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Tag: q&a

  • ‘Oppenheimer’ Is Ludwig Göransson’s Most Personal Score Yet

    ‘Oppenheimer’ Is Ludwig Göransson’s Most Personal Score Yet

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    After attending premieres for Oppenheimer in London and New York, composer Ludwig Göransson is seeing the movie again, this time at a little mom-and-pop theater in Höganäs, Sweden. It may not have the massive IMAX screen that so many people are watching Christopher Nolan’s latest on, but the modest theater in Göransson’s home country will be packed with his family and friends.

    It’s a fitting experience for the Swedish composer, who says that his score for Nolan’s film about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer stands apart from his other work.

    “It’s definitely a different personal journey for me, to do a first-person score, where you do everything from his eyes and from his mind,” says Göransson, who won both an Oscar and a Grammy for the score for 2018’s Black Panther. “It was draining, but very interesting to think about too.”

    Oppenheimer is Göransson’s second collaboration with Nolan, after 2020’s Tenet. The movie is epic in scope, with stunning visual effects and bold scenes, but is also very focused on the emotional state of its protagonist. In three hours, the film traces Oppenheimer’s work as a theoretical physicist to the establishment of the Los Alamos lab, the creation of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer’s activism against further nuclear development and the repercussions of his actions later in his life.

    “You really had to get his character and his emotions out there with the music. It was a tough thing to do emotionally,” says Göransson. “You’re constantly trying to emote what he’s feeling on the screen.”

    The resulting score is often relentless, as Oppenheimer’s intense personality drives the story. The music relies heavily on the violin, but also brings in unexpected sounds like a ticking clock and stomping feet that add to its overall intensity. From Sweden, Göransson spoke to Vanity Fair about being given a blank slate, his toughest scene, and why this score felt more personal than anything else he’s worked on.

    Vanity Fair: What were your early conversations like with Christopher Nolan about the score for Oppenheimer?

    Ludwig Göransson: It starts off with me reading the script, having no idea what to get myself into, and then we have a conversation afterwards. In our first conversation, Chris was just really open. He didn’t have any specific notes or ideas, other than he was interested in experimenting with the sound of the violin for Oppenheimer.

    Oppenheimer

    From Universal Pictures.

    Did that differ significantly from the way you talked to him before Tenet?

    I think for Tenet, in a technical way, there were a lot of ideas that I already had on the table, in terms of inversion and reversing sounds. I think he told me to not do it [laughs]. But I think with this one, Chris really did not really have anything in musical soundscape before shooting the film, so it was really a blank canvas.

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • “I’m Still the MC That Wants to Make Something People Can Feel”: Nas Ruminates on 50 Years of Hip-Hop

    “I’m Still the MC That Wants to Make Something People Can Feel”: Nas Ruminates on 50 Years of Hip-Hop

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    “Lucky me,” Nas says when I mention that he’s never lived in a world without hip-hop. At 49 years old, you might say that the rapper and the genre, which turns 50 this year, grew up together.

    “It’s been great. I remember being a kid and hearing these rap songs and watching the break-dance thing happen and all of that, and all the way to where it became this huge, huge industry. It’s great that I saw it develop into what it is today—and you can still remember what it was,” he says via Zoom from Los Angeles, nearly 3,000 miles and 29 years removed from Illmatic, the critically acclaimed 1994 album that would eventually be inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry and kick-start a career that has resulted in a Grammy Award, film roles, his own investment firm, and a recurring place in the GOAT MC list.

    To celebrate the anniversary, the artist, born Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones, partnered with Hennessy to design a limited-edition bottle symbolic of the lifestyle, culture, and influence of hip-hop–a somewhat natural collaboration as these things go, given his repeated name-checking of the cognac. 

    Courtesy of Hennessy

    “On my first album, I talked about Hennessy before the first song even came on. I’m having a conversation, like, “Pass the Hennessy.” To think about that, my journey and hip-hop’s journey, this is a time, this is a year to celebrate—you know, when you’re mature enough and you’re at the legal age to indulge and celebrate in the way I like to celebrate,” he says. “You can get with what I’m doing. You can see the journey that I had. ”

    Last month, Nas spoke with Vanity Fair about making his debut in the ’90s, being back in the studio during a long-awaited creative growth spurt, and getting existential.

    This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

    Vanity Fair: Illmatic came out when you were 20. Looking back now, what were your wildest dreams when you were putting out that record?

    Nas: I just wanted it to be heard. I just wanted it to have some respect from the people that I grew up listening to or open up a whole new lane for artists my age, to be a new voice.

    Do you ever listen to that album and are you still able to identify with that 20-year-old today, despite all of the other albums, the whole life that you’ve lived? Do you still relate to him?

    I don’t listen to it, but if somebody’s playing it or it does come up, I do think about what life is like and it’s a whole different day today. And it’s like the nineties was a whole different animal and yeah, it takes me back.

    What do you think the biggest difference in your creative process is today compared to then considering you’ve been in the game such a long time, you have so many albums under your belt, you have awards, you have businesses.

    I don’t think about any of those things. I’m still like the MC that wants to make something that people can feel. I wanna express what I’m feeling and make that connection inside the studio so that it has this meaning and draws a picture of where my head’s at today. Hopefully people can, some people, can relate to it, but back then it was just let’s make some noise so people know who I am. Now that they know, it’s a whole different bunch of ideas that naturally an older guy would try to do. That still fits into my style. My signature style.

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    Maggie Coughlan

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  • Iran says to form naval alliance with Gulf states to ensure regional stability

    Iran says to form naval alliance with Gulf states to ensure regional stability

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    June 3 (Reuters) – Iran’s navy commander said his country and Saudi Arabia, as well as three other Gulf states, plan to form a naval alliance that will also include India and Pakistan, Iranian media reported on Saturday.

    “The countries of the region have today realized that only cooperation with each other brings security to the area,” Iran’s navy commander Shahram Irani was quoted as saying.

    He did not elaborate on the shape of the alliance that he said would be formed soon.

    Iran has recently been trying to mend its strained ties with several Gulf Arab states.

    In March, Saudi Arabia and Iran ended seven years of hostility under a China-mediated deal, stressing the need for regional stability and economic cooperation.

    Naval commander Irani said the states that will take part in the alliance also include the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq, Pakistan, and India.

    Saudi Arabia’s rapprochement with Iran has frustrated Israel’s efforts to isolate Iran diplomatically.

    The UAE, which was the first Gulf Arab country to sign a normalization agreement with Israel in 2020, resumed formal relations with Iran last year.

    Bahrain and Morocco later joined the UAE in establishing ties with Israel.

    Reporting by Dubai Newsroom; Editing by Toby Chopra

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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  • Luke Kirby Felt “Destined” to End Lenny Bruce That Way on ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’

    Luke Kirby Felt “Destined” to End Lenny Bruce That Way on ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’

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    This post contains spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s series finale. 

    The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Lenny Bruce has always been dreamy. Sprinkled like pixie dust across 16 episodes of the show’s five seasons, Luke Kirby transformed the real-life comedian into an irresistibly tortured “fairy godmother” of stand-up to Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge. 

    Scenes between the pair, crackling with chemistry, hold that same dreamlike quality—their interactions existing in a bubble outside of reality. But in the series finale, when Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein) encounters a rambling, rumpled Lenny Bruce at a San Francisco comedy club in 1965, that bubble is beyond punctured. And for the first time since playing Bruce, Kirby was meant to bomb. “It was a little alarming to suddenly be met with silence and coughs, but I felt like it was definitely appropriate,” Kirby tells Vanity Fair. “As much fun as it’s been to exhibit this man for all of his charm and magnetism, and for somebody who aligned himself so much with an idea around truth, there is another truth that we had to address.”

    Kirby brings some of Lenny’s disarming mysticism to a Zoom call about the show’s final season. Petting Big Homer, the curly-haired dog that sits atop his lap, the actor apologizes for his “screwy” internet connection and admits he’s still carrying Lenny inside him. “He’s still lingering around, swirling,” Kirby says wistfully. “He’s been such a good friend to me that I don’t really feel like I have to abandon him. It’s sad, scary to say goodbye to something that does feel so destined to be.”

    Destiny is also top of mind in Midge and Lenny’s final scene. Huddled together in the booth of a Chinese restaurant following their snowed-in tryst from the season four finale, she tries to master the art of an indecipherable autograph as he reads her a gushing fortune cookie message. “You mark my words: Very soon, in the not-too-distant future, you will be paying for the Chinese food,” he says with reverent certainty. She’ll go on to perform a star-making set on the fictional Gordon Ford Show, and he’ll succumb further to the personal demons and substance abuse that have slowly begun to bleed into the Maisel universe. 

    Philippe Antonello

    But the series was never going to depict Lenny’s death on screen, cocreators Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino told Vanity Fair. As Kirby says, “They never wanted to veer into anything that could be interpreted as ghoulish or just making a big thing out of something that really maybe wouldn’t feel earned in the context of the show we’ve made,” adding, “I totally appreciated that and agreed with it. But when I saw what they did, I thought it was really quite beautiful. It, to me, closed the ring on the story of Midge and Lenny.”

    That aforementioned Chinese restaurant scene was the last Kirby filmed on the series, and although the day was “really sad,” it also brought joy. “In one of [Lenny’s] last interviews, there was a recording where he was asked: ‘Why do you do it?’ And he said, ‘Because it’s fun.’ The way he says it is so sincere,” Kirby explains. “I tried to abide by that idea on this job.”

    Kirby’s performance on Maisel has earned him an Emmy for guest actor in a comedy series and a seal of approval from Kitty Bruce—Lenny’s daughter, who gets special acknowledgement in the finale’s credits. “When I was starting to do the research, it felt clear to me that he wasn’t pursuing a career that was designed to stir up trouble, or wreak havoc on the zeitgeist,” the actor says. “He was really somebody who wanted to do comedy, but for whatever reason, his way of being was problematic for certain institutions. Those institutions made it their mission to, if not destroy him, certainly hurt his reputation and his livelihood. And he had to meet that face-on.”

    These days, Kirby is reflective about Lenny’s tenderness, as well as his tenacity. “I do keep coming back to a couple things he said around what it is to be a person. He is the man who said, ‘There are never enough I love yous.’ He’s the man who said, ‘I damn the people who would keep the lovers apart,’” Kirby recalls. “For all of his irreverent comedy and stuff he got in trouble for, to me, it feels like it was rooted in a real love for being alive and for people.”

    In Maisel’s fifth and final season, Lenny appears just twice: in the finale and in the premiere, where Midge runs into an especially disheveled-looking version of the comic at JFK. She vows to not “blow it” with her big break. “I’m gonna hold you to that,” Lenny replies. 

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Earns Its Name in the Series Finale

    ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’ Earns Its Name in the Series Finale

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    This post contains spoilers for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s series finale. 

    The four words that gave The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel its name weren’t uttered until the final act of the series finale. Bestowed upon Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge Maisel by Gordon Ford (Reid Scott) after a star-making set on his late-night TV show, the moniker became a symbol of an Upper West Side housewife choosing to become something more.

    “Midge bought into an immature fantasy as a young woman, of house and husband and children and postcards and the right bench and temple and the brisket and ‘the rabbi’s coming, the rabbi is coming.’ That was the be-all, end-all for her,” cocreator Amy Sherman-Palladino told Vanity Fair. “And when she discovered this burning ambition in herself, something she didn’t even know was there, she followed it to the very end.”

    Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, both real-life and creative partners, are well attuned to the power a show’s final season holds. The pair couldn’t end Gilmore Girls, the beloved series they created and shepherded for six seasons before exiting amidst behind-the-scenes drama, on their own terms. (Netflix’s 2016 revival series allowed them something of a do-over.) When I spoke to the pair, Succession had just killed off Logan Roy—though they practically put their fingers in their ears to resist spoilers. The weekly unfurling of Maisel’s final act caused its own brand of stress: “Every week I’ve got to up the Prozac,” Sherman-Palladino said. “Up the dosage, up the dosage, baby.”

    The Palladinos, who spoke to VF prior to the ongoing writers strike, talked about ending Maisel in a tight five—from tackling Lenny Bruce’s death to dreaming up Midge’s star-studded future.

    Vanity Fair: Much of the season is framed with flash-forwards into Midge’s fame and the ramifications it had on her children. How did you pick which snippets we’d see?

    Daniel Palladino: It was an idea that we had flirted with since season two. We tried something too early, so we felt like we should save it for the last season. Picking and choosing them was just really trial and error. We didn’t want to overdo it, except in episode six, “The Testi-Roastial,” where we did flashbacks within flashbacks.

    Amy Sherman-Palladino: We had so much story to get into this season because we needed to wrap everybody up. It really became, what is the big punch? Because you could think of a bunch of funny flash-forwards that would be entertaining to watch—but what is the story punch? That automatically weeded a few things out. And then a couple got weeded out by the fact that we just did not have enough days. We tried to control time, and they wouldn’t let us do that.

    Palladino: In a nine-episode season, we tend to come up with 11 episodes of stuff, and then we try to pound them into [the allotted number] or we start eliminating. It’s inevitable.

    How much of Midge’s future that we don’t see have you filled in for yourselves? I’m assuming you know the identities of all her husbands.

    Sherman-Palladino: We know who the husbands were. 

    Palladino: Approximately. We were strongly implying that Robert Evans was one of her husbands. We implied that Quincy Jones cheated on Peggy Lipton at some point, but it’s fiction—

    Sherman-Palladino: We didn’t say marriage. He didn’t put a ring on it.

    Palladino: One of the things we were flirting with was seeing her with her husband later in life, and that was on the board until the very, very last second.

    Sherman-Palladino: We wanted to show Midge and Joel much later in life—that they both have significant others off in the background, but they were only concerned about each other, and just wanted to hang with each other. They were always going to be this couple, whether or not they were with other people. That was the one sequence we couldn’t figure out how to fit into the schedule. It was just too many days and locations. But we put the picture [of the two of them] in the last episode, and the picture basically did the same thing. The man who’s on her vanity table that she says goodnight to every night is the man that she couldn’t be with. So sometimes, those things become happy accidents.

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • “It’s Almost Like It Isn’t About Me”: Susanna Kaysen on Writing Girl, Interrupted, 30 Years Later

    “It’s Almost Like It Isn’t About Me”: Susanna Kaysen on Writing Girl, Interrupted, 30 Years Later

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    “Time is very weird,” says Susanna Kaysen, best known for her first memoir, Girl, Interrupted. “It just seems impossible that it’s 30 years ago that it came out. Of course, at the same time, it seems a long time ago. It’s both.”

    The memoir, published in 1993, catalogs Kaysen’s 18-month stay at a Belmont, Massachusetts psychiatric facility colloquially known as McLean’s; Sylvia Plath had been a patient, as had James Taylor, Ray Charles, and Robert Lowell. She was admitted in 1967, at age 18, following a one-off visit to a psychiatrist prompted by an episode where she ingested 50 aspirin. A nurse’s admission report, one of several logs Kaysen includes in the memoir, describes her as a “very depressed, desperate young lady…cries easily…very cooperative.” 

    The idea for the memoir was sparked by Kaysen’s working on a novel about an anthropologist: “It came to me,” she writes in the introduction to a new anniversary edition out from Vintage Books, “that I had lived in another small, self-contained place and had observed its alignments and hierarchies, its customs and special language. I intended this memoir to be my own village study.” There are episodic descriptions of the patients she lived alongside. A young woman who arrived each year around Thanksgiving and left after Christmas, who consumed whole roasted chickens brought weekly by her father, the carcasses of which she hoarded in her room. There is a young woman covered in severe, self-inflicted burns, and one described by another patient as a “suburban junkie.” Kaysen describes the institution’s lack of privacy, the 15 and 10 and five-minute checks performed by the nurses. “It was our metronome, our pulse,” she writes. “It was our lives measured out in…dented tin spoons brimming with what should have been sweet but was sour, gone off, gone by without savoring it: our lives.” As much as it is a study of this very specific time and place, it is an engagement with the slipperiness of perception.

    In 1999 the film adaptation debuted, ushering in a fresh wave of fans. It had been a passion project of Winona Ryder, whose bookdealer father gave her an early copy of the memoir soon after her voluntary stay at an in-patient facility following her breakup from Johnny Depp. She played the character of Susanna Kaysen and Angelina Jolie played opposite as Lisa, a fictionalized version of a woman Kaysen knew at McLean’s, for which she won the Oscar for best supporting actress.

    In 1987, Kaysen had published her debut novel, Asa, as I Knew Him, told from the perspective of a young woman imagining the adolescent life of a former lover. It’s a languid book—an intra-office affair at a literary magazine; privileged boys lolling in Cambridge backyard pools—filled with perfect lines: “He had three dollars and she looked like a five-dollar lunch.” Three years later she published Far Afield, the one about an anthropologist working in the Faroe Islands. In another three, Girl, Interrupted. The next books, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, a memoir about the medical saga she embarked upon after developing an acute vaginal pain, and Cambridge, which would now be called autofiction but in 2014 was described as a “novel-from-life,” took eight and 13 years. 

    In all, Kaysen is a superb and sly observer of the minute strangenesses of being human, the interconnected fragility and resilience of the body and mind, and the day-to-day absurd. (While we chat, she brings up the July 1993 issue of Vanity Fair, which featured an item on Girl, Interrupted. “I think my head is wrapped in a curtain,” she says, wryly, of the accompanying portrait, and indeed it is.) Her in-the-works writing project about the “absolutely ridiculous details” of the pandemic—“every single motion of having somebody over for dinner on the porch, everything you had to wash and sterilize and touch, not touch, how exciting it was to go to a store finally and buy a light bulb”—was derailed by what she describes as “this cancer business.” Of her recovery from a recent lung surgery, “Everybody tells me it’s great,” she says. “I don’t agree. But they know. I’m just experiencing it.”

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    Keziah Weir

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  • Emma Cline on ‘The Guest,’ Creative Vulnerability, and Finding Inspiration in Playboy Bunny Memoirs

    Emma Cline on ‘The Guest,’ Creative Vulnerability, and Finding Inspiration in Playboy Bunny Memoirs

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    “I knew from the beginning the emotional temperature of the ending, how I wanted it to feel,” said Emma Cline of writing her new novel, The Guest. “I didn’t know what the specifics were, but I knew where I wanted the book to leave this character.” 

    When we first meet that character, 22-year-old Alex, she is spending August at her boyfriend Simon’s Hamptons house. He’s in his 50s, and during the day while he works Alex takes his painkillers and floats in the pool or the ocean. “The light—the famous light—made it all look honeyed and mild,” Cline writes, “the dark European green of the scrub trees, the dune grasses that moved in whispery unison.” A man on the beach is “tanned to the color of expensive luggage.” Simon’s place is “near enough to the ocean.” High ceilings, polished concrete floors, a freezer stocked with halibut that he’d grill “with so much lemon that Alex felt her mouth vibrate.” It’s a book with the dog days languor of a Sofia Coppola film and the chilling tension of a Patricia Highsmith novel. 

    Back in New York City, Alex did sex work, placing ads for services in exchange for “six hundred roses” or “six hundred kisses.” Her relationship with Simon is also transactional—as perhaps most relationships are—but less blatantly; he buys her a buttery leather bag and designer silk dresses, and is apparently unaware of her history. By the time she’s met Simon, New York has tarnished for Alex. She has left behind angry roommates to whom she owes months of back rent, hotel bars in which she is no longer welcome, and a violent, shadowy contact named Dom who is trying very hard to get in touch. Simon is her way forward, her beam of light. But narrative storm clouds gather when Alex engages in a mild flirtation with Simon’s friend’s much younger husband; it lands Alex in a pool, and puts both her phone and relationship on the fritz.  

    Kicked out of Simon’s—temporarily, she believes—Alex begins hustling her way into other living arrangements, planning to surprise him at his annual Labor Day party, just six days away. By then, she believes, he’ll have cooled down. What follows is a beach vacation by way of an anxiety dream: Alex meets a house manager and wiles her way into a night at the mansion; she finds a group of young people with a beach rental and convinces them she belongs there too. But these encounters spoil, like milk left out on a hot day, and for all her strategy she remains incredibly vulnerable to the whims of others; the men she hopes will protect her do not. 

    “She’s a character who distills a lot of my natural interests as a writer,” Cline said of Alex. “There is something mysterious about what you’re drawn to, any creative person.” Alex, she said, “is somebody whose experience in the world literalizes or exaggerates a lot of my interest in power or sex or the dynamics between men and women.”

    Her 2016 debut novel, The Girls, sold in a three-book deal worth $2 million and was loosely inspired by the 1969 Manson family murders, focusing on the psyches and sexuality of the girls and young women who live at a Spahn Ranch–like commune under the control of a charismatic, volatile, Manson-like leader. Daddy, her collection published in 2020, explores gender and generational tension in 10 taut stories of upper-class discomfort. The Guest reads like the ambitious logical next step in the continuum.

    “In a lot of ways,” she said, the book is “a reaction to The Girls, which was so much about the way the past informs the present. With this book, I knew from the beginning that I really wanted all the action contained over a few days but also, for the reader, that you stay very close to this character in the moment.” Alex’s past isn’t accessible; Cline said that she wanted to resist providing what she called “trauma math.” When someone asks Alex why she is the way she is, Cline writes: “And he was really asking. Expecting some explanation, some logical equation—x had happened to her, some terrible thing, and so now y was her life, and of course that made sense. But how could Alex explain—there wasn’t any reason, there had never been any terrible thing. It had all been ordinary.”

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    Keziah Weir

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  • Elle Fanning’s Grief Transforms ‘The Great’

    Elle Fanning’s Grief Transforms ‘The Great’

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    Warning: Major spoilers for season three of The Great ahead—proceed with caution.

    “Grief is fucking weird.”

    Those words, uttered just moments after The Great kills off one of its two main characters, are a harbinger of what’s to come in the newly released third season. While Elle Fanning’s Catherine the Great has dodged death threats and political coups since touching down in Russia, the queen is safe—for now. Instead, it’s her lovably obtuse and oddly tender husband, formerly known as Peter the Great (played by Nicholas Hoult), who meets his demise in the season’s sixth episode. 

    Circumstances around the actual king’s death remain murky—but it’s been widely reported that Peter was assassinated by Alexei Orlov, younger brother to Catherine’s then lover, Grigory Orlov, while jailed. The show takes a steep departure. Plagued by the fear that he be remembered only as a doting stay-at-home husband to his powerful wife (“Yeah, ’cause that’s what history remembers—good fathers,” an adult-sized hallucination of his newborn son, Paul, taunts), Peter sets forth on an ill-fated invasion of Sweden. Catherine attempts to ease his worries and halt the mission, but Peter won’t be deterred. He proceeds on horseback across a frozen lake—stopping to turn to his wife with a faint, “Actually—” before promptly falling through the ice as Catherine watches in horror. 

    “Gosh, that whole day was filled with so much emotion,” Fanning tells Vanity Fair. “[Series creator] Tony [McNamara], Nick, and I, we went into the woods secretly before the last shot we had together. We took a little vodka shot and did a cheers. That was a very special moment.” Once the last huzzah had been uttered, Fanning was left to lead the show without her other half and—eventually—make the loss worth laughing about. 

    “I was most scared of the episode after his death,” she says, “which is when Catherine’s in her manic grief and extreme denial. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to portray that in a certain way…. It was like, wow, well, Nick’s gone. [It’s] such a hole in the show…. I didn’t want it to go downhill…. But also now a big death has happened, and we don’t want the show to get sad because we’re a comedy. It’s this tightrope of battling the tragedy and the comedy and the absurdist.”

    Fresh off her appearance at the Met Gala (Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell were two of her tablemates), Fanning spoke to VF about mourning her royal partner and how that musical ending brought her real-life catharsis: “I started [the show] when I was 20, now I’m 25. So a lot of these experiences have molded me.”

    Vanity Fair: Before we get into this season’s major event, I want to ask about the state of Peter and Catherine’s marriage in season three. They’ve decided to move on from some sizable hurdles, but they’re still sleeping with knives underneath their pillows. What is it that keeps them so invested in each other?

    Elle Fanning: Obviously, it’s complicated, but I do believe that it’s a matured love in season three. In season two, Catherine—at the end, when she stabbed Pugachev thinking it was Peter, her guttural reaction to that made her realize, oh wow, I can’t lose this person. Because in a lot of ways, he’s the only one who understands her fully at court, which is really fascinating. He’s ruled the country. Whether you think he did it badly or not, he does know the pressures of that unlike anyone else. So Catherine realizes that he does truly see her for who she is and she doesn’t want to lose that companionship.

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • Succession’s Zoe Winters Won’t Say If Kerry Loved Logan

    Succession’s Zoe Winters Won’t Say If Kerry Loved Logan

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    Kerry and her bangs have been through a lot on this season of Succession. From her botched ATN audition to the death of her boss-slash-boyfriend, Logan’s trusted assistant, played to precision by Zoe Winters, has been absolutely put through the wringer. “Until this point, she’s been this impenetrable, indomitable, inscrutable presence,” says Winters. “It’s been really, really satisfying to track her as she unravels in some sense.”

    In episode four of the final season of Succession, we see Kerry reach her breaking point in Logan’s foyer in a showdown with his widow, Marcia (Hiam Abbass). “One of the most painful things is that anything between them was always kept a secret,” says Winters about Kerry and Logan’s relationship. “Now, when she felt like maybe she was on the brink of being able to have more real estate in her relationships, and in her position, and in her security, he dies, and she’s left without anything—and also left without the right to grieve publicly.” Below, Winters opens up  about Kerry’s season four arc, the similarities between Kerry and Marion Davies, and her own tiny apartment. 

    Vanity Fair: How real is the relationship between Kerry and Logan? Does she really love him, or was she in it for the money? 

    Zoe Winters: I think that I definitely have my views of what this relationship is. But for me, it’s been important to leave it up to the audience. Part of why this show is successful is that they don’t do any exposition. They’re not hand-holding the audience in any way. These cameras are just in the room, picking up these interchanges between people that would naturally occur. I think it creates this sense of anxiety, not having all the answers. But the reality of life is that we don’t have all the answers. So I’ve kind of kept my opinion out of it, just so I could give the audience the pleasure of deciphering their own ideas.

    I will say that I think that there’s real feelings there, whether those feelings are on a business level or on an intimate level. He’s the most powerful person in the room, and then the most powerful person in the room looks at you. You feel seen by the most powerful person in the room—what does that do to a person that hasn’t previously had that? I think that she comes from a background where maybe she’s been striving for that, and so she becomes addicted to the power and attention that she gets by his gaze being on her. 

    We talked a lot about Marion Davies, and the fallout that she had from when [William Randolph] Hearst died. He did so much for her career, and maybe also hindered her career. She wrote this letter to Charlie Chaplin’s wife about what it is that she gets from this dynamic. She said something to the point of feeling that being with him gives her worth, that she’s worth something to him. And if somebody this powerful finds worth and value in you, and you’re someone that is in need of that, it’s captivating and intoxicating. I think that that is what has happened to [Kerry] here. 

    With the absence of Logan, Marcia sends a lot of darkness her way. She actually sends Kerry into a taxi to the subway, to her little apartment.

    The thing where I actually relate most to Kerry is the fact that she has a tiny apartment. [Laughs.] So much of this episode is about, I think, landing. Where do people land after the king has fallen? What’s their place, and what’s their value and what’s their worth? Kerry has really lost the sole being that has kept her in the room. And so you can be as mean to Kerry as you want, because she is now rendered powerless.

    It’s such a ferocious line. And Marcia’s had her moments of being humiliated and being betrayed. Everyone has carried the feeling of being broken by him, so then they pass on that torch to someone else. One of the most painful things for me about this episode for Kerry is that whatever the relationship was, she had hoped for some formal arrangements and some agreements and some sort of legalizing that she would have security in her future. [She’s] trying to salvage anything that would promise that.

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    Chris Murphy

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  • David Grann Talks Mutiny, Martin Scorsese, and Searching for Truth

    David Grann Talks Mutiny, Martin Scorsese, and Searching for Truth

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    In 1740, amid an imperial war with Spain, the Wager—a tricked-out merchant ship—set sail from England on a mission to capture a Spanish galleon laden with silver. The mission went awry. Two years later, a glorified raft washed up on Brazil’s shores, carrying only 30 of the original 250-odd crewmen. They told a heroic story of survival against all odds: illness, shipwreck, starvation on a desolate island. Six months later, three more survivors turned up on the coast of Chile, with an accusation of mutiny. 

    In The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday), David Grann untangles the dueling narratives, bringing a nearly 300-year-old drama to life. Drawing from ship logs, survivor accounts, and court records—with context and color from the works of Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, and Herman Melville—The Wager zeroes in on the experiences of a handful of central figures, from Captain David Cheap to a 16-year-old midshipman named John Byron (the poet’s grandfather). The result: a genre-defying literary naval-history thriller, part Master and Commander, part Lord of the Flies.

    “One of my pet interests has always been mutiny,” Grann told VF. “I’m interested in military organizations that are designed by the state to enforce order. What is it that suddenly causes them to disorder? In literature and film, there’s always this question: Are they these extreme outlaws, or are they these romantic figures who are rebelling against something rotten at the core of the system?” 

    Questions like these have long animated Grann’s writing. Among his features for The New Yorker, where he’s been a staff writer since 2003, are a profile of the French serial imposter Frédéric Bourdin and the story of a Polish novelist charged with murder. And his books are cinematic, both narratively and actually, including The Lost City of Z, an account of a British explorer who went in search of El Dorado (Charlie Hunnam stars in the film version); the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (notching Robert Redford a best-actor Golden Globe nomination for the adaptation of Grann’s piece “The Old Man and the Gun”); and the best-selling Killers of the Flower Moon, about the 1920s murders of members of the Osage Nation (with a Martin Scorsese joint starring Leonardo DiCaprio coming to theaters soon). In the wake of finishing Killers, as phrases like “alternative facts” and “post-truth” proliferated, Grann began researching the Wager. He had been desperately hoping that his next book might feature living figures he could call up on the phone, but “this weird 18th-century story felt like a parable for our time.” 

    Vanity Fair: Your writing often includes some kind of grappling with how to tell the story you’re telling, or otherwise engages with the act of storytelling. 

    David Grann: I think early on I was telling stories more straight and traditionally. And then, over time, you start to become more sensitive to the way people are telling their stories, or shading their stories, and also of your own challenges in trying to render the truth. 

    I have a sense of my own inadequacy now. I started off as a young reporter—you watch All the President’s Men and you say, Well, this is how it’s going to be. And then you start to realize that getting to the truth is really murky and hard. I am a zealous believer in the truth, but accessing it and knowing it and documenting it… 

    Sometimes projects lead to other projects. With Killers of the Flower Moon, I was so interested in the fact that here was one of the worst racial injustices and sinister crimes in American history, and yet I had never heard of it. Most people outside the Osage Nation had not heard of it. And it’s like, why weren’t we taught this? Why did this not become part of history? That was something that haunted me. And so when I found the story of the Wager, it seemed like here you could really see the way people were shading their stories, but then also how nations and empires shade their stories and create their own narratives and their own mythic tales. 

    More and more, I’m acutely aware of parts of the story that have been scrubbed or whitewashed, and sometimes really tragically can’t be accessed anymore. Sometimes what haunts me when I do a story, it’s not the things I know, even when it’s a horrible crime, but actually the things I don’t know. 

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    Keziah Weir

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  • Margaret Atwood on Loss and Storytelling

    Margaret Atwood on Loss and Storytelling

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    For the release of her new story collection, Old Babes in the Wood, the author talks Victorian murderesses, The Handmaid’s Tale’s TV adaptation, autofiction, the expectedness of death—and much more.

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    Keziah Weir

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  • Lucinda Williams on Her Life, Her Lyrics, and Everything In Between

    Lucinda Williams on Her Life, Her Lyrics, and Everything In Between

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    Well, there’s a tribe of people who live here; we like each other and hang together. I’ve had this same conversation with people here who are progressive and they all say, “We feel we live somewhere where we can join the fight and it’s going to make a difference.”

    How did you feel when Roe v. Wade was overturned?

    It was a shock—complete and utter dismay. It’s hard to wrap my head around it; like did that actually happen? It seems so unreal.

    Preorder Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You from Amazon or Bookshop.

    Your husband manages you and you’ve collaborated with him a bit on songwriting. How is it living, working, and touring with him?

    It’s hard. At first it felt like it was stabilizing my life, but working on the book with Tom and living with him has been incredibly stressful. Women say [they have] hormonal things, but I think men have that too.

    You’re singing, but still unable to play guitar onstage. How do you feel touring and performing? 

    It’s exhausting. I enjoy the shows but the travel really tires me out. 

    You toured with Tom Petty and did a Hollywood Bowl concert with him the weekend before he died (in 2017)? 

    Yes, I had toured with him [previously] and we did the Hollywood Bowl together; we were just beginning to form a great friendship. Then he died. His death really affected me.

    Did you go through your own bad period of drugs or drinking?

    The drinking, yes. Some drugs, psychedelics mostly. The drinking didn’t come in until my 20s, 30s. As for drugs, I’ve never really got into the hard stuff. I’m a wine drinker, but I’d go into the bars on tour and the wines were horrific. So a friend told me to have vodka tonics instead. 

    You’ve credited Bob Dylan and Neil Young as musical influences; are there any female musicians who inspired you?

    I loved Bobbie Gentry—she was the first female voice I heard whose voice was low and husky. Most of the female voices I heard were high, pretty voices—Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez. They had these amazing ranges and I could never sing like that; it was frustrating. I also listened to Memphis Minnie, Dinah Washington, and I loved Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette.

    What’s the new album like?

    I’ve got some great guest artists singing background vocals on it: Bruce Springsteen, Margo Price, Angel Olsen. I started cowriting with (New York City–based singer-songwriter) Jesse Malin—and one of my favorite songs on it is called “New York Comeback.” We recorded some stuff at the historic RCA studios in Nashville where legends like Tammy [Wynette] and Dolly [Parton] recorded. 

    Can you believe it’s the 44th anniversary of your first album?

    No, the thing with time just blows my mind. 

    All products featured on Vanity Fair are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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    Lisa Robinson

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  • ‘The Traitors’ Agent of Chaos Kate Chastain’s Strategy: “I Trusted No One”

    ‘The Traitors’ Agent of Chaos Kate Chastain’s Strategy: “I Trusted No One”

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    She schemed, she memed, and in the end, she “had a nice cold martini.” The Below Deck alum and breakout from 2023’s first excellent reality-competition show tells all.

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • “The Job Is Not Hard”: An Ever-Confident Eric Adams Speaks to His First Year as New York City Mayor

    “The Job Is Not Hard”: An Ever-Confident Eric Adams Speaks to His First Year as New York City Mayor

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    Eric Adams won the 2021 Democratic primary for mayor of New York City—and, because this is a one-party town, he essentially won the general election too—by a mere 0.8% over Kathryn Garcia. But Adams, in his first year in office, has carried himself with the confidence of a man who won by a landslide. That’s all the more striking considering the challenges Adams has encountered at City Hall: a sluggish postpandemic economy, a spike in crime, record-setting homelessness numbers, a surge in migrants arriving from Central America, and a crippling shortage of moderately priced apartments. Oh, and an explosion in a population that Adams has long obsessed over: rats. There have also been self-inflicted controversies, including attempting to hire relatives and friends for high-paying taxpayer-funded jobs. 

    The mayor certainly appreciates the gravity of the issues he’s facing—hours before talking with Vanity Fair, Adams had raced to a Brooklyn hospital emergency room to check on a cop who’d been shot trying to make an arrest. Yet the mayor has also popped up everywhere from the Met Gala to downtown clubs and traveled far and wide outside the city. He seems to be thoroughly enjoying the job. “No, I don’t think it’s fair to say that,” Adams says. “What you should be saying is that I love the job.”

    Vanity Fair: What’s one thing you’ve learned this year about doing the job of mayor?

    Eric Adams: When someone says, What was the surprise?, it’s difficult to point to something because I knew city government. But I will tell you this: The job is not hard. It’s the volume. All day, every day, there is something to deal with. No matter what other job you have in the city, you are drinking from a garden hose compared to the mayor. You drink from a fire hose. You got everyone around you—some of them for good reasons, some of them from bad reasons. You have to have your instincts up.

    In recent weeks you have announced ambitious goals to build thousands of affordable housing units and to get mentally ill people off the streets and into care. But mayors have been announcing these kinds of agendas for decades, without delivering on a real plan. Why should we think you’re going to follow through and get it right?

    A great question. I’m a big believer in you have to inspect what you expect or it’s all suspect. I’m a computer programmer by nature. And I know that you have to build systems that allow you to see, are you moving in the right direction? Now, trust me, it’s not going to be easy because there’s just so many naysayers. They look for reasons to get in the way of where we could go. Back at the beginning of the year, I said we’re getting all of the encampments out of our subway system. We put a system in place, we monitor it every week. We’ve been able to narrow it down to the stubborn people we’re having a problem with, and we need to get them more services. That is how you get to a destination, through that inspection.

    When crime rates were rising through the spring and summer, you placed much of the blame on New York state’s elimination of cash bail, even though there’s little evidence of a connection between the two. Are you going to try and push for bail changes again when the new state legislative session starts in January?

    Everyone says, Eric, you’ve been unsuccessful with Albany because of just bail. But anyone that knows Albany knows you never get everything you want, particularly in the first year. I wanted to continue mayoral control [of public schools]. I got it. I wanted the earned income tax credit increased. I got it. I wanted a NYCHA trust fund. I got it. If we just fixed bail, and still have a recidivism problem that’s really producing the crimes we’re seeing, that’s a big problem. I need to go after the entire system.

    So I’ll take that as a no on advocating for tougher bail laws.

    No, that’s on my list! I’m going back to Albany to say, can we talk about [giving judges more discretion on] dangerousness again? I don’t stop talking about it just because there’s a philosophical difference. I need to come up with more data.

    You have said many times—including earlier today—that fighting crime isn’t just about cops, it’s about giving young people, in particular, opportunities for education and jobs. How does that square with you trying to cut tens of millions of dollars from the school and library budgets?

    With the library cuts that we’re doing—which we don’t want to do—we’re facing an out-year budget deficit of $10 billion. That money has to come from somewhere. This is additional money we gave them; we’re not digging into operations. Same thing with schools. Not one dollar came off the fair student funding. We were propped up with COVID money, and it runs out. And we have to be honest that the school population has shrunk. We cannot run a city that is dysfunctional in the area of economics.

    Your out-of-town travel has drawn a lot of attention and criticism. What’s one tangible benefit to the city from a trip you’ve taken? 

    Going to Athens allowed me to create an international relationship to show that New York, which has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, is serious about antisemitism. While I was in LA, I moved around the city to look at their encampment problem, their homeless problem, on the ground. I knew when I got back here, we are not going to turn into that. If you don’t get on the ground and see what’s happening in these locales, you’re not going to get the full picture.

    How will the Adams family be celebrating Christmas?

    Hopefully doing nothing. I want to sit down and keep on my pajamas.

    It will be your first Christmas living in Gracie Mansion.

    Yeah, there’s ghosts in there, man.

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    Chris Smith

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  • Morocco airline cancels World Cup fans flights, citing Qatar restrictions

    Morocco airline cancels World Cup fans flights, citing Qatar restrictions

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    RABAT, Dec 14 (Reuters) – Morocco’s national airline said it was cancelling all flights it had scheduled for Wednesday to carry fans to Doha for the World Cup semi-final, citing what it said was a decision by Qatari authorities.

    “Following the latest restrictions imposed by the Qatari authorities, Royal Air Maroc regrets to inform customers of the cancellation of their flights operated by Qatar Airways,” the airline said in an emailed statement.

    The Qatari government’s international media office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    Royal Air Maroc had previously said it would lay on 30 additional flights to help fans get to Qatar for Wednesday night’s semi-final game against France but on Tuesday a source at a RAM travel agency said only 14 flights had been scheduled.

    The cancellation of Wednesday’s seven scheduled flights means RAM was only able to fly the seven flights on Tuesday, leaving fans who had already booked match tickets or hotel rooms unable to travel.

    RAM said it would reimburse air tickets and apologised to customers.

    The RAM spokesperson did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment. Qatar Airways did not immediately respond to Reuters request for comment.

    Reporting by Ahmed Eljechtimi; Additional reporting by Andrew Mills; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Andrew Heavens

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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  • Pele congratulates Weah for World Cup goal against Wales

    Pele congratulates Weah for World Cup goal against Wales

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    DOHA, Qatar — Brazil great Pele congratulated United States forward Timothy Weah for scoring his debut goal in the World Cup in the Americans’ 1-1 draw with Wales.

    Weah got his goal in the 36th minute of Monday’s game to become the first player to score against Wales in a World Cup since Pele, who was 17 years old when he did it in 1958. That was the last time Wales played at the World Cup before this year in Qatar.

    Weah posted a photo of him celebrating the goal on Instagram and Pele congratulated him in the comments section.

    “Congratulations. It was a beautiful goal. Keep dreaming, dreams come true,” Pele wrote.

    Weah responded to “Papa Pele” by thanking him for the “inspiring message.”

    “It is such a blessing and an honor to receive such an inspiring message from The King himself,” Weah wrote. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for the world and us young black men. Grandes Abracos.”

    The 22-year-old Weah is the son of George Weah, the current president of Liberia and the 1995 world player of the year. Weah has scored 18 goals in 75 appearances for the United States.

    ———

    AP World Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/world-cup and https://twitter.com/AP—Sports

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  • Meet Me in the Bathroom Writer on How to Know You’re Living in a Special Moment

    Meet Me in the Bathroom Writer on How to Know You’re Living in a Special Moment

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    Writer and executive producer Lizzy Goodman calls her book and its corresponding documentary “ultimately a story about kids being young and trying to find themselves and coming of age in New York in the context of these larger cultural forces that were going on at the same time.”

    In the spring of 2011, months before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Lizzy Goodman had just turned 30. In the same week, she saw the Strokes and what was supposed to be LCD Soundsystem’s final show at Madison Square Garden. She could sense the end of an era creeping in. That was when she first had the idea for what would become her 2017 best-selling oral history, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, which chronicles the booming music scene of downtown New York from 2001 to 2011 and the rise of era-defining bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, the Moldy Peaches, the Strokes, and LCD Soundsystem. “I felt this sense of wistfulness for what was no longer. It was a clear moment—no sadness, but wistfulness,” Goodman tells Vanity Fair. “I had that feeling of being like, Wow, we’ve kind of grown up.”

    Simultaneously, directors Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern were making a documentary, Shut Up and Play the Hits, about that very same LCD Soundsystem show at Madison Square Garden. A few years later, an advance copy of Meet Me in the Bathroom landed in front of them.

    In a full circle turn of events, Goodman soon received a text from Interpol frontman Paul Banks about someone wanting to turn her book into a documentary. After a series of meetings, Lovelace and Southern took on the project and adapted Goodman’s book into a sort of visual time capsule of the same name, Meet Me in the Bathroom. The documentary weaves together gritty archival footage and raw, reflective interviews with key figures to retell the story of a bygone era of New York City.

    Vanity Fair met with Goodman, who is an executive producer on the documentary, over Zoom to discuss the early-aughts origins of her book, coming of age in New York, and the rampant indie-sleaze revival.

    Vanity Fair: Your oral history, Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, which came out in 2017, was a dose of nostalgia for those who lived it and a sort of education for a younger generation. But it also ended up being a snapshot of a crucial piece of recent American history unfolding. How did you balance telling the story of this specific scene within the larger cultural context of the political, technological, and cultural shifts happening at the time?

    Lizzy Goodman: I felt like I do when I’m pitching any magazine story: the urge to put my skills to use, setting the stage for what is ultimately a story about kids being young and trying to find themselves and coming of age in New York in the context of these larger cultural forces that were going on at the same time. I worked on it for six years and interviewed over 200 people. It was this huge monster. I eventually reached a point in the middle of writing it when I started to try to assemble all those narratives, and there was this moment of realizing that I would need to solve the exact problem you just addressed: Am I writing a book about those things, those big think themes, or am I writing a book using this cast of characters, the bands, to talk about that? Or am I writing a book about these people and weaving those themes into the story? The answer very, very, very, much was the latter. I think of it very much as a story about young people coming to the city in this myth-of-New York way, something that has been happening for generations. This is the time capsule of that, and then there are all these themes that had to come through the narratives of these individual people.

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    Daniela Tijerina

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  • Domhnall Gleeson Unpacks His Serial-Killer Arc From ‘The Patient’

    Domhnall Gleeson Unpacks His Serial-Killer Arc From ‘The Patient’

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    What were those songs?

    I had a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, I had a Jeff Rosenstock song, and I had “All Eyes on Me” by Bo Burnham.

    Oh, that’s interesting. What Yeah Yeah Yeahs song?

    I haven’t listened to them in ages because I was trying to get rid of them from my head. The Jeff Rosenstock one was like, [starts singing] “Someone’s gonna bleed and dribble trails in the snow.” But I used to listen to it for a totally different reason. And it was an acoustic version of “Cheated Hearts” that I had. The acoustic version is really sad and beautiful.

    Have you overcome your inability to dance in public as an adult?

    I still suck, but every now and then the mood strikes and I can do it.

    Let’s end with Sam’s physical appearance. He has this dark hair and orange-y glow. He also picks at his skin and has interesting posture—it’s not ramrod, but it’s not totally hunched either. Can you talk about the combination of all of those things? How much did you bring to it?

    The hair was [director] Chris Long and Joel and Joe’s idea. They wanted him to have dark hair. They felt my natural hair color wasn’t exactly right. But I’d also just finished the play, and I had my hair dyed prior to the play because I was doing The White House Plumbers, playing John Dean. There was still some of that left. My hair color was a little bit unnatural, and then they dyed it brown. They were interested in him being slightly younger than I am in real life. I asked them if I should lose weight. I thought he was quite nervous and on edge. Should he be quite slim despite his foodie tendencies? And they said, “No, you should enjoy your Christmas.” I ended up putting on some weight for it, so he’s a little doughier than I am, perhaps.

    The orange-y glow was down to the makeup and the color grade. If they dye your hair darker, they have to make your skin darker, too, so it doesn’t look too crazy. I was like, Listen, I’m going to play him as a version of me, so I’m not going to try to control his image too much. He just felt a little bit teenage in terms of a lack of impulse control and not being able to understand other perspectives. When you hit puberty, suddenly everything just goes a little bit mad in that way.

    With the clothes, I was much more involved: how short he wore his tie, how he tucked his shirt into his jeans, his chain. He had a fixation on that area of his body, just having something around his neck that felt incongruous with the rest of him. It had to do with going out and thinking, Yeah, I can be tough. I can wear this chain and do that. And yet that’s nothing to do with the rest of his personality. I didn’t want him to be any one thing where you would look at him and say, “Oh, I know who that is,” He could disappear in a room, but if you looked at him for a second too long, you’d go, “Oh god, he’s quite an interesting mix of things.”

    It creates an unsettling feeling around him. He’s not a freak, and he doesn’t stand out that much. But then you realize he has a weird tone to his skin, and the way he picks at himself is a little uncomfortable.

    Exactly. He’s also holding a lot back. In terms of picking at his skin, I ended up with these mad welts on my hands. I wouldn’t even notice it was happening because I’d be at it all day. I’d find myself hitching up my trousers a lot because he doesn’t want to appear slovenly. He’s always trying to control some aspect of himself. He sets his jaw and tries to keep things in. I noticed that in a couple of videos of people I watched, using the jaw to try to control things.

    This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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    Matthew Jacobs

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