The movies in competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival told a story of a porous U.S. film world, a washed up scene, or something in between. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Warner Bros., Niko Tavernise/A24, Focus Features, Universal Pictures
Exhausted from jetlag and with stomachs full of way too much pasta, Vulture’s correspondents have finally returned from the Venice Film Festival. Both of us were on the Lido for the very first time. Besides the thrill of seeing stars in their natural habitat, and the joy of devoting multiple hours a day to experiencing the cream of global cinema, what did we make of the experience?
Nate Jones: This was the first Venice to take place since last year’s SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. On one hand: The stars were back! On the other: American film production was shut down for a significant chunk of 2023, which is when many movies in this year’s festival would have been trying to shoot. Did you notice any effect on the quality of the films in competition?
Alison Willmore: Maybe I’m loopy from having spent an unplanned night in the Charles de Gaulle Holiday Inn Express on my way home, but it’s hard for me to tell what’s normal anymore. 2023 was the strike, but before that was the pandemic, which makes it years of business as not-usual, and at this point I feel like the real question is what the standard is going to look like going forward. There certainly wasn’t a shortage of starry U.S. productions, though I think it says less about the strike than the state of the industry in general that the big studio contributions were sequels — Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (which I liked!) and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux (which I did not).
Meanwhile, the feature that actively sets out to be a Great American Movie of the old school, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, is set in Pennsylvania and New York but shot in Hungary and Italy, and a lot of the other American movies also had an international tilt. Queer (directed by the Italian Luca Guadagnino) is about American expats in Mexico City and South America, while Maria (directed by the Chilean Pablo Larraín) is about the Greek-American opera star Maria Callas living out her last days in Paris. Babygirl and The Room Next Door, both set in New York, are the work of Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn and Spanish legend Pedro Almodóvar. I don’t know what to make of this, so I’ll turn the question to you: Is this a sign of greater porousness in American filmmaking, or a sign of how washed our homegrown scene is at the moment that we need to look abroad for ambitious visions?
Jones: I have a hard time condemning the lack of bold visions in American cinema at a festival that featured The Brutalist, which — whatever else you want to say about it — is undoubtedly ambitious: a three-and-a-half-hour movie about a Hungarian Holocaust survivor trying to put his stamp on the New World. Despite the silent T in his last name, Brady Corbet is as American as golf courses and shopping malls (each of which are prevalent in his hometown of Scottsdale, AZ). That he had to go abroad to make this film is less a condemnation of American filmmaking, and more of American financing. The Brutalist was funded by eight separate production companies, and you’d probably have to be an accounting savant to untangle the European film-board benefits that made it possible. The oft-rapturous reviews that greeted its premiere were, I think, a reflection of the fact that its mere existence felt like a minor miracle.
Still, Corbet was one of only two American directors in competition this year. (The other was Phillips LOL.) Stateside filmmakers were better represented in the wider festival. Besides Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the out-of-competition lineup saw Jon Watts’s Wolfs, Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion, and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2, while Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements played in a sidebar. That feels like a fitting snapshot of where the industry’s at right now, for good and for ill: You’ve got a legacy-quel that’s going to make zillions of dollars; a big starry project that a streamer has insanely decided not to give a wide-release to; a self-funded auteur epic; and a winky metafictional music doc — plus whatever the hell Baby Invasion is.
But your remark about the international bent of films like Queer and Babygirl reminded me of a late-night conversation I had with some fellow journalists who were complaining that our own directors were too online to make great films. Too self-conscious about pissing off their followers, their film’s politics often felt pre-digested. That, to me, was the fun of a film like Babygirl: Reijn was willing to follow her own strange muse wherever it took her, angry commenters be damned. What do you make of this?
Willmore: I can definitely see that argument, though, funnily, I thought Reijn’s previous film, the horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, suffered from not being online enough. But, related to that, one of the things that’s compelling about Babygirl and The Room Next Door, which is Almodóvar first feature in English, is that they both feel off-kilter — set in versions of the U.S. that are clearly being conjured up by someone outside of it. The warehouse automation company presented by Reijn in Babygirl feels more like a low-grade corporate fever dream than an attempt at a realistic place, and its ideas about American workplace culture and sexual mores are all openly drawn from the ‘90s erotic thrillers that Reijn set out to subvert. Meanwhile, The Room Next Door layers Almodóvar’s exquisitely dressed and decorated style over a New York setting in a way that reminded me of Sex and the City in that the writer characters live in fabulous places they shouldn’t be able to afford. But it’s also a film about grappling with mortality that takes an abrupt turn toward the legal issues surrounding assisted suicide toward the end — an odd final development that, again, felt born out of an outside viewpoint on puritanical American morality.
I’d like to hope, in general, that we’re relinquishing the surface-level, Twitter-applause-line style of politics that has plagued American pop culture for years now. God knows, Korine’s Baby Invasion wasn’t beholden to anything except his own nihilistic vision (and a mystifying continuing attachment to feature length runtimes). His latest venture into post-cinema is a first-person shooter inspired expedition around a Florida that’s simultaneously the center and the ends of the earth — whether you love it or hate it, you could never say that it’s playing safe. And in its own way, I’d say the same for Familiar Touch, Sarah Friendland’s lovely little drama about a woman with dementia that’s proof there’s hope for American independent filmmaking even when it’s not about being a Great Artist (though, coincidentally, H. Jon Benjamin shows up in a supporting role playing, like Adrien Brody, an architect). What I loved about Familiar Touch is that it feels genuinely guided by its main character, who’s as prickly as she is personable, and it never condescends to her by trying to fit her journey into a neat message.
But that’s enough high-falutin’ talk for now. Let’s get to the crass American conversation we’ve been waiting on, which is to say: Nate, which of these folks is ending up in the Oscar race?
Jones: I thought you’d never ask! Unlike Cannes, which takes pleasure in holding Hollywood at arm’s length, Venice embraces its status as the kickoff to unofficial awards season. However all the fall festivals are at a weird moment, Oscar-wise. Not since Nomadland in 2020 has the eventual Best Picture winner bowed at Venice, Telluride, or Toronto. That season comes with a considerable asterisk, of course. If you write it off, Venice hasn’t premiered the Best Picture winner since 2017, when The Shape of Water took the Golden Lion ahead of its triumphant campaign of monster-fucking.
I don’t know if we saw any future Best Picture winners at the Lido this year. The closest was probably The Brutalist. There’s a world where it gets nominated for Picture, Director, and Actor; there’s another where it doesn’t even come out in 2024. (Plus, the year after Oppenheimer, will voters really reward another three-hour mid-century epic, with a fraction of the commercial prospects?)
If I had to plant a flag for a nomination that’s definitely going to happen, it’s Angelina Jolie for Maria. Both of Larrain’s previous off-kilter biopics, 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, earned Best Actress noms for their stars, and this one too has a thrilling interplay between the legend of La Callas and Jolie’s own imperious star image. You were not alone in finding Maria underwhelming, but all the reasons critics disliked it — the unbroken hauteur of Jolie’s performance, the film’s stately refusal to go Full Camp — only makes me think Oscar voters will fall hard for it. Plus, Maria just got bought by Netflix, who have never been shy about throwing money around in awards season. (They got Ana de Armas a nom for Blonde, for goodness’ sake.) Jolie feels like a lock, and might even be the early frontrunner.
I’m a little less confident in predicting nods for Queer’s Daniel Craig and Babygirl’s Nicole Kidman, both of whom are repping sexually explicit dramas that fall further outside the Oscar sweet spot. (Both films will be released by A24.) But each turn in surprisingly vulnerable performances worthy of consideration: Craig for molding himself into a lonely, lovelorn loser, Kidman for her raw portrayal of female desire. Forget the film’s copious sex scenes; given her history of tabloid scrutiny, the scene where she’s seen getting Botox injections may be Babygirl’s most naked reveal.
When it comes to awards that won’t happen, I’m skeptical Joker: Folie a Deux will be able to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, which earned double-digit noms and a Best Actor trophy for Joaquin Phoenix. Not only was the sequel savaged by critics, its star now comes into the season dogged by the mystery of why he abandoned the new Todd Haynes project shortly before production — a question Phoenix dodged at the film’s official press conference. Plus, Lady Gaga, who everyone agrees is the best part of the movie, is in it less than you’d expect. This time, the only music Joker will be dancing to is a sad trombone.
Christopher Bannow and Anthony Roth Costanzo in The Marriage of Figaro. Photo: Nina Westervelt
The night breeze was delicious in that late summer way, the lights of Jersey twinkled across the Hudson, and the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo’s vocal cords were projected live on two giant screens, pink and weird and undulating like some beast from the Aliens franchise, as he sang Countess Rosina’s Act Three aria, “Dove sono i bei momenti.” The image made my jaw drop, though perhaps not as much as Costanzo’s — there it loomed, a kind of weird, fleshy synecdoche for all of the frenetically ingenious reimagining of The Marriage of Figaro that’s currently bursting the seams of the outdoor amphitheater at Little Island. Like the production as a whole—which (full disclosure) I saw in a preview rather than at the opening night for critics, and (even fuller disclosure) whose creative team includes several people I know—the moment is both exposed and audacious, at once totally naked and flamboyantly theatrical. It’s a “watch this” flourish in a show that’s full of them. Indeed, this Figaro’s sleeves are so stuffed with tricks it sometimes feels like it’s in an arms race with itself — and, at the same time, the physical truth of the gesture is a wonder. Here on display is the paradox of opera: As a form, it could hardly be more absurd, more flagrantly artificial, and yet the whole precarious, glittering edifice rests atop a real miracle of the human body. If we are sad for the countess, it’s because we stand in awe of the larynx.
Now, take that awe—however much of it you’d spend on nine or so major characters—and stuff it into one body. Costanzo, who recently took over Opera Philadelphia and who seems to pop up almost any time something rad is happening in the opera world, sings every role in this Figaro himself. The show is his baby, gestated with the dramaturg Jacob Mallinson Bird and delivered with mad-scientist zeal by the inexhaustible director Dustin Wills. Rounding out the brain trust is musical director Dan Schlosberg, who helps to bring the whole thing in under 90 minutes by brilliantly slimming down the arrangement for an eight-piece orchestra, which he conducts with ferocity and precision from behind the keyboard. Virtuosity abounds — and extends into the ensemble. For Costanzo isn’t alone onstage; he’s surrounded by a company of actors, all first-rate clowns, who begin the play as his harried, breathless stagehands and gradually morph into full expressions of Mozart and Da Ponte’s characters. Costanzo may be the Kathy Seldon to their Lina Lamonts, but they’re nobody’s puppets. Their bodies—and, ultimately, their own voices—are just as crucial to the project as his. This breadth and depth of creative vitality is what keeps the core concept from feeling like a party trick. We’re not just here for a showcase by Costanzo, but to witness something more like a circus — the wild, symbiotic, you-catch-me I’ll-catch-you frisson of a trapeze act.
That kind of high-stakes, all-hands agility is really what farce requires. Figaro’s careering upstairs-downstairs shenanigans—derived from the deceptively fizzy 1778 play by Pierre Beaumarchais—are also well suited to Wills as a high priest of the church of More Is More. You might think at first that all there is to the show’s set (co-designed by Wills and Lisa Laratta) is its elegant wooden deck and its view of the Hudson, but it’s practically a pop-up book. Trap doors and rollaway sections of floor reveal lights, curtains, furniture, instruments, and people. Ryan Shinji Murray, embodying the drunken gardener Antonio, lip-syncs the majority of his part while doing flips on a previously hidden trampoline. Every climax one-ups itself; every metatheatrical break breaks again. Though I sometimes wished for a more rigorous edit—especially after Costanzo single-voicedly pulls off the opera’s insane Act Two finale and a break has to be built into the show for him—it would be simple petulance to resent a director with 50 ideas to spare when plenty struggle to have just one. This Figaro’s muchness is, more than anything else, ecstatically playful.
Such a breakneck, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach requires a confident handshake, and Wills, Costanzo, and company immediately define the terms: Here comes the countertenor—slight and muscular, with a face somehow both chiseled and elastic—wrestling a rolling costume rack up a ramp and onto the stage with the help of actor Emma Ramos, who wears a stage manager’s headset and a Buster Keaton–ish expression of deadpan haplessness. A spotlight catches Costanzo like a burglar in an old movie. Ramos shoves a yardstick in his hand and a tricorn on his head. Poof, he’s the affable, wily manservant Figaro, busy measuring out the space for his wedding bed. But all it takes for him to become his own fiancée, the clever maid Susanna, is for a rolling door to rotate and for him to sing through a window in its center, while a dress rigged up below the window (and a gazelle’s leap into the treble clef) alert us to his new identity. Then, poof again — a clownish red onesie with a lace collar conjures Cherubino, the adorably sex-crazed serving boy who’s usually played by a female mezzo. (This is where Costanzo’s voice and persona most naturally sit, and indeed, the seeds were planted for this Figaro long ago, when he first played Cherubino at 17.) Fleet, irreverent subtitles by Nicholas Betson and witty, rehearsal-style costume pieces by Emily Bode—a hat and waistcoat here, an open-back dress, a flower crown and ribbon there—keep us up to speed and entertained on multiple levels: Costanzo’s body-hopping experiment, after all, is layered on top of a play that already revels in disguise, swapped outfits, and mistaken identity. But in all the chaos, there’s no confusion. Wills is the kind of man behind the curtain who wants you to pay attention to the strings and levers. We follow, and we take delight, because the magician reveals the trick and trusts the revelation to generate the real magic.
Or magicians, I should say. Along with Murray and Ramos, actors Christopher Bannow, Ariana Venturi, and Daniel Liu, all gifted comedians, also become conjurers as the play goes along. In a parallel to Figaro’s own smiling subversiveness (the original play “caused the French Revolution,” Liu quips at one point, “because the servants had opinions or something”), the production’s corps of non-singers eventually ditch their headsets for costumes and opinions of their own. No longer will they run behind Costanzo, moving furniture and catching discarded props — now they’ll go toe to toe with him, even as he ventriloquizes for them. The results can be hilarious, as when Costanzo’s lower register pours out of Venturi, who swaggers and stamps her way across the stage as the lascivious Count Almaviva, a femme form joyously channeling ridiculous machismo. They can also be astonishingly poignant: Sad-eyed and tender in a golden gown, Liu’s Countess twice prompts a gorgeous ritardando in the production’s madcap tempo simply by sitting still and embodying the heartache of Costanzo’s mezzo. Both “Porgi amor” and “Dove sono” become fully hers, the Countess’s, and his, Liu’s, even as we stare down Costanzo’s trachea during the latter. There’s a delicate act of transference happening, a gift being given, and given doubly. If Liu is a conduit, so too, in some ineffable sense, is Costanzo. The fact that the music travels through an extra body on its way to us heightens our awareness of the miracle of its emergence in the first place.
The Marriage of Figaro is at Little Island through September 22.
The long-in-coming sequel isn’t just a nostalgic retread — it’s a reminder of what makes the director great. Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.
Midway through Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) demands to know “where’s the obnoxious little goth girl who tormented me all those years ago?” The flamboyant conceptual artist is talking to her stepdaughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), who’s grown from the morose teenager of Beetlejuice (1988) into the middle-aged star of a hokey ghost-hunting reality show. But you get the feeling that this is a question director Tim Burton could just as well be posing to himself. The original film was born out of the hectic creative heyday Burton had in the ’80s and ’90s, before he got mired in moribund Disney remakes and bewildering adaptations starring (an otherwise great) Eva Green. Like his character Lydia, who describes what she’s done as selling out, Burton passed from a youthful infatuation with darkness into more grown-up concerns, among them whichever one made 2019’s Dumbo seem like a good idea. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in some ways itself a product of those concerns, both as a 36-years-later sequel and as a story about how Lydia has since stepped into the position of the distracted parent who’s unable to connect with their own moody child. And yet somehow there’s nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form that finds Burton and much of the previous cast getting weird, gross, and, yes, goth in both an idyllic New England town and a gleefully bureaucratic afterlife.
In the first Beetlejuice, monied New Yorkers were just as much the antagonists as the fast-talking ghoulie of the title (sort of — he’s technically “Betelgeuse” in that film). The Deetz family first arrive in Winter River, Connecticut, full of condescension, resentment, and some regrettable approaches to remodeling, and it feels entirely in character that by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, they appear to have partially or entirely returned to the city. Lydia, who’s kept the distinct spiky bangs while graduating to more Elvira-esque dresses, plays “psychic mediator” in front of a live studio audience while her producer and boyfriend, Rory (an oily Justin Theroux), hovers nearby. Her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, made for this), is ensconced in a boarding school where she heads up a doomer-y climate club. Delia has become a Manhattan art star, if her gallery-wide show, “The Human Canvas,” is any indication. The death of her husband, Charles, is both the inciting incident and a handy way of dealing with the fact that the actor who originally played the man, Jeffrey Jones, is now a convicted sex offender — he gets his head bitten off by a shark and spends the rest of the film as a walking torso. Charles’s funeral provides an excuse for the three women to return to Winter River, where, in the course of cleaning out the house, they come back into contact with a certain foul-mouthed spirit who’s still holding a candle for Lydia, the one who got away.
Running through Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the fitting theme of shaking off malaise, whether that comes in the form of lingering grief (Astrid’s father, played by Santiago Cabrera, died not long after he and Lydia split), romantic inertia (Rory hides his manipulations behind therapyspeak), or supernatural hauntings. While Michael Keaton slips zestfully back into the role of Beetlejuice like he never left, and the always reliable O’Hara is spookily unchanged, Ryder plays Lydia, poignantly, as a brittle adult who’s stuck dressing in the style she affected a few decades ago, as though she’d gotten interrupted before she could fully finish growing up. When she begs Rory for one of her pills to get through the day, it’s a moment that’s just on the edge of being a little too real, but the movie otherwise wears its emotional allegories lightly. Lydia may have some unfinished trauma from the past that she has to exorcize, but she also has actual ghosts to contend with. When Astrid, a devout nonbeliever, meets a dreamy neighborhood boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), she learns that her mother isn’t delusional about all the visions she claims to have after all, and soon the characters have to enlist the help of a fiend whose name they never wanted to speak again (much less say three times). In there, also, is a stop-motion sequence, undead hallways at impossible angles, all the cleverly mangled waiting-room corpses imaginable, and the amusing but poetic visual of the Deetz house cloaked in a mourning veil. It’s all rendered in scenes that lean heavily on practical effects (including a demonic baby Beetlejuice that crawls across the ceiling à la the detox scene from Trainspotting).
If that sounds like an odd, lopsided plot, well, the first Beetlejuice lurched along to its own idiosyncratic calypso rhythms too. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trades that Caribbean beat in for a disco one that works startlingly well, maybe because it matches the film’s jolting energy. When Monica Bellucci, playing Beetlejuice’s soul-sucking ex Delores, staples the chopped-up chunks of her body back together to the sound of the Bee Gees, it’s a gruesomely jubilant sequence. And when the film arrives at a lip-synced version of “MacArthur Park,” there’s genuine joy to the way the musical number is staged. So many recent revisitations of old properties play like corporate attempts to reanimate the dead — literally, in the case of movies like Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Alien: Romulus. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice manages to avoid the feeling that its only obligation is to dutifully run through everything familiar one more time. Instead, watching it is a small but significant relief, like reconnecting with an estranged friend and finding out that you still get along after all — and for more reasons than just shared history, back when you were both obnoxious little goth girls.
Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs star in the tragic love story between a Soundcloud scarecrow and a rebellious cheerleader. Photo: Lionsgate
I can’t say for sure that the doomed lovers in the new The Crow were modeled after Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox. But once it occurred to me, the comparison became impossible to shake, because the only better way to sum up the film’s sweaty approach to contemporize its story is the fact that its villain is trying to avoid being canceled. Its hero, Eric Draven, as played by Bill Skarsgård, has the silhouette of a Soundcloud scarecrow, crowned with a Bushwick mullet and inked with tattoos — including a cursive “Lullaby” over an eyebrow — that scream “poor decision-making” as much as they do “emotional rebellion.” Meanwhile, Shelly (FKA Twigs) is pitched as a princess with a dark streak, all elf locks, slip dresses, and sheer layers, a girl who was raised in wealth and trained as a pianist but turned to partying thanks to toxic parenting. The Eric of James O’Barr’s 1989 comic was modeled after Iggy Pop and Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy. An emo-rap update feels right for a movie adamantly branded as not a remake or reboot but a reimagining of the original source material.
The Crow isn’t untouchable — it’s spawned way too many sequels, not to mention a short-lived TV show, for that. But O’Barr’s work and Alex Proyas’s 1994 film adaptation were accompanied by real tragedies — the death of O’Barr’s fiancée in an accident involving a drunk driver and the death of star Brandon Lee in an on-set accident — that gave added ballast to their tormented depictions of a grief-stricken man rising from the grave to seek closure in violent retribution. This new Crow, messily directed by Ghost in the Shell’s Rupert Sanders, with a screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Schneider, feels so lightweight in comparison that it’s almost endearing. Its two beautiful dummies meet in rehab, where they endure the indignity of being made to wear pink sweatsuits and fall in love during group-therapy exercises. Eric imagines Shelly topless in the sketches he pins to his wall, while Shelly is irresistibly drawn to the way Eric sits by himself, declaring him “quite brilliantly broken.” Skarsgård and Twigs have a total absence of chemistry, and while she’s adequate in what’s still basically a dead-wife role, he’s shockingly inert for someone with a career built almost entirely on characters at the intersection of creepy and hottie.
The film may insist that Eric and Shelly’s is a grand romance of soul mates, but what it actually gives us is a burnout-detention boyfriend/rebellious-cheerleader girlfriend dynamic that doesn’t feel like it would last a long weekend. Fittingly, when Eric rises from the grave after he and Shelly are murdered by henchmen on the orders of evil bigwig Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), he proves pretty inept at undead vengeance. It’s not just that he’s not much of a fighter — that doesn’t matter when your body regenerates thanks to powers granted by a mystical crow from the afterlife. He’s also exasperatingly slow to accept what’s happened to him, he untangles the bad business Shelly was involved in only really by accident, and he doesn’t even put on a trench coat until the final act. The way that Eric fumbles his way toward retribution is right on the verge of funny — at one point, he gets run over by a truck — but The Crow can’t bring itself to display a sense of humor. Instead, it makes up for its hero’s initial bumbling by raising its gore quotient later on.
It’s a lot to ask, following in the footsteps of a subculture mainstay. If there were any sense of intentionality behind this new Crow, I’d say it’s trying to provide representation for the Incompetent Goths out there — the IncompeGoths who get an illegible stick-and-poke on their cheekbone, who are indifferent to how goofy their single dangly earring looks, and who keep getting sent back to mystical purgatory to be lectured by a supernatural mentor that IMDb assures me has a name, Kronos (Sami Bouajila). But this film isn’t coherent enough for that. Its baddie, Vincent, is an immortal arts patron of sorts who made a deal with the devil but spends the movie trying to track down a cell-phone video he’s worried will get him in trouble. It takes place in an apparently American city where almost every resident has a different international accent. Shelly is desperately on the run from a man with enormous power, reach, and demonic connections, and the first thing she and Eric do when they escape from rehab is go back to her luxury apartment, with its chubby furniture, and get trashed together.
Look, deep thoughts and deeply held emotions aren’t for everyone, and there’s something blissfully empty-headed about the scene in which Shelly, posing with a book at an Instagram-ready picnic with some random friends, informs Eric that she’s reading Rimbaud. If only The Crow were a little more self-aware, it could be a cult classic in its own right — though probably not the kind its makers were hoping for.
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 fall of 2011, a high-school girl in Le Roy started to display motor tics initially resembling Tourette’s syndrome. Her face twitched. Her arms flailed. She experienced difficulties with speech and became prone to verbal outbursts. But then a second girl at the school began to display the same behavior. After the second, another. Two makes for a curiosity; three a concern. By the time the tally metastasized past a dozen girls, it looked like a contagion. “As the weather grew colder in Le Roy that fall, the symptoms continued to come to life,” narrates Dan Taberski in Hysterical, an audio docuseries that revisits the medical mystery more than a decade later. “An irregular heartbeat finding rhythm.”
Competing theories emerged. Some unaffected students suspected that their peers were faking the malady for attention. Later, the specter of environmental pollution came into play, a natural hypothesis for the industrial town about an hour from Niagara Falls, where the Love Canal disaster, in which toxic-chemical dumping was discovered in the late 1970s to have harmed residents over decades, still looms large. In the case of these girls, state authorities, the media, and large swathes of the community coalesced on a more striking explanation: “conversion disorder,” or the condition in which a person exhibits physiological responses to emotional trauma or extreme stress. In other words, the girls were deemed to be suffering from mass hysteria. The mystery was the stuff of media frenzies, perfect fodder for cable news and daytime shows as it played out.
Taberski, a son of Western New York, grew up not far from Le Roy. He says that he spent a lot of his life there “wearing giant winter coats with giant knit hats with giant pom-poms on top.” Balancing a strong adoration for his old stomping grounds with a sense of moral clarity, the seven-part Hysterical, which he makes with longtime collaborator Henry Molofsky and a team of producers, sees him mounting an interrogation of the “mass hysteria” diagnosis with an explicit intent to keep the girls’ experience front and center.
In this, the series carries some spiritual connection to The Retrievals, the Serial Productions–New York Times audio project from last year that grappled with the failure of key American systems to seriously consider women’s pain. When Taberski asks Emily, who was in eighth grade when she contracted symptoms, whether she experienced any undisclosed trauma at the time, the response feels deflating. “Not anything that would’ve made it into something like this,” she says. “Typical eighth-grade trauma.” Taberski is a preternaturally empathetic documentarian, approaching the story with care where it’s dearly needed and skepticism where it’s sorely deserved. He’s also a seasoned hand who knows the culture of the medium he works in — sadly, podcasting is increasingly home to salacious Investigation Discovery–style storytelling — and so he follows Emily’s response by cutting off any Galaxy Brain suggestions. “There’s no subtext here, by the way, no suggestion that anyone is hiding something or in denial about what’s really going on,” he cuts in over narration. “For a lot of the girls and the parents in Le Roy, it just didn’t feel true.”
Taberski also cuts off any indication that Hysterical will drive toward a clear answer to the mystery. He chases down many of the case’s hypotheses and oddities, but the human brain remains a black box of mysteries through the end. This does not mean that Hysterical does not arrive at an outcome. The natural human desire to scramble for meaning, even if the explanation harms individuals, emerges as the real subject. Late in the series, we learn about how a student who actually suffered from Tourette’s was treated by the school and the community as a kind of scapegoat for the outbreak. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and you are the few,” she recounts being told, an absolutely horrible thing for a high-school child to hear. But as easy as it might have been for Hysterical to paint the scene in simple terms of persecutors and the persecuted, Taberski practices a remarkable empathy for where the broader community was coming from. Everyone just wants their own child to be safe, even if they ultimately have to turn on each other; therein lies the tragedy.
Taberski is one of the finest audio documentarians working today, yet he still seems underappreciated. Part of this likely has to do with the waning power of narrative audio, which has become displaced in recent years by aggressively corporate celebrity–centric chat podcasts. But even during the so-called golden age of narrative podcasting (2014 to 2022-ish), his work was never fêted as widely and as often as, say, This American Life and its widening diaspora of producers. This could be owed to the nature of his breakout hit, 2017’s Missing Richard Simmons, an impish jaunt that sought to track down the titular reclusive fitness star (who died earlier this summer) while doubling as an adoring biography that drew pearl-clutching condemnation from the Times, which called it “morally suspect” for what it deemed to be excessively invasive tactics. I never quite shared that assessment. In any case, Taberski has gone on to produce a body of work that’s as striking for its humanism as its formalistic diversity. Among his projects: Running From COPS, an extended critique of the copaganda reality show; The Line, a vigorous investigation into a war crime in Iraq; and 9/12, an essayistic series taking stock of the manifold experiences processing the long tail of the September 11 attacks.
What happened to the girls in Le Roy is ripe territory for narrative podcasting — far enough in the past to sort through the mess undisturbed, close enough to the present to feel urgent, and inconclusive enough to beg for more investigation. Conversion disorder is a tricky and fundamentally gendered diagnosis. When social media was inevitably fingered as a suspected disease vector, the situation firmly resembled a case of ancient prejudices against young girls being adapted to fit contemporary freak-outs.
All the traits that make Taberski’s work so distinct — a sobriety over the material, a gloriously wry writing voice, a strong knack for compassionate interviewing — are very much present in the series. But Hysterical sees Taberski taking a step further into philosophical territory with a greater, quiet willingness to sit with the abyss. This series explores our constant failure to deal with uncertainty and how fear of the unknown often turns us into monsters. To be hysterical is to be human, and this is a truth that’s both depressing to live with and liberating to learn.
For the Emmys’ weirdest categories, The Bear and SNL are destined to dominate in comedy while drama is anyone’s guess. Photo: FX
They’re far from the most prestigious categories on the Emmy ballot. They don’t even get presented on the main Emmys telecast. But year in and year out, the Guest Actor and Guest Actress categories present some of the most wide-open and fascinating races, where Oscar darlings like Lily Gladstone compete against other Oscar darlings like Olivia Colman. Some of these actors are taking on meaty, episode-shifting roles, and others are just playing bizarro versions of themselves in a cheeky cameo. They might be the guest of the week in a crime procedural, or one of several A-list cameos brought in to make a prestige drama feel even more prestigious, or an SNL host. It’s bedlam!
To qualify for the Guest categories, a performer needs to have been in fewer than half of the season’s episodes. That’s really the only hurdle, so it often leads to regular cast members who were simply only in a handful of episodes getting nominated — think Samira Wiley and Alexis Bledel for The Handmaid’s Tale or Joan Cusack on Shameless. This year, the Guest Actor categories are playing a major role in the campaign of one of this year’s biggest shows — that’d be The Bear. It’s a narrative that strikes at the heart of one of the rare criticisms that came the show’s way last year, and has only been exacerbated with the just-released third season.
The Bear’s more-is-more approach to guest stars in season two led some of the more cynical observers to suggest that the show was baiting the hook for Emmy voters, a tried-and-true strategy that’s worked for shows from Succession (Guest Actor nods for the likes of Alexander Skarsgård, Adrien Brody, and James Cromwell) to 30 Rock (Matt Damon, Jon Hamm, Steve Martin, Steve Buscemi) to Glee (Gwyneth Paltrow, Kristin Chenoweth, Neil Patrick Harris). Hell, you don’t even need to be that cynical to look at the way The Bear hauled out Jamie Lee Curtis, Bob Odenkirk, John Mulaney, Sarah Paulson, and Gillian Jacobs to join Jon Bernthal (season one’s guest-star gambit) to take part in the overstuffed, nerve-jangling “Fishes” episode.
This isn’t to disparage The Bear’s guest stars. Odenkirk and Mulaney were quite good in “Fishes” and Will Poulter and Olivia Colman were phenomenal elsewhere in the season. But anybody who bristled at The Bear over-salting the sauce with guest stars last year couldn’t have been happy with season three doubling down with pro wrestlers, half the buzzy chefs in Chicago, and more ultra-intense Jamie Lee Curtis. Nomination voting closed before season three dropped, so such gripes won’t be reflected in this year’s nominees. As we mentioned here a few weeks ago, there is a very real chance that The Bear gets nearly everybody they submitted for a nomination onto the final ballot. At the very least, Bernthal, Mulaney, and Odenkirk should land Guest Actor (with Poulter waiting in the wings), while Curtis, Colman, and perhaps Paulson get into Guest Actress.
The Bear’s biggest competition in these categories comes from Saturday Night Live, a show all too accustomed to flooding the ballot with starry guest hosts. In the last five years, SNL has amassed 20 nominations and four wins in Guest Actor and Guest Actress in a comedy, for Eddie Murphy (2020), Dave Chappelle (2021), and Maya Rudolph back to back (2020-2021). This year, the show placed every single host from season 49 on the nomination ballot. That means Emmy voters could easily spam their ballots with SNL options … or the competition for votes could dilute the show’s totals. Among this year’s hosts, Ryan Gosling stands out strongest on the Guest Actor side, with his Beavis & Butthead sketch going aggressively viral. I’d also give a boost to Adam Driver, since he was a nominee for hosting in 2020, and Pete Davidson, since returning former cast members (Murphy, Adam Sandler, Bill Hader, and John Mulaney) tend to do well in this category. This is also why Rudolph, Kate McKinnon, and Kristen Wiig have good odds to show up in Guest Actress (especially Wiig for the Jumanji sketch). Voters could also drift toward Emma Stone and Ayo Edebiri, who are expected to be nominated elsewhere on the ballot (for The Curse and The Bear, respectively).
The predicted dominance of The Bear and Saturday Night Live in Comedy’s Guest categories puts pretty much anybody else in the realm of wishful thinking, but some wishes are more likely to come true than others. That’s because this category is where the oft-Emmy-nominated come to pad their gaudy stats. (Of Cloris Leachman’s record-holding 22 acting nominations, ten came from Guest Actress; eight of Michael J. Fox’s 18 career noms have been as a Guest; and all eight of Nathan Lane’s career Emmy nods have been Guest.) This year, Tina Fey is sitting on seven (could get her eighth for Only Murders in the Building) while Maya Rudolph has six (could be seven if she’s nominated for SNL).
This year, Ted Danson could get his 19th career nomination for his guest appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm, though it would be his first ever for Curb, where he’s played a fictional version of himself since the show’s first season. Curb could also land Allison Janney her 16th nomination — and a chance to tie Leachman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus with a record eighth win. Comedy legend Mel Brooks could pick up a 15th career nomination for his brief appearance on Only Murders in the Building, John Goodman his 12th for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and Candice Bergen her tenth for her return to the Sex and the City universe in And Just Like That … A Guest Actor nomination for Sam Waterston for Law & Order would not only be the ninth in his career, but it would also mark the swan song of his L&O character, Jack McCoy.
I’d also expect twice-nominated J. Smith-Cameron to get a nod for playing Deborah Vance’s sister on Hacks — speaking of which, with Hannah Einbinder the front-runner to win Supporting Actress in a Comedy, she might as well get a guest nod for playing a White House social secretary on Julia. Abbott Elementary is still expected to get major nominations this year, so it wouldn’t be a huge shock if the show’s big stunt cameo sidles in. That would be, in case you forgot, Bradley Cooper, playing himself in the episode that aired after the Oscars.
Then there are the longer shots: Will Ferrell and Andy Samberg committing to the bit as withered old courtside-seat holders Lou Adler and Jimmy Goldstein on John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A. Since Richard Kind doesn’t qualify as a guest for that show, let’s give him a nod for playing himself in Girls5Eva. The list of Reservation Dogshopefuls in the Guest categories is long, even with Ethan Hawke not submitting himself: Lily Gladstone and Wes Studi would seem to stand the best chance, but Graham Greene, Zahn McClarnon, and Kaniehtiio Horn all make for deserving nominees. Finally, there’s the matter of one Peri Gilpin, who put in 11 seasons on the original run of Frasier and was the only main cast member to never receive an Emmy nomination. Now a guest star on the rebooted series, here’s a chance for voters to right a historical wrong.
All this fuss about the Comedy categories ironically leaves very little drama for the drama categories. The top-contending shows did not submit very many people for Guest Actor/Actress consideration. Shōgun only offered up Nestor Carbonell playing a Portuguese sailor in Guest Actor and Yûko Miyamoto as shrewd madam Gin in Guest Actress. The Crown only submitted Claire Foy as flashback Queen Elizabeth, while Slow Horses is banking on Jonathan Pryce as Cartwright’s grandfather. The Morning Show submitted a returning Marcia Gay Harden (just one small scene, but were we ever grateful for it) and Natalie Morales, who played a whistleblowing tech worker and longtime friend to Greta Lee’s Stella. She’s probably not that likely to get nominated, and that’s a shame, as she’s been a near-constant presence on TV for more than 15 years in everything from The Middleman and White Collar to guest turns on Parks and Recreation, Girls, and The Newsroom, yet she’s somehow never received an Emmy nom.
The freshman dramas that did flood the ballot with Emmy nominees stand farther on the fringes of the major-category races, making their overall chances pretty dicey. Mr. & Mrs. Smith submitted ten guest performers, including Sarah Paulson, Wagner Moura, Michaela Coel, John Turturro, Sharon Horgan, and Parker Posey, though the most intriguing might be Paul Dano as “Hot Neighbor.” Meanwhile, Elsbeth, in classic procedural fashion, featured new guests every week, submitting 12 names for its ten-episode first season, including Emmy faves Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Krakowski, and Linda Lavin.
Because the Drama races are so open, there’s more room for those wishful-thinking long shots. Michael Emerson, an Emmy winner from his Lost days and a former Guest Actor in a Drama winner for The Practice, would make for a super deserving nominee for his turn as Dr. Siggi Wilzig in Fallout. Glenn Close may be famously bereft of an Oscar, but she’s a three-time Emmy winner and 14-time nominee, so don’t count out her performance in The New Look.
Ultimately, the Guest Actor categories will offer two very different conversations this year. Comedy is going to be all about how well The Bear performs, with its Guest nods playing into that show’s arc of dominance over this year’s ballot. In the Drama categories, because so few shows can dominate, the reactions will likely focus on smaller stories. Maybe it’ll be the long-awaited recognition for deserving actors like Carbonell and Morales; maybe it’ll be good showings for middle-tier shows like Elsbeth and Mr. &Mrs. Smith. Maybe it’ll be both! Unlike in Comedy, that narrative will encompass more than just one or two shows.
Personally, the pair of prospective nominees to which I’m most partial might on the surface look like a deeply random pair of cameos of people playing themselves. But Rachel Ray and Vincent Pastore are so committed to that almost-too-real talk-show scene in the season finale of The Curse that I think they both deserve Emmys. Make it happen!
It’s a long shot, but Bruce Springsteen does appear on the ballot for his performance as himself on the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where he catches COVID from Larry. A surprise nomination for Springsteen would not only be awesome on principle, but would give the Boss his career non-competitive EGOT: He’s got an Oscar for “Streets of Philadelphia,” a bunch of Grammys, and a special non-competitive Tony for Springsteen on Broadway from 2018.
Meanwhile, a fun fact: Of the list of people who are one element away from a competitive EGOT (a.k.a. the real EGOT), there are only eight people for whom an Emmy would complete the list. It is by far the shortest of the four lists (40 people still need that Oscar). Of those eight people, six are dead, and two are Pasek and Paul, who, as we mentioned last week, could seal the deal with a win for their “Pickwick Triplets” song from Only Murders in the Building.
It’s a long shot, but Bruce Springsteen does appear on the ballot for his performance as himself on the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where he catches COVID from Larry. A surprise nomination for Springsteen would not only be awesome on principle, but would give the Boss his career non-competitive EGOT: He’s got an Oscar for “Streets of Philadelphia,” a bunch of Grammys, and a special non-competitive Tony for Springsteen on Broadway from 2018.
Meanwhile, a fun fact: Of the list of people who are one element away from a competitive EGOT (a.k.a. the real EGOT), there are only eight people for whom an Emmy would complete the list. It is by far the shortest of the four lists (40 people still need that Oscar). Of those eight people, six are dead, and two are Pasek and Paul, who, as we mentioned last week, could seal the deal with a win for their “Pickwick Triplets” song from Only Murders in the Building.
When it comes to Emmy voters, they like what they like. The shows they picked last year are more often than not the shows they will pick this year. We all groaned at five consecutive years of Modern Family winning Outstanding Comedy and The Handmaid’s Tale raking in a dozen or more nominations long past its prime. But that kind of rut-digging reaches the point of parody when it comes to the reality-TV categories, where Emmy voters have been nominating the same shows for ten, 15, and even 20 years.
This goes all the way back to 2003, when The Amazing Race won the very first Outstanding Reality Competition Emmy. Survivor and American Idol were the more popular shows, but The Amazing Race had a prestige sheen (world travel! Cinematography!), so it wasn’t a huge surprise when it won. What was a surprise was The Amazing Race going on to win the category for the first seven years of its existence, nine of the first ten, and ten in total. This continued long past the point where The Amazing Race was considered one of the premier reality-TV shows; past the early seasons of Project Runway (which has never won) and Top Chef (which won only once, in 2010). After The Amazing Race won all its Emmys, The Voice won three out of four years, followed by RuPaul’s Drag Race winning five out of the last six years.
In the 21 years the Outstanding Reality Competition category has existed, only five shows have ever won, including a surprise victory for Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls in 2022. Moreover, only 17 shows have ever even been nominated. This category covers, per the Emmy rules, “programs that include a competitive element for a prize […] with produced contestant story elements and other reality-style competitive elements.” This excludes “unstructured reality” shows (basically anything on Bravo) as well as game shows like The Floor or “structured reality” shows like Shark Tank, which apparently doesn’t contain sufficient “story elements” to qualify. (Ask me to explain why Chopped is a Reality Competition while Shark Tank is a Structured Reality show, and I will curl up into a ball.) But even though Reality Competition only represents a fraction of the reality shows produced, five winners and 17 nominees in two decades is a shocking number. At least with Outstanding Variety Talk Series, the one where all the late-night shows get nominated, you understand there are only a handful of shows to choose from. Over the same span, there have been 52 shows nominated for Outstanding Drama and 54 nominated for Outstanding Comedy, and even with those categories eventually expanding to more nominees, that is a wild discrepancy.
This kind of rubber-stamping shows up in a lot of the reality categories. Outstanding Host of a Reality Program has only had six winners since that category debuted in 2008 (RuPaul is currently on an eight-year streak). The Outstanding Structured Reality Program Emmy has gone to Netflix’s Queer Eye for the last six years in a row, and has nominated Antiques Road Show for 14 straight years, Shark Tank for 12 straight years, and Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives in seven of the last ten years. Meanwhile, the Emmys have wholesale ignored entire subgenres of reality; The Bachelor franchise has never been nominated for an Emmy in any of its iterations. The Challenge has been similarly blanked, and its parent series, no less groundbreaking a show as The Real World, was only ever nominated for one Emmy, back in 2000 for Outstanding Picture Editing in a Non-Fiction Program, which it lost to PBS’s American Experience documentary on New York City.
Famously, just last year, Vanderpump Rules became the first show in the Real Housewives universe to receive Emmy nominations, for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program and Outstanding Editing (Unstructured Reality). This category — which has existed since 2014, when the Outstanding Reality Program category (i.e. everything that wasn’t a competition) was split into Structured and Unstructured — has been a hodgepodge of shows from Discovery (Deadliest Catch), A&E (Intervention and Born This Way), and recently Netflix (Selling Sunset, Cheer, Love on the Spectrum). It’s the one reality category where voters cycle in new nominees (last year it was Vanderpump and the winner, Welcome to Wrexham).
So, what explains this uncommonly rigid voting pattern in Reality Competition? Part of it is that reality shows just keep going. If Game of Thrones had lasted 20 years, the Emmys might still be voting for it. But I’ve always wondered how much industry intransigence has to do with this. In the years after Survivor debuted, there was a pervasive sense of unease in Hollywood, as cheaper-to-make reality shows took up more space on network lineups and left less room for shows with writers and actors. Adding a Reality category to the Emmys felt like capitulation to the Fear Factor–watching hordes. Perhaps block voting for the same five shows every year was a way to keep most reality shows from getting extra shine. Of course, conspiratorial thinking like that requires a kind of coordination that only ever happens when Andrea Riseborough is involved. But at the very least, we can say that Emmy voters haven’t shown much interest in seeking out worthy reality shows beyond a narrow few.
The narrow few that are expected to be nominated this year are the same ones that were nominated last year: RuPaul’s Drag Race, Survivor, The Amazing Race, The Voice, and Top Chef. You could make the case for The Nailed It Baking Challenge, since the original was nominated four times from 2019-2022. But just one year removed from the strikes, it’s hard to imagine voting for a show that canceled a season mid-stream amid union talks from its workers.
There is one possible hope for a category shakeup in the form of Peacock’s The Traitors. The all-reality-stars second season was enough of a cultural flashpoint that Emmy voters might just pay attention. While the show is still tinkering with how to perfect gameplay, the character editing in season two was incredible: the Peter Pals alliance, Parvati shooting inscrutable glances across the room, every single Phaedra interjection. The challenges may not have been any better at influencing game play, but at least they involved slamming coffin lids in eliminated players’ faces and snatching up reality stars in Ewok-style tree nets.
Season one was only nominated for Outstanding Casting for a Reality Program, which it won, indicating that voters are at least aware of and in favor of the show, opening the door to even more nominations this year. The shows The Traitors beat in that category, including Drag Race, Top Chef, and Queer Eye, are all bona fide Emmy favorites; considering how much reality TV success lies in casting, it’s a good bellwether category. And vibes-wise, it does feel like Alan Cumming crashing the Emmys red carpet in a turquoise tartan sash is inevitable. That’s the optimistic view; the pessimistic view is that one low-level award is all voters are willing to give to this show, and Emmy voters seem to have lost their Peacock password, having previously slighted shows like Girls5Eva and Mrs. Davis (and even under-rewarding Poker Face last year).
A Traitors nomination, while welcome, would only change the Reality Competition lineup by 20 percent. For a category that’s become fossilized, that’s not nearly enough, which is why I’m proposing a radical solution: Clear the decks. Bar voters from selecting any show that’s previously been nominated. There are plenty of other reality shows out there, and if the Emmys are supposed to be about the year’s best television, they’re overlooking much of what’s new and good in one of TV’s major genres. If voters have latched onto Drag Race in its celebration of queerness and gender transgression, then honor what’s queer and transgressive in a show like The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula. If the tried-and-true social strategy of Survivor has been worthy year-in and year-out, then The Traitors taking the paranoia of vote-out shows to maniacal new heights is worth supporting. If The Amazing Race is commendable for the production challenges inherent in a race around the world, wouldn’t the nervy innovations of a show like Alone be worth a nomination some time?
If Emmy voters aren’t going to acknowledge the evolution of reality-TV competitions beyond their approved handful, then this is a broken category. But it doesn’t have to be. Realistically, we’re not going to see a complete overhaul of the reality TV categories, short of a rule that caps the number of consecutive years a show can get nominated. But I’m never going to quit hollering about it. And if the Academy wants to take some advice this year, we’ve got some suggestions at the ready.
I’m sorry, is The Amazing Race delivering TV like Tom Hanks’s niece (by marriage! All the weirdness in the Hanks family tree falls under Rita’s branches) throwing an absolute hissyfit in the season premiere because she got eliminated? Is The Voice giving you Franklin (née Frankie) Jonas in sweater after enviable sweater? This has been the most cleverly conceived social-strategy show in many years, complicating classic alliance play with multiple threat levels (you want to get rid of the clever players who can guess your identity, but you might need them for help when you have no idea who the hell Donny Osmond’s kid is) and devising weekly games that allow both the players and the audience to put together clues. This is the best play-along-at-home show since we all decided to vote for Sanjaya that one year on American Idol.
One good thing about the Emmys’ reality-TV stubbornness is that it never fell for the insincere “charms” of The Bachelor. But this spin-off of the show deserves to be the exception, if only for recognizing after two decades that love stories are more interesting among people who have actually lived life.
Nobody thought this show was a good idea, and plenty of people remain chagrined that the original series’ anti-capitalist message got watered down with a spin-off. (Then there were all those reports of shivering, poorly cared-for contestants.) Caveats aside, though, Squid Game: The Challenge improbably edited a game that started with 456 players into a narrative that maintained compelling stakes, characters, and storylines, all while the original series’ sinisterly simplistic games weeded out the competition pitilessly.
There’s room for more sweaty wilderness reality competitions beyond Survivor. The History Channel’s Alone, which continues to be the most genuinely perilous show on television, has been dropping survivalists in remote locations to forage, hunt, build shelters, starve, and outlast each other for almost a decade — and it’s only gotten better over time. Alone enters its eleventh season this summer, but the show’s grand innovations and contributions to the reality genre have been present from the very beginning: a storytelling framework that relies on competitors documenting themselves, a robust production infrastructure, and total commitment to the hardcore nature of its premise. Very few things in reality television are as unique as Alone; even fewer achieve its real highs.
The reality-competition category has included shows that involve singing, dancing, cooking, and designing clothes. But not once has the Emmys recognized a program where people make shit out of glass. The time has come to change that with Blown Away, the only glass-blowing reality competition and also the only show that features terms like annealer and gloryhole on a regular basis. The artists on this series sweat — truly, literally — through every challenge, melting and manipulating glass until it looks like bubble gum, then molding it into magnificent sculptures. (Or watch it shatter in their grasp, an event that never gets less nerve-wracking despite the dozens of times it happens.) Blown Away is about the fragility and delicacy of creating art in a fast-paced, industrial environment that seems designed to break it before it can even be seen. Sounds pretty timely to me.
The human body is capable of astonishing things, of effort and physicality and strength that is nearly incomprehensible. Such is the experience of watching Netflix’s Physical: 100, a South Korean reality competition that pits 100 extremely fit people against each other in a series of grueling individual and team challenges to determine whose body is the best. This premise seems a lot simpler than it is: As people of all kinds of backgrounds converge — professional athletes, military veterans, models, MMA fighters, firefighters — many competitors assume they’ll dominate based on how ripped they are or how sturdy or tall, and those expectations trickle down to viewers, too. Surely the most muscular will rise about the rest, given that so many cultures prize ab count over other aspects of fitness. But part of the delight of watching Physical: 100 is how often that assumption is undercut by the contestants’ varying degrees of success regardless of body type. Those subversions make the viewer wonder what, exactly, winning takes. Is it a particular kind of athletic ability? Willpower or determination or stubbornness? Physical: 100 is set up to make us obsess over finding that X-factor, and the cliffhanger-heavy episodic structure and clever editing amp up the drama. It’s a unique format that upends so much of what we’ve come to expect from physical-competition shows, and it deserves recognition for that.
Jen Chaney, Roxana Hadadi, and Nicholas Quah contributed submissions.
From Invasive Species, at the Vineyard Theatre. Photo: Julieta Cervantes
Two imperious blondes haunt Maia Novi throughout her play Invasive Species: Gwyneth Paltrow and Eva Perón. At drama school, Novi is told that she needs to shear off her Argentinian accent and try to imitate Paltrow’s crisp-as-a-summer-blouse American one. (Specifically, Novi keeps listening to Paltrow’s narration of her Goop morning routine, played over the theater speakers so many times that you’ll pick up the inflection yourself.) Then, after Novi buckles under the pressure of school, seeks treatment for insomnia, and is abruptly sent to a New Haven psych ward, Evita enters the picture. Alternating — and sometimes overlapping — with scenes in the hospital, there are scenes of Novi as a star on the rise, cast in some splashy studio production of Evita with a British director who keeps telling her, “No, don’t use that Gwyneth voice or even your normal accent; give us something ‘authentic.’”
The pressure to assimilate (Paltrow) while seeming authentic (Perón) — specifically, to give people the performance of what they think of as authentic (that version of Perón, after all, was written by a couple of Brits) — form the interlocking teeth of Invasive Species, a sprightly romp through the destruction of the self. Novi, who based the play on her own experience at Yale Drama, and her director Michael Breslin (of Circle Jerk) keep the pace quick as the play flits between several realities and temporalities, cross-cutting between surreal postcolonial satire and grim reality, as her supporting cast — a fine-tuned crew of Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez, Alexandra Maurice, and Julian Sanchez — cover multiple roles.
Novi gets stung by the acting bug (embodied by a slithering Sanchez in a literal insect mask; he gives a similar sliminess to Evita’s British director later on) while watching The Amazing Spider-Man as a kid, which makes her disdain Latin American movies and dream of a career in the U.S. She tries out clown school in France and then lands in New Haven among vapid and cutthroat Americans, their eyes gleaming with dreams of landing agents and turning red from all the coke they do. The Americans alternatively fetishize Novi for her foreignness — on a date over tacos, she convinces a hapless American bro that her family is tight with the narcos — and tell her to tamp it down, cut the accent, and conform. Then, when Novi is hospitalized and initially doesn’t know what is happening, the satire falls away: She’s stuck in a ward with a trio of teenagers and a dictatorial nurse (Donatich, also domineering as Novi’s agent, a nice resonance), struggling to understand how she’s gotten there and how she can get out. She can’t remember any phone numbers other than her parents’ (Gonzalez plays both mother and father, in a giant hat and a golf outfit; they’re both grandly useless). She keeps trying to explain to the staff that her behavior isn’t a sign of mental illness, it’s just what it’s like being an actor.
Given that, in character, Novi is obsessed with a forthcoming acting showcase, it’s fitting that Invasive Species, now running Off Broadway after a stop at the Tank last summer, acts as a meta showcase for herself as an actor and writer. In white pants and a tank top, she struts around with confidence, whether as a newbie drama student not realizing she’s landed in a big and threatening pond or as a parodical Evita, a performance enhanced by Breslin’s clever Dior-shaped shadow projections on the wall behind her. But while Novi is comfortable and charming in bombastic absurdity, she can also scale down in scenes where she’s trying to connect with the teenagers around her in the ward, or when delivering a monologue about the origins of her invasive thoughts.
While Novi tends to be affecting and real in those moments — in a way that’s appropriately charged, given her play’s skepticism of the “authentic” — they’re also scenes where Invasive Species tends to retract its claws. When she explores the lives of the teenagers around her in the psych ward, there are stretches of observation that are honed but not thorough, and we don’t escape the feeling that the teens are always seen at a distance. Of the several parts she plays, Alexandra Maurice is most significant as Akila, a queen bee of the ward (she has some sort of Jell-O monopoly) who befriends Novi and provides a dark, funny speech about an attempted overdose. But Akila’s presence fades amid the play’s building mania — she becomes, at the point where Novi needs to arrive at her thesis, primarily a conduit to that crucial realization.
Novi has certainly thought carefully about re-creating those scenes in the ward. Her script cites Spalding Gray’s landmark Rumstick Road, a performance about his mother’s suicide, and notes that “situations in this play that are based on real events and real people should be treated with respect, dignity, and compassion.” That respectfulness, inarguably right as intention, sits awkwardly with the mania of the Hollywood and drama-school satires. Novi aims to use humor to tame the trauma, but the flow sometimes reverses, and the trauma makes the elements of the satire that aren’t well grounded seem all the more weightless. I kept wanting to know more about Akila and the other kids, more about the weird power dynamics of the ward, and less about how annoying your classmates can be. There is a limit on how interesting it can be to hear Yale people tell you how toxic Yale is (and this production is solidly Yale/Geffen-forward, from cast to directors to producer Jeremy O. Harris), and let alone to hear an actor describe their frustrations with a scatterbrained agent. Invasive Species moves fast and intends to please. By the end of the play, Novi wraps up her many threads quickly and neatly. It sent me out on a high, but it left me with the feeling there was so much more to be said — not just about those scenes in the ward but also when Novi approaches and then backs away from further discussing her mother’s mental illness. It put me in the position of a drama-school teacher giving that annoying post-performance note: Strong start, but you could dig even deeper?
Invasive Species is at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theatre.
On the surface, Guantánamo Bay may seem like an unlikely target for Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder, and the Serial team, still principally remembered for spectacle generated from the first season’s real-time true-crime reporting on the case of Adnan Syed. But as Koenig notes in the introduction of season four, this is a story they have been trying to pull together for almost as long as the podcast has been around. “Even as Guantánamo faded as a topic of national discussion, we kept thinking about it,” she narrates. “We even tried writing a TV show about it, a fictionalized version of Guantánamo.” The latest season, then, is an effort coming full circle.
If there’s a clearer symbol for America’s “War on Terror” boondoggle, it’s hard to think of one. Since Guantánamo opened for extrajudicial business in 2002, almost 800 individuals have been held in what functions as the U.S. government’s prison for suspected terrorists—all Muslim, most from the Middle East — but vanishingly few matter in the U.S.’s counterterrorism campaign. Despite flimsy promises from Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden to shut the place down, the lights are still on. The camp, with its dozens of remaining detainees, continues limping along, a piece of machinery left to gather dust in the country’s basement. The U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, but the forever war persists.
It has been six years since the podcast’s last release and almost a full decade since Serial turned into a household name. Now, Koenig and co-host Dana Chivvis ask a question less muck-raking than anthropological: What exactly was Guantánamo like on the inside? Eschewing the serialized structure that gave the show its name, the season is built on short stories drawing direct testimony from a gallery of individuals — detainees, guards, wardens, intelligence personnel, translators — who knew the place firsthand. It shares the same construct as Serial’s third season, which documented the banal goings-on in a Cleveland courthouse. The purpose isn’t to solve a mystery but to piece together the sense experience of a place.
This approach spotlights the team’s gift for provocative detail, which hits you in episode one when Koenig and Chivvis revisit recordings from a guided tour of Guantánamo they took years ago. They hook you with the surreal observation that there are three gift shops at the facility; you might stumble upon Guantánamo x Disneyswag. The moment transitions into a pitch-black admission that the longer they spent in the camp, the more their initial halting discomfort about the shops melted away. They bought merch.
That permeable line between perverse surreality and inevitable normality runs through the season. When a former camp guard relates his experiences, you begin to understand how Guantánamo is a workplace like any other, even if it involves violations of international law. You get the sense of human beings being inexorably shaped by the roles they’re plugged into, their moral compasses shifting over time. Many episodes circle around a scandal in Guantánamo’s history to draw out the brutally Kafkaesque nature of life on the inside. “Ahmad the Iguana Feeder” and “The Honeymooners” recount the story of Ahmad Al-Halabi, an American airman brought in to serve as a translator only to get caught up in a punishing swirl of government racism and bureaucracy. “The Big Chicken” and “Asymmetry” revolve around a warden who oversaw the facility during one of its most ruthless and disputed periods. Across these stories, the individuals in charge try to make meaning out of their power. Meanwhile, former detainees attempt to process the horrors, physical and psychological, they endured. Although some of these stories are not particularly new, Serial’s primary interest is to thread them all together within a feeling: This is what it was like, and this is what it’s still like.
What is Serial supposed to be, anyway? You’ll often hear the critique that the show never successfully replicated the energy of that first season, even as Serial Productions, the studio spun out from This American Life to house Koenig and Snyder’s future projects, continues to be a reliable publisher of popular podcasts, including S-Town and, more recently, The Retrievals. But spectacle was never Serial’s intent. This should’ve been readily apparent when, in season two, Koenig and journalist-screenwriter Mark Boal explored the case of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. Army sergeant who abandoned his post in Afghanistan and was captured by the Taliban. At the time, the second installment inspired feverish anticipation. But when it arrived, its insistence on reframing the focus away from the specific mystery (“What happened to Bergdahl?”) toward a larger idea (“What does it mean for us to keep sending young people to war?”) felt, for many listeners, like a dramatic deflation. The third season, set in the Cleveland courthouse, pushed further in this direction, not only throwing aside the notion of needing a catalyzing mystery but also challenging the importance of Serial itself. “People have asked me and people I work with the question, What does this case tell us about the criminal-justice system?” narrates Koenig, referring to Syed’s story. “Fair question.”
Pointing out the remarkable nature of oft-overlooked systems has turned out to be Serial’s underlying project. In the scope of who gets incarcerated in the U.S., Syed’s excruciatingly drawn-out case isn’t all that notable. Bergdahl’s might be extraordinary, but the blindly accepted notion we send kids to war isn’t. What happens in a courthouse is banal, even if it destroys lives. Guantánamo has been running for more than two decades, and now, buried beneath other political horrors, it has become an unremarkable part of the American story. Serial’sfocus on it is perfectly aligned with what the team has always done: Dust off the machinery of power and render its parts visible.
In the series premiere of Shōgun, Hiroyuki Sanada’s Lord Toranaga, the soon-to-be-exiled regent at the center of the action, is described as “famous for his trickery” by his trusted vassal Lady Mariko (Anna Sawai). Ten hours later, in the last moments of the finale, Sanada sheds the character’s many layers of subtlety and artifice, finally revealing his secret desire to be Japan’s shōgun ruler in the challenge of his gaze, the set of his jaw, and the easy way he wields a katana to dispatch his betrayers. A master of control, Toranaga deftly steers Japan’s various factions — divided among religious and regional lines, and organized behind the country’s Council of Regents — off the path to civil war and into a 260-year era of peace and prosperity known as the Edo period.
These calculations are not dissimilar to Sanada’s role behind the scenes of Shōgun. Six years in the making, including a single day of filming in London in 2019 so FX could retain rights to James Clavell’s novel, the potentially not-so-limited series handed the actor his first official producing credit after years, he says, of unofficial consultant work on Western projects often set in premodern Japan. Sanada ran with the title, encouraging series co-creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks to hire crew with expertise in Japanese costuming, set design, hair and makeup, and stunts; painstakingly poring over translations of dialogue with producer Eriko Miyagawa, and ensuring every single episode was cut with an eye toward period-specific accuracy. Shōgun, as a result, centers Sanada’s mammoth performance in front of the camera and also feels indebted to his decades uncredited behind it.
The series cast and crew have spoken at length about your involvement as a producer, popping into scenes to coach actors, give instructions, and maintain Japanese cultural and historical authenticity. When you look back, was there an especially difficult scene that required a lot of work to get right? Episode four, when Toranaga jumps off the boat and Yabushige’s army is waiting, Toranaga makes a speech, and then Yabushige’s samurai start to cheer Toranaga. It was a complicated scene, and also an important scene — showing Toranaga stealing Yabushige’s army and then leaving for Edo. Toranaga knows it’s dangerous to stay. His strategist face needed to show, and that scene is about Toranaga and Yabushige’s power game.
That was a hard scene. It had so many extras, and such controlled timing. I talked with the director and made the plan of what the extras would say and when. I printed out my plan, and me and the master of gestures, Hannojoh, and the samurai movement adviser, Daiki Ishida, delegated to my team to train the extras: “When I say this, you say this, and at the same time.” [Extends his fist, recreating the chanting gesture from the scene.] We rehearsed and rehearsed during lighting, and we finished on time, before sunset.
Of all of your responsibilities as a producer in pre-production, production, and post-production, was a specific phase your favorite? I had so much fun on set. I was there all day, even if I had no shooting as an actor. In the early morning, check the set decoration, extras, costumes. Then call the crew and cast, then start rehearsal, then consult on moving, accent, or intonation. Go to my trailer, put my costume on, or the opposite way: costume first, then checking the monitors with the armor on. Sometimes, I’d go between main unit and second unit, checking the monitor in the car.
I wasn’t in episode nine, but every day I was on set, supporting Anna in dialogue, movement, everything. I’m so proud of her. And Yuki Kura, the young actor who played my son Nagakado, or Hiroto Kanai, who played Omi — how they drew their swords or how they said a line, with each detail, I went, “Oh my goodness, yes, that’s it.” Or Moeka Hoshi, who played Fuji — her emotional scenes, her reactions. It was my first experience as a producer, coming to creation from zero. I had that pressure, of course, and those responsibilities, but watching the actors getting better and better was such a happy moment for me.
You’ve said that as a producer, all that preparation allowed you to be more free as an actor. Was there a scene where you felt most free as Toranaga? The most exciting and tough scene was Hiromatsu’s seppuku. No dialogue, just looking at each other and knowing what the other is thinking. That was challenging, and so dramatic.
In the scene, there are spies everywhere. We have to disguise this perfectly. It was so hard to remember, Don’t cry. But as an actor, it’s hard without the tears. So I tried to show, I’m not crying, I’m angry. [Growls.] More anger was the only way to never cry. It was a tough scene, but it was a very “Toranagi” scene: inside, storm, but outside, calm or anger. That balance was very Toranagi.
I always try to be simple in front of a camera. No technique, no calculation. I feel freedom to just be there as a character, just breathe as a character, and react to others — no more than that. Don’t think about what to do was my stance, and I could be more blank than usual because I prepared everything as a producer. I know Tokuma-san, who played Hiromatsu, so it was easy to communicate. We never talked much; in the morning, “Here comes the day.” “Yeah, let’s do it.” We were just eye to eye.
When I spoke to Tokuma-san, he said when he was told about the scene, Toranaga and Hiromatsu were compared to Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That detail really adds a richness to understanding the connection between your characters. Tokuma-san said he took this role just for that scene. The very first day he arrived in Vancouver, we were in rehearsal and the camera test and he came directly from the airport to the studio: “Hiro, let’s talk about that scene. I have a plan.”
Tokuma-san, Justin, and I had a meeting about how we could make this scene better and focus on Hiromatsu. It was a little different at the beginning; there were other samurai who commit seppuku, but that’s not too dramatic. It must be only Hiromatsu — that’s more sad, more meaningful. So we recreated the scene, and on the day we were shooting, we were both ready, like horses at the gate. “Let me out now!”
Sanada in episode eight, “The Abyss of Life.” Photo: Copyright 2024, FX. All Rights Reserved.
Were there any other scenes that changed like that? We changed a lot from episode six to eight. Rachel had a lot of great ideas for the ladies and put those ideas in six, seven, and eight — more detail to explain their emotion and their position in that period. That’s the most important part of this season, featuring the women characters.
The other actors I’ve talked to mentioned they filmed scenes that didn’t make the final cut. Were there any scenes you were sad to let go of? I have nothing. I know the meaning of “edit” — the scissor is the final weapon for direction and very important. Sometimes what they didn’t use makes the drama better. It leaves space for the audience to color.
The translation scenes between you, Cosmo, and Anna are really well-choreographed. I saw an interview with Anna where she talked about how, as a gesture of respect, Lady Mariko wouldn’t look at Toranaga’s eyes and would instead look at your throat. What were some of the gestures that were important in those scenes? Every single movement is important: how to sit, how to stand up, how to walk, how to open the shutter screen, how to pour the sake. How to stand — not like that [slumps downward], but like this [puffs his chest forward]. Show the beauty of the kimono, show the hakama pants at the best angle and move your hips back [stands up, pushes his hips backward]. Everything had to be controlled. Especially for the fighting: How to grip, how to hold, how to move, how to place your footsteps, how to position your head. We had a bootcamp for the young actors and the extras, hundreds of extras, every day for more than four weeks. The girls had to learn the lady-in-waiting movement, how to serve the food, how to serve tea. The guys had to learn how to wear the kimono, sword fighting, archery, long spear, marching correctly. They did a great job, the extras. All the Japanese living in Vancouver, their effort was so great — even in the downpour, all-night shooting, battle scenes. They never gave up.
Do you think that level of authenticity helped the other actors, to know that much about what they’re doing physically? Yeah. Once they learned how to move or how to pronounce, they’re free, and it’s up to them as actors. And we’re checking. If they make a mistake, we never just say, “okay.” The teachers and coaches are on set and I’m watching the monitor. That’s why they can relax — if you make a mistake and no one corrects you, that means you have to be perfect. But we are all watching, so after you learn, you go into your character and into the world.
That’s interesting — you have more freedom if you know someone is there to correct you. Yes. That never happened for me on set in these 20 years. That’s why now, it’s easy to focus on my performance. If I make a mistake, they can check. And also, as a producer, I have a scissor as well. [Laughs.]
What were your responsibilities in post-production? We spent a year and a half in post-production. I went to the studio and watched the first cut. I wrote notes and sent my thoughts to the editors and Justin: “This is incorrect, we cannot use this,” or “This scene needs CGI” or “We cannot show this part; trim, please.” They re-edited, and then check, check, check. ADR was next. We hired Japanese voice actors in L.A. who did all the dialogue for the background extras, and we created the lines. We tried three people for each line of dialogue, then I texted the editor: “Second person, take three. This dialogue, third person, take seven.” After that, we had a Zoom between Tokyo and L.A. where we checked all their dialogue, intonation, and emotion for Japanese classic dialogue. Luckily, we finished all the ADR just before the start of the strike. [Laughs.] After that, we started a VFX check. How far was Osaka Castle from the harbor? Or, this area doesn’t have that kind of tall temple, that’s not history. Or, the roof color looks a little modern. Finally, checking publicity, all the characters’ photoshoots. Sometimes there was too much Photoshop makeup for the geisha girls. Or, “This photo is flipped, please don’t do that,” because the swords are on the wrong side and the kimono is going a different way. Usually the left side of the kimono is on top, and if the right side is, that’s for a dead body at a funeral. It’s the culture of things, so even in design, “please do not flip.” That’s the rule. And then all the video clips, the subtitles for promotion, check, check, check. Everything has to be correct.
What do you think was the most authentic part of the series from a Japanese perspective that would be surprising for Western audiences? The Noh theater scene in episode six. We invited real Noh theater performers to Vancouver. We created the Noh theater set in Osaka Castle, and the real Noh theater company created the original show that Lord Ishido produces using Ochiba and Taiko’s characters. All the traditional costumes were hundreds of years old and brought to Vancouver, and professional Noh actors played the characters. It was a luxury.
How long did it take for them to write the show within the show? Less than a month. The actors from the Noh theater were in Vancouver for a week, doing rehearsal and checking the set — the trees’ height, the background, the floor, where the instrument player sits. We spent two days shooting that scene.
You’ve described yourself as a bridge between the East and the West. As that bridge, was there certain wisdom or advice you gave to the younger actors? Shōgun itself is a big, strong bridge, and they felt that day by day, I think. At the end of shooting, all the young actors were saying, “I want to work on a Western project,” had started learning English already, and tried to talk to the crew in English. They were learning one sentence a day. I’m so happy about that. I want to keep creating this bridge, stronger, longer, wider, and introduce the world to our culture and bring Japanese talent and crew. I believe the door is going to be wide open, more so than 20 years ago.
What has surprised you most about how people have reacted to the show? Rotten Tomatoes, 100 percent. [Laughs.] Now 99 percent, because of somebody. I’d never heard about that. That was the first big surprise. And the Japanese reaction was so good. Some people were saying, “We were waiting for this kind of jidaigeki historical drama,” because it’s hard to make historical dramas this well in Japan. They are trying to get the young audience, and they make it modernized, Westernized, and don’t use classical Japanese ways. Real fans of jidaigeki said, “We were waiting. Thank you, Hollywood.”
Was there any discussion of a second season? We discussed that during shooting. We finished the novel in season one, so no more novel. But we have history, real history, and we know what happened. Tokugawa Ieyasu created the peaceful era for 260 years. Who knows what’s going to happen after we release the finale. Let’s see.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Toranaga is based on the real-life Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shōgun of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Japan’s Edo period lasted more than 200 years, until 1868’s Meiji Restoration revolution transferred power to Japan’s emperor.
A team of gesture experts worked on Shōgun to ensure that members of the sprawling ensemble moved in alignment with Japan’s theatrical customs and social norms for the time period, especially for each character’s gender, class, and role. The team also included technical supervisor Toru Harada and period movement advisor Akiko Kobayashi.
Kazufusa Hosho, the 20th grand master of Japan’s Hōshō School specializing in Noh theater, helped craft the show-within-a-show performance in episode six. He read the script and then composed and created the Noh performance that is held in Osaka Castle at Lord Ishido’s request.
The Japanese term jidaigeki refers to period-piece dramas that are set in the country before 1868’s Meiji Restoration, which ended the Shogunate period.
Alex Garland’s Civil War, about reporters covering a conflict in the United States at some unspecified future date, might be the most controversial movie of the year. From the moment the film’s first teaser dropped, Garland, an English writer turned director, was criticized as politically clueless for envisioning a scenario in which a rogue president would be targeted by a coalition of Texas and California (which have nothing in common when they vote in national elections), and also for releasing a film on that subject in the first place during an election year with the same presidential candidates as 2020, one of whom tried to nullify the other’s victory. The discord surrounding the movie increased after its premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival, where Garland said in interviews that Civil War avoided political specifics on purpose in order to start “a conversation” while refusing to speculate on details the movie didn’t include; instead, he said that it was mainly a love letter to journalists, war reporters in particular. There were also gripes that the film was more violent, slick, and loud than substantive, and perhaps represented an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment for the director of Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, all of which were hotly discussed by genre fans but have yet to form a critical consensus.
Garland spoke to Vulture for an hour in Los Angeles recently, elaborating on his decision to avoid political specifics and what responsibility he has to the 2024 American electorate, and digging into more nebulous questions about the relationships between screenwriting and directing, a movie and its audience, and artists and the eras in which they make art. Garland clarified his decision to step away from — though not, as has been previously reported, entirely quit — directing, saying that it was not driven by criticism of him or his latest film, but in fact dated back to the filming of Civil War two years ago.
How are you feeling right now? Or is that a trick question? It’s a fair question. It’s weird. Selling movies, which is basically what I’m doing, is not normal human interaction. It just isn’t. It’s always a little bit odd. This movie is particularly odd, so it amplifies the weirdness. I can normally relax slightly more when I’m doing interviews, and I’m more guarded, more careful, choosing words more precisely — or attempting to.
I do need to ask you — You can ask whatever you want.
Why would you want to stop directing? It’s a complicated thing. What I said was “for the foreseeable future,” and I mean that in a literal sense. I’m working on four — in a way, five — film projects at the moment, none of which are for me to direct. They’re for other people. So I’m working hard, and I consider screenwriting to be a form of filmmaking. Prior to directing, I functioned as a screenwriter, and I don’t think it’s lesser. I just think it’s other. It has different obligations.
You have a family, yes? Yeah, two kids. I shot a bunch of stuff really back-to-back. I was away a lot, away from home a lot, away from life a lot. That is a contributing factor to the decision. But also I think temperamentally I’m a writer who opted to direct, rather than someone who always had a burning desire to direct. The first film I directed, Ex Machina, I did to protect certain scenes, to not leave them open to discussion.
Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson in Ex Machina. Photo: Universal Pictures
Protect them from whom? From whoever the director might be. I just wanted to remove that voice for a period of time. And that would have been true with this movie as well. Like, there would be certain scenes in the way they’re unfolding that I would have found impossible to watch if they weren’t unfolding in the right way.
Which scenes in Ex Machina were you concerned about being mishandled or misinterpreted if someone else had directed the movie? It would have had to do with the specificity of some of the dialogue. On the day, in the moment, there might be an actor who suddenly doesn’t feel like a line is fitting in their mouth, and they say, “Hey, can I say it like this?” And the director, who may not understand the exact reason a particular construction of sentences is in there, might say “sure” and then it’s gone and something is lost. There would be many moments in Ex Machina to do with a specific way something is being described.
Did your concerns have to do with the story’s sexual aspects? Absolutely, yeah. It’s a thought experiment I often have: I’ll think of a script and I’ll imagine, What if X directed it? What if Y directed it? What would happen? And in Ex Machina, there was just some stuff that was close to a line and that could not go over a line. It isn’t always the case, but I’ve had a few experiences where stuff in a screenplay was getting changed in a way I couldn’t stomach. Sometimes I would then turn into a kind of pit bull, which I don’t like doing and I don’t want to be. And sometimes I would just have to shrug.
Was it a case where you felt the intent or the quality of the writing had been compromised or mangled? Or was it simply “That’s not how I would have done it”? On occasion, it might be “That’s not how I would have done it.” But often it wasn’t to do with — this is going to sound like a contradiction with what I just said — the exact words; it would be to do with the exact meaning behind the words. You could actually change the dialogue and hold on to the meaning. That would be completely unproblematic. I’ve never cared about that. But the meaning of a scene can completely change, and the role of a scene within a story can completely change.
Can you give me an example? I’d rather not.
Maybe later? Privately, I could do them easily! I could reel them off! But then also you get confronted with another weird thing, right, which is: So the film is not as you intended, but who cares? Does it actually matter? Film is collegial.
In theory! In theory. I think the way I work is pretty collegial! But what will happen is, there will be some things I care about massively, and it has to be that way on that thing. But in and around that thing, there’s enormous latitude to change things, and I’m actually looking for other people to elevate it past the point that I would have been able to consider.
So these four or five new projects you have in the works are all things where you’d be okay with saying, in effect, “Fly little bird, leave the nest, whatever happens is okay”? Correct. It’s to do with … to me, it feels like my last four films as a director are a sequence of films which are following a sequence of thoughts. Civil War, I think, as far as I can tell, ends that sequence.
What is the sequence? Is it “the science-fiction sequence”? “The speculative-fiction sequence”? I probably lean towards science fiction. Fiction is almost by definition speculative —but speculative to degrees, and sci-fi is definitely at the far end of one of those degrees. I also think sci-fi sort of allows for or even encourages big ideas, which is nice. You don’t have to feel embarrassed of them, actually. Sci-fi audiences kind of dig them.
But no, to answer your question, it has more to do with a set of thoughts I had about how to present arguments within a film as conversation. I’m not saying I’m always successful at that, only that it’s a private set of thoughts that I’m following through on.
By “arguments,” do you mean not making a case for or against a thing but rather a dialectical exchange of ideas? Exactly, and a kind of inclusive one. Bear in mind, I’m not saying I always manage to do that. One of the things I have to do is be careful about what I say because that would disrupt the conversation between the film and the audience, you know? I recently watched All That Jazz, which I hadn’t seen for a really, really long time. And while I was watching, I was having what I felt was an intensely personal conversation, I guess, with many people but also with Bob Fosse’s psyche. Would that conversation be helped by Bob Fosse giving me a memo in addition to the film he made? I don’t think it would have helped. I think the film would have been diminished, you know?
I wondered if the reception to Civil War at South by Southwest, as well as the negative or critical reaction to some of your comments in interviews, played into your announcement that you didn’t want to direct anymore. No, no, no, no. The decision predated that. In fact, it located itself in my mind in a clear way while I was shooting Civil War. That’s when I started stating it sometimes to people I work with, just to give them a heads-up: “Hey, I’m gonna be taking some time out for a while, right after this.”
Time out to write? Well, no. It’s slightly more complicated than that because I’m about to do a film with one of the crew from Civil War, a guy called Ray Mendoza, who was our military adviser. In postproduction on Civil War, Ray and I started discussing a film, and I said, “You should direct this because a portion of what directors do is have answers to questions. It’s not the only thing a director does, but it’s a very important part of what a director does.” And in the case of this particular story, the person who has the answers to those questions is Ray, not me. As soon as Ray takes the position of a director, a particular authority is conferred that is then useful for the execution of what he’s talking about. But I also knew there would be some areas that it wouldn’t be fair to expect Ray to have to answer, like, “Why is the camera moving? Should this be a close-up? Should it be a developing shot? Now should we pop out to a wide shot?” So I said, “Let’s share this responsibility.” It’s not directing in the terms I myself would think of as directing.
So a Ray question would be something like “What’s the military objective in this scene, and why are they using this particular type of formation?” Oh, it’s more than that. That would be a Ray question, but it would go well beyond that. This is, in a very profound way, Ray’s story.
What can you tell me about the film? The film is an account of a real event. That’s basically what it is.
An event for which Ray Mendoza was present? Absolutely. Notionally, in a credited way, it’s a co-written script. But really, on my part, it’s an act of transcription and organization rather than what I would normally think of as screenwriting. That will also be true with the directing. Actually, in a way, the writing of the script is an echo of the way I suspect the film will get made.
Let’s return to Civil War for a second. What year is the movie set in, more or less? It’s not, like, five years from now, is it? In my mind, there were some things I was very specific about as a background sequence of events.
I ask because Jesse and Lee have a conversation where Jesse is talking — —about a massacre, and there hasn’t been a massacre in the movie.
Right. She says Lee took famous photos of something called “the antifa massacre.” We don’t know if it was a massacre by antifa or of, but it seems clear that it happened a long time ago, when Jesse was a child or even before her birth. That would mean this story has to be set at least 20 or 25 years from now, right? Yeah. But as for the vehicles, the phones, the sort of textural stuff of real life — a vehicle which is seven years old now is probably not going to be around 25 years from now, right? And there are a lot of vehicles in the film. In that respect, you couldn’t date this story. What you could do is apply a logical sequence of events that are alluded to within the film, which, to my mind, would allow for the situation we see depicted. But you can’t say, “Starting in 2024, here’s what happens: A, B, C, D.” The way in which some people can create huge graphs for a fantasy epic with multiple parts and figure out the laws and the timelines would be a wasted exercise on this movie!
Cailee Spaeny and Kirsten Dunst in Civil War. Photo: A24
All that being said, I don’t know that anything depicted in Civil War is inherently more far-fetched than the 2019 Los Angeles of Blade Runner or Anthony Burgess’s future England in A Clockwork Orange, which, according to the author’s notes for an early draft, was set in 1980. No, it’s certainly not inherently more far-fetched than either of those stories.
It’s interesting: Blade Runner is drifting towards something that is more closely related to our reality because of changes in artificial intelligence. And Clockwork Orange was always closer to reality because it was talking about the haves and have-nots, the Establishment’s fear of violent delinquency, what measures might be taken, whether those measures would work, whether they’d be reactionary or whatever. And that argument, I think, probably belongs to that period. It clearly scared the hell out of Stanley Kubrick at the point when he released the film and thought, Hang on, this is folding into reality quicker and more seriously than I thought possible.
When I rewatched A Clockwork Orange recently I was startled by how much of the grammar of that film has inserted itself into film grammar generally. Kubrick was a freakishly influential filmmaker.
The equivalent of one of those novelists or playwrights who is actually adding words to the language. Is AClockwork Orange the first film where you have a group of young men walking towards the camera in slow motion and then, within the slow motion, a moment of violence floating out? I’m just curious.
One thing we can say for sure is it’s the scene that made a lot of other directors go, “That was cool — I want to do that in my movie.” And they did do it. Scorsese, especially. Let’s go back to Civil War again, though! No, no, I wanna stick with A Clockwork Orange because when I was talking about Civil War being an extension of a sequence of films and something I’ve been working through, bringing in A Clockwork Orange speaks directly to the thing — which is that there’s a disconnect between the intention of a filmmaker and the way a narrative is received. Not only is there a disconnect; it’s a good thing that there’s a disconnect because it involves the imaginative life and it’s built into the terms of conversation. Everything I say to you and you say to me, just in our talking, may not be fully understood either way. Conversation is in some respects impressionistic. It’s connected but impressionistic. And film is a really good exercise in demonstrating that. Clockwork Orange, for example, should mean either slightly or very different things to different people, and that is in no way problematic.
Speaking of problematic: There were complaints after the trailers and after the South by Southwest premiere that it was unrealistic to think California and Texas could be allied against the president because California votes Democratic in national elections and Texas votes Republican. I explained it to myself as, well, there are large numbers of Republicans in California who hate the rest of the state and want to secede; maybe they’ve seceded or taken over by that point in history, and that’s why California is allied with Texas. But maybe I’m wrong? One of the reasons the film does not specify the reasons behind Texas and California is to consciously, deliberately leave that space as a source of engagement.
So my speculative interpretation — Is as valid as mine.
And it’s not necessarily wrong? It is explicitly not necessarily wrong. What I would say is that all the thoughts put together, I hope — whatever disagreements you and I might have — a consensus would arrive from those things. Which, because I’m a fucking science nerd, I’m going to demonstrate to you now. [Garland takes out his phone and calls up the screenshot below.]
Photo: Galton Board App
Okay, what are we looking at here? What we’re looking at is a Galton Board. It’s a series of ball bearings falling and it’s a random 50-50 on which sides of each of these shapes they bounce. But a consensus appears as a product of the accumulated states. That orange line shows the state of the consensus.
So if you applied this to an audience’s reaction to a film, could this Galton Board perhaps represent the fullness of time rendering a consensus verdict? This is how I’m feeling watching All That Jazz. Bob Fosse might be there [points to the left side of the board], I might be there [points to the right side of the board], but this is the shape [points to the peak in the middle].
What do you make of the obsession with “solving” ambiguous endings and filling in every last bit of imaginative negative space in a story with explanations, backstory, and lore? Seems anti-art to me. I totally agree, but it’s worth pointing out that even if you do attempt to fill every single gap in a narrative, you will still not get this perfect, harmonious, unified response to every single moment and every single beat. It just never appears! The quest is quixotic, you know? I think most mainstream movies do exactly what you said, and they are open to less interpretation than the other kind. But I suspect if you go on any film website, you’ll see fans angrily arguing over the meaning in a movie that already explains everything.
Refusing to explain everything is not a flaw. But it sure does make people mad! The most satisfying film I saw last year was Anatomy of a Fall. It really does not answer one of its own central questions, and that in no way bothered me. In fact, I liked it even more for not answering it. But then there’ll be other people who walk out and throw their hands up in disgust going, “What the fuck? Did she do it or not?”
That’s funny because there are people who will insist that the film does in fact give you an answer, just as there are people who insist Zodiac gives you a clear idea of who the Zodiac killer was. That would be another subjective response. Here’s another thing that’s interesting: I just don’t really care what the filmmakers say, personally. But what if the filmmakers say, “No, no, we gave an answer — it’s there, it’s this,” but I didn’t see it? Does that mean I saw the film incorrectly? I don’t think so.
I don’t know. But I do know that sometimes my misreadings of a film are as interesting to me as what the film is actually saying, because of what it reveals to me about myself. Exactly. My whole journey over this sequence of films was a playing out of exactly what you just said. I felt with Civil War, this is as good as I will ever be able to do.
Are you comfortable saying what the film is about in a very general way? What I can say is that Civil War is about a state. I don’t mean a state like a country; I mean a state of thinking, which is divided and contains a path to forms of extremism so there is something of the real world located within it.
Every science-fiction film is about the time in which it was made. For sure. That’s one of the reasons I love sci-fi.
Therefore, Civil War is about our time too? Yeah, I hope so — and I hope so in a kind of thoughtful and conversational manner.
What would you say to somebody who accuses you of being irresponsible for making a film like Civil War and releasing it during an election year? The truest thing I’d say about that is I honestly don’t know whether it’s responsible or irresponsible because I would need to know too many things I don’t know in order to be able to answer that question. But what I do think is that there’s a converse, a counter to that, which is “What’s the consequence of not saying things? What’s the consequence of silence? Of silencing oneself or silencing other people?”
What is the film warning us about? Two things. If I was going to be reductive in a way, and I’m not inclined to be reductive, I would say that — paradoxically, considering the subject matter — the film is about journalism. It’s about the importance of journalism.It’s about reporting. The film attempts to function like old-fashioned reporters. That’s thing No. 1.
What’s the other thing? Just a simple acknowledgment that this country, my country, many European countries, countries in the Middle East, Asia, South America, all have populist, polarized politics which are causing and magnifying extreme divisions, and the end state of populism is extremism and then fascism.
That relates back again to journalists because you have governments with checks and balances, but you need this other thing, which is the press — free, fair, but also trusted. And at the moment, the dominant voices in the press are not trusted. They’re trusted to a degree by the choir they’re preaching to but not by the other choirs. I’m in my 50s. When I was a kid, if in what the old days was called a “broadsheet newspaper” ran a story about a corrupt or lying politician, it didn’t matter whether you were a reader of that newspaper or not, the impact would be enormous and very likely would end that person’s career. That world has gone.
It’s funny because so many movies still end with a video or audio recording being played publicly to prove that someone is corrupt, and the implication is that the bad person was fired or sent to prison. It worked perfectly in a 1970s paranoid conspiracy thriller because the heroes got the story out, and the sinister government course or the sinister corporate course was screwed by the story having come out.
Why is that kind of ending hard to accept now? It’s a consequence of three things. One is powerful external forces: politicians who deliberately undermine trust in the media for their own ends because it’s useful for them to have the media be distrusted. Social media creates an enormous amount of noise and counternarratives and theories that just create a kind of static over all of the information; it has a tonal quality which is often akin to shouting. And then also, very large, very powerful media organizations, which found themselves driven less ideologically than by advertising, needing to target audiences and hold on to those audiences. That became more important than unbiased news reporting.
It’s easier to get people to listen to your message if it’s one they already agree with? Yes, and that works very well. But it doesn’t work well for everyone who sits outside of that audience.
How does this relate back to the mentality of the journalists you depict in Civil War? They’re reporters. They’re reporters. The era I grew up in was an era of reporters in news journalism.
It doesn’t seem to matter to the reporters in Civil War if they’re embedded with the good guys or the bad guys. Why would it? They’re reporters.I think we need those kinds of people because we need for journalists to be trusted because they are the people that hold governments to account. And governments will, at times, regularly, predictably become corrupt.
What was the influence of your father, who was an editorial cartoonist, not just on this movie but on who you are? Huge. In two really significant ways. Every night Dad would watch the nine o’clock news because he’d be looking for a story that he’d do a cartoon about the next day. All of — not all, but the vast majority of — his close friends were journalists. My godfather was a foreign correspondent; my brother’s godfather was a different foreign correspondent. They were around the kitchen table; they were sometimes living in the house. I grew up listening to them. Like the journalists in this movie, they could be spiky, they could be difficult, they could be compromised or conflicted, but there was a kind of purity in this one aspect of their work that they were deadly serious about.
The other thing is Dad was a cartoonist, so I grew up around drawing, and I grew up around comic books. Comic books are sequences of images, and that’s, basically, even as a screenwriter, I am offering up sequences of images and editorial decisions. The scene ends here, and this image contrasts with the thing you just saw, and that carries its own implicit meaning or complication.
It’s so interesting hearing you talk about your father’s influence and journalism because, now that I think about it, your films feel reported. Like you’re going, “Here are the characters, here are the issues they have conflicts over, here is the story, here is the ending. Whatever you make of all this is up to you because I’m on to the next thing.” That’s exactly it. And I am aware that the attitude pisses some people off because they want the reassurance of knowing where the filmmaker stands with regard to various issues.
I remember when Ex Machina came out, I had arguments with people about the ending, where Ava leaves Caleb trapped. Some people wanted her to take him along or at least free him. How do you feel about that? Her point of empathy was the robot played by Sonoya Mizuno. Those two empathize with each other. They were in the same boat. She was in a prison; she was trying to get out. Kyoto, Sonoya’s character, empathizes with Ava. That would be my answer. But I find it interesting that people said it was cruel or non-empathetic, that it proves AIs don’t have empathy. I was like, “Empathy with who?”
It’s astonishing to me that Ex Machina came out ten years ago. You have a sequence where the creator, Nathan, takes Caleb into the laboratory and talks about how he used his power as a tech billionaire to basically eavesdrop on every communication in the world to create this AI. That’s what’s in the news now, that very thing: the scraping of information without consent or compensation to create an agglomeration that machines plug into. I always felt a real skepticism with these tech leaders. Because they work in tech, we make an assumption that they’re geniuses, and they’re very quick to also make that assumption about themselves. And I sort of think, Eh, you’re entrepreneurs. It just so happens that you’re not in milk production; you’re making social media or whatever the hell it is. That doesn’t confer on you any special status at all. And as the years roll by, that’s the other thing that’s been demonstrated — they’re really not geniuses. They’re just people with a lot of money and a lot of power. That in itself doesn’t make a genius.
Was Ex Machina a warning? I definitely thought about it in those terms. It was actually in the TV show Devs that I really went further down that line. In fact, one of the characters in Devs, one of the computer programmers, says he’s not a genius, he’s an entrepreneur.
Do you ever read the news and think, Yeah, I called it? I never think my stuff is prescient. I know there’s a big conversation happening about these issues at exactly the same time that I write things, so I know it’s not prescient; it’s more sort of factual. I think people are very, very good at correctly anticipating problems. They’re just terrible at doing something about it. They just don’t act.
I organized two screenings of Annihilation, and afterward, the audience had an astounding number of different interpretations of the film: that it was about the uncertainty principle, that it was about grief, that it was a metaphor for cancer. There were assorted theological readings. I wondered if you had a specific reason for making that movie. If I was going to be very reductive about Annihilation, it would probably be about self-destruction, that that could include cancer or behavior or any number of things. But this is true of all the films I make: It’s not one goal, one thing; it’s a set of thoughts. Ex Machina is that too, explicitly. It’s just easier for me to talk about the things that are explicit, like machine sentience, rather than the things I hope will float out, such as gender — where gender resides, whether it’s conferred or taken, that kind of thing.
Another thing I noticed about your movies, as both writer and writer-director, is that they are filled with people choosing to place themselves in harm’s way, whether they’re Ava trying to escape the complex, or the journalists in Civil War, or the crew in Sunshine trying to plant a bomb that will reawaken the Sun. That’s quite interesting.I’ll refrain from talking too much about that and getting a bit autobiographical, but I do sometimes think there’s a part of me that is thoughtful and there’s a part of me that is delinquent. And I can see the delinquency.
What do you mean? Delinquent in the “potential droog” sense, or in some other sense? Holistic.
Holistically delinquent? In some respects. You know, people have different sides to their personality and character. I can see it clearly in Civil War. It’s thoughtful and it’s conversational, and I think it would be fair to say it’s also highly aggressive. The two things are just right next to each other. In these films, there’s something very restrained and also something unrestrained.
That’s also true of 28 Days Later. Danny Boyle and I like working on a long-term sequel to that. He’s in prep now, and it starts shooting pretty soon.
What a shitshow it must be in that world 28 years later! Well, in some ways yes, but in some ways no. We had a kind of deal between us, which was to not be cynical, and I think both of us are sticking pretty hard to that principle.
You called yourself a science geek earlier, and you obviously enjoy getting philosophical, but you’re not much for explanations, are you? I don’t have any explanations! The larger the searchlight, the larger the circumference of the unknown.
Titled Warfare, the film is rumored to be a dramatization of events that occurred during the Iraq War in 2006 and that earned Mendoza, a former Seal Team 6 member, a Silver Star “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against the enemy.” The cast includes Noah Centineo, Taylor John Smith, Adain Bradley, Michael Gandolfini, Henrique Zaga, and Evan Holtzman.
Nagakado’s impulsive act not only breaks societal rules and goes against combat protocol, but it heralds a destruction of the established order. Photo: Katie Yu/FX
Spoilers follow for the fourth episode of Shōgun, “The Eightfold Fence,” which premiered on FX and Hulu on March 12.
Strict etiquette, rigid ceremony, and a pervasive understanding of how to behave dictate everything in Shōgun. This is a world of genteel courtliness, in which regents exchange bows and endearments by day and send killers after one another by night in demonstrations of calculated, personal violence. There is an honor and order to all this that must be maintained for the system to function. And in the thrilling, nauseating, transformative final minutes of “The Eightfold Fence,” all of that decorum is literally blown to pieces.
For most of Shōgun’s first four episodes, political maneuvering is the narrative priority. Yes, a man is boiled alive, bandits’ throats are slit, and a three-way battle breaks out between feuding regents’ convoys in the middle of the night. Yet far more screen time is devoted to Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) tricking the Council of Regents and its leader, Lord Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira), into delaying their impeachment of him; the regents bickering over what to do about shipwrecked Londoner John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) and the Protestant threat he poses to the country’s Catholics, converted by Portuguese missionaries over the years; and Lady Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai) serving as Blackthorne’s translator and sharing his intentions and plans with her liege lord, Toranaga. At some point, Toranaga will make his move, but probably not from the little fishing village of Ajiro, where so many of his allies are hiding out, and certainly not for weeks or even months.
Until then, nearly everyone in “The Eightfold Fence” thinks they have time. Time to prepare: Mariko tells Blackthorne that Toranaga expects it will take six months for the pilot “Anjin” to train the Japanese army in “foreign tactics,” in particular how to use the cannons Toranaga claimed from Blackthorne’s ship, the Erasmus. Time to strategize: Lord Kashigi Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano), who is playing both sides of the Toranaga-Ishido rivalry, is increasingly irritated by Toranaga’s absence from Ajiro and unsure of how to prove his loyalty to Ishido, who believes Yabushige helped Toranaga escape Osaka. And time to approach a future death in the heavily ritualistic and honor-driven way that is customary to this culture in this time: Yabushige considers going to Osaka to turn himself in, knowing that the regents will, worst-case scenario, at least let him commit seppuku; Lady Usami Fuji (Moeka Hoshi) agrees to be Blackthorne’s consort for six months but plans to kill herself afterward to join her husband and son in the afterlife.
The cannon attack, though, interrupts this sense of nebulous Hereafter to ground the story in a fatal now. It’s in character for Toranaga’s son, Yoshii Nagakado (Yuki Kura), to start a war to prove himself; in all their father-son interactions, Toranaga is chastising Nagakado for his hotheadedness. It’s also in character for the scheming Lord Omi (Hiroto Kanai) to trick Nagakado into recklessly acting outside his own self-interest if it could actually benefit Omi and his uncle Yabushige. Shōgun lays the constitutional groundwork for the scene well, but there’s no way to anticipate what the final moments of the episode will actually look and sound like — how visceral, how sensorial, how graphic.
When Nagakado turns the cannonballs against Ishido’s messenger, Nebara Jozen (Nobuya Shimamoto), and his samurai, the projectiles and chain shots rip through bodies and upend the performative civility with which the regents are supposed to treat one another. Horses and people are split into pieces. Blood spurts out of where some limbs used to be, while bone sticks out of other parts. The precise aim that the cannons had previously exhibited while smashing far-off targets during training is just as effective on the living, scattering corpses haphazardly on the ground, the camera capturing the askew angles found in death. Exploding cannons and agonized screams are the soundtrack of a polite society being ushered into a new, more indiscriminately brutal age, one that Nagakado meets with foolish confidence, Omi with a nefarious grin, Blackthorne with outsider confusion, and Yabushige and Mariko with informed despair.
This raising of stakes could never have happened if Blackthorne hadn’t landed in this country, if he hadn’t brought these more advanced weapons with him, and if his very Protestant presence (and the information he shares with Toranaga about Portuguese claims on Japan) hadn’t helped spark a bitter religious conflict. The “eightfold fence” that Mariko told Blackthorne the Japanese build within themselves to guard their secret feelings from the outside world is rendered useless here; the cannon attack is too shocking, the danger it brings to Toranaga and his allies too dire, for anyone here to hide their reactions to it. To understand the impact of the episode-closing cannon attack, a more suitable comparison than the eightfold fence can be found in an earlier scene. As Mariko explained to Blackthorne after the Brit experiences his first earthquake — to the practically shrugging Mariko, “a baby”; to him, an amazing shock — “Death is in our air and sea and earth. It can come for us at any moment.” Think of Yabushige’s repeated drafting of his final will and obsession with pinpointing the moment that separates life and death: The likelihood of cataclysmic shifting has taught the Japanese that, to a certain degree, they “control nothing” — even with all the rites and traditions they use to exert some power over the unknowable, the possibility of random death is a constant.
And yet: Random death by geological happenstance isn’t the same as random death by surprise massacre. “This is not how samurai fight. You’re savages, all of you,” Jozen yells before Nagakado cuts off his head, and his shock is not necessarily at the treachery of this strike; we’ve seen ambushes, abductions, and assassination attempts in Shōgun already. But all of that violence goes on at night or behind closed doors — nowhere as brazen as on a battlefield in the middle of the day, with no announced terms, and without the approval of one’s liege lord. Nagakado’s act not only breaks myriad societal rules and goes against combat protocol, but it heralds a destruction of the established order; there’s no intimacy, no comparison of merit or speed or skill, to a cannonball offensive lodged from hundreds of yards away.
Toranaga was aghast at Blackthorne using the word belongs when describing how the Catholics consider Japan, and here we see the explosive impact of foreign interference, how an invention and ideology from another place can be more infectious than an invasion. In “The Eightfold Fence,” that friction turns combustible, serving both as a warning about breaking with tradition in a place so steeped in it and as a step forward into the next phase of the Shōgun story. War is coming! But more broadly, change is coming, and that may prove even more destructive.
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.’”
The Commodores, still not nominated. Photo: Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a bizarre institution that manages to simultaneously be one of the highest honors in music and also be extremely peripheral.Last year, when legendary singer Tina Turner died, just about every article covering the news mentioned her status as a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer. Some even had it in the headline. It’s an immediately recognizable shorthand for significance. On the other hand, most people completely forget about the Hall’s existence, save for maybe one or two times a year. These moments usually coincide with its major announcements: who’s been nominated, who’s being inducted, what’s happening at the annual induction ceremony. And the typical response is often one of incredulity, if not outrage. “How is this artist not already in?!” “This artist sucks and doesn’t belong!” “Who cares about the Rock Hall?”
This weekend, the Hall announced its slate of nominees for induction in 2024. Like every year, the list includes the previously nominated (Jane’s Addiction, Mary J. Blige) as well as some first-time nominees (Foreigner, Sade). Over the next few months, there will be no scarcity of discussion (online at least) of these acts, and even more so for the handful that eventually get voted in for induction. But for now, let’s take a moment to formally acknowledge some of the artists most deserving of Rock Hall induction who somehow have never been nominated.
Some notes before we begin. Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after their first released recording. This could mean an album, EP, single, whatever. For the majority of the Hall’s existence, it was technically 26 years, as the nominating committee would choose artists at the end of the year for induction the following year. For example, Led Zeppelin’s first release was in 1969 (their debut album), so they became eligible in 1994, then were inducted in 1995. Further confusing things, the pandemic shifted the Hall’s entire calendar, both delaying the inductions and pushing the nomination process into the following year. In an attempt to clear up all this confusion, the Hall considered two new years of eligible artists last year for the 2023 ballot, definitively making 25 years the eligibility requirement. No amount of time passing renders an artist ineligible.
Also, the Rock Hall has a pretty loose definition of the term “rock and roll.” I get a lot of shit on my podcast, Who Cares About the Rock Hall?, for claiming the “roll” part of the term includes genres like R&B, soul, funk, and hip-hop. But I think I’m right, and it appears the Hall agrees: Acts like Chaka Khan, Lionel Richie, and Jay-Z have recently been inducted, to name a few. So cry as you might that they’re “not rock and roll,” but the point is moot. The ship has sailed, and there’s no coming back. And honestly, if it’s a ship that’s playing Whitney Houston (Class of 2020) and the Spinners (Class of 2023), then it’s a ship worth being on.
Note: This is a list that is updated every year when the new ballot is revealed. Artists that were once on the list but then removed after their first nomination: The Go-Go’s, Iron Maiden, A Tribe Called Quest, George Michael, and Joy Division/New Order, as well as 2024 nominees Cher, Kool & the Gang, and Mariah Carey.
Became eligible: 2004 ceremony
Case for induction: The B-52s kicked off their career in 1978 with the avant-garde party bop, “Rock Lobster,” a song so weird and great that it inspired John Lennon to start making music again. After four albums (including two undeniable classics, their eponymous debut and Wild Planet), the death of guitarist Ricky Wilson could have meant the end of their career. But they regrouped for an astonishing comeback with 1989’s Cosmic Thing, featuring two of their most iconic songs, “Roam” and “Love Shack.” And enough can’t be said for their influence as one of the earliest and most prominent queer bands in rock.
What’s the holdup: Hard to say because they’re so innovative and have had success both critically and commercially. A potential problem might be that the layman probably only knows four of their songs (the aforementioned three, plus “Private Idaho”). But anyone who’s dug into their catalog even a little bit knows there’s no scarcity of really great music.
Became eligible: 2013 ceremony
Case for induction: “I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it.” This is Kurt Cobain, talking in a 1994 Rolling Stone interview about the creation of Nirvana’s opus, Nevermind. He’s referring to the signature noisy, soft-then-loud, punky-but-still-pop sound that Nirvana (inducted in 2014) may have popularized but the Pixies had previously perfected. In the late ’80s, the Pixies put out two pivotal alt-rock LPs, Surfer Rosa and Doolittle, that set the template for grunge. Although none of their songs were hits at the time of release, many are considered classics today: “Here Comes Your Man,” “Where Is My Mind?,” and “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” to name a few.
What’s the holdup: Traditionally, the Hall is not great at acknowledging music that was influential, despite not being massively popular. It took the Stooges eight ballots and 15 years before they were finally inducted in 2010. Eligible since 1992, MC5 have been on six ballots and still aren’t in. And these are groups from the ’60s, an era that the Hall voters tend to like! Worthy underground artists from later time periods (Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Hüsker Dü) are likely to struggle, given the lack of mainstream name recognition.
Became eligible: 2019 ceremony
Case for induction: There’s no official list of criteria for induction into the Rock Hall, but if there were, it would likely include things like critical acclaim, commercial success, innovation, and influence. OutKast overachieves in all these categories. The Atlanta-based hip-hop duo featuring Big Boi and André 3000 is among the most critically celebrated in the genre, with three appearances on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list and six Grammys. All of their studio albums have gone platinum, with 2003’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below reaching diamond status, no doubt buoyed by its twin No. 1 hits: the quirky, inescapable “Hey Ya!” and the sultry banger “The Way You Move.” Never afraid to experiment or push sonic boundaries, OutKast certainly had “somethin’ to say,” and their influence can be heard in artists from Run the Jewels to Frank Ocean.
What’s the holdup: The Hall seems to have a methodical approach to hip-hop, which typically results in one newly eligible act from the genre getting in each year. Last year it was Missy Elliott, the year before that it was Eminem. They could have paved a similar path when OutKast first became eligible in 2019, but at that time the Hall was still trying to find a way in for rap pioneer LL Cool J (who was finally inducted three years ago through the catchall side category of Musical Excellence). For this year’s ballot, the Hall is reaching back to two previously nominated hip-hop artists that came before OutKast’s time: A Tribe Called Quest and Eric B. & Rakim.
Became eligible: 2015 ceremony
Case for induction: When Seattle was getting all the attention for the grunge explosion in the early ’90s, the Smashing Pumpkins came bursting out of Chicago with their massively successful second LP, 1993’s Siamese Dream. The album showcased frontman Billy Corgan’s hard-rocking bonafides (“Cherub Rock”) as well as his sensitive side (“Disarm”) and catapulted them from critical darlings to platinum-selling superstars. Their follow-up, 1995’s triple-album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, was even bigger, achieving diamond certification and earning them Record of the Year and Album of the Year Grammy nominations (rare for a rock band at that time). Many of their songs, including “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” “1979,” and “Today,” continue to be alt-rock radio staples, proving the enduring appeal of their work.
What’s the holdup: Billy Corgan is not well-liked. His nasally, acquired-taste voice aside, it’s his bristly personality that has earned him a bad reputation over the years. Certainly not helping his case is his multiple appearances on right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s talk show. Too bad for the other members of the group, who also exist, to Corgan’s occasional dismay.
Became eligible: 1997 ceremony
Case for induction: Under their original name, the Blue Belles, they were an East Coast doo-wop group putting out modestly successful music throughout the ’60s. Not long after original member Cindy Birdsong left to join the Supremes, the remaining trio of Patti LaBelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash rebranded as simply Labelle in 1971. With that name change came an overhaul in image and sound. Decked out in outrageous, space-inspired costumes, they leaned into funk, rock, and soul. This new direction not only allowed lead singer Patti to better showcase her powerhouse voice but it also set up Nona to blossom into the group’s primary songwriter. The band’s peak came in 1974 with the smash-hit LP Nightbirds, buoyed by the No. 1 single “Lady Marmalade,” a sonic precursor to the disco revolution that would come years later. This success took them to the cover of Rolling Stone, becoming both the first girl group and the first black vocal group to do so.
What’s the holdup: Labelle may have been a groundbreaking group, but it’s really Patti by herself who has the name recognition and the consistent hits (“If Only You Knew,” “New Attitude,” “On My Own”). So do you nominate the critically acclaimed band or the more commercially successful solo artist? This was a similar conundrum that the Hall had with Chaka Khan, who was nominated three times as a solo artist and four times with her band, Rufus. After seven unsuccessful tries on the ballot, Chaka was eventually ushered in by herself as a “Musical Excellence” induction last year. Perhaps this will be the same fate for Ms. LaBelle, but the Hall should try her band on the ballot first.
Became eligible: 1999 ceremony
Case for induction: Does anybody sound like Barry White? That ultra-deep, smooth voice is unmistakably his, and you have to give it up when an artist owns their sound. Here’s another question: Is anybody’s music more synonymous with having sex? If a TV show or movie wants to signify a sexy moment, they play Barry White. That’s the power of this guy’s music. Not to mention, he’s got the catalog to back it up. He sold millions of albums throughout the ’70s, supported by seductive songs like “I’m Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby,” “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me,” and the iconic “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe.” But unlike many of his peers from that era, he was able to make a significant comeback two decades later with 1994’s multiplatinum LP, The Icon Is Love.
What’s the holdup: White passed away in 2003, and in recent years, it feels like the Hall’s priority has been to induct living artists. 2020’s class was a bit of an exception, as three of the six inductees were deceased: Whitney Houston, The Notorious B.I.G., and T. Rex. However, 2021 and 2022 swung back in the other direction, with all the performer inductees still living. Last year saw the posthumous inductions of George Michael and the majority of the Spinners, but the 2024 ballot features mostly living artists with the exceptions of Sinéad O’Connor and many key founding members of Kool & the Gang.
Became eligible: 2006 ceremony
Case for induction: Hailing from Australia, INXS were one of the most reliable hitmakers of the ’80s. At first, it began with minor successes like “The One Thing” and “Original Sin,” but by decade’s end, they were scoring Top 5 American hits like “What You Need,” “Need You Tonight,” “Devil Inside,” and “New Sensation.” These songs, among many others, exhibit the group’s signature blend of danceable rock hooks with front man Michael Hutchence’s sultry vocals. It’s this musical alchemy that not only shot them to the top of the charts but has also kept INXS as an enduring part of the New Wave canon. They continued putting out solid and popular work into the ’90s, but their run was cut short by the death of Hutchence, who committed suicide in 1997.
What’s the holdup: The Hall has been famously slow to induct acts of the ’80s, but that seems to have turned around recently. In the past three years, we’ve had inductees like the Go-Go’s, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Pat Benatar, Lionel Richie, and George Michael — all artists who had to wait more than a decade each since their initial eligibility. This influx of ’80s artists might be attributable to a change in leadership; in 2020, Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner resigned as chairman and handed over the keys to the Hall kingdom to MTV co-founder John Sykes. So with a more ’80s-friendly leader at the helm, maybe INXS’s day is around the corner.
Became eligible: 2000 ceremony
Case for induction: Formed while students at Tuskegee University and signed to Motown Records just out of college, the Commodores were one of the hottest funk bands of the ’70s. They had a knack for powerfully rhythmic songs that oozed sex, like “Brick House” and “Slippery When Wet,” but what took them to stratospheric heights of success was their co-lead-singer Lionel Richie’s preternatural skill as a balladeer. His songs like “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady” showcased the group’s softer side and garnered them huge sales and major Grammy nominations. Richie would split off for a solo career in the early ’80s, but the group soldiered on without him, scoring one more Top 5 hit with 1985’s “Nightshift.”
What’s the holdup: Lionel Richie is far and away the most recognizable member of the Commodores, and the Hall chose to induct him as a solo artist in 2022. That doesn’t necessarily exclude the Commodores from future consideration, but it certainly kicks them way down the priority list, unfortunately. They already got the famous guy to show up — are they just gonna induct him again immediately? So it might be a while for this one.
Comedian Joe Kwaczala is the co-host of the podcast Who Cares About the Rock Hall?, along with comedian Kristen Studard.
Bradley Cooper is Leonard Bernstein. Photo: Netflix
This article originally appeared in Gold Rush, a subscriber-only newsletter about the perpetual Hollywood awards race.
Want proof that we did indeed go through a post-2020 vibe shift? A bunch of people on the internet are rooting against a big, starry Oscar movie — for reasons that have nothing to do with the film’s assumed politics.
For years, I have tracked the annual arrival of each season’s Oscar villain, the contender that inspires a panicked “God, no!” among awards enthusiasts. The Academy may pretend that the Oscars is purely about celebrating the very best in the craft, but we know better. This is a competition, and as such, deciding who you’ll root against is almost as much fun as deciding who you’ll root for.
I came of age as a pundit during the Trump presidency, which heightened the stakes of the villain conversation. For right-thinking people of the era, the success of films like La La Land, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and Green Book was proof not just that awards voters didn’t share their tastes, but of something rotten in the country itself. I don’t want to suggest that we’re in a less polarized moment now or that people have developed healthier attitudes about art. (Last week’s Barbie kerfuffle should disabuse us of that notion.) But I do think it’s a positive development that the 2024 Oscar villain is a throwback to the seasons of yore, when people rooted against a title on purely aesthetic grounds. This year, one unlucky film became the Oscar villain simply because it was boring, basic, and a little pretentious. That’s right — I’m talking about Maestro.
Though I’ve made it my job to follow these things, I confess I did not see the Maestro backlash coming. I caught up with the Leonard Bernstein biopic a week after it played the New York Film Festival in October, and while it wasn’t my favorite of this year’s awards crop, I admired the formal inventiveness, the commitment to period mannerisms, and Bradley Cooper’s evident love of flirting onscreen. It seemed to me like a fairly standard Oscar movie, which is precisely what everybody else hates about it.
The thing Maestro detractors often say is that they have no idea why the film was made, except to win awards. My answer to this is that Maestro is about a straight woman and a gay man who fall for each other, and instead of using each other for clout the way they would today, decide to get married. It’s about how going into a relationship with your eyes fully open is still no defense against getting hurt. To me, that’s as valid a subject for a movie as any. Sounds swell, my friends say, but absolutely none of that has been communicated to the general public. To those who haven’t seen it, Maestro is a movie about how Cooper spent untold amounts of time and money transforming himself into a very important conductor, in a movie about how this conductor was very important. (The private life of Leonard Bernstein is, as Cousin Greg might say, not IP many of them are familiar with.) And thanks to Netflix’s characteristic largesse, the film has also become impossible to ignore. Drive past a billboard, take the subway, browse the internet, and there’s Cooper, baton blazing.
Few of those who have seen the film have rallied to its defense. I’ve heard grumbles from older members of the Hollywood Establishment that Maestro sidelines Bernstein’s art and activism, the very things that made him important. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody said that the film “leaves out the good stuff.” And Cooper’s allusive direction has bugged even those less invested in the tale. As one redditor put it, the film’s attempt to swerve around biopic clichés left it feeling as if it had been assembled “entirely from deleted scenes and outtakes.” Consensus is that the film is technically marvelous but cold, as if Cooper spent such time studying Bernstein’s tics that he lost sight of the man’s soul.
Above all, the thing that seems to be bugging people about Maestro is Cooper himself. Not since Anne Hathaway has an Oscar contender lost so much goodwill simply by campaigning so hard. Now, Cooper has not been alone on the awards trail. Cillian Murphy is not sitting at home in monkish penury. Paul Giamatti has not taken a vow of silence in honor of Thespis. But Cooper has accidentally violated one of the cardinal rules of campaigning: Show you want it, but don’t be desperate. Thus even standard celebrity behavior has been filtered through an unflattering lens. Fans side-eyed his extremely public romance with Gigi Hadid, saw shade toward Murphy in his Variety “Actors on Actors” interview, and passed around blind items hinting at diva behavior behind the scenes. Through strange awards-season alchemy, the combination of Maestro and Cooper’s star persona has made the public recoil from both.
For while Maestro has been dinged for not revealing much about Bernstein, I suspect in its naked stretch for greatness it is a little too revealing about Cooper. At the risk of psychoanalyzing a stranger, it’s worth digging into his teacher’s-pet intensity, the quality many observers find so off-putting.
Like Taylor Swift, another try-hard frequently seen at NFL games this season, Cooper hails from the upper-middle-class suburbs of Philadelphia — a world I can speak to, because it’s the world I come from too. (Both of my siblings attended the same private high school as Cooper.) This is an environment where the dream of meritocracy still holds sway, where a smart kid from a well-off family could believe that if he studied hard enough his dreams were indeed within his grasp. Cooper was exposed to the work of Bernstein as a child; as a young adult he matriculated at Georgetown, rowed crew, studied abroad in France. Mare of Easttown this was not.
Yet although he had high-culture ambitions, even studying at the famed Actors Studio, Cooper’s early-Hollywood forays came at the other end of the industry. His first regular gig was playing a beta on Alias. His first big movie role was as a douchebag in Wedding Crashers. The film that made him a star was The Hangover. By the time Cooper was able to open a movie, his A-list peers — guys like Leonardo DiCaprio, Christian Bale, and Joaquin Phoenix — had been famous for over a decade. By the time The Hangover: Part II hit theaters, that trio had racked up six Oscar nominations between them. Is it any wonder that when Cooper was finally granted access to the world of prestige cinema he would be desperate to prove he belonged?
The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan noted that, on both of his big Oscar plays, Cooper has run a director campaign, not an actor campaign. Rather than trying to dazzle with charisma in the manner of Giamatti or Colman Domingo, his narrative highlights his diligent preparation, his intense focus. This has earned him the approval of elders like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, though, so far, not the directors’ branch. I heard rumors about Cooper being a bit of a pill on the Star Is Born campaign, and if he goes home empty-handed yet again, we may hear similar stories this year.
The irony here is that, for all Cooper’s strenuous efforts, Maestro has managed to become the season’s official villain without ever being a legitimate threat. The film hasn’t won many precursors, and though the Academy nominated it in seven categories, including Best Picture, it’s considered a long shot in most of them. (The one exception is Makeup & Hairstyling, where makeup maestro Kazu Hiro is favored to win his third trophy.) What makes this even funnier is that the film that is dominating all comers this season is Oppenheimer — another warts-and-all biopic of a Great Man from the 20th century, which also features a jumbled timeline and black-and-white cinematography, and whose director is likewise often accused of taking himself too seriously. By all rights, Oppenheimer should have become the season’s biggest villain. Why didn’t it?
First and foremost is Barbenheimer. Though I’ve heard whispers that Team Oppenheimer were not the biggest fans of the meme, which they felt trivialized the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there’s no doubt the summer phenomenon inoculated Christopher Nolan’s film from an Oscar-villain backlash. It helped make Oppenheimer a hit, giving it the feel of a winner from day one. By treating the films as a linked pair, the meme also undercut the budding gender essentialism around them; just as Barbie became for the boys, so too did Oppenheimer become for the girls, gays, and theys. And crucially, the craze added an element of fun around what is, let’s face it, a fairly gray and dour film. The internet could not pretend that Oppenheimer was being shoved down their necks, because they’d already claimed it as their own.
This all could change if Oppenheimer keeps winning absolutely everything. (In the wake of Barbie’s snubs, I’m starting to notice uncharitable readings of Nolan’s quotes, an important leading indicator.) Of course, there’s no reason either Oppenheimer or Maestro had to wind up this year’s Oscar villain. But the fact that the latter did and the former did not tells us something: Intellectual pretension is acceptable in our awards vehicles; emotional pretension far less so.
Drake and Olivia Rodrigo, two UMG artists who have gone viral on TikTok. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Prince Williams/Wireimage, Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
TikTok just got a lot quieter. Universal Music Group, the largest music corporation on the globe, has taken its music off TikTok as it struggles to negotiate a new licensing agreement with the platform. In an open letter to musicians and songwriters on January 30, UMG said TikTok could not come to an agreement on key issues of payment, AI, and safety. The label group said it had an “overriding responsibility to our artists” that outweighed the consequences of leaving the app. “We will always fight for our artists and songwriters and stand up for the creative and commercial value of music,” UMG said. TikTok doubled down in its own response, accusing UMG of “greed” and lying. UMG’s current contract expired on January 31, and afterward, the company’s musicians were no longer available on the app. Artists have taken their music off TikTok before, but a removal at this scale is uncharted territory for musicians and TikTokers alike.
UMG’s letter cited three concerns: compensation, AI protections, and online safety. UMG said TikTok wants to pay its artists “a fraction of the rate” of other social platforms and only makes up about one percent of the company’s total revenue in the first place. The company also criticized the prominence of AI recordings on TikTok, accusing the app of “nothing short of sponsoring artist replacement by AI.” And UMG is worried about TikTok’s inconsistent content moderation amid “the tidal wave of hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment on the platform” that affect their artists.
UMG claimed TikTok began to resort to intimidation tactics in their negotiations by removing the music of some of its smaller artists. “TikTok attempted to bully us into accepting a deal worth less than the previous deal, far less than fair market value and not reflective of their exponential growth,” the company said. UMG cited “an overriding responsibility to our artists” in taking this stand. In a separate note to songwriters, the company added, “We believe our greatest responsibility to you is to make sure your songs are appropriately compensated, on platforms that respect human creativity, with your music in environments that are safe for all and effectively policed.”
Most of pop music? UMG is the largest of the Big Three major-label groups (along with Sony and Warner), comprising juggernaut pop labels like Republic, Interscope, Def Jam, Capitol, and Geffen while also distributing music from other labels. In other words, this is way bigger than just one record company. And it doesn’t simply encompass artists signed to UMG labels either — this development will also affect songwriters whose music is published by Universal Music Publishing Group, which includes some artists who are signed to non-UMG labels as performers. That means the list of affected artists is pretty much a who’s who of pop music: Taylor Swift, BTS, Drake, Ariana Grande, Bad Bunny, SZA, Billie Eilish, Adele, Olivia Rodrigo, the Weeknd, and Rihanna, to name only a few. In 2023, 12 of the 19 No. 1 songs on the Hot 100 were by UMG artists, including Morgan Wallen’s record-setting “Last Night.”
And many UMG artists found success on TikTok. A dance challenge on the app turned the Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” into the longest-running Hot 100 hit ever; TikTok helped Rodrigo first break out with “drivers license.” Swift revealed her Midnights track list in a series of TikToks, and even Drake got in on the fun in 2020 with the blatantly TikTok-bait song “Toosie Slide” — which immediately hit No. 1. Now, as Swift prepares for a new leg of her Eras tour and Grande readies her seventh album, Eternal Sunshine, UMG risks missing out on prime opportunities.
Metro Boomin, who’s on Republic, supported the move on Twitter. “I love the creativity and appreciation the kids show for the music on TikTok but I don’t like the forced pandering from artists and labels that results in these lifeless and soulless records,” he wrote, after tweeting a GIF that said “It’s about damn time.”
In its own, much briefer statement on January 30, the social platform called UMG’s claims “false” and criticized the move. “It is sad and disappointing that Universal Music Group has put their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters,” TikTok said. The platform noted that it has deals “with every other label and publisher.” For good measure, TikTok also reminded UMG of its billion-plus users and the “free promotional and discovery vehicle” the company would miss out on. With both companies publicly taking such hard lines, it doesn’t sound like a resolution is coming soon.
Short answer: We don’t know. TikTok doesn’t make its royalties public, and those rates are different depending on each label group’s deal. (That’s what got us here in the first place.) We do know, though, that UMG isn’t bluffing when it says TikTok is just a fraction of its income. According to Goldman Sachs’s 2023 “Music in the Air” report, which analyzes industry finances from 2022, TikTok made the music industry $220 million in revenue that year. That’s … not a lot. “Emerging platforms” like TikTok only accounted for 6 percent of the industry’s total 2022 revenue, and TikTok was only a 14 percent share of that (up one percent from 2021). Yes, that’s significantly more than YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels, but less than Facebook or even Peloton. Fourteen percent of 6 percent indeed comes out to a little less than one percent of the music industry’s total revenue. To UMG, which made $10.95 billion in revenue in 2022, that TikTok money is pocket change.
UMG has been concerned with TikTok’s payments for years. At the 2022 Music Matters conference, UMG’s CEO and chairman, Sir Lucian Grainge, said the industry should “avoid repeating past mistakes” by not advocating for fair pay on TikTok, per Music Business Worldwide, citing previous dynamics with YouTube and MTV. And on UMG’s 2022 Q3 earnings call, Grainge and other leadership expressed hope for a fair deal with TikTok. “When you look at what the funnel that TikTok has, when you look at the billions of views, the rate at which the company has grown, we will fight and determine how our artists get paid and when they get paid, in the same way that we have done throughout the industry for many years,” Grainge said, per Music Business Worldwide. “I have seen this movie before, I know the ending.”
Yes, but UMG’s concerns about artificial intelligence and TikTok go beyond the platform being “flooded with AI-generated recordings.” In its letter, UMG said the app isn’t just complacent in the AI content boom, but encourages it. The company didn’t specifically mention TikTok’s new AI Song tool, but that probably didn’t help the app’s case. Earlier this month, TikTok began rolling out the feature, which can turn user-written lyrics into a song in one of three chosen genres (pop, hip-hop, and EDM). “It’s not technically an AI song generator,” a spokesperson toldthe Verge, adding that the name would “likely” be changed. This is just the latest AI tool from TikTok, joining others like Creative Assistant, which uses AI to help creators make videos. TikTok has become more strict about identifying AI-generated content on the platform, though, announcing new requirements for labels on posts involving AI content last fall.
For its part, UMG is involved in AI too. Last year, for instance, UMG announced a deal with the AI startup Endel through which its artists could use Endel’s AI technology “to create science-backed soundscapes.” When UMG announced that deal, though, its executive vice-president and chief digital officer, Michael Nash, specifically spoke about “the incredible potential of ethical AI” — ethical being the operative word. UMG has run into trouble with AI before, as when the anonymous artist ghostwriter released a song called “Heart on My Sleeve” last year featuring AI dupes of Drake and the Weeknd — both UMG artists. TikTok helped that song go viral, and UMG’s stock suffered about a 20 percent hit afterward. Yeah, it goes back to money: One of the chief issues with AI-generated music, to UMG, is that it could “massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists.”
Concerns over harmful content on TikTok are nothing new, reaching all the way to Congress, which questioned CEO Shou Zi Chew over the issue in 2023. UMG wrote in the latest letter that TikTok has “no meaningful solutions” to safety concerns. While the label is referring to hate speech and harassment, it says this also extends to “content adjacency issues,” or ads running alongside inappropriate content. Unsafe content is particularly salient to UMG at the moment as Twitter cracks down on AI-generated nudes of Taylor Swift; the letter cited “pornographic deepfakes of artists” as an example of harmful content. UMG went on to call TikTok’s approach to moderation “the digital equivalent of ‘Whack a Mole,’” referring to “the monumentally cumbersome and inefficient process” of asking for a post to be taken down. TikTok has claimed it uses tens of thousands of moderators, along with an AI algorithm, but even some of those moderators have criticized the app’s processes.
All of the Big Three label groups have been negotiating with TikTok since 2022, Bloomberg reported. Warner Music Group — the smallest, covering artists like Dua Lipa and Zach Bryan — struck “a wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind partnership” with TikTok last July. A press release was scant on details, but touted increased partnership between the companies, like finding “new ways to harness TikTok’s revenue generation and promotional capabilities” for Warner’s musicians. Good news for your “Training Season” TikTok plans.
But UMG isn’t the only group with concerns. Sony Music Group, which has artists like Beyoncé, Doja Cat, and Miley Cyrus, has expressed an interest in higher payment for short-form video. Chairman Rob Stringer didn’t specifically mention TikTok at the company’s 2023 investor presentation, where he said Sony is “aggressively leaning into” short-form video, Music Business Worldwide reported. “It doesn’t take a scientist to realize that we are being underpaid by some of those content providers,” Stringer added.
UMG’s deal with TikTok was up January 31, and its artists’ music is off the app as of February 1. If you attempt to use a UMG artist’s song on TikTok, it says “music is not available.” If you’ve been sitting on any SwiftTok ideas, looks like you’ll have to keep waiting.
