WASHINGTON — President Trump’s chief of staff is defending herself after granting an extraordinarily candid series of interviews with Vanity Fair in which she offers stinging judgments of the president and blunt assessments about his administration’s shortcomings.
The profile of Susie Wiles, Trump’s reserved, influential top aide since he resumed office, caused a scandal in Washington and prompted a crisis response from the White House that involved nearly every single figure in Trump’s orbit issuing a public defense.
In 11 interviews conducted over lunches and meetings in the West Wing, Wiles described early failures and drug use by billionaire Elon Musk during his time in government and mistakes by Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi in her public handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Wiles also acknowledged that Trump had launched a retribution campaign against his perceived political enemies.
“I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution,” Wiles told Chris Whipple, the Vanity Fair writer who has written extensively on past chiefs of staff, “but when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
Wiles also cited missteps in the administration’s immigration crackdown, contradicted a claim Trump makes about financier and convicted sex offender Epstein and former President Clinton and described Vice President JD Vance as a “conspiracy theorist.”
Within hours of the Vanity Fair tell-all’s publication Tuesday, Wiles and key members of Trump’s inner circle mounted a robust defense of her tenure, calling the story a “hit piece” that left out exculpatory context.
“The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history,” Wiles said in a post on X, her first in more than a year. “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story.”
The profile was reported with the knowledge and participation of other senior staff, and illustrated with a photograph of Wiles and some of Trump’s closest aides, including Vance, Bondi and advisor Stephen Miller.
The profile revealed much about a chief of staff who has kept a discreet profile in the West Wing, continuing her management philosophy carried through the 2024 election when she served as Trump’s last campaign manager: She let Trump be Trump. “Sir, remember that I am the chief of staff, not the chief of you,” she recalled telling the president.
Trump has publicly emphasized how much he values Wiles as a trusted aide. He did so at a rally last week where he referred to her as “Susie Trump.” In an interview with Whipple, she talked about having difficult conversations with Trump on a daily basis, but that she picks her battles.
“So no, I’m not an enabler. I’m also not a bitch. I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in,” Wiles said. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”
Despite her passive style, Wiles shared concern over Trump’s initial approach to tariff policy, calling the levies “more painful than I had expected.” She had urged him, unsuccessfully, to get his retribution campaign out of the way within his first 90 days in office, in order to enable the administration to move on to more important matters. And she had opposed Trump’s blanket pardon of Jan. 6 defendants, including those convicted of violent crimes.
Wiles also acknowledged the administration needs to “look harder at our process for deportation,” adding that in at least one instance mistakes were made when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested and deported two mothers and their American children to Honduras. One of the children was being treated for Stage 4 cancer.
“I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did,” she said.
In foreign policy, Wiles defended the administration’s attack on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and said the president “wants to keep on blowing up boats up until [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro cries uncle,” suggesting the goal is to seek a change of governments.
As Trump has talked about potential land strikes in Venezuela, Wiles acknowledged that such a move would require congressional authorization.
“If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress,” she said.
In one exchange with Whipple, she characterized Trump, who abstains from liquor, as having an “alcoholic’s personality,” explaining that “high-functioning alcoholics, or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink.”
He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” she said.
But Trump, in an interview with the New York Post, defended Wiles and her comments, saying that he would indeed be an alcoholic if he drank alcohol.
“She’s done a fantastic job,” Trump said. “I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer — purposely misguided.”
Wiles also blamed the persistence of the Epstein saga on members of Trump’s Cabinet, noting that the president’s chosen FBI director, Kash Patel, had advocated for the release of all Justice Department files related to the investigation for many years. Despite Trump’s claims that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island, Wiles acknowledged, Trump is “wrong about that.”
Wiles added that Bondi had “completely whiffed” on how she handled the Epstein files, an issue that has created a rift within MAGA.
“First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk,” Wiles said.
Wiles added that she has read the investigative files about Epstein and acknowledged that Trump is mentioned in them, but said “he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
Vance, who she said had been a “conspiracy theorist for a decade,” said he had joked with Wiles about conspiracies in private before offering her praise.
“I’ve never seen Susie Wiles say something to the president and then go and counteract him or subvert his will behind the scenes. And that’s what you want in a staffer,” Vance told reporters. “I’ve never seen her be disloyal to the president of the United States and that makes her the best White House chief of staff that the president could ask for.”
Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget whom Wiles described to Whipple as a “right-wing absolute zealot,” said in a social media post that she is an “exceptional chief of staff.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the “entire administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”
Wiles told Vanity Fair that she would be happy to stay in the role for as long as the president wanted her to stay, noting that she has time to devote to the job, being divorced and with her kids out of the house.
Trump had a troubled relationship with his chiefs of staff in his first term, cycling through four in four years. His longest-serving chief of staff, former Gen. John F. Kelly, served a year and a half.
“I sometimes question, have I made any progress?” Taylor Frankie Paul, who in just three short years leapt from being the leader of #MomTok on Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives to the single lead of ABC’s The Bachelorette, asks Vanity Fair. “We’re humans, we make mistakes; and I feel like I do [make] a lot of different mistakes. That’s what life’s about—it’s trial and error. I’m learning different lessons now in this phase of my life.”
Paul’s latest chapter plays out on season three of the wildly popular Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which reveals that while promoting the show’s second season this spring, Paul privately suffered personal betrayal involving on-again, off-again ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen, father of her one-year-old son, Ever True, and a close family friend. When I reach Paul, she’s in the backseat of a moving vehicle, being whisked from one mystery location to another for her turn on The Bachelorette. Paul can’t technically disclose that she’s not near home, but the palm trees peeking through the car’s back windows confirm: we’re not in Utah anymore.
Since 2022, when Paul, now 31, revealed she was divorcing husband Tate (father of Paul’s daughter Indy and son Ocean, who do not appear on Mormon Wives), after she engaged in “soft swinging” (some heavy petting and emotional affairs, but no “full-on” sex) within their married friend group, she has been filming her life at a near-continuous pace.
Before sending shockwaves through Utah’s #MomTok community, Paul already shared near-daily snippets of her more buttoned-up Mormon life with what eventually grew to 1.8 million Instagram and 5.8 million TikTok followers. When the first season of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives premiered last September, it launched the eight MomTokers, led by the headline-making Paul, to something approaching Housewives-level fame.
“Sorry if I sound like I’m losing my voice, we’re getting over a little cold,” Paul rasps. The “we” another reminder that as the single mother of three who blew up her life, then made a reality show about it, is far from an obvious pick for ABC’s increasingly staid reality dating series—but more on that adventure later.
Taylor Frankie Paul (center) catches up with her fellow #MomTok members Miranda McWhorter, Mikayla Matthews, and Mayci Neeley during Secret Lives of Mormon Wives season three.Fred Hayes
Deep into an evening spent on the set of the Sundance series This Close, Shoshannah Stern and Marlee Matlin started chatting while waiting to resume filming on a long dinner scene. The pair had already bonded as deaf actors. Stern, who also served as the show’s co-creator and executive producer, had found great inspiration in her Oscar-winning co-star. She can’t recall what they were talking about, exactly, but at a certain point, she noticed Matlin staring at her.
“She’s looking at me and she says, ‘You need to direct,’” Stern says.
What was going on in Matlin’s head at that moment?
“It was late at night, and I kept thinking as I was watching her that she’s been around this industry for a while—and it just popped into my head,” she says. “She doesn’t give up easily when it comes to writing. She doesn’t give up easily when it comes to acting. She sets her mind to it. So why not go beyond that, and go up beyond to direct?”
Around this time, producers had approached Matlin interested in making a documentary about her life. She stipulated that she would participate only if Stern—who, again, had never directed before—helmed the film. Years later, Stern’s Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore is critically acclaimed, award-winning, and now playing in select theaters. (It is also available for digital rental or purchase.) The film offers a nuanced portrait of a Hollywood icon through Stern’s bold use of craft and narrative.
Still, that night on the This Close set, Stern didn’t feel remotely ready to take such a project on. She had built her own acting career, playing roles on major series like Weeds and Grey’s Anatomy, before finding her voice as a screenwriter. “I literally had never thought about [directing] before,” Stern says, speaking in American Sign Language beside an interpreter. “I didn’t think I could. I didn’t think I would be allowed to.”
When I later relay this Matlin over Zoom, her face falls. “I’m basically experiencing PTSD as a result of those words being used. A lot of kids who are deaf experience those same words,” Matlin says. “I’m glad that she was able to change her mind about feeling ‘not allowed’ to say, ‘Fuck off. Fuck off.’”
Stern grew up in the Bay Area to a fourth-generation deaf family. Her mother was a stage actor. As a kid, she wanted to follow in those footsteps. This was before the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, though. “There were almost no captions on TV—so you’re hungry for information, you’re hungry for stories. That makes you very curious,” Stern says. “I’m always asking my friends who can hear, ‘What’s the other table talking about?’ They’re usually like, ‘I don’t know, I’m not listening.’ I would never stop listening, if I could.”
We’re pretty much by ourselves on this warm July day, however, sitting in a quiet vegan restaurant near her Los Angeles home. After she orders her lunch, Stern tells me about the challenges she faced in chasing her dreams. While she planned to study theater at college, her education was supported by the Vocational Rehabilitation program, which helps many deaf people in the transition out of high school. It requires program approval for any major. “You don’t really have freedom. They said, ‘No, [theater] is not a reasonable major to have. You’re not going to be a contributing member of society if you major in theater,’” Stern says. She chose English, while still acting in plays at Gallaudet University whenever she could.
During the winter break before her final semester, she went home and told her parents she was going to quit acting for good. The next day, she got an email from Warner Bros. with an audition offer.
The secretary for Gallaudet’s theater department had recommended Stern to the casting agents on the sitcom Off Centre, created by the Weitz brothers of American Pie fame. “She gave them my email address. I didn’t have an agent—I didn’t have anything. I was a college student,” Stern says. She booked the cheapest flight she could down to LA and completed the audition. Then she booked the part, and has essentially been in Hollywood ever since.
Even when auditioning for deaf parts throughout the aughts, Stern was often the only deaf actor in the room. This was decades out from Children of a Lesser God, Randa Haines’s searing 1986 take on the romantic drama that made Matlin the first-ever deaf actor to win an Oscar. (Troy Kotsur became the second for CODA, which also starred Matlin, in 2022.) Stern bristles when hearing that movie called “groundbreaking,” to say nothing of other milestones achieved by her and her peers before and since. “Stories about deaf people can be groundbreaking. They can,” Stern says. “But I would like to think that it’s because they push perspective, they push the form, they push understanding, they push the nuance.”
In 1971, Elsa Peretti was still three years away from the partnership with Tiffany & Co. that would assure her status as one of the most consequential jewelry designers of the 20th century, but she already had the aplomb of a star. Wearing a tie-dye Halston caftan, perched on an Angelo Donghia chaise longue in her apartment on Irving Place in Manhattan, she explained to a journalist how she came to have it: “You must have a lot of confidence but very little compromise with yourself.”
Peretti, who died three years ago at the age of 80, exhibited both those qualities from an early age. Raised in a palazzo in Rome, she chafed at the expectations of her wealthy, conventional family. At 21, she wrote her father a letter declaring her intention to live independently; in response, he cut her off financially. Undeterred, she taught languages and skiing at her former finishing school to support herself before settling in Barcelona, where she began modeling and fell in with La Gauche Divine, a group of artists and intellectuals who opposed the fascist Franco regime. At the time, said Stefano Palumbo, the general director and a board member of the philanthropic Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation, which he helped Peretti to establish in 2000, “Europe was not ready for a woman who decided to be an artist, who decided not to get married, not have a family.” To her family’s dismay, she was just getting warmed up.
Peretti’s modeling agency sent her to New York in 1968, and, despite what were viewed as considerable drawbacks—“When I came here, what they liked was the blonde girl. With big blue eyes and very young. I was very tall, very dark, very skinny.… I was everything too very,” she later remembered—she became a favorite of designers like Halston, Charles James, Issey Miyake, and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, who loved her lanky frame and cropped, slicked-back hair. But modeling was a means to an end. When a silver bud vase pendant she designed on a whim for one of di Sant’Angelo’s runway shows proved to be an unexpected hit, she knew she had found her true vocation.
At the time, silver had a down-market reputation that made it a risky choice for fine jewelry. Peretti, however, insisted on using it in her collections. She sensed that grand, formal jewels were as passé as girdles and white gloves; in their place, she offered ease. Her earrings and necklaces were meant to be put on and forgotten about, with no sharp points to catch on sweaters or hair, no warnings about not getting wet, and the designer’s blessing to wear them to sleep. Moreover, she wanted women to feel like they could buy her jewelry for themselves instead of waiting to receive it from a man. “I design for the working girl,” she proudly proclaimed. The response was so overwhelming that Peretti single-handedly turned silver into a viable alternative to gold, netting a 1971 Coty Award for jewelry and her own corner at Bloomingdale’s in the process. When she began collaborating with Tiffany, the venerable house had not sold silver jewelry since the Great Depression.
Peretti’s design process was highly personal, but her biomorphic shapes gave her jewelry a rare timelessness that Tiffany’s customers continue to appreciate. “Elsa used to say, ‘Jewelry is not fashion,’ ” said Palumbo. “It does not have to be discharged as soon as something new comes along.” Her Bone Cuff, for example, which was inspired by religious relics she saw as a child and is so true to human anatomy that it must be bought to conform to one wrist or the other, is as relevant today as it was when it was designed. Her Bone Candlesticks, a riff on an X-ray of her own femur, still look modern, as does her Henry Moore–inspired Open Heart pendant. Her Diamonds by the Yard, shimmering chains that, as the name implies, can be bought at various lengths, were rooted in memories of the way her grandmother casually wore her own diamonds. Now, in addition to the long-standing classics, Tiffany is offering special limited editions of some of Peretti’s favorites to mark the 50th anniversary of this fruitful partnership. These include a diamond pavé Amapola brooch, named after the Spanish word for “poppy” and featuring a black silk bloom, and large 18-karat yellow gold High Tide earrings, which ripple like water.
Halston was instrumental in introducing Peretti to Tiffany executives. He and Peretti were close, and the fashion icon was initially delighted by his friend’s success. When he launched his fragrance, he asked Peretti to design the bottle; she obliged with a curvy flacon shaped like a chic gourd. But once her fame began to rival his own, their relationship, always intense—as Peretti liked to point out, they were both Tauruses and took slights seriously—soured. The low point came during an argument in 1978, when Peretti hurled a sable coat Halston had given her in lieu of payment for the bottle design into the fireplace of his townhouse, on East 63rd Street. She had wanted to deepen their connection with more personal conversation, she later explained, while Halston preferred to keep things superficial, a stance she found…unsatisfactory.
Even by the standards of a famously louche era, incinerating sable was impressively bad behavior. And, indeed, Peretti held her own in those years. She palled around with Andy Warhol, Stephen Burrows, Marina Schiano, Berry Berenson, and Joe Eula. She walked the runway at the Battle of Versailles. She vamped in a Playboy Bunny costume on a terrace for her then lover Helmut Newton, a scene that resulted in one of the decade’s most electrifying images. She was who Victor Hugo, Halston’s streetwise boyfriend, turned to when he needed fast cash. When Studio 54 cofounder Steve Rubell had the temerity to call her “honey pie,” she smashed a bottle of vodka in protest. Halston stepped in, and the showdown turned so heated that Warhol noted in his diary that it was enough to make him want to stay home for the rest of his life (as if).
But even while she was living dangerously in Manhattan, Peretti was building a refuge for herself in the abandoned Catalonian village of Sant Martí Vell, which she vowed to make her home after glimpsing it in a photo in 1968. As soon as she earned the money, she bought and renovated two of its decrepit buildings, then two more, until she had put her stamp on the entire village. She created workshops for the artisans who crafted her jewelry, guest quarters, and living spaces for herself. Although she owned far more luxurious residences, Sant Martí became her home base. She spent the final few months of her life there.
When Palumbo first met Peretti, her insistence on art directing her environment was immediately evident. She interviewed him not in an office but at her summer house overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, under a pergola of strawberry grapes. A few days later, the pair traveled to Jordan to attend a summit on environmental conservation. After the conference, Peretti suggested they rent a car and explore the Jordanian desert. As they neared the ruins of the ancient city of Petra, she announced that they needed music. They stopped at a roadside kiosk, where, to the delight of the proprietor, she requested a cassette by the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. For the rest of the trip, that was their soundtrack. “Even in the car, she needed to create her own artistic atmosphere, ‘a room of one’s own,’ as Virginia Woolf wrote,” said Palumbo.
Rebecca Dayan, the actor who played her in Netflix’s Halston, thought Peretti deserved her own show. Palumbo has an even bigger idea. Describing Peretti as a jewelry designer, he said, doesn’t begin to encompass her impact. Instead, “she is a protagonist of history. She belongs not to the history of fashion or design but to the history of art.”
I’m waiting for Kieran Culkin at the tip of the Greenpoint ferry platform, where he’s suggested we meet on a Friday morning to get on the boat, take it a few stops to Dumbo, then walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan — a sort of hung-over New Yorker’s triathlon. He’s late and sending me self-effacing riffs about it: “I was just about to text you to see if you were also running late or if you were the kind of person that was professional and an actual adult, unlike myself.” The ferry pulls into the dock at the exact moment that I spot him on the horizon. He is instantly recognizable, clad in all black and wearing a pair of sunglasses, eyebrows perma-arched, hair like an inverted comma, walking with distinct hustle but not running. The boat starts boarding right as he reaches me, a little out of breath and visibly relieved that he pulled it off. “This is what I do,” he says. “I pull up to airports, I don’t even know what airline I’m flying. Sometimes I don’t know what city I’m going to. I still get on the plane and everything’s fine.”
As we line up to show our tickets, Culkin, a lifelong New Yorker who rode the subway around the city alone by 13 and who contains all of the ungovernability and bullshit-detecting that this implies, digresses into a spontaneous but deeply felt spiel about the ferry’s flawed digital ticketing system (“The physical ticket, I can just put it in my pocket. I just have to get here early enough to go to the kiosk and fucking do it. But I’m lazy. And now I’m bitching about how lazy I am”). I will soon learn that this is his greatest talent, second only to his ability to wring humor, poignancy, and a sense of total reality from the dozens of onscreen characters he’s been playing since early childhood. Later, he will joyfully go full Larry David on everything from coffee-lid sizes to the concept of wearing shorts (“It’s a weird garment”).
Culkin, 42, has made his career portraying boys, teenagers, and now adult men not unlike himself: hyperverbose and stubborn, skin-of-their-teeth charming, effortlessly funny, irascible and self-lacerating. He’s mastered the art of playing people who think they’ve mastered the art of the carefree, loutish façade but whose pathos and pain glisten through the cracks. He uncovered that instinct as a part of the brief but powerful Culkin Child-Actor Dynasty in blazingly earnest ’90s films like The Mighty and The Cider House Rules and Father of the Bride, sharpened it as a teen in artier fare like Igby Goes Down and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, and most recently and famously perfected it on HBO’s Succession as sad perverted clown Roman Roy.
He’ll next star in the film A Real Pain, a dramedy about a pair of cousins who embark on a Holocaust tour of Poland in memory of their late grandmother. Culkin is at the apex of his idiosyncratic powers as the magnetic charmer Benji, whose easy banter with his fellow tourgoers gives way to increasingly volatile moods that reveal a tormented core. Jesse Eisenberg — who wrote, directed, and stars opposite Culkin — is the ostensible protagonist David, Benji’s uptight, socially awkward cousin who envies and pities him in equal measure, but A Real Pain is Culkin’s showcase. Eisenberg remembers being consistently astonished by Culkin’s ability to show up on set with no idea which scene they were filming that day, scan his lines, then casually deliver “the greatest acting I’ve ever seen in my life.” Its Sundance and Telluride premieres received glowing reviews praising Culkin’s performance specifically, entering him into the Best Supporting Actor Oscar conversation.
And Culkin nearly dropped out of the film. He’s notoriously picky about taking jobs; he turned several of them down in the years after 2002’s Igby, unsure if he wanted what he saw as a fun childhood hobby to be a proper career. “Things were coming,” he recalls of that time, like movies written specifically for him, and “I freaked out, ran away.” He eventually got comfortable taking on more parts, only saying “yes” when he really connected with something — which is exactly what happened when he read the script for A Real Pain while filming Succession’s final season in 2022.
“It was one of the very, very, very rare scripts that I laughed out loud reading,” he says as we disembark and begin our trek toward the bridge, both sweating in the early-September sun as he curses himself for coming up with this activity and then showing up for it in an entirely black outfit. “It was that rare thing of, Oh, I know who this character is and I know how to do it.” Specifically, he recognized Benji as a near-perfect doppelgänger of someone unnamed whom he knows in real life as well as in a sort of a quantum-multiverse, Sliding Doors version of himself. “I’m one quick little misstep away from being that person,” he says, and he credits his decision to stop smoking weed in his 20s as one of the things that saved him from a lonely, depressive, Benji-esque fate. He took the role after the Real Pain producers told him the film wasn’t shooting for another year. “I’m like, ‘Oh, a year? That’s not real life.’ Then that year was up. And I had a panic.”
Culkin is a consummate wife guy who brings up his spouse of 11 and a half years, Jazz Charton, dozens of times unprompted and tells me his ideal job would be a stay-at-home dad. “Some people say that but don’t really mean it,” he says, knowing how the whole thing sounds. “And some definitely just couldn’t do that.” So he was particularly stressed by the idea of being separated from Charton and their two kids. He learned while making Succession that eight days is the maximum he can be away from them without plunging into dissociative despair. “I don’t know who I am without them,” he says. As we exited the ferry, Culkin instinctively reached to grab a stroller from the storage area. “Where are my fucking kids?!” he joked.
He tried to pull out of A Real Pain just before production began and ended up on the phone with Emma Stone, his onetime girlfriend and a producer of the film. “She did an almost reverse-psychology thing on me,” he says, laughing. “She was like, ‘Oh, I totally get that. If I were you, I’d probably feel that way.’ And I was like, ‘But have they started?’ She goes, ‘Oh, yeah. They’re actually already in Poland scouting locations; people are hired.’ I was like, ‘It’s not like people would be out of a job?’ She’s like, ‘No, no, they would, but it’s not on you. You said ‘yes,’ but if you have your reasons for not doing it, you’re not responsible for these people’s jobs. It’s fine; you do whatever you want.’ And I got off the phone and I went, ‘Ah.’ ” Stone laughs recalling the conversation. “I can’t believe he talked about it publicly,” she says. “Producing, I’ve realized now, is like parenting — every kid needs different things.” Stone got on the plane with Culkin, his wife, and their kids to make sure he made the journey. “I was so grateful that he did it, but, also, thank fucking God. Because it would’ve been catastrophic,” she says.His family was able to join him for a good chunk of the shoot but not all. When I ask how he pushed through the 25 days without them, he deadpans, “Alcohol.”
Eisenberg didn’t learn about Culkin’s attempt to back out until after the film was finished. But when Culkin eventually told him, he was relatively nonplussed. “It was just another thing in a long line of, like, Who is this person?” Eisenberg says. He cast Culkin without ever having seen him perform in anything. The two had only met briefly — once on the set of Zombieland (where Culkin was visiting Stone) and once at an audition for Adventureland, which Culkin didn’t get but Eisenberg did, and where, Culkin tells me, he made the spontaneous artistic choice to pinch Eisenberg’s nipples through his shirt as part of the audition scene and forgot to remove his hands once the director called cut. When I bring this up to Eisenberg, he pauses thoughtfully. “I had forgotten about that. That’s right,” he says. “We’ve never discussed it. I think he squeezed my breasts.” While the breast-squeezing left no lasting impression, what did was Culkin’s “magic trick” ability to project both lightness and darkness simultaneously and in equal measure. He “exhibits real quickness, but there’s also a kind of real-world heaviness to him,” Eisenberg says.
Culkin isn’t Jewish, which was a major discussion, Eisenberg says: “I have 17,000 thoughts about this, and where I come out is he gave me an amazing gift by helping to tell this story that is very personal for my family.” As Benji, Culkin is as enchanting as he is impulsive and infuriating, casually befriending other people on the tour to the astonished envy of David then later berating their sweet guide for his “constant barrage of stats.” In a vivid moment roughly midway through the film, he publicly melts down about the cognitive dissonance of traveling first class on a Polish train on a Holocaust tour, embarrassing David and baffling his peers. David in particular can’t seem to understand why Benji is so consistently plagued by suffering. “You see how people love you? You see what happens when you walk into a room?” he goes on to ask him. “I would give anything to know what that feels like, man.”
With Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain. Photo: Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Unlike a lot of actors, who tend to try to distance themselves from their most widely known role in fear of being existentially stuck or typecast, Culkin constantly and happily steers our conversation back to Succession. The show was deeply meaningful to him — it was where he says he finally realized he wanted to be an actor. On a personal level, he was such a fan of the series that he almost always watched it with Charton as it aired each Sunday night, though he mostly avoided the internet discourse. “My wife would tell me certain things, like, ‘Oh, people are making fun of the way you sit.’ And she’ll show me on her phone. And I’m scrolling, like, ‘Oh, yeah, I sit weird in the show. I didn’t know that.’” He still hasn’t seen the final episode, in part because he was already in Poland filming A Real Pain when it aired. It’s been so long now that he and Charton are planning a rewatch going back to episode one. He admits he might also be avoiding the finale because then the whole thing will really be over. He still daydreams about a spontaneous fifth-season pickup: “There’s part of me that feels like, When are they going to call?” he says. “I think maybe the reason is because I didn’t get the closure of watching the last fucking episode.” Suddenly, we are confronted by the half-naked body of his Succession co-star Alexander Skarsgård hovering above us on a gigantic billboard. Culkin stops talking and looks up at him, beaming with pride. “Well!” he says. “There he is.”
While filming Succession, where he was encouraged to play around with his lines and his character, Culkin developed a sort of free-associative acting style, but he won’t go so far as to call it improv (“That has a certain feel to it”). Instead, he calls it blagging, British slang he picked up from his wife that loosely translates to “fake it till you make it.” He doesn’t like to talk too much about how he does this or try to analyze it; to look at it too hard might ruin the whole thing. “It’s written, and I understand the character, and then some shit comes out sometimes; that’s it. And I don’t force it,” he says.
The not-improv improv of it all caused an initial clash between Eisenberg and Culkin on the set of A Real Pain. Eisenberg is a type-A planner and had each scene carefully blocked and plotted out. Culkin felt stifled by the relative formality. “It felt a little bit like going backward,” he says. “Jesse had set up shots before I got there to be like, ‘You’re going to stand here.’ And I’m like, ‘How do you know?’ He goes, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ I’m like, ‘Well, we haven’t tried it yet is all I’m saying.’ I tried to go along with him those first couple of days, and it felt like, Why am I hired?” Eisenberg remembers changing his mind after filming a specific scene in which he asked Culkin to run up to co-star Jennifer Grey, who plays a tourgoer who bonds with Benji, and say whatever he wanted because they weren’t going to use the audio. “He was so free and funny that I didn’t mind throwing out the blueprints.”
Photo: Mark Seliger for New York Magazine
We’re in the East Village now, Culkin’s erstwhile neighborhood of 20-plus years, where he’s meeting up with Charton. He spots her from across the street and makes a loud birdcall to get her attention. Charton is disarming and funny, and the two are clearly enamored with each other, falling into natural repartee about their kids and each other. Charton lovingly mocks Culkin for being winded from our walk. “We went to our daughter’s school, and you’re only supposed to use the elevator for an emergency or if you have to, so we took the stairs and Kieran was out of breath at the second floor,” she says, laughing. Culkin picks up the story: “I made it to the third, and I took a break. She thought I was kidding.” Charton imitates Culkin: “‘I can feel my heart!’”
In January, Culkin got up onstage at the Emmys and informed the world that he’d like to have another baby, which Charton promised him she’d consider if he won. “She had no faith that I was going to,” he explains, shaking his head. “I didn’t have that forethought of like, What’s going to be the response to this?” It backfired somewhat. “I was very moved, No. 1,” Charton says. “And then I was very confused that he would bring up my uterus.” Culkin nods cheerfully, willing to accept notes. “That I was calling you out publicly,” he adds. “I mean, luckily he’s not super-famous or anything, but I got weird messages from friends and family about it,” Charton says. “I feel like my uterus is now public domain.” He is openly apologetic about the bad blag, and the possibility of another kid is still on the table.
Culkin’s next big project is Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway, opposite Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr, in the spring. He agreed to do the play because he thought it would give him more time with his family. “Then I talked to friends who do theater and have young kids, and I was like, ‘Wait, is it good?’ They’re like, ‘No, you never see your kids. You’re working every night. You never do bath time, bedtime. You get one night a week,’ ” he says. Instead of trying to get out of it, he asked the producers to change the schedule so he could have Sundays off. To his surprise, they said “yes” and moved the show to Mondays. “I’ve never heard of the show going dark on a Sunday,” he says. “Now I get one day a week dedicated to just being a dad.”
That night, he and I meet up at a Gramercy steakhouse whose interior is emblazoned with a gigantic sign that reads “Beef and Liberty,” the sort of place that the Roman Roys of the world might conspicuously snort cocaine off a leather banquette and where, across the street, the entire Lohan family is dining outside. When I ask Culkin if he knows Lindsay, he corrects me on the pronunciation of her name (LO-uhn) and says he doesn’t ever recognize any famous people except for the anchors on NY1; recently, he says, he chatted up a very important higher-up at Disney without having any idea who he was. We order dirty martinis — “Very, very, very dry, barely any vermouth” — and Culkin deliberates for a very long time about which steak to choose, asking the waiter pointed questions about its provenance before landing on a huge bone-in so he can take the rest home for his family. But later, when he asks for a to-go box, he hands it all to me, insisting on giving me the leftovers because he wants me to make a steak soup that one of his brothers once cooked for him. He takes a deep breath and begins describing the recipe for it in passionate, exacting detail.
The Hays County Pet Resource Center is now a part of Neighbors by Ring, a public safety mobile app to share hyperlocal updates with Ring camera users in Hays County. Ring aims to connect residents with public safety agencies through the Neighbors App to create safer, more informed communities.
In their home office with their dog, Pepper. Photo: Ashley Markle
I can tell you who I’m writing for, and I can tell you who I’m keeping in mind,” romance novelist Casey McQuiston says. We are one cocktail in at the Scarlet Lounge, an Upper West Side bar co-owned by the actor Michael Imperioli. “I am writing for trans people — capital-F For,” McQuiston says. “Trans people, queer people, those are a lot of the people who engage with my work in ways that make me feel like they got it.” But McQuiston, blockbuster queer-romance author of The Pairing (out in August), is always aware of the broad audience of American romance readers. There’s the old-school image of the straight white midwestern wife tucking a mass-market paperback into her purse, and there’s the more probable reader of today, someone who might pick up The Pairing at a Target with no idea that its leads are queer. “You’re gonna be 60 percent of the way in before you know that’s what you’re reading, and I have now Trojan-horsed you into reading a trans romance,” they say. “I’m really interested in those people, too. I think they have often been underestimated. And I think they should peg their husbands.”
Red, White & Royal Blue, which came out in 2019 and was McQuiston’s first novel, is a publishing fairy tale. A love story about Alex, the politically driven son of the first woman U.S. president, and Henry, a reserved British prince, the book is maximalist and swoony, leaning unabashedly into joyful sentimentality. The line “History, huh?,” which Alex first mentions in a letter he writes to Henry about a possible gay romance between Alexander Hamilton and a Revolutionary War hero, becomes a rallying cry for supporters of Alex and Henry in the book as well as in real life, where the quote is a popular catchphrase on RW&RB–inspired merchandise and emblematic of the kind of Obama-era earnestness the novel evokes. With little publicity, the book became so popular that it quickly required multiple printings. By the end of 2019, there were 100,000 copies in circulation.
McQuiston has published two more novels since then: One Last Stop, a sapphic mass-transit time-traveling romance, and I Kissed Shara Wheeler, a more personal YA novel about growing up queer in a southern conservative Christian community. Their ability to move among genres while retaining an unmistakable core identity in their work has been crucial to their success. “It would be impossible for me to overstate how important Casey is to the development of queer romance and traditional publishing,” says Leah Koch, co-owner of the romance bookstore the Ripped Bodice. Isabel Kaufman, a literary agent and a friend of McQuiston’s, agrees. Their fans are devoted, “which means they can bring their readers with them wherever they go,” Kaufman says. Amazon Studios released an adaptation of Red, White & Royal Blue in 2023 starring Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez, and the film did so well (including an Emmy nomination) that McQuiston is currently working on the screenplay for a sequel. Their newest novel, The Pairing, is all the things McQuiston is best known for — a book about queerness and found families and self-knowledge, full of humor and the intense awareness of how hot a blunt jawline can be.
But there’s also a noticeable shift in the questions and ideas that animate The Pairing compared with those that define Red, White & Royal Blue. Published when queer romance was still vanishingly rare at the major publishing houses, RW&RB hinges on the story of Henry and Alex coming out of the closet, insisting that their polished, high-profile public personae can include their queerness. RW&RB is full of tenderness and careful first steps. The Pairing is hotter, for one thing — more bodily, more sensory. The book follows two bisexual exes named Theo and Kit who reunite on a food-and-wine tour of Europe as they eat and drink and lust their way across the Continent; it is not a coming-out book or a story about the public celebration of queer identity. Kit is a cisgender man, and in a recent Instagram post McQuiston describes Theo as having “an abundance of gender.” But those qualities are part of who Kit and Theo are, not a driving plot mechanism. Instead, amid its joyful gluttony, the book focuses on misunderstanding, on all the ways that visibility is not the end of the story and how being seen is not the same as being understood, an idea that keeps driving Theo and Kit apart even as they embark on increasingly horny European escapades.
Despite McQuiston’s enormous success, being misunderstood is still a source of anxiety for them. Some of it is just who they are: They love lists and diagrams, they love fully committing to a bit, they need to know exactly what each of their characters is carrying in their bags and what songs are on their playlists. Some of it has to do with gender and sexuality. “I knew that I was queer by the time that I was 20,” they say, “but the gender thing was more of a Saturn-return situation.” They have been publicly out as nonbinary since 2021, but The Pairing is their first adult book to be published since then, and because the film adaptation of RW&RB was released during the writers’ and actors’ strikes, they haven’t done much publicity in those years. “It’s been two years since I’ve been out in the world promoting my work,” they say, “and I feel like I’ve gotten spoiled in this little bubble. Most of the time, I’m engaging with people who know me and understand me and gender me correctly. I forget that sometimes I have to go back out into the wider world.”
McQuiston, 33, grew up in Louisiana, where their high-school experience was much like the one in I Kissed Shara Wheeler. They attended a private Southern Baptist high school, though McQuiston’s family was Catholic; their parents chose it for the small class size and academic rigor, not specifically for the Christianity. “I don’t think they knew the extent of what it was like,” McQuiston says. “Its packaging is ‘Christ-centered education,’ but they’re not going to lead with, like, ‘We’re going to have chapel services where we tell all your children that they’re going to hell if they’re gay.’” As restrictive as the school was, McQuiston says it made them resourceful. “It made me a better writer because I felt so weird and alone and wrong and mismatched in this place,” they say. “I was looking to create my own little book and live there.”
They read everything from Harry Potter to ThePicture of Dorian Gray to TV recaps, but they imagined a future as a YA writer in the vein of John Green or maybe someone with more of a fantasy bent. They attended Louisiana State University, where they studied journalism in an attempt to be practical. They had been thinking about moving to L.A. after graduation, maybe writing criticism or pursuing journalism full time, but after their father died, they decided to stay closer to home, working for a local newspaper and writing romance in the off-hours, a side project they started toying with when the fantasy books they had earlier considered writing didn’t materialize. “As soon as I figured out what genre I was supposed to be writing in, all these blocks I ran into every other time I’d tried to write a book just came down. It was like, Oh, I was always supposed to be a romance writer,” they say.
They began writing RW&RB in 2016, inspired by the election and the 2015 romance novel The Royal We. When RW&RB sold in March 2018, they used their advance to move to Colorado, where several of their friends had landed. They stayed there for two years, living in Fort Collins, renting a house with college buddies, and working odd jobs. Once the book started taking off, they moved to New York just before the pandemic began and have been there ever since. They now live in Queens with their partner, who works in publicity at a publishing firm. They’re planning to get engaged — they even have rings they’ve both designed and made and plans for how to propose — but have not had the time: “I know what I’m doing, he knows what he’s doing, but it’s like, work is really busy right now, man!”
McQuiston has been crafting two projects at once over the past several months. One of them is the movie sequel to RW&RB, which they’re co-writing with playwright Matthew López, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay for the first film. At test screenings, he says, they were getting comments about how the film was a little corny. “When it came to those ‘cheesy’ comments, I was like, You know what? I’m going to view that as a good thing. It’s going to operate in this realm, just the way the book does.”
Writing the sequel’s screenplay has presented interesting challenges, especially because there’s no book to work from. “It’s a mind-fuck!” McQuiston says. “We have things that were left out of the movie, and there’s a little bonus chapter I wrote for the collector’s edition. Other than that, we’re making it up as we go. But I’m also considering it as a different canon. Changes that were made in adapting ripple out into character and story.” Book Alex decides to go to law school, but the movie characters are older, at different inflection points in their lives. What does that mean about what they want now and what they care about?
The other project occupying McQuiston’s mind is the one that will become their next book. It’ll be a spinoff of The Pairing, though they can’t yet say which character will play the central role. Shortly after our time together, McQuiston and their sister depart for a research trip to the Basque Country, where some portion of the next novel will be set.
They love this part of the writing process. Travel and the time and space to research were not available to them earlier in their career. On a day trip to San Sebastian, they realized the beach was full of people swimming in various states of nudity and decided to go for it. “I swam out to my shoulders and rolled my swimsuit down and was like, Here I am,” they say. They had top surgery in November and had never swum with their shirt off before. “I had this moment of floating in the ocean, in this bay, looking at this castle and these mountains in this city full of amazing food and all these different kinds of bodies and people.” They’re so happy to be at this place of freedom with their work. “It is exactly what I want to be putting out as an artist right now.”
In the video for her new song, “27 Club,” Tierra Whack appears in her customary setup: a surrealist world splattered with bright colors and filled with weird characters. At what seems to be a pep rally from an alternate universe, Whack wears a silver garment that looks like a cross between a choir robe and a clown suit. As a melancholy melody starts to play, she cycles through a series of animated masks — one with running eye shadow, another with subtle clown makeup — before she reveals her actual, downcast face. “I can show you how it feels,” she sings, then drops an octave, “when you lose what you love.” As band members and cheerleaders dance joyfully around her, she tells a story of disillusionment and loneliness, of how thoughts in isolation can make you feel so invisible that the people close to you can’t even recognize when you’re hurting. Those thoughts lead to an unsettling conclusion in which, on the song’s hook, Whack repeatedly chants the word suicide.
“I’m surrounded by all these people cheering me on, but it’s wearing me down,” Whack says, explaining the concept to me. “I’m trying to go through the motions because things are happening in my life but I’m still supposed to push through as a public figure.” It’s the morning after Valentine’s Day, and we’re at Yowie, a boutique hotel, shop, and café on Philadelphia’s buzzy South Street that feels straight out of one of her music videos. Owned by Whack’s friend Shannon Maldonado, it’s arrayed in bold colors and has quirky home goods for sale: Harry the Peanut candles, mini ceramic houses that store palo-santo sticks, and John Waters posters. Whack herself is dressed as if she’s about to break out into one of her dizzying rhymes, rocking a bright-green Issey Miyake pantsuit and fiery-red hair. She called the song “27 Club,” she says, “because I planned to end my life at 27. I’m 28 now, so I made it through. I’m figuring it out.”
The story of “27 Club” is a far cry from how the multifaceted Philly native first came into the public eye with her breakout 2017 single, “Mumbo Jumbo,” and then 2018’s Whack World, an audiovisual spectacle featuring 15 one-minute-long songs accompanied by stunningly inventive music videos. Generally, Whack’s work resembles off-kilter Sesame Street episodes with creepier concepts. The video for “Mumbo Jumbo” depicts a twisted trip to the dentist in which she leaves with a horrifying, permanent Joker-like smile, but the song’s contents don’t reflect any of that eeriness, mainly because there aren’t any discernible spoken words. Songs like “Hungry Hippo,” “Cable Guy,” and everything since, like “Only Child,” have been soulful, kooky Pop Art communicated through lullaby-esque melodies and buoyant raps. It never gets too dark, even when she shows flashes of sadness. But the past few years have forced Whack to confront some buried traumas, and the new music reflects that.
“I came up kinda rough. My mom was single, working many jobs. It sounds like the story is so common, but it’s my life and it’s personal to me,” she says. “Then I find this hobby: me writing poetry, then rapping. Then I realize I wanna make this my thing.” When she was 15, her mother spotted members of the We Run the Streets crew, a local rap collective, walking around the neighborhood and told Whack to spit something for them. In a moment now memorialized on YouTube, a young Whack — then going by Dizzle Dizz — raps confidently, “Stop and see, my flow is all chocolaty / I’m guaranteed a record deal / On top near Lauryn’s Hill / You wack, so imagine how Tierra feel.”
The video went viral, and We Run the Streets became her management team. Local radio stations invited her to freestyle; in one of the more popular videos from that time, she raps for Meek Mill at Philly’s Power 99 FM. Even before the otherwordly big-budget videos, you can see her penchant for humor and free expression in these early efforts: Wearing brightly colored wigs, she contorts her voice for dramatic effect and sways her body to illustrate punch lines, stylistically reminiscent of artists like M.I.A., Rye Rye, and fellow Philadelphian Santigold. “My mom used to always dress me in bright colors. I would stand out,” Whack remembers, laughing. “In school, everybody would have the navy-blue thing, and she would get me bright red and orange.” But despite the virality of that work, she didn’t love her Dizzle Dizz persona. “Everyone was happy for me, but I wasn’t happy. I just felt like I was selling myself short,” she told The Fader back in 2018. So she moved to Atlanta with her mom for her last year of high school and sharpened her skills quietly before returning to Philadelphia and going by her government name.
Photo: Camila Falquez for New York Magazine
In 2017, with renewed confidence, Whack uploaded “Mumbo Jumbo” to SoundCloud; she signed to Interscope that same year. It changed her financial situation immediately. “I’m thinking I’m about to have to get two jobs and figure it out,” she says. “God sent me the perfect blessing.” The advance she received couldn’t have come at a better time: Some months earlier, her stepdad had thrown her out, and she was unhoused for three months, splitting time between friends’ couches and a storage unit she could barely afford. Two days before her 21st birthday, she found her grandmother unresponsive. It was the first time she had encountered a dead body.
Meanwhile, her fame was ratcheting up. Whack World dropped the following year and received rave reviews. Lauryn Hill invited her to open at a tour stop in Philadelphia, and André 3000 became a mentor. In 2019, Beyoncé enlisted Whack as a featured artist on The Lion King: The Gift album. Whack seemed primed for a career in the tradition of eccentric rap stars like Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes, and Ludacris — more-than-capable lyricists with imaginative visual identities who offer mainstream appeal. But instead, Whack went fairly quiet. Rather than make a full-bodied follow-up to Whack World, in 2021 she released a few three-song EPs (Rap?, Pop?, and R&B?) that didn’t inspire much conversation. Late last year, she put out Cypher, a sort of autofiction documentary that captures her life as a rising rap star but takes a turn when she encounters a crazed fan. But she didn’t release an actual album.
The reason, Whack says, was that her depression had finally caught up to her and she started having suicidal thoughts. “I was at a breaking point. I was looking for a reason to do it. But I was too cowardly to do it myself,” she says of her ideations. “As this next level of success is coming to me, I’m like, I don’t feel like I deserve this. But I worked so hard to deserve it.” (She bangs the table with every word for emphasis.) The stillness imposed by the pandemic helped. “It was like a gift and a curse because I was running,” she says. “When I finally had time to sit down, I was overwhelmed, but I knew I had to find a way out of this. The discipline of having to sit still and sit with your thoughts, I needed that.” She started seeing a therapist and doing more physical activity: playing basketball and riding her bike. Luckily, Whack World paid her bills even when she wasn’t producing more music. “Whack World is my hugest blessing because I was surviving off it for years — like, up until now,” she says. “Everything opened up: sync placements, shows, different branding deals. People were on me. It fed me for six years. That’s unheard of. That’s how I know I made a classic.”
She seems to be in a better headspace these days. Her life now consists of a routine she loves: going to her favorite smoothie spot; checking in with her mom, who lives close by; and hitting the gym to clear her mind. She’s committed to her hometown, too. “I don’t wanna be nowhere else,” she says. “A lot of my friends be tryna shit on Philly, and I tell them to shut up. They’re ready to take their next check and get out of here. I’m like, ‘What is so wrong with the city?’ ”
Despite Whack World’ssuccess, it doesn’t technically count as an album, according to the rapper’s contract with Interscope, so World Wide Whack will be her official debut. The 15-track project feels like a burial of Whack’s former self. Remnants of that other person are still there: the playfulness, the world-building, the commitment to experimentation. But there’s so much more self-reflection going on. On the album’s intro, “Mood Swing,” Whack sings beautifully about anxiety and the need to try new things, as her therapist suggested during the pandemic. In “Two Night,” she talks about dealing with feelings of abandonment by her biological father, whom she also briefly dismisses (“You remind me of my deadbeat dad”) in Whack World’s “Fuck Off.”
Whack in the “27 Club” music video. Video: Tierra Whack/YouTube
She collaborated with the Philadelphia-based visual artist Alex Da Corte to direct three videos for the project, including “27 Club.” They met in 2019 when Whack accompanied a mutual friend to one of Da Corte’s invite-only rehearsals for a performance. “We’re both in Philly, and we’ll send each other music or images of art and stuff,” Da Corte says. Each video represents a time of day: “Shower Song,” which incorporates techno-pop elements, features two-dimensional stop-motion graphics filled with a palette of primary colors to symbolize the morning; “27 Club” references late-’90s videos from the MTV countdown-show era; and in the soon-to-be-released video for “Two Night,” Whack plays a balloon floating through the city’s skyline before the crowd revolts, throwing stuff at her. At the end, night falls, and she’s flattened until the next day, when the cycle repeats.
The music for “27 Club” took much longer to complete than the other tracks on World Wide Whack because of the vulnerability it required. Whack says there were times when she would go to the studio, record six songs per session, and still leave unfulfilled because she couldn’t get that one song done. An unlikely source of inspiration — the 2021 documentary Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James — set her free. “It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen,” she says. At some point in the film, the focus shifts to the Mary Jane Girls, a group the Buffalo music legend helped put together in 1979. Previously unaware of them, Whack paused the film and started to do some light research.
“That night, I got in the car and played their song ‘You Are My Heaven,’ and it did something to my body. It gave me chills. I’m like, Yo, I wanna make something like this,” she recalls. A few weeks later, at a studio session in Atlanta, her producers finally figured out the perfect way to channel that song’s energy: “We were in a dark room with a blue light. The vibe was already there. They found the right drums, then I said, ‘I can show you how it feels.’ I did not know the song would be about me attempting to kill myself, but it came so easy. I cried, and I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been trying to say.’”
Catherine Parenteau was pretty much born with a tennis racket in her hands. Beginning at age 4, the Canadian was a natural, working her way up the circuit until she eventually achieved a top-five ranking in the country. Recruited by the University of Arkansas to play Division I tennis, she finished out her collegiate career playing at Michigan State University.
It was during her final year at Michigan State, however, that Parenteau discovered a new sport, one that captured her heart and interest: pickleball.
Today, the 27-year-old is the No. 2 singles and No. 4 doubles player on the professional circuit.
While pickleball enjoys a reputation as your grandmother’s favorite game, to see Parenteau on the court is to know that the sport has a hard-core, athletic side to its personality, too. And as younger, faster, more skilled athletes enter the game, the level of play is only rising.
There are an estimated 4.8 million people playing pickleball in the United States today, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s annual report on single sport. Of those, the fastest growing segment is players under the age of 24, and there are hundreds of tournaments around the country throughout the year. In 2019, the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) formed and became the first organization to offer a professional tour.
Pickleball is changing
Parenteau was at first a bit reluctant to try pickleball back in 2016 when her Michigan State tennis coach, Simone Jardim, herself a professional pickleball player, suggested she give it a go. “I thought it sounded silly, and it took me three weeks before I picked up a paddle,” Parenteau said.
Much to Parenteau’s surprise, she loved it. “I joined a club and began playing three to four times a week,” she said. “I entered my first big event — the US Open Pickleball tournament — in 2017.”
Pickleball tournaments are open to both amateurs and pros, unique from its more exclusive tennis cousin. While Parenteau’s star was rising in the tournaments, Ken Hermann came along and founded the PPA.
“We’re the official pro tour of USA Pickleball and offer sanctioned events,” he says. “We wanted this to be successful, and after getting shut down in 2020 due to the pandemic, we’ve had steady growth.”
In 2022, that equated to 32 events for pros, offering singles, doubles and mixed doubles.
“We’re in a unique phase right now,” Hermann said. “We’re not yet at the stage where the pro tour breaks away on its own, but I don’t think we’re that many years off from that.”
Prize money is not yet enough that a pro pickleball player can make a living off their winnings. The PPA Championship, which starts Oct. 6, has a payout of $3,000 to singles champions and $10,000 to doubles. But there are plenty of sponsors jumping in the game now to close that gap. Parenteau, for instance, counts among her sponsors Skechers shoes, Jigsaw Health electrolyte solution, Charge Electric Bikes, Takeya pickleball accessories and Paddletek paddles.
“At first it was hard financially to travel to tournaments,” she said. “But with my sponsors and the PPA expanding, I’m able to now travel and afford a team that helps me stay on top of my game.”
That team includes a coach and a nutritionist, now. Parenteau is on the court four to five times a week, and conditions five times a week off the court to stay in top form.
“You need a huge amount of athleticism to compete at this level,” Hermann said. “We’ve got a lot of young women in the top 1,000 of the WTA now entering the sport.”
These up-and-comers are making the more experienced players take notice.
“The young players hit the ball very hard, and it’s tough for me to play against them, even at 27,” Parenteau said. “Every year, there is new talent coming into the game and the more that enter the sport, the better it gets.”
As the popularity of pickleball continues to soar — it has been the nation’s fastest-growing sport the past two years running — it will continue to attract more sponsors, participants and fans to follow the pro circuit. That’s what New Belgium beer is counting on, as it vies to become the “beer of pickleball.”
“We like that it’s an inclusive, quirky sport that you can make as competitive as you want,” said Joanna Laubscher, the brand’s community marketing manager. “The talent at the pro level is insane and as more people start to follow it, they will see that legit athletes are at the top of the game.”
While pickleball has yet to become an official NCAA sport, it is rapidly evolving into a competitive club sport at the college level.
“The beauty of pickleball is that it’s easy to learn and pick up,” USA Pickleball Association CEO Stu Upson said. “But to take it to the pro level, you must be dedicated. You can’t just go out on the weekend and play and expect to compete as a pro — which is good for the sport.”
