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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

Jacket and Trousers Able Made.

———

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.

The post Ruthie Rogers and Noah Baumbach on the Art of Getting the Best Out of People 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.

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.

———

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. 

The post Drew Goddard Tells Cynthia Erivo the Real Story Behind <i>Project Hail Mary</i> appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have a gift for finding the heart and humor in any material they touch, from their early work rebooting 21 Jump Street to their Oscar-winning effort producing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse. Now, after getting let go mid-production from directing Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2017, the directing duo have returned to live action blockbusters with Project Hail Mary, an adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestselling novel that just broke all sorts of box-office records. Starring Ryan Gosling as a lone astronaut who wakes up in deep space with no memory of how he got there and is tasked with saving the world from a dying sun, the movie opened to $80 million domestic and proved that audiences are still willing to come to theaters if the material is worthy. Maya Rudolph, a longtime friend, collaborator, and self-described Gos-head, was one of the people who couldn’t resist Project Hail Mary’s charms, so when she connected with Lord and Miller recently over Zoom, she wanted to know how they did it.

———

RUDOLPH: I got dressed up for you guys.

MILLER: Oh, you look nice. I put on my finest T-shirt.

LORD: At least you’re wearing a collar. Thank you for doing this. It’s an unbelievable imposition on you.

RUDOLPH: I was lucky because I got to watch the movie and I snuck my son in—he’s a total Gos-head. 

LORD: Of course he is.

RUDOLPH: He’s 14. I don’t want to speak for my son, but I loved it. It made me realize I haven’t watched a movie that made me feel that way in a very long time, the way I used to feel when I watched movies. I felt cradled in the arms of Ryan Gosling. I have a lot of questions for you, but my first one is: how did you know that the dynamic between Ryan and Sandra Hüller was going to be so perfect?

LORD: We just got really lucky.

RUDOLPH: What the fuck?

MILLER: When you put two great actors together, you assume it’s going to be great. But it was even better than we thought because she brought all this nuance and warmth to a character that could have been a cold, stock boss-lady. They wanted to do a great job for each other, and you could feel that energy every time they were together.

LORD: They were nervous in front of each other.

RUDOLPH: They were?

MILLER: So nervous.

LORD: It’s two different spheres of cinema bonking into each other.

RUDOLPH: I don’t know how much of it was improvised, but because I’ve had the luxury of saying some of your words on screen, I know there’s always room for it.

MILLER: There’s always some play, yes.

LORD: It was really loose.

MILLER: There’s only one scene between them that wasn’t loose, and it was their final scene together. We rehearsed it and it was like, “Yeah, these are the words.”

LORD: Drew Goddard wrote that scene, and we were like, “We can’t mess with this. Just do it three times.”

MILLER: The way they did it even in rehearsal was like, “This is it. Let’s just capture it.”

RUDOLPH: It’s the gravity of the subject—how dire things truly are at that moment—that needs to be communicated. Did this come from thinking about what we’re living with?

LORD: I don’t think Andy [Weir] based it on any specific things. It’s his thought experiment: “Okay, what would we do? What would it take?” He tried to plan it out and understood there would be a very brief window where, if somebody was as powerful and compelling as Sandra, they might be able to get different space agencies to work together. 

RUDOLPH: I implicitly knew, loving your work, that I was excited to see what you’d do in live action. The way you already speak so many visual languages, it makes perfect sense that it’s Ryan and Sandra, and that it’s about a space buddy and the world falling apart. I had no expectations of what you were going to make, I was just expecting a new language. What’s incredible about this movie is it gave me the feelings of a traditional film I grew up watching, but with all the sophistication of the way you guys work visually. When Rocky’s ship came in, I was like, “Yeah, they probably talked about that a lot.”

LORD: For about a year. All of our ships are tubular because our materials aren’t strong enough. If we put a corner on a spaceship, it would explode. But Rocky’s materials are so strong he can have angles. And then we thought, “What’s the most creative animal on earth? A bird. So maybe they made it like a bird’s nest.”

MILLER: Every aspect of the movie took a lot of smart people working together, but this movie has so much invention in it. The production design team, the VFX artists, everyone, they were coming at it from a philosophical standpoint from the beginning. People felt a sense of ownership because, from the start, everybody could feel it could be something special.

LORD: Charlie Wood designed everything. He lives in a 500-year-old house in Bath, full of stained-glass windows. So he said, “What if Rocky’s ship looks like Notre Dame, with buttresses all over the place?”

RUDOLPH: It does.

LORD: It’s like an exoskeleton. We kept thinking about how, when you meet somebody new, you only see the surface. The more you get to know them, the more you understand the layers inside. Ryan and Rocky meet and aren’t sure if it’s friend or foe, but the more time he spends with him, the better he gets to know him. We wanted the ship to unveil itself the same way.’

RUDOLPH: In the cold silence of space, when that thing starts following him, you’re like, “Is this going to eat me?” It looks sharp and terrifying.

LORD: I know.

MILLER: That was Ryan’s feeling too. “If a mysterious object that looks like a bundle of sticks showed up, my first thought wouldn’t be, ‘What is this?’ It would be, ‘I’ve got to get the hell out of here.'”

RUDOLPH: I would just have a heart attack in space. When he woke up with that tube down his throat and looked out the window, that’s the moment I give up.

LORD: We condensed it to the length of one Kris Kristofferson song, but there’s about half an hour’s worth of material of him flipping out, being drunk, being unable to deal with anything.

MILLER: We shot so much of him just falling apart, and ultimately, the audience—

LORD: They had a hard time with it. You can be sad for two minutes in a movie, but then you’ve got to get a move on. You’re not the first person to say it felt like a throwback. Are movies too mean now?

RUDOLPH: Yes.

LORD: They’re trying to freak you out.

RUDOLPH: We were all raised with heroes we could picture ourselves knowing or being friends with—relatable, but also genuinely funny. The humor that comes out of that man’s mouth, he’s our guy for our generation.

MILLER: It’s hard to imagine someone else doing this part. Luckily we didn’t have to because he had the rights to the manuscript from the beginning.

RUDOLPH: Oh, wow.

LORD: He’s a frustrated comedy writer in the body of a very famous, good-looking movie star.

RUDOLPH: That’s showing up more and more. He’s definitely gotten more comfortable at SNL — he has people there he can laugh with now, like Mikey [Day]. They’re like, “Just put The Gos in. We’ll be all right.”

MILLER: Let them do their thing.

RUDOLPH: When you think about a Marty McFly, or watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, somebody charming and funny and relatable and strong and charismatic that you feel good about, and then you see their heart burst open with love for a rock creature, it reminds us of our humanity.

LORD: We wanted to make a movie that was affirming. The movie thinks you’re smart and loving, and maybe sometimes we just need to be reminded of that. I thought that’s what every movie did. That’s what Paul’s [Thomas Anderson] movie did.

MILLER: We really wanted to explore his vulnerability, fear, and frailty. He’s a great microbiologist, but not a guy who’s an expert at everything, not an “I’ll go into that burning building to save the kittens” guy. We wanted him to wake up terrified and have to overcome his fears and actually grow into a brave, heroic person. That’s why you can relate to him. I don’t really relate to people who are super confident winners from the jump.

RUDOLPH: Ryan’s definitely the guy for the job, even though he’s far more good-looking than the majority of us.

MILLER: His secret is that he often plays the low man in the scene and confers status onto whoever he’s with. When you’re handsome and confident, your instinct is to be like, “Fuck you.” But even in scenes with a rock puppet, he was like, “Sorry, I’m talking so much.”

LORD: He’s like Warren Beatty or Robert Redford—big, tall, strong, handsome movie stars who are always trying to find ways to get lower than the other people in the scene. Isn’t that interesting?

RUDOLPH: You guys remind me of musicians. Bringing the style of Ryan to meet the style of Sandra, those are two completely different rhythms that work so beautifully together. I’ve always had this thing with great musicians where I can’t wait to see them play live. 

LORD: I like that analogy. When you see a great band, you feel the different personalities of the musicians and how they come together. What I love about a movie is seeing all the heads of departments and all the actors represented on screen, not squished into the single voice of a dogmatic filmmaker, but with an aperture wide enough to include lots of different voices. In animation, the hardest thing is getting personality into the movie, so we always encourage the animators: “Bring ideas. Try stuff. These things are gagging for personality.”

MILLER: For James Ortiz, who was Rocky—both the lead puppeteer and the voice—we auditioned and did chemistry reads with puppeteers from all over the world. We had two scenes and an improv game for them to do with Ryan, and it was immediately clear when James came in and said, “I don’t need your puppet. I brought my own.” He put Ryan on his back heels, and after he left, the three of us looked at each other: “That’s Rocky.” 

RUDOLPH: So they were really in the room together?

LORD: Yeah.

MILLER: We built a creature with Neil Scanlan and the Creature Shop team. It took a year to get him right. By the end of the movie, it’s about 50/50 animation and puppetry, but he was always on set. James was always in the scene, even when what they were doing wasn’t physically possible with a puppet, like rolling around inside a ball.

LORD: All the sets are built five feet off the ground to accommodate the puppeteers underneath.

MILLER: They were always working behind a wall because of their different atmospheres, but they could react together and improvise and chase ideas. That’s why even from the early camera tests it was clear: they had chemistry. Some of Ryan’s laughs are him being genuinely delighted by the puppet and by James.

RUDOLPH: I really loved his stuff with Lionel [Boyce] too. That’s where you start to trust him: “Oh, this is going to be my guy. He’s good. He makes friends.”

LORD: That’s his instinct.

MILLER: He’s always looking for connection in a scene. That’s why we had Priya Kinsara as Mary, the computer voice of the ship, in a little soundproof booth in Ryan’s ear, so in those early scenes, before he had anybody, he could talk to her and she would respond. So he didn’t feel totally alone.

RUDOLPH: That’s the elephant in the room of this movie. How many people can be on screen by themselves for that long and keep it interesting? It never feels like he’s alone. You’re never thinking, “When does the next person come in?”

MILLER: Very few people could have pulled off what he pulls off.

RUDOLPH: There’s also such beauty in what you created to tell a story of solitude. Solitude sounds like the worst thing in the world, and all the way off planet Earth sounds like a full-blown nightmare, and yet it was fascinating and funny and charming, and I was there for every second.

LORD: We tried hard to make it not punishing to the audience.

RUDOLPH: It’s never punishing.

LORD: The movie means you well. Even in the music, we told Daniel Pemberton, who did the score, “These singers need to be rooting him on. This melody has to say, ‘We believe in him. It’s a call to action.'” We did versions that were just really spooky.

RUDOLPH: Like 2001 vibes?

LORD: Yeah, spine-tingling.

RUDOLPH: When I think of never wanting to go to space, I secretly think of the 2001 score. It’s fucking terrifying.

LORD: One of the things we spent time on is the idea that space is where we live. We’re all from space.

RUDOLPH: What the fuck?

LORD: As the movie goes on, we actually made the stars friendlier, more colorful, happier, because we wanted the characters to slowly feel at home out there.

MILLER: So many space movies are about a person leaving the warmth of home for the loneliness and cold darkness of space. This felt like this guy is more alone at home, and when he gets to space, he makes a friend and finds a new home. We wanted it to start off scary and overwhelming, then become warmer as the friendship builds.

RUDOLPH: You guys are really good.

MILLER: Our job was to plan extensively and then set up a playground, so that when Ryan and others came on set and we found a better way to do something, we could pivot. Sandra singing karaoke wasn’t in the script.

RUDOLPH: Really?

MILLER: We were scouting the ship where we’d shoot the aircraft carrier scenes and it had a karaoke machine. We thought, “Everyone should be socializing, but Sandra can’t because she’s the boss.” Ryan came to us and said, “Sandra has a beautiful voice. It’s crazy we’re not asking her to sing karaoke.” We said, “But we’re only on set for another 36 hours.” So we asked her anyway: “Would you sing a karaoke song tomorrow at the end of the day?”

LORD: So fucking uncool.

MILLER: She said, “Okay, but I get to choose the song.” That night she chose the Harry Styles song. The lyrics are absolutely perfect for the story. We told her, “The idea is that you want to show the crew you believe in them, that you love them, that it’s going to be okay, and then when you’ve communicated that, you shut it back down and get back to work.” She came and did it, and we started shooting the reactions of the other people. They didn’t know what she was going to do, and everybody’s jaw was on the floor. Those reactions are all real. It ended up being the heart of the movie and a crucial part of her character.

RUDOLPH: That’s why I love when you guys make movies. What I learned at SNL was: “We don’t have time to wait. We have a show tonight.”

MILLER: “Figure out a way to make it happen.”

LORD: A set should be a place where everybody’s trying to say yes.

RUDOLPH: So many technicalities to fulfill, and yet you still created space for play and fun. Very few people are capable of that. I’ve known you guys for a very long time, but I’ve decided, after this conversation, that you’re a band.

LORD: You have to accommodate both voices.

RUDOLPH: Different voices that speak the same language but listen to each other’s.

LORD: The building block of everything we do is a relationship.

RUDOLPH: You’re like The White Stripes and The Black Keys, but different. If anybody is capable of EGOTing, it’s you two.

The post The <i>Project Hail Mary</i> Directors Tell Maya Rudolph How They Pulled Off This Year’s Biggest Hit appeared first on Interview Magazine.

When Sean Baker finished Anora, he could have taken a breath. Instead, he flew to Penang, Malaysia, with an iPhone, a skeleton crew, and Michelle Yeoh and made Sandiwara, a short film for Han Chong’s self-portrait residency which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. Shot guerrilla-style in the streets and hawker markets of George Town, the movie follows Yeoh, who plays five different women—a hawker, a food critic, a waitress, a pink-haired vlogger, and a singer called Lady Orchid—each moving separately through the streets and food stalls of the city before converging at a neon-lit open-air food court. It’s s character study, proof that Baker’s instinct for finding real life inside real places survives the leap from indie cinema to fashion commission. Here, the two talk Penang, iPhones, and why sex comedy might be the next frontier.

BEN BARNA: Do you see this as your official follow up to Anora? Is it part of the Sean Baker filmography?

SEAN BAKER: Yes, officially it’s my follow-up to Anora in the sense that it’s the first project I’ve directed since finishing that film. Obviously it’s a short and not one of my features, so it lives in a slightly different category, but I absolutely consider it part of my filmography. For me, everything I direct is part of the same creative path, whether it’s a feature, a short, or something commissioned. It’s all practice in storytelling.

BARNA:  You play five different characters in 11 minutes. Which one was the hardest to find in such a short amount of time?
 

MICHELLE YEOH: Sean and Han made it very clear from the beginning that each woman had her own identity and place in Penang. My approach was to understand who they were, what they wanted, how they moved through their daily lives, and what mattered to them. The Hawker character was the hardest because when you don’t have dialogue, you can’t hide behind words, the final scene was emotional. And, The Vlogger was interesting as she was so far from who I am. I remember thinking, “Who on earth is this person?” And I did a lot of research to make sure I do it right. 

BARNA:  What was it like making a short? Was it easy in comparison to what you normally do? Was it liberating?

BAKER: I tend to put my full heart into everything I do, so the level of effort doesn’t really change whether it’s a feature or a short film. The scale might be smaller, but the creative investment is the same. At the same time, this project was for Han Chong and self-portrait, so there’s a different kind of pressure there. When someone invites you into their world and trusts you with their brand, you want to make sure you deliver something that makes them proud. So it’s liberating in some ways, but there’s also that responsibility.

BARNA: What was it like to work on a guerrilla set with a tiny crew after doing so many massive blockbusters lately?

YEOH: It felt like going back to the core of filmmaking. Simply capturing life as it unfolds. Shooting on an iPhone really showed how storytelling has become more accessible in this time of creators. Working with Sean, Sammy, Chris, and Alex in such an intimate setup, in real environments, it allows ideas to flow easily, bringing a kind of immediacy you don’t always get on larger productions.

BARNA:  Did you feel self-conscious at all about having to deliver a Sean Baker-feeling project for Self Portrait?

BAKER: Not really. I think the reason I was brought on was because Han likes my style and was interested in seeing what that perspective might look like applied to Penang. That actually makes things easier because it means I don’t have to second-guess my instincts. As long as I felt I had some understanding of the place and the environment we were working in, I knew I could approach it in the way I normally approach my films.

BARNA:  How did it feel to film in Penang, effectively in your own backyard?

YEOH: Penang felt familiar, but seeing it through Sean’s eyes made it feel new. Watching him work with his team, Sammy, Chris, and Alex was like being part of a masterclass in curiosity and observation. They approached the city with real openness, and that allowed its texture and life to come through naturally.

BARNA:  Sandiwara marks your return to the iPhone after Tangerine. Why did this specific story in Penang require a smartphone?

BAKER: There were very practical reasons. We had a two-day shoot and Michelle was playing five different characters, which meant we had to move extremely fast. A lot of the scenes take place out on the streets of Penang or in a busy, active food court, so we needed a setup that allowed us to be quick and relatively invisible. Shooting on a smartphone meant we could work with available light, move through real locations, and capture moments without shutting down the environment around us.

BARNA:  Which of the five characters’ outfits from self-portrait did you actually want to take home?

YEOH: Each outfit was so thoughtfully tied to the character wearing it that it’s hard to separate the clothes from the character. They really helped shape how each of them moved and existed in the world. I honestly couldn’t choose just one.

BARNA:  What does shooting on an iPhone give you that other cameras don’t or can’t?

BAKER: The biggest thing is freedom. You can shoot very discreetly, which is incredibly useful when you’re working in real locations with real people around. It also lets you get into tight spaces and move quickly without a large footprint. And there’s another aspect I like, which is that it removes a lot of the intimidation factor, especially if you’re working with people who aren’t professional actors. A smartphone camera feels familiar, so it can help create a more relaxed environment.

BARNA:  How do you balance the needs of a fashion brand with your desire to tell a story?

BAKER: For me it’s about making sure the designs are celebrated while still keeping story and character at the center. Han’s work is beautiful, so you want to give it the space to be seen. But I approached it as a short film first. If the audience is entertained and engaged with the narrative, then the fashion becomes part of the storytelling rather than feeling like an interruption.

BARNA:  What do you think the appeal is of seeing food on camera, and people eating on camera?

BAKER: It just works on a visceral level. Food is one of those universal experiences—everyone can relate to it. When you see something delicious being prepared or eaten on screen, it taps into the senses in a very direct way. It can make a scene feel more immediate and more alive.

BARNA:  You shot a vlogger segment within the film. Is that character a critique of how we consume content in 2026 or an embrace of it?

BAKER: It’s definitely timely. The vlogging culture is such a huge part of how people document and share their lives now. For us it was also just a fun opportunity for Michelle and me to lean into the humor of that format. It allowed the film to play a little bit with tone and perspective.

BARNA:  You’ve announced your next feature is a love letter to 1960s/70s Italian sex comedies. What draws you to that specific genre right now?

BAKER: I think it might be time to bring sex back to the screen in a way that’s playful and a little irreverent. Those Italian comedies had a sense of humor about sex that felt very human and very honest. They weren’t afraid to be silly or awkward about it, and that’s something I find appealing. There’s a lot of comedy in sexuality, and I think sometimes we forget that.

The post Sean Baker and Michelle Yeoh Went to Malaysia With an iPhone and Made a Movie appeared first on Interview Magazine.

If you’ve never stumbled down the rabbit hole of reaction channels, prepare yourself. Buried deep in YouTube’s endless scroll is a genre built on a starkly simple premise: watching someone else watch things. These creators are reacting to the latest album drops, new episodes, the movie everyone’s talking about. Sometimes they’re skipping to the good parts, or sitting with you through every minute of it. Surprisingly, the audiences tuning in aren’t a niche pocket of the internet. They’re massive, with individual channels racking up anywhere from 100 to 700 million views. Somewhere along the way, reaction content stopped being a curiosity and became a phenomenon, one thats caught the attention of the very artists being reacted to. Sabrina Carpenter, Rachel Zegler, The Weeknd and even Drake have all taken notice. To satisfy our curiosity about this booming corner of the internet, we sent a questionnaire to some of the biggest reaction channels right now.

———

ASHLEY IPPOLITO

YouTube: @urinternetmomash

Subscriber count: 838K

Photo courtesy of Ashley Ippolito.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

We are the most connected we have ever been, yet also lonelier and more disengaged than ever. It’s so easy to get stuck doomscrolling or seeing countless opinions on topics that don’t even need to be addressed, and in those situations, we find comfort in the media that makes us happy. Whether it’s because you don’t know anyone close who likes the same thing as you or you want to know what a TV show is about without the commitment of watching all 10 episodes, the reaction space provides all of that.  

Is content creation your main source of income?

Right now, YouTube is my main source of income. My mom supported me financially and emotionally when my regular retail job was going out of business. I was trying to build up my YouTube career with only $200 a month paychecks. I’m so happy I took the risk and went for something I wanted.  Fun fact, reaction content does not make as much money as the average YouTuber does. I could have the same subscribers or engagement as someone who does lifestyle content, but they are more lucrative to brands and the algorithm. 

Which video did you get the most backlash from?

When I reacted to the show Yellowjackets. I said that the soccer coach was hot–which he was! Suddenly, I was accused of diminishing the sapphic relationships in the show and undermining everything that it stood for. The backlash was enough that I never finished the show, but maybe one day.

What is the toughest part of your job?

Staying current. My audience jokes that I am three months late to everything, but it’s not always entirely my fault. An audience member can sit down and watch an entire show in 6-10 hours, but that amount of time for me could only be used to edit maybe one or two episodes out of the series. In addition to the runtime of what I’m reacting to, making sure I follow copyright fair use laws adds to the final production time of a video. With the way media is consumed now, by the time I can get to something, I feel like everybody has already moved on to the next thing. 

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole?

Anything to do with feuds or accidents that happened on movie sets and, of course, cat videos. 

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones? 

I did have a drink and a night of relaxation when I hit 800k on tour, but I have started celebrating other milestones in my life more so than the numbers, like getting my new place, my cat’s first birthday, and my sister’s graduation. 

What’s one thing you refuse to react to?

Usually, I’d say no if I couldn’t put it on YouTube without getting in trouble. But honestly, I still try to find a way around that. Euphoria? Anora? Heated Rivalry? They’re all up on the channel with heavy edits and blurring. I do have to be strategic about what I post. There is a lot more planning and involvement than people think, especially once you have sponsors that want to have a say on what type of video their ad is placed on. That’s a whole other ballpark.

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before? 

When I attended Sabrina Carpenter’s Q&A session during her Emails I Can’t Send tour, the girl I was standing next to—who I became friends with that day—had the chance to ask Sabrina a question. When Sabrina saw me standing next to her, she said, “Oh my God, I watch your videos all the time. I had no idea you would be here.” Naturally, I blacked out in the moment.

A message to your haters?

I would be mad too if I saw someone thriving by doing something you do every Friday night on your couch for free. If anyone can do this and it’s so easy, pick up the camera! The internet is so vast and there is so much out there, don’t bother yourself with what I’m doing. 

———

ANTHONY FANTANO

YouTube: @theneedledrop

Subscriber count: 3.08M

Photo courtesy of Anthony Fantano.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

I think there’s a lot of isolation and atomization going on in modern society currently, and as a result, experiences that you might be having together with a larger community are just no longer part of people’s routines. Watching another person who you sort of trust like a close friend, is kind of the closest we get back to that. I also think reactions and streaming in general are much quicker than turning in more formal content that’s methodically edited and combed over.

Is streaming your main source of income? 

No, it’s just kind of one of many irons in the fire that I have going on. Between Twitch, YouTube, Patreon, TikTok and ads, it all kind of comes together.

Which video did you get the most backlash from?

Probably my My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy review. Though, I’m still quite proud of having the position on that record and I have doubled or even tripled down on it multiple times.

What is the toughest part of your job?

Keeping my finger on the pulse of what’s happening. There’s so much music out there right now, and there’s so much happening all over the music world all at once that it’s kind of difficult to keep up with all of it.

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole?

Any music-based rabbit hole. But my most recent favorite was Marcus the Worm from VRChat. 

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones?

These days, I celebrate the length at which I’ve been able to continue to do this rather than the size of it. I never thought I’d get out of my basement doing this. I thought I would top out at a hundred thousand viewers and that’s it, but I’ve somehow garnered more than that. There are people who have had channels much larger than mine, but their career has only lasted half as mine.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to?

Pressure.

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before?

Yeah, Drake. He’s a big fan. He’s a really huge fan of what I do. He loves my reviews. He loves my stuff. He watches all my videos. He comments on all of them too.

A message to your haters?

I don’t know what I could say to the haters or what the haters could say to me that I haven’t heard a million times for the past 10+ years. They’re like, “You’re the worst thing. You’re wrong. You’re terrible. You’re an idiot. You got the worst taste in music.” And I’m just like, “Okay, I’m just going to keep making videos. Bye.”

———

TRIN LOVELL

YouTube: @lovelltrin

Subscriber count: 728k

Photo courtesy of Trin Lovell.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

I believe that people watch reaction videos for the same reason I started creating them: Community, and shared interests in things that people in your life may not know about. Commentary videos also serve as this shared experience of watching together, similarly to mukbangs. The act of watching a movie with someone can bring comfort to many people. 

Is content creation your main source of income? 

Yes.

Which video did you get the most backlash from? 

Recently, Heated Rivalry.

What is the toughest part of your job? 

Probably working in a vacuum. I film, edit, and come up with most video concepts alone, and sometimes I feel like an echo chamber of myself. In those times, I need to put the laptop down and speak to some real people. 

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole? 

Censorship laws within movies, and how the rating system was created and has evolved over time. I know, it’s thrilling. 

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones? 

Honestly, just posting and celebrating with the audience. Sometimes, my parents would send me flowers, which is always so sweet.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to? 

Fifty Shades of Grey. I made it a rule when I was under 18 due to many people requesting it. Now that I’m older, I just carry on the rule for no reason other than because I said it on camera when I was 17. 

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before? 

Yes! I’m really lucky to have a friend in Rachel Zegler. We became friends before she made her film debut in West Side Story. She said that she found my Bring It On videos and then DMed me! So surreal, I can’t believe that happened.

A message to your haters? 

If I have the right to criticize and discuss movies and TV shows, they also have the right to criticize me.

———

HAMILTON TROY HAYES

YouTube: @hthaze

Subscriber count: 1.06M

Photo courtesy of Hamilton Troy Hayes.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

Ever since COVID, I think people have become really lonely. I think people crave a kind of friendship where you used to be able to sit down and listen to an album or watch a movie with someone. It might be the feeling like you’re spending time with someone who is invested in the same thing as you.

Is streaming your main source of income? 

Streaming is not my main source of income. We actually donate every dollar from streaming to a different charity every month, along with funds from the Patreon too. But overall, we are solely funded by our Patreon community, The HT Hotties! I recommend Patreon to any creator with copyright issues like the ones I run into, because 99% of my YouTube videos on the channel are demonetized, and I’m still trying to have a career with something I love doing.

Which video did you get the most backlash from? 

Any Taylor Swift video is where you are going to find the most. But I don’t see backlash as a bad thing when we do get it; it is a necessary part of commentary! As long as comments aren’t attacking my character I say it’s fine.

What is the toughest part of your job? 

I’m a pretty emotional guy, so regulating my emotions and being a blank canvas for whatever we need to listen to that day is usually my first hurdle. Also, deciding between reacting to what is viral versus what I genuinely am interested in listening to can be tough. Though, being a YouTuber is genuinely pretty easy in the big scheme of it all.

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole? 

Fire-arm safety! I’m really passionate about that right now. And D20. I’ve been binging all the Dropout shows, I’d love to be a guest someday.

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones? 

When the channel hit a million subscribers, we had a little party with some friends and a cake. But now, I feel like hitting milestones should have some real-life thing behind it. Sometimes, a number is just a number. Seeing how my impact can affect our community positively is the “milestone” I try to hit nowadays.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to? 

Artists who are pedophiles or abusers and A.I. music. 

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before? 

Yes! Just to name a few, we have Sabrina Carpenter, Lady Gaga, Lizzy McAlpine, PinkPantheress, 5 Seconds of Summer, Role Model, Troye Sivan, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Lorde, Zara Larsson, Conan Gray, and Noah Kahan. The Tik Tok is very popular–shoutout to Leah, my assistant, who runs it.

A message to your haters? 

Smooches.

———

JON DENTON

YouTube: @jondenton

Subscriber count: 518K

Photo courtesy of Jon Denton.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

There’s something innately human about watching someone react to something and connect with it. It’s essentially how we learn and evolve as a species, and these videos capture some of that human essence. If you think about it, so much reality TV focuses on reactions. Think of the judges and audience shots in American Idol. This is just an extension of that, dialed into very specific moments that people love or hate.

Is content creation your main source of income? 

It is. I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to do this full time since 2020. Before that, I was a video game reviewer and consultant, so I’ve been creating content in some manner for over 20 years.

Which video did you get the most backlash from? 

During the Kendrick [Lamar] and Drake rap beef in 2024, I had a lot of backlash from Drake fans, which continues to this day! It’s all good though, I like the energy. 

What is the toughest part of your job? 

Keeping a level head when a video underperforms or overperforms.

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole?

Recently, conspiracy theories. Although I’d much rather just watch TheBurntPeanut clips. 

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones?

I should really celebrate these things more. It’s important to take a breath and feel grateful for everything.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to?

I don’t refuse, but I don’t enjoy reacting to mediocre music. 

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before?

Many, and most famously, The Weeknd himself. It’s amazing what can happen when you put yourself out there! 

A message to your haters? 

I don’t care about them. 

———

GREGORY ALBA

YouTube: @thereelrejects

Subscriber count: 1.45M

Photo courtesy of Gregory Alba.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos?

Reaction videos tend to attract people who are already fans of the property because they want to see others experience certain moments. At the end of the day, these movies and shows always boil down to the emotional experience. I believe that a reactor’s job is not only to affirm a general consensus, but also to get in touch with their emotions and let it out, even if you happen to not like it. 

What is the toughest part of your job? 

I didn’t set out to start a business. I was just making videos hoping to get into the newspaper as a movie critic. It wasn’t until a year in when I learned you can make money doing this. Naturally, it became a job, and turning it off is the hardest part. The creator studio app is a business app but it’s more addictive than any social media app because it carries everything in one–views, business, and hell, even validation. From the second I wake up until I go to sleep, I’m usually doing some type of work for the channel. 

Is content creation your main source of income? 

Absolutely.

Which video did you get the most backlash from? 

We loved the first Wicked–it was our biggest movie reaction, and I was obsessed with it. Then, we did a reaction to Wicked: For Good, and we weren’t really fans of it. But like I said earlier, we’d mainly be attracting people who already loved the movie, and oh boy, our video was disliked. At the end of the day, we can’t let that stop us from being honest about our experience because it’s subjective. This idea that movies and shows can have an objective take is ridiculous. 

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole? 

Watching people do drama videos about comedian podcasts. Outside of that, my usuals are movie essays, movie reviews, personal development videos, a lot of Conan O’Brien, and The Weekly Planet.

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones? 

Honestly, we don’t really celebrate hitting follower milestones, but we should. We hit a million subscribers a couple years ago, and I still haven’t received our YouTube placard. I haven’t received an email about getting it either.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to? 

The Human Centipede 2. After watching the first one, which actually performed well for us, I just can’t sit through something even worse than that.

A message to your haters?

I hope you find ways to make your time more useful. My favorite haters are the ones who leave a mean comment on my YouTube video and then find my Instagram to send a message. Like, you gotta be the biggest loser with zero productive time to do that. Just leave it in the comments section.

The post These Creators Are Getting Rich Off Reaction Content While the Rest of Us Watch appeared first on Interview Magazine.

In 2006, Cillian Murphy was interviewed in the pages of this very magazine by fellow  Irishman Colin Farrell. At the time, the 29-year-old actor was relishing in his sudden rise as a movie star following a breakout year that included standout roles in Red Eye, Batman Begins, and Breakfast on Pluto. Little did he know just how in demand he would become. Now an Oscar winner, Murphy is returning to the world of razor blades, racketeering, and robberies in Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. After six seasons of the hit TV series, he reprises his role as the British gangster Tommy Shelby—still striking, soft-spoken, and possessed of a talent that transcends decades. To celebrate, we’re revisiting Murphy and Farrell’s conversation below. 

———

COLIN FARRELL: It’s 4 p.m. now in the Dominican Republic. Which is what time where you are, in London?

CILLIAN MURPHY: Comin’ up to 9.

FARRELL: Are you workin’?

MURPHY: I’m doing another Danny Boyle movie, actually. It’s a sci-fi movie, set in a spaceship, and I play a physicist. Then stuff starts to go wrong, as it generally does on spaceships.

FARRELL: Well, it wouldn’t be a drama if it all went swimmingly.

MURPHY: There you go. They’re trying to do a classy sci-fi movie, which hasn’t been done in a long time. Not since Alien [1979], I guess.

FARRELL: It’s your second time workin’ with Boyle. 

MURPHY: Yeah, it is. I think the reason people work with the same people again is not so much loyalty but because there’s an understanding there, you know?

FARRELL: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a thing with anyone, whether it’s an actor or a director or somebody in your office, where it takes a while for you to find some kind of groove or begin to understand each other. But that’s just cut out the second time around. You just move straight into it.

MURPHY: That’s the thing. There’s a trust and a shorthand, so it just makes it easier all around. I’m lovin’ Boyle, man. It’s also from the same writer who did 28 Days Later.

FARRELL: Alex Garland?

MURPHY: That’s right, yeah.

FARRELL: Ah, brilliant.

MURPHY: Yeah, so it’s Garland’s freakin’ screenplay. I’m lovin’ it. It’s just that I’ve done that kind of green-screen and wire work and all that stuff. 

FARRELL: It gets old fast, doesn’t it?

MURPHY: I just do a lot of crosswords, man. [laughs] 

FARRELL: Trist’s something I’ve started to do on Miami Vice. There’s this guy, Allen Weisinger, on this film. He’s one of them fuckers that gets the New York Times crossword on Friday and has it done just before he finishes his coffee, you know? I can only do it by Monday.

MURPHY: No, I’m not on that level, man. But you’ve got time on your hands, you know? There’s so much time being spent setting up on these kinds of movies, so you do a lot of hanging around. It’s a different type of acting, too, because when you come on you have to be totally honest.

FARRELL: Yeah, you can’t do it in halves. And the subtlety, or any ability you have to relate to something that you’ve experienced, is taken out of it because you’re on a fuckin’ spaceship. Are you fighting aliens? What are you doing?

MURPHY: I’m not at liberty to divulge that information. [laughs] It’s more existential, like 2001 [1968]. 

FARRELL: Or Solaris [1972].

MURPHY: Yeah, there you go. It’s sort of about how space fucks with people’s minds. We can’t survive without the sun and the air, and the sun is dying in this movie.

FARRELL: So it’s not that far-fetched.

MURPHY: No! That’s the truth, man. The sun will die. We just don’t know when. I’m having a blast. It’s the longest shoot I’ve ever done, too. You’re on Miami Vice now nine months, yeah?

FARRELL: I’m on this one now almost a year. I’ve been on it since January with prep and all that shit. We’ve been shooting since May, I think. 

MURPHY: The longest I’d ever been on a shoot before was, like, 10 weeks.

FARRELL: How long have you been shooting now? 

MURPHY: Sixteen weeks, so about half as long as what you’re doing.

FARRELL: That’s four months, man. If you lived to 70, that is about 1/180th of your whole life.

MURPHY: [laughs] There you go, yeah.

FARRELL: Man, you’ve had a mad couple of years, brother. Red Eye was a nice one, as well. It did remind me of Phone Booth [2003] a bit. I’m sure it’s a pain in your bollocks, people sayin’ that to you.

MURPHY: Well, they say that as a compliment. The writer very openly admits that he was inspired by Phone Booth with the confined space and people under pressure. It was just a brilliant actor’s piece to do.

FARRELL: Yeah, you and Rachel McAdams were fuckin’ great, man. She’s gorgeous.

MURPHY: She’s amazing. She could do anything. She’s just very down-to-earth and aware of the whole business.

FARRELL: And to work with Wes Craven—he’s really a fuckin’ legend. 

MURPHY: Yeah, absolutely. That movie was designed to give the audience what they want when they go to see a Wes Craven movie, even though it was a slight departure for him.

FARRELL: It wasn’t particularly a gore-fest, yeah. 

MURPHY: There’s a bit of that at the end, where I’m running around like Freddy Kruger.

FARRELL: How was the Batman Begins trip?

MURPHY: That one was mad because I was only on that movie for about three weeks. That’s all my part took, on and off.

FARRELL: Well, it felt like much more than that, which is a big compliment to you. It seemed like your role was a much bigger part of the whole grand scheme of things—even when you weren’t onscreen.

MURPHY: Thanks, man. It was just a great thing to be involved in. I mean, you’ve worked with the legends. Sometimes it wasn’t even in scenes with them, but they’re just in the movie with you, and you think, Fuck, I’m in the movie with Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman! I have to say, though, I think I’ve done my quota of bad guys. No more fuckin’ baddies ’cause I’m the least likely villain.

FARRELL: You’re a scary old fuck. It started with Disco Pigs [2001], which I saw years ago. Obviously, you did that part onstage to such high acclaim, but in that film you were totally fuckin’ mental.

MURPHY: For me, what’s interesting in drama is when you play people under pressure, or people who change dramatically. You get to go to places you never would. You get complete license to explore those dark interiors. I just find that a bit more interesting.

FARRELL: Absolutely. It’s never the smooth aspect of the character’s life or psychology that you draw on. It’s the bits of the characters that are either unsure of themselves or it’s those dark places that are most interesting and make you fall in love with them. I’m talking about your new one, Breakfast on Pluto, because with your character, Kitten, there’s an odyssey. It’s like a journey home. You just fall in love with her. But the thing you fall in love with is not even her sense of humor or frivolity or easiness in certain situations where most of us would shit ourselves—it’s that as much as she seems to fly in the face of adversity and know exactly who she is, she’s still struggling to find her place in the world.

MURPHY: Totally, man. Some people asked Neil Jordan if it was about the loss of innocence, and he corrected them very quickly, saying, “No, it’s about the maintenance of innocence.” Which I think is a very smart observation. Kitten really contradicts your normal narrative arc for a protagonist where they go from A to Z and they completely change. She kind of stays the same, and the people around her change. Her innocence and the kind of disco world that she insists on maintaining through every fucked-up situation that she gets in is what changes everyone else. What you see in the end is that there’s a big change in Liam Neeson’s character and even in the mother. The part where Ian Hart’s character is beating the shit out of me in the interrogation room because he thinks I’m a member of the IRA, and eventually becomes my protector, is a complete flipside of the normal portrayal of how these police would deal with a suspected IRA person. So it’s messin’ with all that.

FARRELL: Did you read the book?

MURPHY: I’d been in love with Patrick McCabe’s writing for years. I think The Butcher Boy is up there with Joyce and Beckett as a seminal piece of Irish literature. I really do. This is a kind of companion piece to it.

FARRELL: It’s a beautiful, absurd world. It’s like taking everything that lives underneath, subterraneously, in all Irish people and bringing it to the surface, the stuff that’s right under that bubbles up in us all. It’s all there in our culture, hidden by bravado and circumstance, or whatever it may be. Your work in this movie is really gorgeous, Cillian. Really gorgeous.

MURPHY: Well, thanks. Of all the characters I’ve played so far, Kitten is the one I have the most affection for. Those misfits you meet during your life are the ones you love the most—people who are just a little too weird or a little too smart or a little too strange who don’t fit into normal society and get picked on. Kitten is that, but ultimately, she triumphs.

FARRELL: Yeah, absolutely. So doin’ all these movies, do you miss the stage at all? Because you’ve done incredible work onstage as well. 

MURPHY: I guess I do. But the problem with it is that it takes up so much time. We’ve always said that the great parts in theater, like Hamlet and all these characters, are always gonna be there for time immemorial. But the movie parts come and go, so if there’s a moment where you can play them, you’ve got to go and eat it up, man, the way you’ve done.

FARRELL: Make hay while the sun shines, they say. But you know, while you’re still enjoying it and still challenged by it, you stay on that road. Then when that road becomes too trodden by your own footstep, you leap off of it onto another path. That’s what I’m thinking. I’ve got two pieces lined up within the next year and a half. Then I’m gonna take a year and just be with my family and my son. Just chill out, take it easy. It’s six years now that I’ve been away. It’s fine that we get a hotel room in the Dominican Republic. I mean, life ain’t tough for me, don’t get me wrong. But I’m just missing being home big-time.

MURPHY: No matter where you are or how well you’re looked after, you’re always Irish and that’s where you’re always going to be drawn to. 

FARRELL: Well, listen. We’ll leave it at that. I will give you a shout, man, or you give me a buzz, and we’ll find each other over Christmas when we’re in Dublin.

MURPHY: Yeah, absolutely. Look after yourself, with those hurricanes. 

FARRELL: Oh, yeah. They’ve mostly gone north of us. When I was in Miami, Katrina passed by, and I was there for that, but we only got a lick of it. It’s like the difference between sitting beside someone in a bar when they fart and sitting at the other end of the bar and thinking for a second that you smell something but it’s gone, and you go, “Must’ve been an elephant.”

MURPHY: Spoken like a true meteorologist. [both laugh]

FARRELL: Apparently, they got all these names like Wilma on a list. They’ve gone to the Flintstones now, because they’ve run through so many fuckin’ names.  

MURPHY: Jesus, man. It’s been a crazy year.

FARRELL: Yeah, record-breaking. It’s been like 12 or 13 storms—a lot of damage.

MURPHY: Mother Earth is saying something.

FARRELL: Now that’s another story for another time, man. Okay, take care.

MURPHY: Bye, bye, bud. 

The post A Young Cillian Murphy Tells Colin Farrell About His Rise to Fame appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Pre-Oscars panic is basically mandatory, unless you’re May Hong. When I called the Korean-American actor, best known for voicing Mira in the animated phenom KPop Demon Hunters, ahead of Sunday’s Academy Awards, she was bare-faced and allegedly “breaking out.” It’s nightmare fuel for most, yet, to her own surprise, she was completely unfazed. “Usually I’d be agonizing,” she explained. “I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t care.” That laissez-faire attitude is hard-won. Hong has gone from maximalist product junkie to meticulous ingredient detective, copy-pasting INCI lists and vetting everything from moisturizers to exfoliants in her battle with fungal acne. The result is a routine that reads less like a vanity shelf and more like a lab protocol. As she gears up for the peculiar high-glam theater of awards season, we get into manicures, microcurrents, and why no-makeup makeup will always reign supreme.

———

OLAMIDE OYENUSI: Hey. Where are you?

MAY HONG: I’m at home in Bed-Stuy. 

OYENUSI: I’m in Manhattan. This rain is gross. I guess to set the scene for the readers: is it a bare-faced or full-glam day for you?

HONG: Very bare faced. I’m breaking out right now.

OYENUSI: I don’t see a single pimple.

HONG: Just over here, this activity.

OYENUSI: It’s giving freckle.

HONG: [Laughs] Yeah. Usually, I’d be much more bummed out about it. Especially with the Oscars coming up, I feel like I’d be agonizing over what to do like, “Shit, I have to fix this before this date.” I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t care.

OYENUSI: Well, that’s great. Walk me through your daily skincare routine. Do you have any non-negotiables for morning and night?

HONG: It took me a really long time to figure out that I have fungal acne that gets activated with certain ingredients, so I’ve had to really pare down. I actually did a beauty interview, I don’t know, almost 10 years ago now, and I was using a thousand products. It was very maximal. But now, a non-negotiable is ketoconazole shampoo. It’s basically for dandruff. It’s either bright red or pink, and it’s medicated. And in the U.S., of course you have to get a prescription, but everywhere else you can just get it at the drugstore. So I recently picked some more up in Thailand when I was there being part of Arden [Cho]’s movie. I also used to over-exfoliate, for sure.

OYENUSI: Your face or body?

HONG: My face. I was doing way too much. Anyway, I use Sofie Pavitt Mandelic [Clearing serum] every day, and I really notice when I don’t use it.

OYENUSI: Do you double cleanse? 

HONG: I’ll use Bioderma to wipe makeup off and then wash my face, but I’ve moved away from oil cleansing because of the fungal acne stuff. A lot of oils will activate a breakout.

OYENUSI: What’s your go-to moisturizer with that in mind?

HONG: I’m sad that I have to do this, but I have to go on this website called folliculitisscout.com, and I have to copy-paste every ingredient list to see if it has ingredients that cause malassezia, which is the bacteria. It’s basically a yeast that grows, and then that makes you break out. They’re not pimples either. It’s just a reaction. It’s tiny bumps. It seems like there’s something in it, and then you pop it and there’s not. It’s really crazy.

OYENUSI: Are they red? Is it more like a whitehead?

HONG: It looks like a whitehead. It looks like multiple whiteheads. I’ve ruined my skin trying to pop it and then realizing that it doesn’t have a seed, and then that gets infected and then becomes an actual active pimple. 

OYENUSI: Not popping pimples is really difficult. It’s too satisfying.

HONG: That’s why it’s Starface for the win.  It’s such a lifesaver, because you have to put the sticker on. Oh yeah, and my moisturizer is from a Korean brand. It’s by S.Nature, and it’s called Aqua Squalane [Moisturizing Cream]. I’ve bought it so many times.

OYENUSI: I’m glad that you brought up Korean skincare. It has changed my life. What other products do you like?

HONG: I like the MEDIHEAL pads.

OYENUSI: Toning pads?

HONG: It’s the Phyto-Enzyme Clear Peeling Pad, and they’re single-use pads that are pre-soaked. And that’s my physical and chemical exfoliation. I think I used to do too much, and all of Korean skincare is about consistent, gentle exfoliating. What else did I recently buy? I just put it in an Olive Young order.

OYENUSI: Ooo, I’m tapped into Olive Young. When you feel a breakout coming, do you have an emergency protocol?

HONG: I’ve never been through what I am going through right now, obviously, with K-Pop [Demon Hunters] and the schedule and flying so much and all of this stuff. I can handle it, but in October it came to a head where I just was so fucking stressed out, and I had really unexplainable, intense amounts of just breaking out. You know when you have an “I don’t recognize myself” skin moment?

OYENUSI: I either need to get my hair done or go to therapy.

HONG: Yeah, it was just fucking stress. So honestly, I think that it’s about staying consistent. Of course there are topical answers to problems. I emergency-called Sofie, because she’s a personal friend of mine. I was just like, “Help me.” It was this panicked text like, “Can you get me in? Can I get something, anything?” Of course, an emergency mandelic peel will do something, but it’s also mental health. It feels like you’re doing something for the problem, but that’s as much of the process as the topical solution. It’s not like, “Yeah, okay, now I’m saved,” or whatever.

OYENUSI: Maybe for the next two days.

HONG: [Laughs] Yeah. I think more than anything, it’s about trying to be less stressed. And I’d say normally I’m not a super stressed-out person.

OYENUSI: What’s your sign?

HONG: I’m a Scorpio. 

OYENUSI: I had to ask, partially because I just wanted to, and also because you were like, “I don’t get that stressed.” 

HONG: [Laughs] I’m the first day of Scorpio. I’m a Libra-Scorpio cusp—October 24th.

OYENUSI: Spooky. Do you wear sunscreen every day? Is it in your moisturizer?

HONG: I’ve been bad lately and not using it. I don’t know why. Maybe that’s my little rebellion.

OYENUSI: Do you use tools like a gua sha, LED mask, anything like that?

HONG: You know what I use? I use a ZIIP.

OYENUSI: What’s that?

HONG: It’s a microcurrent and nanocurrent device. And you just put a conductive gel on your face, and there are multiple programs that you can select from an app on your phone, and you just follow that. I really, really notice it. But mine broke, and then Sofie recommended this other brand that FaceGym uses. Basically, it just snatches your face. I’ve taken before-and-after photos multiple times. I consistently use it when I have events and stuff, and your eyebrows are just so much higher. But I try to lead up to it.

OYENUSI: I know you have an art school background. I’ve noticed artists are always really good at makeup, and doing a full glam. But you’re also a model, and that’s typically more bare-faced. If you could only choose one for the rest of your life, which would it be?

HONG: Bare face, for sure. 

OYENUSI: Are you good at doing full glam? I just assumed.

HONG: I am.

OYENUSI: Of course.

HONG: I actually feel really confident about doing my own makeup, and I do think that it has to do with being an artist. Even when I work with makeup artists, I always insist on at least doing my own lashes and my brows. It’s really hard for me not to want a little bit of control over things, or I’ll always tweak. This is going piss to makeup artists off. Fuck.

OYENUSI: [Laughs] I actually have a question that says: “Do you ever tweak what the MUA is doing on set?”

HONG: Yes, yes, yes. I recently was on set and I asked some other actresses, “Do you go in after people?”  And all these actresses were like, “Of course I fix it a little bit in the way that I like.” So it’s not just me. I’m not the monster fucking with other people’s work.” It’s a weird boundary because it’s their work, but it’s my face.

OYENUSI: Do you have a concealer or foundation that you trust not to betray you in harsh lighting? Do you even use foundation?

HONG: I don’t like to use full-face foundation. I have multiple colors of the Clé de Peau stick concealer. I just take a little brush and dab a little bit onto it, and I mix colors to color-match. I’ll just put little dots and just tap, tap, tap. Imagine Photoshopping, clone-stamping your face. You know what I mean?

OYENUSI: I do. Sometimes foundation can make you look older in a way that’s not always the most appealing. 

HONG: I do not like it. When I have too much makeup on—especially when I have too much contour-type of stuff on—it makes me feel dysphoric. It ages me, I think.

OYENUSI: So bronzer or blush—which do you prefer?

HONG: Blush. Always.

OYENUSI: Do you have a go-to lip combo?

HONG: No. If I’m going out, I don’t really love carrying a bag. I’m a jeans-and-pockets guy, so I’ll just have a lip balm in my pocket. It’s like lighter, lip balm, and some lip color that I’ll also use on my cheeks.

OYENUSI: What does your body-care routine look like?

HONG: I will go to King Spa in New Jersey. [Laughs] Oh, god. Do I have to start think about being naked in a different way? I don’t know. That’s something I’ve been thinking about where I’m like … no one recognizes me. I’m a voice actor.

OYENUSI: Do you like that?

HONG: Yes. It’s amazing. I love that I’m not recognized.

OYENUSI: A bit undercover. Is there a specific manicure that you like?

HONG: Simple. I love a fresh set, because I’m too tactile of a person and I need to be able to do stuff. I end up wrecking them or clipping them, or even ripping them off. It’s crazy.

OYENUSI: What’s your current nail color?

HONG: Like a wine red. It’s so old. Look how much it’s grown out.

OYENUSI: That’s up close. If someone were to clock you for that they’re doing too much. Ok, speed round: a current beauty trend that you want to try?

HONG: I really love watching crazy K-beauty makeup where it’s just tiny, detailed highlight-and-contour stuff. Because Korean beauty contouring is so different from Western contouring. They use a lot of cool gray, where you just want to contour an entire plane of your face to make it look narrower rather than defining certain areas or trying to make your nose look more sculpted. I like watching it in an ASMR way. 

OYENUSI: I understand that.

HONG: My mom just taught me from such a young age that wearing makeup where it almost looks like you’re not wearing makeup is the best. It shouldn’t be obvious. But now, being photographed more for award season and all this stuff, I’m like, “Oh, you have to do a little bit too much because a flash will wash you out.” So if I were to do my own makeup, it just looks like I’m not wearing any makeup. But I realize you have to go overboard for photos at events. I feel like I’m in drag when I do all this award stuff. I’m so butch on a regular basis, so then when I get dressed for awards stuff or whatever, I feel like I’m in full high-femme costume—and that’s the makeup too.

OYENUSI: Well, have fun at the Oscars. I’m excited to see your look.

HONG: I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to wear. You’re lovely. Thank you.

OYENUSI: Of course. Bye.

The post Why <i>KPop Demon Hunters’</i> May Hong Didn’t Prep Her Skin for the Oscars appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Photo courtesy of Gina Gershon.

Magnetic and self-assured, Gina Gershon made a name for herself in Hollywood as a risk-taker, often taking on queer roles in cult classics like Bound and Showgirls. Needless to say, her willingness to step into the bold and unconventional meant that she often found herself in some pretty surreal or sticky situations. After 40 years in the industry, the Los Angeles native compiled dozens of them in her new book AlphaPussy, a chronicle of coming-of-age blunders and cringe-worthy celebrity encounters that only made her stronger. “It’s not a self-help book,” she insists. “This is just how I navigated, in my way.” But that’s not to say there isn’t a bounty of insights to be found in its pages. Alphapussy, in fact, leaves the reader with a potent feeling of empowerment and autonomy. Take it from the genre-defiant artist and composer Laurie Anderson. “We have a lot of stories that have never really been told,” she told Gershon on a Zoom call last month. “But we have a million books and plays and operas about how men feel about their fathers.” In conversation, the two longtime friends talked matriarchy, Medusa, and surviving in La La Land.—ARY RUSSELL

———

GINA GERSHON: Thank you for doing this, Laurie. This is a normal conversation. This is a professional conversation. [Laughs]

LAURIE ANDERSON: Well, you’re really helping people with this book. I especially appreciated that you said there was only one piece of advice that you’d like to offer. “Learn about your parents.” I was thinking about that because I had a quite wonderful dream last week where I was talking to my mother and we were both 40 years old.

GERSHON: Wow.

ANDERSON: I was thinking, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to have coffee? I would really get along with her.” But no, I thought she had a lot of problems.

GERSHON: Wouldn’t that be great to be able to sit and talk to her about it? You’d understand and forgive so much.

ANDERSON: Well, you’re a very generous person to say that. 

GERSHON: Not good for her. I mean, good for you.

ANDERSON: Nothing’s good for her anymore. She’s dead. But I loved the way you were describing how your mother’s completely oblivious to the fact that she’s pregnant and you said, “It’s just me floating around quietly, creating myself in the dark.” That’s a lovely phrase. How did you catapult yourself back into that little person you were? 

GERSHON: I’m a storyteller. I don’t consider myself a writer so much. But I realized I don’t want to write a tell-all book about Showgirls, or about show biz. They’re interesting stories, but it’s not really me. It felt icky. So I said, “I don’t want to do that.” Then over time, I got into the exercise of writing stories down on paper, because I’ll forget them at some point. Once I started the process, all of a sudden I’d be sitting there and an image would come into my head of the bowling alley.

ANDERSON: Oh  yeah.

GERSHON: This is where my acting training would come in, all that sense memory work.

ANDERSON: Tell me about sense memory work.

GERSHON: So let’s say you need to come up with a certain emotion, or you’re trying to figure out a certain part in a scene that’s difficult. Then maybe something from your past shows up and you lay there and you start watching it like a movie. So many times when something would float up to my consciousness and I didn’t know why, I would go on the mat until I finally saw the scene, until I remembered it. Sometimes stories would come up and I’d be like, “Oh my god, I remember that.” But thematically it didn’t quite fit, so then I wouldn’t use it. I had to be somewhat disciplined because a part of me wanted to go out on these super weird tangents. Of course, I’ve had nice memories too, but they didn’t belong in this book. 

ANDERSON: I bet a lot of other things would come back if you look from a different point of view. 

GERSHON: I wouldn’t have gotten these stories from my mom until she was basically on her deathbed, because she was so vulnerable and we had time. She wasn’t going anywhere. Her deathbed lasted three years. 

ANDERSON: I remember that.

GERSHON: Instead of being defensive, she had softened.

ANDERSON: There’s really something amazing about being with your mother when she dies. It’s pretty iconic, especially for women. 

GERSHON: Definitely, and it’s more intense for women. Men, they’re there, but women and their mothers, there’s nothing like that relationship. The father and son thing is pretty intense. But you notice when the mother’s dying, it’s usually the women who are there.

ANDERSON: Men are too lazy and they also feel it’s a little too sexual. It’s a little too invasive. They don’t want to know those kinds of things about their mother. They don’t want to change her diapers. 

GERSHON: Nor should they, and the mother doesn’t want them to do that either. My mom didn’t want me to do all that stuff. 

ANDERSON: Right.

GERSHON: But it’s interesting—they gave birth to us, but in the end, I was helping birth her death.

ANDERSON: This is why I have a lot of hope for women writing things—operas, books. We have a lot of stories that have never really been told. And we have a million books and plays and operas about how men feel about their fathers.

GERSHON: It’s true.

ANDERSON: We’re just starting to catch up.

GERSHON: I remember going to school and studying mythology. I said, “All these hero journeys, they’re all men’s stories.”

ANDERSON: Hello!

GERSHON: I don’t know if it was Joseph Campbell, but it was someone who said, “Well, the woman is already whole, so they don’t have to go through this.” It’s like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

ANDERSON: Oh, bullshit. They’re back doing their laundry.

GERSHON: What I’m noticing in the last few years is they’re taking Antigone, Medea, Medusa, all these myths about how  women were so horrible, but they’re telling the women’s side of the story, and how they really were victims just trying to survive. 

ANDERSON: This could be our era, our evolution. It doesn’t seem so at the moment, but you never know.

GERSHON: The patriarchal system hasn’t worked. It’s got to go back to the matriarchal system, which seemed to have worked for billions of years.

ANDERSON: But also, what works about this book is it comes from your story. And while you’re referring to your AlphaPussy theory, it’s very organic.

GERSHON: I’ve been very clear when I talk to people in interviews, “Listen, this is not a how-to book, it’s not a self-help book. These are my experiences.” I’m not trying to advise anyone. This is just how I navigated, in my way. 

ANDERSON: That’s the book’s power.

GERSHON: You can’t really teach anyone anything, anyway. Everyone has their own experience. It’s been interesting doing interviews with this [book] because everyone really comes at it like, “Oh, so what did you get out of it?” And the answers are so different.

ANDERSON: What surprised you the most?

GERSHON: Nothing has surprised me, but it’s all more of a reflection on who they are and their own experience. Some people like this story, some people like that story. Someone was telling me about the poker story, how they found it so satisfying.

ANDERSON: Yeah, that one’s satisfying. I was really happy to read about some of your teachers, how appreciative you were of [Robert] Altman and your time in Vermont. That must’ve been amazing with David Mamet, too. Who else was there? 

GERSHON: Bill Macy was up in Vermont. Mamet, I didn’t talk to a lot. He was a little intimidating, but he gave me some of the best advice I got out of college, which was to learn to direct yourself.

ANDERSON: That’s amazing.

GERSHON: I was like, “Oh, you’re so cynical. That’s crazy.” He’s like, “If you are lucky in your life, you’ll have maybe three directors who actually direct you.”

ANDERSON: When you were writing this, you’re following one particular thread of this attitude of yours—there you are punching [Bob] Dylan, there you are confronting directors.

GERSHON: I didn’t start out writing about it like, “Oh, how do you manipulate? How do you survive?”

ANDERSON: Right.

GERSHON: I was inspired by younger actresses who were very good, but maybe they’re in their thirties and they would sometimes tell me, “The director on the set is doing this.” And it was really tripping them up. And I said, “Well, you’ve got to tell them to stop.”

ANDERSON: People aren’t able to hear that because honesty and truthfulness are not something that we’re trained to do. We’re trained to be devious.

GERSHON: No, but as you get older, if I had known all the stuff I’m talking about now, I might have been able to deal with these situations. I was trying to figure it out in real time instead of being able to recognize it.

ANDERSON: Yeah. I like the sections where things weren’t working out. I like to see when things get fucked up. Who are you then? How open are you? How truthful are you? The only time I learn anything is when everything is really fucked up and I fall apart and I feel like shit. But it’s one of the few times in my life when I’m actually open to understanding things a little better. Pay attention to your own suffering, and you’ll find out a lot of things.

GERSHON: Definitely. I’ve changed a lot because, when I was going through all these things, I was going on total animal instinct because I didn’t want to get attacked. Now looking back on it, hopefully I’ve gained some compassion and empathy and wisdom.

ANDERSON: You definitely feel somebody changing in this book, and watching this little punk learn lots of other things in other ways is an amazing story.

GERSHON: I’ve learned a lot watching you when you’re directing music. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh my god, people are doing these things wrong.” But you’re so uber calm and so gentle and people do what you’re saying. I’ve watched you several times and it’s really amazing. 

ANDERSON: Well, one thing that is definitely true is that I see the potential in things rather than what you think is fucked up. That’s one of the things that some performers miss when they get nervous about an audience. You forget, they’re totally on your side, but it’s not just altruistic. New Yorkers want you to make something great and to succeed. It’s a magnet city for people who want to make things. And this book really shows that feeling. You’re in the film world, the music world, the theater world, and it’s a really kaleidoscopic picture of all of these things, plus all of these characters who pop up. It’s not just a self-portrait, but these great little mini-sketches of all these characters. I mean, who gets to see Bob Dylan boxing? 

GERSHON: And people don’t just want you to be great. They want to see something authentic and real.

ANDERSON: Yes.

GERSHON: And that’s why Wally [Wallace] Shawn is so great, because he’s so authentic. Even if you’re seeing a show and something goes wrong, the audience loves it because they’re seeing something real and authentic. When I was younger, I was too much of a perfectionist and I was missing a lot of stuff that I could have explored. I wanted to be as great as I could be. But you know what? There’s no humility in perfection. ‘Cause where are you going to learn?

ANDERSON: There’s two things I saw recently, and one was full of high production value and stars and it was not working at all. It was pretentious. I used to do shows where every slide had to be in that exact spot with that exact sound and that exact light. And then John Zorn said, “Hey, you want to play? You want to do some improv?” And I was like, “What do you mean? This sounds like a very bad idea.” But it was so freeing. It was alive. It had air in it. It had decision-making. You talk about this in the book, too, the whole Larry David thing.

GERSHON: [Laughs] I was just making shit up. I’d never gotten to improv that much. The thing with Curb [Your Enthusiasm], with Larry, he was like “You come in and you flirt.” That’s all you get. But you have to whip something up and it’s so freeing and so fun.

ANDERSON: Well, you have to have chops to do this stuff.

GERSHON: I think doing music definitely helped me with improv.

ANDERSON: Yeah, it was nice to see how you weave in what you were learning as a musician and as an actor. That was really cool.

GERSHON: It’s kind of all the same, just different sides of the coin, different sides of the prism.

ANDERSON: Yeah.

GERSHON: Well, Laurie, we’ve been talking for over an hour. So I think you better go and—

ANDERSON: Step into the night. Well, this has been fun for me. I’ll see you soon, okay?

GERSHON: It’s always fun to talk to you. Thank you for doing this, Laurie.

ANDERSON: Oh, it’s my privilege. Thank you.

The post Gina Gershon Tells Laurie Anderson How She Survived the Hollywood Hothouse appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Ken Leung spent four seasons on Industry turning a deeply flawed finance guy into one of the most compulsively watchable characters on TV. Eric Tao was a role that asked everything of the veteran actor who, until Industry, had been doing essential but undervalued work in projects like Lost, The Sopranos, and Person of Interest. It ended as it had to: not with a triumph but with a quiet devastation, Eric walking alone down the middle of a road, blackmailed out of the only world he cared about. With his time on the show now seemingly behind him (an Eric appearance in season five is not out of the question), Leung reconnected with fellow Industry alum Harry Lawtey for a conversation about ego, fatherhood, getting recognized in public, and the usefulness of having no expectations.

———

KEN LEUNG: Thanks so much for doing this, Harry.

HARRY LAWTEY: It’s my pleasure, mate. I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I’ll try my best.

LEUNG: Same. We can both not know what we’re doing together.

LAWTEY: That sounds nice. How are you?

LEUNG: It’s a busy time. The holiday was a resting time for me, and then everything exploded, so there’s a lot going on, but it’s all good.

LAWTEY: I thought a nice place to start would be the first question that Myha’la asked me when we did a feature for Interview a couple years ago. I suppose it’s a bit of a cheat to copy her, but in some ways, it’s also a bit of a cheat question because she started by asking me, “What question or questions do you wish that people who interview you would ask you?”

LEUNG: That tickles a part of my brain that I never use because it implies that you have something that you want to say, and I don’t think of myself that way. I like thinking of myself more as a middle person who recognizes what needs to be said or put out there, and then I’m in the privileged place of being the conveyor of that message.

LAWTEY: I definitely align with that sort of ideology. There are other artists and other mediums that are far more well-placed to make their own individual statements where we often, by choice, find ourselves as the conduit, like you say, rather than the spokesperson.

LEUNG: Also our field has this danger of giving voice to our ego so much that I try to minimize that as much as possible.

LAWTEY: Some of the questions I thought of asking you were around that theme, because I’ve always thought of you as a quite egoless person—not devoid of ego because none of us are. But since we started making the show, we’ve had the privilege of watching your boy grow up. I’ve always wondered when working with colleagues, having a child, how did that alter your ego or perspective as an actor, and in what ways did it influence you creatively in your career?

LEUNG: Well, he is our first and only child, so I had no reason to assume I knew how to do it, how to be a parent. And to this day, he’s 10 now, and Nancy and I are always talking about, “Well, should we do this? Should we do that?” I’m personally always interrogating myself, “Should I not have said this?” Or, “How do I address this in a way that centers him and not myself?” And I think I’ve learned to do that with, maybe, people. I’ve tried to look at everything with the lens of it being a child. I think that came from having Dash. That could be a person, that could be a scene that we’ve not played yet that is about to be birthed. And I find that it’s very useful to think of it that way. 

LAWTEY: I think Eric has always been a behemoth within the show. He was this apex predator in season one, but along the journey of the show, he’s been humbled. And for years I’ve told as many people as I can that you are the most underrated actor in America. Have you ever thought of yourself as an underdog in such a competitive oversubscribed profession? Do you think it’s a useful notion for an actor, or is that a negative idea?

LEUNG: An underdog meaning people are betting on you losing?

LAWTEY: Yeah, or as in you have something to prove or you have the odds stacked more elsewhere and you have something to overcome.

LEUNG: I feel that speaks to Eric a lot. He’s basically a coward who dreams of being a hero. We see that in season four from the get go. When we first meet him, he’s hiding out. He finally has time for his kids. He couldn’t be further away from his kids. He’s on a golf course. He’s living what looks like a dream. You work all your life to do nothing, to relax, and he’s not relaxed until he gets a call to action, and then that activates something. To your question, I wouldn’t say underdog in that people are betting on you to lose, but to have no expectations. It helps to have no expectations because if you have expectations, you’re kind of limiting yourself to those expectations. Whereas if you have none, it can be anything. It’s funny that you’re referencing when we started out, because I came into the show differently than I go into most shows. I took ownership of the role, as my perceived standing as the kind of veteran actor in a cast of mostly young actors. That wasn’t the case for most of my career. 

LAWTEY: I can see that. For us at the beginning, we sensed that from you. You were always very much a mentor for us and you had a very quiet, noble brand of leadership. And I know that was something that you and Lena [Dunham] discussed at the beginning, and it was something that you took seriously. Moving on into season four, you’ve had this working relationship with Marisa and Myha’la for so long now, and they’ve become incredibly accomplished actors in their own right. I think for me, they are generationally gifted. I’m interested to know in what ways they have inspired you. As someone senior, what have you taken from them?

LEUNG: They inspire me by how they carry themselves. They are genuinely confident, self-possessed artists, and you included. When I was y’all’s age, I was not that. Being an actor today is very different because there’s all this social media and how you market yourself and being comfortable in the public eye in a way that was never asked of an actor to be. One could very easily shrink from that, and they go the other way. They embrace it so comfortably. Because I guess my fear is, if you’re too much in that world, what happens when you go back and you have to play a role and do your work? Is it distracting? And they never seem distracted at all.

LAWTEY: I completely agree. They’re kind of unfazed, and by comparison, I think I’m quite phasable, but I’ve looked on in wonder at the way they carry themselves with such assurance.

LEUNG: But you have this great thing of you’ve been able to remain yourself in all your doubts. It’s very easy to lose yourself in this business, and all of you have remained yourself. You’ve kept your voice, and when you act, it comes from you. That’s really beautiful to witness.

LAWTEY: Oh, thank you, mate. One of my favorite memories with you is from a couple years ago where I found myself in New York on my own for a weekend, and we met up and went for a walk around Central Park. It reaffirmed to me that you are a New York person with a very distinct connection to the city. We walked around for quite a few hours and you got recognized plenty of times. What does it feel like to have your presence in your own city shift into something new, to lose some anonymity through your success?

LEUNG: It used to be really jarring. It used to be, “Hey, I’m doing this thing and suddenly I get interrupted by a person who thinks I’m somebody else.” There’s a case of mistaken identity. It’s nice to be recognized because people are seeing your stuff, but then they’re not seeing you. So it used to be weird. Now it’s evolved. Generally speaking, it’s really sweet and there’s this feeling that you’re not by yourself, even if you think you’re going through life alone, you’re kind of not alone. You have invisible support everywhere. That’s a very special thing. Sometimes you’re distracted by it, but maybe it’s pulling you into something you’re forgetting. How is it for you?

LAWTEY: Obviously, it largely comes down to the approach and the way someone chooses to do that. But it’s almost always incredibly kind. I remember saying to myself early on that I don’t ever want to become a person for whom when someone makes the effort to tell you that they appreciated something that you’re a part of, you don’t meet that with gratitude. It feels like people are rooting for you in some way, or at the very least noticing your effort, and that’s nice.

LEUNG: Sometimes it’s just a smile from a distance. [Laughs]

LAWTEY: Exactly! Maybe we’re reading into it and people are just smiling at us, and that would also be really nice.

LEUNG: Right. Maybe they’re smiling at somebody behind us.

LAWTEY: Maybe we’re just kind of completely self-involved.

LEUNG: And we’re like, “Ah, Industry.”

LAWTEY: Back to Eric, he’s an incredible character within the show, so cleverly constructed by Mickey and Konrad. And for me, the convergence of that writing and you, that’s the secret sauce of the show. One of the many privileges for us as actors who get to be part of long-running television is an arc. You get to go through an evolution, or a revolution even. There’s no better example of that than Eric. How have you digested that change and has it surprised you?

LEUNG: I didn’t think we were ever going to meet my daughters. And actually, we don’t really. However, for this season, we shot a lot with Serrana Bliss, who plays one of my twin girls, and the season for me was about her. It was about Eric’s attempt to find a path to his daughter who, despite him being an absentee dad, starts to resemble him in all the worst ways. I think that alarms him and he has no relationship with her. He’s given a kind of opportunity with Harper, and it looks like a business opportunity. But I think for him, it’s not so much a business opportunity. The deeper purpose is, well, here’s a young woman who understands me, who I can talk to. We have a common language. She gets all my flaws. We’ve loved each other and hated each other. Maybe through her, I can learn the path to my kid. I think that informs the whole season for Eric. Even Dolly, the girl that he hooks up with, in this new mindset that Eric is trying to learn, he sees her as a potential true love, totally oblivious to who she is and what her hidden agendas are. All of that can be traced to him not knowing how to reach his daughter. I didn’t expect that at all. We shot a lot that we actually don’t see. It’s almost like a shadow season that informs the actual season, which is really interesting.

LAWTEY: It’s always funny to think about scenes that you shot that don’t make the cut, or scenes that we all have to collectively imagine in between seasons where you have to go, “Well, that all still happened.”

LEUNG: Well, it actually did happen, so it’s in you. It’s almost like I wish every show was like this where you can shoot, live through stuff that maybe you’ll never use, but that informs what you use. It’s cool.

LAWTEY: And what’s something about Eric that nobody knows apart from you?

LEUNG: I love the baseball bat as a metaphor because it reveals this insecurity in him. That despite the bluster and the bravado and the rooster walk, he’s kind of a scared person. And the baseball bat is his amulet, which is ironic because we no longer had the baseball bat for season four, but there was a baseball. And I thought it was a really great metaphor because he’s gone from the thing that hits to the thing that becomes hit. 

LAWTEY: I always love those brief glimpses where you see Eric truly afraid, or broken or shattered. It shines brighter in the context of all his other behavior. And how much, if anything, of you is in Eric?

LEUNG: I think all of me. I don’t go somewhere else to play him. My parents are in there, my brother is in there. My parents’ story and struggles as immigrants, where they came from, what China was like when they left, the hard time I have communicating with them, what kind of person that’s caused me to become, the kind of communicator I longed to be as a result of that wouldn’t be the case if we were closer. All of that is in there.

LAWTEY: That’s a beautiful answer, man. What’s a piece of advice from another actor that has really stayed with you?

LEUNG: Jeff Fahey, who acted with me on Lost. He once said, “In order to tell the truth or find the truth, you need to leave the mother.” And that’s how he said it. He said it in a way that did not invite questioning. And I took it to mean all our fears, our anxieties, our hangups, all of that are learned, the mother being the teacher of all that stuff. In order to find our true voice, we need to leave. You need to leave the thing you know the most in order to find something new.

LAWTEY: Right. And then along similar lines, who’s the first person that comes to mind if I ask you who’s the best actor you’ve ever worked with?

LEUNG: Oh, Jim Caviezel.

LAWTEY: When did you work with him?

LEUNG: On Person of Interest. Jim Caviezel for two reasons. One is I knew very early on, almost in his introduction to me, he told me he was dyslexic. Just a very vulnerable way of saying, “This is who I am, here’s how I’m imperfect.” And so I loved him immediately. And secondly, because he’s dyslexic, he couldn’t remember two lines ahead of where we are. So his script is always printed out in these little placards that his assistant hands to him when he needs it. And what that does is he is always right here right now because he can’t not be. And to act with that is incredible because it forces you to equally be right here right now, not because of any plan or any acting philosophy, but because that’s all he can manage. It makes him just eternally in the moment. 

LAWTEY: That’s certainly my experience of acting with you. There’s such an immediacy to it and it feels like you’re leading and listening at the same time. The moment I really realized it was when you were screaming at me outside the elevator. For me as an actor, I was like, “Oh, there’s no letting up. I have to be here right now because this actor is so immediate and instantaneous in this moment.”

LEUNG: With that scene, I started off wrong and it was Isabella who put me on the right path. It looks a certain way on the page, “Oh, this is when I’m slapping Robert around and yelling at him.” And so I thought it was right from the get go, “What’s the matter with you?” And it was just all out right from the start. And Isabella was like, “Take it from the beginning, find it, don’t start there.” And then it was great. 

LAWTEY: I remember you saying at different times over the last couple years that this is a role that you had been waiting for, or to be seen in a different light. And with that under your belt now, is there another way you’d like to be seen? Is there a dream role for you, or a real life person that you’d love to play?

LEUNG:  I recently played a real person that did not want to be part of the project, and so we didn’t have any actual information, and so I had to intuit a lot of it and almost speak to him telepathically. And I wrote him a letter, he never wrote back. He just didn’t want anything to do with the movie. I really liked that, to know that you are playing somebody who’s walking the earth right now. 

LAWTEY: I guess my last thing I wanted to ask is, how does it feel to be an artist in America right now?

LEUNG: It feels like a great opportunity. I’m often a little confused, or I should say curious about how people have taken to Eric. They know he’s this toxic character, and what attracts them are not his higher angels. It’s when he’s yelling the hell out of Robert that they like. They like the violence of Eric. I’m always curious about that. It makes me wonder, why do we prize violence so much? If we suddenly saw Eric soft, I know almost for certain that people would be like there’s a weakness to it, that suddenly this is no longer the Eric they love. And inevitably it’s not about Eric at all, obviously. It’s about us. What is it in us that prizes a certain show of strength? The writer Ocean Vuong says this: “When you do something good, why do I tell you that you’ve crushed it? Why do I tell you that you’ve killed it? Why is it the language of violence that I use?” It’s a question that the show offers a great opportunity for us to ask of ourselves. We obviously see one person after another, their downfall and what that leads to. And yet the people who it resonates with, they resonate with it despite it leading to a downfall. I think that the show’s greatest contribution is to cause us to ask those questions of ourselves.

LAWTEY: Great answer.

LEUNG: You know what’s funny about this is if it was really you and me talking and it wasn’t for something, we wouldn’t talk so much so fast.

LAWTEY: Yeah, I think it would’ve taken four hours probably. Alright, that’s it.  

LEUNG: Thanks so much, Harry.

LAWTEY: My pleasure. See you soon, mate.

LEUNG: Alright, brother. Bye. 

The post Ken Leung Takes Harry Lawtey’s <i>Industry</i> Exit Survey appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Neighbors begins, fittingly, as a kind of internet spiral. Before it was an HBO docuseries, it was a shared obsession among co-directors Dylan Redford and Harrison Fishman, plus Fishman’s brother Sam, the project’s executive producer and cinematographer, who began cutting together compilations of neighbor disputes in 2019 while living in Miami. Grainy ring-cam meltdowns. Shirtless men screaming over property lines. Women weaponizing leaf blowers. The videos were raw, tiny operas of ego and grievance. Soon the trio were staging their own fake disputes, hiring actors, posting them online, trying (and failing) to convince the internet they were real. The joke, of course, was that reality was much stranger.

When their friend Steve Smith floated funding for a small pilot, the bit mutated into something more ambitious: What if they filmed real neighbor disputes as they unfolded? They saw these conflicts as “windows into the American psyche,” a phrase that sounds academic until you’re watching two grown adults wage psychological warfare over a fence. The result is completely unhinged. I watched all six episodes in a state of constant shock and low-grade anxiety, unable to believe these people existed, then unable to stop thinking about them altogether. This led me to casting director Harleigh Shaw, whose work on the series is its own feat of endurance art. Building trust with subjects, sometimes living alongside them (including two weeks with nudists), she locates not caricatures but full human ecosystems. Just before Neighbors premiered on HBO Max, I spoke with Redford, Shaw, and Fishman over Zoom, about the strange intimacy of filming people in the dark, traveling the country in search of a true cross-section of America, and pointing a camera at someone mid-meltdown, totally naked.

———

CRISTINE BRACHE: Hey guys.

DYLAN REDFORD: Hey.

HARRISON FISHMAN: Hey, Christine.

HARLEIGH SHAW: Hey.

BRACHE: How are you doing?

REDFORD: Good, how are you?

BRACHE: I’m good. Where are you guys at?

SHAW: We’re at our apartment [with Harrison]. 

BRACHE: And are you in L.A., Dylan?

REDFORD: No, I’m in New York. I’m in Dumbo at the Gummy Films office.

BRACHE: Oh, cool. Harrison, I see you don’t have a shirt on.

FISHMAN: I’m not wearing any clothes right now because this is about nudism. I think for the sake of the interview we should say that all of us were just nude the whole time.

BRACHE: I agree. So I’m in London and I have a show opening, which is why I can’t come to your premiere tomorrow in New York. How are you guys feeling about it?

REDFORD: Nervous, but also excited. It’s basically the first time that a real, public viewing of our show will happen. We’ve made this thing just with friends and family for three years. We all think it’s funny and feel really good about it, but now we get to see what an audience thinks, and also the rest of the country.

FISHMAN: Also, the show really mirrors how we met these people and ingratiated our lives into their lives. I feel like it’s very personal in that way, and it’ll be cool to really show people who we met.

SHAW: A lot of my nerves dissolved already after the trailer came out, because all of the subjects are super excited about it. The idea of them seeing it for the first time is the most nerve-racking part for me personally.

BRACHE: Because you want to do right by them?

SHAW: Yeah, of course. I want them to love it, and feel like they and their stories were represented in a way that feels true to them.

BRACHE: I love watching things in big groups when it’s stuff that I’ve made, because you get to hear people laugh. I’m really curious to see how the internet responds to this show in particular because it’s just so unhinged.

FISHMAN: It’s funny, I feel like we all went from making videos that we put right onto the internet for a small audience or short films that go to some festivals to making a show that all of America is going to see. That jump is crazy.

SHAW: It’s surreal.

BRACHE: It was a pretty small production, right?

REDFORD: Yeah, we did a lot of things ourselves and we kept the team really small. We had our producer based in New York, Rachel Walden, and then Harleigh was also there doing all of the casting work. Lena Redford, story producer, worked with Harleigh, hunted down story leads, helped market the casting call, and now, the show.  Then on the ground it was me running sound, Harrison running A camera, Harrison’s younger brother Sam running B camera, and then Andy Ruse, our producer. 

SHAW: It was an insane process. It was definitely the most challenging thing I’ve ever been tasked with casting, because you’re not just trying to get one person to be in a documentary—you’re trying to get them and their neighbor that they hate to do this together. We worked with a whole team of subject producers and researchers, and there were different people who cycled in and out, including Lena Redford, Dylan’s sister. We could have found enough stories and made a show in two months, but the show would’ve been all 60-year-old white ladies who hate each other, you know what I mean? To get the variety that we wanted in the season took some time, and we wanted it to feel like a mosaic of our country in the present moment when we were making it. 

FISHMAN: Harleigh did such an amazing job. It’s really hard to find wealthier people who are in a dispute who are willing to go on camera.

SHAW: That was the hardest one.

FISHMAN: And you found Jeff, who was a senator, which is crazy.

BRACHE: And his neighbor across the street from him, I was just completely surprised by her existence. Because she thinks she’s an alien, right?

FISHMAN: Well, Cristine, we believe that Alexa is an alien too.

BRACHE: She’s an alien, but she’s also an art advisor too. Like, a regular conventional art advisor?

FISHMAN: Definitely.

BRACHE: I feel like a lot of the people that were cast have such niche interests that I could have never fathomed existed. Each episode I just kept feeling baffled in many different ways. I think it’s a big testament to the casting. It captures the cultural divides in America, and I think it also points to how absurd a lot of these really passionate positions are when it’s all said and done. Because it’s expressed through the microcosm of the neighborhood dispute, but really it represents cultural disputes in America.

SHAW: That’s what we were talking about a lot throughout the whole process.

BRACHE: I thought that was really smart. I was really curious about what it was like to really earn these people’s trust? How long did it take?

SHAW: I mean, with the pilot specifically, Harrison and I were able to just walk up and knock on those neighbors’ doors and build a trust in person. We didn’t always have the opportunity to go in person depending on where it was in the country, because we didn’t really have the budget for the casting team to be traveling all over. So a lot of the trust had to be made in the initial phone calls. Me and the whole team of subject producers had sometimes three hour long calls with people followed by another three hour Zoom with someone’s whole family. There were these trust-building things—caring about the problem, listening to them. I think it helped having a small crew as well.

FISHMAN: But you and the whole casting team, it’s like a 24/7 job because it doesn’t end.

SHAW: Yeah. Like, you get a text in the middle of the night on a Sunday and they’re unsure. So it’s just about talking them through it.

BRACHE: What do you think the subjects want when they say yes to being filmed in a documentary like this?

SHAW: I think they just want to be seen and heard. In a lot of these cases they’ve tried calling the cops, they’ve tried everything to try to get their neighbor to stop and nothing works. They’ve been dealing with it so long.

FISHMAN: Yeah, it’s sort of unfortunate that if you’re in a neighbor dispute you really don’t have many options. The police really can’t help you because it’s a civil matter. A lot of the time police tell you if you’re in a neighbor dispute to film and document everything. That’s why people end up over-documenting and creating this crazy database of footage.

BRACHE: Oh yeah, that was insane. So many of the neighbors were just compulsively photographing. I couldn’t see myself in a position where you spend so much of your energy on this matter, but it means so much to these people. But each set of neighbors had that level of intensity. How do you interpret that?

REDFORD: I mean, for a lot of these people their entire net worth is wrapped up in their home. And I think that reflects a larger issue in our country, that it’s very difficult to buy a home, the disappearing of the middle class and the housing crisis. Also, these things often come down to property value. If someone’s doing something that takes away visually, or does something aesthetically that looks bad, or if you lose a little bit of land, all of that does affect your property value which then affects your savings, how much money you have and your ability to keep your home. Those are the underlying stakes to the whole thing. Then, as Harrison said, the system itself for litigating and deciding who’s right and who’s wrong is predicated on creating a story. And the only way you can tell that story in civil court is by having as much evidence as possible. So our subjects have to become their own filmmakers and they have to document everything to tell the most compelling story in order to protect their land and their value. I think all of our characters are very idiosyncratic and have really interesting private lives, but I also think that any person in the US is capable of finding themselves in this situation. And oftentimes, neighbors who win in court are just better storytellers. They know how to position their story in a way that makes more sense than the other person, even if factually the other person’s right.

FISHMAN: Or they just filmed more.

REDFORD: Totally, totally. It’s like you have to take the initiative and do the work.

BRACHE: What’s the guy’s name from the second episode, the Jacuzzi guy?

REDFORD: Darrell.

BRACHE: He was amazing.

FISHMAN: Oh, I know. He’s a special guy.

BRACHE: Very special. And his house and his partner, they were just so adorable. Whose idea was it to do night vision pillow talk?

FISHMAN: That was our idea. To be totally honest, filming Darrell and Bruce sleeping in night vision was surreal. 

BRACHE: It seems like such a surreal experience to sit there and record these people in these rooms. It’s just so intimate. I’ve never really seen that before in a documentary, but I was thinking that in reality TV shows they probably–

REDFORD: They do it a lot. Yeah, it’s in Survivor, and Big Brother. 

FISHMAN: But it was important to us to do that because we just wanted to show the level of intimacy that we had with these people. They really opened up their lives to us. We’ve always talked about how grateful we were to get the access we did. It’s important for documentaries in general, but for this show, access is everything.

BRACHE: Did you guys ever feel afraid about the amount of tension between the neighbors? I felt so much anxiety when I was watching the whole series. Some of them even had guns. You were kind of imminently close to fatal violence at all times.

FISHMAN: Well, we never felt afraid that any of the subjects were going to hurt us intentionally, ever.

REDFORD: Or really hurt each other either.

FISHMAN: I think the only times we were really afraid for our life were when people brought out guns and we were afraid they were accidentally going to go off. I mean, it’s intense and people do say really wild things about the other party.

SHAW: But, for example, for one story, our subject producer Max, found them on TikTok. And when he was first talking to them he describes his neighbors as these violent people. He was like, “Don’t even try to contact them, you’re going to be in danger.” Then I finally get in touch with the other side, and they’re like, the nicest, warm-hearted people. But there was always a hearsay threat of violence, especially in the casting process. They’re working themselves up about something, but if they were able to just sit and talk with the neighbor they would see that they’re not as scary as they think.

REDFORD: Yeah. I feel like we trusted Harleigh to vet out stories early on that felt too dark or too dangerous. I feel like that’s something you had to deal with a lot.

BRACHE: So I just also want to circle back to Harrison’s nudity—

FISHMAN: I’m naked right now.

BRACHE: Yeah. Harleigh told me that you guys spent two weeks in a nudist colony gaining trust from the community for the season finale, which was beautiful. I should mention that Harleigh and Harrison are a couple, also.

FISHMAN: We’re a couple, yeah.

BRACHE: I want to know, Dylan, why did you pass on the nudist colony?

REDFORD: Well, it was a little bit of a budgetary thing because Harleigh and Harrison were on the East Coast and had housing in Florida, so it was a lot easier for them to fly down. But honestly, them being a couple is actually really critical to the success of this. It built so much trust and joy from the people that they engaged with, and I think a lot of these communities are looking for young couples specifically to move in and to start young families.

BRACHE: So wait, you guys all had to be in there naked while you were shooting?

REDFORD: Yes.

BRACHE: Oh my god.

FISHMAN: We filmed completely nude.

REDFORD: Yes.

BRACHE: The whole crew?

FISHMAN: The whole crew.

REDFORD: Yes.

FISHMAN: There’s a lot of documentation of this.

BRACHE: That’s such a bonding experience.

FISHMAN: Sam, my brother, would wake up every morning when we were filming this story and ask, “Do I need to be naked? Do I need to be naked? Do I have to film naked?!” And it would be so painful but I would say, “Yes, you do need to be naked.” In some of these communities there’s rules around nudity. But also filming people that are nude when you’re fully clothed is inherently really strange and voyeuristic. 

REDFORD: And super negative.

FISHMAN: Super negative. You’re immediately an outsider. It’s so much weirder to wear clothes there than to be naked. 

SHAW: I mean, we even had to be comfortable with them taking pictures of us naked. That was one of the most bizarre realizations, I think.

FISHMAN: Right. Even during the casting trips they would start taking photos of us.

BRACHE: Harleigh was telling me about how this is the nudist capital of the US.

FISHMAN: Of the world. It’s Pasco County, Florida.

BRACHE: Oh, of the world?

SHAW: Yeah. They’re mostly gated communities. But they vary. Some of them are super nice and will have a whole clubhouse and restaurants and stuff. Some of them are a little bit more simple. They’re all within an hour radius from each other, so we spent time in a variety of them. 

REDFORD: I feel like you guys basically are nudists.

FISHMAN: We’re nudists.

REDFORD: This is an important distinction: I am not a nudist. I hated every moment that I had to be naked because I sunburn really easily and I sweat a lot and it sucks to be naked all the time.

BRACHE: When I think about the show overall, you guys saw a lot of America. What’s your overall take on the country based on your experience?

FISHMAN: We were just talking about it yesterday, but making this show made me love and appreciate America so much more than I had previously. If you take it on a surface level, the conflict is inherently uncomfortable. But the people themselves are just amazing, and our country is so diverse. 

REDFORD: I think there’s a little ounce of hope here, because these neighbors that are in conflict had a lot in common, and we had the opportunity to see that. We could occupy this point of view that neither one can occupy, where we see those commonalities and those places of overlap. I don’t know what it would take and how it would happen, but it does give me hope that somehow there’s a way for some of these neighbors to see how much they have in common and how similar their worldviews are.

BRACHE: Yeah, it seems almost like if you humanize the person you’re in conflict with it’s easier to empathize with them.

REDFORD: That’s a great way of putting it.

BRACHE: Anyway, thank you so much for taking this time.

REDFORD: Thank you for doing this.

SHAW: Thank you so much. This was awesome.

REDFORD: We love talking to you about this show.

The post “Yes, You Need to Be Naked”: Inside the Making of HBO’s <i>Neighbors</i> appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Shirt and Pants Bottega Veneta.

Chloé Zhao spent her early career as a director on the American back roads, casting rodeo riders and nomads in films that felt more like documentaries than fiction. The Rider made people pay attention. Nomadland won her an Oscar. Then she did Eternals for Marvel, a lesson in big-budget storytelling that she took with her. Now she’s back with Hamnet, based on the Maggie O’Farrell bestseller about William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) grieving the death of their son, and how that loss inspired Hamlet. It’s her most personal film yet (it’s got 8 Oscar noms, including a Best Director nod for Zhao), all Jungian symbolism and dirt under fingernails. Steven Spielberg, who produced the movie, says she’s the only director who could’ve pulled it off. Bradley Cooper, who interviewed her the day after she won a Golden Globe, agrees.

———

MONDAY 11:30 AM JAN. 12, 2026 LA

BRADLEY COOPER: Hey.

CHLOÉ ZHAO: Bradley.

COOPER: What’s up?

ZHAO: About to eat a chocolate bar because I need sugar. Don’t know if it’s too early in the morning for that. Happy belated birthday.

COOPER: Oh, thank you. I just heard that you won the Golden Globe last night.

ZHAO: We did.

COOPER: Congratulations. The Eagles lost, so it’s a good balance.

ZHAO: Oh, no! I’m sorry. I know you’re a big fan.

COOPER: Yeah. Let me just start by saying how honored I am to be doing this. If you told me as a kid that I could see a movie that affected me the way this did and then be able to talk to the filmmaker for 45 minutes about it, I’d fall over and faint.

ZHAO: It’s very generous of you.

COOPER: I’d like to talk about the first image of the film, how Agnes [Jessie Buckley’s character] is asleep within the root of a tree, and the cavern below the tree. I’m bringing this up because there’s nothing arbitrary in this movie. I’ve seen it twice, and you really feel like you’re learning about the filmmaker in any film worth its weight. I felt like you opened your soul in this one.

ZHAO: Your intuition is really strong. With the little time we’ve spent together, you can probably tell it has more me in it than all my previous films.

COOPER: Yeah.

ZHAO: For me, the beginning of a script is always the hardest to write. I don’t know how to start films, because I feel like the beginning and ending isn’t a line, it’s a circle. With this film, I was stuck for months.

COOPER: Right.

ZHAO: Out of desperation, I called Maggie O’Farrell, the writer of the book and my co-writer on this project and said, “Is there a piece of music you listen to?” Because when things don’t work in life, I tend to look to poetry or music, something older than film. More abstract.

COOPER: Yes.

ZHAO: She said, “Actually, there’s a song I was listening to on repeat,” which was [Henry] Purcell’s “When I Am Laid in Earth” [Dido’s Lament]. He wrote it maybe a decade after the original Hamlet was performed. The chorus keeps repeating one sentence, which is “Remember me remember me, remember me.” Maggie thinks maybe Purcell had actually seen a production of Hamlet and was inspired to write that opera [Dido and Aeneas]. As soon as I heard it, the opening wrote itself because something bigger came through.

COOPER: Yes!

ZHAO: You understand that.

COOPER: I do.

ZHAO: In terms of the tree, the black hole in the ground was not part of the script. I just happened to be in Kyiv right before I went to Wales to scout, and I was with somebody who was making a documentary in a strip of forest on the frontline. By the time I got to my forest in Wales on a peaceful spring day, he was sending me images and footage of his forest, and I saw these black holes in the ground that were land – mine holes and dugouts. In my forest, there were also these natural black holes. I just sobbed and sobbed by this hole, feeling like death in some way connects us. It comes for all of us, and yet it gives us the capacity to love and to have empathy for each other when we experience loss and grief. Somehow it became clear to me—this hole has to be at the beginning of the film.

COOPER: Isn’t that something?

ZHAO: You exist, you wait, and something is going to speak to you.

COOPER: Yes, Chloé. It’s unbelievable. Talk to me about the choice, which I just loved—I was so floored when Agnes touched Hamlet’s hand, and she sees William [Shakespeare] for the first time, for who he really is. Then the second time I watched the film I realized that in seeing him, she got the gift of understanding that there is an afterlife, that there is faith in something greater than earth. By seeing his art, she became a believer. And for me that’s why she’s laughing. Tell me if I’m on the right path.

ZHAO: I’m getting chills, because you’re touching on the underwater part of the iceberg of what I’m trying to archetypally discuss. We both worked with Kim Gillingham, and I’m sure because you also worked with Kim, you also read Jung. Jung really gave me a language that helped me understand what is going on with me, because I didn’t grow up with religion. Jung believed that spirit and matter, when they come together—when spirit penetrates matter, when matter holds spirit— they produce what he called the divine child. That is another word for soul. William is a representation of spirit, and she is a representative of matter. And that is the earth. And then the other one is this idea of the— what’s the word?

COOPER: The ethereal?

ZHAO: The spiritual. Storytelling is a big part of that. Words materialize what we don’t quite understand. She can’t transcend matter. That’s why she’s frozen in grief, and she needed that beam of light, that spirit, to penetrate. And for him, without her grounding him—

COOPER: He’s going to float away.

ZHAO: He’s going to float away. So the death of his child, the density of his wife’s grief, is the matter, and his own body as he ages is what brings him down. That’s what makes his work so soulful, because those two things are affecting each other.

COOPER: I mean, he puts earth on his skin.

ZHAO: I know! I love that you say that. I’m going to use that in my Q&As. “He puts the earth on his skin because it’s matter containing spirit.” Thanks, Bradley.

Dress and Shoes Bottega Veneta

COOPER: [Laughs] It goes back to when you are watching the work of a filmmaker who is thinking on those plateaus, that’s when everything becomes so specific. As a viewer, I was in such great hands. It’s a catalog of images that all point to the very thing you’re saying throughout the entire film. It’s really incredible.

ZHAO: Thank you.

COOPER: I loved how you shot the breakfast and dinner table scenes with William’s family, so often just staying in that wide shot. And I love your willingness to have characters walk out of frame and not pan over. You saved that slow pan for that room where the child was getting sick. Roma did that so wonderfully, remember?

ZHAO: Yes.

COOPER: Can you talk to me about the cinematic language in that respect?

ZHAO: Just like our first trip to the forest with Łukasz [Żal] my cinematographer, our desire is to find Agnes’s language. If it’s rational, you should frame the whole person. But for her, there’s life that exists outside rationality and there’s life that exists just off the screen.

COOPER: Wow.

ZHAO: Sometimes if we did a shot where the camera was catching everybody, Łukasz would go, “Too perfect. We want the camera to sometimes just miss someone.”

COOPER: That’s beautiful.

ZHAO: I also give a lot of credit to my editor Fonsi [Affonso Gonçalves]. I’m not very good at editing coverage. If you give me a bunch of coverage and six people talking around the table, I don’t know where to start. [Laughs]

COOPER: I agree.

ZHAO: But if you give me a montage, I’m your girl.

Dress and Veneta Bag Bottega Veneta

COOPER: I’d like to pivot to your actors. Jessie Buckley was so overpowering when I first saw it. It’s kind of all I was left with, because she just floored me. I’m so glad when I saw it the second time, I could really appreciate how wonderful Paul Mescal is. But she’s just so singular that I didn’t have the bandwidth to take in anything else on the first viewing.

ZHAO: I appreciate you saying that, because both of them stepped out of their comfort zones and went to places they were previously a little hesitant to go.

COOPER: Yes.

ZHAO: It’s sort of the imagery of looking at a volcano, something in nature that man has not tainted. And then you have this lonesome hunter with his dog in a little shed, away from his family. He’s trying to find the beast. That’s what we’re talking about—the relationship. Because we are him. We’re looking at this thing that we have lost, which is our inner animal, our inner Agnes, our inner forest and volcano. And the reason why we can’t look away from her is because we see a part of ourselves that we have cast away and denied.

COOPER: Wow.

ZHAO: You feel for him because that’s the caged animal we feel so often, it’s him. And from there, great, great art and storytelling is produced.

COOPER: So how did you begin to explore this volcano with Jessie? Talk to me about how she came into your life for this project.

ZHAO: I had not seen her earlier work. I was on the jury at Venice and I saw The Lost Daughter and thought, “Wow, who is this?” And then when I read the book, I couldn’t quite see anyone else but her. I needed somebody who was willing to take all the masks off and give themself completely to the camera. Because the moment you feel like she’s holding back, she’s worrying about her angle, any of that, you’re going to lose the audience. You need somebody who’s going to be present moment to moment, and to do that, as you know, is physically, spiritually, emotionally, extremely taxing. She actually introduced me to Kim. Jessie writes poetry, draws, reads so much, gardens. She’s always trying to create. She’s not just an actor, she’s a storyteller. She just has something she has to get out of her. And then we did a dreamwork session together for the first time. It was my dream. That session, I feel like we ’re still unpacking. That was almost two and a half years ago, and that informed the script massively.

Shirt and Pants Bottega Veneta

COOPER: Wow. Tell me about Paul.

ZHAO: I initially wasn’t going to say yes to this project because of the logline. I felt like I didn’t have the life experience to tell that story. And then a few hours later, when I got to Telluride after receiving that call from Amblin [Spielberg’s production company], I met Paul for the first time. I didn’t know who he was because Aftersun hadn’t come out yet. I just remember going for a walk with him. He has this nervous energy. You feel like this person has a wolf gnawing at him. The compulsion to create, if it’s not exorcised, will eat him alive. And then I kind of went, “Do you think you can play young Shakespeare? ” I wanted somebody like Brady [Jandreau] from The Rider [Zhao’s debut film], someone I don’t know. When it’s like, “There’s something you haven’t shown the world, and I would like to create a vessel for you to show it. ” That s exciting.

COOPER: Very exciting. That’s how I felt with Will [Arnett].

ZHAO: Totally.

COOPER: And even Laura [Dern]. I wanted to write a character for her that we haven’t seen and that would push her to a place I know exists in her, but maybe she hasn’t explored fearlessly.

ZHAO: That’s the joy as a director, right? What else can you ask for?

COOPER: That’s it. Because then you’re just bored.

ZHAO: You’ve done that for people in your films over and over. I think we’re both excited about that merging of the essence of a person and the character.

COOPER: Somebody was telling me the other day, I don’t know if it was Warren Beatty who said, “Casting is plot. ” I love that line.

ZHAO: Sometimes I don’t know how to answer questions about how you work with the actors day-to-day. Once you cast the right person, the well is so full.

COOPER: Yes.

ZHAO: You just find ways to get the water out every day, but if the well is not deep enough, techniques don’t matter.

COOPER: To that point, how did you meet these children?

ZHAO: The casting process for the twins was long, but Jacobi [Jupe] had been there from the beginning because he’s Noah Jupe’s little brother.

COOPER: Right. I learned that after.

ZHAO: Yeah. Noah played Hamlet. He’s from an acting family, but we thought, “It can’t be him. That’s too easy. This is going to be a long process. I need to go to my casting director.” And then in the end we went, “I think it’s still Jacobi.” We did a lot of auditions with him. We put him through the E.T. test, which Steven [Spielberg] told me about.

COOPER: I don’t know that.

ZHAO: It’s on YouTube. When they auditioned the kids from E.T. They basically told them, “I’m going to take someone important from your life away.”

COOPER: I have seen it!

ZHAO: I did that to the main three kids that auditioned. The goal is not to see if they can achieve the right kind of acting. It’s to see if they’re willing to be present.

COOPER: I saw that Sam Mendes and Steven Spielberg are part of this project. What was it like to navigate the waters of making a big studio movie that is so specific and personal to you? Was that an effortless journey or did you find yourself having to protect things you wanted to explore?

ZHAO: I learned, and I can see from your film, that you lead this way as well, that the strength of leadership doesn’t come from dominance. It comes from interdependence within an ecosystem that needs to be carefully protected and tended. Interdependence doesn’t really fit the model our industry is built on, even the word director.

COOPER: Yes.

ZHAO: I find that word—

COOPER: Even the word action.

ZHAO: I know. [Laughs] Things always balance themselves out in the end. I was very lucky that I did have people like Steven and Sam and Focus Features, and there’s an understanding of the umbrella that they’re putting above me so I could cultivate that environment. Also, the film is not that expensive. We have almost no establishing shots because we couldn’t afford it. [Laughs]

COOPER: But in my memory, it doesn’t feel like that. I smelled, saw, heard the environment throughout the whole thing. The earth is such a major part of it. Such a tangible part of your film is the vast nature of it. It’s not myopic, it’s not small. So it’s incredible that you had all these restrictions, because it feels so epic to me.

ZHAO: I’m always fascinated by the intelligence of the audience. If you can get them onto the right emotional landscape, they don’t care about these other things.

COOPER: No. Because they start to create them, they see them anyway.

ZHAO: Totally. It’s the imagination of each person, not just an artist. Anyone has access to the divine. We just lost the rituals to do it. We were born creative, imaginative creatures.

Jacket, Shirt, Pants, and Shoes Bottega Veneta

COOPER: I was just talking about this the other day. Everyone is so creative. All you have to do is allow them the playground to walk into. I had such a wonderful time with Steven on Maestro, where I also felt that bubble that was created that allowed me to explore and be fearless. He’s a wonderful curator and shepherd for artists in that way. We’re lucky he’s around.

ZHAO: Absolutely. And when he gives notes, they’re sharp.

COOPER: Yeah. And by the way, you’re going to have to defend your point of view and discuss it, which is the way it always should be when you’re creating. There just can’t be any lie. Everybody has to say exactly what they think.

ZHAO: Yeah. He read the first draft and had a couple of notes, but the big one, he was like, “It’s missing a moment between father and son. ” Because we adapted from the book and it’s less about Will. So that scene, “Will you be brave, ” that didn’t exist in our first draft.

COOPER: And what about Emily Watson? Her performance.

ZHAO: There was a moment on set on her first day. I was like, “Guys, we’re watching Emily Watson act. ” It’s just a treat.

COOPER: It’s something, right? I remember watching Sam Elliott on A Star Is Born and I was like, “Whoa. This can’t be happening.”

ZHAO: I don’t know what it is with that generation. Maybe what they went through when they were young is so unthinkable to us.

COOPER: Where to from here, filmmaker?

ZHAO: In general?

COOPER: No, artistically.

ZHAO: I think I want to do a play.

COOPER: Wow.

ZHAO: I want to be more in the body. There’s something paradoxical about cinema.

COOPER: Yes.

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ZHAO: I try to see how present I can be to make movies. And then being in some of the theaters when Hamnet screened, I went, “I pushed as far as I could right now with my knowledge and ability because it did transmute. It does allow the audience, whether it’s through music, sound design, or the actor’s performance, to be in their body more.” But then a play, I wonder if that can teach me something else that I can bring back into cinema.

COOPER: That’s really smart. I think we’re on a similar path of trying to represent the immediacy of human existence, but through a lens.

ZHAO: This is why it feels so simple, but also deep and personal. Sometimes people ask me, “How do you place the camera? ” And I say, “I’m actually next to the camera and I use my body as a gauge. ” If I’m feeling something I want the audience to feel, then the camera’s in the right place. And you’re also a great actor, so you tapped in that way. You know you can use your own body. The camera is a body. It’s a camera body, not a camera mind.

COOPER: That’s right.

ZHAO: Look at us.

COOPER: We’re growing.

ZHAO: We’re like kids in high school. We re maturing. Thank you so much for doing this.

COOPER: It was an honor. I’m so happy.

ZHAO: I hope I see you.

COOPER: Yes. Thank you for this.

———

Hair: Amidat Giwa using Oribe at Bryant Artists 

Makeup: Lynski

Lighting and Digital Technician: Benedict Moore

Fashion Assistant: Emeline Taverne

Production Director: Alexandra Weiss 

Photography Producer: Georgia Ford 

On-set Production: Andre Augusto

Post-production: Cecilia Rabeschi

Location: Epitome Studios

The post Chloé Zhao and Bradley Cooper Go Super Deep on <i>Hamnet</i> appeared first on Interview Magazine.

All photos courtesy of Anna Baryshnikov.

Anna Baryshnikov, daughter of Mikhail and graduate of Northwestern, has spent years being very good in small parts in other people’s things. In Idiotka, the debut feature from director Nastasya Popov, she finally has a movie to call her own. In it, she plays Margarita, a scrappy fashion designer in West Hollywood’s Russian enclave who enters a reality TV competition called Slay, Serve, Survive  as a last-ditch effort to save her family’s home. The movie, which costars Julia Fox, Owen Thiele, Camila Mendes and Gabriette, among others, is both sharp satire and tender immigrant story, elements Baryshnikov worked on closely with her director during the movie’s scrappy and collaborative development process. As her Love Lies Bleeding costar Kristen Stewart told her when they reconnected for this conversation, it’s a small film with a lot of world inside it.

———

ANNA BARYSHNIKOV: Hi.

KRISTEN STEWART: Hey, dude. What’s up?

BARYSHNIKOV: We had our premiere last night, so I’m a little worse for wear.

STEWART: Really? Are you in New York?

BARYSHNIKOV: I’m in New York.

STEWART: It’s also 4:30 PM. So, damn. Well done.

BARYSHNIKOV: That makes it sound like I had a crazy night. I just didn’t sleep because I was excited and happy.

STEWART: That’s so nice. So not a boozy hangover, but not even a weird, “Oh, everyone just saw my vulnerable art thing” hangover? Because sometimes you wake up and you’re like, “It’s just out there now, looping in people’s memories!”

BARYSHNIKOV: No, no, no. I’m half really happy and half filled with self-hatred.

STEWART: No.

BARYSHNIKOV: Just a healthy amount.

STEWART: I actually just watched [Idiotka] this morning. Dude, it’s so trippy because we made Love Lies Bleeding together, but because we live on separate coasts, and I’m admittedly pretty bad at keeping in touch with people, I’m so curious about what the fuck you’re doing all the time.  As someone who misses you, it’s so fulfilling to watch this movie because so much of it is you. There were parts where you got to imbue so much of your selfhood and, not to sound cheesy, but it was really nice and to watch the movie for that reason, because it’s been ages.

BARYSHNIKOV: Thank you. I miss you, too. I saw that you just bought a movie theater. No big deal.

STEWART: I can’t wait to tell you about that. It’s so sick.

BARYSHNIKOV: I can’t wait to talk about that. But yeah, you hit the nail on the head. There’s a lot more of me in this movie than anything I’ve done. That was such a funny thing to arrive to because I really thought I was playing Nastasya [Popov], the director. So much of it is so personal to her, and we had gotten so close leading up to it that I felt like I was trying to channel something in her. But then I watched it and I was like, “That’s actually a lot of me, in fact.”

STEWART: How much of that is motherland Russia [Laughs]?

BARYSHNIKOV: [Laughs]

STEWART: And how much of that is because of your concentric circle type stuff, which usually happens when you make a movie with someone and it’s the right time, right place, right person.

BARYSHNIKOV: The mother Russia of it all, we had very, very different childhoods in that respect. She grew up in this very specific enclave in L.A., and she introduced me to a version of it that I didn’t know existed. Both of her parents are Russian, and I grew up much more baked into my mom’s side of the family, so much of my understanding of my Russian identity was seen through the lens of someone who had left that country and politically is very opposed to that country, as is Nastasya’s family, but she had this very particular immigrant experience. She had been writing the movie for a year when I first read it,  and we developed it together for another year. Then we shot a little teaser in her grandmother’s apartment and raised all of the money. By the time we made it, not only was she like my sister at that point, but I knew her world a lot better. Also, I realized a lot of things about how I grew up that I thought were just quirks about my family are actually quite Slavic.

STEWART: And this is her first movie?

BARYSHNIKOV: Yeah.

STEWART: Hell yeah. I think that you doing two things at once is  exciting. I was just talking to another actor and I had assumed  they had something to do with the writing of this thing that they had worked on and they were like, “No, I didn’t write it at all.” I would’ve said the same thing to you if I didn’t know you. That might’ve sounded super naive, but that’s only because they had such a defined role in the movie. So, I guess my question is: Did you actually help write this thing? Because it feels like two voices infused, and I could be totally off base, and the writer/director could be like, “Fuck you. She didn’t. “

BARYSHNIKOV: She wouldn’t say fuck you, she’s a big fan. [Laughs]  It was such a different experience because a lot of how I approached my work in the beginning of my career was very much in reverence of someone’s vision. But Nastasya always wanted the best idea to win. When something is autobiographical, that’s also really tricky because you’re getting notes on things that you actually experienced. I know you’ve been through that process with your own movie. So, I was just kind of blown away by how flexible she was. The real turning point with my involvement in the development was when we shot this teaser that we were going to send around to beg everyone for money—

STEWART: And then also having to send their fucking ideas with proof of concepts no matter what because nobody can actually make it happen. It can’t be just a script and an incredible actor. And you’re like, “Why is this so hard?” Because they’re like,  “Can she really do it?” And we’re like, “Yes! We’ll make  the five-minute thing to show you that we can really do it.”

BARYSHNIKOV: Yeah, you have to make like 17 shorts and beg people, and she made upwards of 100 mood boards. But the teaser, financing aside, was really useful because it was really clear what felt most alive about the project. The early iterations of the draft were much more like quiet family stories. It used to be called Dochka, which is the Russian word for daughter, and it was focused on that father-daughter relationship. But there was always this undercurrent commentary on L.A. and how much the process of trying to get her work made made her feel like an idiot. This sense of humor emerged from the project and that was really out of conversations between Nastasya and one of the producers, Tess [Cohen], who’s also like her best friend. That was when it all kind of became a bit of a mind meld.

STEWART: That’s so cool. This is like a snow globe movie. I don’t mean to sound platitude-y, but when the connectivity on a set is ornate because there’s so much acceptance of other people’s ideas, you get to make these small movies feel fucking immense because there are so many different lives in it that’s not just the singular director’s vision. Making movies is trippy because you have to plan as fuck, and there are all these parameters in which you can lose control. But if you stay stuck in this narrow expectation, you don’t see all the shit that happens around you. So I’m impressed with this movie just because it does feel like this tiny thing, but then when you look in, it’s this big, huge world. And I feel like girls are really good at doing that. Not to be too binary about it, but it’s because you’re open.

BARYSHNIKOV: I think you have to be willing to nip your ego in the bud right away. I was just amazed at her ability to do that after she had done so much self-mythologizing to get the movie made. She was 29 when we shot it.

STEWART: Damn, that’s impressive. It’s tricky to watch younger people make movies about the internet because you can be more scathing without being condescending. When I watch movies that have vlogs or anything that talks about that kind of presentational experience, the worst is when it condescends to it and tries to be like, “We’re better than the internet. We’re making fun of the internet.” Your movie did not do that at all. She’s on the show and she never at any point goes, “This is all bullshit. This is too dark.” Because she really loves what she does and there are ways to get visibility. There are also environments in which there are monsters at work because our world can’t really escape that. I guess all in all, what I’m saying is that the movie doesn’t shit on ambition, even if it could feel trite to other people, it’s like she still feels super pure in what she wants. And so therefore, yeah, use that fucking show, girl. Use the internet.

BARYSHNIKOV: It was weird because when we were trying to get the movie made, it felt like we were going through the process that she goes through in the movie, which is that you have to be down to play the game.

STEWART: Totally. So what else are you doing?

BARYSHNIKOV: We’re going to Chicago with this, which is fun and scary because I’m going back to my college campus for the first time, and I was not good at being in college. I did not thrive.

STEWART: [Laughs]

BARYSHNIKOV: Then I’m going to SXSW to see another feature [Sender] that I did that is someone else’s first feature. I feel like I’ve been through it with Nastasya and I’m thinking about what he’s [Russel Goldman] about to experience. I also did a little scene in The Drama that’s coming out in April and a Cape Fear adaptation that’s coming out in June.

STEWART: Holy shit, girl.

BARYSHNIKOV: Yeah, I did Cape Fear with Javier Bardem. Have you worked with him?

STEWART: No. I’ve met him, but I have not worked with that man. He’s so cool.

BARYSHNIKOV: I love him. Such a crazy good actor.

STEWART: Who made that movie?

BARYSHNIKOV: It’s a TV show.

STEWART: Oh, that makes sense.

BARYSHNIKOV: The creator of the show is Nick Antosca, but they’ve also got the [Steven] Spielberg and the [Martin] Scorsese looming over the project.

STEWART: Oh, shit. Gosh, we started a company so we have lists of people that we’re like, “We just need to work with this person again.” I’m using this opportunity via an Interview article to be like, “We have some stuff for you, man. It’s headed your way! [Laughs]

BARYSHNIKOV: [Laughs] I know. I do feel like you just asked what I’m doing and I was like, “Well, here are the talking points.”

STEWART: No, I genuinely did want to know all of those things. But doesn’t it feel weird when you do a bunch of acting and then do so much talking about it?

BARYSHNIKOV: Right now I want to be like, “Just watch it.”

STEWART: Yeah, there has to be a way to fluff people up, get them hard for your project, but not necessarily tell them everything before they’ve walked in. What happens is that you start providing a syllabus on your movie, and you’re like, “I’m just an actor. What the fuck? Watch the movie and think for yourself.”

BARYSHNIKOV: This one, we really set out to make something fun, so it’s easy to have a good time talking about it. It had been a minute since I met someone like Nastasya, who cared about entertaining people so deeply and really wanted to make something that she and our friends would enjoy. I found Nastasya for this movie when  I was at dinner with a friend, and I was saying how much I loved being on set, and even though I had had a few great jobs right before then, like Love Lies Bleeding, I was parachuted in for three days and got high having so much fun doing it. Then it was over and you look at the people opposite you and you’re like, “Now they’re going to do it for the rest of the day and I’m warm and I want to do more.” So I was just saying to this friend, “I really want to be number one on something because I want to know the crew. I want to be there.” Now, I’m almost scared of all of this to be over. If I don’t have an Idiotka task left to do, I’m going to be really sad. I can imagine you feel the same way about your movie [The Chronology of Water], which I fucking love so much.

STEWART: Thanks for going to watch it. But yeah, being on set with you was so fun. I was like a pig in shit on that project. This is a good way of putting it, especially in print when people can’t see that I’m really a nice guy and that I’m not a fucking asshole saying this. You do really remind me of me in your enthusiasm for never wanting to leave. There are some people that come in and don’t want to meld with the process. You know what I mean? Just become inextricable from it so you could just never leave. You already know I feel this way about you, but that is so rare to encounter. Even when people are good, it’s rare to feel so enlivened by somebody else’s excitement. And also, you’re like an acrobat, you’re so funny and you hold every moment. Your control over timing—and I don’t mean ba dum dum funny—but you’re good at making jokes. There is a tension and release that you have very adept control over. We all have our different shit that we’re good at, but you are fucking good at yours.

BARYSHNIKOV: Now I’m sobbing. That’s too nice.

STEWART: It’s true.

BARYSHNIKOV: Thank you. Actually, watching you, I feel like I can give myself a little permission to say out loud how much I love doing it, because you were like, “You want to make movies? You love movies?” And I’m like, “Yeah!” [Laughs]

STEWART: [Laughs] Fuck yes.

BARYSHNIKOV: I mean, so much of what I love about doing this is being with other people. Nastasya’s dad had us over when we were done shooting and he was like, “So you made a movie, proud of you guys. But you know each other now, and that’s what’s really important.” We were so high on the movie that we were like, “No, the movie’s what’s important.” But now I feel like the time I spent with her—those 19 days—is the thing that I will cherish so much.

STEWART: But dude, those 19 days are the movie. Movies are like timestamps—they’re like little flagpoles you put in your life when you’re lucky enough to be somebody who gets to work on movies. Making that movie is the time you spent together, and the movie’s a trace of that. I feel the same way with Immy [Imogen Poots] in my movie. The movie happens to be this little shadow of our relationship.

BARYSHNIKOV: She’s so good in your movie. Goddamn.

STEWART: It’s crazy.

BARYSHNIKOV: I’ve never seen someone able to embody being different ages like that in the same film. She felt so young in the beginning, and she grew so much. She’s just crazy.

STEWART: It’s nuts. She just has integrity. She was like, “I’m 17.” And you’re like, “Okay, cool.” [Laughs]

BARYSHNIKOV: There was a description in an early draft, it was the first thing that I read in it that I was obsessed with, but was stealing a tomato while walking down the street and eating it. And there was this description of the tomato dripping down her forearm, and I now appreciate how hard it is to make those moments happen, especially when you’re moving so quickly.

STEWART: It’s scary.

BARYSHNIKOV: Yeah. And watching your movie, I was just like, “God, they got all of these delicious moments.”

STEWART: The most important scene is the tomato, period. Do you know what I mean?

BARYSHNIKOV: I mean, people always say this, but the accidents are the best. A tiny moment of the movie that’s one of my favorite moments is when I’m scrambling to get ready because they’ve showed up at the house and I overslept. And when we were shooting it, toothpaste got all in my hair, and I did that thing where you run through it really quickly and it makes it disgusting and worse. I was so annoyed that it had happened, but then when I watch it, I’m like, “Ah, well, that’s my favorite move in the movie, I guess.”

STEWART: Yeah, totally. I bet there’s tons of those in there. And you shot in L.A.

BARYSHNIKOV: We shot during the writer’s strike, and I feel like we got away with murder a little bit. I was also struck by how nice it is for people to be able to shoot in L.A., for the crew and their families. I mean, I’m preaching to the choir, but obviously more should shoot there. It was really about that city and a corner of that city that I had never seen on screen before. And now I love it there.

STEWART: I know. We just shot The Wrong Girls here, and we’re inside most of the time. Even though we got the tax credit, we didn’t have the money to then ever be allowed to go outside. There’s a few times where we’re like, “Oh my god, a palm tree.” They make it really impossible unless you’re fucking Paul Thomas Anderson. And by the way, not disparaging him. Love him.

BARYSHNIKOV: It felt like we kept stealing shots. We were like, “We’re just going to do this outside really quickly.” And then a Russian store owner would come out, and Nastasya would start negotiating with them in kind of broken Russian because she was nervous. And then we would get the shot really quickly and move on.

STEWART: You could spend more time here if you wanted to. Just throwing that out there.

BARYSHNIKOV: Perhaps I will.

STEWART: Well, when the fuck do I get to see you again? We should do a Nevermind [Pictures] meeting.  By the way, the name of my company is Nevermind  if you were like, “What do you mean a Nevermind meeting?”

BARYSHNIKOV: Oh, I thought this was an L.A. cultural thing that I don’t know. Yeah! I’m available.

STEWART: We just need to pull your ass into our office and ask you a bunch of questions.

BARYSHNIKOV: I would love it.

The post Take It From Kristen Stewart: Anna Baryshnikov Is a Star appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, photographed by Danny Lim.

The path to Hollywood isn’t a yellow brick road. Starting from a small village in Norway, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas made several detours: after being rejected from Norway’s top acting school, she joined an exchange program in Brazil, studied psychology for a year, spent a semester at New York’s Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, and then returned to Norway, where her parents run a theater production company. And now, at 36, Ibsdotter Lilleaas is a first-time Oscar nominee for her quietly affecting turn as Agnes in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, where she and Renate Reinsve play sisters navigating the prospect of reconciliation with their estranged filmmaker father (played by Stellan Skarsgård). The film’s meta-commentary on memory, trauma, and filmmaking itself has captured the hearts of audiences and critics—each of its lead actors are nominated for Academy Awards, as well as Trier for his direction. As Ibsdotter Lilleaas approached the final leg of her very first awards circuit, Sebastian Stan put her in the hot seat to reflect on a number of pinch-me moments, from meeting Susan Sarandon to being called the year’s best “special effect” by none other than Paul Thomas Anderson.—SIMON DWIHARTANA

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SEBASTIAN STAN: Hi, Inga. It’s so nice to meet you.

INGA IBSDOTTER LILLEAAS: Hi, nice to meet you too. Thank you for doing this.

STAN: Yeah, no problem. My pleasure. Where are you?

LILLEAAS: I’m back in Norway. 

STAN: It’s late for you, right?

LILLEAAS: Well, nine o’clock. I just took my son to bed and he fell asleep like, five minutes ago.

STAN: How old is your son?

LILLEAAS: He’s four-and-a-half.

STAN: I am so impressed with you and Renate [Reinsve] to have been doing this for months and being moms at the same time. It’s just superhuman effort.

LILLEAAS: Sometimes it feels like it actually. [Laughs]

STAN: Yeah, I’m sure. First of all, you’re incredible in the movie. I think you and Renate and everybody did such a beautiful job. It’s real and authentic and raw. I loved the movie and I loved your performance, but I didn’t know that you also decided to go across the globe to Brazil, then you ended up learning Portuguese? How old were you when you went to Brazil?

LILLEAAS: I was 17 and I wanted to do a year of exchange. I actually wanted to go to America, but of course,  it was full. I was too late. So they just listed a bunch of countries and I just heard Brazil and I said, “Okay, I’ll go there.” I didn’t speak any Portuguese.

STAN: But you speak it now.

LILLEAAS: I do, yeah. I learned it while I was there. Was there any acting involved with the exchange program? 

LILLEAAS: It was very academic, so I just sat in the classroom and I didn’t understand anything. I just wrote letters and read books and studied. But I think I’ve always wanted to be an actor. My parents, they ran this theater workshop where they rented out costumes and lighting equipment, sound equipment, and they produced amateur theater groups in the whole area where we lived. So I grew up more focused on theater production than the acting, and it wasn’t until later that I even understood that you could do it as a job.

STAN: It’s funny because when I was around that age, I wanted to go to Lee Strasberg and NYU, so I was definitely trying for it.

LILLEAAS: I actually wanted to apply to the school in Norway, the most famous one, but I didn’t get in. So I just started university and I did a year of psychology there, but then I felt like I had to sort of go somewhere. My mother was the guidance counselor in our high school and also a theater person, so she knew about a lot of different schools and methods and stuff. She said that that one was a famous one, so I read about Strasberg, of course, and I was curious.  And I learned a lot—I feel like I grew up a little. And then when I came back, I applied to another school in Norway that’s further north, so I went there.

STAN: Was that also an acting school of some sort?

LILLEAAS: Yeah, it’s an acting school. All of the acting schools in Norway are theater schools, but they have film courses. My first love of acting is with theater. But I always had this feeling that I could do movies, that I could be good at that way of acting. I did a short film in my third year of school and it was a really good experience. Then I got the lead in a movie, so I started to feel like I’d found a way to work as an actor that really resonated with how I wanted to work in a more intimate way—not so big on the very big expressions, on acting to the back row and all of that.

STAN: At what point in time did you become aware of Joachim Trier or his films?

LILLEAAS: I remember watching his first movie, Reprise, when I was in my 20s when I was a student in the university and I really loved it. And I had some friends who were obsessed with it. So when his next movie came out, I was in acting school and we all went to see it and I was so blown away by the actors. I thought they were so natural and conversational. There was so much going on under the surface, so much unsaid that was so intriguing, so then I just followed his movies ever since. I’ve always wanted to work with him since then and I just never thought that that was going to happen. And then after The Worst Person in the World, I don’t think any of us thought that he would stay and make a movie in Norway again, but luckily he did. We thought they would disappear.

STAN: So for this movie then, did he seek you out? Did you seek him out? Was it a meeting where you talked about the script?

LILLEAAS: I’d met him a few years ago, but we never talked and didn’t know each other. But I know the casting director and she calls me often for things, so I went in for a normal first audition and then they called me back for a second one. Then I had a long conversation with him, then a test with Renate. And then, it was such an unusual thing for me to meet the director in a second audition, that he took that much time to have a conversation with me that wasn’t necessarily about the script or the character. We talked about life and art, a lot of stuff. I mean, he’s very good at creating relationships with people, getting to know them. Rarely do I feel like I’m able to find anything of value in an audition, but now I felt like I had some valuable experience going through these meetings and these tests. I felt like I’d gone to work and that if I didn’t get the part, I would still have something that I could take away in a way.

STAN: I wish I would’ve been like that. [Laughs] I always took things a little personally, I guess. When you read the script, with the family being involved in the arts, did any of that immediately resonate for you because of your own experience with the theater group that your parents ran? 

LILLEAAS: Well, it definitely resonated somehow. I don’t necessarily know if it’s literal, but I recognize the parents who have a passion, who put in a lot of work and time and effort somewhere else and how, as a child, that affects you in a way. But also the sibling relationships; I have an older sister and a younger brother, so I’m in the middle. And I really recognized those conversations as true—I was really taken by them and responded very emotionally to the whole script. Because it’s also the aging director who’s trying so hard, but he’s also just a little boy looking for his mother. And also the actress aspect—the American actress coming into this family. Not that I know what it’s like to be an American movie star, but the struggle is the same, I think. You’re trying to get to the bottom of something, and oftentimes it’s not so easy.

STAN: I saw this interview where you talked about how you guys had these rehearsals where you’d get together—you and the DP and Joachim in the home—and go through the scenes and he would film it? So I’m curious how much it evolved over time, the scenes and how they were written.

LILLEAAS: He films all of the rehearsals, and then we’d do a little improvisation and we’d do the text and try to figure out the words—what’s the best way to say this? They’d already done a really good and thorough job with the lines and everything, so not a lot needed to be changed. But we also removed a lot while we were rehearsing. So we always shoot the scene as it’s written—we try to do a “right take,” if that’s how you would say it. But then he does “jazz” takes, where you can just do whatever you want, basically.

STAN: That sounds kind of great. 

LILLEAAS: Yeah, to sort of make mistakes, to mess it up. And we talked about that a lot—I’m always afraid to make mistakes, and that’s a thing I struggle with while I work, to not be so scared to do stuff, to not be afraid to fuck it up.

STAN: When you were filming, did you have the sense that this is going to be special?

LILLEAAS: I remember that they were nominated for an Oscar for the last movie they made at some point and just having this panic feeling. It was before we started shooting, but then I forgot about it when we started working. But I did always feel like we were making something of value. And when it was coming to an end, I felt such grief that it was over and that this is never going to happen again. This moment, this thing that I’ve experienced, is something else. It’s when everything comes together, everyone’s perfect in a way. The editor’s great, the cinematographer’s great—it’s just everything.

STAN: And Stellan Skarsgård is such a legend over there. Were you intimidated by him at all? And if you were, did that help you? Because technically, as his daughter, you had to sort of deal with this dynamic.

LILLEAAS: Yeah, but I think Agnes needed to be so comfortable with him in the discomfort. She makes herself connected to him in this way because she insists on this relationship working. It would’ve been a problem if we didn’t have a good chemistry or if he was kind of a douchebag. But he’s very much not. [Laughs] He’s very nice. He’s so normal in his way of being, he doesn’t take too much space. He takes a little and then he leaves a lot for the rest of us. And he always stays on set; he doesn’t leave. So he becomes part of the… what is it?

STAN: Family?

LILLEAAS: Part of the furniture almost.

STAN: And then suddenly you guys are all nominated for the Oscars and you’re going to L.A. and you see Steven Spielberg, all these people. Paul Thomas Anderson saw your movie and knows who you are and called you “the best special effect of the year.” How do you deal with that? What is that feeling? Is there a moment over these last few months that you’ll always go back to or think about?

LILLEAAS: I went to this luncheon thing in New York, me and the whole cast in New York, and Susan Sarandon was there. I’m a fan of Susan Sarandon, of course. We were going into a room and she came in front of me and Renate and she just said some things about the movie and about us and I was just so… That’s the only time I’ve been emotional. I almost cried in that moment. And Susan was emotional, Renate was emotional. It just felt profound, in a way. And then I met Paul Thomas Anderson on, what was it, Tuesday?

STAN: That’s so fun. And I guess the other piece now is like, CAA is now going to be part of your life. So is that exciting or is that nerve-wracking? Do you think you may have more of a relationship with the U.S. now, working in English more?

LILLEAAS: I don’t think I’m able to imagine that far ahead. It’s always such a difficult thing for me because I’m so used to living day to day. As an actor, you don’t know what you’re doing tomorrow, so I sort of trained myself not to think ahead. I’m not planning on moving there and trying that kind of thing. I’m too old for that, I think, and life is too cemented here. But there are a lot of really good filmmakers in America that I’d love to work with. And if I would be able to work with any of them, I would be very happy to.

STAN: But do you think you’d ever do Jurassic Park?

LILLEAAS: [Laughs] You’re the first person to ask Jurassic Park. A lot of people say Marvel—”Are you interested in doing a Marvel movie?” I don’t know why people ask that.

STAN: I sort of feel like in the U.S., you’re often encouraged as an actor to find this balance of both worlds, where you can do something more commercial that also enables you to provide for your family. And then maybe you’re lucky to get one of these great sort of films…

LILLEAAS: Well, I’m not going to say no to Jurassic Park right now. [Laughs]

STAN: Well, I think there’s something to be said about it, but I’m very impressed with how grounded you are about it all. I’m not surprised, because at least in your performance, without knowing anything about you, I felt I saw a real person. But it’s very exciting to imagine what you might do next.

LILLEAAS: Internally, I’ll feel like I have to prove something. I already feel that so much of the time.

STAN: Yeah, but you’re not alone in that. I remember one time I worked with Julianne Moore and I remember she had to cry in the scene. So I just sat there being like, “I’m going to watch this.” And beforehand, she was incredibly nervous. She was really worried about it. She was like, “I hate doing this. I never think I’m going to be able to do these kinds of scenes.” And of course when it happened, it was incredible. But I think it’s something that we all share because of the way that we’re exposed in those situations.

LILLEAAS: I think that’s why I’m an actor, because I am very curious. I’m curious about myself, but also other people. And I’m trying to understand other people by understanding myself.

STAN: Are you bringing your son to the Oscars? [Laughs]

LILLEAAS: He’s like four-and-a-half, so…

STAN: That might be a lot.

LILLEAAS: This has no value to him. I’m trying to explain to him and make him understand that it’s like, a competition. It’s like the biggest competition that an actor can be in. You don’t really do anything, so it’s not really a competition, but when I’m trying to explain it to him it just loses value. The more I say, the less it sounds like.

STAN: Maybe when gets a little bit older, you can show him the movie The Hunger Games and you can go, “This is what your mom had to do.” Because sometimes, I honestly fucking think it’s The Hunger Games.

LILLEAAS: If it was The Hunger Games, that would’ve been easier for me. I mean, I love talking about this movie, but it does drive you a little crazy and it’s—

STAN: It’s not normal.

LILLEAAS: Oh, no. It’s not.

STAN: But this is going to be a movie that will be talked about for years to come. I mean, it can really make me cry. [Stan starts to cry] And these things about our parents—they’re doing their best, but then it’s our turn. That’s going to happen for all of us. Anyway, a movie like that should never be taken for granted. And I think you guys will have a good night no matter what happens.

LILLEAAS: Yeah, I think so. We’re going to celebrate and be together and it’s going to be great. 

STAN: And I’ll just be over here crying. But you enjoy the ride. You deserve it and I’ll be rooting for you guys.

LILLEAAS: Thank you so much. Thank you for doing this.

The post Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas Takes Sebastian Stan Inside the Whirlwind of Awards Season appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Grant Gee, photographed by Jan Tracz.

Over the course of his career, veteran documentary filmmaker Grant Gee has followed musicians (Radiohead, Joy Division, and more), novelists (Orhan Pamuk) and essayists (W.G. Sebald). And now, he is back with something completely new—a biopic titled Everybody Digs Bill Evans, which premiered last week at the Berlinale Film Festival. We meet the titular jazz pianist, played by Anders Danielsen Lie, during the worst moment of his life, right after the untimely death of his close friend and collaborator Scott LaFaro. The film, viewers realize, proceeds more like a thought experiment than a conventional biopic. Gee, 61, is more interested in the psychology of suffering, opening the film with a cross-cutting sequence that juxtaposes Evans’ and LaFaro’s concert with the latter’s death and its aftermath. The memory of music, emphasized by black and white colors, becomes a Proustian madeleine.

Our interview is scheduled two days after the now-infamous Berlinale press conference during which Wim Wenders argued that the cinema should “stay out of politics”—another reason why the festival has seemed to gradually decline in stature over the last couple of years. When I notice Gee from a distance in the 1,600-seat Berlinale Palast, he appears withdrawn, confirming my suspicion that Grant Gee the man might, like Grant Gee the filmmaker, prefer the shadows to the spotlight. Shortly after his film’s world premiere, he joined me to talk about his very first contact with Evans’ music and the real difference between making a documentary and a feature film.

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JAN TRACZ: Thank you for finding time.

GRANT GEE: It’s a pleasure.

TRACZ: How is Berlin treating you so far?

GEE: I haven’t seen a great amount of it this time, but I’m back for another job for a month in a few weeks time.

TRACZ: Can you say what kind of job?

GEE: I have another strand of work, which is working with theater directors who use film and video in their stage shows, so I’m working on a show at The Schaubühne.

TRACZ: David Byrne was there two nights ago. Did you manage to talk?

GEE: No, no.

TRACZ: I ask because, first of all, I would love to see a documentary of yours about The Talking Heads. Before Bill Evans, you haven’t done a film on an American artist, right?

GEE: Is that right? Yeah, that’s true.

TRACZ: What happened? 

GEE: There was no conscious changing of mind. The conscious thought was I started directing music videos that led to a couple of music documentaries. And after the second one I thought, “Okay, if I do any more of this stuff, I’m going to be typecast as the guy that does music films forever.” I didn’t want that at that time. Before this, the last music film I did was 2007, nearly 20 years ago, and I’d been trying to get another one made. And it was really almost by accident that this odd little novel about an American jazz musician was the one.

TRACZ: Do you remember listening to Bill Evans for the first time?

GEE: Yes, I absolutely do. I saw a photograph of Bill, I didn’t know who he was, and there was something about his expression in this photograph which was fascinating and made me want to listen to whatever music this person made. So I asked a friend: “Where do I start with Bill Evans?” He said, “Well, get the Sunday at the Village Vanguard album.” I got it. And I can remember putting on the first track, “Gloria’s Step,” with no expectation of what was going to come out of the speakers.

TRACZ: What did you feel? 

GEE: I would have felt enchanted and charmed and excited by the deft delicacy of it. Something like that. I can’t put it into words, but I can remember the feeling.

TRACZ: What made Evans so special?

GEE: I don’t know enough about music to be able to say what made him different from other piano players. I only know it in terms of feel. I think there’s something maybe about he’s got a more rhapsodic quality than many pianists. There’s a chapter in a great jazz book called Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s, by Bill’s friend Gene Lees; it’s portraits of a number of great jazz musicians and titles the chapter on Bill “The Poet.” I don’t know how Bill’s technique is more or less poetic, but I think one can feel that there’s a poetic melancholy, even in the most sentimental of standards that he covers.

TRACZ: Tell me more about Evans’ grief.

GEE: All I know is, in the film, he didn’t talk a great deal about it. He didn’t say much about it in interviews either. What do we know about Evans’s grief? It’s odd because so little was actually written about him by people who knew him or about his emotional life. What has survived has been Chinese whispers based on one interview. So for instance, his close friend Gene Lees, who wrote the book that I referred to earlier, wrote that “He never really got over Scott [LaFaro’s] death.” That’s one person’s opinion, but it’s probably the only person who actually knew Bill, so anybody who’s written about him since has taken that quote and refracted and refracted. But if it’s true that he never really got over Scott’s death, then you work backwards to be like, “Oh, shit, what must that have been like at the time?”

We do know that after working on Kind of Blue, he decided that the modal music that he was making with Miles [Davis] wasn’t the direction he wanted to take. He wanted to lead his own trio. He’d had a trio before he worked with other musicians before. But the Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian Trio was the one where it all came together. So Bill is achieving his professional and creative dream by 1960. It reaches its apogee at the Village Vanguard in 1961. And 10 days later, Scott’s dead. That trajectory… What is that? What happens after that? He never really got over that. Let’s just imagine how that might be.

TRACZ: When I was driving here today, I was listening to Undercurrent, the album that was out a year after.

GEE: Oh, yes. I love, love, love that one.

TRACZ: And I have to say, it hits different after watching the film. He was trying to find peace after death. But was he able to find his peace, do you think?

GEE: Who knows whether he found peace or not. Undercurrent is interesting because it’s a duet with Jim Hall and I think they all could relax more when he was not Bill Evans leading the Bill Evans trio. Did he find peace? The next album that he made as leader of a trio was at the end of 1962 or maybe end of 1962, I think. You’d struggle to hear any grief in that. But whether he found peace? Yeah, I honestly don’t know. Everything I know is in the film.

TRACZ: Do you remember the cover of the album, Undercurrent?

GEE: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

TRACZ: Because I was thinking of that photograph, this Weeki Wachee Springs.

GEE: I’ve been to Weeki Wachee Springs.

TRACZ: Yeah?

GEE: If you look at a video for the band Supergrass called “Low Sea,” it’s shot in Weeki Wachee Springs, and I shot some stuff on that and they still have mermaid shapes there, or they did 10 years ago.

TRACZ: Wow. This is your first feature, right?

GEE: First drama feature.

TRACZ: Drama feature. And is there a real difference between documenting artists and directing actors?

GEE: It’s really hard to say. It’s all filmmaking. So, fundamentally, it’s the same thing. It’s just different components of the film. Obviously in a drama, the actors are a component that you have very little of in documentaries. The biggest difference for me is, with documentaries, you’re doing so much yourself. I was joking, but other people carry things around for you when you’re doing drama, you don’t have to carry all the stuff yourself. It’s like the difference between being in an orchestra and being a solo musician. Directing actors to the extent that you need to do for a drama feature was a new experience for me. I expected that my skills in the room actually doing detailed technical direction were not going to be the best, so I tried to compensate by what I thought my strengths were, which is giving them all contextual and psychological information beforehand and talking a lot about roles. And to my mind, I did relatively little active directing. We blocked everything out, but I was asking a lot of questions. And if they had any questions for me, I would answer as best as I could. But it was about allowing the actors to propose what was going to happen here.

Everybody did so much more for this film than I imagined that they would. There was a real sense of letting people do what they do. And to a certain extent, that’s part of my nature. When I teach documentary students I’m always saying, “Just do what you do and don’t tell people what they should do. Let them do what they feel they should do, and then just a little bit of shaping, maybe.” But with people of this caliber, you just let them do what they do, and if they’ve got any questions, they’ll let you know, and then you answer those questions as best you can.

TRACZ: Can I ask you a final question?

GEE: You can ask as many questions as you’d like.

TRACZ: Death appears on so many levels in this.

GEE: Death? Yes.

TRACZ: LaFaro dies, the ex-girlfriend and the brother kill themselves, and Evans was also very young. 51, I think.

GEE: Yes.

TRACZ: What’s your personal relationship with death?

GEE: I’m getting old, so one’s aware of it getting closer. It’s weird, isn’t it? The film about Joy Division, Ian Curtis killed himself. But I don’t know about my relationship with death. What’s the Woody Allen line? “Death’s all right. It’s dying that’s the problem.”

TRACZ: That’s a great conclusion.

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