perceived victim,” Gordon said.

For Perla, the incident has left her shaken, but OK. She is looking forward to putting this behind her and being a mom.

“She’s my first baby so I just don’t want anything to happen to her,” Perla said.

Police also say it is best to park in well-seen areas, try to go in pairs to your car when possible and have your vehicle keys in hand ready to lock and unlock the doors quickly.

The 32-year-old driver who was shot, Jorge Garcia, was rushed to the hospital with critical injuries, but authorities say those injuries are non-life-threatening.

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October 14, 2022
Austin Pets Alive! | 10 Days to 100: Austin Pets Alive! Sets Goal of…

Apr 22, 2021

Austin Pets Alive! will begin a brand new campaign from May 1 to May 10 — 10 Days to 100. The innovative animal rescue organization hopes to add 100 or more additional donors to its monthly giving program, Constant Companions, in just 10 days.

Constant Companions are the most dependable donors for the organization. Expanding the Constant Companion family allows APA! to continue setting its sights higher than ever. With its eyes set on making Texas No Kill, APA! relies on the generosity of Constant Companions to support this expansion and constant innovation.

Launched nearly a decade ago, APA!’s monthly giving program allows loyal supporters from all over the world to regularly contribute to lifesaving efforts in Central Texas and beyond. Currently, the program has 1088 Constant Companions that give $46,269.88 a month to Austin Pets Alive!. That’s 154 pets saved every month by APA!’s Constant Companions alone.

The 10 Days to 100 campaign will feature compelling stories of companion animal lifesaving that would not be possible without those who support APA! every single month. With the help of local artist and animal lover, Will Bryant, exclusive tote bags are being created for qualifying Constant Companions. New members and those who increase their membership level will be able to take home custom tote bags exclusive to Constant Companions. Be sure to follow Austin Pets Alive! on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to keep up with all of the action.

Each monthly gift, no matter the level, sustains APA!’s mission and writes a brighter future for every companion animal in Central Texas.

Want to join Constant Companions and can’t wait until May 1? Click here to sign up!

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April 22, 2021
Austin Pets Alive! | Austin Pets Alive! announces 10th Annual Paddle…

Apr 16, 2021

Austin Pets Alive! is thrilled to announce the return of Paddle for Puppies, presented by Austin Subaru and hosted at Rowing Dock. Though the format may look a little different from years past, the concept — and the cause — are the same.

Instead of hosting this fundraiser on one day, it has been spread out over the course of a weekend to accommodate social distancing needs. Participants can register for their preferred time slot on one of three days (May 7, 4-8 pm; May 8, 8 am-12 pm; May 9, 8 am-12 pm) and enjoy a leisurely paddle, kayak, or canoe ride on their own down Lady Bird Lake. All participants will receive an exclusive Paddle for Puppies t-shirt, and all proceeds directly benefit the APA! Parvo Puppy ICU.

This is the 10th anniversary of Paddle for Puppies. Since its inception in 2011, Austin Subaru has raised over $20,000 each year through this community favorite activity. APA!’s Parvo Puppy ICU is a specialized facility designed to care for puppies that contract canine parvovirus, a highly contagious and life-threatening virus. Dogs with parvo are often at extremely high risk of euthanasia in certain shelters and regions that lack the resources to safely quarantine and treat these pups. Through this program, APA! provides shelters across Texas with an alternative to euthanasia and saves around 500 lives each year.

Due to recent detection of toxins in an algae sample taken from Lake Austin, APA! is not encouraging participants to bring their dogs along for the paddle at this time. Humans of all ages, however, are welcome to attend. Registration starts at $40 per adult, with an optional boat rental fee. Children under 16 can be added on as a second rider for $25. All attendees can register on the Paddle for Puppies website ahead of time.

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April 16, 2021