Photos by Billy Cole Landers and Austin Dewitt. Courtesy of Shazam Studios.

Where do you go when you run out of inspiration?

I usually put my phone down and go outside. I find inspiration in the mundane, everyday, unnatural beauty, and especially the trash of NYC. It constantly pushes me to think and envision outside the box and create art out of literal garbage.

———

What are you trying to survive?

What aren’t I trying to survive. EVERYTHING! Trying to survive with composure, and going against making everything look perfect on the IG grid. I’ve always felt like a warrior, but warriors have feelings too. And those feelings can take you out.

———

How do you handle rejection?

Rejection is redirection. I just keep moving forward on to the next.

———

What’s the most New York thing about your work?

I think my ability to hustle, exchange ideas, and never take no for an answer. These are things that are deeply engrained in the way I work and how I see things. It’s also super important to me to amplify community and bring people together. Launching Shazam Studios has brought so many incredible spirits together in collaboration and helped bring my exhibition to life.

———

What did you learn about yourself in the process?

I’ve learned about my artistry and how I want my work to live beyond image-making. Seeing and feeling the potential of what it can be sparked a new sense of excitement in the expansive ways that I can create. The idea of allowing everyone to see the years of built up traumatic experiences was something that I was initially nervous about. I feel a sense of appreciation being able to see the intersections of my identities and honoring how rich the material is.

———

Who is your favorite character?

My favorite character would have to be “Sex Doll.” The doll isn’t perfect. She has wear and tear. I was yearning to break down the hypersexualization of trans identities by becoming this limitless figurine that holds power behind closed doors. Placing myself in a custom vinyl bodysuit, massive boobs, tissue paper vagina, and a silicone sex doll mask, I was fully immersed in this fantasy.

———

Which of these looks are you wearing to the function?

Depends on what the function is. The one that I can wear seamlessly to any of the functions would be “Kitty Kitty.” She has a certain playfulness that would fit in any room as she also lives in the backyard.

———

When do you feel the most confident?

I feel the most confident when I am surrounded by my tribe. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized the power of my home and the people that fill it. At the opening of my exhibition, my loved ones surprised me and came all the way to Texas to celebrate this moment.

———

The post Richie Shazam Builds a Mythology of the Self in Austin appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Before bonesmashing and meth, men ate steak and eggs to get jacked. Matt Lewis—known online as Silverback Tarzan—is a 53-year-old hunk who’s built a 400K following by looksmaxxing naturally. He encourages men to tap into their masculinity and the cosmos in order to optimize their appearance. His shtick sits somewhere between self-help and satire—except he’s completely sincere. So what’s his secret to macho self-mastery? We administered a questionnaire to find out.

———

What do you do?

I’m a social media creator and campaigner.

Where do you live?

Portslade, Brighton.

What is your purpose?

We [Matt and his partner, Tara] have built Silverback Tarzan as a campaign for social change. A place to explore how we can make better choices for our own health, relationships, and for the whole web of life. Understanding our connection to each other, to all the details of our planet and our place in the cosmos. 

How did you get your name?

I chose it. It’s kind of tongue in cheek, but it is also something I wanted to live up to and it gave me a vision of myself to grow into.

What’s your workout routine?

I train almost everyday. These days, my training is almost entirely bodyweight workouts. Although I do like gym sessions, especially when it’s been raining for days and I have one set of clothes left because they’re all muddy from doing breakdancing in the mud. 

What do you eat?

I eat plenty of protein to maintain my bulk (many eggs a day, cheese, fish, white meat, some red meat, and a lot of nuts), varied fruit and veg to keep my vitamins and minerals up, and a minimal amount of complex carbs to keep my energy going.

How many hours of sleep do you get?

I get 8-9 hours of sleep most nights. 

Are you all-natural?

Yes.

Are peptides fair game?

What are peptides? Honestly, I don’t even think about supplements of any sort because I don’t use them or believe in them. 

What do you read?
I haven’t been much of a reader until the last few years. I’ve enjoyed some philosophy, breathwork, psychology, and religious books as I like looking at how other people and myself perceive the world.

Who do you follow?

I don’t really follow anyone apart from family. I don’t really scroll. I prefer creating content. Even before socials, I didn’t even have a TV. My time is precious, and I’m always up to something.

What’s your vice?

Avoidance dressed up as productivity.

How do you relax?

Listening to tunes, dancing, moving, and my favorite is lying in the sun with the rays hitting my skin—the moments when the body smiles.

What’s your biggest red flag?

Low-level bullying that people pass off as confidence.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

I don’t really do stuff that I feel guilty about for pleasure. If it’s fun, I do it. If it would make me feel guilty, I wouldn’t do it.

Enlightenment or a six-pack?

Six-pack.

Who’s your favorite Instagram hunk?

Anatoly [@vladimirshmondenko]

What do you regret?

I regret trying to be a hero instead of holding connection as a priority. I regret not noticing earlier that society makes you try to be a winner when all we are after is connection. Not understanding earlier that life is a rat race, and I wish I’d slowed down and seen and felt the abundance earlier. 

Who do you listen to?

I love listening to a massive range of tunes, but especially old school acid house and ambient electronic beats. Stuff that makes me get a vibe and that leaves space for me to rap along to. The Prodigy, Frankie Knuckles, Leftfield, Emancipator, Bob Marley, Nick Mulvey, Fink, John Kennedy, Pitch Black, Random Rab.

What is it all for?

It’s all for smelling, tasting, hearing, feeling, and experiencing. Doing the job of being conscious for the cosmos. Feeling the joy, pains, tasting the fruits, the sourness, hearing the bird songs and the car alarm irritations. Experiencing the joy and the hurt.

The post Silverback Tarzan’s No-BS Guide to Looksmaxxing appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Julia Wolf, photographed by Ary Russell.

FRIDAY 1:07 PM APRIL 3, 2026 EAST VILLAGE

Don’t let the lyrics about throat slitting and Instagram aura farming fool you. Julia Wolf is more wholesome than you think. As we sat down surrounded by skulls, tarot cards, and cauldrons, she recounted how she spent the morning glued to her Nintendo Switch playing Pokopia, which she described as a cross between Animal Crossing and Pokémon. Wolf first achieved virality with her song “In My Room,” cultivating a solid fanbase of Twi-hards who would go on to use her track in their TikTok edits of the film. As her career continued to grow, her haunting vocals secured her position as the premier voice of the ghost of girlfriends past on EDM tracks with John Summit and rap bangers with Drake. On April 7, Wolf announced her The Deep End world tour, set to commence in the place where it all began — Forks, Washington. But before she got on the road, I had a few questions for the world’s number one Twilight enthusiast. A week after she moved to New York, I met up with Wolf at Hekate Café & Elixir Lounge for a witchy conversation about casting love spells, leaving Los Angeles, and why her grudges last a lifetime. 

———

ARY RUSSELL: I was watching your Zach Sang interview and you said you left LA because you wanted to be somewhere quieter, so naturally you moved to New York City. [Laughs] What was the reasoning behind that?

JULIA WOLF: We went to Portland [Oregon] in between my two tours thinking that’s where we were going to move because I love the Twilight of it all. But when we got there, it felt like I would be retiring too early. So I moved to Queens, which feels like the quietest neighborhood I could have chosen. 

RUSSELL: What have been some differences you’ve already found between LA and New York?

WOLF: Here, I can leave the house no makeup, sweatpants, and not feel any pressure about running into someone or having to look good. Whereas in LA, I was constantly comparing myself to every beautiful woman who was walking around. It was mentally exhausting. 

RUSSELL: As you get bigger, it’ll be easier to stay more anonymous in New York. I was watching your apartment vlog and it’s so cute because, with pop stars, you see them doing YouTube for some sort of promotion, not an intimate moving vlog. How are you balancing having that closeness with fans while also maintaining that mystique as a pop star and prioritizing your mental health?

WOLF: It’s unfortunate, but I can’t engage in the comments anymore. I’m too sensitive. So even if something’s a little negative, it’ll stick with me for days. That’s why I want to do YouTube and do funny TikToks, to just show personality and that this is a normal chick. But I do need a little bit of my mystique. Aura farming right now.

RUSSELL: I loved your album Pressure.

WOLF: Thank you.

RUSSELL: I also really connected with the lyrical themes about love and devotion. Do you get obsessed with love?

WOLF: A part of it is that I wasn’t finding any relationships whatsoever. I was ghosted, rejected for six, seven years. Nothing was landing. So not only does that absolutely deteriorate my self-esteem but, when I do start these budding things with people, I latch on so hard because I just desperately–

RUSSELL: Don’t know when you’re going to get it again?

WOLF: It feels so fleeting. I have always been that way. I mean, even with the one that worked out now, it’s very consuming and sometimes brings out the worst in me.

RUSSELL: How long does it take you to get over someone?

WOLF: My gosh, it depends. What I would do is just start talking to someone else. I’m like, “I can’t get over this until I realize that other people exist.” 

RUSSELL: Are there things that you do to get the ball rolling on closure?

WOLF: I would probably say my sister took the brunt of it, and just yapping.

RUSSELL: What are sisters for?

WOLF: I have to talk it out. Because the more that I hold it in, it does drive me insane. Just hearing someone else’s perspective on it snaps me out of it a little bit. We’re dissecting it together.

RUSSELL: You’ve collaborated across many genres with John Summit, Drake, and more. How do you know that a beat is going to work with your lyricism and your voice? 

WOLF: With all of those collabs with people, they’ve really allowed me to take the reins on it and build around whatever I create, which has been super cool that they trust me in that way. They don’t want me to fit into their world, but rather have the two come together. 

RUSSELL: Does it give you a level of confidence as an artist that someone like Drake is like, “I trust you?”

WOLF: Completely. It could not be more validating. We were freaking out about that. This road is extremely discouraging, so when things like that happen it feels good.

RUSSELL: Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of sad girl musicians?

WOLF: Phoebe Bridgers, there is no one better to me. Phoebe and Ethel Cain are my top. I love Soccer Mommy, as well. I only listen to the same records over and over. It’s really bad.

RUSSELL: On your album, you have a big connection to Twilight and Jennifer’s Body. Which is interesting because, when those movies came out, they were critically panned but now have become cult classics. Are you someone that likes the idea of second chances? 

WOLF: Unfortunately, because of how sensitive I am, I can also be very reactive. So if I even get a tinge of someone not feeling it, I am quick to burn the bridge. I would hope that people treat me the way I’ve treated them, so I don’t really love handing out second chances if I’ve been wronged. Why wouldn’t it happen again? 

RUSSELL: So your grudges last a lifetime.

WOLF: Forever. It’s hard to rebuild the bridge once it’s been destroyed. 

RUSSELL: “In My Room” is the song that defined the TikTok edits of 2025. Do you have any favorite TikToks that have used the song? 

WOLF: I really love when people replace my lyrics with their own lyrics. It’ll be like, “I stalk myself on Pornhub just to see what you’ll find.” Those are funny. 

RUSSELL: The ones that I really like are when it’s the acoustic version. That difference between how it sounds sonically perfectly captures what it means to change, for better or worse.

WOLF: Do you know Summer House?

RUSSELL: I don’t watch the show, but within the past three days I’ve gotten all the tea from everyone around me. Have you been seeing Summer House edits?

WOLF: Yes. I’m a diehard Summer House girl. They did an edit with that whole situation and that one honestly made me very sad for Ciara [Miller].

RUSSELL: With Twilight, who’s the character that resonates with you the most?

WOLF: It’s Bella. That’s why I fell in love with Twilight in the first place. Not for Edward, but more so for this girl who’s in high school, super shy. Twilight came out when I was in eighth grade and experiencing those same things where I could not even make eye contact. I saw what happened to her and I really wanted that to happen to me one day. 

RUSSELL: I definitely relate to Bella because I always resonate with this idea of devotion to the point of detriment. 

WOLF: Me too.

RUSSELL: In “In My Room”, my favorite lyric is “I stalk myself on the internet just to see what you’ll find.” When you look at your own Instagram, what do you see?

WOLF: Oh my gosh, that’s a good question. I see someone who is not trying too hard to impress anyone, just being herself in an honest, sometimes silly way.

RUSSELL: In “Girls,” the lyric that I also really loved was, “I’m on the wrong side of 30” because it really touches on this fear of aging and that you’re running out of time. Do you wish that success had happened earlier for you? Do you think that you would have been able to handle this if this happened when you were younger?

WOLF: I don’t think so. I think I would be cringed out. And who’s to say I won’t be 10 years from now? But I don’t believe that I knew myself well enough and was exposed to enough artists to feel inspired by. 

RUSSELL: By the time this will be out, you will have announced your tour. What city are you most excited for?

WOLF: It has to be New York. I grew up coming to shows here. So, to go from audience member to stage here will always impact me more.

RUSSELL: Do you have any pre-show rituals to get your head in the game?

WOLF: Obviously, I do my vocal warmups and I have my tea with honey. They say that if you stir your coffee with intentions in the morning clockwise, water can hold your intentions. I was doing that religiously every day last tour. 

RUSSELL: Are you someone that’s a spiritual person in that regard?

WOLF: I definitely dabble in the witchcraft of it all and I be casting spells in my room because I wholeheartedly believe that it did impact my life once I started getting into that stuff. 

RUSSELL: Have you ever cast a love spell?

WOLF: Of course.

RUSSELL: Has it worked?

WOLF: Yes. That was the catalyst to making me a believer. I loved this one girl on YouTube and I noticed she had a subsection of witchcraft, so I tried one of them. Nothing beats your first spell because I had no doubt in my heart. I was just full of belief. I was under the moon, and then two months later I met the love of my life.

RUSSELL: You mentioned that you drink tea on tour. What’s on your rider when you’re on the road?

WOLF: We have tequila, beer, and Throat Coat tea. The guys want beef jerky so the whole room freaking smells like beef jerky. 

RUSSELL: You have to put an embargo. When you’re going to different cities on tour, what’s been the most interesting thing that you found? 

WOLF: We were lucky to do Europe this past time, but I did not expect to fall in love with Poland the way that I did. The Polish churches are so gothic inside — skulls, burgundy, just gorgeous color palettes. 

RUSSELL: You have to go to the catacombs when you’re in Paris.

WOLF: I know.

RUSSELL: Tour can be both physically and emotionally demanding. What type of things do you do to recover night after night when you’re pouring your heart out?

WOLF: I have my cozy shows that I watch on the bus. This last tour was Schitt’s Creek. It is so funny, I didn’t realize. My mother is Moira from that show.

RUSSELL: You have Bee Blackwell opening up for you after you opened up for Machine Gun Kelly. What things did you learn from that experience you could potentially pass on to her?

WOLF: MGK was so adamant that I gain his fans. And it’s just about showing that she and I have a good relationship too. As long as I’m putting the light on her as well, that will be really helpful. I would tell her to have a good time and not get too in your head about it if people aren’t looking right at you.

RUSSELL: I’ve discovered some of my favorite artists as openers. You’re planning to debut some new music while you’re on tour. How do you feel about seeing the raw live reactions of the audience as you’re singing something that they’ve never heard before?

WOLF: I love it. We’ve cultivated a very welcoming and supportive fan base, so anytime I’m playing something new,  you could hear a pin drop. Everyone is just there to embrace the new stuff, which I’m so grateful for. 

RUSSELL: How do you hope that Julia Wolf fans are going to dress for the concert?

WOLF: I love anything from the Elena Gilbert vibe, to my emo baddies. We have a song that could fit any vibe.

RUSSELL: Even with the John Summit collab, let’s get the rave girls in here.

WOLF: Bring it on. 

RUSSELL: What are you manifesting for this tour?

WOLF: Hopefully that people come. [Laughs] And we just make some core memories. Last tour, we had some proposals happening.

RUSSELL: Do you have favorite signs that fans bring?

WOLF: Anything Twilight. I already have so much Twilight merch, but the amount of gifts is so cute. Sometimes they’ll just put the book in the air. 

RUSSELL: How many times have you read the series and seen the movies?

WOLF: You don’t want to know. I have lost track. 15 times? This is also over the course of 20 years we’re talking about. I can’t tell you. It’s infinite.

RUSSELL: But never enough?

WOLF: Never enough.

The post How Julia Wolf Cast a Love Spell on Drake and John Summit appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Jonah Hill wears Shirt Dior. Tank Top Varsity Los Angeles. Glasses and Watch (worn throughout) Jonah’s Own.

Jonah Hill has been famous long enough to have been celebrated, scrutinized, written off, and underestimated. For most of his adult life, he’s been one of the most recognizable faces in American movies and he’s absorbed the good, the bad, and the ugly that comes with it. That dynamic—between the public and the private, the person and the persona—informs every scene of Outcome, his second narrative feature as both writer and director. In the dark comedy, Keanu Reeves plays a beloved movie star whose carefully maintained public image is about to come undone, unless he can do something about it. When Hill connected with none other than Martin Scorsese, who directed him in The Wolf of Wall Street and makes an appearance in Outcome, celebrity, cancellation, and the American sport of tearing down its heroes were all on his mind.

———

MONDAY 9 AM FEB. 16, 2026 SO-CAL

JONAH HILL: Hey, Marty. I think you’re muted, my friend.

MARTIN SCORSEESE: Am I okay?

HILL: I can hear you. I can see you.

SCORSESE: There you are, young man.

HILL: How are you, sir?

SCORSESE: I’m okay. The picture’s really good.

HILL: My picture?

SCORSESE: I finally saw it. It’s hilarious and moving. It seems to have an interesting progression from your first picture, in terms of visual interpretation of the frame. I actually saw it by myself and I enjoyed it by myself. It’s really something to be proud of, Jonah.

HILL: Thank you, Marty. My biggest fear in doing this was that you’d have to lie about liking the movie.

SCORSESE: [Laughs] I’d say, “Listen, I can’t do the interview,” or something.

HILL: I was saying to my wife, “He’s seeing it over the weekend, so what if he hates it but already agreed to do it?”

SCORSESE: When we see each other, we’ll go into more detail. This is your third film, but the second one was a documentary?

HILL: Yeah, exactly. This is my second narrative film. Thank you for being a part of it. Your character is my favorite. Was it hard to watch yourself?

SCORSESE: I forgot it was me. I couldn’t see what you and your DP were doing with the camera.

HILL: Do you remember when you walked on set and I was like, “Do you want to see the frame?” You had to fight against your instincts to look, but you knew you were in good hands with Benoît [Debie, the cinematographer].

SCORSESE: Well, what you have in the frame is a narrative. So I did forget it was me up there, which was really interesting. That’s because of your guidance and your patience, and Keanu. Poor Keanu.

HILL: He really eats it the entire movie.

SCORSESE: How did you approach this provocative subject matter, both as an actor and a director? I wonder if you could just slam on about that for a bit.

HILL: Sure. I’ll just bore you to tears on that, Marty. Need a good nap? I got you.

SCORSESE: [Laughs] It’ll be fine. I’ll just doze off for a second.

HILL: I love Keanu Reeves. He has this one part in Parenthood, and it’s the only time you ever see him lose his shit, where he seems out of control in a way I related to. He loses his temper, his patience, and is frustrated with the world.

SCORSESE: Right.

HILL: And I thought, “God, I wish Keanu Reeves would do more parts where he’s a mess of a person.” When all this cancel culture stuff was happening, I thought, “Who’s the one person that people would be the most bummed about getting canceled?” It would be Keanu Reeves.

SCORSESE: We all love him.

Shirt and Pants Dior. Tank Top Varsity Los Angeles. Shoes Vans.

HILL: I just called him up and said, “Can you come over? I have an idea for a film.” I said, “You’re this guy who’s a beloved movie star, but there’s something that’s going to come out that may threaten what people think of you.” He loved Mid90s, and to his credit, the man stood by me. He said, “Go write it.”

SCORSESE: In terms of the cancellation, people have always been able to make money off someone else’s desperation. That’s what the confrontation at the end is really about.

HILL: I think people are just fucking struggling. Ultimately, we’re so wrapped up in ourselves. To me, the whole movie’s an allegory for social media.

SCORSESE: But it doesn’t play like an allegory, Jonah. An allegory is a lesson. This plays like a story about people.

HILL: You’re right. Wrong word. Not many people can relate to a movie star, but the way I view it is, we’ve all turned ourselves into scorched, middle-aged movie stars by putting our lives up for judgment on social media every second of every day. You go through the same exact feelings being Tom Cruise as you do being a mom in Salt Lake City putting her kids up online for public judgement.

SCORSESE: You’re right.

HILL: You build an identity just like a famous person does. Look at me, or you. “Martin Scorsese. World-renowned director.” “Jonah Hill, great actor, moron.” Then you have to live up to the packaging you’ve put out into the world. I started noticing it with younger people, where they have the same feelings I felt as a public person.

SCORSESE: Yes! There’s something about just existing—you’re judged simply for being. That’s what stardom really is, when you think about it. And it’s not new. There’s a film I mentioned to you, It Should Happen to You. George Cukor directed it. Jack Lemmon’s first film. It’s all right there.

HILL: You told me to watch that for this film.

SCORSESE: That’s right. And we thought at that time, “What a strange thing.” But it’s happened.

HILL: Now it happens to everybody. You’re the Reef Hawk [Reeves’s character] of your school because people on social media are following you the same way tabloids follow famous people. I saw my nephews walking through life scared of perception in a way we weren’t in when we were in high school.

SCORSESE: That’s right.

HILL: And all you do is lie awake at night freaking out about what people you’ll never meet think of you, versus the three people who know you best and have to tolerate you on a day-to-day basis. I wouldn’t wish the paranoia Reef lives in on my worst enemy, but I have to say at times, I’ve related to it.

SCORSESE: It’s constant. That’s the world now. Everything is filmed and photographed. It’s the nature of building up a god and goddess and then wanting to tear them down. Talk about how you approached that as a writer and within the structure of the picture.

HILL: Thank you for pointing that out. It’s very much about how since the dawn of entertainment, since Fatty Arbuckle, there’s the entertainment of the hero soaring, the entertainment of them being knocked down, and then the entertainment of them rising from the ashes.

SCORSESE: That’s right.

HILL: But the truth is, modern entertainment is pretty much just tearing someone down.

SCORSESE: I’m afraid so.

HILL: I wish it wasn’t. My form of entertainment is your films, or books or music. But if you look at “entertainment,” the business around it plays to our sickest parts.

SCORSESE: The weakest part of our personality is the gossip part. I’m old now, but over the years, I really disliked hearing it.

HILL: It’s so low.

SCORSESE: But also I’m afraid of enjoying it. You know what I mean, Jonah?

HILL: [Laughs] Yeah. Because we’re human. If Reef Hawk saw that Tom Cruise was going through the same thing the next day, he’d read that article. It’s always been that way. When I drive by a car crash, I look.

SCORSESE: Yes.

HILL: Our mutual friend Spike Jonze taught me the greatest lesson by accident. One time we were in a car and a bunch of people were gossiping, and Spike, after five minutes, goes, “That’s enough gossip. Let’s change the subject to something positive.” I use that all the time. It’s our lowest form of connection and communication.

Jacket and Jeans Celine. Polo Lacoste.

SCORSESE: Yeah that’s true. Your compositions and your DP’s lighting were really remarkable. At first it has a feeling of a graphic novel. There’s the great film The Ladykillers—Alexander Mackendrick did the original one, and later the Coen brothers did a version of it, quite good. But the original is like an Edward Gorey drawing. Everything is real, but there’s an almost animated feeling to it. You’ve got that here in the first third of the picture. There’s something going on with the shots of that Malibu house. Oh god, the terror of that beautiful sky. Everything’s going to come down.

HILL: A beautiful nightmare. I really wanted it to feel heightened, almost not real.

SCORSESE: Heightened is the word. You’re a writer and I’m not.

HILL: I don’t know. I see a co-writing credit on Goodfellas and a lot of other films.

SCORSESE: [Laughs] Yeah, a few pictures. Was this something you were generating when you were doing Stutz?

HILL: It’s funny because I’m editing my next movie now. I made a very conscious choice to be in post while this one comes out. I never wanted to be in the position where I finished such an emotional film with nothing to do.

SCORSESE: Because you will live in that hell.

HILL: I finished Mid90s and I finished Stutz with nothing on my plate and no ideas. It was torture. When you finish a movie like Stutz, where you rack your brain and talk about death and your insecurities, you’re like, “Well, what’s next?” How about nothing? How about the blank page?

SCORSESE: Get out of town.

HILL: This marked a trilogy of very emotional movies. My next one is way more farcical and funny.

SCORSESE: Rhythm and pacing. That’s the hardest.

HILL: You helped inspire this movie. You gave me A New Leaf, Elaine May’s first movie, when we did The Wolf of Wall Street.

SCORSESE: It’s a masterpiece.

HILL: I watched it during Wolf of Wall Street and it has my favorite sequence in a movie maybe ever, where Walter Matthau says goodbye to being rich. I thought I really want to make a comedy with a man and a woman where they both go through that excruciation of not being rich anymore. What do you do in that circumstance? So me and Kristen Wiig are adults who get cut off in their mid-40s by their parents, Nathan Lane and Bette Midler.

SCORSESE: Oh my god, disaster.

HILL: I wanted to make a movie that has emotion, but the jokes are at the forefront of the engine.

SCORSESE: You worked with your editor on this for a couple of films?

HILL: Nick Houy and Nick Ramirez were co-editors. Nick Houy works with Greta Gerwig and me, and he’s pretty much been bouncing back and forth between us two.

SCORSESE: The rhythm and pace is really well done.

HILL: I can’t wait to tell them that. I love that I get to leave this call and go edit.

SCORSESE: That’s the best part.

HILL: It’s the fucking ace of spades, man. I get to leave and work on the best puzzle in the world, right?

SCORSESE: Exactly.

HILL: I get to be in the process, knee-deep in fixing puzzle problems in a Rubik’s Cube. I’m not thinking about how my interview with Marty went, because now I’m working to make a movie.

SCORSESE: That’s what’s going on now in the pre-production of my new film, it’s a Rubik’s Cube constantly.

HILL: You’re getting 500 billion questions a day in a hotel room in Prague.

SCORSESE: Beautiful place, by the way.

HILL: Beautiful place, but you’re away from home.

SCORSESE: That’s the problem. I’ve got to be here for another two months. I’ve got to get back to New York.

HILL: I know what that’s like. And I have two kids now. The only thing that could ever separate me from my family is the editing room. I love the writing, I love the shooting, but editing—

SCORSESE: Editing is the best.

HILL: It’s like dessert every day. Even the problems are dessert.

SCORSESE: I would do it for free.

HILL: I say the same thing. And Rick [Yorn], our mutual manager, says, “Don’t tell anybody that.”

SCORSESE: I got away with a few. A couple I did for nothing.

HILL: [Laughs] Thank god for Apple. They let me make a movie with movie stars that reaches for real depth. I’m not saying I’m a great filmmaker, I’m not saying I made a great film, but I’m swinging at depth. Sometimes that can feel like a fool’s errand in today’s culture, because when you were coming up, movies were more culturally important than they are now.

SCORSESE: That time has changed. It doesn’t mean they’re less important. It’s how they’re presented. It’s where you see them. When you go to a theater, the film begins at a certain time. It demands your attention. At home you can turn it off, go get a glass of water, come back, sit down. You command that. But in the theater, the film commands you and tells you, “Look at me and go into this dream,” in a sense. And that’s why I think to be able to have, as you say, Apple in this case, and also for my new film and the last film—

HILL: Apple’s producing the film you’re about to make?

SCORSESE: Yeah. To give us the chance to make something where we’re trying to—

HILL: Swing at something.

SCORSESE: Yeah. I see a lot of the newer films and I’m amazed by what I see, but I can never do it. But I do think Apple gives you the chance. They’ve given us the chance to make something that’s different, that takes a little time maybe to seep in.

HILL: Man, that’s like your movies to me. They hit you more two days later. What I don’t love about fast-paced culture is that you experience it, it’s candy, and you’re onto the next.

SCORSESE: Yeah, yeah.

HILL: Before we leave, I want to share with the world or anyone who’s reading this who wants to be a director. Before I shot Outcome, we all had a big dinner, you, me—

SCORSESE: In L.A.?

HILL: Yes, when you were promoting Killers of the Flower Moon. Me and my producing partner got to dinner and we were talking about the movie, and you gave us some advice. You told us, “Just make sure to listen to the movie.” Do you remember saying that?

SCORSESE: The movie’s going to tell you. Sometimes you go off on different roads, but it’s going to pull you back. I think it was Haskell Wexler who said it—you go with a design in mind, and then you come back with what you think you got. Very often you get exactly what you want, but in most cases you don’t. Are you okay with what you got? Because it’s going to change.

HILL: I think that’s important for people to know if they want to be directors, because it’s crazy how much my movies have changed in the process of making them. And I learned that from acting for you. Obviously we went to millions of crazy places during Wolf of Wall Street.

SCORSESE: Yeah, well you guys did it. You and Margot Robbie and Leonardo DiCaprio.

HILL: But you showed me how much a movie can change through making it. It would be cool to hear you expand on that a little bit for someone who’s reading this and may be going to make a movie.

SCORSESE: Well, in some cases. Not everybody works that way. In other cases people get exactly what they want and that’s the film. That’s great. What we did on Wolf, you know what that is. Suddenly you are off in the ozone layer or something, and I have to bring you guys down. I don’t believe I told Jon Bernthal to hit you, did I?

HILL: I said it was okay. It wasn’t against my consent [Laughs]. You didn’t tell him to hit me in a mean, fucked-up way. We were discussing it—you, me, Leo, and Jon.

SCORSESE: And then we had to get out because the man who owned the house was really getting mad at us.

HILL: For context, the guy who owned Jordan Belfort’s house was desperate to get us out. He goes, “Guys, I’ve got to get back in my fucking office. Ten minutes ago you said you’d be out of here.” Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese are shooting a scene in your office. A woman has money taped to her breasts. What do you have to do that’s cooler than this?

SCORSESE: And I’m saying, “How the hell do you want me to get her out of here? She’s got money taped all over her.”

HILL: This guy’s pointing at his watch like, “Get the fuck out of here, Marty.” And listen, did the guy lose 45 minutes of valuable whatever-the-fuck-he-does time? Yes. I’ll leave you with this, Marty. I co-raised my nephews and they’re now 18 and 16. They’re great boys. But we had to have these rules of which of my movies can they see and which they cannot see, right?

SCORSESE: Oh yeah, I know, the whole thing.

HILL: Yeah, I’m sure you’ve had that your whole life with kids. The point was that the only movie off-limits when they were like 11 or 12 was Wolf of Wall Street. We let them see Superbad and 21 Jump Street and everything else.

SCORSESE: Yeah, sure.

HILL: So we’re at dinner and they’re 13 or 14, and the older brother agrees with something in a very hearty way, and he goes, “Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh.” And I look at him and I’m like, “You saw Wolf of Wall Street,” because he’s doing Matthew McConaughey’s hitting his chest. And the younger brother’s like, “You fucking idiot. You fucked us.”

SCORSESE: [Laughs] They’re always ahead of us. Oh, god.

HILL: Well, I love you Marty. I don’t like to performatively say it, but I love you. I appreciate you. Thank you for taking the time to do this and to watch my film. Thank you for being in my film.

SCORSESE: Thank you.

HILL: Your words about it will mean more than anything else, except for the process.

SCORSESE: It’s terrific.

HILL: Love you, Marty. Thanks.

SCORSESE: Love you too. Bye.

———

Grooming: Jason Schneidman using California Born at Solo Artists.

Tailor: Megan Bright.

Photography Assistants: David Katzinger and Irene Tang.

Fashion Assistant: Sasha Campbell.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

Production: Eppy at Radish Films.

The post Jonah Hill and Martin Scorsese on Gossip, Cancellation, and Why It Had to Be Keanu appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Mackenzie Thomas, photographed by Lucia Brown.

FRIDAY 5:00 PM APRIL 3, 2026 HELL’S KITCHEN

I’m in Hell’s Kitchen at 5 pm on a Friday, and it’s surprisingly desolate. I’m walking into the ART NY theater to see Mackenzie Thomas perform for four hours. I can’t remember the last time I watched anything for four hours, and I’m intimidated at the prospect. I know Mackenzie Thomas the way most people on Instagram do: she’s the 5-foot-something girl running around Bushwick with a selfie stick and baby bangs, filming herself dancing on Photo Booth. You might also know her as the girl who went viral for reading entries from her childhood diary on TikTok. I am briefed, via the internet, that I Said What I Said recaps Thomas’s 2025 through tweets and diary entries, and I’m quietly skeptical about the viability of this “performance art.” But there must be something to it because this is the 8th run of the show, it’s gone global, and it’s totally sold out every time. 

It’s nearly 10 pm when we finally file out. The sun set hours ago, and there’s an unspoken agreement among everyone leaving that we’ve never seen a piece of theater quite like this before. A yellow MacBook projecting a year of this woman’s digital footprint somehow made a room full of strangers cry laughing, and then just cry. I meet Thomas outside the venue for a cig. She’s swapped the ’60s-esque, red, A-line mini from the show for a black mini skirt and her own merch. She’s just as cute in person. We light up.

———

LUCIA BROWN: Do you have a cig? 

MACKENZIE THOMAS: Yeah, of course.

BROWN: How was it? How do you feel post-show?

THOMAS: I always feel crazy. I mean, I seek it out. But I think living your life at a vulnerable extreme is just…you can’t not feel crazy after bearing your all for four hours. But I feel good, and I hope that I’m able to move on from the stuff I talk about in the show soon.

BROWN: I was going to ask, does it feel sort of therapeutic? Or does it feel like you’re rehashing old trauma?

THOMAS: Fifty-fifty. I think there’s a harm in sitting in pain, but also artists suffer for their art and this is the gift I’m comfortable giving. It feels like what I’m supposed to do and I’m really happy that I get to do it.

BROWN: And you’ve performed this piece—

THOMAS: Eight times.

BROWN: Yeah, eight times. Wow.

THOMAS: This is the eighth time. 

BROWN: Are you tapping out after this?

THOMAS: I’m tapping out unless someone gives me money.

BROWN: [laughs] Does it feel different now versus the first time you did it?

THOMAS: Yeah, the first time I did it was so crazy. I didn’t know if it was going to work. I didn’t run through the tweet part of the show, and I just kind of let it happen. But now I know the show, I know the beats, and that feels really good. I feel really good. 

BROWN: Are the audience reactions relatively the same or different every time?

THOMAS: They’re different every time. People laughed a lot in this show, and usually there’s less laughter. I can feel people getting really serious. I love it when I can feel people getting really serious. I had new friends, old friends, internet friends in the audience, and that’s, like, how do I not feel at home during all of that?

BROWN: There was such a mix of people in the audience. There were two old men in front of me and a twenty-year-old girl beside me. I was like, “What is this crowd? I love it.” 

THOMAS: I don’t know. It’s so good. 

BROWN: What does prep look like the day of? What did you do today? 

THOMAS: I wake up, I wash my hair really good. I started tech at 11:30 am, and my friends are all working for free. Two of my best guy friends were ushers tonight. My friend Sara worked the board, and I just got to hang out with them all day. So it’s like nothing’s better than that. It’s so fun. And we ate Chick-fil-A, and it was kind of heaven.

BROWN: That’s awesome. And then what are you going to do after this? How do you decompress after a show like that? 

THOMAS: I usually stay up pretty late. I drink a Red Bull on stage.

BROWN: That’s what was in the wine glass.

THOMAS: Yeah, so I just kind of sit, and I’m like, “damn.” Every thought that I have is just, “damn.” But I hope that I am able to feel kind of different. I hope that I’m able to feel like I’ve moved on past this year.

BROWN: And are you still documenting? Is there going to be a part two, a 2026?

THOMAS: No.

BROWN: No? Never again?

THOMAS: No.

BROWN: Too much?

THOMAS: I don’t want to do a gimmick. I’m already writing stuff now that I’m interested in doing new stuff with. I am sure I’ll do this show again, but I think I just need a little break. I’ve been doing it every two weeks basically since the year started. The first show was on January 2nd.

BROWN: You put it all together that quickly?

THOMAS: Yeah.

BROWN: That’s wild. I kept thinking, “How is her computer not crashing right now?” The amount of tweets and clips you go through is crazy.

THOMAS: I started writing the show in the middle of January, and I finished it on my 27th birthday on December 21st. And then I finished the script, and finished writing the tweets on New Year’s.

BROWN: So you sort of envisioned it during the year or…?

THOMAS: No, I didn’t know this was going to happen. I mean, this all stemmed from a breakup, a brief relationship that I had, and I was so upset and confused that I had no choice but to bring it all out to the dance floor and bare my all.

BROWN: I loved watching you dance. Were you a dancer growing up?

THOMAS: No.

BROWN: Oh, really?

THOMAS: But my mom is a wedding singer and just like—

SPEAKER 3: Congratulations. That was great.

THOMAS: Thank you. I’ll let you play with my computer soon. 

SPEAKER 3: I’ll come over. Let’s hang out soon. 

THOMAS:  Yeah, okay. I love you.

BROWN: But yeah, I clocked the Dance Mom’s reference as well, and I was like…surely.

THOMAS: No dance experience, just comes through. I just like to move. I don’t know. I always thought that there was humor in the way that I danced but I guess, in the past couple of years, It’s just something that I do and I just like it. 

BROWN: You do it well.

THOMAS: Yeah. I like to dance. 

BROWN: Where’s the best place to dance in New York?

THOMAS: The best place to dance in New York is in your bedroom. It’s in my bedroom.

BROWN: Period. With a cute outfit on.

THOMAS: Sometimes, but usually I think I do my best dancing when I’m in my sweats.

BROWN: Are the baby bangs here to stay?

THOMAS: Absolutely forever. I think I’ll have them forever.

BROWN: Period.

THOMAS: Yeah, unless something happens to me. Unless I am in a fire and my hair gets burnt off.

[Another friend pops in.]

SPEAKER 4: Great job. I saw your show.

THOMAS: Thank you. Oh my god. Wait, did you like it? Did the girls like it? Did they come?

SPEAKER 4: Yeah, they’re right there. They liked it. They liked it a lot. I’m still processing, but—

THOMAS: Yeah, I’m still processing.

SPEAKER 4: It seems like it’s a lot for you, for everyone. How do you feel?

THOMAS: Crazy. Always.

SPEAKER 4: That’s not a bad thing necessarily.

THOMAS: No. I always feel crazy. Thank you for coming.

SPEAKER 4: Of course. Congrats.

BROWN: You have such a cute community. 

THOMAS: I love my friends. 

BROWN: What does your For You Page look like right now? You had a bit of a TikTok hiatus…

THOMAS: Yeah, I did. My For You Page… I am really interested in people who are documenting their life, and it ranges from mommy vloggers to schizophrenics. Those are my people.

BROWN: That’s a nice mix. 

THOMAS: It is.

BROWN: [laughs] Awesome. Well, I love that. Thank you for chatting with me. 

THOMAS: Oh my God. Thank you for coming. 

The post How Mackenzie Thomas’s Tweets Made a Sold-Out Theater Cry appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Coat and Belt Burberry

PinkPantheress used to hide. The 25-year-old British musician blew up on TikTok in 2021, making lo-fi drum‘n bass tracks on GarageBand while studying film in London. Face unseen, name a mystery. That era is over. She’s a pop star now, complete with elaborate music videos, a BRIT Award for Producer of the Year, and the kind of attention that follows you whether you want it or not. But PinkPantheress is still just a character. The person underneath rides the Tube, hangs out with her day ones, and has no interest in Nobu. As she tells her friend Clairo, the separation is the point.

———

WEDNESDAY 7 PM FEB. 25, 2026 LONDON

PINKPANTHERESS: How are you, gorgeous?

CLAIRO: I’m good. It’s good to see you. Why are you in the dark?

PINKPANTHERESS: I’m in my bedroom and I was just having an argument with my boyfriend, so I was like, “I need it to not be bright right now.” But I’ll make sure to ask the good, good.

CLAIRO: I thought I was interviewing you?

PINKPANTHERESS: Wait, what? I thought I was asking you!

CLAIRO: I have all my notes here.

PINKPANTHERESS: Bitch, I’m gagged! I was like, hold on.

CLAIRO: Girl, this is for you.

PINKPANTHERESS: [Laughs] Oh, thank god.

CLAIRO: Did you not know that?

PINKPANTHERESS: Claire, I don’t even know what day of the week it is.

CLAIRO: I have your whole life story written down anyway, so it’s perfect.

PINKPANTHERESS: Oh, fabulous. Thank you so much.

CLAIRO: Yay. Okay, so I made a timeline and I called it the Pink Pipeline. It’s everything I know. Your whole story, it’s so mystifying to me. You started as this anonymous underground producer hero, and then you had this face reveal and everyone was like, “Wow, she’s so stunning and hot.” And now you’re Grammy-nominated and you won Producer of the Year. You’re the first woman to win that at the BRITs. It’s so inspiring.

PINKPANTHERESS: Thank you.

Coat and Belt Burberry

CLAIRO: When I hear your story I think about some of my heroes, like Kate Bush, because she produced her own music. She was charting and a huge pop star, but then she stepped away from the spotlight and she’s remained this legend. So my question is, how do you feel about mystery? How do you feel about—

PINKPANTHERESS: Mystique.

CLAIRO: Yeah.

PINKPANTHERESS: That’s actually a question I had for you. [Laughs] I’ve always been shy and I think that’s something you can relate to. I wouldn’t call you introverted in real life, you’re very bubbly, and I’m bubbly too. But online we’re more understated. It’s a, “Let the music do the talking” kind of thing. Or at least that’s how I initially started, before all these silly internet mo- ments with me doing stupid shit.

CLAIRO: [Laughs]

PINKPANTHERESS: I never wanted to show my face because I didn’t want it to affect how my music was received. Not even because of pretty privilege. It was more like, “What if they don’t like how I look? What if they think it doesn’t match up with what they’re listening to?” I think the way I look has actually affected people’s willingness to listen to me. It’s helped me a lot, but it’s maybe made people not want to listen to me as well. I’m way more outside now, I’m more open with my opinions, but there’s part of me that wishes I didn’t do a lot of these things. Maybe it would’ve stunted my career, but sometimes I value mystique over everything else. It’s really beautiful to be someone who hides and then appears when a musical moment happens. Like Kate Bush. She’s one of my inspos as well.

CLAIRO: I do think it’s cool when you pop out and do everything when you’re promoting something. And then you can decide if you want to disappear again.

Mid-length Kensington Heritage Trench Coat in Coal Blue Burberry

PINKPANTHERESS: Yeah, for sure.

CLAIRO: The thing that sets you apart for me is that your music videos are always so intricate and huge, and I feel like they’ve become your trademark in a way. Do you think a lot about music videos when you’re making songs?

PINKPANTHERESS: The videos have been such a pivotal part of this era because I was like, “I’m going to try and do the pop thing.” So yes, I think of the videos before anything’s even materialized. I like to give people my ideas and then get the treatments. I studied film, so that’s part of it. I have the kind of brain that says, “This shot should be like this.”

CLAIRO: It’s so cool to watch someone go for everything. You have this confidence and you’re unafraid of going after the wilder ideas. It’s a nice reminder for me that you can actually do everything you want to.

PINKPANTHERESS: Yeah. One thing I’ve been talking to a lot of artists about is how labels these days are so stingy with budgets. I’m not trying to put my label on blast at all, but one of the issues with these videos is that some- times labels don’t trust artists enough with their money.

CLAIRO: That’s true.

PINKPANTHERESS: It’s very frustrating, because as much as the label provides a service, we provide a service. There is no money without the artist’s fan base, without the artists doing these live shows. It’s a very weird transactional relationship with your label where it’s like, “We’ll give you this money if this song does this well.” It removes a lot of the creativity. I have to do a lot of persuading. That’s the thing that upsets me the most about the process of music videos: someone has to approve the budget. I understand that music is a business, but it completely destroys my creative desire.

Mid-length Kensington Heritage Trench Coat in Coal Blue Burberry

CLAIRO: I understand, but also to anyone at home, I bet they wouldn’t even realize this would be a struggle for you because of how much success you’ve had.

PINKPANTHERESS: Of course.

CLAIRO: But now you can kind of stand 10 toes down on your ideas, watch them come to life, and prove them wrong when they doubt you.

PINKPANTHERESS: That’s 100 percent what it’s been. For example, my team didn’t want “Illegal” to be a single. Somebody from my label must’ve been like, “It’s crazy that you called that. None of us really saw it coming.” I’ve always made music based on my instincts. I produced “Pain.” I made “Break it off.” I knew these songs had a level of quality that people would admire. Now you can’t release an album before your label hears it, and if their opinions don’t match yours, sometimes you’ll knock heads. But it’s hard to trust them because it’s like, “My writing is the reason you signed me in the first place. Why would I need to change or alter anything about the song, if I’m the reason that I’m signed?”

CLAIRO: Having to defend your reasoning is so difficult, especially if it’s coming from an intuitive place. You have to really explain yourself.

PINKPANTHERESS: For sure.

Coat and Scarf Burberry

CLAIRO: So how’s the tour? You’re probably basically burnt out at this point—or are you on a roll?

PINKPANTHERESS: Funnily enough, I just did Laneway, which I know you did last year.

CLAIRO: Yeah.

PINKPANTHERESS: It was so much fun. But all those flights absolutely wrecked me. It really did feel like a little summer camp. But with each flight I was getting sicker and sicker. I even had a little chest infection, and the flights themselves are causing the illness. I have this chronic pain in my throat just from the dry cabin. Mentally I’m fine, but it’s taking a toll on my body. That means I look tired for shoots now, or in interviews I might have a scratchy throat, or I can’t record vocals.

CLAIRO: Right.

PINKPANTHERESS: I’m also getting a weird fatigue from seeing myself online. When I have too many clips going viral at once, I get really in my head. Even if it’s great things, all the eyes on me can be really terrifying. I’m always on such high alert like, “Oh my god, what can I expect today?” That’s been quite overwhelming. Have you been okay mentally?

CLAIRO: I haven’t been doing anything, so I’m fine. [Laughs] But I get burnt out really easily. I get sick every two weeks on tour.

PINKPANTHERESS: It’s horrible.

CLAIRO: Yeah, it takes a certain amount of stamina and confidence and trust in the entire rollout. I like that you take your time with your projects, but then fully immerse yourself.

Coat and Scarf Burberry

PINKPANTHERESS: I appreciate that. When I said there are parallels between me and you, I think it’s that at the core of who we are, the music is what leads. Obviously there are people who do an album a year and it’s great, but I need time to research how to produce a certain way, or what to tap into. I try to study the music I’m about to make, so I really immerse myself in a specific sound for a few months or a year. And it goes without saying I want to be able to live a normal life for a little bit. [Laughs]

CLAIRO: That’s where privacy and mystery comes in. Because ultimately it’s very hard to do it when you are so outside.

PINKPANTHERESS: I completely agree with you. When I tell people that, for example, I go on the Tube, they’re always like, “What? When the Hannah Montana wig is off, I’m just an ex-student of UAL [University of the Arts London]. I go out with my graphic designer friends. I’m not at Nobu. I have some eccentricities, but at my core I’m a very simple person, and “simple” and “pop star” are terms people don’t associate together.

CLAIRO: I feel that. I’ve seen you talk about branding and how important it is. That’s something I sort of learned around my last record. If you’re a private person but you have this look or brand, you can hide behind it and find protection and be confident. I can take it off and just be normal, not feel so pressured to keep it up 24/7.

PINKPANTHERESS: That’s one of the reasons I’m so happy my stage name is not my real name. There needs to be some separation—that’s why I can go so hard with these music videos. Because in my head I’m like, well, this isn’t me on the regular, this is me playing into a character. I have to be Pink when I’m onstage dancing, otherwise I go crazy. I lose my sense of self.

CLAIRO: How do you deal with mis- conceptions? Are you like, “Well, they’re criticizing the character, it’s not me?” Or are you like, “Wait, we are the same person, and this does hurt my feelings?” When people criticize my music, I’m okay with it. When people criticize who I am, or my character, I do get a little upset. I take everything personally.

PINKPANTHERESS: I agree with you. I was struggling with my sense of self before this whole branding thing. I didn’t know how I should look. I didn’t really care about styling myself. People used to say I dressed really badly because I didn’t care what I put on. But then it’s like, you’re a pop star, so now you do need to fill in these roles. When I’m in the makeup chair I’m like, “I hate all these products on me but I know I need this makeup because I have to be camera ready.” I have to remove myself.

CLAIRO: It’s out of body.

PINKPANTHERESS: It’s easy to feel bogged down, but my job has only made me so much stronger and better as a person. With fame, people can actually go down really dark roads, and it can lead to self-destruction. But I’ve been lucky enough to say that it’s done nothing but build me into a much better version of myself.

CLAIRO: That’s beautiful. Real diligence got you to this place. And for you to be celebrated for that is such an amazing feeling. You being the first woman to win Producer of the Year [at the 2026 BRIT Awards], on top of this year you’ve already had, is the coolest thing to me.

PINKPANTHERESS: Yeah. Even though there are a lot of front-facing female producers, I feel like a lot of people don’t even know what production is. Genuinely, people were commenting, “What does this mean?” I’ve always been very open about the fact that my skill lies solely in production. If you listen to me expecting good vocals—that’s not what people listen to me for. So when I read people saying, “She can’t sing. Why are we even paying attention?” I’m like, honey, that’s not why people are paying attention. With this award I’m just like, “Thank god I’m being recognized for the thing I actually do best.”

CLAIRO: It’s probably the most full-circle type of recognition you could get.

Long Kensington Heritage Trench Coat in Honey, Shirt, and Shoes Burberry

PINKPANTHERESS: Wait, actually, I was going to ask you, do you produce your own tracks?

CLAIRO: Yeah. That’s why I’ve been so invested in your story. I’m very opinionated in the studio. Nothing flies without my knowledge. Every single thing that’s being added on is through my filter and the filter of people I trust. We’re building up the songs from nothing. That’s why it’s so inspiring to see you win this award. This is what so many girls have been doing in their rooms for so long, and it feels so great to see someone win.

PINKPANTHERESS: Well, I love all your output. And I love watching people review your project because I’m such a nerd. I watched a sample breakdown of your whole thing, and it was fantastic. But I will have to say, yes women producers. I’m shocked that I’m the first winner of this award.

CLAIRO: It matters so much.

PINKPANTHERESS: It does matter. I know it’s the BRITs, but I’m like, “Why hasn’t Claire been nominated? Why hasn’t Rosalía or Imogen Heap won this award yet?” I keep thinking of all the women before me and I’m like, “Why am I the first one?” But I’m grateful for it, and thank you so much, Claire. You know I love you.

CLAIRO: No, I love you. And I’m so obsessed with your work and all your opinions, and all the things you give other young artists and peers. What you offer is so valuable and so cool. It was great talking to you. Go get some sleep.

PINKPANTHERESS: Oh, girl. I need it. Thank you so much, Claire.

———

Hair: Anoushka Danielle using Color Wow.

Makeup: Joy Adenuga at Forward Artists.

Nails: Michelle Class using Joonbyrd.

Tailor: Ellen Poppy.

Photography Assistants: Will Bruce and Martin Eito.

Fashion Assistant: Virginia Pensiero.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

On-set Production: Indy Davy.

Post-production: Grain Post Production.

Location: 63 Sun Studio.

Special Thanks: Blondie’s Bar.

The post PinkPantheress Tells Clairo Why It’s All an Act appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Daniel Goldhaber, photographed by Jason Lester.

Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s latest film, a meditation on modern censorship, has itself been repeatedly censored. It’s been (another) long road for the collaborators, who finished their new slasher, Faces of Death, two years ago, only to have it mysteriously pulled from SXSW just three days before its premiere. IFC eventually stepped in to shepherd it toward release, but the setbacks didn’t stop there: disputes with MPPC over whether the original content could be shown, posters flagged and pulled, trailers buried behind YouTube bans. It’s a bleakly comic run of obstacles, though when I met Goldhaber for coffee last week, he seemed more amused by the irony than defeated by it.

After a prolonged limbo, Faces of Death has finally surfaced. Starring Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, and Josie Totah, the film reimagines the infamous 1978 VHS snuff tape by the same name for a world governed by algorithms. What was once passed hand-to-hand in the basements of defiant teenagers is now ambiently available online, always within reach. The film, out in theaters this Friday, continues the duo’s taste for provocation, following the success and backlash of How To Blow Up a Pipeline. In conversation, Goldhaber and I dive into the attention economy, content moderation as a political choice, and assassinating our tech overlords.

———

EMILY SANDSTROM: Well, congratulations. How are you feeling?

DANIEL GOLDHABER: I’m feeling good. I mean, it’s been such a long road. It’s been seven years.

SANDSTROM: Tell me where this all began?

GOLDHABER: We got an email from our agent at CAA in 2019, saying, “Legendary has the remake rights to Faces of Death. Are you interested?” And Isa, who I made Cam with, and I wanted to continue working together. We’d sold a couple of other things on a small-scale level, but Faces was our first proper studio job.

SANDSTROM: Had you seen the movie before you were approached?

GOLDHABER: No, we hadn’t. We went back and watched it and realized we’d definitely seen clips of it online. There’s a brilliant exec at Legendary, John Silk, who had the idea alongside us that Faces of Death is now online, but really, it’s kind of everywhere. Thinking of it as exploitable IP is a pretty galaxy-brained, insane thing for a corporation to do. That’s something we tried to fold into the movie itself: essentially, a private equity mindset. Legendary saying, “There’s value to extract from this fake snuff film compilation from 1978 because of its name recognition.” From the beginning, we felt a successful version of the movie would leave the audience wondering if it should exist at all. It felt like thumbing our nose at the studio a bit, which ultimately caught up with us and made the film harder to release.

SANDSTROM: Yeah, tell me about the delays. 

Photo by Isa Mazzei.

GOLDHABER: There’s only so much I can get into. It took about a year to get the studio to prove the casting in the movie. Then we shot the film and then edited the movie, but it was a challenging process because the strikes happened. We were two-thirds of the way through our production, and Isa was pulled off set, and so I had to do the last third without her, and also without the ability to write anything. Then we finally finished the film, and we were supposed to premiere at SXSW in 2024. And for reasons that I can’t get into, the film was pulled from the festival three days before the lineup was announced. Then it took two years for us to find a distributor. We had to fight very hard.

SANDSTROM: You’re making me feel conspiratorial.

GOLDHABER: I would say it was a problem of censorship and of corporate interference. I’ll leave it at that. 

SANDSTROM: What happened next?

GOLDHABER: Eventually it was seen at IFC, and they were very passionate about it, but it took them some time. They fought really hard to be able to release this movie. And then finally we dropped our first teaser, and it immediately got banned from YouTube. 

SANDSTROM: I saw you post about that, yeah.

GOLDHABER: Yeah, that wasn’t the marketing. It was annoying. It’s not trafficking on YouTube because they essentially put the movie behind a 17+ screen wall, which means it won’t embed on websites, for all of our marketing materials. We had our own censorship battles with the MPAA too. But the point is that we’ve had trouble marketing the movie, and our materials have gotten banned and taken down.

SANDSTROM: How do you feel about that?

GOLDHABER: On one hand, I think it’s an exciting narrative for the movie, since the movie’s about censorship. We also got into a censorship issue with the MPAA about the hammerhead scene, when Margo’s moderating. They forced us to cut a section where you see the scalp get peeled back and flopped out from the moderation sequence. 

SANDSTROM: Yes, my hand was covering my eyes for that.

GOLDHABER: But like 15 minutes later in the movie, Charli [XCX] shows her phone that has the exact moment that they had forced us to cut from the moderation feed. I think ultimately what the MPAA did not care for is the fact that we’re placing the hypocrisy of moderation around violent imagery at the forefront. That’s what they forced us to cut down. But the actual material itself they had no problem with 10 minutes later in the film. 

SANDSTROM: Super interesting.

Courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder.

GOLDHABER: It’s the same thing with the posters they had banned. You have multiple posters out in theaters right now with heroines head to toe in blood. MPAA has no problem with that. But you have a poster that has an out-of-focus, bloody face in the background with a censored icon over it, then all of a sudden they’re taking issue.

SANDSTROM: It sounds like you’ve been on a journey. You also worked briefly as a content moderator yourself, right?

GOLDHABER: Yes, over a summer for a startup that my friends had. 

SANDSTROM: What was that like?

GOLDHABER: It was really disturbing. Aside from the child pornography, it was all stuff that I had encountered on the internet at one point or another. Usually if you run into fucked up footage on the internet, you go looking for it. But to suddenly see it blasted at you, you start really thinking about who’s on the other side. Why are they posting this? The first two or three times I was monitoring the feed, I was really horrified. You get off work after doing it for four to six hours and you feel nauseous. I have friends now that work in moderation, and one of them saw Faces of Death and said that the most realistic aspect of the film is Margot’s dead-eyed stare. That’s an idea that we’re trying to communicate in the movie, how we all adjust so quickly. But the biggest inspiration I took away from working as a content moderator was simply thinking, this is a cool job for somebody to have who then runs into some sort of a mystery.

SANDSTROM: Right.

GOLDHABER: But there’s nothing that Margot sees when she’s moderating, outside of the pornography, that isn’t familiar to what we all see on our content feeds all the time. Moderation is, by and large, a smokescreen job. It can very quickly and easily become a vehicle by which these companies also enact censorship. You can even just literally see in the [Sam] Altman-[Mark] Zuckerberg case, Zuckerberg being like, “Don’t worry. We’ve got our team on taking down anybody trying to dox or target people working for DOGE,” which is kind of not really the point of these platforms. You should have every right to discuss the identities of people working for the government. 

SANDSTROM: Right, it’s a political decision not to. 

GOLDHABER: Yeah, it’s a political decision, and yet these human-run moderation divisions are also the exact people enacted to monitor undesirable speech on the apps, which the movie also talks about. 

SANDSTROM: Do you feel detached from the film at all since it’s taken such a long time to come out?

Courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder.

GOLDHABER: It’s complicated. I thought I would maybe feel a little more detached than I do, but what the movie has to say is something that I still feel really passionate about. There’s also a lot of technical things about this movie that I’m extremely proud of. There are sequences in this film that I think are the best sequences I’ve ever made. And I got to shoot on 35-millimeter, and we’re exhibiting prints, and I’m getting a 2000-screen wide release. This is all awesome and I’m lucky to be able to make movies on this scale, but I also think that I have always believed in trying to make films that push forward the cultural conversation from a formal standpoint, from an aesthetic standpoint, from a thematic standpoint. I’m always trying to do something that’s new on every level. And now more than ever, there is a tremendous amount of resistance from the establishment towards any idea that is socially confrontational. 

SANDSTROM: Do you feel like you’re meeting a lot of filmmakers that are willing to go against the grain in the same way? Or do you think there’s so much anxiety that people just want to get anything made at this point?

GOLDHABER: Most filmmakers I know are having difficulty getting the projects that they feel most excited about. Even when those are projects that have a strong commercial motor, there just are so few buyers. Distributing movies is really challenging. We want to get young people in the movie theaters. Ultimately, it needs to be young people, not just making the movies but running the studios, running the distribution companies, running the financing. You’d see a much stronger command of how to actually connect with young people.

SANDSTROM: Let’s talk about the film’s marketing. 

GOLDHABER: I think the marketing has been really reflective of what the movie is. When marketing is at its best, it drives a participatory atmosphere in the target audience and in the culture. Being able to do that means being able to craft a narrative and an aesthetic, but it also is about understanding how to actually reach that audience. The core audience of this movie is people who saw this VHS tape when they were 15 in their best friend’s basement and were traumatized by it, and they’re a horror fan and want to revisit that experience 30, or 40 years later, right? It’s also a young audience. It is people who grew up seeing Barbie [Ferreira] and Dacre [Montgomery] and Josie [Totah] on their TV’s, that are now really excited to see them in a fucked up horror movie.

SANDSTROM: What were you thinking about when you were writing Margo [Barbie Ferreria] and Arthur [Dacre Montgomery]?

GOLDHABER: Margot and Arthur for us were always seen as two sides of the same coin: Somebody who’s fallen victim to the temptations of the internet and somebody who wants to exploit them. For Margo, it was really important to feel like there was a person in this role who was an authentic human being. She feels like just a young queer person with a shitty job living in New Orleans. And Barbie was so game that she just always wanted to look like shit. She was like, “This girl isn’t cool, she doesn’t go out.” She really wanted to live that role and inhabit it to the fullest.

SANDSTROM: Right. 

GOLDHABER: When you look at the circumstances of a lot of places in America–the social alienation, the economic disenfranchisement combined with like our gun laws, these explosive acts of violence become almost inevitable. And when it comes to Arthur, you have something that springs from a very similar source. I really want people to be looking at his surroundings. This house that he lives in, his neighborhood. He claims his parents have recently died, and everything he owns is something that he ordered from the internet. He wants attention for what reason? Because this is somebody who’s actually never been able to connect with anybody in his life.

Courtesy of Independent Film Company and Shudder.

SANDSTROM: So you’re really looking at him as a product of his geography.

GOLDHABER: Exactly. Faces of Death was also a meditation on how the American suburbs mediates the intersection of violence and alienation. 

SANDSTROM: Some of those shots of the suburbs are just jarring at the end. They’re very difficult and uncanny.

GOLDHABER: Right. Then there’s also, he’s got a Hitler painting up in his house.

SANDSTROM: Right. And he looks a little… He looks a little …

GOLDHABER: He looks a little fasc.

SANDSTROM: Yeah. He looks a little fasc.

GOLDHABER: And that was all on purpose.

SANDSTROM: Do you find conversations about the attention economy generally interesting?

GOLDHABER: I do. I mean, it’s the number one thing that’s motivating Arthur, right? A huge swath of our company has decided that we place a premium on the value of people’s attention. That’s one of the last scarce resources capitalism can still exploit to create corporate value. And one of the greatest ways to get lots of attention very quickly is by committing an act of mass violence. So we have set the economic principle that committing an act of mass violence means that you have increased value as a person.

SANDSTROM: What did you think about the recent Meta case?

GOLDHABER: It’s a travesty that they were fined six million dollars. I think that’s insane.

SANDSTROM: Tell me more.

Photo by Adam Hendricks.

GOLDHABER: I mean, it’s great that there was a little bit of a legal precedent established to say that these algorithms are damaging, but the problem is that went hand in hand with a six million dollar fine. On some level, the message is being sent that this is acceptable. The number of people that that behavior reaches, it should be a fine in the tens or hundreds of billions. A six million dollar fine is barely a rounding error. It’s an insignificant amount of money.

SANDSTROM: Yeah. I would at the least love to see some money used to go back into schools.

GOLDHABER: These people should be in prison.

SANDSTROM: You feel that way?

GOLDHABER: [Laughs] 100%. I do believe in the carceral system for the people that run social media companies. We pretend that the algorithm is just some machine thing that has a mind of its own that we have no control over. The algorithm is fed incentives. We tell it what to do. We tell it what matters. We tell it how it makes money. These are human inputs that make these decisions. You could decide that the most important thing is not keeping people on their phones 24/7. When you look at all the science on how devastating social media is—for brains, for culture, and even people’s ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness—it’s hard not to see it as one of the greatest disruptions and destructions of human life in history. 

SANDSTROM: What’s next for you?

GOLDHABER: What I’m most passionate about is showing people what they haven’t seen before—how so much media and systemic design is built to obfuscate the ways our world is slowly eating away at us, disempowering us, driving us apart, and destroying the environment. We’re made to feel powerless. I’m interested in exposing those systems. Not in a didactic way, but in an emotional, immersive, cinematic, and deeply human way that gives people a sense that there’s something they can do about it. I also have a film with Regency on the horizon. It’s a lovers-on-the-run story, but with a fresh take.

The post <i>Faces of Death</i> — a Film About Censorship — Is Being Censored appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Photo courtesy of Patrick Radden Keefe.

Children are often liars. Whether to fit in, to stand out, or to appease their own imaginations. We extend them grace on account of their innocence. But at what point does that impulse calcify into something compulsive, abnormal, or even dangerous? The question has preoccupied Patrick Radden Keefe since he first encountered the story of Zac Brettler, the 19-year-old Londoner who plummeted to his death from the fifth floor of a high-rise after spending years fabricating an identity as the billionaire son of a Russian oligarch. First published as an explosive piece of reporting in The New Yorker in 2024, the story became the seed of London Falling, a book-length excavation of Brettler’s dizzying architecture of lies.

Working closely with Zac’s parents and friends (but notably without the help of Scotland Yard) Keefe traces how a teenage fantasy of extreme wealth metabolized into a full-blown double life. In the process, Keefe uncovered a London transformed by dark money, reminiscent of the cartel-haunted fog of Mexico he reported on fifteen years ago, as he explained to his friend Issy Wood on the phone last week. In conversation, the two got to talking about the childhood urge for fabrication, the manosphere, and London’s gradual transformation into a glittering playground for oligarchs.

———

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Hey.

ISSY WOOD: Hi. This is weird. 

RADDEN KEEFE: I don’t think we’ve ever communicated this way.

WOOD: No, we’re mainly just text and restaurants.

RADDEN KEEFE: And walks.

WOOD: Also walks. I’m still very honored and a bit confused that you wanted me to be the one to do this. 

RADDEN KEEFE: Oh, come on. 

WOOD: I mean, it’s very special for me because we saw a lot of each other when you were in London shooting Say Nothing. And that was around the time that you heard about this story. I remember every time we’d try to meet up, you’d be like, “I can’t do tonight, because I’m chasing some police guy that doesn’t want to speak.” Should we talk about how we met?

RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah. I’m going to reconstruct this, and you tell me if I get it right. I was writing about Larry Gagosian for The New Yorker, and it turns out we have a bunch of mutual friends. But the one who gets all the credit is Naomi Fry who said I should talk to you because you had a complicated dynamic with Larry. He basically wanted you to become one of his artists and you flirted with the idea, but ultimately decided against it. Does that feel like a fair characterization?

WOOD: Yeah. 

RADDEN KEEFE: So we ended up talking a lot about Larry and you told this amazing story about being at a party at his place in New York coming out of COVID and everybody was in a celebratory mood.

WOOD: Yeah, freshly vaccinated.

RADDEN KEEFE: You talked about how at the end of the night, Larry was drunk and he kept shouting at his staff to play Aerosmith. And he was very cooperative with the profile, but during the fact-checking, there was one thing that he really took strenuous issue with. It’s my favorite parenthetical denial of all time, “Gagosian denies that he was drunk or requested Aerosmith.” And after the piece came out, Al Freeman Jr. then painted that line just onto a square of paper. I ended up buying it and it now adorns my bathroom downstairs.

WOOD: Ah. The Gagosian profile turned you into an art collector.

RADDEN KEEFE: Exactly. 

WOOD: I was wondering if you were maybe slightly more disgusted by the art world than the world of Zac Brettler and the London gangster milieu that he participated in briefly.

RADDEN KEEFE: They’re so adjacent. Well, let me back up for a second. For people who know nothing about the book, it’s about this kid Zac Brettler who was an upper middle-class teenager growing up in Maida Vale in London and went to a fancy private school in the northern outskirts of the city. Some of his classmates were the children of post-Soviet oligarchs and, as a teenager, he got very taken with the whole money culture in London. So supercars, designer clothes, and Mayfair, and private nightclubs. And he ends up, unbeknownst to his parents, adopting this alter ego. 

WOOD: Including a Russian accent in some cases.

RADDEN KEEFE: Yes, pretending that he is the son of a Russian oligarch and that his name is not Zac Brettler, but Zac Ismailov. He has this aspirational sense that there’s always another room you could be getting into. There’s always a more exclusive circle. There’s always a nicer car, a nicer house, a nicer watch you could own.

WOOD: Remind me briefly, which character in the book named his children after tax havens?

RADDEN KEEFE: [Laughs] Yes. So, One Hyde Park is this big, splashy, sterile development that’s hard to miss. It’s this monstrosity that’s plunked down there, and Zac pretended that he lived there. That building was developed by the Candy Brothers who started when they’re really young, kitting out luxury apartments for Russian oligarchs and then helping them build things and source real estate. And one of them seems to have named his two children after tax havens, a daughter named Isabelle Monaco and a son named Cayman.

WOOD: But he claims that Cayman is actually from a Porsche model rather than the islands.

RADDEN KEEFE: Yes.

WOOD: As if that’s in any way better?

RADDEN KEEFE: Well the punchline is like, “Of course, I would never name my child after the Cayman Islands. He’s named after the Porsche Cayman.”

WOOD: There are some very good, and very necessary, moments of comic relief in what is otherwise a very dark book. I was thinking about what I’ve taken away from it, and one conclusion is that London is—well, I suppose the legal term is dodgy-as-fuck.

RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah. I lived in London from 2000 to 2001 and I’ve been coming back at least once a year since then, and I feel as though the whole culture of the place has changed. Some of it is a generational thing, but there’s a ubiquity of luxury consumer goods. Even Mayfair feels different now.

WOOD: For sure. When I was in Qatar recently, I spent half my time trying to work out if Qatar was how it is because of Mayfair, or if Mayfair is how it is because of Qatar. I was like, “I’m in the same place with slightly different colors.”

RADDEN KEEFE: Right.

WOOD: Did you lie as a teenager?

RADDEN KEEFE: I did. I lied in the casual way that kids do, but not in the pathological way that Zac Brettler did. Zac was an extravagantly accomplished liar. I mean, this is somebody who would meet Russians and pretend that he was Russian. It boggles the mind to think about it. And he started really young. I spoke to people who knew him when he first arrived at Mill Hill, the school he attended at 13, and he would tell them his mother had died. My sense is he did this because he intuited that people make themselves emotionally available to someone they believe has suffered that kind of loss. It was a sort of shortcut to intimacy. So, on the one hand, he was in a class of his own when it came to lying. On the other hand, everybody lies.

WOOD: Yeah. I don’t know how innocent lying becomes pathological, whether it’s fated from the jump if you have that capacity, or whether it’s just the case of the first few lies having such pleasant results.

RADDEN KEEFE: Sometimes you get trapped in it. 

WOOD: I can’t remember who said this, but you marry your lies. It is your longest relationship.

RADDEN KEEFE: That’s a great line. I wrote a whole book about Gerry Adams claiming that he was never in the IRA [Say Nothing], and it becomes more and more ridiculous for him to say that. But I think that when he started telling the lie, he didn’t have any sense that he was going to marry it, or live with it forever.

WOOD: In the case of Zac, the escalation of it is shocking. I told a lot of lies as a teenager also.

RADDEN KEEFE: What kinds of lies?

WOOD: I mean, I was a child and a teenager with anorexia, which is to live in a constant state of lying about what you’ve eaten, about what you haven’t eaten. You lie to yourself, primarily. So, it’s a very dishonest state to begin with. But I remember the most insane lie I ever told was, I had never had sex, but I claimed that I had gotten pregnant and that I’d had an abortion.

RADDEN KEEFE: Wow.

WOOD: I grew up in Portsmouth on the south coast. It was a very rough football hooligan town, but it had so many teen pregnancies. There was something in me that just wanted to be part of that conversation. So I gave myself a kind of immaculate conception and a fictional abortion. It narrowed my already very narrow friendship base. There was not one person that ever believed it. I believed it the most.

RADDEN KEEFE: So, it was a situation where you told people and they just didn’t buy it?

WOOD: No. My appearance didn’t match this kind of thing. But it’s a relief to tell that story now because it was such a wild thing to do.

RADDEN KEEFE: But this is partially adolescence. 

WOOD: It is. I came up with this weird theory: I wonder if little girls primarily tell lies to try and fit in, and little boys primarily tell lies to try and stand out.

RADDEN KEEFE: Oh, interesting.

WOOD: But I mean, you’re a father of two sons, so you probably know this slightly better than I would.

RADDEN KEEFE: It’s funny because I think, if anything, their impulse is to fit in. Whereas in Zac’s case, the last thing he wanted to do was be another one of the teenagers in his school.

WOOD: What is your relationship like with Zac’s parents now?

RADDEN KEEFE: It’s great. It’s often the case that I’m writing about people who don’t want me to, or who are dead, or sometimes who are threatening to sue me. But in this case, they really opened themselves up to me. We spent hundreds of hours talking over the years about this very intimate stuff, and at times it could feel like therapy. But I had to keep reminding them it’s not therapy. We’re doing this intimate thing here in the dark, but eventually I’m going to turn on all the lights and open the blinds.

WOOD: Yeah. 

RADDEN KEEFE: There’s also this strange situation which they are about to experience where they might be on the tube and they see somebody reading the book. There’s that weird asymmetry where they don’t know anything about the person, but the person feels as though they’ve actually lived those years with the Brettlers. It’s strange.

WOOD: Right. And it’s hard to describe fame. It’s like a one-way mirror. 

RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah. It’s strange for the parents to have that. One of the things that really interested me was the parents investigating their son’s death. He goes off the balcony of this luxury building into the Thames. It’s unclear, is this a suicide? Is it murder? Is it something more exotic? The parents trust Scotland Yard to get to the bottom of it, but then there’s this gradual awareness that the police aren’t actually going to come and help. So they have to try and work it out themselves. That was really interesting to me as a dynamic. They’re incredibly invested, but they also get pulled into this underworld in London inside the city they hadn’t known. 

WOOD: Oddly, your book has given me an extra fondness for London, which is the complete opposite reaction I was probably supposed to have. I’ve also been wondering what Zac Brettler would’ve thought of the Manosphere, having watched the Louis Theroux documentary so recently. I mean, your sons will probably know more about that world than you do.

RADDEN KEEFE: Well, it’s not that it’s their world exactly, but if you’re a kid and you’re online, you’re swimming in that water.

WOOD: Inevitably. And it involves, again, these aspirational signs of wealth. Houses, employing OnlyFans girls. 

RADDEN KEEFE: Yes. Zac, it appears, was doing a little bit of drug dealing. I think mostly prescription stuff. But one of his friends told me it was to a bunch of OnlyFans models and what have you. The funny thing is it’s all these macho guys peacocking around and talking about getting girls, but mostly what they want to do is spend all their time with other men, not girls.

WOOD: Right. Even just getting their teeth done, and the gym, and using steroids. These are gender-affirming procedures. It’s almost like drag. It’s very ostentatious in a way. That used to be young women, I think, more than men. I’m curious to know why it’s now happening to men.

RADDEN KEEFE: Why do you think?

WOOD: Sometimes I think that the promise of feminism was that we send women into the workplace, but men didn’t promise to go along with their share of the household stuff. That plus the industrial revolution means that men don’t really work with their hands anymore. I think that’s made for a perfect storm of lack of purpose. I mean, in the case of Zac, being that lost was very dangerous.

RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah. I don’t want to give in to this particular moral panic and yet, at the same time, it’s undeniable that our lives are so mediated by our phones and by an algorithm. They have this undertow quality where you just get sucked deeper and deeper into whatever your preoccupation is. 

WOOD: Right. There’s an endless supply. Pick your poison. Do you think Zac killed himself? 

RADDEN KEEFE: I don’t. I’m certain that he didn’t. I think he jumped to escape. The guy that he was in that apartment with was a very, very dangerous guy. And the more that I know about that individual — who I think on that particular night was in the process of figuring out that this kid was actually not the billionaire son of a Russian oligarch — the more I think he was trying to get out of there alive.

WOOD: I mean, it’s a great book because it functions like a Rorschach blot for conspiratorial thinking. I’d be very curious to see what people project onto it, given that we’re in a golden age of conspiracies right now.

RADDEN KEEFE: Exactly. I remember years ago writing for The New Yorker on Mexican drug cartels. During fact-checking, people in Mexico would roll their eyes and say, “You’re never going to get to the truth. It’s all a fog of conspiracy and innuendo. Some things just aren’t knowable.” And I remember, somewhat naively, thinking from an American point of view, “No, certain things are knowable.” They’d say, “A former president took a 60 million bribe, or maybe he didn’t. Who knows?” And I’d think, “That’s impossible. You have to be able to get an answer to something like that.” Now, though, London or New York feel more like Mexico did to me 15 years ago. There’s this sense that maybe it was a murder, maybe a conspiracy, maybe someone was working with authorities, maybe people at the highest levels were involved. But we’ll never know.

WOOD: Well, I look forward to hearing Dua Lipa’s take on this.

RADDEN KEEFE: So do I. Let’s see if she has one.

WOOD: The only review I care about.

RADDEN KEEFE: Me too. This has been so much fun.

The post Patrick Radden Keefe on <i>London Falling</i> and the Architecture of a Lie appeared first on Interview Magazine.

photography shot by Kate Owen @thekateowen

It’s difficult to catch Yosef Munro. The Nines, NoHo’s red-hued, maximally plush, celeb-packed lounge and piano bar, where Munro, 41, has been a piano man since its opening in 2022, is “selective,” if we’re being polite about it. Should one make it through the thick velvet curtains, they’ll encounter Munro’s nimble, nuanced takes on Chaka Khan, or Luther Vandross, making the place come alive. It’s less tricky, and far more likely, to hear recorded expressions of the classically trained jazz pianist and composer: he’s written jingles for Shake Shack and scored ads for Adidas; brands like Cartier hire him to play their parties; he designs sound for apps like Chess.com. The man is a sonic Willy Wonka, with beats, effects, and chord progressions as his sugars. This month, Munro added another confection, releasing an album, Just Trust, as Gooskii (he’s made several piano records under his own name). It’s a fervent, thoughtful octet of tracks, wherein simple drum loops ascend to formidable, crescending dance beats that touch on electro, industrial, and noise as they make a poppy landing in Munro’s commanding vocals. It’s electro pop, but not; jazzy house that would find a happy home on a road trip, or in a crowded club. It’s a chance to catch Yosef Munro, even if it’s not in a chic Manhattan nightspot, and even if it’s not quite Yosef Munro. It’s Gooskii.

———

JOHN ORTVED: What’s a Gooskii?

YOSEF MUNRO: Names, they’re always a struggle. It’s hard to come up with something that feels cool, that other people like, that hasn’t been done, that’s not on the nose, that’s not stupid, that’s not too weird. There’s a bar in Pittsburgh called Gooski that I used to go to when I was “21.” I added an “i,” which I think is cheeky, makes it my own, and codes it as an electronic artist. And it sounds like the name I was called growing up, “Yossi.” It feels funny and insane, because I love this work, but I’m trying not to take it too seriously.

ORTVED: Why not?

MUNRO: If I spend too much time on it, then I never put it out; I put it aside, and it dies on an old hard drive. I’m great at starting projects. I’m terrible at finishing them.

ORTVED: You wouldn’t be the first artist to experience that. Except Taylor Swift. She’s perfect.

MUNRO: She’s definitely prolific.

ORTVED: Is there any Pittsburgh sound in this record? 

MUNRO: There’s some of the Rust Belt in the whole tapestry of esthetics that I come out of as a person and an artist.

ORTVED: I can’t tell if you’re more like Art Blakey or Trent Reznor, part two, the Oscar-winning composer.

MUNRO: I would never compare myself to either one, because those are two greats. My background is jazz. Coming to New York in 2008, I started to leave the jazz world, and slowly get more of a foot into noise, metal, rock, dance music, electronic, underground stuff. 

ORTVED: You say this is “Death Jazz.”

MUNRO: On Spotify, that’s Gooskii’s bio. I like the contradiction of those two phrases, but I really am a big fan of death metal. And my background is jazz. Death Jazz was not totally inappropriate, at least in the persona of Gooskii.

ORTVED: Persona?

MUNRO: This is the first time I’m doing anything that’s not under my name, and it feels like a different person. I’m running this stuff in my home studio, but I can definitely imagine singing this on stage. 

ORTVED: Why now for an album?

MUNRO: It’s a combination of AI generated stuff saturating things, and feeling sad about that, and feeling like I have to make up for lost time. I think there will always be a market for music that’s made by people. 

ORTVED: There’s a tension there, because you’re anticipating a need for man-made music. Yet, in every Gooskii track, every beat, there’s machines. 

MUNRO: Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when synthesizers started to be used heavily in popular music, critics said “This is not man-made.” The difference, versus AI generative stuff, is that I had to learn what a signature is, what chords work well. There’s a combination of education and taste. The impetus, the soul of it, is coming from my brain. I also execute. 

ORTVED: I hear some classic electronic references here, going back to Kraftwerk and Wendy Carlos.

MUNRO: That’s intentional. There are classic drum machine sounds: Linn drum, 606s, 707s. 

photography shot by Kate Owen @thekateowen

ORTVED: Where did the album’s name Just Trust come from?

MUNRO: That’s something that’s come into my personal and spiritual lexicon over the past few years as I’ve dealt with things that scare me, like scuba diving, martial arts, taking my motorcycle out on to the highway. “Just trust” became a bit of a mantra. It sounds simpler than it is; it took practice.

ORTVED: Scuba diving?

MUNRO: In 2021 my wife, Hannah, and I were in Tobago for the holidays. Everything was closed due to COVID, including the beaches, so there was nothing to do besides walk around the jungle or dive with the local shop. I’d spent my whole life convinced I had a phobia of deep water. After that trip, I was like, “Wait, I fucking love diving.” I got an advanced certification in 2023. 

ORTVED: Do you see yourself performing this album? 

MUNRO: If it happens, it will be behind two decks at a smaller venue: Maybe with a drummer, and I’d have a keyboard. My aim for this project is to kind of put out music, not necessarily perform it. Someone would have to ask me to do it, and then I’d figure it out.

ORTVED: I’d like to hear it at The Nines, where you’ve played for some very discerning ears.

MUNRO: I love that piano, I love that room, I love the other piano players, and I really love the team there. 

ORTVED: Does your work at the Nines translate into making this album, or are they worlds apart?

MUNRO: A lot of times when I finish a song, I linger on the last note, but don’t cut the pedal. I’ll improvise something. I’ll land on a jazz standard, or Dolly Parton, but in those improvisational moments, it’s very stream of consciousness. That process is similar to when I sit at home and I’m starting a new Gooskii track. I’ll turn on my Prophet, which is a synthesizer, and I’ll just kind of play around: vibe on a chord progression, or play with a rhythm as a baseline and see if it works.

ORTVED: There’s that same risk in improvisation–you just have to just trust and then let it go.

MUNRO: Yes. And honestly, I feel really great about what came out. And that’s not because I think it’s perfect. It’s because I think it’s not.

The post Who Is Gooskii? appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Jacket, Tank Top, and Pants Versace.

 Jaafar Jackson had never acted when producer Graham King approached him in 2020 about a biopic on his uncle Michael. Instead of auditioning the usual way, Jaafar sent King a voice note of himself speaking as MJ. King called back immediately. What followed: years of obsessive solo prep and a quiet determination not to let anyone else take the role—even after a global casting search. Now Jaafar makes his debut in Michael, charting the rise of the King of Pop. Co-star Miles Teller watched the transformation up close and had one question: How did he pull it off ?

———

TUESDAY 3:30 PM FEB. 24, 2026 LA

MILES TELLER: Jaafar.

JAAFAR JACKSON: What’s up, bro? How’s it going?

TELLER: It is good. I was so excited that they asked me to do this.

JACKSON: I’m glad you’re here.

TELLER: The last time I saw you was when—was your mom seeing it for the first time?

JACKSON: She was. It was my mom and a few siblings. It was pretty surreal to see their reactions. She came to set one time, but she wasn’t aware of what to expect. Even in the process of preparing for it, I didn’t tell her for a full year.

TELLER: What do you mean? When you booked it, you didn’t tell her?

JACKSON: No. No one in my family knew for a full year. I kept it pretty quiet until I felt comfortable enough to share it. But when my mom saw it on-screen, it blew her away. It was hard for her to connect it to me, so it was very emotional for her.

TELLER: How big is the Jackson family? How many cousins do you have?

JACKSON: I don’t know the exact number, because there’s new babies every year. I think it’s around 35 to 40 cousins. And I have nine brothers and two sisters.

TELLER: And your mom, when she finally did process it, what did she say? I imagine parts of it feel almost invasive to the family members because it’s such a personal story.

JACKSON: Oh, for sure. Especially seeing moments that she was familiar with, growing up and being around the family, and then seeing it on-screen while her son is portraying Michael. It was strange for her and she’s very protective of me, knowing what’s to come with it.

TELLER: Sure.

JACKSON: My father hasn’t seen it yet, and I can’t wait for that.

TELLER: I mean, it’s really a shot out-of-a-cannon performance.

JACKSON: Yeah. It was a full body experience and definitely shows a side of me that my mom hasn’t seen.

TELLER: Graham King [the producer] has worked with some of the absolute best, and he said the thing he really wants people to understand is you are Jaafar and you are playing Michael. It’s not an impersonation by any means. How did you feel when you first saw it?

Jacket, Shirt, Sunglasses, and Tie Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.

JACKSON: Going into it I tried my best to say, “I’m going to just try to watch without critiquing anything.”

TELLER: It’s never going to happen.

JACKSON: [Laughs] As soon as it came on, it was a completely different experience than what I thought it was going to be.

TELLER: Yeah.

JACKSON: It went by so fast. I was like, “Wait, that’s it?” But the second time I saw it was a completely different experience. I was able to understand what the story is and really allow myself to enjoy what’s on the screen, rather than thinking of all the things we shot that aren’t in there. Because that was my problem the first time. I was like, “Where’s all that footage?”

TELLER: Yeah.

JACKSON: I was proud of what I saw, but there’s that little voice in your head. It’s like, “Was there another take of that move that could have been better?” But overall, it was a great feeling. Each time I see it, I find new things to appreciate.

TELLER: I don’t think that feeling ever goes away. It’s really hard when you have so much experience connected to something and then it’s condensed into this two-hour movie.

JACKSON: Exactly. That was the thing I was fighting against. I had all those memories on set and even the additional photography we did. That was what stood out to me—seeing how they’ve shaped it together. That was my first time ever being on set, and I tried to stay with that confidence, even when I was surrounded by 50 people on set. There were times where I would be a little self-conscious going into some of the big performances.

TELLER: Often, no matter how much prep I do, it’s tough to not want to show them you can do the whole movie that first day of filming. Was there a particular scene or moment when it really felt like it clicked for you?

JACKSON: From day one I was put in a position where I had to show up ready, because it started with the performances.

TELLER: Which is smart.

JACKSON: Which I loved, too. It allowed me to get all that nervous energy out and just embody Michael on stage. Once they said “action,” I let loose. But when we got to the dramatic scenes, I thought, “Oh, shoot. Now we’re going to the acting side.” Because I heard a few people were teasing me here and there.

TELLER: They should not have done that. [Laughs] We know it’s all acting.

JACKSON: I just allowed myself to put trust—obviously in Graham, but really in myself. I just kept saying, “It was divine timing. I’m here for a reason, so take it day by day.”

TELLER: Often even when somebody’s not blood related or knew the person personally, they talk about feeling the spirit of the person that they’re portraying. How would you describe what it felt like, portraying your uncle and getting his story out there?

Jacket, Jeans, and Shoes Celine. Sunglasses Jacques Marie Mage. Watch Omega.

JACKSON: It’s the type of experience that reshapes who you are for the better. To be able to live in those shoes, feel some of what he was feeling, see life through fresh eyes the way Michael did—it was important to feel all those things so I could come from a place of truth, rather than trying to imitate or copy the shape of the moves. I wanted to learn the meaning behind the move, the essence of it. What really helped was having access to Michael’s personal writings. His journaling, his poems, his mantras and affirmations, that was a breaking point for me. I started doing the same thing, applying affirmations on walls and mirrors. It started with the voice, then the mannerisms and movements. I do miss that feeling on set. Once we stopped, I had to get used to it.

TELLER: That doesn’t go away ever, especially when you’re as committed and invested in a project as you were for this. You slept on the floor in the home for a little bit?

JACKSON: Always on the floor because there’s no furniture in the house at Hayvenhurst.

TELLER: You could have gotten an air mattress.

JACKSON: It’s funny because Graham said, “Are you sure you don’t want production to get a bed or anything?” I got one of those thin Japanese-style mattresses.

TELLER: Okay.

JACKSON: It wasn’t too bad. I set up Hayvenhurst, which is a family home that they lived and grew up in, and I grew up in. I lived there for 15 years. I went back there and created a research room. There was a dance room where Michael used to train. I started training there, and I slept in many different rooms in the house just to feel the energy. Staying there allowed that to happen without forcing it. I was so fortunate to have that as my playground. Without that, I don’t think it my performance would be what it is, honestly.

TELLER: I feel like the only time you could really regret giving a certain performance would be if you left a stone unturned.

JACKSON: I wanted to dissect everything. That’s one thing I learned from Michael, how he dissected like a scientist. I applied that to my own being and acting and dance, because I always had rhythm, but I didn’t know how to dance like Michael.

TELLER: Nobody does. Although people are going to see this and be like, “That’s as close as it gets.”

JACKSON: To do it in a way that is believable is the challenge. You can do the moonwalk, but to make it believable is a whole different thing. It could be as simple as a spin. That’s probably the hardest move for me, the spin. Only because naturally, if I were to spin, I’d spin to my right because of my balance. But Michael spins to his left. It wasn’t until a couple of months before production where I actually started to nail it consistently, and I was rehearsing it for three years. People think it’s easy, but it was so complicated. I learned through just repeating it over and over again. It became an obsession.

TELLER: What did it feel like that first day with Colman [Domingo] and Nia [Long] playing Michael’s parents, getting into that family dynamic? That had to be very cathartic.

JACKSON: I remember seeing Colman for the first time when I was at the Sony stages. He had a hair and makeup test, and he came and visited while I was on stage rehearsing. He was just standing on the side of the stage looking at me, but I didn’t know.

TELLER: The lion is watching.

Suit and Shirt Chanel. Sunglasses Jacques Marie Mage. Bow Tie Tom Ford.

JACKSON: After I finished the performance, I looked to the left and he’s there. I’m like, “Whoa.” Because that’s the first time seeing him. He walked up to me and we just hugged, and I really felt that love and protection from Colman throughout the entire shoot. It was crazy for me to see him bring Joseph [Jackson] to life. He was so locked in, and we weren’t even rolling. So when we were actually starting to roll weeks later, shooting at Hayvenhurst, there were so many things going on in my head while trying to be present. Past memories of seeing my grandpa in that same chair he was sitting in, or the same chain he was wearing, and then seeing Nia as my grandmother, having that love and that passion and those little subtleties that really make her who she is, it was very emotional. But at the same time, it allowed me to be there in that moment and to feel what Michael must have felt.

TELLER: What are you most excited about for the movie?

JACKSON: I’m most excited about people getting to understand Michael from a point of view they haven’t seen before, to feel the quiet moments. Because a lot of people are familiar with the iconic moments, but there’s a whole emotional layer that hasn’t ever really been seen. I feel like people will understand him a lot more. How do you humanize someone that there’s so many opinions on, so many different stories from so many different people? To me, it was starting at the beginning, focusing on his personal writings and speaking to people who were closest to him. I have very few memories with Michael as a kid, but some of those were very helpul and informative as well.

TELLER: Are you proud of all the work we’re talking about, that started in 2020 and is now finally coming out in 2026? Are you ready to be broadcast out to the world and show what you can do?

JACKSON: Man, I’m excited to share it. Michael definitely gave me that bug of wanting to act, through embodying him. I don’t know what’s after this, but I’m excited for whatever it is. I definitely want something completely different.

TELLER: What’s nice is that whatever you play next will not be anything remotely close to Michael Jackson. I can promise you that. We just felt like you walked onto set every day as Michael Jackson, and honestly, it was just so enjoyable to get to feel like a fly on the wall for that.

JACKSON: That’s great to hear, because I remember—and I’m not just saying this because I’m speaking to you, because I’ve shared this with Graham—when I was preparing, before you were even brought on, there are a few films I would watch to inspire me, and Whiplash helped me continue that repetition and obsession for greatness. So when Graham told me that he was having lunch with you, I was like, “Wait, I’d love that.” It was a full circle moment for me. I’m glad we got to share that on set.

TELLER: Yeah, and I’ll see you on the next one, hopefully. What did you find to be the toughest song performance? Filming long days with the performance expectations of Michael is tough, so I have to imagine it gave you such an appreciation for what he was able to do for so many years.

JACKSON: I always ask myself, “I wonder how Michael’s toes looked after all that training?” Because my toes started to transform, wearing those loafers and putting in the hours. But I would say the toughest one for me was “Billie Jean” from Motown 25, only because we would break down every movement frame by frame and match it. Every other performance was somewhat similar, just the structuring and the staging. But with other performances I had more freedom to apply my own instincts or feelings, within the vocabulary of Michael.

Jacket Chanel. Jeans and Shoes Celine.

TELLER: That’s such an iconic performance, because on the tours and stuff there’s a good amount of material and we recreated it beautifully. But for that one, it’s like you can side-by-side it.

JACKSON: Yeah. So that was the toughest one, staying within the timing and also the style. And then learning ‘70s style Studio 54-era grooves, then the later era. It was just getting familiar with my own body and comfortable doing things that might look crazy or silly at first. But after doing it for many, many months or a couple of years, you find that confidence and you do it with a lot of belief.

TELLER: And the old question people still like to ask: Did you keep any props? Was there anything that fell off the truck, as they say?

JACKSON: Maybe I shouldn’t tell you that yet. [Laughs]

TELLER: Well, with the statute of limitations, they can’t come after you.

JACKSON: I definitely have a couple of things that meant a lot to me, but I did not just take them. I definitely ran it by a couple of people and got their blessings. I have a glove and the loafers.

TELLER: When’s the last time you put on the loafers?

JACKSON: Actually, a couple of days ago.

TELLER: Are you wearing them right now?

JACKSON: [Laughs] No, I only put them on if I’m rehearsing. So a couple of days ago I put them on.

TELLER: Do they still make those? Or was that just for Michael, and once he was no longer using them, they kind of went out of business?

JACKSON: You know what, I’m trying to find a new pair right now and it’s not that easy. Because the ones he had, there’s no rubber at the bottom for traction, it needs to be smooth. So you kind of have to find one that doesn’t have that, and it’s a little tricky.

TELLER: Well, I appreciate the heck out of you, man. I’m so proud of you and I truly cannot wait for people to be introduced to Jaafar Jackson. You’re in for quite the ride.

JACKSON: Thank you, Miles. I appreciate that. And there definitely was that love felt on set every day. I can’t wait for the world to celebrate it. Hopefully I’ll see you in Berlin, man.

TELLER: Yeah, I will be seeing you soon. First one for you in the books. That’s a wrap.

JACKSON: Thank you, brother. I’m glad it was with you.

———

Grooming: Colleen Dominique using Sisley Paris at The Wall Group.

Photography Assistant: Francesca Coppola.

Fashion Assistant: Natalie O’Campo.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

On-set Production: Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell.

Production Assistant: Justice Beverley.

Post-production: Alex Hainer.

Special Thanks: Palihouse Hollywood.

The post Jaafar Jackson Tells Miles Teller How He Unlocked the King of Pop appeared first on Interview Magazine.

All photos courtesy of Julio Torres.

Welcome to Seek Help, a column where we enlist our wisest and weirdest friends to give us answers to life’s most impossible questions. For the latest installment, we tapped our favorite Salvadoran comedian Julio Torres to dispense advice on some spiral-worthy situations, following the release of his new comedy special Color Theories. Below, he shares some pointers on coming out, flirting in Spanish, and coexisting with ghosts.

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A week after I came out as a lesbian, my dad came out as bisexual. Is he purposely trying to reheat my nachos?

Pride and joy are not a limited resource. It is not a cake where if someone takes some of the cake, that means that there’s less cake for you. However, it seems like you haven’t been made to feel that way. And I would inspect why that is upsetting to you. Why is there a week-long embargo on other people coming out after you’ve come out? What is the dynamic between you and your family that has made you feel like when you have exciting news, someone wants to steal your thunder, as it were, or to use your term, “reheat your nachos”. I think there are enough nachos for everyone. And I don’t think he’s reheating your nachos. I think that perhaps your father has his own nachos. And there’s enough for everyone.

What should I put in my job application for a comedy writer position?

I have no idea. I don’t think I have ever succeeded at getting a job via an application. Name. Last name. Unless you’re using a pseudonym. Thanks with an exclamation point at the end of it. The jobs that I’ve gotten have been from exposure to my work. So maybe focus on living a beautiful life away from your job application with things that you’re proud of.

What’s the quickest way to learn Spanish so I can get fine Latino trade on my trip to El Salvador?

Memes are accidental language flashcards where you understand the nuances of the humor in a culture, so I would find meme accounts. If I could offer a tip, there’s a phrase that’s used in El Salvador for when you’re walking around shops. The shop owners will say, “Pase y vea sin compromiso,” which means “take a look without commitment.” That applies while flirting, too. It’s like, “Take a look, no commitment necessary. If you like something, let me know. But if not, you can keep walking.” 

I never get along with my fellow gays. What’s wrong with me?

I have insufficient data to answer this question because I don’t know you, so I can’t assess what is wrong with you. I also don’t know the gays that you’re attempting to befriend, so I can’t attest to whether that is a them problem or a you problem. But I would say that you shouldn’t feel obligated to get along with any group specifically and just find joy where you organically fit in.

My friend always starts hitting on me when we’re drunk. How do I tell them I’m not into them without ruining the friendship?

Your friend is already ruining the relationship by hitting on you when they’re drunk and it would behoove you to be honest with them if this is a friendship that you’re actually invested in maintaining. If this person also wants to genuinely be your friend then this is feedback that they’ll appreciate, hopefully.

I think my apartment is haunted, but the rent is super cheap. How can I expel the ghosts? 

Your rent is super cheap because your apartment is haunted. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, okay? If you expel the ghosts, that means you’re expelling the deceased who are making your rent cheaper because you are a sub-letter of the ghosts. Now, how can you get rid of them? Evicting them is not on the table. I think you have to learn how to coexist and make this the best you can. Or if it feels like it’s untenable because they’re eating your food or whatever, then I would just find a new apartment.

The post “Find a New Apartment”: Julio Torres Has Some Advice for Our Readers appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Samara Weaving has spent the last six years watching Ready or Not earn its place in the pantheon of little movies that could. The 2019 horror comedy was a small, bloody affair, so small that Weaving’s manager was handing out free tickets at The Grove just to get people in the theater. In the time since, the movie, about a bride who is hunted by her new husband’s murderous family as part of a deadly game, has become a modern horror touchstone, which means that a sequel is inevitable. Cut to six years later and a very pregnant Weaving is promoting Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, which picks up seconds after the first movie left off, and adds new cast members like Kathryn Newton (who plays Weaving’s estranged sister) and Sarah Michelle Gellar, another genre queen who couldn’t wait to talk to Weaving about doing your own stunts, what it actually takes to survive a horror movie, and why neither of them will answer to “final girl.”

———

SARAH MICHELLE GELLAR: I have a new computer and I totally can’t figure out how it works.

SAMARA WEAVING: I’m allergic to technology, I think.

GELLAR: I always call Freddie [Prinze Jr.] a Luddite and he hates when I say that, but it’s actually the definition. If he comes near my stuff, it breaks.

WEAVING: I’m the Luddite. [Laughs]

GELLAR: I’m probably the worst person to do this because I’ll probably ask nothing anyone is interested in, and just what I want to ask you.

WEAVING: I want to ask you a million questions.

GELLAR: I’m going to start by saying that this film only works because you are so great in it. To be able to balance the ridiculousness and the comedy of it, but to have the gravitas, is what makes it work. 

WEAVING: That’s so nice. 

GELLAR: It’s literally just the truth. We all get to be so incredibly ridiculous and you have to always play everything for real. And yet, you still somehow manage to get laughs, which is really to your credit of why you’re such a superstar in these films. And physically what you put yourself through. My favorite story was in the first movie that you lost your deposit on your rental because of all the blood. You literally stained the apartment. 

WEAVING: The apartment was pink by the time I left.

GELLAR: How did it feel the first time you zipped that dress back on, aside from grossness?

WEAVING: I have to give credit where credit’s due. The writers wrote such a grounded woman. They got that tone so right in the script because these insane characters come in for just the right amount of time, make the audience take a deep breath and laugh, and then you can go right back into the stakes of it all. You guys made my job so easy/hard because—

GELLAR: We’re ridiculous.

WEAVING: But it’s so fun, and my job is to be an audience member and just react. Going back to your question, the dress. In the fitting I was a bit loopy, but I put the dress on and came out, and we were all weirdly emotional because I was like, “Oh, she’s back.” I was also struggling with, “What is this character again? It’s been six years, what am I doing?” The power of costume, you put that thing back on and you’re like, “Oh yeah, this brings back memories and I feel her.” But also, we didn’t know what we were making on the first one. 

GELLAR: I can imagine. 

WEAVING: We were having a good time, but the tone was so strange and everyone was being so weird and it was such a small budget. We didn’t know if anyone was going to watch it. My manager was running around The Grove, handing out free tickets to strangers. The fact that six years later we have the privilege to make another one was so nice because we had such a good time. Otherwise, why would you put yourself through this craziness again? 

GELLAR: I know what it feels like to have something that you love, that you don’t know if anyone’s going to see, and then it gets legs and keeps going. Those are the ones that mean the most as an actor. It doesn’t matter who I mention Ready or Not to, they’re all like, “Oh my god, I love that film.” People are still discovering it and seeing it for the first time. How does that feel? 

WEAVING: It must be the same with Buffy, right? There’s a new generation that are discovering and falling in love with it. The fact that I get to do it again because people love it as much as I do, is so touching and great. 

GELLAR: I tell everyone that this movie is a love letter to all the fans that love the first one. We’re just going to go farther, do more, be more ridiculous. 

WEAVING: We have a bigger budget, you guys. 

GELLAR: We should acknowledge that we had a bigger budget, but not a big budget. When I came on, I was actually surprised, because of the success of the first one, how lean they still wanted to make this one. What I learned from it was that’s how [the filmmaking collective] Radio Silence works best, when it’s all of us putting in all that effort. It’s almost like a way of weeding out people who don’t want to be there. 

WEAVING: No ding dongs, we don’t have time. 

GELLAR: [Laughs] There’s no time, there’s no money. But in hindsight, I understand why, because it let us have the freedom to make the movie the way we all wanted to. 

WEAVING: It feels like camp. You just have to get down and dirty. 

GELLAR: I would also be remiss if I didn’t talk about you and Kathryn [Newton], because my husband and I went to go see the movie and Freddie hadn’t read it. 

WEAVING: It still blows my mind that SMG and Freddie Prinze Jr. are like, “Yeah, we just saw your movie.” The teenager in me has to chill out a little bit. 

GELLAR: [Laughs] Totally fair. The chemistry between the two of you is unreal. I always tell people, you go into a film and whoever your partner is, you can love someone off camera and have no chemistry on film, you can hate someone and have all the chemistry in the world. You guys didn’t know each other before? 

WEAVING: Well, that was Tyler and Matt playing Cupid. They had her in mind the whole time. 

GELLAR: Right, because they did Abigail. 

WEAVING: So they invited Kathryn to a screening of Ready Or Not, and they were like, “Guys, meet.” We’d met briefly at something a million years ago, and she was just as weird and as awkward as me, and we very quickly fell into this sisterly relationship where she’s asking me for advice with boys and— 

GELLAR: Oh, she wasn’t asking you for advice. You were basically ghostwriting all of her texts. 

WEAVING: [Laughs] Yeah, I was. And then I would be texting boys about Harry Potter, and then I’d go, “Kathryn, do you know what I’m talking about?” She’s like, “I’ve never watched Harry Potter in my life.” “Well, you’re going to go on this date and not know what I’m talking about.” 

GELLAR: Why have we not sat her down to watch all of the brilliant Harry Potters? That’s another conversation. 

WEAVING: Yes. 

GELLAR: I think people would be surprised because before I met you, I thought of you as this ridiculously stunning Australian bombshell. I was like, “I wonder what she’s going to be like?” It’s such a pleasant surprise when people meet you, because you’re not who people think you’re going to be. You’re even better. You’re this weird gamer nerd. We would try to get you to go out and you’d be like, “I’ve got a raid tonight.” 

WEAVING: Yeah, “I’ve got Assassin’s Creed, man.” 

GELLAR: Is that something that helps you unwind? 

WEAVING: Yeah, I think I’m quite an introvert. The nature of this job and the culture that we are in, we’re sort of a slave to extrovertism, so I want to make sure that when I’m at work, I’m of service to everyone. If I’m in a grumpy mood, I know that it has a trickle-down effect. 

GELLAR: Are we allowed to talk about scenes? Because I have a favorite scene in this movie and it wasn’t a scene I was in, but it was a scene I had the pleasure of watching. Let’s just call it the two bride scene. 

WEAVING: Oh, my. Isn’t it phenomenal?

GELLAR: It is. Honestly, I’ve never been in a theater where I literally wanted to ask the projectionist to please rewind like I was at home on my couch. Shawn and I, we were deceased. 

WEAVING: It was so fun. The stunt team went above and beyond. They had to do a lot of the heavy lifting because I couldn’t. 

GELLAR: Hold on, hold on. No one loves a stunt team more than I do, but let’s talk about how many of the stunts you did yourself. It was actually really funny because, people who see the movie, there was no stunts for Ursula really in the script. And then they kept talking about my fight with you. And I’m like, “What are they talking about?” I didn’t realize they were writing one for us. 

WEAVING: Oh yeah, we can’t have Gellar do a movie and not have a fight. 

GELLAR: It was my last day and they literally taught it to us 30 seconds before we went out there. And I’m used to it, that’s been my life, but let’s talk about how great you are. I watched that bride scene and I was the one behind the monitor, going, “Did they hurt her?” You were taking hit after hit. Yes, there was a stunt team, but you do such a huge portion of it. 

WEAVING: It’s fun though, isn’t it? 

GELLAR: It’s fun until you’re really hurting. You always hit that one moment where it’s like, “I went too far.” But what’s funny was, in this film, it didn’t happen in our big fight sequence. I was fine after ours. It was a different scene where I woke up the next day and I was like, “I need a massage or I can’t move my neck.” 

WEAVING: Yeah, I think it was Harrison Ford who was like, “Oh, stunts, you don’t get hurt.” It’s like, “No.”

GELLAR: Oh, you do. Did you find it easier or harder to leave Grace this time?

WEAVING: That’s a really interesting question. I always process things about two weeks later, especially after a job. I call it the actor’s hangover. I always get sick.

GELLAR: Oh, everybody gets sick. The second they say wrap, you get sick. 

WEAVING: You get sick because your body’s just going, “Don’t get sick now. Stay with it.” And then you crumble and break. But two weeks later, it’s “I miss people, I miss Toronto. That set was really fun.” I don’t know if it’s necessarily the character, but I get attached to all you ding-dongs. 

GELLAR: On a movie like this that’s so intense, a lot of times between takes, everyone goes to their corners and does whatever their thing is. I always have a book, some people sew, some people have their games, you always had a board game out. But I kept finding us trying to get closer together which is so rare. 

WEAVING: We’d all just be giggling. And I think you need that a little bit on a set like this, especially if everyone’s cool. 

GELLAR: What do you think makes Grace different from other final girls? 

WEAVING: Oh, that’s hard. 

GELLAR: I get asked this a lot too, and that term wasn’t around when I started. I almost feel like it needs to be rebranded because final girl makes other women seem unsuccessful. And you’re so much more than just a final girl. I feel like it should be survivalist. 

WEAVING: At least final woman, we’re not young [Laughs]. It is quite dismissive, isn’t it? It would never be final boy. 

GELLAR: Right, no one ever said to Bruce Willis, “How does it feel to be the final boy?” You and I are going to start the rebranding. I think it’s survivalist. 

WEAVING: It’s survivalist. I think you learn from all of the previous women who’ve done it before, don’t you? And then it’s really like, “Okay, how can I have a different take on this story?” And a lot of that is to do with the writers and directors, and we all plan together.

GELLAR: We should talk about your trailer too, how you literally had to map everything out.

WEAVING: I map it all out, and then throw it away. But I really wanted to avoid playing fear the same in every scene, because as an audience member, when I see fear being played the same, it gets boring for me. And I wanted to have a really clear fear arc, if you will. So I wanted her to start out in denial where it’s real shock and almost disassociating from it, and then getting true terror and the reality of it has sunken in. 

GELLAR: It just goes to show why you are so great in this film, because it can be very easy to just go in and it’s all there on the page. But you are so thoughtful into what the audience is going to see, who Grace is. And you get to this stuff when people ask those dumb final girl questions or horror, this and that. It’s like this is the one genre where we really get the chance to shine as women. We can be the strongest, we can be the funniest, the fastest, that we’re not just the girlfriend. And this movie in particular really shows it because this is a love story between two women. It’s a love story about family and sisters and belonging. And when you talk about her being a wolf and how all she wants is to have that family and how this is a discovery of the family was there all along, but she didn’t know how to access that. 

WEAVING: Yeah. I think I’m actually in awe of actors that can show up and have kind of read it a few times and deliver. And it’s so annoying when they’re like, “How are you so good? You literally just read it yesterday.” 

GELLAR: I would also be remiss not to talk about the opening. I am so in awe of you in the opening because this is six years later, but the movie picks up one second after the first one. You have to literally go back to that exact spot and it’s seamless. How was that? 

WEAVING: Yeah. It was almost like a somatic experience where I was just in the space that was so similar that it felt like I’d done this before. And the costume truly was the biggest trigger.  And they had built the set and it was kind of the same, but kind of different. It was really surreal. It was just, thank god I hadn’t changed too much. 

GELLAR: Yeah, you didn’t get a new face. [Laughs] Well, I can’t wait for everyone to see you in this movie because there’s already this expectation, and you blow it out of the water. I got to see it a couple weeks ago and I can’t wait to see it with an audience. 

WEAVING: I’m so excited. Are you coming to South By? 

GELLAR: Are you coming to South By? Am I delivering a child? 

WEAVING: I think you will be delivering a child. 

GELLAR: Yes! 

WEAVING: I think we can make it work.

The post Samara Weaving and Sarah Michelle Gellar Want to Kill the Final Girl appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Photo courtesy of Lauren Auder

Welcome to SOUND ADVICE, Interview’s weekly destination for playlists curated by our friends, enemies, and lovers. In recent weeks, we’ve featured playlists from Zack Fox, Danny L Harle, and Mckayla Twiggs. This week’s installment comes from British-French songwriter and producer Lauren Auder, who dropped her sophomore record, “Whole World as Vigil,” last Friday. With collaborators Dviance and Alex Parish, the album grapples with the deep complexities of human connection, the difficulty and the beauty. To mark the occasion, we asked Auden to make us a playlist and tell us all her secrets.

———

Where do you dance? In the bedroom.

London or France? Unfair advantage for France, being a whole country. 

What song on this playlist is your guilty pleasure? I have no guilty pleasures!

What’s your favorite sound effect? Roblox “OOH” or Bathory’s horse neigh on their album Blood Fire Death.

Dream collab, dead or alive? Lou Reed, obviously.

Who do you trust most with the aux? My roommate, Cajm.

What do you pray about? More time, more rest.

Best arrondissement in Paris? 20th probably?

What song is currently on replay? “Close to the Edge” by Yes. 

What album was your coming-of-age soundtrack? Mysterious Phonk: Chronicles of SpaceGhostPurrp.

Tell us a secret. I cheated my way through Latin class in secondary school. 

Night or day? Day!

What is your studio session pet peeve? Weed smell :/

Which Skins character did you relate to the most? None, I’m 27!

What are you listening to as you complete this questionnaire? Space heater next to my bed, Italian lesson next door.

What does your notes app look like? Incriminating. 

You just arrived at the function. What are you drinking? What are you smoking? Cheap lager or expensive red wine, a Syrah if it’s winter. 

The world is ending. What are you wearing True religion jeans and a white button down, as per.

The post Lauren Auder is Praying for More Time appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Jacket Hermès, Sweater Loro Piana, Jeans J. Crew, Belt Adam’s Own.

Adam Friedland won’t shut up. A standup comic at heart who earned a cult following as a host of the brilliantly juvenile podcast Cum Town, he has since reinvented himself with The Adam Friedland Show. It’s a Dick Cavett-style talk show, and he’s emerged as one of the most compelling and unpredictable interviewers of his generation. Whether he’s talking to Sarah Jessica Parker or Zohran Mamdani, Friedland approaches each conversation with equal parts genuine curiosity and gleeful chaos. He’s just as likely to troll his guests as he is to ask them something devastatingly on point. When we asked him who he’d like to speak to for this story, his only direction was it had to be a talk show legend. So we introduced him to Maury Povich.

———

TUESDAY 3 PM FEB. 17, 2026 NYC

MAURY POVICH: Hi, Adam. How are you?

ADAM FRIEDLAND: I’m very well. How are you sir?

POVICH: I’m okay.

FRIEDLAND: Where am I speaking to you from?

POVICH: I’m in Palm Beach, Florida.

FRIEDLAND: Phenomenal. You’re at old Mar-a-Lago.

POVICH: Thankfully I’m a little north of that.

FRIEDLAND: Are you a snowbird?

POVICH: I guess. I go back and forth to New York when I do my podcast and things like that. And then we spend a good four and a half months in Montana, where we’ve been for almost 30 years.

FRIEDLAND: Do you have a nice spread out there? You’re like a Yellowstone-style guy.

POVICH: Well, there are a lot of wealthy people who live in places like Yellowstone Club and these high-end gated communities. I don’t understand why you would want to go to Montana and then live in a gated community.

FRIEDLAND: So you live in a McMansion?

POVICH: No, we live near Glacier National Park, about 40 miles from Canada. We kind of live on our own mountain, which I love.

FRIEDLAND: Oh my god. You have the best life ever.

POVICH: Only because I married Connie Chung.

FRIEDLAND: You’re a gold digger, Maury.

POVICH: Absolutely. My wife was making 10 times what I was making when we got married. How’s that?

FRIEDLAND: You’re like the model of the ideal Jew. You have the respect of urban people who love you from the show, and you have a gorgeous Asian wife. You’re the ideal for all of us.

POVICH: I’d like to think so.

FRIEDLAND: My friend Joe, he’s a little bit older than me, he’s a television writer. He’s won a bunch of Emmys. His first job was as an intern on your show.

POVICH: Oh, wow.

FRIEDLAND: He said he used to answer the phone for people to call in and the person on the other end would be like, “Hello Maury,” because they didn’t realize you didn’t pick up the phone.

POVICH: Yeah, I didn’t pick up the 1-800 number. [Laughs] I’m glad there were some successful people that came out of the internships. This is before your time. I did a very popular show called A Current Affair on Fox.

FRIEDLAND: I’m well aware.

POVICH: I interviewed Don Lemon the other day and he told me he was an intern there!

FRIEDLAND: Don Lemon was recently a guest on my talk show.

POVICH: Is that right? He was on my podcast, too.

FRIEDLAND: And he was also recently a guest at a federal penitentiary.

POVICH: Correct.

FRIEDLAND: It’s a small world! Growing up, when I was sick and stayed home from school, I’d watch The Price Is Right, and then I’d watch you and Jerry [Springer]. It was the most entertaining stuff in the entire world, and I thought you and Jerry were the coolest guys, genuinely. The way you could command chaos swirling around you, it made a huge impression on me. Now I’m doing a talk show, but it’s not like that. There’s no studio audience. It’s more of an interview show, like Cavett.

POVICH: Jerry and I, we go back.

FRIEDLAND: Did you have a relationship with Jerry?

POVICH: Didn’t see each other a lot, but we were very friendly. For the last 15 years, we both taped our shows in the same studio in Connecticut, but Jerry and I started the national talk shows in the same year, in 1991. Jerry described our shows this way, and I thank him for it: “Maury, your show is the real deal and my show is wrestling.”

FRIEDLAND: Jerry’s backstory was fascinating.

POVICH: Absolutely.

FRIEDLAND: He was mayor of Cincinnati, and he paid for a hooker with a check.

POVICH: Correct.

FRIEDLAND: And he was so beloved that he won a write-in campaign.

POVICH: And then he got into the news business in Cincinnati. We were both doing newscasts. Nobody realizes I was doing news 25, 30 years before I was ever a talk show host. It prepared me, that’s for sure.

FRIEDLAND: It’s like getting your 10,000 hours, I suppose. You’re talking into a camera.

POVICH: Exactly.

Suit Emporio Armani, T-shirt Canada Goose, Shoes Converse.

FRIEDLAND: I did podcasting for nine years, so I’m doing a different format.

POVICH: I’m now following you. I’m doing what you used to do.

FRIEDLAND: We were doing a comedy podcast, but I got sick of it. We were three 30-year-old men behaving like 11-year olds at a sleepover. It was really funny, but creatively it got pretty stale. My current show requires a tremendous amount of research and prep. I’m attempting to do something that’s produced like a television show, but on the internet. I was working two hours a week, getting a pretty great salary for doing this stupid comedy podcast. So from a business standpoint, I’m an idiot to be doing way more work.

POVICH: And making less money.

FRIEDLAND: I don’t really know. Money stresses me out.

POVICH: Why would money stress you out?

FRIEDLAND: My parents experienced financial difficulty when I was growing up, so my big worry is my business manager will call me and tell me I ran out. I’m doing well, but knowing the numbers is a source of anxiety.

POVICH: You’re so different than I am. We never had a lot of money. My father, by the way, was a columnist for The Washington Post for 75 years. But as you know, you don’t make a lot of money working in print. He always said, “Money makes you less nervous.”

FRIEDLAND: He’s insane, this guy!

POVICH: He also said money gives you a sixth sense in order to enjoy the other five.

FRIEDLAND: I have no idea what that means. One thing I do know is that money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness, but I also know from being a struggling comedian and then eventually doing well, that you can’t be happy without it. When you don’t have it and you’re constantly stressed about it, it consumes your life.

POVICH: That confirms what I said.

FRIEDLAND: Yeah. I threw a tantrum with my business manager when they wanted me to do an IRA. They’re like, “You get it back when you’re 65.” I was like, “The 65-year-old me? That guy’s a loser.” They’re like, “You’re an idiot, Adam. It reduces your tax burden.”

POVICH: Exactly.

FRIEDLAND: And I was like, “I don’t care about that 65-year-old. He’s a doofus. Tell him to make his own money.”

POVICH: You’ll get there, Adam. And you’ll call this guy up and say, “So when can I start taking the money out of my IRA?”

FRIEDLAND: I had to accept that I’m a comedian and I’m not predisposed to understanding any of that stuff, so I have a wealth manager that handles it. I used to lay in bed at night stressed out about the fact that I needed to file my taxes. They say you’re a book Jew or you’re a money Jew.

POVICH: Oh wow. I don’t know if I’m either one.

FRIEDLAND: I’m neither. I’m illiterate and I hate money.

POVICH: Look, I was in TV news for 25 years. I wasn’t walking around Wall Street with a lot of money, that’s for sure. By the way, since you’re a comic, what standups do you like?

FRIEDLAND: I think standup stinks.

POVICH: It stinks?

FRIEDLAND: Yeah.

POVICH: I just interviewed a standup.

FRIEDLAND: Which one?

POVICH: He’s the closest thing to George Carlin. His name is Josh Johnson.

FRIEDLAND: I don’t know him.

POVICH: You never heard of him?

FRIEDLAND: Now I’m feeling competitive.

POVICH: He’s 35 years old and you don’t know him?

FRIEDLAND: I’m 38.

POVICH: Come on, Adam.

FRIEDLAND: He’s probably jealous of me that I’m older than him.

POVICH: He’s not jealous of you because he’s doing fine.

FRIEDLAND: Maybe I know Josh. I’ll look him up. When I was growing up, I was obsessed with stand-up, but once you’ve heard every joke and do it for your career, you don’t view it in the same way. I’m a sports fan because I can’t do any of that shit. But watching another person doing standup makes me genuinely anxious because I’m like, “I know exactly what that guy is going through in his head on that stage.”

POVICH: Look up Josh Johnson. I’m telling you right now, you’ll appreciate it.

FRIEDLAND: Oh my god, you’re obsessed with this guy, Maury. What about me?

POVICH: This guy can go two and a half, three minutes without a laugh as he builds a story. It’s terrific.

FRIEDLAND: Oh, I know this guy. Yeah, he is funny.

POVICH: You know how I found out about him?

FRIEDLAND: He’s a correspondent on The Daily Show, right?

POVICH: Yeah. He’s an anchor there, too.

T-shirt Stylist’s Own, Jeans Levi’s.

FRIEDLAND: So are you going to come to a show of mine?

POVICH: I thought you gave up comedy.

FRIEDLAND: No, I didn’t give up comedy. I’m in Philly this weekend.

POVICH: It’s too far. Do you know Philadelphia? It’s a tough town.

FRIEDLAND: They’re real dumb.

POVICH: It’s the greatest. Are you kidding?

FRIEDLAND: I agree with you. It’s wild. There’s real energy. I lived in DC for a long time. You grew up there?

POVICH: I lived there until I was 37.

FRIEDLAND: It’s an entirely different place.

POVICH: DC is made up now of a lot of people who never came from DC.

FRIEDLAND: Exactly. And they’re so ugly, too. The talent there is nothing to write home about.

POVICH: You know what we thought about that town? That the President of the United States was the mayor and Congress was the city council. That’s how we grew up.

FRIEDLAND: I went to GW [George Washington University] and then I started standup in DC. I was supposed to go to law school, but I had to come out of the closet as a clown to my parents.

POVICH: That must have gone over well.

FRIEDLAND: They were like, “Get a normal job, you psycho.” It’s a ridiculous thing to tell your parents. To be honest with you, I’m tremendously lucky. It’s a terrible industry to go into. It’s not a meritocracy, we’ll put it that way.

POVICH: Did you used to go to clubs and wait to go on last when nobody would be around?

FRIEDLAND: In DC, I was the opener for touring acts in a small comedy scene. I was the nebbish Jew. I remember my parents were like, “We don’t know anyone in show business.” I was like, “You don’t understand comedy. You have to be the best.” And then I moved here and there were 10,000 guys literally named Adam Friedland, who probably had the same argument with their parents.

POVICH: Adam, now you’re turning on your own name.

FRIEDLAND: What I’m saying is, in the small scene in DC where I started, I was the nebbishy, Jewish, self-deprecating guy. Then I moved up to New York and there was nothing special about me. It was a very humbling experience.

POVICH: [Laughs] You ever make it to Carolines?

FRIEDLAND: Of course I’ve done Carolines.

POVICH: She’s still around, isn’t she?

FRIEDLAND: She is. The club on Broadway isn’t open anymore.

Sweater J. Mueser, Shorts Canada Goose, Sunglasses Thistles, Shoes Nike.

POVICH: When I used to do the news in New York, she used to come on a lot to promote her stuff.

FRIEDLAND: Yeah, I had Richard Kind on the show, and he was a singing waiter at one of her places in the Hamptons or something.

POVICH: [Laughs] You’re kidding.

FRIEDLAND: That was one of my favorite episodes. Have you seen the talk show?

POVICH: Which talk show?

FRIEDLAND: My show. The Adam Friedland Show.

POVICH: No, I haven’t. Are you any good?

FRIEDLAND: I’m alright. I do it my way. I’ve had some big guests. I had Mamdani.

POVICH: I heard. How’d you do with him?

FRIEDLAND: Great.

POVICH: He didn’t overwhelm you? Pretty smart guy.

FRIEDLAND: No, no, no. We’re the same kind of guy.

POVICH: I see.

FRIEDLAND: We’re both guys that are, like, from the same tree.

POVICH: I didn’t vote for him.

FRIEDLAND: You voted for Sliwa?

POVICH: No. I voted for Mamdani in the general. I didn’t vote for him in the primary.

FRIEDLAND: I thought you were a Curtis Sliwa guy.

POVICH: No, but I go way back with him. [Laughs] I knew him when he had his original beret.

FRIEDLAND: It’s not a good look for America. We don’t like berets.

POVICH: Well, it was a red beret.

FRIEDLAND: Yeah. But for us, we’re like, “What are you, a mime? Are you in France?” But what I got from Mamdani was the sense that—my parents are baby boomers, and I remember in ‘92 they were so excited about Clinton. And I guess it dawned on me when I was talking to Mamdani, it was like, “Oh, this is the first leader from my generation.” We’re both millennials.

POVICH: You didn’t get excited about Obama?

FRIEDLAND: Obama’s not a millennial.

POVICH: I understand that, but you’re old enough. You said you’re 38 years old.

FRIEDLAND: I was excited about Obama. I’m saying this is the first time it felt like, “This guy’s genuinely our generation.”

POVICH: I got you.

FRIEDLAND: And Mayor Pete doesn’t count.

POVICH: Kind of like the way we were—

FRIEDLAND: About Clinton.

POVICH: Well, I’ve got to go back to Kennedy.

FRIEDLAND: I thought you’re Millard Fillmore’s generation.

POVICH: Close.

FRIEDLAND: I guess Mayor Pete is also a millennial, but he just seems like he’s a suck-up, like he’s asking the teacher if he could have more homework over the weekend.

POVICH: I’ve never paid much attention to Buttigieg.

FRIEDLAND: I’m just saying as a guy, if I was in class with Mamdani, we’d probably be friends. We’re both into soccer and hip-hop and movies.

POVICH: So did you ask him about Israel or not?

FRIEDLAND: I didn’t ask him about Israel. What the fuck does the mayor of New York have to do with Israel? That’s driven me insane, to be honest with you.

POVICH: Well, he ran on that kind of—

FRIEDLAND: No, he didn’t run on Israel. Cuomo was hitting him on Israel because he had quotes from the past. But honestly, that really upset me as a Jewish person, that they were making it all about Israel when there are homeless people in New York. It just made it seem like we’re more important than everyone. That didn’t feel good. But beyond that, he was being painted as radical in a way that he’s fundamentally not. He’s from the Upper West Side, he’s practically Jewish. And a lot of my friends I grew up with who were like, “This guy is radical,” called me after he came on the show and said, “While I still don’t agree with his politics, he seems like a pretty decent guy.”

POVICH: As long as he gets along with [Police Commissioner] Jessica Tisch, I can handle him.

FRIEDLAND: Well, it seems like people in the city are very happy with him right now. He got the universal pre-K done quickly. It does feel like an Obama moment. I remember the excitement when Obama was elected and the disappointment of how McConnell and the people who understood the game made his two terms in office hell. They weren’t able to translate a popular grassroots movement into legislative success. I think Zohran has this mix of policy people who are young and driven and experienced, and people who understand the messiness of municipal politics. He has like a 75-year-old in his inner circle. You need people who know the game and you need people who have the vision.

POVICH: This is very interesting, Adam. You talk a lot.

FRIEDLAND: Is that bad or good?

POVICH: I don’t know [Laughs]. You invited me to talk to you.

FRIEDLAND: I invited you?

POVICH: Oh, sorry. I invited you?

FRIEDLAND: I don’t know. They just told me you were going to be on this and I was so excited. I thought you were interviewing me. Am I interviewing you?

POVICH: I think we’re just talking to or above each other.

FRIEDLAND: Can someone from the magazine tell us? Because if I was meant to interview you, I sincerely apologize.

EMILY SANDSTROM: Maury is technically supposed to be interviewing Adam, but I think this is very much a conversation. This has been fun to listen to.

POVICH: I had no idea! I thought I was being interviewed and now I’m interviewing you! Well, good!

FRIEDLAND: This is so funny. We both thought we were being interviewed.

POVICH: [Laughs]

FRIEDLAND: Maury, this is unbelievable. So you’re like, “This freak won’t shut the fuck up.” I’m never going to forget this for the rest of my life.

POVICH: [Laughs] You’re not the first person to run over my answers.

FRIEDLAND: You must have been so offended, this entire time I was blabbing about Mamdani to you.

POVICH: [Laughs] I didn’t know what I was doing.

FRIEDLAND: This is one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.

POVICH: It’s the story of my life.

Jacket Stylist’s Own, Shirt and Pants J. Crew, T-shirt Hanover, Sunglasses Ray-Ban.

FRIEDLAND: I can interview you if you want.

POVICH: No. I’ve been interviewed so much, I have nothing to say.

FRIEDLAND: Maybe I’ll ask you questions you’ve never been asked.

POVICH: I think we’re in good shape.

FRIEDLAND: Did your dad know Tony Kornheiser?

POVICH: Of course. He hired Tony Kornheiser.

FRIEDLAND: Unbelievable. He’s the funniest guy ever. He’s like Larry David.

POVICH: He is the sports version of Larry David. I just spent a weekend playing golf with him in Florida.

FRIEDLAND: So my friend Pablo, who does a podcast as well—

POVICH: Pablo and I are best friends. Pablo Torre?

FRIEDLAND: Yeah.

POVICH: You’re buddies with Pablo too?

FRIEDLAND: I was on his show last week. I’m good friends with him.

POVICH: So was I!

FRIEDLAND: I constantly beg him to introduce me to Tony. I love you and Tony and Jerry. Let’s link this to the beginning of our conversation. My parents came to this country, so I kind of had to learn American Jew. A lot of people when they meet me think I’m from New York, but it’s only because I’m wearing glasses and I’m obnoxious and I don’t shut up. But in reality, it was people like you and Kornheiser and George Costanza or Seinfeld or Bob Dylan that educated me on what an American Jew was.

POVICH: You didn’t learn through Dylan, that’s for sure.

FRIEDLAND: Of course I learned from Dylan!

POVICH: Not about Judaism.

FRIEDLAND: It’s not about Judaism, it’s about what an American Jew is. It’s not like you talked about Judaism on “You Are Not the Father,” but you were a Jewish guy. I’m a fraud, Maury. I’ve constructed my entire being off of movies where there’s a schmuck and it’s the Upper West Side and there’s a precocious blonde girl he’s trying to impress.

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POVICH: [Laughs] I think we got a lot of stuff going on here.

FRIEDLAND: Wait, I have one question for you.

POVICH: What?

FRIEDLAND: Are we going to hang out when you’re back in the city?

POVICH: Yeah, we can hang out. I’ll be back in the city in April and May, if you’re playing anywhere. Do you play in New York, or don’t they allow you?

FRIEDLAND: I do weekends on the road and then I’m working on my talk show. Actually, I’d love for you to come on the show. How about that?

POVICH: Okay. Maybe I’ll have you on my show.

FRIEDLAND: He sounds excited to come on my show.

POVICH: Look, I’ll tell you what happened to me. I never realized what kind of impact I had. And since I retired— I was on a show the other day and I was walking down the hall and this guy comes and gives me this big hug and he says, “You’re my man.” And I look at him and it’s 50 Cent, and I go, “Holy shit. Maybe I did have an impact.”

FRIEDLAND: You’re a legend, sir.

POVICH: I’ll be up in April and May, we’ll have fun.

FRIEDLAND: You better do my show. You swear? This is going in print.

POVICH: Depending on whether I do your show and how that goes as to whether you’ll do my show.

FRIEDLAND: Okay. Fun.

POVICH: Alright, good enough.

FRIEDLAND: Bye, Maury.

———

Grooming: Ashtyn Thurbe.

Photography Assistants: Nate Jerome and Eve Alpert.

Fashion Assistants: Abby McDade and Claudia Sanchez.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

Post-production: Nikita Shaletin.

Location: Shio Studios.

The post “He’s Insane, This Guy!”: Adam Friedland Meets Maury Povich appeared first on Interview Magazine.

———

HANNAH CROSBIE: How’s the jetlag doing?

TROYE SIVAN: Genuinely fine. I woke up at six today, and yesterday just before five, so it’s getting better.

CROSBIE: What’s your go-to jet lag cure? 

SIVAN: I try not to nap for the first day.

CROSBIE: That’s hardcore.

SIVAN: It’s a hard rule. Even if it’s just melatonin, I’ll take something for the first three nights. Even if I feel exhausted, if I wake up at four, I can’t get back to sleep.

CROSBIE: Honestly, American melatonin was such a game changer for me when I first went over and discovered CVS. I found those insanely good red gummies.

SIVAN: Oh my god, they’re so delicious.

CROSBIE: They shouldn’t be that delicious. What are your fashion week plans?

SIVAN: Nothing really, I’m just in town to throw this party for Penfolds tonight.

CROSBIE: That’s why I’m here. I write about youth culture and drinking a lot and how they fit together. Or how wines and spirits are trying to fit into the constantly shifting tastes of our generation. Booze is my job now but I have such a different relationship to it than when I was growing up.

SIVAN: When I think about what wine means to me now, it’s all about community and connection. You know what I mean?

CROSBIE: I do.

SIVAN: My point of inspiration for so many things is a beautiful, sunny afternoon in Melbourne, sitting with friends in a park, and opening a bottle of wine. Wine bar culture in Melbourne is so incredible, those days when people are pouring out into the streets and everyone is so connected, having a gorgeous time together and making really special moments. I love a three-hour dinner. 

CROSBIE: I often talk about connectivity through drinking. This idea of not going out and using alcohol as a tool to get drunk or party, but using it as a tool to connect with people.

SIVAN: Totally.

CROSBIE: Wine is totally unique in this way. If you open a beer, you’re having one beer to yourself. If you order a cocktail, you’re having a cocktail that’s just yours. Wine is something that you inherently share. But there’s also this different way you can find connection through wine. In the UK, where I live, I always say we’re a nation of drinkers rather than producers.

SIVAN: Right.

CROSBIE: But someone like you who’s born in South Africa and brought up in Australia, you have that connection to wine that I almost wouldn’t even be able to begin to understand. I talk to my French friends about how when you’re from a winemaking country, how much a part of your life that industry is.

SIVAN: I’m just so proud of anything Australian. Let me give you an example. The other day it happened with this actress in The Pitt.  

CROSBIE: Oh my god, I wanted to talk to you about this. 

SIVAN: I found out she was from Adelaide, and I freaked out.

CROSBIE: You said on Instagram you couldn’t leave the house because you truly believed you worked in an ER.

SIVAN: Truly. I feel like I’m in that TV show now because of her. I just get so proud of good Australian things, especially when it’s on a global scale. It’s true for wine as well. For me, growing up and even seeing ‘Margaret River’ on a bottle, which is a town I grew up four hours away from, makes me really, really proud. I feel like it’s something we do very well. It’s very chic.

CROSBIE: This is the thing we need to find. Because everything I read at the moment is telling me that young people aren’t drinking anymore. I’m always trying to make the case that they are, but instead of cheaper and worse, it’s something a bit more elevated, with a story behind it. We’re still drinking, but we’re choosing our moments. 

SIVAN: One thing that’s been fun about getting older is having those moments where we enjoy a really good meal with delicious wine. Nothing makes me feel so good. I walk away from those nights feeling genuinely fulfilled. Especially with how much time we all spend on our own these days. It’s the antidote to all that.

CROSBIE: I’ve been thinking a lot about being truly present when it’s so easy to fall back into your phone. Especially since COVID where we all had to become immediately self-sufficient, and then we went back out to discover these experiences hospitality can give us, it became even more special.

SIVAN: Totally. It’s always such a yawn when somebody takes out their phone at dinner. Then other people take out their phones around them, it just becomes a moment for everyone to go on their phone.

CROSBIE: Yeah. I’d obviously love to know where you love to eat, but I also don’t want to doxx your favourite restaurants. [Laughs] I guess what I really want to know is what you look for in a perfect wine bar.

SIVAN: To be honest, I couldn’t tell you a single name of a restaurant in Paris, because I get guided by my fashion friends who just take me to these chic places where the wine is good and the ambience is amazing. One thing that I really care about is a personable sommelier.

CROSBIE: I have thoughts on this.

SIVAN: It’s really important to have someone explain the wine to you where it doesn’t really matter your level of previous knowledge. I really admire people who can dispel some of the intimidation people can feel from wine. That’s what I want to do when I’m talking about wine.

CROSBIE: There’s still this snooty sommelier myth.

SIVAN: Exactly.

CROSBIE: Like, they’ve lovingly put the list together, they would love nothing more than to talk about it with you and match you with the perfect bottle of wine.

SIVAN: No, I always ask. It’s part of the experience, part of the fun, part of the show.

CROSBIE: I completely agree.

SIVAN: And then the music has to be good.

CROSBIE: What kind of music?

SIVAN: It depends. One of my favorite things to do in L.A. is go to Korean barbecue. There’s this place, I don’t remember the name, but they play very loud, very intense K-pop and Korean dance music, and it puts me in the best mood. The dinner feels completely unhinged by the end. [Laughs] You’re dancing, drinking, and then cooking your own food? It’s very fun.

CROSBIE: I just wrote a column on this. It started off as a completely different piece. I wanted to write about playlist curation in restaurants and so many people told me you can almost predict exactly how customers will order when you play different music. La Camionera, this iconic lesbian bar in London, told me that reggaeton makes people buy palomas, red wine if they play jazz. Music becomes this thing that guides the evening along. 

SIVAN: That’s super, super interesting. 

CROSBIE: What are you doing this evening?

SIVAN: Oh, I’m doing this really chic dinner, all my beautiful fashion friends are here because it is Paris Fashion Week. Nice wine, nice people, and I’m gonna be showing Aussie wines I’m really proud of: it’s what I love to do. 

CROSBIE: I’ll be there. [Laughs] 

SIVAN: Yeah, me too.

CROSBIE: Thanks for your time, darling. I’ll see you later.

The post A Boozy Chat With Troye Sivan appeared first on Interview Magazine.

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Most of us first encountered Thomas Doherty on the Gossip Girl reboot, where he played Max Wolfe with the kind of camera-ready confidence that makes you assume he was raised on set. He wasn’t. The Edinburgh-born actor came up through musical theater before moving to L.A. and learning the ropes of on-camera acting. If Gossip Girl was part of that education, Doherty’s new role in season two of the post-apocalyptic hit Paradise feels like a graduation. The 31 year-old actor is back in New York now, where he just finished a run in Little Shop of Horrors on stage, and where he’s talking to his friend and former Tell Me Lies costar Grace Van Patten about what it feels like when you’ve finally arrived.

———

THURSDAY 6 PM MAR. 5, 2026 NYC

GRACE VAN PATTEN: Are you ready?

THOMAS DOHERTY: Hi. Oh, I’ve missed you so much.

VAN PATTEN: Are you ready for my hard-hitting questions?

DOHERTY: [Laughs] Always.

VAN PATTEN: I just watched the first season of Paradise and I’m obsessed with it. I literally finished the last episode of season one a few days ago, and then I checked my phone and there was a text to do this. It was crazy timing.

DOHERTY: [Laughs]

VAN PATTEN: It’s an insane cast. Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, and now Shailene Woodley in season two.

DOHERTY: Your twin.

VAN PATTEN: I have to ask, did you feel like you were seeing double?

DOHERTY: Okay, this was a real roundabout moment. I watched Tell Me Lies when it first came out, and I was like, “Oh my god, that’s Shailene Woodley.” Then I went on Tell Me Lies and worked with you, and then the job after was with Shailene Woodley. Kind of mental.

VAN PATTEN: I think your whole career should be going back and forth between us.

DOHERTY: I would do anything for that. And then we could have a three. [Laughs]

VAN PATTEN: A three what?

DOHERTY: I don’t want to finish that. Like, three of us, you know?

VAN PATTEN: A trio?

DOHERTY: Yeah, a threesome.

VAN PATTEN: I’m not really sure why I’m not playing her long-lost sister.

DOHERTY: Yeah, you guys are 100 percent sisters.

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VAN PATTEN: Did you watch the show before you got the part?

DOHERTY: Yes. I’m fascinated with the post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world sci-fi thing anyway. And the audition came about after Tell Me Lies, so I was unemployed-ish. I was unemployed for nine months or something.

VAN PATTEN: Were you starting to get anxious?

DOHERTY: No, never.

VAN PATTEN: Wow, good for you.

DOHERTY: Do you get that?

VAN PATTEN: For sure. I hit a certain point where I’m like, “I will never work again.”

DOHERTY: That’s so interesting.

VAN PATTEN: It’s irrational. I just get antsy. I’m really bad at creating a routine for myself.

DOHERTY: What really helped me was moving to New York.

VAN PATTEN: Oh yeah. I do find that New York is a lot easier.

DOHERTY: Well, you’re from here.

VAN PATTEN: I’m from there, and I find it’s so much easier to be lonely in L.A.

DOHERTY: I lived in L.A. for three years and it was so hard for me. Granted, it took me so long to even know the difference between an agent and a manager. I was learning from scratch and it was hard to do it from the outside. But L.A. is a city where you can just float. That’s why New York’s been so good for me, because of the energy here, and the proximity. Sometimes, if I don’t have anything to do I’ll just go for a wander, or I’ll go for a coffee, because the probability of bumping into someone you know is— [Laughs] That makes me sound so sad.

VAN PATTEN: [Laughs] You’re so popular.

DOHERTY: I made myself sound like I don’t have any friends.

VAN PATTEN: I know what you mean. You can walk out your door and there’s always something going on. There’s constant energy.

DOHERTY: I don’t know if this is true, but apparently Manhattan is on top of the biggest quartz mine in the world.

VAN PATTEN: Is this a headline you read?

DOHERTY: This was a TikTok on an ex-girlfriend’s phone.

VAN PATTEN: A quartz mine? So are you trying to say there’s crystal energy coming through the ground?

DOHERTY: Yeah.

VAN PATTEN: I would like to believe that.

DOHERTY: Even if it’s true or not, it still has that magic.

VAN PATTEN: I know.

DOHERTY: But working in L.A. is actually amazing.

VAN PATTEN: That’s a dream.

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DOHERTY: Yeah, honestly, Grace, working at Paramount Studios—like being from Edinburgh and then driving under the arches.

VAN PATTEN: Those studios are the one thing that has stayed the same since the beginning of movies. Did you feel like an old actor, driving to work?

DOHERTY: I felt like I was in a movie.

VAN PATTEN: That’s so fun.

DOHERTY: The Paramount lot has been really good at trying to preserve as much as possible.

VAN PATTEN: Do you have a trailer on the lot, or do you have a room?

DOHERTY: A trailer on the lot, which I prefer. It gets me into the mindset, you know?

VAN PATTEN: Yeah, a little tin box.

DOHERTY: They’re tiny. I think I’m a third of a trailer still. I don’t think I’ve made it up to half yet, but I’ll get there. But even the sound of the ladders walking up to the trailers is so specific. And the smell, and they all look the same, with weird brown wood. Then you have your food come in, and it all tastes the same. I love that side of my job. [Laughs] When I get asked if I prefer theater or film, I say I love the two hours when plays or musicals are happening. You never came to see Little Shop [of Horrors], by the way. I hate you for that.

VAN PATTEN: Venus and the fly trap. No, what was it? Rocky Horror? Oh fuck, what was it?

DOHERTY: Little Shop of Horrors.

VAN PATTEN: I’m genuinely sad I didn’t come to see that.

DOHERTY: Save it, Grace.

VAN PATTEN: Just do another one, please.

DOHERTY: I can’t wait to do another one. But I like the lifestyle of film.

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VAN PATTEN: You like the nostalgia and the routine, it seems?

DOHERTY: I like the whole thing. It’s all-encompassing.

VAN PATTEN: You like the connective tissue between each job?

DOHERTY: That’s a great way to put it.

VAN PATTEN: I like that too. It seems like you’re a creature of habit.

DOHERTY: You don’t know if you’re going to have it all week, or maybe you’ll have it on Monday and then Friday, but that’s still enough routine for me. Whereas with theater, it’s too structured.

VAN PATTEN: It’s so disciplined.

DOHERTY: Oh Jesus, yeah. Have you done it before?

VAN PATTEN: Yeah, it ruined me. In the best way. It’s so scary, and so much when you’re doing it, but I’ve never felt more fulfilled than when I was done.

DOHERTY: Yeah.

VAN PATTEN: I genuinely felt so proud of myself for just doing it. Like showing up every day. Also, you cannot hide when you’re doing a play. You can’t do another take.

DOHERTY: But I love that. Even when it’s a bad show, you learn so much from it.

VAN PATTEN: Yeah, and you get to fix it in real time. Did you shoot season two before or after you did the play?

DOHERTY: Before. So I did season two from March to August, then I had a week off, and then I went straight into the play. I needed more time off.

VAN PATTEN: That’s quick.

DOHERTY: Yeah. I had to learn the music in two weeks. Honestly, the lines were the harder part for me. There’s dancing, there’s puppetry. You’d have known if you came to see it.

VAN PATTEN: [Laughs]

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DOHERTY: I think doing a play would be a wee bit different than a musical, because a musical is physically so taxing. I was playing against time with Seymour [his character in Little Shop], and the only way I could convince myself that I was this character was to energize it. When you start the show energized, you have to keep up that consistency. You have to go to the theater at 5pm, but you don’t get home until 11pm. You don’t fall asleep until 1am. Then the next day you’re tired and you’re trying to save your voice and stuff.

VAN PATTEN: What do you think you’ll take from the play into your next job?

DOHERTY: I think I’ll be a lot more grateful. I mean, theater life is rough. Mentally, emotionally, physically. You suck it up because everyone else does. Whereas we’re kind of pampered on sets.

VAN PATTEN: Yeah.

DOHERTY: We’re afforded so much time and space. It’s a different kind of hard. But energetically, it’s not as demanding. I had to find a composure within that energy. So now I can bring that composure into a much more relaxed environment. And with that, there’s a calmness, where I think authentic choices come to you.

VAN PATTEN: Mm-hmm.

DOHERTY: Does that make sense? I know it sounds a little pretentious.

VAN PATTEN: It sounds like you’re trusting yourself more.

DOHERTY: Yes, I really do. I’ve done 10 years in the industry, and I always refer to that as my apprenticeship. But now I’m in spaces where I feel like I belong, and like I can have a voice. I’m taking ownership and possession of my work more. For a long time, I was just drifting. But then I had to really look at things and ask, “Do I want to stay here or do I want to do more?”

VAN PATTEN: That makes so much sense.

DOHERTY: I’m not trying to prove anything either. That’s where you can be the most honest with your work, because your ego becomes diminished.

VAN PATTEN: I completely agree. Okay, segue. I want to talk about Link [Doherty’s character on Paradise].

DOHERTY: Hit me.

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VAN PATTEN: I want to know what you actually did to prepare for this role. Did you learn survival skills? Your character is named after a character in [The Legend of] Zelda. Did you play Zelda to get into character?

DOHERTY: I was in L.A. on a Thursday for casting, doing final chemistry reads with Annie [Woodley’s character], and by Friday I was in L.A. filming. The first scene I did was with Shailene. She cries, I cry, we’re crying.

VAN PATTEN: Oh my god, that scene was gorgeous. I could feel how pent-up these two people who haven’t been touched in years were. I can’t believe that was the first one.

DOHERTY: I’ll be honest. In the first take I was just watching Shailene act, and I was like, “What the fuck is going on? This is my life?” Then I was like, “Okay, lock in Thomas.” It was just like working with you. I never had to act. You’re so, so real. And Shailene’s the same. And doing Little Shop of Horrors with Madeline Brewer as well. All three of you girls, I could work with all of you for the rest of my career.

VAN PATTEN: That’s so nice.

DOHERTY: But with Shailene, all it required was vulnerability, and that is so scary. I talked about the whole drive into Paramount. All these things are really big moments in an actor’s career, but you can’t bring them onto set. It’s kind of hard to leave it in a third of a trailer, but when you’re working with really good actors, they lock you in.

VAN PATTEN: Yeah, you’re forced to go there.

DOHERTY: But I didn’t really have much time to prepare. I just tried to pick Dan [Fogelman, the Paradise creator]’s brain. Because you know what it’s like when you get onto a show. They’re still writing the last episodes, so they don’t even really know who your character is. You have to beg them for as much information as possible.

VAN PATTEN: That was my next question. What were the conversations like with Dan?

DOHERTY: You know what it’s like. It takes you a beat to find a character. And then once you settle in, you’re like, “Oh, thank god.” I just tried to personalize as much as I possibly could in a short period of time. Personalization is a good way for me to—

VAN PATTEN: Find your way in?

DOHERTY: Yeah. I think when you endow it with emotion, it comes to life more.

VAN PATTEN: I obviously know how goofy and silly you are, and how much you love to have fun. I love seeing little slivers of that in your performance. I’m like, “That was a Thomas laugh.”

DOHERTY: [Laughs] I laugh in Scottish.

VAN PATTEN: You laugh in Scottish?

DOHERTY: Yeah, if I’m doing an American accent, I still laugh in Scottish. It’s my giveaway. It’s time to get an American laugh.

VAN PATTEN: Were you ever a Boy Scout in Scotland? Did they have that?

DOHERTY: We do, yeah. But I was too cool for that.

VAN PATTEN: Of course you were.

DOHERTY: And then I got uncool, later in life.

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VAN PATTEN: Thomas, what would your contribution to the end of the world group be?

DOHERTY: That’s a hard question, Grace. What would yours be?

VAN PATTEN: Don’t turn this around on me. I know what yours would be.

DOHERTY: Performing for the troops? [Laughs]

VAN PATTEN: Yeah, you’d be the morale booster. You’d keep everyone happy.

DOHERTY: Really?

VAN PATTEN: You’d be the laughs, and you’d keep everyone’s energy up.

DOHERTY: That’s really sweet of you. I’d like to think so. Honestly, I would love to be like Link. Maybe not with the responsibility of leadership.

VAN PATTEN: To be the leader would be crazy.

DOHERTY: Stressful. The show touches on this for sure, but when it’s about survival, people change so quickly and fall back into a very primitive mode which is void of morality, almost. I mean, we’re seeing it today already in the world.

VAN PATTEN: Yeah.

DOHERTY: But Sterling and Link show that you always have a choice. The takeaway from the show for me was that you can choose to be a good person.

VAN PATTEN: I love that. You’ve just done so much. You’ve done comedy, you’ve played musicians, you’ve been a vampire.

DOHERTY: [Laughs] Twice.

VAN PATTEN: Really?

DOHERTY: Yeah. I look like a vampire. Sometimes I look at myself and I’m like, “What the fuck?”

VAN PATTEN: You’re a great vampire.

DOHERTY: Thank you.

VAN PATTEN: But you were in Gossip Girl and Tell Me Lies. And now you’re a survivor in the end of the world. There’s so much variety. Is that a thought-out thing, or are you just drawn to what you’re drawn to?

DOHERTY: It’s a bit of both, honestly. But I’ve always had this 10-year apprenticeship idea in my head. Because I never did any film, it was all musical theater, I was like, “I need to learn the camera.” I’ve been very fortunate, and I have an amazing team behind me. I couldn’t have planned it better myself. Some nights I would’ve gone to bed earlier. But we had fun, Grace. We had fun.

VAN PATTEN: Yeah.

DOHERTY: And doing a variety of things has allowed me to know what I want to go after.

VAN PATTEN: What is that?

DOHERTY: I want to work on bigger productions, with different directors and different actors. I want to keep growing as a person and also as an actor.

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VAN PATTEN: Yeah. I have a good game we can end on.

DOHERTY: Oh, I love that.

VAN PATTEN: I was going to ask, “Who’s your top five dinner guests that are alive?” But I’m going to do it Paradise style. If you could choose five people to be in your group for the end of the world, who would you choose?

DOHERTY: Do I have to personally know them?

VAN PATTEN: No.

DOHERTY: Alright. We’re bringing Eckhart Tolle along for sure.

VAN PATTEN: You need that.

DOHERTY: Let’s get the vibe set.

VAN PATTEN: Yep.

DOHERTY: And—oh, god, this is a hard one. Honestly, probably Shailene.

VAN PATTEN: That’s amazing. Who’s going to be your fighter? Sir William Wallace?

DOHERTY: Who?

VAN PATTEN: Braveheart. You know that’s my ancestor?

DOHERTY: [Laughs] Do you know how many Americans have said that to me?

VAN PATTEN: I’ll show you the documents. I have proof.

DOHERTY: This is really hard.

VAN PATTEN: I’ll change it to, if you had to pick four characters you’ve played, who would you choose?

DOHERTY: Dracula, 100 percent.

VAN PATTEN: Did you and Shailene talk about how you were both in a movie called The Descendants?

DOHERTY: We didn’t, actually, because hers was really cool.

VAN PATTEN: So is yours. Okay, it might be a trio. It might be you, Shailene Woodley and Eckhart Tolle.

DOHERTY: Oh, and Daisy, my dog.

VAN PATTEN: That’s a good one. Well, good luck to you four.

DOHERTY: Grace, you’re such an angel, I love you.

VAN PATTEN: That was so much fun.

DOHERTY: I’ll be out in three weeks.

VAN PATTEN: Okay, hit us up. Let’s do something.

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———

Grooming: Amanda Wilson using Oribe at A-Frame Agency.

Photography Assistant: Diego Salcedo.

Fashion Assistant: Izaake Zuckerman.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

On-set Production: Tashi Bhutia.

Production Assistant: Giselle J. Quinones.

Location: NYC Film Locations.

The post Thomas Doherty and Grace Van Patten on Vampires, Threesomes, and Hollywood Dreams appeared first on Interview Magazine.

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Best known for conquering television on Friends, Lisa Kudrow has spent the past two decades playing one of Hollywood’s sharpest jokes: Valerie Cherish, the gloriously delusional star of The Comeback. Co-written with Michael Patrick King of Sex and the City fame, the show has become a 20-year trilogy about the indignities of TV production. In its third and final season, Valerie takes on the rise of the machines by starring in an AI-written sitcom—a cheeky twist for a multi-camera series legend. As Kudrow tells her former Web Therapy co-star Lily Tomlin, it’s the perfect ending, until her next comeback.

———

TUESDAY 2 PM FEB. 10, 2026 LA

LISA KUDROW: Hi, Lily. Look how pretty your setup is. Thanks, by the way, for doing this.

LILY TOMLIN: Oh, I owe you so much.

KUDROW: Oh yeah. [Laughs] I owe you.

TOMLIN: No, I owe you!

KUDROW: No, I owe you! What if that’s all we say?

TOMLIN: Are you trying to emphasize that I’m way older than you?

KUDROW: You’re a little older than me in that you were a young woman when I saw you on [Rowan & Martin’s] Laugh-In and then all I did was Edith Ann at school.

TOMLIN: We go way back.

KUDROW: The teachers would say, “That’s really good!” And I was like, “Yeah, if you want, I can do it for other classrooms.”

TOMLIN: Let’s not get talking about me because—

KUDROW: That’s all I want to talk about, because you’re way more interesting and influential.

TOMLIN: Sure.

KUDROW: It’s true.

TOMLIN: I was thinking about—who are you married to?

KUDROW: His name’s Michel Stern. He’s not an actor or anything in this one.

TOMLIN: No, I know that. And you have a son?

KUDROW: Yeah, Julian. He wants to direct and he’s in The Comeback. Oh, you froze. I can’t hear you.

TOMLIN: I’m back. Let’s just clear the decks. What’s the first thing you and Michael Patrick King talked about when you started season three?

KUDROW: Before we knew there would be a season three, we’d talk about what would happen to Valerie, 10 years later. Michael said, “I have an idea. What if Valerie gets offered the lead in a sitcom, but it’s written by AI?” [Laughs] And I said, “Yeah, that’s right.”

TOMLIN: He was trying to get out of writing it.

KUDROW: [Laughs]

TOMLIN: I know the story intimately. He was burned out. He said, “I can pull this AI thing off with Kudrow. She’ll never know the difference.”

KUDROW: That would’ve been clever, except we write these together. We wrote all the episodes this time, just the two of us, because we decided early on this will be the last one. So it’s like a trilogy. And also, I don’t know that I’d want to do it again in another 10 years. [Laughs]

TOMLIN: Totally.

KUDROW: So we started fleshing it out, and in doing that we realized our first season was reality TV at the very beginning of reality TV. Everyone thought that would be an extinction event for the industry and writers, and it wasn’t. And then our second season was 10 years later, when it was all about edgy half-hour dark comedies on premium cable. It was just Paulie G, the character, writing all of them. Without setting out to do that, we’ve been sort of chronicling this industry over the past 20 years, where the number of writers you need seems to be cut in half every 10 years.

TOMLIN: Now we have AI. That’s one machine needed to make a show.

KUDROW: That’s the premise we’re looking at this season. And Valerie being Valerie, is really reluctant at first. She’s like, “I don’t even know if it’s legal. Is anyone else doing it? Are the writers going to hate me? Can’t have that. They still run television.”

TOMLIN: You’ve done their jobs in.

KUDROW: Of course we didn’t actually use AI to write it. We did talk to people who worked in AI, just so we knew what we’re talking about, and they’d say, “Well, you should try it to see how it works.” And we just went, “Nah.”

Top, Pants, Gloves, and Shoes Prada.

TOMLIN: Are you drawn to characters who are slightly delusional, or do they just keep finding you?

KUDROW: It must be a part of who I am. To me, the funniest thing is someone who has no idea that they’re operating in an alternate reality.

TOMLIN: When you’re going to play somebody, do you have a distinct hairstyle in mind?

KUDROW: It usually comes later. You’re big with that. On Web Therapy, you had your hair ready to go. Is that a place you start?

TOMLIN: Sometimes. Of course, that character was in prison, so she had—

KUDROW: Cornrows. [Laughs] For Valerie, it was pretty clear early on that she should be a redhead, because blondes are ditzy and brunettes are too serious, but redheads are fun and smart. That’s what I thought her thinking around that would be. And then we wanted her to have the same hairstyle she would’ve had in the ‘80s. Jonathan Hanousek came up with that. It was so flattering.

TOMLIN: Oh yeah.

KUDROW: Valerie looks so much better than I do. [Laughs] Good for her.

TOMLIN: Oh, now wait a second. What’s harder, making people laugh or making them cringe?

KUDROW: I don’t have much difficulty making people cringe. I think laughter is always trickier. Especially for younger people who are discovering it now, they’ve had Housewives and Love is Blind. They’ve seen people doing very intimate and embarrassing things in front of a camera. And everyone is sort of curating their own reality show on social media, so it’s not so novel that Valerie’s got cameras on her all the time.

TOMLIN: This is a revelatory education for me. I have not kept up with the times.

KUDROW: You know how everyone’s always on social media. Another issue is that what we see, we’re not sure if it’s AI generated or not. There should be some rule that they need to let you know.

TOMLIN: That’s why I’m profoundly disappointed that you and MPK didn’t have the show written by AI.

KUDROW: We thought we could do it better.

TOMLIN: That could be a great experiment, a beacon to the future.

KUDROW: Well, yeah, we didn’t do that. I’m sorry. I guess the headline is “The Comeback Disappoints Lily Tomlin.” [Laughs] We just wrote a serviceable sitcom.

Jacket Loewe.

TOMLIN: Has anybody done a show by AI? Because gosh, get my agent on the phone.

KUDROW: I don’t think so.

TOMLIN: And I thank Lisa Kudrow for this Emmy, because it was really her idea to do a show by AI and I just happened to step in.

KUDROW: You can do the next season of The Comeback, the AI version. Lily in a reality show about her on a show, pretending to be on a reality show while shooting a fake show.

TOMLIN: That sounds promising. [Laughs] Okay. You studied biology at Vassar?

KUDROW: I did. I thought I wanted to be a doctor.

TOMLIN: Your father’s a doctor.

KUDROW: And my brother. They talked me out of it when I said, “I don’t know that I actually want to do this.” They said, “Then don’t.”

TOMLIN: They had tough love.

KUDROW: They were just supportive. It’s really a grind.

TOMLIN: My mother and father went to the doctor.

KUDROW: Oh, so that’s your connection. [Laughs]

TOMLIN: So tell me, when you studied biology, how far did you get?

KUDROW: I was studying evolutionary biology, and I intended to continue to graduate school.

TOMLIN: But you fulfilled your vision of evolutionary biology. You developed a species of characters that reveal—

KUDROW: Humanity to us.

TOMLIN: Yeah, that’s it.

KUDROW: The uncomfortableness of humanity. It’s hard to articulate, but for me, biology was a creative endeavor because it’s theoretical. The fun was coming up with theories for how things work. I was really interested in the complexity of our minds. How on earth did that arise out of random mutations?

TOMLIN: When did you realize that The Comeback had become a cult show? Did that have anything to do with random mutation?

KUDROW: The Comeback was a random mutation that some forces of nature didn’t appreciate as being valuable. They tried to make it extinct. Early on we were confused because a lot of people we respected let us know they thought it was great—writers, actors, artists, creative people. Then executives would say, “Yeah, so which was the reason it got canceled?” I don’t know the reason.

TOMLIN: Did you say anything to them like, “Well, was it me?”

KUDROW: I’m not that insecure. Honestly, we were getting great feedback while it was on. We heard David Bowie called HBO when he was going on tour, being like, “I don’t want to miss any.” Being canceled was shocking, but I wasn’t devastated because I thought, okay, this is beyond my control. What we did was good. I’m proud of it.

TOMLIN: You’re a mature, stable, incredibly gifted artist.

KUDROW: Thank you. I really try not to take things personally, because when people are saying something to you, they’re talking about themselves and their own issues. Or is that just me not taking responsibility for anything? [Laughs]

Coat Gucci, Top and Jeans Lisa’s Own.

TOMLIN: What’s the most embarrassing thing Valerie has ever done that you’d never do?

KUDROW: Almost everything. Well, when I’m talking to a showrunner and trying to make a point, even though they’ve made it clear they don’t care, I mostly know when it’s time to walk away. Do you?

TOMLIN: I usually give a little shove from behind or something.

KUDROW: [Laughs] Because you’ve done both. You’ve written, and you’ve been an actor for hire. Web Therapy was improv and you were full of fantastic ideas for the character and story. But when it’s a written script, do you pitch?

TOMLIN: Oh, no. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. You can’t make as profound a change as you feel is needed.

KUDROW: Right. But what stops you from trying to make as profound a change as you think is needed?

TOMLIN: If I feel I can impact it, I do it. But I don’t want to go into that. Let’s change the subject.

KUDROW: Okay. I’m just wondering if over the years, because now we’re going back to late ‘70s and ‘80s, has it gotten easier for you to have an opinion or make a suggestion?

TOMLIN: I’ve grown more accepting. I say, “Let’s just follow this through and see if he was right or I was right.”

KUDROW: [Laughs] Okay.

TOMLIN: I go with the flow, then I come home and angst over it day and night until it’s too late to reshoot.

KUDROW: I’m going with the flow more too, since I was on Friends.

TOMLIN: You could only make Phoebe pay off that way—she was so honest and true to who she is. I think she’s beautiful and perfect. It turns out she was kind of an admirable character.

TOMLIN: Oh, yeah.

KUDROW: At the time, it was like, “She’s such a ditz. How is it that you only play ditzes?” And I thought, Is she a ditz? To me, she wasn’t.

TOMLIN: Who said that?

KUDROW: Everybody. In 1994, it was like, “I love her. She’s such a ditz.” And it’s like, yeah, okay, that was what a ditz was to us. Someone who wasn’t towing the line.

TOMLIN: Exactly.

KUDROW: But she wasn’t stupid.

TOMLIN: How do you make that what becomes you?

KUDROW: At first, Phoebe was very, very far from me. It took a lot of work to justify the things she would say and do. Not in an irritating way—it was fun. Over the course of 10 years, a little bit of her came into me. I lightened up a little more and read some books on spirituality and things, just to try to understand her.

TOMLIN: Gosh, I love that.

KUDROW: Yeah. That’s why I don’t like playing characters that are too evil. I don’t want to inhabit that so much.

TOMLIN: I never wanted to kill someone on screen.

KUDROW: Yeah.

TOMLIN: I did kill someone in a series once. It wasn’t on-screen, but I still didn’t like to be identified with killing someone. It was my husband’s girlfriend. That was even worse. It showed a lack of growth on my character’s part.

KUDROW: Yeah. But it can also be enlightening to play unevolved people. I mean, you’ve really got to like them. I always start off thinking it’s a cautionary tale, and then it turns out they weren’t so wrong.

TOMLIN: [Laughs] Well, that is a life lesson.

Coat, Shirt, Skirt, and Shoes Bottega Veneta.

KUDROW: With Valerie, it’s like, you know what? She never gives up, whether it’s worth it or not. Good for her. She’s kind of strong, ultimately.

TOMLIN: Without even getting embarrassed. People are rolling their eyes at her but she doesn’t acquiesce. That gets my vote as strength.

KUDROW: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TOMLIN: Tell me, on your trip through Hollywood, what did you learn at 30 that you wish you had known at 25? Were you famous at 25?

KUDROW: I wasn’t famous until 30 or 31, and 25 was before I had therapy. But in terms of acting and auditions and stuff it was, “Don’t confuse people liking your work with them liking you. And don’t wait to get permission to like yourself, because you’ll need that. You’re all you’ve got.”

TOMLIN: We’re conditioned to think it’s arrogant if you like yourself and it’s not. It’s a requirement.

TOMLIN: Absolutely.

KUDROW: For stability.

TOMLIN: Is there any role that you passed on that you think about now?

KUDROW: I don’t regret things because I know why I said no to everything I’ve said no to. Sometimes it’s because I don’t get the point of the story, or I’m just not connecting with it.

TOMLIN: I don’t know if I’ve even been offered anything.

KUDROW: I feel like I’m offered things at the last minute, when someone else can’t do it, which I’m fine with by the way.

TOMLIN: I did that once. I got a part in And the Band Played On. Whoopi was going to play the role. Dr. Selma Dritz. I was delighted to come in for this political expression of someone’s idea.

KUDROW: Boy, was that good.

TOMLIN: Do you think sitcoms are dying or are they just evolving?

KUDROW: I wish they were evolving. 30 Rock and Seinfeld and Friends were really funny and really well written. But I’m not drawn to new sitcoms that are multi-camera in front of an audience because I’m not buying it. I don’t know if that’s just because I’ve seen too many single-camera sitcoms—I think we need to get back to being able to tell jokes. I feel like we’ve been too afraid to make jokes that might make people uncomfortable.

TOMLIN: The multi-cameras with an audience, they’re not short on jokes.

KUDROW: Right. But the really good ones, they’re not tame jokes. They’re jokes that are kind of, “I can’t believe you just said that.” Comedy is about surprise. You need things you didn’t see coming.

TOMLIN: That’s true. Do you ever watch yourself ?

KUDROW: I can watch The Comeback, no problem. Now I’m comfortable watching Friends without punishing myself. I’m trying to have that be my nighttime show, so I have a laugh or two before I go to sleep. There are still episodes I’ve never seen. Have you seen every Grace and Frankie?

TOMLIN: No.

KUDROW: You should. It’s good. Can you watch yourself or is that—

TOMLIN: I can.

KUDROW: I just get nervous. What if somebody walks in and I’m watching myself? That’s really embarrassing.

TOMLIN: It is. [Laughs] Well, I have just one last question.

KUDROW: Okay.

Coat Gucci, Top and Jeans Lisa’s Own.

TOMLIN: What does the word comeback mean to you now, versus when you created the show in 2004?

KUDROW: I mean, at first, to me, a comeback—that was the most embarrassing reality show to be on, because it’s saying, “I went away.” To me, it was really embarrassing that she’s so desperate to get back in the spotlight that she agrees to be on a show called The Comeback.

TOMLIN: Oh, no.

KUDROW: Now, it’s the most celebratory word. We love a comeback.

TOMLIN: [Laughs] That’s a random mutation that is really, really extraordinary.

KUDROW: We’ve mutated comeback from cringe to celebratory.

TOMLIN: And you are an individual who should be celebrated at every turn, at every replay—forget replay. I didn’t mean to say that.

KUDROW: [Laughs] This coming from someone who is unbelievably brilliant, inspired, and true to yourself.

TOMLIN: Thank you a lot.

KUDROW: You’re it, Lily. Not just for me. For everybody.

TOMLIN: I’m just a random mutation.

KUDROW: [Laughs] You are the best of the random mutations. Thanks for doing this.

———

Hair: Meghan Heaney.

Makeup: Elaine Offers using Victoria Beckham Beauty at Exclusive Artists.

Nails: Jolene Brodeur using Celisse at The Wall Group.

Set Design: Jeremy Reimnitz.

Photography Assistant: Lili Peper.

Fashion Assistant: Rio Garcia.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

On-set Production: Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell.

Production Assistant: Grace Perkins.

Post-production: Kelsey Haley.

Post-production Coordinator: Leonardo Cardemil.

The post Lisa Kudrow Tells Lily Tomlin How She Outlasted the Industry appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Kembra Pfahler, photographed by Marissa Fortugno.

“Performance is not entertainment,” shock artist Kembra Pfahler explained during the launch of her new eponymous book with Rizzoli at Dover Street Market last week. The statement distills four decades of uncompromising work into a single phrase. For Pfahler, performance is ceremony, a ritualistic act of critique, and collective transformation. Since arriving on the Lower East Side in the early 1980s, Pfahler has been the driving force behind a feminist underground in New York. From her early Cinema of Transgression to The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black (her legendary rock band of painted, blackened-tooth performers in mountainous wigs), to gallery interventions featuring dozens of painted nude bodies, she’s forged a visual language entirely her own. Along the way, she’s obliterated every rule about acceptable femininity, refusing the polite confines of female artmaking and performance. The new book collects four decades of ephemera, performance documentation, and portraits of her unflinching vision. To celebrate, we’ve gathered some of Pfahler’s most electric moments from the book. 

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Kembra Pfahler in Innocent zip top by Samoa Moriki, 2008.

Stills from Blue Banshee, director Mike Kuchar, 1994.

Kembra Pfahler home between tours, New York, 1994. Richard Kern.

Skeleton Fornication II, 2006. Katrina del Mar.

Kembra Pfahler modeling Chanel water bottle holder, Interview, 1990. Joshua Jordan.

Flyer for First Annual Kembra Pfahter Film Festival, August 27, 1993. Imagery from Fear of a Karen Black Planet, video to promote A National Health Care (1993). Katrina del Mar.

Kembra Pfahler with red chair and flower headdress, c. 1995. Katrina del Mar.

Kembra with Tape and Bowling Balls, 1995. Richard Kern.

Kembra Pfahler TVHKB tour collages and set list, 1998.

The Anti-Naturalist Show, Anthology Film Archives, New York, 1995. Laure Leber.

The post Black Teeth, Butt-Prints, and Bouffants: Revisiting Kembra Pfahler’s Electrifying Art appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Drew Goddard has a knack for finding the human center inside material that should feel impossible. He did it with The Martian, turning a man stranded alone on Mars into one of the warmer films of that decade. He pulled that same trick with Bad Times at the El Royale, wringing empathy from a cast of strangers with secrets in a roadside motel. Now he’s done it again with Project Hail Mary, the adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestselling novel which just pulled in $80 million its first weekend and has become the most talked-about film of the year. To unpack how, Goddard sat down with Cynthia Erivo, his collaborator on Bad Times, for a conversation about the women that made him, the fear that comes with creating, and why making great art doesn’t have to cost you everything.

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GODDARD: This is Drew Goddard.

ERIVO: This is Cynthia. We are at the Mandarin, sitting in this really pretty restaurant.

GODDARD: It’s empty, which is fun.

ERIVO: It’s also an indication of how far we’ve come. I’ve been here so often that they’re just like, “Here, fine, have the room.” [Laughs]

GODDARD: I think you deserve the room.

ERIVO: So do you. This is such a lovely thing to be able to do with you today.

GODDARD: I’m so grateful that we’re doing it. I was thinking about it on the drive over, if we had told ourselves 10 years ago, when we were standing in the rain on Bad Times [at the El Royale], that 10 years from now I would be promoting his talking space rock movie and you were playing 23 roles in Dracula, we’d say, “That sounds about right.”

ERIVO: I’m glad we’re here. To have sat in that cinema and watched that movie, I cried and laughed at the same time and texted you immediately. “This is insane. I don’t know how I’m so connected to both of these characters, one of whom doesn’t even have a face.” I think this is a part of who you are. You can be invested in something that should be inanimate, but make it so completely full of feeling and connection. What goes through your mind when you’re creating characters that way?

GODDARD: I can look back at my work and see that so much of the joy is through the characters. That’s what attracts me. Doing characters that aren’t like me.

ERIVO: Yes.

GODDARD: I find that thrilling. I grew up in a small town in New Mexico wanting to get out, and I’ve found a way in my career to see the world.

ERIVO: Mm-hmm.

GODDARD: With this one, it was based on a book and I had worked with the author [Andy Weir] on The Martian, but that scared me. I didn’t want to go back to the well. But when I read it, I could find compassion for a creature that had no face. From a screenwriting point of view, it was a nightmare. From an artist’s point of view, it was thrilling.

ERIVO: It’s the challenge, right?

GODDARD: That’s my sweet spot.

ERIVO: You’re lured by the challenge, but terrified by it.

GODDARD: We have that in common, right?

ERIVO: This is what the 23 characters are. You’re lured by it, but also absolutely mortified and terrified by what it will bring. There’s innate curiosity in the way you find these characters. Even on Bad Times, each one is so different and yet so full, each one completely excavated all of the many complications that come with being a person that is alive, that has to make a life for oneself within each character. And I found that within this piece.

GODDARD: I love hearing that because it’s never a conscious goal.

ERIVO: Yeah.

GODDARD: I just love learning, and what jumps out to me now that I’ve finished this movie is that it’s a movie about learning and the value of learning. I’ve picked a career that forces you to learn all the time. That’s not accidental.

ERIVO: When you say the word learning, it’s in neon lights in my brain, because as I look back at what I was watching, each one of these characters is desperately trying to find a way to communicate. They have to find a way to learn each other’s language in order to survive.

GODDARD: Yes.

ERIVO: The wonderful thing, as a viewer, is watching how that unfolds, the patience it takes, the time, the discovery. It feels like you’re creating an instruction booklet on how to communicate with another person who is not like you.

GODDARD: I don’t know that that’s how we set out, but we knew what we wanted to not do. It sort of works on the page, but in cinema, you want to see these characters interact. Me and the directors, Phil [Lord] and Chris [Miller], we all kept each other honest by saying, “The very hardship of creating this is going to be the point.”

ERIVO: I wonder how you found the way to communicate empathy and compassion through these characters, because I can’t imagine any part of this was easy. In the making of it, in the patience of it, it feels like that filtered into the DNA of this piece.

GODDARD: I think so. Finding empathy and compassion through the art of making something together leads to the product. There’s a reason we’ve picked collaborative art. We could do other art forms that are just about us, but we’ve chosen a different path.

ERIVO: It forces us to learn about how people work, how people tick. And hopefully it forces us to learn how to be better communicators, even when it’s difficult. That’s the very heart of what we do. I think it’s in the heart of what you particularly do. I will never forget, just before we started shooting Bad Times, sitting with you and Jeff [Bridges]. He had shown me a video of a person having an episode of Alzheimer’s.

GODDARD: Yes.

ERIVO: Both of us watched it in silence. When we came away, we were both in tears. And throughout the whole experience, there was a real fervor for understanding each of these characters and where they come from and why they are the way they are. No one’s story is linear. Neither of them have a linear path. The way our protagonist gets there is almost completely through force because someone else, whether right or wrong, believes in him.

GODDARD: Yes.

ERIVO: And he doesn’t believe in himself. But how do you make a character like Sandra Hüller’s feel really clear, not as though she feels sorry for herself, but clear about what she has to do, while still showing empathy in the hero?

GODDARD: You trust first and foremost what your initial attraction is. Sandra Hüller plays Stratt, who’s in charge of this mission. This whole movie is a triangle between three characters: Ryland Grace, who’s Ryan Gosling, Eva Stratt, who is Sandra, and Rocky, our space rock. We needed all three to be fully fleshed out characters, and that excited me.

ERIVO: Yeah.

GODDARD: Sandra said something in an interview, that she was grateful to play a woman who wasn’t defined by her struggle.

ERIVO: Right.

GODDARD: It’s fun to see a person in charge who has to make decisions that affect the entire world. That’s the type of role we see men play all the time. It just felt different to do it this way. I liked writing her. She’s a character I have needed throughout my life. I am a person who has had women specifically believe in me when I did not believe in myself and knock me upwards at key moments. I think about teachers a lot because this movie is about teachers. My mom’s been teaching school for 50-plus years.

ERIVO: Wow.

GODDARD: She defines her existence as a teacher and a mother. But the most important thing that happened to me as a writer was when I started at the University of Colorado Boulder at the same time Lucia Berlin started teaching. Lucia is an exquisite short story writer, nothing like the work I had been interested in at the time, who saw me and believed in me when I didn’t. She said, “No, you can do this,” and exposed me to a world of knowledge I never would have seen. I think a lot of that is in Stratt.

ERIVO: You talk about the women in your stories, and I have to agree. You don’t write them like anyone else. You really have an understanding of the full life of them. I love that you’ve taken from the women in your life and made an effort to create them fully on your screens. If there was another adventure you could write for a woman, where else would you take her?

GODDARD: First of all, I’m not sure I do have a full understanding—I recognize that I can’t. So part of it is saying, “Here are the building blocks I can see. Now let’s find other artists who actually do.” And this is where I bring it back to Bad Times, because that’s what it became.

ERIVO: Yeah.

GODDARD: I can’t fully know, but I can trust you. That’s part of this, “Here’s what I’ve got. I’m not going to be perfect, so help me.” I’m more comfortable now saying, “I don’t have the answers.” That comes with maturity. And then understanding that it’s exciting. My favorite moments on Bad Times were when I was wrong and you would make it better and I’d realize, “Oh, this got better in a way I did not see coming.” That’s what makes art thrilling.

ERIVO: To be able to see it through someone else’s eyes and go, “Oh, your idea.”

GODDARD: Yes. That’s what’s really fun.

ERIVO: Forgive me if I assume, but is there a particular love of music?

GODDARD: Oh, without question.

ERIVO: I think it speaks through your work. In this film specifically, in two ways—the space in the silence, and the needle drops. Did you know what musical drops were going to be in there?

GODDARD: It was not me. Because of The Martian, I had written very specific needle drops, but I did not want this to feel like The Martian. Chris and Phil said, “Let’s do this differently. We also don’t want a long array of pop songs. We don’t want this spaceship to feel like an American spaceship, we want it to feel like it was built by the world.” So they challenged themselves to put songs in from all over the world. Now when I watch the movie, because part of it is about language, I’m struck by how you don’t recognize the languages. Some people can, of course.

ERIVO: Well, I’m a geek. I freaked out when I heard “Pata Pata” because I’m obsessed with Miriam Makeba. I’ve never heard it in a movie before. It’s very rare to hear a South African artist in the mainstream. She’s one of the biggest South African stars there ever was. To hear that, and to understand it was an attempt to make it feel of the world, was such a beautiful thought.

GODDARD: When I told them that, they were so happy. The other thing I find lovely is that it’s doing the very thing happening to the protagonist, putting the audience in a position where they don’t understand the language and yet they’re connecting to the emotion. I don’t understand all those languages and yet I understand the emotion.

ERIVO: How do you go about writing a character that cannot speak?

GODDARD: It was really hard. We’ve been working on this movie for six years. I always try to start from a place of emotion. What are we trying to convey? How would I convey this if you’ve taken away all my safety nets? You go brick by brick. With Rocky, the animated form was crucial. That’s why Chris and Phil, who had revolutionized animation with the Spider-Verse movies, were the right people to direct this. I don’t know anybody else who could have made this creature come to life visually.

ERIVO: Did you know when you began writing this that you wanted Ryan to play the lead?

GODDARD: He was attached to the book before I was, which was fun because I know his range. He’s very comfortable in comedy, drama, and heartbreak, which are the big three polarities for me. I didn’t have to self-edit. I could swing for the fences knowing he would be up for it. 

ERIVO: Did the writer come to you to do the screenplay?

GODDARD: Andy texted me April 1st, 2020, two weeks after the world shut down. That was in the backdrop of this, the terror of it all. Andy said, “I finished a new book. I’d love you to do this. Will you please read it?” My initial response was, “Andy, I don’t want us to just go back to…” The Martian was such a special experience. I didn’t want to let him down. But then I read it and realized, though he had started working on it years before COVID, it was speaking to larger themes of the importance of empathy and compassion in a scary time. I thought, “Oh, I’m going to have to do this.”

ERIVO: I hate that so much, and you love it. Or hate it and love it at the same time, because once it happens, you can’t put it down.

GODDARD: When I start to think I’m going to do something, I find myself looking for reasons not to. Do you do that too?

ERIVO: Yes. Every fiber of my being made me want to say, “What are the reasons I can’t do this?”

GODDARD: What makes you say yes? What are those pieces?

ERIVO: If I feel like I don’t know it, if I feel I’m going to be forced to learn more about myself, if I know it’s going to challenge me and force me to become a better artist, that’s the thing that makes me want to go for it. Even when I’m very sure it will be hard. It doesn’t stop me from wanting to challenge myself, because I think it makes me stronger.

GODDARD: Without question. I look back and think, “I picked that because it would make me better,” not just as a better artist, but as a better person.

GODDARD: How much do the people you’ll be working with factor into your decision? We’ve all internalized this idea that filmmaking has to be hard to be good, grueling to be good, destroy lives to be good. When I look back at the directors everyone revered, the story was always the same: “Yes, I was divorced four times, my family was destroyed, but I created this work of art.” When I was younger I thought, “I’m never going to be great because I care about my family too much.”

ERIVO: There’s another way.

GODDARD: And we don’t talk about the other way nearly enough. 

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