It makes sense: He’s had some serious experience. The dashing 38-year-old British actor is perhaps still best known for his smoldering Duke of Hastings on the first season of Netflix’s Bridgerton, which set Christmas 2020 ablaze.

“I check in every now and then [on Bridgerton] because I have a lot of friends there and people I love, and they do wonderful work,” he says of the show, which continues to be a smash hit in its fourth season, despite Page’s absence. “I’m not fully up to date, but I know enough not to be running around asking anyone to be my mistress any time soon.”

It’s taken Page five and a half years to return to the genre. But he finally has, Italian style, in You, Me & Tuscany, out in theaters this month from Universal. In a 2026 twist on Roman Holiday, he plays Michael, a lonely winemaker in central Italy who falls for the charms of Anna (Halle Bailey), an American chef who shows up from New York, pretending to be married to his cousin Matteo.

Don’t worry. It will all make sense when you see it on the big screen, which Page says was integral to his involvement in the project.

“We haven’t really seen romantic comedies in cinemas lately,” says Page, acknowledging that movies like You, Me & Tuscany have, over the past decade, become a staple of streaming services like Netflix, Peacock and Amazon Prime. “We’ve gotten into the habit of watching them at home, so I wanted to participate in that landscape coming back into bloom.”

The first time he watched the movie was at the Universal Studios screening room in central London. He was alone save for a security guard who’d taken his phone away “so I didn’t film the movie,” Page says, conceding it was a “very cold environment to see this type of film. Two guys who don’t know each other in a dark room.”

“But within about five minutes, I heard the first chuckle come from behind me,” Page recalls. “It was just a free, almost childish giggle. That gave me permission to chuckle and giggle. And now there are these two strangers—two fully grown men who have escaped from this busy concrete world—chuckling and giggling and enjoying this escape together, giving each other permission to do that. I found that to be an incredibly beautiful thing.”

It’s why Page is particularly thrilled that audiences will be able to experience the movie together, in public and on the big screen. “They’re going through something together,” he says. “It feels like an event.”

Page’s last few films, like the spy thriller Black Bag opposite Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender and the big-screen Dungeons and Dragons adaptation Honor Among Thieves, might not make you think so, but the actor believes “rom-coms and romances are very important.”

Not just as a shared experience, he explains, but as a self-improvement exercise.

“They’re movies where people talk through their problems and how to become better people. I think that’s a really important lens for people to see their lives through. It’s the human stuff,” Page says.

“Films reflect reality as it is, but they also reflect reality as it can be,” he continues. You, Me & Tuscany is a fantasy, an escape. “But everything in it is in the bounds of reality,” he says. “You can buy a ticket on an impulse and go somewhere as beautiful as Tuscany. It’s a real place. We didn’t make it up.”

Sure, Anna’s character in the movie tells a few white lies and gets in a little bit of emotional hot water, but, Page insists, to make life exciting you have to take a few risks and a few tumbles.

“You have to find people that will open up your view of the world,” Page says confidently. “You need to see life as beautiful in order to strive for life as beautiful. If you see it, you can be it. You need to see idealized versions of life in order to create them for yourself, to discover new ways of living that can fulfill you more.”

The audience may be experiencing a kind of adventure on screen, but, Page hopes, “when you leave the theater, you’re coming out singing the soundtrack, thinking, ‘You know what? That could be me! It’s not going to work out exactly the same way, but maybe I can break the shackles of a life that feel restrictive.’”

You don’t hear George Clooney and Julia Roberts or Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell talking like this on Entertainment Tonight, do you? Applying the underpinnings of Ticket to Paradise or Anyone But You (which, by the way, was based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing) to the development of the human psyche? Well, it shouldn’t surprise you that Regé-Jean Page has a background in Shakespeare, having starred in The Merchant of Venice with Jonathan Pryce at London’s Globe in 2015.

“Regé appreciates the rom-com genre on a deep level,” says Kat Coiro, director of You, Me & Tuscany. She describes the actor as particularly multifaceted, “layered like a lasagna.”

“He never condescends,” she adds. “He embraces the joy and crowd-pleasing aspect. He knows what has come before, is aware of the tropes, the successes and the pitfalls. It all made him an incredibly valuable partner as we set out to make a big, theatrical rom-com.”

Of course, Page’s damn good looks help make things bigger and more thrilling. “The smolder in person is quite something to behold,” says Coiro. “The man knows how to work the camera, that’s for sure. But the smolder isn’t manufactured. It comes from having so much going on behind the eyes. The wheels are always turning.”

Want to know one thing Page’s wheels aren’t really turning about, especially now that he spent a few months in Italy playing an Italian vintner? Wine.

Go ahead. Imagine you’re in a nice restaurant like Carbone with Page. It’s a date. Everyone’s staring at you from around the room. “Who’s that with the guy from Bridgerton?” they’re all asking. You pass your date the wine list. He was just in a movie about wine. He’s got to have ideas. White or red, at least. So you ask: “What should we drink, Regé?”

“That’s my nightmare,” Page says. “My nightmare.”

Really? Yes, he confirms. “I can appreciate a good glass of wine, but I have nowhere near enough wine knowledge. I learned enough to get by, but the things you learn for an acting job tend to go in the same bucket as my lines go into. They are bright and vivid on the day, but as soon as the job is done, they disappear into the ether.”

Page can’t even name the best glass of wine he had during the production—not the grape, not the label, though he recalls the Airbnb he was staying in when he had it. Still, he more than makes up for it in wine vamping and setting the scene.

“The wine is about where you’re drinking it, when you’re drinking it, how you’re drinking it,” he stresses, noting that the only thing he brought back from Italy was coffee. “Anyone can have a great glass of wine, but they don’t know how good it tastes until they find the right person to drink it with.”

While you wonder if you should scratch your head in confusion or ask the sommelier for some advice, he keeps improvising. So, of course, you swoon, staring into his dark brown eyes.

“We were out on the balcony looking over the farm. There was a charcuterie board. I was looking out as the sun was going down,” Page remembers. “And the wine tasted so good. It’s possibly because it was very good wine, or possibly because of the environment we consumed it in.”

And you know what? He’s probably right.

Page insists he’s always been an earnest overthinker. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an explorer,” he says. “Acting feels like a travel adventure. I get to live someone else’s life in a different place and report back the things I’ve seen. It’s almost like travel journalism, but for the psyche.”

When he’s not acting, Page splits his time between London and Los Angeles, usually in three-month cycles. “The two cities complement and refresh each other,” he says. In Southern California, he says he often has to be “very switched on.” In London, it’s calmer. He likes to get into the garden.

“I’m not very good at it, but it’s an activity,” Page says of gardening, which he insists is a pastime rather than a hobby. “It’s more of a kind of watering and singing to the plants and myself.” Usually that’s a soundtrack of Motown and a little bit of Sam Cooke. “The plants never object to Sam Cooke,” Page says. Who would?

Gardening returns him to his childhood in Zimbabwe, where his grandparents had a big farm. “I remember going out and picking fresh guavas and avocados,” he says.

These days, he doesn’t study gardening or even read about how to do it. “I just wander in and muddle about and work entirely off instinct. I’ll listen to the birds. It’s a grounding thing, when I can be just a human being,” Page says. “I should just call it ‘Time outside, getting my hands dirty and occasionally helping a plant if I’m lucky by mistake,’ but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”

When he’s not getting his hands dirty in actual London dirt, Page has been sowing the seeds of a few streaming projects. There’s an erotic thriller called Hancock Park for Netflix and a rom-com for Apple based on the novel Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman. Page has also been developing a new Great Gatsby for the West End stage.

“To my eyes, it’s the best interpretation of the spirit of the book that I’ve seen on paper anywhere,” he says. “It’s a book that lives between the lines.”

He’ll, naturally, play Jay Gatsby. “I like the idea of this chameleon with a past. His striving for this gilded world and his slight misunderstanding of how that will or won’t give him what he wants is almost Ripley-esque,” Page says. “I find him very tragic, but he represents all of us, in that way.”

Gardening and acting, I tell Page, certainly have a lot in common. He agrees. “You spend a lot of time tending to the bulbs,” Page says. Then all the flowers pop at once, in the springtime, and everyone sees the fruit of your labor. “It all happens very quickly, but you’ve spent a long time beforehand, beneath the soil.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time with acting, and I take it very seriously,” he says, shifting to a metaphor about a man who grows bamboo for years without any bamboo to show for himself, to the consternation of his friends. And then, overnight, the bamboo grows 6 feet and no one thinks he’s crazy anymore.

That’s sometimes what it feels like to work as an actor, he explains. “I probably take it slightly too seriously. But I enjoy it, seeing how far I can go. And then to balance it out, when I’m not at work, I try not to work at all.”

Groomer: Jessica Ortiz using Tom Ford Beauty

Hair: Marcos Reggae Smith

Photo Assistants: Eric Hodgman, Joao Otavio

Styling Assistant: Amanda Estrada

Photographed on location at Corner Studio in New York City

The post For Regé-Jean Page, It’s All About Love appeared first on DuJour.

At London’s Donmar Warehouse, there’s Evening All Afternoon, a two-character jewel box of a piece about a woman and her teenage stepdaughter in the UK during the pandemic. At New York’s Public Theater, there’s Antigone (This Play I Read in High School), Ziegler’s take on the Sophocles play, starring Tony Shalhoub and Celia Keenan-Bolger.

Ziegler, who graduated from Yale and St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, is perhaps best known for her play, Photograph 51, about the X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and her role in the discovery of the structure DNA. Nicole Kidman famously starred in a production over ten years ago in London; Ziegler is currently working on a film adaptation that Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) plans to direct.

Here, Ziegler talks about what it’s like to have new work opening on both sides of the Atlantic.

How does it happen that you have a play in London and another one in New York at the same time?

Mostly by accident. Theater moves slowly until suddenly it doesn’t, and projects that have been developing for years can end up landing at the same time. These two plays were written at different moments and for different reasons. They found their collaborators and their homes on their own timelines. The fact that they’re now running in parallel is honestly a little surreal. The real challenge, of course, was rehearsing them simultaneously! But now that that part’s done, I’ll admit there’s something very cool about having two such different pieces out in the world at the same time, in a sort of conversation with each other across continents.

What was the genesis of Antigone (This Play I Read in High School)?

I didn’t read Antigone in high school. I didn’t touch Sophocles’ play until I was in my 30s, when a theater in California commissioned me to adapt it. I read the original alongside Jean Anouilh’s adaptation and was moved by both. At first I stayed close to the original story—about Antigone defending the body of her brother. Then a friend read a draft and asked how it was relevant  to me, to women, to our world. I had to start over.

What about Evening All Afternoon?

That play draws on people I’ve known, stories I’ve been told, poems and plays I’ve loved. Its title comes from a Wallace Stevens poem, and to me the phrase captures the slippery, non-linear way time actually functions in our lives. There’s a touch of Hamlet in the play—ghosts on rooftops warning their children to beware of a parent’s new partner. It’s a more intimate piece, about family, memory, and the stories we construct about ourselves over time. What surprises me, looking at both plays together, is how much they share. Both grapple with motherhood: what it feels like to be a mother, to lose a mother, to contemplate becoming one..

Is it better to debut a play in New York, London, or somewhere else?

I’m a New Yorker, so there’s an added intensity to opening here—so many people in my life will see it. My family, my close friends, my son’s Hebrew school teacher, my mother’s tennis partner. That’s wonderful and terrifying in equal measure. In London, there’s a little more breathing room. The culture of theater-making also feels slightly looser there, more relaxed, with a bit more rehearsal time built in. Though I won’t pretend I didn’t need my customary two glasses of wine to get through previews there either. Truthfully? I don’t think one city is better than the other. Except that I’m from New York and have always been obsessed with London. Their critical landscape also feels a bit more democratic—which makes it a kinder environment in which to debut work. So I guess my answer is probably…Wichita?

Celia Keenan-Bolger and Susannah Perkins in Antigone (This Play I Read in High School) (Joan Marcus)

The post Anna Ziegler’s Twin Openings Take Center Stage appeared first on DuJour.

She’s an actress with huge franchises to her name, including The Hunger Games and Pitch Perfect. She’s in the small but exclusive club of actors who are also successful directors. The last feature she directed, Cocaine Bear, grossed over $90 million on a production budget one-third that size. She’s a prolific film and television producer, about to go to SXSW with a new passion project. And she’s a wine entrepreneur.

So, it might be something of an inside Hollywood joke that her latest character, in The Miniature Wife, which premieres on Peacock in early April, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer who is accidentally, well, downsized to six inches tall.

Based on a short story by Manuel Gonzales, 52-year-old Banks plays Lindy Littlejohn, a successful novelist and Washington University creative writing professor who’s hoping to have a bit of a relationship renaissance with her self-absorbed scientist/entrepreneur husband, Les (Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen). But Les is aiming for a financial windfall thanks to his developments in miniaturization.

Anyone who’s seen Honey, I Shrunk the Kids can guess what happens next.

“I loved the idea from the jump,” says Banks, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “It’s a relationship study. It’s about the power dynamic of a couple. It’s about a woman who lives in a world that’s not made for her. It has this absurdist lens. It’s certainly a metaphor for feeling small in the world. As women, all of our hopes and dreams and desires are always being minimized. We’re so often made to feel small.”

The Miniature Wife creators Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner, who previously worked on Goliath and Boardwalk Empire, among other shows, insist that Banks was their first choice to play the role.

“She has this ability to move seamlessly from the most ridiculous physical comedy of battling a giant fly to the raw vulnerability of giving her daughter, with whom she has a strained relationship, a nose hug—all while being six inches tall,” they say. “She’s such a gifted physical comedian. Her comedic timing is brilliant.”

Comparisons to Lily Tomlin in the 1981 camp classic The Incredible Shrinking Woman are inevitable.

To play Lindy’s sometimes bumbling, sometimes narcissistic, sometimes caring husband, Banks waited for Macfadyen to become available. “I was really looking for someone who matched the tone, and he just really checked every box,” Banks says. “We didn’t offer it to anyone else, and he’s such a delight.”

“Acting together was just a blast,” says Macfadyen. “She’s super smart, super funny, with a real emotional heft. It was a joy to navigate the insanity of Les and Lindy’s relationship over these 10 episodes.”

Banks, who grew up the eldest of four kids in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, did not expect how hard playing the role would be.

“My husband [producer Max Handelman] says I was the least mentally prepared for this job than any job in my entire career,” Banks says. She, Macfadyen and the rest of the cast spent a lot of time reading the scripts out loud and getting to know their characters.

“You just imagine you’re going to be making the scenes with that person,” she says of her many moments with Macfadyen on paper. But when it came to actually shooting the show, 70 percent of it involved green screen work alone, pretending to be half a foot tall.

Banks had worked with green screens before, notably when she played the villain Rita Repulsa in the Power Rangers reboot in 2017. “But there were a lot of practical effects. They dressed me up and attached me to wires, and they’d fly me around,” she says.

Macfadyen would be off reading lines into a microphone, and “I’m in a coffee mug in front of a green screen making eye contact with a ball on a stick,” Banks recalls. “I felt very vulnerable sitting alone with nothing around me, having to create the entire reality at all times.”

Still, Banks made everything fun, say Ames and Turner. “Elizabeth committed to every ridiculous bit. One of our favorites is Lindy burning down the dollhouse. Elizabeth rode around on the green screen set on an electric scooter covered in ash and laughing maniacally. She really went for it that day, and it was a sight to behold.”

“I think it’s fun and funny, and I want people to think about the dynamics in their own families. What does ambition and selfishness look like in the modern world?” Banks says of what she’d like audiences to take away from The Miniature Wife.

The goal, she adds, was to create something “that feels oddly relatable, but also like nothing else on television.”

As a producer, actor and director in a changing Hollywood landscape, Banks thinks it’s more and more important to do that. “It’s really all about how to be as fresh and entertaining as possible,” she explains. “How do you tap into things that are in the zeitgeist, and how do you make old things feel fun and new?”

Part of that involves keeping tabs on what her two teenage sons, Magnus and Felix, enjoy. “They’re not watching Euphoria, and they’re not allowed to be very online,” she says. “But we love to watch shows together.” Among them: Only Murders in the Building, The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park. “Teenage boys love that stuff.”

At the same time, it’s interesting to Banks that “old stuff is new again.” Her kids are watching The Office and Reno 911!, while she’s constantly approached by young fans who’ve just seen her in The Hunger Games, even though the first film in which she played creepy stylist Effie Trinket was almost 15 years ago.

“I’ve so moved on, but what a gift,” Banks says of the blockbuster series. “Effie is still alive and well.”

The truth of the matter, Banks says, with a dash of humor, is that “I’m in a bunch of iconic movies, man.” There’s The Hunger Games. There’s Pitch Perfect. There’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

“You always set out for icon status,” she jokes. “Why try to be anything else less than?”

But how do you reach iconic movie status? Is there a formula? Banks thinks so. “You give audiences something that’s a little bit safe and then you go transgressive, a little bit messy and dangerous,” she says. “I think that’s where it happens.”

Whenever she considers a new project, she says, “I definitely make a box and say, ‘Are we checking icon status?’ You don’t always get there. It’s not the fault of the material. A lot of movies are made by a committee.”

For instance, the first time she heard the pitch for Bottoms, a teen comedy she produced starring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, “I knew it was going to have a voice. It’s about young people figuring out their life and how to get laid. That’s iconic.”

Banks will probably direct another movie next summer, “by the time my life and the scripts and the casting and the prep line up,” she says. But she tries to space things out, she explains. Making all 10 episodes of Miniature Wife involved spending six and a half months in Toronto, “and I’m also raising two kids, and I want to be home and with the family.”

She tries to be outside as often as possible. She loves to ski. “It’s six, seven, eight hours of moving your body—there’s nothing better,” she says. And though she loves Los Angeles, she misses the snow in Massachusetts. “I always say there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear. Get the right snow pants and get out there.”

She’s also trying to change the way we sip our pinot as the co-owner and chief creative officer of Archer Roose Wines, a luxury canned wine company. It’s all about storytelling, she says. “And drinking your way to a better planet,” Banks adds.

Whether she’s 15 centimeters tall onscreen or 5-foot-5 off it, Banks’ goal these days is disrupting the system. “That word didn’t exist when I was growing up,” she says. “But even then I was an ambitious go-getter. I’ve been collecting a paycheck since I was 12. I lived in a small town and wanted a big life.”

Mission accomplished.

“We live in an incredible time,” Banks says. “And if you’re a woman who does things, you’re disruptive. But you know what? It’s really fun.”

Hair: Kat Thompson

Makeup: Beau Nelson

Nails: Queenie Nguyen

Photo Assistants: Zach Fernandez and Liam Booker

Styling Assistant: Jaimee Hager

Production: Arzu Koçman for Productionising

Production Assistant: Balca E. Sagmanli

Photographed on location at Rosewood Estate, 500 St. Cloud Road in L.A.

The post Elizabeth Banks: Still Big On the Small Screen appeared first on DuJour.

What was it like playing in Giant on the West End?

I went to drama school in London for a semester abroad and studied at The National Theatre, so to come back was really fun. I have spent quite a bit of time in London the last few years, and I love it so much. I have a real community there now. I knew how incredible the play was but I had no idea people would be so desperate for it. It is a conversation that people are afraid to have right now.

How do you imagine the response will be different or similar in New York?

I am trying not to have expectations. I am trying to let New York tell me what it thinks rather than coming in with assumptions. The only assumption I’ll make is they’re going to be louder and in some ways I am down for that. New York is not a quiet city.

What’s exciting about bringing it to New York?

New York is my home. I’ve been here 20 years. I’ve never lived anywhere else for that long. I moved here because I knew that being an actor was an incredibly unlikely career and I would spend a lot of time not getting acting jobs. I knew I would be happier failing here more than any other city. I love the energy of New York, I love the style, the challenge, the New Yorkness of New York. And I was right, I spent a lot of time waiting tables here but it always felt like home. I am so happy to be working from home. It rarely happens these days.

What’s your relationship with Roald Dahl’s canon from when you were a kid?

I grew up reading his books and watching the movies based on them. Funnily enough, my favorite was The Witches. The Anjelica Huston movie was on repeat. I think his books are fantastical and fun, but they get at what it feels like to be a kid, to live in your imagination before you really live in the real world. And they teach you how to process the world you will enter as an adult.

How did your relationship with Dahl change with being a part of the play?

I didn’t know about the controversy before the play. I can’t separate every artist from the art, but I can separate Dahl. In this day and age, we draw hard lines around these things, but I think for me it’s more personal and intuitive. I can still love his work despite having deeply conflicted feelings about him as a flawed human being.

Does playing the role make you wish you worked in publishing at all?

My mother is a writer and there was a moment in my life when I thought about it. Briefly. But no, this play doesn’t make me want to pivot! Working in publishing seems like a lot of babysitting. Let’s be honest: I am an actor. We’re the babies not the sitters.

What’s most exciting to you about making your Broadway debut?

My 18-year-old self is still screaming. I didn’t know if I’d ever make it to Broadway. I know it’s silly to ascribe meaning to it in that way. I’ve done over 30 plays in my life, and I don’t think just because something makes it to Broadway that means it’s better. But it’s still a thrill and to have it happen with this play is the most exciting thing possible. I have known since the moment I read it that I would do it wherever it was. To get to take it to Broadway is beyond my wildest dreams.

Aya Cash and John Lithgow in Giant

The post Aya Cash’s Giant Broadway Moment appeared first on DuJour.

After a rave review in The New York Times, his monologue Blue Cowboy was extended again and again at the Bushwick Starr last fall. Cale starred as a version of himself, a writer who has an affair with a closeted local during a trip to Ketchum, Idaho.

Cale also shows up in the movie The Testament of Ann Lee as John Hocknell, one of the original Quakers who came to America in the 1700s.

His latest play The Unknown just opened to a lot of buzz at Studio Seaview where it plays thru mid April. Sean Hayes stars in the one-man show as a writer who thinks he’s being stalked.

Here, Cale, whose Talented Mr. Ripley-like monologue Harry Clarke is available to listen on Audible (starring Billy Crudup), talks about the busy time.

What inspired you to write The Unknown?

In the early part of my career I only worked on my own shows and occasionally acted in films. I’d never acted in a play and received a call to audition for one directed by a stage director I admired. The play was brilliant, and I did the audition. As I didn’t have an acting agent, I called the casting director who’d contacted me in the first place. I wasn’t asking or wanting any feedback from the audition, I just wanted to know if any decision had been made. The casting director told me what the director thought and it was such a cruel, dismissive appraisal of my worth as an actor and also, in a way, my specialness as a person. It was awful. I’m resilient, but it was the kind of remark that could devastate a less stable person and certainly make them give up pursuing an acting career. So, that was the original basis for the idea for The Unknown—an emotionally damaging remark made to an actor who was being rejected for a role and that unstable actor seeking revenge. The plotline of The Unknown shifted from that, but that was the initial inspiration.

What’s the impetus for you to start writing a new monologue/theater piece? 

I usually start with an event that has intrigued me or emotionally engaged me, either imagined or something that happened to me, something I’m going through or I witnessed. I then imagine what would come next or just dramatically explore what actually came next. All of my shows are emotionally autobiographical. Some are factually autobiographical or parts are factually autobiographical. They’re all some form of self-expression, so as soon as I start writing, and I write very intuitively, some of myself goes into every story.

How do you decide when you’re going to perform a show yourself or have another actor do it? 

The Unknown is the third of my shows that I didn’t perform. With Harry Clarke, the first of the three, it wasn’t an option. Audible, the producer, didn’t want me to perform the piece. They wanted someone more widely known for their first venture into theater. So with that I didn’t have a choice, except choice of actor, and my first choice was Billy Crudup, who very happily accepted and was beyond brilliant in the show, and that all certainly worked out. With Sandra, the second show, I considered performing it myself, but it was written for a woman, and that decided it for me, and I wanted Marjan Neshat, who played the role. Leigh Silverman, the director of all three of the shows I didn’t perform, sent Sean Hayes the first seventeen pages of The Unknown, which was all there was at that point. Sean was interested to know what happened next. I wrote the remainder of the script and met with the two of them, initially about the script being the basis of a film I’d write, Leigh would direct and Sean would star in. By the end of our lunch, Sean wanted to perform the show on stage. It was such an exciting idea to me that I didn’t even consider performing The Unknown myself.

Why do you think Sean Hayes is a good fit for this role? Or even a better fit than you are yourself? 

I love out-of-the-box casting. So the idea of Sean, who’s such a charismatic, immediately likable person who you automatically trust, playing someone who, at a certain point in the story you begin to question their trustworthiness or state of mind as the narrator, was interesting to me. I didn’t think of who would be a better fit.

How did your role in The Testament of Ann Lee  come about? What was that experience like? 

Mona Fastvold, the director/co-writer of the film, and Brady Corbet, her partner and the co-writer of Ann Lee, are friends of mine. I’d read an early draft of the screenplay. Mona and Brady saw me perform my solo musical memoir, We’re Only Alive for A Short Amount of Time at The Public Theater in NYC, and offered me the role via text from Hungary, where they were preparing the film. It came to me as a complete surprise. Working on the film was one of the most extraordinary and spiritual experiences I’ve had. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given.

 Will we hear from Harry Clarke again? 

I certainly hope so. Either on stage or in a film.

Sean Hayes in The Unkown (Emilio Madrid)

The post David Cale’s Singular Voice Takes Center Stage appeared first on DuJour.

Whether she’s being directed by the late, great David Lynch, Greta Gerwig, Mike White, Alexander Payne, Noah Baumbach or Steven Spielberg, Dern transforms herself completely into a role. The daughter of actors Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern, Dern grew up in Los Angeles and spent time on her parents’ movie sets at a young age.

“I knew I wanted to become an actor when I was 7 years old,” Dern has said. “My dad was working with Alfred Hitchcock, my mom was working with Martin Scorsese—and it was the great summer of my childhood.”

One of Dern’s first roles was as an extra in the Scorsese film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which earned Ladd an Oscar nomination.

In 2018, Ladd was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Doctors told her that her only hope of getting better would be by attempting to expand her lung capacity through exercise. So Dern and her mother began going on walks near the beach, during which the pair had deep conversations about life, love and their relationship.

“I thought I was dying, so Laura and I just told each other everything,” Ladd said. Dern recorded their conversations, which became their joint 2023 memoir Honey, Baby, Mine. Just after sitting for DuJour’s cover shoot and before an interview with Dern could be completed, Ladd died at age 89.

“My amazing hero and my profound gift of a mother, Diane Ladd, passed with me beside her this morning, at her home in Ojai, California,” said Dern in a statement. “She was the greatest daughter, mother, grandmother, actress, artist and empathetic spirit that only dreams could have seemingly created. We were blessed to have her. She is flying with her angels now.”

It’s certainly a bittersweet time for Dern. While dealing with the loss of her mother, she also welcomes the return of her Apple TV series Palm Royale, as well as two of her most exciting film roles since she won an Oscar five years ago for playing a powerhouse divorce attorney in Baumbach’s Marriage Story.

First up is Baumbach’s latest, Jay Kelly, in which Dern stars as the beleaguered publicist to the title character, played by George Clooney.

“I love working with Laura because the work never ends. She makes everything better,” says Baumbach. “Laura and I are in a forever dialogue that continues through and beyond the movies we’re making. We meet at dinner, call and write each other with character and story ideas, locations we’d like to shoot in, movies to watch, books to read. Laura is an early reader of all of my scripts because she always seems to understand what movie I’m making better than I do.”

After that comes Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? The film is its own kind of Marriage Story, though certainly a more optimistic one. This time, Dern stars as Tess, a one-time Olympian volleyball player who is questioning her longtime relationship with Will Arnett’s Alex.

Arnett, Cooper and Mark Chappell co-wrote the film with Dern in mind. “She’s such a powerhouse,” Arnett explains, describing his costar as a “great artist.” “Her ability to find all these details about her character and bring them to life is truly remarkable. Laura’s Tess is such a rich, complete and complicated character, and she always finds ways to surprise. I think Laura really rewards the audience with a deeply honest performance that at times forces you to catch your breath.”

“That was my goal, to write a character worthy of her abilities,” adds Cooper. “To work with her is a lifelong dream.”

Hair: DJ Quintero
Makeup: Gita Bass
Photo Assistants: Brandon Abreu, Margaret Gibbons and Evan Lee
Styling Assistant: Kyle Gleason

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This month also marks the release on the streamer of Kelly’s first ever rom-com, Champagne Problems. In the holiday romp, Kelly, an effortlessly young 45, plays Sydney Price, an American executive who flies to Paris to execute a takeover of Chateau Cassell, a family-owned Champagne house. Of course, on her first night there, she has an epic date with a man who turns out to be the heir to the company after a meet-cute at a French bookstore. (Art imitates life imitates art: Kelly’s own first stop in Paris is usually Shakespeare and Company, the bookstore on the Left Bank.)

With its musings on Ratatouille, swoonworthy scenes of the City of Lights around Christmas and equally swoonworthy romance, Champagne Problems goes down like, yes, a glass of bubbly.

“I’ve always wanted to do a rom-com, and Paris is my favorite place in the world, so when the script came, I said, ‘Great, I’d love to,’” recalls Kelly. “To think I would get to do a rom-com in France, that was very exciting. It’s such a nice breath of fresh air. We laughed all day.”

During filming in Paris, Kelly rented a flat in the Marais. “For me, it’s all about food, and I ate a lot,” says Kelly, who only speaks a little bit of French. “I love to go out to eat by myself, especially when I’m out on the road. I go exploring and watch this culture happen around me.”

One of her favorite haunts is Chez Janou on Rue Roger Verlomme. “Whenever anyone is going to Paris, I always send them there. I just love how French it is. They’re famous for their chocolate mousse that comes in this huge bowl, and they just come over and lop it on the plate,” she says. “I’d order this delicious beef stew and an entire baguette with salted butter and a glass of wine, and I’d just sit and eat at the bar and watch all the waiters be so lively. The whole French people being rude thing—I haven’t experienced that.”

In addition to the time spent in her favorite city, making the movie “was everything I’d hoped it would be,” says Kelly. “I’m a bit of a goofball, and I got to let loose and let my personality show. It was nice to be silly. It was a really nice respite from being on a drama and being so emotional.”

Of course, Kelly is talking about Ransom Canyon, in which her character, Quinn O’Grady, a concert pianist who moves home to Texas to run a dance hall, pines for Staten Kirkland, played by Josh Duhamel. It’s a pivotal love triangle that has made the show a hit. But Kelly also could be talking about Tell Me Everything, the memoir she released in 2023 that chronicles her complicated relationship with her mother, a stripper who struggled with drug addiction.

Originally, Kelly wanted to tell that story as a movie in the vein of grounded family dramas like Thirteen and The Florida Project. She wrote it as a screenplay, which she planned to direct, and the prolific Simon Kinberg was going to help produce. Though she wasn’t sure if she would star as her mother onscreen, “I was going to get it made,” Kelly says. She started talking to line producers to develop a budget. But just as things were becoming real, the pandemic hit.

“Everything went away,” explains Kelly. A few people told her that there was so much more to her story—moving to Hollywood; her initial plans to be a nurse; booking her breakthrough role on Friday Night Lights—that she should reconceive it as a book. Tell Me Everything was a cathartic experience. It became a New York Times bestseller and thrust Kelly, whose career had quieted a bit, back into the spotlight.

“Sometimes, once you get clear, healthy and happy again, things can flow back in line,” Kelly says. Publishing the book “changed my life.”

For one thing, it opened the door to Ransom Canyon. “It’s about relationships and beautiful landscapes, the horses and the ranches. There’s a real nostalgia to even the aesthetics of the show,” Kelly explains, when asked why she thinks Ransom has connected with audiences. “Everyone can relate to these family dynamics and heartache and not being able to get out of your own way when you’re trying to make a relationship work.”

To play Quinn, Kelly had to learn to play piano. Now she can share her musical know-how with her real-life boyfriend, Dan Reynolds, lead singer of the band Imagine Dragons. “I’ve been to so many of his shows, and they’re an emotional experience,” she says. “When he’s playing new music at home, I just can’t get enough of it.”

Season 2 of Ransom Canyon will have eight episodes instead of 10 and “more levity,” she explains. Filming in Albuquerque reminds her of her complicated childhood, of course, but things now couldn’t be more different. “I’ve never seen more beautiful sunsets,” she says. “It’s breathtaking every single day.”

She spends a lot of time on her own there. “I’ve made a lot of peace with being alone, and I actually enjoy it.” But it means being left alone with her thoughts, too, which occasionally drift to where she is in her career.

“I feel so lucky to have been doing this for 20 years. It’s crazy,” Kelly says. “It’s one of the hardest businesses to support yourself in, especially coming from where I came from. I started so green.”

And now she’s risen to be among the Netflix crème de la crème. “But more importantly, I know my worth now,” she says. “I feel like I do belong.”

Hair: Ricky Fraser
Makeup: Diane Buzzetta
Photo Assistants: Dante Guerra and Maya Sacks
Styling Assistant: Grace Olyphant
Photographed on location at Netflix Studios in Los Angeles

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Surprisingly, it’s been a decade since Chenoweth last appeared in a Broadway production. That was a revival of On the Twentieth Century, opposite Peter Gallagher. She returns this fall in a new collaboration with Wicked composer Steven Schwartz based on the 2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles.

The musical The Queen of Versailles, like the film, follows Jackie Siegel, the wife of a timeshare entrepreneur (played onstage by F. Murray Abraham), as she attempts to build a $100 million house in Orlando, Florida, inspired by the Palace of Versailles. Previews of the show begin October 8 at the St. James Theatre.

What interested you in playing Jackie Siegel?

Jackie is a complicated, wildly different and outrageous character. At the core of her, Jackie is someone who has the shared desires of building a better life for herself and her family, and that’s very relatable! At this point in my career, this was more of a challenge for me. It’s maybe the role I’ve been waiting to play my whole life.

Why do you think this particular story makes an exciting musical?

At the heart, this story is about the American dream. Everyone in the world can relate to the idea that we are striving for a place in the world where our greatest desires are to build a life and a future for our families and foster a sense of happiness. The American dream, however, can also be the American curse. We put so much pressure on ourselves to do better and be better than those that came before us.

Do you have any extravagant indulgences at home that are particularly Queen of Versailles-ish?

Shoes. My shoe closet is an embarrassment.

Since you appeared in Wicked in 2003, how often have you talked to Stephen Schwartz about working together again? Why do you think this is the project that came to fruition?
He’s been threatening to write me a show since I left Wicked, but it really started about 10 years ago. I thought it was sweet. I know how busy he is, so I never really considered that he would actually do it. Our relationship isn’t just based on theater. There’s a lot of love there. When I see him, we talk about life, not music theater. But lately we’ve been talking a lot about music theater.

When you’re not working on the stage, do you miss it?

Without a doubt, being in front of a live audience is where I thrive. It’s been 10 years since I’ve played a role on Broadway. Remember, Broadway is where I started, so in a sense it’s like coming home every time I return.

How does the way you take care of yourself change when you’re making a movie or a TV show versus being on stage eight times a week?

Being on Broadway is the hardest thing there is, I don’t care what anyone says. You could liken it to being a player for the NBA or NFL or any type of athlete. It’s rigorous, it doesn’t let up, so obviously health is the main priority. For the past year and a half, I’ve become addicted to hot yoga. That’s a place I really feel strong. Getting eight hours of sleep is the most challenging part for me, since I’m an insomniac. Eating healthy is the most important part. These seem like regular things, but it’s so integral to doing eight shows a week, and it’s not as easy as you think. I like to do vitamin drips once a week when I’m on Broadway. And staying hydrated is the most important thing. I have to also be very quiet when I’m not at work. For me, my voice needs rest and not a lot of talking. Let’s just say I’ve gotten very good at being a mime.

What did you do over the summer with your time off?

There has been no time off. I have done concerts, events to raise awareness about The Queen of Versailles, done several endorsements and private opportunities. I also shot a pilot for NBC called Stumble, which premieres November 7. I’ve loved all the opportunities, but I do wish I would have taken some more time off.

Is there a book you loved this summer you’re telling friends to read?

Final Gifts by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley and The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins.

How many times did you see the Wicked movie?

Three!

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“I’m a horror girl,” says Williams, proudly.

She considers herself a skilled producer of horror films—mostly because she’s consciously aware of what horror fans want while also working hard to tell stories that satisfy her own intellectual sensibilities.

“I try to keep up with them and with horror trends, but I’m not good at watching the actual movies,” Williams says. “They don’t mix well with my nervous system.”

Williams says she typically watches horror films on airplanes, when she’s easily distracted and less prone to jumpscares. Her husband, the actor Alexander Dreymon, narrated the plot of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, a huge horror hit when it came out in 2022, to Williams. She didn’t sit through the movie.

“He explained the movie to me verbally,” Williams recalls. In Barbarian, a woman checks into an Airbnb only to discover there’s lots of gruesome stuff happening in the basement and beyond. “I just listened, and I had trouble sleeping for two weeks.”

Hopefully, she’ll get to sleep easier these days. This fall, Williams escapes gory ritual killings and murderous artificial intelligence for the romance genre with the release of Regretting You, a tearjerker based on the 2019 bestseller by Colleen Hoover (It Ends With Us). In the movie, Williams plays Morgan, the mom of teenage Clara (19-year-old Mckenna Grace). When Morgan’s husband, Chris, and her sister Jenny die in a car accident, Morgan and Clara need to figure out how to repair their relationship, with help from Morgan’s brother in-law Jonah (Dave Franco).

Williams made Regretting You back-to-back with M3GAN 2.0. Alternating between the two films was a kind of “genre sandwich whiplash” for the 37-year-old actress.

“It was like, ‘Falling in love with someone onscreen? What is that?’” Williams recalls of playing tender and sentimental scenes with Grace and Franco after playing opposite a psychopathic robot doll.

She had little cause for worry, says Franco. “Watching her move so seamlessly between comedy and drama was seriously impressive,” he says. “I was blown away by how effortlessly she could tap into deep emotion when the scene called for it. At the same time, she’s genuinely funny and brought so much levity to the role.”

Regretting You director Josh Boone agrees. Williams, he says, is “hilarious, self deprecating; her attention to detail is head-spinning. She’s a producer through and through as well as a brilliant actor. She really is going to surprise people in this because you’ve never seen her play this role before. She’ll make you laugh and cry in the same scene.”

Williams is on the frontlines of yet another trend, as Hoover is having a major Hollywood moment. It Ends With Us, starring Blake Lively, grossed over $300 million worldwide last year, and two more Hoover adaptations are on the horizon: Universal’s adaptation of Reminders of Him, starring Maika Monroe, is coming in early 2026 and Amazon MGM plans to release Verity with Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in fall 2026.

“I love when I can’t put a book down, especially when I get into bed,” Williams says of the Hoover novels she’s read. “I don’t want to be having existential worries about the future of our planet or society. I save that for the daytime,” she adds, laughing.

She’s been surprised by the response she’s already gotten to the Regretting You trailer. “I’ve heard from more people in more corners of my life about this than anything else I’ve done,” Williams says. “People saying, ‘This is one of my favorite books,’ or ‘I’m so excited you’re doing this.’”

Even one of her young co-stars from 2014’s Peter Pan Live!, now college-bound, wrote Williams to say, “You are my dream Morgan.” Of course, that means Williams has a lot to live up to. “I have to try to be everyone’s idea of Morgan, and that can’t be possible,” she says.

Williams thinks the film, which harks back to hits like Terms of Endearment and The Notebook, will connect deeply with viewers. “I’ve been watching cuts, and the audiences are super interactive,” she says. “They’re gasping, laughing, crying. There’s lots of tissues. It’s so emotional, and it’s been a minute since we all cried together at the same thing.”

“I’ve cried watching it,” she adds. She showed a cut to her mom and dad, journalists Jane Stoddard and Brian Williams, and they were equally emotional. “My parents both cried, too.”

Playing the mom of a teenager onscreen had its challenges, says Williams. “But it helped that I was playing someone who’s close to my own age. It didn’t feel as weird as I thought it was going to, and it’s strange how natural it looks to me. I was definitely not made to be a parent at that age. I needed to be a disaster for a little bit longer and be someone else’s child before I had one of my own.”

Williams and Dreymon have a son, Arlo, who’ll turn 4 this fall. “We’re into the dinosaur phase,” she says. “He’ll start suddenly quoting a dinosaur podcast. Kids are really spongey when they find something they’re passionate about.”

Did playing Morgan make her nervous about Arlo becoming a teenager? “I’ve been worrying about that since I was pregnant,” Williams cracks.

The three live in Connecticut, not far from Williams’ childhood home. She moved out of New York City right before the COVID-19 pandemic began and never went back. She feels slightly “estranged” from Manhattan and Brooklyn these days. During a recent interview, she was asked about some of her favorite New York restaurants. “It turns out they were all closed,” Williams laughs.

Raising a family in Connecticut “is so wonderful,” she explains. “It’s very familiar. It feels cozy. My friends from growing up and I talk about this, and two of us have ended up in our hometown. We’re waiting for everyone else.”

At the beginning of the summer, Williams launched a podcast with her lifelong BFFs Hope Kremer and Jaymie Oppenheim, who both live in Maine, called Landlines. They discuss topics related to adulthood, relationships and parenting.

“There’s a lot of work involved, and it’s been a fascinating learning curve, but it’s the most fun,” says Williams. “It feels like such a great hack to hang out together. It’s been pretty dreamy.”

Part of the goal of Landlines is to demystify the “supposed-tos.”

“It’s so herculean to raise a kid,” says Williams. “But there are a lot of people who make it look easy. We’re three demographically identical people, but we all have really different insights into the subjects we talk about.”

In a lot of ways, parenthood and the podcast have had Williams reminiscing about perhaps her most iconic role: Marnie on six seasons of HBO’s Girls.

“I miss all the people we made Girls with. It was a singularly incredible experience,” Williams says. “I wish someone had told us when we were making it that none of it was normal.”

The experience of the show airing wasn’t easy. “I loved playing Marnie a lot, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but it was also deeply painful,” she says. “It was so loud culturally, which had its rewards. It was amazing to be part of a project that so many people cared about. But people were so mean about it, too.”

Lately, the series has been experiencing a resurgence thanks to rewatch podcasts and TikTok clips. When it first aired, Williams says, people would remark, “This is my life every day. I don’t want to watch this. I don’t want to run into these girls. I don’t want to work with them.”

Now, the younger generation has a “little bit of distance that’s so much more appreciative and generous,” she says. “I’m loving the way Gen Z is responding. It’s like looking through a yearbook rather than reading the newspaper. I talk about Girls more now than I did five years ago.”

“What an incredible ride it’s been, and to still be on,” she says.

Hair: Xavier Velasquez
Makeup: Samantha Lau using Dior Beauty
Nails: Pattie Yankee
Photo Assistants: Eric Hodgman, Farley Schilling
Styling Assistant: Kyle Gleason
Shot at Corner Studio in Manhattan

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What surprised you while researching this book?

Working with the high net worth clients, I get to see how wealthy people build wealth in this country. So, it’s been a fun journey through the presidents, because some of them were incredibly good at making money and others were not and even the presidents who are ‘supposed’ to be financially successful, were not.

Do you feel that the American Dream has become impossible to attain?

Access to the housing market wasn’t as challenging as it is today. The American Dream is still there, it’s just sometimes harder to access. Financial literacy is incredibly important. Right now, only about half of the states in the U.S. have a financial literacy requirement for high school graduation, which is unbelievable when you consider how important that is for a building block for financial success over time. Most people want their children do better than they did. That has always been the crux of the American dream. And I don’t care if you’re Democrat, Republican or Independent, most people would agree on that. I want people to understand the American Dream is still there, but it’s getting harder to achieve and we really need to come together and have thoughtful discussions about how can we make it easier for people to buy a home and access education without taking out an obscene amount of loans.

Do even billionaires struggle with money?

No matter how successful you are, we all struggle with money. The difference between regular Americans and wealthy Americans is the wealthy Americans have the flexibility and the cushion to make a mistake with their money and be able to pivot away from it, whereas if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you have a lot less breathing room for a mistake when you make one. And trust me, everybody makes mistakes financially. It’s more about how you rebound from it, right?

Which of the U.S. Presidents was a good saver?

Herbert Hoover grew up in a Quaker household and growing up he learned how to budget, how to function in a community and how to give back. Even though he grew up poor and as an orphan, he learned early on that while he had this amazing ability to make money. And by the way, not only did he make money, he owned gold mines, so he made serious money, he understood that his role in it was to also be in the center of a web of people that he could help, whether it was friends and family or charities, or, helped prevent famines in Europe after the World Wars. Hoover is a great example of giving back.

Is there a President whose legacy surprised you?

Ronald Reagan grew up poor in Illinois, his father was an alcoholic and had a volatile childhood. There are stories of the Reagan family leaving in the middle of the night because they don’t have the money to pay their landlord. But what’s interesting about Reagan and how money shapes him is instead of being cynical or feeling like he can’t win, Reagan looks for positive influences, and he learns that from both his mother and his girlfriend’s father, who taught him a lot about money and budgeting. And so these early negative experiences for Reagan ends up becoming positive ones for him. He learns how to budget, he learns how to be optimistic about money and learns how to bootstrap. There are elements of his early money story that factor in today with what his legacy is in terms of how America should handle its finances.

What was your background with being financially astute?

I grew up middle class in southern New Jersey but, like a lot of presidents, I also went out into the world and wanted to learn and understand how things how things happened. And I was very fortunate, because the first 12 years of my career was spent at a division of Goldman Sachs where I worked with wealthy people. And the thing that I loved most in that that time period of my career was, when we had a new client, we had to learn about their path. And I was always fascinated, when you talk to these CEOs and CFOs, that they often talked about two things: they worked hard and they got lucky. I’ve tried to make all the presidents human, even the ones that I might not have liked politically, I found I came to like them personally, because I could relate at times to the struggles and the and the decisions they had to make.

“All The Presidents Money”

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The critically acclaimed television series won the 44-year-old Los Angeles-born performer an Emmy in 2016 for his role as the clinically depressed computer hacker Elliot Alderson. But that was nearly a decade ago. During that time, most actors would have not only moved on from the experience, but also perhaps divorced and married a couple times, fired an agent or two and released a fragrance and a fashion line.

But most actors aren’t Malek. Most actors don’t read poetry in French to practice their language skills. Most actors don’t seek out the daily print edition of The New York Times when they’re living in London, either. It’s a testament to Malek’s seriousness and how fully immersed he becomes in his work that he’s still thinking about working with that key grip 10 years on.

But Malek often ponders the work he did over the course of a day. “I’m always re-editing myself at night,” says Malek. “Even scenes I wasn’t in.”

That’s, in part, because Malek is a perfectionist, even though he hates the word. It’s because he also loves to watch movies getting made. He loves thinking about movies getting made. He loves making movies.

He might have been a cinematographer. “I always wanted to be one,” he says.

Instead, on his current path, he’s an actor who has appeared as both a terrifyingly compelling Bond villain (in 2021’s No Time to Die) and won an Oscar for his indelible performance as Queen singer Freddy Mercury in 2018’s monster hit Bohemian Rhapsody.

Malek, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn, is a sponge. On set, he doesn’t like to stay in his trailer. He likes to go out and learn from his colleagues—not just his fellow actors, but cinematographers, steadicam operators, costumers, production designers and assistant directors.

During our conversation from his home in London, where he appeared earlier this year at the Old Vic in the title role of Oedipus, he references many below-the-line craftspeople by name. He still stays in touch with several of them.

“It’s a great sense of family,” says Malek, of working on a movie. “My first time on set, I was absolutely enamored by this extraordinary collaboration from a collection of great artists. There’s just this magic that happens.”

His desire to recapture that magic may be why when Malek finds a script that excites him, it’s hard for him to let it go. That’s what happened with The Amateur, which he produced and in which he played a widowed C.I.A. agent, and with his latest film, Nuremberg, out in November from Sony Pictures Classics.

When Malek read director James Vanderbilt’s screenplay about the post-WWII trials of 24 Nazi leaders, based on the book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, he was immediately interested. “It read like an Aaron Sorkin film,” Malek recalls. “It reminded me quite a bit of A Few Good Men, actually.”

Malek wanted to play the role of Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, the U.S. Army psychiatrist who evaluated, among others, Hermann Göring, one of the most infamous Nazis on trial.

“Kelley is quick-witted. He’s funny. He’s ambitious. He’s charming, but his charm is disarming,” says Malek. “He’s a complicated character. I’m very drawn to those people.” Kelley is also as far away from Freud as possible, instead sporting a sleek leather jacket that Malek sometimes wondered was “too Top Gun.”

But Nuremberg, Malek says, is a complex character study with plenty of eccentricities. “It’s a courtroom drama, yes. But it’s also a story about people facing the weight of history and trying to do what was right when the odds seemed impossible. How do we seek justice and face those uncomfortable truths? How do we protect human dignity? I’ve consistently gravitated toward characters negotiating silence and complicity, trying to break through systemic corruption.”

When development on the movie stalled because of various Hollywood strikes, Malek kept pestering his team about getting the movie off the ground.

“Sure enough, it came back,” he recalls. “And it was almost as if I felt like a younger actor again, getting that call finally saying ‘Yes!’ I had that euphoric feeling of ‘I get to be a part of something very special, perhaps even extraordinary.’”

Vanderbilt observed Malek’s uncynical enthusiasm up close and personal during their initial meeting. “The first time we met to talk about the script was at a restaurant, and we sat there for about three hours. Then [Malek] asked if he could come over to my house the next day to continue the conversation,” recalls the screenwriter and director. “So he shows up at my house at eight in the morning, meets my wife, meets my kids, meets my dog, and we spend the whole day going through the script. He never stops digging, he never stops trying to make the thing better.”

Malek says that making a movie “takes a village.” “That show doesn’t go on the road without everyone being recognized,” he adds. He describes his co-stars, who include John Slattery, Michael Shannon and Russell Crowe as Göring, as an “extraordinary lineup of powerhouses.”

He says he’s often looked at Shannon’s performance in the movie Take Shelter as a manual for “how to act scenes.” In turn, Shannon describes working with Malek as “exciting, alive and present.”

“It makes you feel like you’re not working,” says Shannon. “Rami makes you feel like you’re just being, you know? He’s just a presence. An alive actor. He’s so plugged into what’s going on and such a great listener. His eyes! You can tell he’s taking everything in on such a deep level.”

Meanwhile, Malek recalls his scenes with Crowe as taking place in “close physical contact in suffocating environments.”

“They’re so tense,” he adds. “I had to switch into an even higher gear.”

“Rami has an effortless charm, and spending time with him was a pleasure,” says Crowe, in return. “He approached the character and his narrative arc with an intense bravery.”

After Nuremberg, Malek has plenty ahead to keep him busy. He is interested in fashion and regularly collaborates with Cartier, Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent and Miuccia Prada. “I call her Mrs. P.,” Malek says. “We get along well. It’s a very fun relationship.”

He plans to play Buster Keaton in a limited series. Malek also says he’s writing a film he expects to direct.

But he’s also trying to stay grounded. “I’m finding it very important to reconnect with family and friends with the same vigor that I approach my work,” Malek says. “I can be a bit hard on myself, and I’m working on moments of personal growth.”

Not to mention trying to keep his perfectionism in check. “I thrive in chaos, and I appreciate a great challenge,” he says.

Groomer: Fay De Bremaeker
Photo Assistant: Isaak Hest
Styling Assistant: Molly Ellison
Tailor: Eleanor Williams
Production: Alexandra Oley, Lina Levein
Digital Tech: Matthew Willcocks
Post Production: Nadia Selander
Photographed on location at the Broadwick Soho hotel in London

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At this point, she’s as synonymous with the five boroughs as the yellow taxi, the black-and-white cookie, the tarnished copper tones of the Statue of Liberty. Well, maybe something a little less iconic, closer to Katz’s Delicatessen and the TKTS Booth in Times Square.

The point is that Rachel Brosnahan, who was born in the Midwest but now calls the Upper West Side her home, turned Midge into that icon. Yes, the show’s creators, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, conjured her, but Brosnahan brought the housewife with standup comedy aspirations to magical life. She made her one of the most indelible female characters on television since, hmm, the beginning of television. The portrayal earned Brosnahan, 34, an Emmy nomination for each of the show’s five seasons. (She won for the first.)

“Even though it’s been a few years since I’ve played her, she still feels very present. She’s still with me,” says Brosnahan. “You take a little piece of every character you play with you, whether consciously or subconsciously.”

It will certainly be fun to see if any of Midge’s mannerisms show up in Brosnahan’s latest and biggest project to date. This July, she plays yet another bold and nervy fast-talking dame. If Mrs. Maisel is “local famous,” her latest character is recognized worldwide. And this one was already iconic before she got to it; Brosnahan is playing Lois Lane in the latest big-screen incarnation of Superman, directed by James Gunn. The character first appeared in comic book form 87 years ago, in 1938’s Action Comics #1, as a journalist for The Daily Planet and the longtime love interest and comic foil for Clark Kent, aka Superman. She’s appeared since then in multiple films, animated shows and television series.

“I didn’t grow up reading comics, but I was particularly drawn to fantasy and people with powers when I was a kid,” recalls Brosnahan, citing The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books and the lesser-known Daughters of the Moon series, about five ordinary teenagers in Los Angeles who happen to have supernatural abilities.

They may not be superheroes, but “the draw is similar. They’re aspirational,” says Brosnahan. “They show us the power of courage and empathy. They give us hope that good will always win and that so often superheroes aren’t the only powerful ones.” Regular people can be, too.

“As a young woman, you’re always looking for role models,” she continues. “I knew about Lois Lane. My dad grew up on the Margot Kidder version. You’re desperate to find characters who have all the things that you want to be.”

The Milwaukee native also happened to be a fan of Gunn, the writer-director who shepherded Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and DC’s The Suicide Squad to the screen and is now a co-CEO of DC Studios. This summer’s Superman is meant to begin a new era of DC films and re-jumpstart the universe.

It was with all this in the background—not to mention performing in a three-hour stage version of Lorraine Hansberry’s rarely produced The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opposite Oscar Isaac at the time—that Brosnahan recorded an audition to be Lois Lane in her apartment.

“We made it in the living room, a little bit too late at night. My husband, Jason”—the actor Jason Ralph—“played Superman.”

Gunn was impressed enough by the self-tape to bring Brosnahan out to California for a “chemistry read” with three aspiring Clark Kents, alongside two other actresses vying for the role of Lois. It was what Brosnahan calls a “good old-fashioned mix-and-match. It was a wild experience. We were all dressed the same.”

“It was living the dream to take a play like [Sidney Brustein] to Broadway and then to drop in, quite literally, to a completely different universe,” she says. “It was one of those moments. There was something magical about getting on a plane after a performance, trying to get to L.A. on no sleep.”

Brosnahan didn’t approach the audition as a competition. “I learned a long time ago that you’re not reading against someone,” she says. “You’re seeing whether it’s not you or it’s you.”

“Obviously,” she wanted the part, she says, but Brosnahan saw it as a “fun day on a studio lot. We don’t get to do so much in person anymore, which is so much what this art form is about. At the risk of sounding like a total nerd, it was a joyful experience of what I love about performing, which is being surrounded by other people who love it, too.”

Just before she left to go back to New York, she met the man who would become her Superman: David Corenswet, a Juilliard graduate perhaps best known for a role in Ryan Murphy’s The Politician on Netflix.

“We said, ‘Hey, how are you?’ and then we read together once, and we did one take. It was over, and it was such a whirlwind. You don’t really have time to think about it,” says Brosnahan. “Neither one of us really remember. We kinda blacked out.”

Recalls Corenswet: “We shook hands, said hello, sat down, bickered for ten pages, got up, said goodbye, and the rest is history.”

“In the screen test, her chemistry with David was off the charts,” says Gunn, who also got a glowing recommendation from Mrs. Maisel co-creator Sherman-Palladino “singing [Rachel’s] praises like no one has ever done before.”

Brosnahan, Gunn adds, “has a wit and an incessant drive about her that is 100 percent Lois Lane. Working with her is a Q&A session every day. She has tons of questions about how I see every little moment in the movie, every line and action. Honestly, I love it. She cares about Lois and the film as much as I do.”

To that end, Brosnahan says she did “a lot of research” in preparation for the role. “I spoke to a couple of investigative journalists to find out what makes them tick. It really helped.” (It also helped with a separate project of her own. More on that later.)

Many actresses have played Lois before, most recently Amy Adams. Brosnahan says she admires the character because “she’s brilliant, she’s courageous, she’s relentless and determined and she feels motivated by the word ‘No.’” Though Brosnahan insists Lois and Midge Maisel have almost nothing in common, “They’re both bold characters who are being pushed to their limits in different ways.”

Most of Brosnahan’s work on the film involved “practical” shooting—that is, on real sets with real people. During her first two days of shooting, she and Corenswet shot a 10-page scene in an apartment. “It felt like it could have been an indie movie,” she says.

That’s the kind of acting Brosnahan is used to.

But Superman isn’t an indie movie. It’s a huge summer blockbuster with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars, featuring mondo special effects. “It was and wasn’t what I expected,” she says. “It was so fun.”

For the first time, Brosnahan played against an invisible canine, Superman’s dog Krypto, as space constraints made it impossible for Jolene, the dog’s stand-in, to be in the shot. Same goes for an adult actor who did a lot of the animals’ motion-capture work. They couldn’t even fit in a tennis ball for her to work with.

“I had to do it in thin air,” Brosnahan says. “I’m not a great mime. I’ve never felt like a worse actor. At least James told me it hasn’t been cut.”

Brosnahan also gets to fly with Superman, of course. “We did an air ballet,” she says. “I had a blast.” When they filmed the scenes, Corenswet had already been flying for many months, so she had a good guide and companion.

“David just is Superman,” Brosnahan says. In those scenes, Lois is particularly distracted from being airborne “by the handsome gentleman in front of her.” The same might be said for Brosnahan. “I don’t know that I was so focused on the flying,” she says. “Still, the hardest part is getting the feet to look right. When in doubt, point your toes.”

Corenswet lauds Brosnahan’s “many talents” that far exceed pointing toes. “Her incisive inquisitiveness is a great gift to the character and also to her scene partners. So is her facility with language and her appreciation of a good argument.”

The actor admits that “similes are not my strong suit,” but he compares working with Brosnahan to “standing in the shallows of a river.” “It’s refreshing and invigorating,” Corenswet says, “and those tiny fish come up and bite your feet, and you think, This kind of hurts, but I’m definitely enjoying it.”

Her next stop before the film’s release: crossing many a major body of water as part of a massive global press tour. Brosnahan expects it will be “pretty fast and furious. We’re going all over the place.” Is she ready? “Is anyone ever ready?” she asks. “Talk to me on the other side. It’s about making sure you have enough clothes and snacks. If you’re hungry, you’re grumpy.” (She likes trail mix and Luna LemonZest bars.)

Is she prepared for all the outfit changes for premieres, press conferences and photo calls? “I play dress-up for a living, so I love it,” she says. Don’t expect a full-on Margot Robbie-as-Barbie style transformation from Brosnahan on the red carpet. “I love a little nod, though,” she says. “We’re looking for ways to pay homage to the universe. We might be the only ones who know.”

Since wrapping Superman, Brosnahan has filmed an adaptation of King Lear called Lear Rex. She’ll star in (and executive produce) the second season of the David E. Kelley anthology series Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+. She’s developing films with her producing team in which she may or may not star. She’s also been trying her hand at directing—on a nonfiction project she’s not yet ready to really discuss.

“I’ve always loved the medium,” she says, citing a documentary film class she took at NYU that turned her into “an obsessive viewer of documentaries.” This is where interviewing investigative journalists for her Lois Lane preparation came in handy.

Brosnahan won’t say much about the new work, but she will say that the process has forced her to “focus on the moment” and “be present.” “That’s enlightening for me as someone who is often looking around corners,” she says, looking for the next role, the next gig.

In the early days of her career, when she broke out on House of Cards, “so much was happening so fast, and I was so concerned about what was going to happen next,” she admits. Then Mrs. Maisel took off like a jumbo jet. “Now I’m just in a moment of wanting to feel two feet on the ground and really experience all of it.”

“If we’re lucky, we’re allowed to have eras,” Brosnahan says, adding, with a wink, “as Taylor Swift has shown us, at least. You can’t be an artist if you’re not having new experiences. And I want to be present for them.”

So, what era is Brosnahan in now that she’s embarking on the path to global stardom and recognition?

“I probably won’t know until it’s over,” she says. “Ask me again in a few years.”

Hair: Clay Nielsen
Makeup: William Scott Using Dior Forever Skin Perfect
Nails: Gina Eppolito-Cohen
Photo Assistants: Milos Janjusevic, Ross Thomas
Styling Assistant: Kyle Gleason
Production Assistant: Emerson Scheerer
Tailor: Morgan Foote
Shot at the Manhattan Suite at the Park Hyatt New York

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This summer, for the first time, audiences will get an off-stage perspective of the extraordinary on-stage collaboration between these five iconic NYC dance companies during a free panel discussion on Tuesday, July 29 at 5:00pm in the David Rubenstein Atrium, featuring the artistic leaders of all five companies: Eduardo Vilaro, Ballet Hispánico; Alicia Graf Mack and Matthew Rushing, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; Susan Jaffe, American Ballet Theatre; Wendy Whelan and Jonathan Stafford, New York City Ballet and Robert Garland, Dance Theatre of Harlem, moderated by Shanta Thake, Ehrenkranz Chief Artistic Officer of Lincoln Center. Each afternoon, one of the companies brings its unique teaching style to participants of all ages with free dance workshops in the David Geffen Hall lobby. The series will offer a variety of dance forms, appropriate for all ages and abilities. “BAAND Together began as a gesture of hope during a time of crisis,” explain the artist directors of the five companies. “What started as a response to the challenges of COVID has grown into a celebration of what makes New York extraordinary—its creativity, its diversity and its spirit. These performances remind us that the arts are not just entertainment; they are a vital force that brings people together and lifts us all.”

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Founded in 2015, Through Her Lens: The Tribeca Chanel Women’s Filmmaker Program is a mentorship initiative that offers support, artistic development and funding to emerging U.S.-based self-identifying women and non-binary filmmakers. The program’s advisory committee–consisting of Jane Fonda, Patty Jenkins, Laura Karpman, Greta Lee, A.V. Rockwell and Kerry Washington–guides its evolution, brings in new collaborators and offers direct consultation to participating filmmakers. Each year, the program includes a three-day immersive workshop with one-on-one mentorship and intimate participant workshops focused on script-to-screen development, music composition, costume design, producing and directing. Participants work with mentors to shape and refine their projects and pitches, culminating in a final presentation to a jury of industry experts. One team is selected to receive full financing to produce their short film with support from Tribeca Studios; the remaining four projects are awarded development grants. Over the past decade, Through Her Lens has made a significant impact on the industry. Forty-five short films have been developed, with eight fully funded winners premiering at major festivals like Sundance and TIFF and securing distribution through platforms such as Max, Searchlight and Criterion. Eight of the nine winning filmmakers are women of color, and over 70 percent of all participants are women or non-binary people of color. Alumni of the program have gone on to direct critically acclaimed projects, including A.V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, Numa Perrier’s The Perfect Find and Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny.

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“Path of Liberty is a celebration of America’s enduring ideals of liberty, equality, and unity,” says Stefan Soloviev, principal of The Soloviev Foundation and chairman of the Soloviev Group. “By showcasing personal stories from across the country, we hope to foster a deeper connection between individuals and the principles that unite us all. The Soloviev Foundation is proud to support this project, which brings together art, history, and humanity in a way that will resonate for generations to come.” Spanning over six-acres on Manhattan’s East Side from 38th to 41st Street on First Avenue, Path of Liberty: That Which Unites US has been designed by multi-specialty creative studio C&G Partners and directed by award-winning filmmaker, director and producer Daniella Vale. “Path of Liberty is not only a reflection of our nation’s history, but also a call to action—inviting each of us to reflect on the shared values that continue to shape America today,” says Michael Hershman, CEO of Soloviev Group. “Through this powerful visual experience, we aim to spark conversation and inspire solidarity.” Guests can experience Path of Liberty: That Which Unites US free of charge on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM. Complimentary reservations can be made on pathoflibertynyc.com, with new dates continually added and walk-ups always welcomed.

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In Paris, Sargent was immersed in a cosmopolitan circle of artists, writers, and patrons, as he navigated a successful path through the French exhibition system, achieving acclaim, recognition and awards. Sargent soon excelled at creating flattering, if provocative, portraits that gratified his patrons and their desire for social status. Sargent and Paris will examine the enduring fascination with society and celebrity that inspired the artist to create the now iconic “Madame X.” The exhibition will look in depth at the portrait, its creation, and the ensuing scandal, and for the first time ever, Sargent and Paris will reunite Madame X with its numerous preparatory drawings and paintings. The exhibition will present a nuanced understanding of the painting at the heart of a scandal that is as infamous now as it was in 1884 along with an appreciation for the originality and brilliance of Sargent’s art, underpinning the more sensational aspects of artistic society in 1880s Paris.

“Sargent’s career was indelibly shaped by the time he spent in Paris. Over the course of one remarkable decade, he created the boldest and most daring paintings of his oeuvre,” says Stephanie L. Herdrich, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Painting and Drawings at The Met. “Sargent and Paris will showcase these visually stunning and ambitious works, shedding new light on his distinctive artistic vision. We are thrilled to partner with the Musée d’Orsay to reunite this collection of great works in New York and Paris.”

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DuJour talked to the London-bound Raicek about her new play, how it all came together and trading the Hamptons for the Cotswalds this summer.

Your new play My Master Builder is inspired by Ibsen’s The Master Builder. Tell us about the connection.

Not long ago, I was invited to a dinner party in the Hamptons, hosted by an eminent British couple on the cusp of divorce. As the evening unfolded, and games of psychosexual warfare were played between the couple, I realized I had not only been invited as a guest—but as a pawn. I came away from that night wanting to write a provocative, high-stakes new play about a complex love triangle; a vulnerable marriage shattered by the arrival of a young woman, with whom they share an intimate past. While that story was consuming my subconscious, I found myself reading a book called Munch’s Ibsen for a different play. I realized that Ibsen’s love triangle— problematic in its portrayal of the two female characters—was, in a way, the scaffolding for my own and, within itself, had such startling contemporary resonance.

Did you imagine this play would be produced so quickly with such an all star creative team?

I wrote My Master Builder, with feverish intensity, in about seven weeks last year. I was under commission by wunderkind Broadway producer Greg Nobile’s Seaview Productions, who I had pitched the idea to shortly after the inspirational dinner party. Shortly thereafter, in August 2024, that first draft landed on the desk of director Michael Grandage who was intrigued. In September, Michael threw together a casual cold reading with Ewan McGregor and wanted to hear the play as the character of Henry, the architect. The next week, Michael said to me: “How do you feel about starting rehearsals in spring?” News only topped, a few weeks later, that the brilliant Elizabeth Debicki and Kate Fleetwood would be joining Ewan McGregor to complete the twisted love triangle. Now, six months later, we are opening the play. So, it has been a whirlwind!

Ewan hasn’t been on the London stage in 17 years. What are you excited to see from him?

It has been inspiring to watch the special connection between Michael and Ewan, which has been developed over two previous productions. And, of course, beyond thrilling to see Ewan, a masterful theatrical powerhouse, back on stage. I think that has something to do with his trust in the Michael, a theatre legend, to fearlessly tackle new work, which probes the charged sexual politics of our time in a nuanced and challenging way.

Elizabeth Debicki and Ewan McGregor in rehearsals for the West End play My Master Builder (Johan Persson)

The play takes place over July 4 weekend in the Hamptons. Have you spent many a July 4th weekend out East?

I have spent many holiday weekends out east, but mostly in the role of the guest—the outsider entering the dynamics of a domestic situation which, as a playwright, can be mined for dramatic potential. What fascinates me is the poeticness of the Hamptons terrain which, to me, feels very Ibsen. The dunes, the seascape, the light that inspired many abstract expressionists…it all has a very dreamy quality. And within that, you have the classic theatricality of being trapped in a country house–and what is more dramatic than the secrets and surprises that can be revealed within the alcohol-tinged, heightened context of a party?

You’re swapping NYC for London this spring and summer. Any places you’re excited to explore?

Once the play opens, I’d love to take a weekend jaunt to the Cotswolds. I am also planning a weekend in Cornwall to see the lighthouse—Virginia Woolf’s, that is, from To The Lighthouse—and to visit the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden.

This is your first play being produced in London. Have you spent much time here before?

While New York has my heart, London is only other city I could imagine myself living. I have been very fortunate to split my time between The Twenty Two in Marylebone, where I am living as the unofficial playwright in residence for the month and the Wyndham’s Theatre.

Describe a perfect day in London.

An early morning walk in Hyde Park to stroll by Henry Moore’s “The Arch,” or the rose garden in Regent’s Park when in bloom. Then breakfast on the terrace at The Twenty Two. If I can sneak in some culture, I would try to re-visit the new Edvard Munch exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery; the stunning acquisition of Joan Mitchell’s “Iva” at the Tate Modern or the Cecily Brown commission at the top of the Courtauld. Pre-theatre drinks at the Fumoir at Claridge’s or dirty martinis at the Connaught bar. I’m excited to see shows like Giant, Richard II and Fiddler on the Roof. And post-show fries and champagne at J. Sheekey or the Ivy Club.

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The reopening of the Frick invites visitors to experience the museum’s collection anew, with its iconic masterworks reinstalled in restored galleries on the first floor and smaller-scale paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects on view throughout its newly opened second floor. In addition, the Frick’s inaugural season features a slate of special installations and public programs, including a special commission of porcelain plants and flowers by sculptor Vladimir Kanevsky, a presentation that pays homage to the floral arrangements made for the Frick’s original opening in 1935.  “Visitors will now be able to experience even more of our collection and programs, thanks to the many architects, preservation experts, curators, artisans and innumerable museum and library staff who have collaborated to restore the original mansion while also creating new galleries, program spaces and public amenities,” says Ian Wardropper, the Frick’s former director.

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Hair: Amy Farid
Makeup: Taylor Levitan
Styling: Eliza Yerry
Clothes: Dorothee Schumacher
Shoes: Manolo Blahnik
Earrings: Jenny Bird

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I saw the show at the Almeida in London in 2023, and you were amazing. Did you imagine you’d still be on this Streetcar journey a couple of years later?

I don’t think any of us imagined the response and getting to revisit this play so many times. That’s a rare privilege. But the journey for me began much earlier in 2020 when Rebecca Frecknall first approached me about the part. Stella has sat with me for so long now that it will be a very difficult goodbye. But what a way to end this journey, to perform a great American classic in NYC. I could never have imagined that. As a company, we’ve gotten so close that it’s easy to play and respond to each other. It’s the most generous company of actors I’ve ever worked with, and I think that chemistry is palpable on stage.

How do New York audiences respond to the production differently than audiences in the UK?

British audiences tend to be more reserved and a little self conscious. But New Yorkers—you guys are loud! That first show we did in BAM, we were a little stunned by the response, because it’s so culturally different from what we’d been used to in London. But I love it! You’re not afraid to engage with the play. It feels so alive and uninhibited, and it’s a wonderful energy that we can feed off.

How do you come down from a performance?

It’s tricky. It takes me a few hours to wind down, and so I have to occupy my mind away from the play. It’s different every night. I might read a bit or watch some tv before bed.  I just picked up Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian yesterday. I’m excited to read that. I just finished Adolescence which deserves all the superlatives it’s gotten. I’ve been watching The White Lotus, and whilst on an ‘I’m obsessed with Parker Posey’ tangent I discovered the cult movie Best in Show. It made me laugh so much. It was the perfect movie to watch on my day off from the play.

Have you had to save Paul Mescal from screaming fans?

Paul doesn’t need saving. Whenever I’ve bumped into his fans, they are very sweet and polite!

How are you enjoying being in Brooklyn?

I love exploring Brooklyn so much. I spend hours just walking around listening to music or a podcast before I head to the theatre. Been listening to a lot of Angie Stone, Ali Sethi, Fleetwood Mac and Billy Joel on repeat. Greenlight Bookstore is near where I’m staying in Brooklyn. I love going there and sometimes picking up a copy of The New Yorker. It’s very cliché but hey, when in Rome…

Hair: Carlos Ferraz
Makeup: Charlotte Yeomans
Styling: Rachel Davis

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“She was so happy,” Gadot recalls. “She said, ‘Mommy, you’ll be a perfect Snow White.’”

Then her eldest daughter, Alma, revealed that their mother wouldn’t be playing the porcelain-skinned princess with a penchant for singing with bluebirds, aka the fairest of them all. “She told her, ‘She’s not playing Snow White. She’s playing the Evil Queen.’ My 8-year-old was devastated.”

For the Israeli-born Gadot, getting to show up every day as the Evil Queen opposite Rachel Zegler as Snow on set in London was a kind of dream.

“It’s something that I’d never gotten to do before, and it’s different from anything I’ve ever tried to go for. It was really, really fun,” says Gadot. “She’s not dark dark. She’s theatrical and vain. She’s a drama queen. She’s grand. She’s bigger than life, and she loves it. Kooky, campy, unhinged. And I enjoy the camp.”

Even though the character is called the Evil Queen, Gadot doesn’t see her that way. “I can’t think about a character as scary and bad,” she says. “I have to find a way to love her.” To develop the notorious villain’s dimensions, she did a lot of research about the psychological underpinnings of the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

“I tried to find the vulnerable places in this envious relationship between a mother and daughter. I knew what triggered her, and from that I fell in love with her,” Gadot continues. “There’s something liberating about an out-of-the-box character that doesn’t always make sense.”

For the big-budget tentpole remake, which opens in March, Gadot gets to do two things she’s never done before onscreen.

The first: sing a big musical number.

“Who knew she could sing?” you might ask. So did the film’s director, Marc Webb.

Growing up in Israel, Gadot didn’t have a lot of experience onstage or in musical theater. At 23, she appeared in Festigal, a kind of Hanukkah pantomime extravaganza for kids where she played the Little Mermaid. “I sang and danced,” she recalls. “There might be footage of it online.” (There is. It’s amazing, if reminiscent of a Eurovision contest.)

Showing up on the Snow White set for her big number, a song called “All’s Fair,” “was definitely jumping into some new uncharted waters,” says Gadot. (Mermaid pun unintended.) “But once you commit to something, you just go with the flow and trust the process. You do it once and then twice, and you become comfortable with it. It was actually really fun. I’m my biggest critic. Whatever I do, I always have a hard time hearing my voice. But I think it works for the character.”

“She’s having so much fun and can sell that delicious song,” explains Webb. “Her performance is both dangerous and fun, the perfect combination for a Disney villain. The kids are a bit scared, but they love it and want more. I think there are going to be a lot of Evil Queen costumes at Halloween this year, and we owe a lot of that to Gal.”

The second first for Gadot is that she gets to play ugly.

Like, really ugly.

When she transforms into the Old Hag to trick Snow White into eating a poison apple, “that was the part that I most enjoyed playing,” says Gadot. This includes the four hours of prosthetics necessary to transform from beauty to beast. “People had no idea it was me. There’s something so interesting about completely erasing the way people react to me. It’s about disappearing and getting to be able to really do whatever you want to do. No expectations. It’s like you’re a blank page. I loved it.”

It’s very easy to imagine Gadot as superhuman. She’s certainly embodied it on screen, because she’s best known for her many years playing Wonder Woman in two films directed by Patty Jenkins and several ancillary DC movies. As for whether the character returns in James Gunn’s new DC universe, “I have no idea,” Gadot says. “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Now 39, Gadot served in the Israeli Armed Forces after winning the Miss Israel pageant at 19. She co-owns a healthy macaroni and cheese company called Goodles because she loved the boxed Kraft macaroni and cheese her aunt and uncle would give her every summer they visited Israel when she was growing up. “I loved it,” she recalls.

With her husband Jaron Varsano, a real estate developer-turned-film producer, Gadot is also the mother to four daughters. Ori, their youngest, turned 1 in January, but it was a challenging pregnancy. She was born during emergency surgery Gadot needed for a blood clot in her brain which Gadot discovered after pushing for a simple MRI.

“I had major, major headaches,” Gadot says, adding that similar clots happen to three out of 100,000 women. “I was literally the statistics. All it takes is to be aware of the symptoms.”

The point, Gadot adds, is she’s not indestructible. “I’m not superhuman. I’m not perfect. I’m not a cyborg,” she says. A year later, “I’m feeling great. I came out of it with not even a scratch. And the emotional, physical and mental growth made me all the more grateful for life and the simple moments.”

Of course, most of those moments involve spending time with her husband and kids. Though Gadot is extremely close to her much younger sister, the house “was very, very quiet” when she was growing up, she says. Because of the age difference, it often felt as if they were only children. She was jealous of friends with big families and lots of siblings.

“I wanted to have a messy home with mayhem and all that,” Gadot explains.

And, indeed, with four daughters between the ages of 1 and 13, “it’s mayhem,” Gadot laughs. “If you come to my house, they laugh, they fight, they cry. It’s a whole range of emotions, and I love it. Yes, it’s a lot. I juggle. I do my best and we have help and my husband does the best job as a dad. I don’t sleep a lot.” (She says she’ll get six hours “on a good night.”)

A major takeaway from Snow White is that beauty is only skin deep.

“I think what the movie challenges is how exactly to define beauty,” says Webb, the film’s director. “For the Queen, beauty is external. For Snow White, beauty is measured by a feeling of kindness and connection to her people.”

With four daughters growing up in a TikTok-obsessed world, it’s a distinction that must resonate in Gadot’s house. “I always tell my kids that for me, growing up was so much easier than it is for you,” Gadot says. “They grew up with all these filters. With curated postings. They think it’s real, not knowing that it’s been totally filtered and retouched. I tell them, ‘Whatever you see out there, it’s false, not true.’ It’s a very confusing world for a girl.”

To that end, Gadot tries to find iconic female characters to play, in part to create indelible onscreen role models that transcend time. She’s been developing a project about Cleopatra for years. Another series in development was about the Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr, who not only had a storied career in Hollywood but also co-invented a radio guidance system to prevent radio jamming during WWII.

“It was too expensive to film,” says Gadot of the Lamarr project. “But I’m drawn to strong, inspiring, groundbreaking women. I have this urge to celebrate them and tell their story the right way.”

Gadot is currently learning how to run for a project she’ll start filming this spring, The Runner. “I’m very athletic and I grew up doing all types of sports, but if there’s one thing I’ve tried to avoid, it’s running,” she says. “If there’s one way for me to learn to do it properly, this is it.”

Olympic sprinter Malachi Davis is coaching her, and she’s discovered that she does like it. “It’s not like suffering. I enjoy the challenge. There’s a whole science behind how to do it right,” she says. “To be honest, I’m just so grateful. I get to do what I love, and I get to learn a new skill by the best of the best.”

During her recovery, Gadot’s doctor told her to break a sweat every day. Then she found the script to The Runner, but knew she couldn’t recover in time. The film’s director, Kevin Macdonald, said they’d wait for her.

“So for the past seven months, I’ve been training and working and the universe just heard my doctor,” Gadot says. “I don’t want to sound too mumbo jumbo, but I do believe that, if we’re in movement, the path of the universe will show itself.”

Hair: Jenny Cho-Semple
Makeup: Mary Phillips
Manicure: Shigeko Taylor for Apres Nail at Star Touch Agency
Set Designer: Michael Wanenmacher
Production: Arzu Koçman by Productionising
Digital Tech: Brett Panelli
Photo Assistants: Kurt Mangum, Kevin Faulkner 
Shot at Studio Stropa in Los Angeles

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Hair: Peter Butler
Makeup: Gita Bass
Dress: Markarian

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“I like that character so much, even when she was bad,” Rhimes said.

But Washington doesn’t necessarily feel the same way.

“Not really,” Washington says, laughing, when asked if she misses—and misses playing—Olivia Pope. “I mean, I love her. She’s a pop culture icon. But I also love having the opportunity to play other characters. I’ve always imagined myself more of a character actor.”

One of Washington’s latest characters is Captain Charity Adams in the film The Six Triple Eight. If Adams doesn’t end up being as indelible as Pope on Washington’s long resume, including playing Kay Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland, Della Bea Robinson in 2004’s Ray and Anita Hill in the 2016 HBO movie Confirmation, she should be.

Adams, who died at 83 in 2002, was the first Black woman to be an officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She was the commanding officer of the 688th Central Postal Directory Battalion, made up of Black women serving during World War II.

The film, directed by Tyler Perry and released by Netflix in December, chronicles the journey of the 855 women as they sort more than 17 million pieces of undelivered mail that has left families and soldiers bereft from lack of contact with their loved ones. While their mission may sound minor on paper, on screen it is cinematic and epic. The women fight endemic and systemic racism. Their ability to fulfill a mission set up for failure ends up being an enormous feat of morale and patriotism. Perry, perhaps best known for his over-the-top comic characters like Madea, approaches the subject with subtlety and restraint. He—and Washington—may very well have a sleeper of an awards season contender on their hands.

Washington actually came upon the subject while she was filming social media content for Black Herstory Month. She honored many important Black women in history, including Rosa Parks and Pam Grier. Washington’s director of social media suggested that Washington pay attention to the Six Triple Eight, who had been awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in March 2021 for their service.

“I just thought their story was so magical,” Washington recalls. “I’d never seen myself in these WWII movies before.”

It so happened that Perry was circling a project about the battalion, too. An email from Perry and producer Nicole Avant, who is married to Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, was waiting in Washington’s inbox to gauge her interest in playing Charity Adams.

“It was like, Holy crap, I had just learned about these women,” says Washington, who had worked with Perry over a decade earlier on the film For Colored Girls.

“I knew in an instant that she should play Major Charity Adams,” says Avant. “I can’t see anyone else playing this role better.”

Adds Perry: “When you’re telling stories about Black women, you need to lean into the experience of Black women who understood a version of what the ladies of the 6888 went through. Kerry has such a presence, and she is so loud. I knew she would know how to command an army.”

Washington is an anchoring presence in the film, but The Six Triple Eight is really an ensemble piece. It’s filled to the brim with young, talented Black actresses, including Ebony Obsidian, Shanice Shantay and Sarah Jeffery, the last of whom most impressed Washington’s kids—10-year-old Isabelle, 8-year-old Caleb and 19-year-old stepdaughter Anaiya—with former football player husband Nnamdi Asomugha.

“We’re huge Descendents fans in our household,” Washington says of Jeffery, who plays Princess Audrey, daughter of Princess Aurora, in the Disney Channel franchise and sings a song called “Queen of Mean.” “They said, ‘You’re doing a movie with the ‘Queen of Mean?’ That’s so fun!”

(Washington’s kids were also impressed by her Southern accent for The Six Triple Eight. “Why do you sound so different?” they asked when Washington showed them the film’s trailer. “It was the biggest compliment for me.”)

Perry says that observing Washington with her co-stars “was really inspirational. She has a grace and elegance that is always present, and I saw the others be in awe of her. She was so welcoming and made sure they were comfortable.”

“I have a much more low-key, casual nurturing vibe than Captain Adams, but it felt like a real honor to help them bring this to life,” says Washington, who also came on as a producer. Working with so many relative newcomers reminded her of starting out “when I was doing Ray and The Last King of Scotland, those early moments in your career and how exciting it is to be a part of something like this.”

When a thunderstorm struck the Six Triple Eight set in the U.K., the production shut for a few hours to get the generators going. This gave Washington and her castmates some unexpected down time. Washington pulled in the choreographer Debbie Allen, who helped stage the film’s dance and marching scenes, and got all her co-stars into a circle.

“I said to everyone, ‘This is your moment. Let’s jump in and see what questions everyone has,’” Washington recalls. “And we just talked about life and love and careers and dating and marriage and making smart choices and leadership and vulnerability. It was one of the most special hours I’ve spent on a set ever.”

(The information pathway went both ways during filming. What did Washington learn from her younger castmates? “Lots of TikTok dances,” she says.)

Washington remembers that she tried to convey to her younger colleagues that, when it comes to success, “half of it is luck and the other half is faith and being willing to say yes or no. It’s a little bit like being willing to follow your instinct and being prepared for when luck reveals itself.”

Washington says that writing her memoir Thicker Than Water, released last fall, was particularly instrumental in helping her find a new path. The Six Triple Eight was the first project she tackled after completing the book. Because she’d poured her soul out on the page, “there was a level of self-awareness and inner clarity that I was able to bring to Charity,” Washington says. “She had a real lack of emotional baggage or shame, a real quality of strength, a level of presence and comfort with herself as a leader.”

Telling her own story, for instance, that the man who raised her was not her biological father, that she was conceived from donated sperm, helped her step into that power. “It was an opportunity to step into the idea of myself as the lead character of my life,” Washington says. “Knowingly or unknowingly, I always was a supporting character in my parents’ story.

“I’ve always been so private, and I think I was afraid that writing the memoir would make me less interesting as an actor,” she adds. “But my own willingness to be this vulnerable has given me even more courage in my work. I think I have more peace. I think I’ve begun to embrace what it means to be a leader and to walk into spaces that scare me.”

Because of the family secrets, Washington says her “inner compass” was “fractured for a really long time. I always knew that something was up in our home, but I was always told there was nothing to look at. So I learned not to follow my instincts.”

But lately, at least since the catharsis of the book, she’s learning to trust herself more. To let go a little bit. To not grasp so tightly. “I suddenly felt so free,” Washington says. “It’s been a pathway back to my intuition and my connection with myself. I’m trying to be more and more directed by my inner compass as opposed to things that outwardly define success.”

She never expected, for instance, that she’d be producing (under her banner Simpson Street) multiple television shows like Unprisoned and Reasonable Doubt, even directing several episodes. Making documentaries like Daughters, in which four young girls prepare for a dance with their incarcerated fathers. Working in theater, which Washington hopes to return to very soon. “I’d like to get back on stage,” she says, adding that she’s currently mulling over a revival of a play.

Multitasking has always been important to Washington, even if it’s not at the level of Perry. “I think I have to just not hang out with him to see that I’m doing more,” Washington laughs. “But the people I’ve looked up to are multihyphenates: Rita Moreno and Jane Fonda and Cicely Tyson. They directed and wrote and acted. They’re civically minded. They had families. I don’t think I ever expected I’d be doing this many kinds of things, but I really am happy doing all the things I’m doing. I always want to make sure there’s some kind of intentionality.”

Washington says she’s always believed that a door doesn’t close without another one opening, but, in the past, she’s often wondered if she’s moved through the doors too quickly.

“I’m often forcing the next door open. I don’t let myself sit in the hallway,” she says. “I want to give myself a little more time in the hallway. I want to allow myself to be in a fluid and creative open space so I can really discover what’s next.”

Hair: Takisha Sturdivant
Makeup: Carola Gonzalez
Manicure: Sreynin Peng using Dior Le Baume
Production: Arzu Koçman by Productionising
Shot at AGP West Studio in Los Angeles

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When Yellowstone took a long hiatus, Grimes stayed busy with his music career. Blending elements of country, folk and Americana, Grimes released his self-titled debut album in 2024. The Dayton, Ohio, native and his wife, Brazilian model Bianca Rodrigues Grimes, recently welcomed a baby boy. For the past seven years, the couple has shuttled between Montana (where the series films) and Nashville, but now that the show is over, Grimes is writing a second album and headed across the country on his “Playin’ on the Tracks” tour, which kicked off in November. We caught up with the actor and musician before he hit the road.

You’ve been married to Bianca since 2018. How has it been to have been with someone since breaking out on the show?

I felt like my life really started when I met her—it sounds cheesy but it’s true. I know where my priorities lie now and what’s most important and I get to enjoy my career more because I take it a lot less seriously now.

You recently had your first child. How has it been to become a parent? Is there anything you learned from the show about parenthood?

I think the hardest thing to relate to with Kayce was the fact that he was a dad, because I wasn’t one, so there was a lot of me asking my friends who are fathers how certain things made them feel. Taylor [Sheridan, the show’s creator] is such a good writer that it made it a lot easier to play the role on the show, but in no way did that actually prepare me for fatherhood.

You’ve played Kayce for seven years. How have you approached this part?

I think Kayce was sort of the outsider of the family. He’s dealing with a lot of demons—it’s not super fun to be the guy in the Western who’s feeling his feelings all the time, so there’s a challenge to that, but I fell in love with him. He’s a good heart and a good soul and he is trying to do the right thing, so for me it was always justifiable playing Kayce.

Who in the cast are you closest with outside of work?

Definitely Kelsey, who plays my wife—there’s a lot of different worlds on this show, and we kind of had our own, so we spent a lot of time together. Really since Day 1 we got along really well. I’ve said it before, she’s the coolest actress I’ve ever worked with—she’s so good at what she does and so easy to work with.

What will you miss most about the show?

Well, I don’t have to miss the location luckily because I live there now. I’ll miss the cast and crew, I’ll miss playing Kayce, I’ll miss the world and the imaginary ranching work of it all. Some of the relationships I made on this show are really special and I think they will last a long time.

What was it like returning to the set in Montana without having Kevin Costner there?

It was something we all knew was going to happen at some point in the story—just narratively, there had to be a moment where we would see if the family could keep the ranch without the patriarch. I don’t think we expected it to happen this way, but it’s an ensemble cast; there were enough people carrying the weight [that] I don’t think it will affect how the audience sees the story. It was definitely different without him. Kevin is an icon, but we’re all professionals, it didn’t really affect how we did our jobs.

What’s your favorite memory from set?

Something that always comes to mind when I think about that is the days when we’d do the cattle drive scenes and we’re cowboyed up. There’s no way to fake that, you just have to do it—so we’d all be on horseback and in our cowboy gear, you’re somewhere gorgeous and the sun is setting and you’re running out of time because you’re losing the light, so everyone is gunning around. There’s some beautiful chaos there—in those moments it feels like you’re really cowboying, which is not something a lot of people get to experience. Those days made me feel really lucky.

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It’s a welcome return for Hilty, a one-time Glinda from Wicked and mother of two. The last few years have been challenging for the 43-year-old actress, after she tragically lost her sister and brother-in-law and their son in a plane crash in 2022. After a hiatus doing mostly voice-over work, she has also returned to television in Amazon’s The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh.

You haven’t been on Broadway in a while. What are you most looking forward to?

I’m really looking forward to being a part of a company again and feeling like, as a group, we’re doing something magical together. As physically taxing as it can be, I love the regularity of an eight-show week and seeing the same people every day, on- and offstage.

Is there anything you’re not looking forward to?

Seeing cell phones and recording devices lit up in the audience. We can see everything that’s happening in the house, and the lights are extremely distracting to us onstage, not to mention how awful it is for everyone who is sitting near lit-up phones in the audience.

You probably get offered every musical that’s being cast. What made you want to do Death Becomes Her?

Death Becomes Her is one of my absolute favorite movies, and it’s one of the few films that makes sense to reimagine as a musical because of its campy, heightened reality. When I read the brilliant script and listened to the incredible songs, I was completely sold!

Have you spent time with Meryl Streep? How do you feel about the possibility of her coming to see the show?

Like everyone else in the galaxy, I am a huge fan of hers, and I would be so delighted if she were to come to the show. My hope is that anyone who is affiliated with the iconic movie would see our show and feel the love and reverence we have for the work they did. I’d also hope they’d appreciate our interpretation of this big, fun, fabulous story, which is simply, “What if they sang and danced while they tried to kill each other?”

How do you wind down these days after a performance?

During our Chicago run, I’d take a long bath, drink a cup of Sleepytime tea, and watch as many episodes of Traitors, Below Deck or Selling Sunset as I could manage until I fell asleep. Now that my family is with me in NYC, each night will probably consist of packing school lunches for my kids and complaining to my husband about how many lit-up cell phones I counted in the audience.

Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard in Death Becomes Her

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Francis, a mere 25, won the Olivier Award for the London production, and he’s has already started his own path in Hollywood, as a cast member on the final season of You on Netflix.

“I had the best time ever on set,” says Francis. “It’s 100 percent something I want to pursue.”

For now, though, it’s all Broadway all the time, which the actor describes as a “wonderful whirlwind.” New York audiences, he explains, “find things funny that UK audiences didn’t necessarily respond to. They are definitely more vocal here for sure. I’ve never heard a cheer like that for the final bow of our opening night.”

A centerpiece of Francis’ performance involves singing the complicated and wordy second act opening number while walking backstage, outdoors and back into the theater. The feat is so seamless it’s often mistaken for being a taped feed. “Every single night people would question me about it at the stage door,” Francis says. “Singing in ⅞ time and walking is quite tricky.”

Of course, the song had to be re-blocked for West 44th Street. (The show played at the Savoy Theatre in London.) “I would say the route is slightly longer, so we had to figure out what pace to walk at to hit all the points we need to hit,” he explains.

To cool down from a show, Francis says he watches some television and uses a steamer before bed “for 20 minutes.” But other than that he’s looking to enjoy New York City as much as, at least, Joe Gillis probably would.

Says Francis: “I want to catch as much theater as possible, try as many good restaurants as possible and fully embrace the New York City lifestyle.”

Grace Hodgett Young and Tom Francis in Sunset Boulevard

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I saw The Hills of California in London, and I thought it was absolutely terrific. Told everyone to go. What’s it like performing dual roles, a mother and a daughter?

It’s a very satisfying challenge to take on. Both characters really informed each other in terms of making them as different and distinct from one another as possible but also figuring out in what ways they should be similar, from physicality and vocal quality to what drives each of them and why. They should reflect each other, since the decisions of the mother, Veronica, get played out in the grown up daughter, Joan. Now that we’re in performance I can put all of that to the back of mind and just enjoy the fact that I get to do something completely different in the last part of the play to the first two acts.

What does it feel like to have someone write a play for you?

It’s a huge privilege and I feel incredibly grateful. It allows me to have a deep understanding of who my characters are and what the story is telling the audience right from the start, and the process feels very organic and effortless. Still, the writing is just so good. I know I would be having a wonderful experience in any of his plays, written with me in mind or not. I don’t usually read anything until he has enough he wants to formally workshop with a bunch of actors. And then my process begins and that doesn’t have a lot to do with him. We don’t cross over a lot.

What kind of impact has this play had on you as a mother, and a mother of daughters?

The main impact is that I’ve seen a lot less of my children in the last year! In terms of the themes of the play, I’m not sure it has. Of course it makes me think about the kind of mother I want to be remembered as, but I was always giving that constant consideration anyway. I’d like to think I’m a very different parent to Veronica in the play. For a while now I’ve believed that the best I could do for my girls is get out of their way and allow them to be exactly who they are. It makes me think more about my relationship with my own mother and with my siblings, and in that regard it has taught me a lot about acceptance and allowing things to be as they are without trying to bend and change people or circumstances.

What did you learn from doing The Ferryman in New York City that you’ll try to apply to doing The Hills?

I’ll try to look for all the ways I can to unwind and switch off from the craziness of the experience. Doing a big, emotional, challenging play on Broadway is beyond exciting but that can also become overwhelming. If I focus on regulating and resetting when I can, I’ll enjoy the experience all the more.

The play is very emotional. How do you come down from a performance?

I usually come home, eat and watch live court trials on TV for a few hours. I’m a natural night owl, so I love the peace of being awake at 2am knowing there’s nothing else I can be doing. I should probably have an herbal tea and do some yoga and meditate, but I guess that’s Imaginary Me. A long soak in a bath at the end of the eight show week does me a lot of good.

Donnelly in The Hills of California

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The role of the tough-as-nails Winnifred the Woebegone, who is unafraid to climb castle walls or swim a moat, was famously created by Carol Burnett. She made her Broadway debut in the musical, a comic retelling of “The Princess and the Pea,” back in 1959. (Sarah Jessica Parker played the role in 1996.) Here, Foster talks about her decision to return to the role and how much she misses her stint as the lead of Younger, Darren Star’s genius half-hour comedy that ended in 2021.

What made you want to bring Once Upon a Mattress to Broadway?

I had an absolute blast doing the show when we did it at New York City Center earlier this year, so bringing it to Broadway felt like a no-brainer for me. It’s such a joyful show, and there’s something in it for everyone—no matter what age. It’s nice to exist in that joyful world and provide that escapism to audiences right now.

What do you enjoy most about playing Winnifred?

She’s the zaniest character I have ever played. She’s so self-assured in who she is, even though she is unusual! I love playing characters who own their uniqueness, and it gives me so much freedom as an actress to really go there and do the craziest things. She is basically an unleashed version of myself.

How do you feel about the idea of “happily ever after” and fairy tales?

I have a 7-year-old daughter, and sometimes, when we read the more classic fairy tales, I’m like, huh! Evil queens, princesses and finding your prince…the messaging that you must behave or you’ll be thrown in an oven and eaten was what I had when I was growing up. I’m excited that my daughter now experiences much broader and more complex messaging with heroines who aren’t looking for love, but for friendship and community; heroines who are strong, independent and unique. I think in many ways, Princess Fred was way ahead of her time. Even though she is looking for love, she is doing it completely in her own way, one that is truly authentic to her. One of my favorite lines from the show is “Princess Winnifred is unusual and Prince Dauntless is unusual—maybe they can be unusual together.”

What are the challenges of Once Upon a Mattress in comparison to, say, Sweeney Todd or Anything Goes or The Music Man?

Winnifred is an incredibly physical character, and there is a lot of physical comedy, so really maintaining my body is the thing I’m most concerned about.

We all have our “Princess and the Pea” things we’re precious about. I, for one, have a hard time sleeping without a really good pillow and a water bottle next to my bed, even if I don’t drink from it. Do you have any eccentric sleeping habits?

I sleep with earplugs and two white noise machines. I always have a glass of water by my bed but never drink from it. I remember an old wives’ tale that if you leave a glass of water by your bed it will catch the bad dreams, so you never want to drink from it.

I, for one, really miss Younger. Do you? What do you imagine Liza is up to these days?

I miss the cast so much. Working on that series was seven years of our lives! I’d be curious what Liza is up to. She’s almost 50! Maybe it’s time for a reboot?

Liza worked in publishing. Any books you’ve read you’re telling friends to read?

I recently read Kelly Bishop’s memoir, The Third Gilmore Girl, and I loved it. Her story is so inspiring. I’m a huge Gilmore Girls fan and I worked with Kelly on Bunheads, so it was amazing to learn more about her and hear her tell her story.

How do you unwind from a performance?

I love watching a little television. I’m a big fan of all reality TV. I just did a serious binge of The Traitors. And every single night I light candles and take a bath. That’s my ultimate come-down ritual. 

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But amid the many second acts of his career, Lowe, 60 and still a looker, has reversed the tables and become the interviewer.

On his popular weekly podcast Literally!, Lowe goes toe-to-toe with subjects like Oprah Winfrey; his good friends Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr.; Ed Zwick, who directed him in his 1986 breakout About Last Night; Netflix head Ted Sarandos; Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Lowe’s own family members, including his wife, Sheryl, a jewelry designer, and their sons Matthew (a “civilian” who has a law degree and works in venture capital) and John (an actor with whom Lowe currently stars on the Netflix comedy series Unstable).

Lowe gets the most anxious when his family members appear as guests on the podcast. “I don’t know what to ask them. I don’t know what they’re going to do,” he explains. Non-Hollywood types like billionaire tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen also make him anxious. “I get nervous when I have super smart people on,” Lowe says.

“What I love about the podcast is it’s more about listening than questioning. You have to listen when you interview, just like when you act,” he says. “People are interesting, and if you follow what they’re saying, they’ll reveal a lot. You go down all the rabbit holes.”

Lowe says part of the reason he started the podcast was as an antidote to the often silly viral moments that come out of late-night television, like Carpool Karaoke or Lip Sync Battle. Lowe appreciates old-school interviews and old-school talent.

“I watch [old episodes of] The Tonight Show, and they were raconteurs. They knew how to be self-deprecating and charming. They knew how to land a joke,” Lowe says. Now, he explains, a talk show producer will call and ask something like, “Can you get in a go-kart with me?”

“I want to vomit in my mouth,” he says.

Lowe’s guests know he’s a “safe zone,” but he still wants his conversations to be “real, with ebbs and flows.”

“I’m not out there looking for salacious stuff, and I’m not looking to pile on,” he continues. “If I have Tom Brady on my podcast, I don’t need to ask him about his divorce. There’s always more value in moving people away from the stuff that makes them uncomfortable.”

That said, Lowe admits: “I don’t think I’m a pushover. I make fun of my guests plenty.”

Despite having recorded more than 200 episodes, Lowe finds it’s easier to be interviewed than it is to interview.  Doing the podcast, “I have to have my producing and editing hat on, wondering, When is it time to move on from this subject? Is this getting slow? Is this getting boring?”

It’d be hard to imagine anything Lowe doing these days as boring. Sure, over the years he’s had plenty of clunkers—from dancing with Snow White at the 1989 Oscars to a handful of movies better left unmentioned—but he covered all that in his 2011 memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends. We’re drowning in a sea of celebrity memoirs these days, but Lowe’s stands out as ushering in a new age of the Hollywood confessional.

“Of all the things that I’ve done, I choose my memoir over the best episodes of television I’ve made,” Lowe says, ranking it above canonical shows like The West Wing and Parks and Recreation. “The degree of difficulty and the upside versus downside is off the charts. You have to be authentic and honest. If you’re going to dance around things, you have no credibility.”

When Lowe started writing the book, “the celebrity memoir was dead. It was dead!” he says. “Now, when I talk to people in the publishing world, they say that Stories I Tell My Friends is the first thing they give to someone when they’re writing a book.”

In the memoir, Lowe dissects his bad-boy image, substance abuse problems and the decision to raise his family in Santa Barbara instead of Los Angeles. Looking at his career trajectory following the book’s publication, it seems now that the memoir may have exorcised any unnecessary self-consciousness and brought on the Golden Age of Lowe.

Lowe has long seemed to poke fun at his image (see Wayne’s World and Austin Powers), but stints on later seasons of Parks and Recreation, The Grinder (which lasted one memorable season on Fox in 2015) and now Unstable have given us a Lowe that is admirably loose, a bit mischievous—even goofy. He seems to be having a great time.

“He’s an actor to his bones and also so, so experienced that his approach is always playful, always truthful and he always makes it look effortless,” says his Unstable co-star Sian Clifford, who stars as chief of staff to Lowe’s tech god Ellis Dragon, a kind of Elon Musk doppelganger. “He’s certainly shown me how to approach my work with a much lighter touch.”

Lowe believes that one of the tricks to a successful character-driven comedy is lots and lots of episodes, so he’s grateful that a second eight-episode season of Unstable drops on Netflix in August. He’d like to see much longer seasons, but “you can never argue with the mysterious [Netflix] algorithm. Still, one of the things I love about the show is it’s fun and has laughs and it still won’t take you as long to watch as The Irishman.” (That’s Netflix’s notoriously expensive Scorsese movie, which runs 209 minutes long.)

“You have to get to know the characters and you need to spend time with them,” Lowe explains of growing a sitcom. “It’s a proven fact that Parks and Recreation wasn’t even funny until the second year. It didn’t become Parks and Rec until episode 40! Eight episodes is not enough time to get to know characters. I stake everything on that. There’s a reason that people are liking season two of Unstable. They know the characters now. It’s a mathematical thing.”

The show also provides an opportunity to work opposite his son John, with whom he co-created the series. “He’s really coming into his own,” says Lowe. “As you go along, you learn the strengths of the actor, and we adjusted his character to make him less of a dweeb. The writing got crisper.”

The goal for Unstable, says Lowe, is “absurdist and heartwarming. Arrested Development is the North Star.” But it can’t all be absurd. “You have to care about the characters. If they’re not grounded, you’re watching a cartoon. At the end of the day, you don’t really care about Homer Simpson, but live-action comedy has to come out of real emotion and real conflict and real relationships and something you believe is plausible, even if it’s just barely sometimes.”

On top of Unstable and his podcast, Lowe is always working. “When I became an empty nester, I decided I could commit to more things.” In addition to the Fox series 9-1-1: Lone Star, he recently created a game show he sold to the network.

“It sounds really stupid, but the idea came to me in a dream,” Lowe says of the game show. “You’ve gotta keep yourself learning, and that’s how the spirit stays young. I love to work. It keeps me vital. I’m also aware of how few people are working into their sixth decade in this business, and you don’t get there by not working.”

At this point, there’s not much in Hollywood Lowe hasn’t done, and there aren’t many people he doesn’t know. “You’d have to dig pretty deep. The truth is, I can get anybody on the phone, and that’s sick. It’s amazing to do,” Lowe says. (It also makes booking his podcast a lot easier.) “But there’s always some new mandate or idea that Hollywood concocts that makes me have to learn or stumble.”

All that work means Lowe doesn’t have a lot of time to enjoy the other stuff his industry produces. “When I actually find something that compels me to watch from the beginning to the end, I want to weep,” he says, noting The Iron Claw and Saltburn as recent works that held his interest. “Though, here’s the problem: I liked Saltburn a lot more when it was called The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is one of my favorite movies.” Succession gets his gold star. “I’d give my fucking eyeteeth to be on a show like that,” Lowe says. “I’d be so down for Succession: The Musical.”

Until the Roys start singing on Broadway, we’ll have to be satisfied with The Outsiders, which Lowe has not yet seen.

“I’m flattered, though,” Lowe says, acknowledging the new generation that will get to experience S.E. Hinton’s “amazing” story. “How could you not be? I can think of so many movies or TV shows or moments that are lost to the mists of time five years later, let alone 40. To be a part of something for 40 years? Wow.”

Hair: Grooming: Jason Schneidman for Solo Artists at The Men’s Groomer Salon, Los Angeles
Production: Arzu Koçman by Productionising
Production assistant: Nathan Waters
Shot at the Corazza House in Los Angeles

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She’s got a new show on Apple TV+, Land of Women, which launches in June. She’ll be in the fourth season of the hit series Only Murders in the Building, set to debut on Hulu in late August. She’s got a tequila brand, Casa del Sol, which she launched in 2021. She recently announced that she would become a strategic advisor and investor in Siete Foods, the fastest-growing Hispanic food company in the United States, known primarily for its gluten-free tortilla chips. (Longoria met Siete co-founder Veronica Garza at a cheerleading camp when they were growing up in Texas.)

Longoria has worked steadfastly with the Television Academy Foundation to help encourage inclusion in the entertainment industry. She’s an investor in a women’s soccer team (Angel City Football Club), a men’s soccer team (Club Necaxa) and is co-owner of the ElevenEleven padel team. There’s also her philanthropy. She founded Eva’s Heroes, based in San Antonio, Texas, in 2006 and was just awarded the 2024 Courage and Civility Award by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez.

With a schedule that packed, you can imagine her nonstop travel. A few weeks ago, she was in London for two days for her friend Victoria Beckham’s birthday. While there, she also filmed for an upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol (called Christmas Karma) directed by Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), in which she plays the Ghost of Christmas Past. She lives between the U.S., Mexico City and Spain, she says, but on the day we connect, Longoria is about to board a flight from Los Angeles—the home base of her company, appropriately named Hyphenate Entertainment—to Miami, where she and her husband, the media mogul José Bastón, keep an apartment.

“I recently was in an airport in Poland and I saw myself in a big L’Oréal ad. And all I could think was, That’s so crazy. That’s me. I’m still really confused, and I’m always surprised,” Longoria recalls. She’s referring to yet another one of her many jobs—global ambassador for the beauty company—which she has held for the last two decades.

“What can I say?” she asks. “I’m the ultimate multitasker.”

Longoria suggests her ubiquity is the result of just hanging around the entertainment industry for more than two decades. She started as Flight Attendant #3 on an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 but moved quickly on, in 2004, to Desperate Housewives, one of the last huge shows of network television.

Oh, and, at 49, she’s also a mom to 5-year-old Santiago. “The other day I heard [my son] say, ‘No, my mom’s an actress.’ And I looked at him and I thought, How did he even know that word and what it meant?” Longoria says. “He’s still unimpressed.”

He might be the only one unimpressed by Longoria’s ability to juggle it all.

Coming off of directing the film Flamin’ Hot, which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Song for “The Fire Inside,” Longoria needed a break. That’s why she’s only producing and starring in Land of Women, soon to debut on Apple TV+.

At the beginning of the series, Gala (Longoria) has just opened a sexy wine shop in New York City. She quickly discovers that her husband owes some bad people a lot of money, and they’re coming to collect. So Gala runs away to Spain with her annoyed daughter (newcomer Victoria Bazua) and her slightly cuckoo mom Julia (Carmen Maura, a favorite of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar).

“I usually reverse-engineer my projects,” says Longoria of her work as a producer. “I start with a place I want to shoot.”

For Land of Women, Longoria told her friend, the writer/producer Ramón Campos, that she wanted to film in Spain’s wine country. She wanted something “super female forward,” she explained, and suggested Under the Tuscan Sun as a reference point. A month later, Campos came back with a pitch based on a bestselling Spanish novel by Sandra Barneda.

“So much of television is set in a dystopian future, and I can’t watch television set in a dystopian future,” says Longoria, who admits to “watching everything,” especially on plane rides. “I don’t want to worry and then start setting up my doomsday bunker after watching a television show.”

Land of Women, she explains, is optimistic, “very blue skies and fish-out-of-water. You just want to be there.”

Filming did, indeed, take place in Spain in the small medieval city of Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dalí. It’s at “the complete other end” of the country from Marbella, where Longoria is relocating. To get to Figueres, at the eastern edge of Catalonia near the French border, “You need to take a plane, a train, a car, and then scale down a mountain,” Longoria jokes.

One last trick: The show is bilingual. (Actually, some of the characters speak Catalan, too.) “What’s the most authentic storytelling? I would talk to my daughter in English and my mother in Spanish,” says Longoria. “This wasn’t possible 10 or 15 years ago, but streaming has made content more global. The No. 1 show is Squid Game in Korean. Subtitles are very acceptable, and so is the idea of Spanglish. We’ve changed the way we seek out storytellers and points of view.”

Easier said than done. “I’d never acted in Spanish,” Longoria admits. “My brain hurt at the end of the day. But I’m the American in the show. I make a lot of mistakes in Spanish, like I do in life. I say the wrong word at the wrong moment.”

“Watching Eva act is like watching Messi play soccer,” says Land of Women creator Campos. “Above all, she’s a natural and tireless worker who always supports the team and understands that she’s a crucial part of it—but just one part of it. She’ll get her hands dirty when needed, without worrying about appearances.”

It helps that Longoria could identify completely with her onscreen double. “I’m literally my character,” Longoria says, all the way down to being an oenophile. “I love wine. I love everything about it. I love the different grapes. During COVID, all I did was read about wine. I decided that I was going to study for the sommelier test.” She didn’t end up taking the exam, “but I still want to.”

See? Always multitasking.

After the success of Flamin’ Hot, Longoria decided to take a break from directing. “You could not have stopped me from making that movie,” she says. But even for someone who’s always steering the ship, it was a lot of work.

“I’m not rushing to make my sophomore movie because I’m looking for something to speak to me,” she says. Currently, “I’m reading everything,” including lots of potential biopics. “I’ll know it when I see it. I’ll know it when I read it.”

But this year, she says, “I’m only acting. This year is: Let me go back in front of the camera.”

First up: Land of Women. Next in line: Only Murders in the Building. “I’m most comfortable in television comedy,” Longoria says. “It was the first thing I learned, so I have probably worked the 10,000 hours. You find confidence through that many at-bats.”

But Only Murders in the Building isn’t your everyday television comedy. It’s a television comedy alongside the legendary Meryl Streep. No sweat, Longoria says. Streep is actually her distant relative, a link she discovered when they were both on Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“We actually call each other ‘cousin,’” Longoria laughs. The first time they made the connection in person was at an AFI tribute to Jane Fonda. Longoria sheepishly said hello to Streep. Since then, whenever they see each other, Longoria says, “We’ll say, ‘How are you, cousin?’ and ‘I’m good, cousin.’”

In the first Zoom table read for Only Murders, attended by 100 people from Zach Galifianakis to Molly Shannon to Selena Gomez, Streep introduced Longoria as her cousin.

“She tells the story and everyone’s so confused, because I’m the most Latina person in the industry and she’s Meryl Streep,” Longoria recalls.

Working on set in New York was, indeed, like family. “We talked a lot about democracy and politics,” Longoria says. “But when you have leaders like Steve Martin and Martin Short, you’re never not laughing. Watching them make a lunch order is a show in itself. It’s a constant roast about a sandwich, a 30-minute comedy about mustard.”

In addition to working with Streep, Longoria also had the opportunity this year to star opposite Eddie Murphy in The Pickup, a heist comedy that also stars Keke Palmer and Pete Davidson.

The movie, for Amazon MGM, is directed by another of Longoria’s longtime pals, Tim Story. She auditioned years ago for Story’s Fantastic Four, but didn’t get the role. “I think it was [the Invisible Woman, the role that went to] Jessica Alba, but it was one of those situations where they say, ‘We can’t tell you the story or let you read the script,’” Longoria says.

Longoria doesn’t often get starstruck, but that’s how she felt about working with Murphy. “He’s my Hollywood,” she explains, describing how she was inspired by Murphy’s classic projects from Harlem Nights to Beverly Hills Cop. “He’s my kind of funny. He’s a comedy savant.”

“And of course the first day on set, we have to kiss,” Longoria says. “So it was like, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and then mwah.”

Well, is Murphy a good kisser? “We didn’t have makeout scenes,” Longoria demurs. “It was just a good-morning kiss.” Do they have a texting relationship now? “He’s very private,” Longoria says, adding that no, they don’t send each other Netflix recommendations. “I just sat and listened.”

In addition to 1) ordering a sandwich with Martin Short and Steve Martin; 2) being introduced to 100 people as Meryl Streep’s cousin; and 3) kissing Eddie Murphy—a major year for anyone, no doubt—Longoria also got to see Tom Cruise do the splits on the dance floor at Victoria Beckham’s 50th birthday party in London in April.

Of all of those experiences, which was the most entertaining?

“It’s a toss-up,” Longoria says, adding that Cruise “is the kindest human being and the best dancer. I’ve seen him dance at many parties.” She didn’t recall him doing the splits at any of those other parties, though. This was special. “I danced for five hours at the party and we didn’t leave till 3 a.m.,” Longoria says. “I woke up sore wondering if I’d worked out [too hard] the day before. No, we just danced a lot.”

Longoria insists that she doesn’t actually know everyone in Hollywood. It just seems like she does.

“There are so many people I don’t know and I want to work with, and I’m old,” she says. “But I’m lucky. I’m definitely lucky.”

Her secret recipe is relatively simple, actually.

“I don’t like wasting time,” Longoria says as her airplane is called for boarding. “I consider time like money. You’re either spending it or you’re wasting it, and I choose to spend it.”

Hair: DJ Quintero for L’Oréal Paris
Makeup: Genevieve Herr for L’Oréal Paris
Manicure: Julie Kandalec
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Francesca Lazaro
Shot at the WSA Building in New York City

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A Rough Way To Go by Sam Garonzik

Once Upon a Time by Elizabeth Beller

The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon by Heath Hardage Lee

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan

Magic Pill by Johann Hari

All That Glitters by Orlando Whitfield

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Firebrand is named for the king’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr, played by Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander. Directed by Karim Aïnouz, the film chronicles Parr’s perseverance as a Protestant sympathizer who survived her husband’s deadly Catholic regime. Law, in a near-monstrous supporting role, plays the king’s violent last gasp with sneering resentment and a secret sense of remorse.

“He’d been a highly attractive and sought-after golden boy,” says Law, 51. “He was a romantic in a way, believing each time that he’d found the right woman. The murder and the mayhem that ensued was part of his sense that they had let him down.” Lumbering around shadowy halls on swollen legs, Law’s Henry VIII is a sour and spiteful menace. “He’s full of regret, self-medicating with alcohol and trying to deal with intense pain and the madness that it brings on.”

Law says that his approach to a role depends on the project and the director. He’s worked with a legendary set of the latter, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson and Mike Nichols. Law’s wide-ranging body of work includes prestige period dramas like Road to Perdition, Cold Mountain (for which he landed his second Academy Award nomination in 2004), and The Aviator; sci-fi thrillers like Gattaca and A.I. Artificial Intelligence; and, more recently, major franchise installments like Fantastic Beasts (as the young wizard Dumbledore) and Captain Marvel.

For Firebrand, embracing the physical embodiment of Henry VIII and all that it entailed was essential to Law’s process. “It took so much time every morning to get into this huge, weighted costume and I would stay in it for the rest of the day,” Law says. “You could rehearse in jeans and a T-shirt, but then you would turn up in this enormous outfit and realize you’re going to knock everyone over. So you might as well maintain that sense of Henry’s shape and size.” That went for the king’s stench, too: Law collaborated with historians to conjure up a scent of bodily decay and wore it during the shoot inside a Derbyshire castle.

“It was so terrible that some days you couldn’t help but laugh,” Vikander says. “Jude was trying to make you go down a new path, try different things. What these characters went through was so tough, but we also had a lot of fun working together,” Vikander says. The Swedish actress recalls admiring Law during production on 2012’s Anna Karenina, her first English-language film, where “he proved the work ethic and kind personality you need to bring to set,” she says. “He’s the most humble and down-to-earth person, which makes working with him extremely joyful.”

Many of Law’s early, career-defining performances hinged on an inescapable charm—Alfie’s solipsistic womanizer, lovers with secrets behind their dazzling smiles in Closer and The Holiday—that hypnotized audiences and heroines alike. “I didn’t feel like I really ever leaned into playing handsome, but there were roles that required an attractive energy,” Law says. “I was trying to play against my looks in my early 20s, and now that I’m saggy and balding, I wish I had played it up.” He’s being at least somewhat facetious: A trailer for the 2020 HBO series The New Pope, for example, shows a taut, chiseled Law striding slow-motion across a beach in a white Speedo.

Still, parts have recently come the actor’s way that “have not leaned in to any sort of attraction,” he says. “It’s been satisfying not having to turn that switch on.” Law scowls over a thick mustache as Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy;  later this year, he will star in Ron Howard’s Eden, based on the true story of a group of people who retreat to the Galápagos to flee facism, and as an Idaho FBI agent pursuing a white supremacist group in The Order.

Law is also stepping into another entertainment juggernaut, as a Jedi shepherding a band of kids through harrowing adventures in the Star Wars series Skeleton Crew. Law, who grew up admiring the original films but “wasn’t a Star Wars geek, or whatever the polite way to say it is,” describes his character as “contradictory, complicated, mischievous and at times heroic,” though not very paternal. “He has no time for someone crying because they’re 11 and really scared,” Law says, “He’s like, ‘Pull yourself together and get on with it.’”

Law’s own parents were teachers who retired young and pursued their dreams of founding a theater troupe that travels around Europe. “Their love of the arts—film, theater, dance, music—was hugely influential” on Law and his sister, the painter Natasha Law, he says.

A father of seven, Law describes himself as an “excessive” dad, “because I think about them all the time.” His wife, Phillipa Coan, and their two kids have been traveling with Law for the past couple of years, living in seven or eight countries, an itinerant period he calls “wonderful but hard.” “I’ve never been someone who’s comfortable going off to film for weeks on my own. Having the reality to return to makes you feel normal again before going back to playing someone like Henry VIII.”

Acting is proving to be a family trade: Law’s eldest son, Rafferty, with his first wife Sadie Frost, appears in the Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air, released earlier this year. “It’s complicated because I’m aware of how hard it is,” Law says of watching his son get into the industry. “When I came into this business, I didn’t have the comparison, but with him, people might always say, ‘Oh, you’re just like your dad.’ Which is nonsense; his career is his career.”

“I’m thrilled because we get to share our enthusiasm, and I get to give him advice if he wants to hear it,” Law continues. “I’m immensely proud that he’s put himself out there because he found something that he loves. He’s obviously seen the way I work, and it’s rubbed off on him.”

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How did you find Stereophonic, or how did it find you?

It was one of the last auditions that I got before the pandemic shut down. The production didn’t move forward at the time so when I got the audition in my inbox last May, I jumped at the chance to tape for it again. It was one of those scripts that you don’t forget. The material is so rich. I’d like to think I’ve grown as a person and performer over the past few years so I was thrilled to bring that to it. A couple months later we began our rehearsals at Playwrights Horizons.

In the show, we only hear snippets of the songs the band is recording. What’s that like as a performer?

The snippets of the songs allow for the process of songwriting to do the storytelling. The songs aren’t these theatrically transcendent moments like they would be in a traditional musical. In Stereophonic, the characters are listening, commenting on the tempo, watching whether or not they’re playing in the right key. At least that’s what I try to keep in mind when those moments reveal themselves in the show. It also allows for a catharsis once we finally make it through a full song. We occasionally practice the full song in band rehearsal to remind us that the tiny parts we are working on in the play will ultimately gel into a could-be 70’s hit rock song.

Will the Stereophonic band of the play release an actual album?

During our break before our Broadway transfer, we put a record together. It got all of us excited and gave us a chance to reflect on how far we had come as a band since our first rehearsals. The process was also a helpful reminder that this is what our characters were living every day for years. Constantly listening, re-recording, spending hours killing time in between takes. The record will be out soon. We still need to figure out our band name.

There’s a scene where your character sings certain phrases of a song over and over, and you can’t quite hit a high note. How do you do that?

These characters are constantly seeking perfection in their music, the mood and tone and what evokes the world of the song. “East of Eden,” the song at the top of Act II, is Diana’s most personal, tortured song. It speaks so clearly to the dynamics in her and Peter’s relationship. Making my voice crack is the last thing I’m thinking about. I’m thinking of how fatigued Diana is, how tense her relationship is at the moment, and, more than anything, I’m trying to do the opposite of cracking and actually land the note.

What do you feel about bringing the show to Broadway?

Out of the seven cast members, six of us are making our Broadway debut alongside the playwright David Adjmi. When I signed on for our Playwrights run, I had no idea we might transfer a few months later. And now that it’s happening, it all feels like kismet.

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Why is Vladimir Putin an interesting character to play?

His stillness, his mask; what I can observe of how performative that is has been really helpful. Imagining the inner tension through the outer stillness has really interested me. I love the physicality. More generally, I’ve found the crossover between the personal and the political a really rewarding area to explore. It’s a paradox that someone who has such a massive role and presence, such tremendous influence on the world stage might be reduced in people’s (or my?) mind to something two-dimensional, morally speaking, almost mythologically speaking. But to be afforded space to think into that head or to experience that journey imaginatively is a privilege and a revelation to me. I’ve found myself thinking a lot about medieval ideas of kingship; whether in such a position you could come to believe that your will is, intrinsically, the land’s will, the nation’s will, that in some sense your body is the land. And then I’m fascinated by how that impacts on the intimate sense of loyalty and betrayal, of duty and responsibility, then of ambition, of appetite of what it feels like to grow into a power you might perhaps never have expected.

What’s the most intimidating thing about playing the role?

I expected to be more intimidated by Putin’s presence in the collective imagination; by the pressure to live up to an audience’s collective idea of him. In actual fact, that’s never felt like a problem; quite the contrary. It’s a huge privilege to play someone who is so alive in an audience’s imagination. It creates a really dynamic dialogue; a conversation which feels new every day, because of the daily news cycle. There’s always a new perspective, what feels like a new pattern to discern. Even though the play finishes in 2013, we’re examining formative events.

How has your performance and relationship to the material changed as you’ve moved from the Almeida to the West End and now to New York?

Like I say, it feels like such a living relationship. The material allows it to land minutely differently every day. We’ve moved from a small space progressively into bigger spaces. While the intimacy of its beginnings was a joy to play, it feels hugely enriching painting on bigger canvasses. And the material is so big, so epic, I think it grows in a bigger space. The hope is that it’s always growing and deepening.

Will you miss Tom Hollander on Broadway?

I love Tom as a friend and I admire him so much as a colleague. I’ve just been so lucky to share a stage with him in every way. His work was so dazzling on this, so rich. It always is. And now Michael Stuhlbarg, who is mercurial and meticulous and powerful, and intelligent, and intense, and organic, and surprising, capable of such huge depths and such delights. What an enormous privilege! It’s a whole new dream. I’m just loving working with him. I’m in awe of his rigor and his virtuosity. It’s a real joy to be playing a whole new dynamic. Michael’s making something very special indeed.

What do you expect to be different in New York as you start performances?

To be honest, I just don’t know what to expect! I’m so interested to see how the play lands here. Every nation has its own psychology. How will a play about patriotism, power, money, ambition, single mindedness, opportunism, friendship, rivalry ignite in the mind here? Obviously, America has a different relationship with Russia from the UK’s relationship with Russia, so I imagine an American will be coming to the play from a slightly different angle to a British person. Is Putin’s place in the imagination in some way different here from there? I’m so excited to find out.

Why should New Yorkers come see the show?

Rupert’s production is so astonishingly agile, so captivating. It’s slick and witty and disturbing and profound, and he makes it feel so effortless. And at the simplest level it’s really entertaining! I won’t start enumerating the whole cast, but  I’m very proud to be a part of it.

What’s your favorite thing about working with Peter Morgan?

Peter is masterful at making a complex argument dramatically clear; taking on big ideas and putting them within our grasp without debasing or simplifying them. He’s a brilliant examiner of power, both in the world and in the domestic space. It’s really exciting watching how he molds a story. And he’s very generous and unprecious about listening to the actors, being in conversation with what an actor feels they need from the inside, in terms of rhythm for example. He’s collaborative and supportive and infectiously enthusiastic and funny!

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This March, in the Netflix fantasy film Damsel, Wright plays a similarly intimidating character. She is Queen Isabelle, mother to Prince Henry (Nick Robinson), who will stop at nothing to continue a grisly tradition: sacrificing a young woman to a dragon in order to repay an ancient debt.

Isabelle meets her match in Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown), the titular damsel who is not going to let some fire-breathing beast take her down without a fight. Wright describes the 20-year-old Stranger Things star, who also produced the movie, as a “little whippersnapper” with “quite a presence on screen.”

“You’re either born with it or you’re not,” says Wright of Brown’s talent. “And she was.”

The Texas-born Wright, 57, was clearly born with it, too. She grew up in San Diego and began modeling at age 14. By her late teens, she was already acting on the daytime soap Santa Barbara, and a transition to feature films like The Princess Bride came soon afterward.

Damsel is a particularly cool fairy tale for contemporary audiences, says Wright. “It’s not the classic ‘damsel in distress’ story. It’s very modernized,” she explains. “The dragon is not just evil; it’s not just trying to kill and maim. It’s doing it for a female reason that’s beautiful. We could also tap into the metaphor that the dragon is the state of our world we’re all trying to fight.”

Wright’s not sure how the script for Damsel arrived in her inbox, though she did quite like director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, a 2007 standalone sequel to 2002’s 28 Days Later. Wright surmises that, when casting, Netflix executives thought of her because they were well aware of her work on House of Cards and thought, “She knows how to play an evil queen.”

In Damsel, Queen Isabelle “absolutely believes you have to continue this tradition” of human sacrifice, says Wright. In contemporary terms, she affirms, “We would call her a sociopath.”

“Robin manages with very nuanced craft to portray the most evil behavior. The audience can feel and understand where this evilness comes from,” says Fresnadillo. “She takes you with her heart, and a mesmerizing performance, on a path that can lead you to the darkest places.”

Wright laughs at the idea that she’s been typecast, first as a deceitful POTUS-in-waiting and now as a manipulating queen. In fact, during our interview, the actress—thrice married and divorced, most recently to Clément Giraudet, who worked at the time in VIP relations for Saint Laurent—is refreshingly warm.

“These are just fun to play,” Wright says. “It’s a hoot playing characters like that.”

Scheming swindlers are quite a change from the gentle characters Wright played in the early days of her career. There was Jenny, the angelic best friend-turned-wife of Tom Hanks’ title character in 1994’s Academy Award–winning Forrest Gump. And, of course, there was her breakout role as the farm girl-turned-princess in 1987’s The Princess Bride, which, even 35 years later, remains an unparalleled and charming mainstay.

“It’s so funny,” recalls Wright. “I was doing an interview about Damsel, and one of the questions was, ‘Can you imagine Princess Buttercup growing up to become Queen [Isabelle]?’ I said, ‘Don’t even say it! Let Princess Buttercup be innocent!’”

Wright admits that over the following years she was often typecast as another kind of woman, “the pained mother-slash-wife.” But when House of Cards came along, “that kind of opened up a new vein. It was so nice to break out.”

House of Cards also encouraged Wright to try her hand at directing, and she ended up behind the camera for 10 of the series’ episodes. With an experienced crew behind her, adding to her duties on the show “wasn’t really that much harder. You do sleep less. I’d stay up till midnight because we were shooting in Baltimore and our editors were in L.A., then at 4:30, get in the gym with my trainer, then the makeup trailer around 6 a.m.”

Directing herself was kind of like turning on a light switch: “I would call ‘Cut!’ in the middle of a scene when I thought I was shite.”

Still, Wright adds, “I’m probably a really annoying actor to direct. I’m always inserting myself inappropriately into the conversation: ‘Why don’t we try this? What if we did that?’” She’d often ask Gary Jay, the late camera operator on House of Cards, about the lenses he was using. He became Wright’s directing mentor and was the one who suggested she give directing an episode a shot.

“I was petrified, but we had so much fun,” Wright says. Now, she says, “I sure do love directing. I love seeing the evolution of a performance; how you can throw a little piece of a novella at an actor and watch the transformation happen in front of you.” Yes, every actor’s different, but “we know what we need, and I love the collaboration. There’s nothing more fun than building. I don’t care what kind of project we make, even if it’s, ‘Let’s go make a papier-mâché house.’”

“She’s a very curious woman,” adds Damsel director Fresnadillo. “She has a humbleness and an openness to absorb and learn from everything and everyone. She’s a strong creative collaborator and a true team player.”

At a Netflix Emmy party, Jason Bateman asked Wright if she would direct some episodes of his series Ozark. She said yes. “It was one of my favorite shows,” she says. A producer sent her the script for the film that became her feature directorial debut, Land, about a woman who decides to live off the grid after her husband and son are killed in a terrorist attack. She shot it in 29 days in and around a cabin at the top of a mountain in Alberta, Canada.

“It was an incredible experience and incredibly challenging,” Wright says. “I learned a lot from the mistakes I made, and I’m hoping I won’t make the same mistakes again.”

Wright has moved on to speaking about her next project, a series for Amazon she’s currently prepping in London called The Girlfriend, based on the novel by Michelle Frances. It’s a psychological thriller about a strange love triangle between a mother (Wright), her son and her son’s new girlfriend (Olivia Cooke).

“I really want to feel the textures of tension between these two women,” Wright says about her approach, which includes using Saltburn as an inspiration. “In another world, my character and Olivia’s would have been BFFs. They’re really wily, strong alpha females, and they’re both in love with the same boy. One who just happens to be my character’s son. It’s twisted. He’s caught in the middle, wondering who to believe.”

Wright hopes she can make something surprising with The Girlfriend. With “400 other television shows” to compete with these days, “it’s so hard to be original,” she says.

That said, she has no interest in mining Forrest Gump or The Princess Bride for a new story with familiar characters and IP.  “They talked about doing a sequel to The Princess Bride, meeting Westley and Buttercup 25 years later, but maybe Rob Reiner pooh-poohed the idea. I agree. Just keep that sweet piece of cinema alone.”

Only in the last decade did Wright’s own children, Dylan and Hopper—with her ex-husband Sean Penn, now both in their early 30s—even watch The Princess Bride.

“We probably tried to show them when they were younger,” Wright says. “They never wanted to watch our movies.”

Now, both kids are pursuing careers in the arts. Hopper is currently producing a music video in Thailand. Dylan is developing her own projects. “I’ve a feeling she’ll be a director,” Wright says.

As kids, both said they’d never act. “They thought it was boring,” Wright says. “But they knew acting from watching on a set where they weren’t working. That’s boring.”

As they’ve grown, “we both have worked with them on scenes or run lines for auditions all the time,” Wright explains, referring to Penn. “They’re both so good. I love it whenever they ask. It’s fun to see them growing at it. They’re still finding their way, but they’ll find it. They definitely have the creative gene.”

Meanwhile, Wright recently reteamed with her Forrest Gump family—Hanks, director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Eric Roth—to film a movie called Here, based on a graphic novel by Robert McGuire. “Actually, we all live around the corner from each other [in California],” Wright says. “It was like no time had passed getting the band back together.”

The film takes place in a single room and tells the story of the different people who have lived there. “It spans the entirety of civilization,” Wright says. Both she and Hanks had to play themselves in their 20s. “I’m almost 60 and Tom’s 60-something. We’re never looking 32 or 19 ever again.”

But, as when they de-aged Harrison Ford in the latest Indiana Jones movie,  Zemeckis used a “deep fake” camera that “downloaded every piece of data [the stars had] ever had on screen,” Wright says, including Hanks on Bosom Buddies and Wright on Santa Barbara and being interviewed on Entertainment Tonight at 20.

“You could see the innocence in my eyes, and they’re translating all of that youth onto my 57-year-old-face,” Wright says. “It’s so trippy. Oh, my God. Both of our mouths fell to the ground. My first question was, ‘How dangerous is that?’ But it’s happening anyway. It’s moving so fast.”

And in all likelihood, that new technology will just inform Wright’s continuing career, in front of and behind the camera.

“You know what? A director can’t make anything without a team. The best idea wins. There’s no ego,” Wright says. “And I love the teamwork.”

Hair: Daniel Martin
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Manicure: Edyta Betka
Contributing Visuals Producer: Catherine Gargan Hall
Photography Assistants: Ben Kyle, Isaak Hest
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Olivia Bellamy
Shot at the 1 Hotel Mayfair in London

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Makeup by Chelsea Gehr for Exclusive Artists using Make Up For Ever

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She realized that making art in Hollywood didn’t have to be a competition between herself and her peers. It could be collaborative.

“It could be a team sport,” Lyonne says. “You need all your pals to make things.”

Russian Doll was the first time in Lyonne’s career that “I had any real power to bring in my people, and that was across the board,” she explains.

That career has been a long one. Lyonne got her start in 1986 at the age of 6 on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Though there were a few blackout years in her mid-twenties, Lyonne might now be at a career peak with the hit show Poker Face on Peacock and her own production company.

As Lyonne spent time behind the scenes with Russian Doll, she realized that it wasn’t all about her. She found great fulfillment in supporting the friends and colleagues she was collaborating with to make really good work. “To see someone crush it and know that they did it, that’s a win for me and a win for them,” Lyonne says.

She’s since tried to infuse that dynamic into the rest of her life with more directing and producing. There’s The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy, an animated series Lyonne produced with Maya Rudolph about a pair of alien doctors, created by Cirocco Dunlap, a writer Lyonne worked with on Russian Doll. It airs on Amazon Prime starting in February, featuring additional voice talent from the likes of Sam Smith, Kieran Culkin and Keke Palmer, “and the show’s fucking amazing,” Lyonne says. “But to see Cirocco get her own show over the course of a few years? It’s just so satisfying.”

This month, Lyonne is shepherding another talented friend to fame and fortune, this time on Netflix. Lyonne directed the filmed version of comedian Jacqueline Novak’s one-woman show Get On Your Knees, an autobiographical deconstruction of oral sex that was an Off-Broadway hit in 2019.

Lyonne saw it live several times and fell for both it and Novak. (It was directed for the stage by another funny guy, John Early.) “I was just a massive fan, and I wanted to produce the Netflix special,” Lyonne says. “You’re so in it with her brain. She stalks across the stage, just dropping gem after gem after gem.”

There’s not a ton you can do with a standup special, admits Lyonne, but she tried to give the piece some texture. “We tried to give it the feeling of shooting on film,” she says. “I prefer a feast for the eyes and the mind all at once. It makes me happier.”

Among the references Lyonne brings up when discussing Novak’s Netflix special: 1982’s Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip; 1979’s Town Bloody Hall, the famed documentary by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus of a panel discussion between feminist advocates and Norman Mailer that took place on the same Town Hall stage where Lyonne filmed Get On Your Knees; 1974’s Lenny, Bob Fosse’s Lenny Bruce biopic starring Dustin Hoffman; and even The Red Shoes. (The reference to that 1948 fable came from her cinematographer, Sam Levy, who also worked on Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.)

Lyonne, as you may have guessed, has an encyclopedic brain and a thirst for knowledge. “My teenage years, I was like a sponge,” she says. “I had such a love of cinema and for books.”

She also has a love of puzzles. She’ll occasionally contribute a crossword to The New York Times—as in, write one. And even if she’s the busiest now that she’s ever been, “the one thing I make time to do,” she says, is complete the newspaper of record’s daily games, including Spelling Bee, Connections and Wordle.

Lyonne is also a big reader. She ticks off just a few of the books she’s currently reading that are floating around in her Los Angeles bedroom, including but not limited to: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, about sustainability, by the American architect Buckminster Fuller; The Comet, by W.E.B. Dubois; Labyrinths, a collection of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges; Celestial Heirs: A Space Age Interpretation of the Bible; and the intense-sounding Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe.

This isn’t pretension or a put-on. Lyonne is really into all this stuff.

“Is my brain atrophying in Los Angeles?” Lyonne asks. “I don’t think so. For better or worse, I’ll always be wired the way I am. I’m always wanting more information. I’m always gravitating to new ideas and new music and new thinkers.”

But it’s not all work and intellectual pursuits. Surprising even herself, Lyonne says she’s started surfing. “It’s a real get-it-while-you-can kind of thing,” she says. “It’s fun and it’s hard and I think I’m too old to be scared. Plus, I love the ocean and swimming and I have very good balance.” (At some point in her youth, Lyonne was a gymnast, she says.)

She splits her time between New York and L.A., which, she says, automatically “eliminates the conversation of ‘Do you prefer L.A. or New York?’ since I knew I would be in both for the rest of my life.”

Still, she adds, “Every time I land in New York, I feel immediately energized. The city is still in my bones. It’s insane to live anywhere else. New York has intellectualism. Los Angeles has road trips.”

Part of reaching this point in her career, with multiple stops and starts along the way, has been figuring out how to meet her needs and wants. “I had a really good run as an actress between 6 and 16. I started with Pee-wee Herman and ended with Woody Allen, who was a very popular figure in 1995,” Lyonne says. After filming Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You, she transitioned to NYU Tisch’s filmmaking program. Though she dropped out, she always knew she’d find her way to being a producer or director somewhere down the road. It also provided a solution to the age-old-Hollywood fear of, well, aging and not getting work because you’re getting old.

“The next generation comes up,” says Lyonne, who will turn 45 in April, “and time doesn’t go backward. It is what it is.”

Lyonne has found it’s much easier to “wake up at 5 a.m. for someone else than myself,” she says. “Over time, we lose interest in ourselves and gain interest in other people. I find it much more satisfying to see Jacqueline alive and getting to sing her song.”

“I’ve hit a lot of personal markers of achievement. I feel spoken for,” Lyonne adds. “In my golden years, the thing that brings me the most happiness is watching other people realize their dreams.”

Hair: Coree Moreno
Makeup: Molly Stern
Manicure: Sreynin Peng
Set Designer: Evan Jourden
Production: Viewfinders
Digital Tech: DJ Dohar
Photo Assistants: Danya Morrison, Ricky Steel
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Victoria Cameron
Shot on location at 1034 North Orlando Avenue in Los Angeles, represented by The Fridman Group at Compass

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There’s the old version of Dove Cameron. That Dove burst onto the scene a decade ago in the Disney Channel hit Liv and Maddie. She played both Liv, a teen actress who returns home from Hollywood to Wisconsin after her TV series ends, and Maddie, the tomboyish twin sister she left behind.

That Dove also starred, in 2015, as Mal, the daughter of Maleficent (Kristin Chenoweth) in the hit television movie musical Descendants. It’s one of those canonical Disney films that has influenced an entire generation of kids through two sequels, Halloween costumes and trillions of soundtracks and replays. It also turned Cameron into a household name with, yes, 48 million Instagram followers.

That was Dove Cameron 1.0. Or, as she describes it, “Back when I was still blonde, dating boys, wearing pink and smiling more.”

The new Dove Cameron—call her Dove Cameron 2.0, or maybe the real Dove Cameron—performs in operatic musical theater in London, lives on the Lower East Side, is openly queer, readily discusses her struggles with mental health and might just be the next great American pop star.

“The entire Disney thing,” as Cameron calls it, “is an old-fashioned studio network. You join when you’re a child. You keep that hair for four years. You have to freeze yourself in time. You share a brand with your characters on television. Nobody tells you that, but that’s what you do. I thought people knew that it was a brand more about the Disney Channel than it was about me.”

That Cameron was known for her music, with hits like “If Only,” but “none of those songs were written by me.”

Defining her “me” is of particular importance to the 27-year-old multihyphenate. “I experienced such backlash after Disney that I didn’t know who I was. What if I don’t want to rock the boat? I’d never been able to be myself in the public eye. Could I come out as queer and still feel safe in the world? Was I going to feel so picked apart again? It’s one of those things you can’t take back.”

But Cameron knew what choice she had to make, and she chose herself. “You can be the person everyone wants you to be and feel safer and be trapped by that,” she says, “or you can step into yourself as an energy and risk that it doesn’t work. But at least you get to sleep at night knowing you’re not cosplaying as someone else.”

In conversation, Cameron seems like a wise soul. Hollywood parties, she says, make her uncomfortable, “but there’s no secret door that leads you to nirvana and the dimension where everyone is like-minded.” Maybe it’s years of therapy. Maybe it’s learning from her mother, a poet. Maybe it’s the books about grief she likes to read. Maybe it’s the idea that she’s finally getting to be herself. Maybe it’s the years’ worth of sci-fi movies and television shows she watches on a regular basis.

“When I couldn’t find myself in the community around me, I could always find myself in music and movies,” says Cameron, who grew up near Seattle and started acting in community theater at the age of 8 before moving to Los Angeles a few years later.

Music and film have “always made me feel like I wasn’t from a different planet,” Cameron says. “I was always afraid that I could never find my people growing up. I was always on the periphery. But a sci-fi movie makes me remember how the brain works. It makes me feel the walls aren’t caving in. In fact, I have one of the Avengers movies playing right now.”

Cameron cites movies that “feel strange,” or “disturbing films that are pleasant and romantic,” as her favorites, films like Ex Machina, David Lynch’s Elephant Man, Pan’s Labyrinth and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Those exotic worlds resonate with her. “I think there’s something really inherently human in dystopia,” she says. “I think movies about robots reveal things about humanity. There’s this dichotomy of striving for perfection but knowing that perfection marks the end of humanity.”

“I’m not pro-AI or pro-robot,” Cameron qualifies, somewhat humorously. “I’m actually a huge, huge fan of human beings. I’m very social, actually. I’m a huge cuddler.”

That’s why she moved from the West Coast to New York two years ago. “I’m a walking city girl,” Cameron says. “I like to be in the middle of everything. I have so much noise and chaos going on in my brain and my nervous system; New York City matches my energy. I can process myself here more. I don’t hate Los Angeles; I just don’t feel like my best self there. I feel like the scary person in the corner that everyone’s wondering, ‘What’s going on with her?’”

In New York, Cameron says, she rarely feels lonely. “I talk to people and make friends and I sit outside of shops and strike up conversations with strangers,” she explains. “It makes me think [about] how wonderful it is to be alive. How many humans there are still to meet. I’m such a person that feeds off connecting with humans. I love having mini romances for an hour every once in a while.”

Even though she went to high school in Los Angeles, most of her friends, at least the ones “that are on that same equilibrium wave” as she is, live in New York. Of course, when she started writing her new album, Cameron discovered that most of the music industry is based in Hollywood, which she’d just left.

“The music industry is the Wild, Wild West. What a crazy feat it is to get an album finished. It’s been such a shocking, overwhelming process,” Cameron says. “I was really naive going into it.”

That’s in part because Cameron says she did the music thing “backward.” The very first song she wrote for herself—at least the first as Dove Cameron 2.0—was “Boyfriend.” It’s sung to a female crush. Cameron alluringly sings why she’d make a better lover: “ I could be a better boyfriend than him/ I could do the shit that he never did/ Up all night, I won’t quit/ Thinking I’m gonna steal you from him/ I could be such a gentleman/ Plus all my clothes would fit.”

In truth, Cameron says of the song, “I thought it was trash. I was going to delete it off my phone.”

But her team suggested she put it on her TikTok, and it exploded. “It just took me by my hair and pulled me around the world,” she says. “My entire 2022 was chasing this runaway car that was this song.”

Cameron says that the experience was inspiring. “To see people embrace this song, to have them feel it expressed in their bodies was really emotional for me,” she says. “I thought, maybe this secret dark fantasy of being a musician is something I can do. Plus, it would be weird if I walked away after a song this big.”

After that monster hit, she had to work backward and try to develop her sound. “‘Boyfriend,’” she explains, “was a one-time experience. I had to do a lot of deep diving to find what sounds make me feel connected to myself. Everything I do comes from my personal life and my experience first.”

Even though Cameron says she “floats toward things that are melancholic,” baring her soul in writing sessions “freaked me out. I’ve always been prone to depression and contended with my trauma, but I’d mask up and wall up and go to work. Now I was telling stories about things that were very private and painful.”

The result comes in two parts; Alchemical Volume 1 was recently released. There’s a Billie Eilish quality to the music. Some of the songs are “high production bangers,” she says, “but I think it’s genreless. It’s getting back to what I would make if I could make whatever I wanted. It’s about deciding that the only person’s opinion that matters was mine.”

Though Cameron loves to support her friends and has been listening to “Olivia [Rodrigo’s] album, Taylor [Swift’s] album, Sabrina [Carpenter], Renée Rapp, Conan [Gray’s] new stuff,” she wants to keep her sound as pure as possible.

“I love what’s successful on radio, but I don’t want to start thinking about metrics or trends or what people are loving. I don’t want to get insecure about my own process. I’ve done the whole this is what people want from me [thing],” Cameron says, referring, no doubt, to the first Dove Cameron skin she shed and has left, it seems, long behind her. “I want to focus on what I want to say. What lights me up. But I’m still trying to find my voice.”

Hair: Jacob Rozenberg at The Wall Group
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Fashion Stylist Assistant: Amber Rana
Shot at Studios by SK in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

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Henry Purcell’s opera, “The Fairy Queen,” performed by Les Arts Florissants (Julien Gazeau)

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“Light Cloud, Dark Cloud” (1957) © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023

“No. 14” (1960-2)© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023

“The Ochre (Ochre, Red on Red)” (1954-2) © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023

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Something that comes up a lot in the show is: How did you get to be here? So, how did you get to be here, on Broadway, in Merrily?

Oh man, it has really been a journey. I have always loved Sondheim but I really didn’t know the history or full story of this show until I auditioned in May 2022. I saw the audition material, and I just knew that Gussie Carnegie and I had a lot in common, which is scary, because Gussie is extremely complicated. But when the sides for the audition said ‘I’ve been in five Broadway shows… I’m inches away from the top… success isn’t happening fast enough’ something really resonated with me and this character. My audition was an hour and I was with Jonathan Groff doing the scenes and just laughing and crying and having the best time. When I walked out, the casting director said ‘unless I’m crazy you booked this.’ Two days later, I booked it! Now Merrily will be my sixth Broadway show, which I can’t even believe. So many things have happened to get to this moment, some amazing and some heartbreaking but this is my first Sondheim show and it feels like a true manifestation a year and a half in the making. But when I really think of it, it’s a lifetime in the making. I think Gussie, this cast and this role is a once in a lifetime experience and it’s taken a lot to get here, but there’s nothing I would change to be where I am now.

The show is a lot about success, failure, the roads we didn’t take, the roads we did. What feeling does that bring up in you every time you perform it?

It is so deeply personal. It is about an artist trying to make it in New York City and the friendships that we have, the friendships we lose, true determination, the price of success, and it does make you reevaluate every choice you’ve ever made. It can be very cathartic to experience this every day, and find new ways to dig in deeper, but it can also be very emotionally exhausting because this show is so intimate in a lot of ways. It questions our perceptions of success and love. To me, Gussie is a woman, who had to fight very hard for everything she has. She’s had to make a lot of non-emotional decisions to gain success. She’s had to sacrifice a lot of who she was to create who she is now, a person who is palatable for the general public and who is profitable for all of the people around her. That is a very heavy crown to wear especially in a world where, as this is set in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, we are in the civil rights era and Black people are very rarely seen for the depth and humanity that we have.

Krystal Joy Brown and Jonathan Groff in Merrily We Roll Along (Matthew Murphy)

What’s your relationship like with Sondheim’s canon of music? Do you have a favorite song of his?

I’ve always loved his work, the complexity and the depth of his compositions. I grew up, watching the PBS specials of shows like Into The Woods, Company and, of course, Westside Story. His music is infectious, intoxicating and thought-provoking and always makes you see that musical theater can be extremely complex. I have to say “Being Alive” from Company is my favorite Sondheim song. It was actually my audition song for college. I just think that the music and the words of that song are so beautiful, moving and poignant. My second favorite would be “Not a Day Goes By” because of the drama!

What are some of your cult classics: movies, books, theater that took the public a long time to appreciate?

I truly love that Purlie Victorious is getting another life. I was blown away when I saw this new on Broadway production in previews. It is so amazing and to think that Ossie Davis wrote that script in 1961; it is astounding for how much it resonates now. I always find it amazing when things that are seemingly of a very specific time resonate in today’s landscape. That can be wonderful and it can also be slightly jarring when you see the same issues occurring today. Even Merrily is based off of a play that was written in 1934 and the themes hit today just as hard…and that’s almost 90 years ago!

How are things different between performing the show off Broadway and on Broadway?

I think we tried to keep the show pretty similar, and as intimate as possible, even though we’ve multiplied the space times five. Off Broadway, our theater was 199 seats and our backstage space was incredibly tight. Katie Rose Clarke, Lindsay Mendez, and I all shared a dressing room. Reg Rogers, Jonathan Groff, and Daniel Radcliffe all shared a dressing room. And then the entire women’s ensemble were in one dressing room, and the men’s ensemble was in another, and they were separated by barely a curtain, so we were really all in it together. I think that’s where the deep bonds were created. When you’re just that close to one another in that amount of time you can’t help, but become very close personally. I think that the connections with this cast are really special. I really do hope
that I have made some lifelong friends here. I definitely think that doing the show off-Broadway first created that foundation.

Has the cast become more familial because you’ve been together so long?

This cast is very connected. There is a level of depth that is created in these relationships. I believe that we are very protective over each other in a lot of ways, and I have felt so supported by this company, in ways that I could never express. In this time, people have gotten engaged, had babies, some castmates have become roommates, we have dealt with family/personal loss and other challenges, but I hope that my castmates feel just as supported by me in the ways that they have supported me through all kinds of endeavors that have happened in the last year that we have known each other. The show and the story is so
unique for a musical, we’ve had to be extremely vulnerable and express so much of ourselves to each other.

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Brittany Adebumola and Dominique Thorne in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding

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For the last two decades, Peter Cincotti’s albums have been produced by music icons such as Phil Ramone and 16-time Grammy winner David Foster. “Since my debut album 20 years ago, I’ve followed a winding musical road that curved around genres, from jazz to pop to rock and more,” says Cincotti.  “That road was sharp and flat, black and white and held together by one thing: the piano. Killer On the Keys celebrates the power of the piano, the greats who have played it and the unexpected stories it has inspired me to tell.” Peter has performed in some of the world’s most prestigious venues, from Carnegie Hall to L’Olympia in Paris, collaborated with artists ranging from Andrea Bocelli to David Guetta, shared the stage with legends such as Ray Charles, has been featured in films and television series such as Spiderman 2 and House Of Cards. Cincotti has morphed genres and blended influences in a variety of ways, creating an upbeat blend of musical styles that brings active, rhythmic piano playing back into the landscape of modern music.

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“It must have been terrible and I didn’t really understand it, but the whole experience was a revelation,” says Mirren. It was her first real exposure to the theater, and it made her realize she needed to be an actor.

“The play, the lights going down, the amazing story being told, the complexity of the dialogue—it all just exploded in my mind, the way things can do when you’re a prepubescent teenager,” she recalls.

When Mirren got home, she started reading a set of the complete works of Shakespeare that her parents had in the house. “You know those books where there are thousands of pages and the print is really tiny?” she says. “I found that and started reading about these incredible characters, from Caliban to Queen Margaret.”

Shakespeare, she adds, is a “lifetime of work” and has perhaps become her own lifetime of work. “Even then, it’s the great wonder of Shakespeare that you never quite get to the end of it. I’m a great believer that Shakespeare shouldn’t be read until you’ve seen it. I still love to go.” She estimates that she’s seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream at least 10 times and has played nearly every role, from Titania, the queen of the fairies, to both young lovers Helena and Hermia.

That Mirren can slip into nearly any role is a testament to her incredible flexibility as an actor. In her decades of work, Mirren has won a Tony, an Oscar and five Emmys. Now 78, she has been a Calendar Girl, a detective (on television’s Prime Suspect, before doing television was cool), a faithful servant (2001’s Gosford Park), and the Irish wife of a ranch hand (on Paramount Plus’ Yellowstone spin-off 1923, opposite Harrison Ford). She’s been an action star (2010’s Red) and a cockeyed narrator for a famous doll (this summer’s Barbie), as well as a vast number of real-life individuals, including Alma Reville, aka Lady Hitchcock; Catherine the Great; Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper; Queen Elizabeth I; and Queen Elizabeth II. It was the latter of these that won her the Oscar, for 2006’s The Queen, and the Tony, for 2015’s The Audience.

This fall, Mirren takes on yet another world leader: Golda Meir, the first and only female head of the Israeli government. The film, Golda, directed by Oscar winner Guy Nattiv, follows Meir during the 19 days of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973.

Mirren, who is not Jewish, has been criticized for taking on the role. She has called the controversy “utterly legitimate.”

“It was certainly a question that I had, before I accepted the role,” Mirren told the Daily Mail last year. “I said, ‘Look Guy, I’m not Jewish, and if you want to think about that, and decide to go in a different direction…I will absolutely understand.’”

Nattiv says the idea to cast Mirren as Meir originated with the late politician’s grandson Gideon. “And it’s a brilliant idea,” Nattiv says. “Helen has the perfect combination of an authoritative, commanding figure but also this huge well of emotion and humanness. I’d live in any country that chose Helen as their prime minister.”

As for Mirren’s own interest in the role, “It’s an incredible challenge to play someone who was alive and well known,” she says. “Women in positions of great power are rare in history. There’s not many of them. I think they have to be twice as good as any man—or even 10 times. It’s absolute, total commitment. Golda had it. Catherine the Great had it. Elizabeth I had it. Elizabeth II did, too. There’s no casualness about their approach.”

Besides, Mirren continues, life is always more interesting than fiction. “You find extraordinary eccentricities and complexities,” she says. “Real characters are much denser than any sort your imagination can produce. Any person you meet at a bus stop has more in their life story.”

In preparing to take on a role, Mirren says she does a certain amount of research—but not too much. For her role as Clara Dutton in 1923, she read autobiographies of pioneer women in the American West. “But I’m terribly lazy about preparation,” she explains.

What to Mirren is laziness is complete submersion to her fellow actors. “Her concentration is absolute,” says French actress Camille Cottin, who plays Meir’s longtime assistant Lou Kaddar. “Every inch of her body turns into the character. She tells so much with her eyes. I loved her patience, her calm energy, and I greatly admired how easily she could switch from her character to herself again.”

Mirren’s physical transformation into Meir was equally remarkable. The politician—who smoked more than 80 cigarettes a day, including in her hospital bed, and died of cancer in 1978—had a very specific look. Thanks to the use of prosthetics, Mirren, who plays Meir around age 75, a few years before her death, looks older and wearier in the film than her own offscreen years.

“We went through various manifestations; going further, taking pieces away,” recalls Mirren. “Eventually we got to a point where we felt it was sufficient but hopefully not too much. With that sort of makeup, you’re wandering into dangerous territory. Obviously, it’s there and you can’t say it’s not there. But on the other hand, the audience knows I’m not an Irish woman living in Montana.”

During the two to three hours she spent daily in the makeup chair, Mirren would meditate on the character and listen to Meir’s many speeches. Mirren loved becoming this woman, she says, wrinkles and all: “I’ve never done anything like that before. It was an adventure. I got so used to being that person in the daytime that when the makeup all came off and I saw myself as I am, I’d forgotten that was what I looked like. It’s that acting thing—am I becoming her or is she becoming me? There’s a picture the crew made of me and Golda, and we’re in identical outfits. She’s turning to me and saying something, and I’m looking forward with a cigarette. It’s really powerful.”

Nattiv says that he never saw Mirren out of costume during the whole shoot. “She was Golda. Working with her was a dream come true.”

Mirren says her desire to act has ebbed and flowed over the years. “You’re so driven when you’re young, and as time goes on, you don’t have the same mad drive and desire.” The anticipatory anxiety before playing a character doesn’t get worse, she adds, but “it certainly doesn’t go away.”

“It’s a leap into the unknown each time,” she says. “You’re having to create a new family, a new set of relationships. You don’t know if the elements are going to come together. You’re cooking a meal, but without a recipe.”

Still, Mirren adds, “I’m always very excited if I’m being asked to do something I’ve never done before. It’s a fear and a thrill at the same time, like going on a bungee jump.”

When she was offered her role in 1923, there was no script, but the prospect of working with Ford and series creator Taylor Sheridan was exciting, as was being part of the Yellowstone universe.

“It’s soap opera in the best possible sense, like War and Peace. It’s this huge trajectory of American history through the eyes of a family,” she says. “The best literature is great soap opera.”

That role also gave Mirren the opportunity to do something new: drive a buggy. “It’s both easier and more difficult than it looks,” she says. “It all depends on the horse. I’ve never really understood horses, but I got to understand them a bit better. They’re unpredictable and predictable at the same time. They’re funny. They make me laugh.”

Having been married to the filmmaker Taylor Hackford for 25 years has given Mirren even more comfort on film sets. “It’s put me very much on the director’s side, doing my absolute utmost to make the director’s life bearable and to fulfill my actor’s end of the bargain,” she says. “I have a much greater sense of patience.”

She directed a short film in 2001 that made her want to direct more herself, but, “at my heart, I’m an actress. To become a director, I’d have to stop acting, and I didn’t want to give up my acting career. I’m blown away by people who act and direct. I don’t know how they do it.” As she explains it, she appeared in one scene in her short “and I found it almost impossible to concentrate on acting, which takes all of your imagination, while at the same time being practical about where the camera is. I couldn’t do it.”

Instead, she siphons much of her extra energy into gardening, whether it’s at home in the U.K, in Lake Tahoe, where she lives with Hackford, on set or in a hotel room—wherever there happens to be an opportunity.

“It’s meditative,” she says. “It’s a huge body of knowledge which I don’t have and I’m always trying to add to. The beauty of nature is so fantastic. It’s wonderful to watch something grow that you’ve taken a cutting of. My husband is a tree person, and I’m bushes and flowers. It’s a classic division of labor. It’s amazing to see trees we’ve planted.”

“I think gardening probably helps me be a better actor,” Mirren explains. “It kind of cleans your brain. You can’t have an ego with a garden. The fucking plant just won’t grow where you want it to grow. It’s good for an actor to have the cobwebs and ego and insecurity go away for a little.”

Helen Mirren participated in this cover shoot and interview in June before the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Hair: Charley McEwen
Makeup: Neil Young
Manicure: Lucy Tucker
Seamstress: Siobhan Dillon
Producer: Catherine Gargan

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What have you learned about Imelda Marcos in the course of appearing in Here Lies Love?

Oh my goodness, so much. My mother came from the Philippines as a teenager, but we never talked about the history of the country when I was growing up. So, the main thing that I knew about Imelda Marcos was that she had an immense shoe collection. While researching this role I’ve learned so much. In the show, I play her during her rise and fall over a 40 year time period, from ages 17 to 57, until the People Power Revolution where she, and her husband Ferdinand Marcos, were ousted from power and the country. So, there’s a lot in there. But, the most important thing that I learned about in my research for Here Lies Love was the People Power Revolution. The heroic people of the Philippines reclaimed their democracy in a completely peaceful 4-day protest. Learning about their strength and courage has been so inspiring. Getting to share that story with the world every night is a dream come true.

How do you feel about the immersive aspect of the production?

It is a journey for audiences like nothing they’ve ever experienced in a theatre before. The audience, due to the immersive nature of the show, is cast in the role of “The People of the Philippines” over that 40 year era. So, it’s truly incredible to be telling this story with a new audience as my scene partner every night! I get to interact with them throughout the show, shaking their hands during the presidential campaign, singing to them at the Marcos’s wedding reception, and again later when the audience becomes the protestors in the People Power Revolution itself. As someone who has spent a lifetime in this beautiful theatre community, I truly believe that this show is absolutely the most inventive Broadway show that has ever existed. I am so honored to get to share it with audiences and cannot wait to welcome audiences into this immersive experience every night.

Does the immersive aspect of the production ever affect a night’s performance?

Yes! Because the audience is basically my scene partner over the course of the evening, playing the role of the Filipino people throughout the 40 year timeline of the show, my performance is definitely affected by their energy and presence. The way that we connect as I am immersed in the audience, singing 3 feet away, shaking their hands… it allows me to experience each moment through their eyes, which affects what I bring to each moment. It’s a massive challenge, a thrill, and a gift, to have these special moments of connection with different audience members every night. It is the honor of a lifetime.

What was your experience with theater in New York while you were growing up in Princeton?

I was raised in the Bay Area in California, but was so fortunate when my family moved to Princeton when I was a teenager. I loved living so close to Broadway in NYC!  My parents, who were never involved in the arts (my Mom was a nurse and my Dad was a publisher), were avid theater and music lovers. So they took my brother, Adam Jacobs, and I to see shows a lot!  I guess that made a mark on both of us, since we both wound up starring on Broadway!

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In addition to the house’s support of dance institutions and festivals around the world, Chanel is the sponsor of the Baand Together Dance Festival in its third year as part of Lincoln Center’s outdoor Summer for the City event. From July 25-29, renowned dance companies Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, American Ballet Theatre, Ballet Hispánico, Dance Theatre of Harlem and New York City Ballet will share the spotlight. Each of the five free evening performances are curated collaboratively by the artistic directors of the companies, featuring works that are quintessential of each company’s style and brilliance, as well as the world premiere of “Pas de O’Farill” by Pedro Ruiz, a new duet featuring dancers from Ballet Hispánico and New York City Ballet, commissioned by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Ballet Hispánico is performing “Lnea Recta” by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, American Ballet Theatre “Other Dances” by Jerome Robbins, Dance Theatre of Harlem “Nyman String Quartet #2” by Robert Garland, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater “Dancing Spirit” by Ronald K. Brown and the New York City Ballet “The Times Are Racing” by Justin Peck.

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Nevertheless, it’s understandable if she feels otherwise. She’s maintained a nonstop schedule lately, with several projects awaiting release this year, most notably the certain-to-be-a-hit comedy The Out-Laws, which will premiere on Netflix July 7.

She’s had an enduring career after gaining recognition in 2006 for her three-year stint on the long-running TV series Degrassi: The Next Generation. She garnered next-level fame and recognition with her follow-up series The Vampire Diaries (and, later, its spin-off The Originals). Playing a dual role on the hit nocturnal drama, Dobrev developed a fervent fan following that continues to this day.

“I was very lucky,” she recalls of that period. The series was filmed in Atlanta, where she and her fellow cast members, including Ian Somerhalder and Kat Graham, weren’t constantly stalked by paparazzi. “We were able to live relatively normal lives until we flew out for some big press event. I think that was a really healthy way to grow up, considering that we were on a very popular show.”

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During the series’ eight-year run, Dobrev found time for many other projects, including the buddy comedy Let’s Be Cops, the contemporary queer classic The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the big-screen blockbuster XXX: Return of Xander Cage. And she hasn’t stopped working since its finale, appearing in the action thriller Lucky Day and the popular Netflix rom-com Love Hard. Simultaneously, her online profile has grown exponentially, and she currently has bragging rights to more than 26 million Instagram followers. To put it into perspective, that’s 7 million more followers than Madonna.

When informed of this, Dobrev takes a long pause. “Wow, I’m still trying to absorb that,” she finally says. “I didn’t realize that. I’m such a fan of hers.”

With such recognition, there comes an equal amount of responsibility to be a positive role model for her impressionable fans. “I don’t take it that seriously, to be honest,” she admits. “I forget that I have that many followers. I try to lead an authentic life and post whatever is happening in my life, and also keep some privacy in some areas of my life if I can.”

She stops to consider her social media influence on others and its effect on her own life. “There are amazing things that come from it,” she says. “It can also be unhealthy in a lot of ways. You have to manage that and make sure that you don’t get too consumed by it. Taking breaks is also really important for mental health, I think, as a lot of people have highlighted in recent years.”

Her latest project will likely elevate Dobrev’s fame even further. The Out-Laws is a raucous Adam Sandler–produced crime comedy in which Dobrev stars alongside Adam Devine, Ellen Barkin and Pierce Brosnan. Dobrev plays Parker, a free-spirited yoga instructor who is engaged to Devine’s straight-laced bank manager Owen, who begins to suspect that his future in-laws are bank-robbing outlaws. It’s a character she considers a departure, one that required her to spend at least 45 minutes each morning having tattoos applied to her body.

Devine, an uninhibited comic actor who has been friendly with Dobrev since the two appeared together in 2015’s The Final Girls and in an episode of Devine’s Comedy Central series Workaholics, predicts a long career for Dobrev. “She is a fantastic actress, and I think she is going to be around after I’m kicked to the curb.”

When informed of this, Dobrev smiles. “There’s no way he’s ever getting kicked to the curb, so let’s just set the record straight there,” she says with a laugh. “But, yeah, I’ll keep doing it as long as people want to keep watching the things that I make.” She pauses for a moment to reflect. “I’m doing this more than anything for creative expression, and because I love it so much. But, of course, I have other aspirations to continue producing. I directed a short last year and it’s doing the festival circuit. I’d love to direct a feature at some point. My aspirations still lie within this industry.”

Necklace in 18k white gold with diamonds, earrings in platinum with diamonds, prices upon request, BAYCO, bayco.com

Demonstrating her devotion to the industry, Dobrev was recently seen marching alongside picketers in the Writers Guild of America strike. It was no mere photo op; the actress is genuinely on the side of the people who create her characters and put words in her mouth. But her support is also personal: “I’ve written something that hasn’t been made yet,” she reveals. “With the threat of AI coming, I think it’s a complicated issue, but I do think it’s really important that a fair outcome is reached for everyone.”

Another project she’s helped bring to life is The League. Dobrev is an executive producer on the powerful documentary about the early years of the Negro Baseball League alongside musician and Oscar-winning documentarian Questlove. The film has just begun to travel the festival circuit. “It’s such an important story to tell the history of the league forming, as well as segregation that ultimately led to integration,” she says.

On the rare day when she isn’t working, Dobrev likes to sleep in late as late as her body will allow her. “I’ll have a matcha and walk my dog, Maverick, go to the gym or do a Pilates class, steam and sauna, watch a movie, order takeout and go to bed early. That’s like my perfect, perfect day.”

Unlike other influencers of her stature, there’s one thing Dobrev wants to keep private: her three-year relationship with three-time Olympic gold medal–winning snowboarder Shaun White.

In April, when asked about the possibility of an engagement to Dobrev, White replied that, after finishing his Olympic career in 2022, he finally has the freedom to do whatever he wants and claimed the two were just enjoying their time together. “But you never know,” he added coyly. “We’ll see what happens.”

Although the couple has reportedly begun cohabitating, their families have spent holidays together, and they attended the L.A. premiere of The Out-Laws arm-in-arm, Dobrev is cautious about discussing their relationship.

Whatever the future may bring, Dobrev has jam-packed her summer with plans. “I have trips to Europe planned and friends’ weddings to attend,” she says. “I want to walk my dog and hopefully get some sleep.”

It will be a well-earned rest.

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Hair: Christopher Naselli at The Wall Group
Makeup: Lisa Aharon at The Wall Group
Manicure: Gina Edwards
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Fashion Stylist Assistant: Hillary Sproul
Shot at the Hard Rock Hotel New York

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One Dance performs July 20-22 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City

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There are her roles in some of the best (and most rewatched) comedies of the past decade, like Bridesmaids, Neighbors, Spy and, most recently, Spirited, opposite Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell.

There are the family films she’s lent her voice to, from the hugely successful Peter Rabbit movies to this summer’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, out in early August.

There are the charming, underrated indie movies in which she’s made a particularly relatable impression, including The Meddler, opposite Susan Sarandon, and Juliet, Naked, with Ethan Hawke.

She’s also starred in horror movies, including most of the Insidious franchise—the fifth installment, subtitled The Red Door, comes out in July—and on stage, including a revival of You Can’t Take It With You with James Earl Jones on Broadway and a production of Medea, opposite her real-life partner, actor Bobby Cannavale, at BAM in 2020, just before the pandemic.

And that’s not even taking into account her innumerable television roles, from her breakout on Damages, with Glenn Close, to her glowing personification of Gloria Steinem in FX’s limited series Mrs. America.

In the last few years, perhaps unexpectedly, Byrne has become, basically, a poster girl for Apple TV+. In August, she returns with a third season of her series Physical, a dark comedy in which she plays Sheila Rubin, a San Diego housewife with an eating disorder who finds solace in the world of aerobics in the early 1980s.

But before it comes Platonic, which premiered on Apple in late May. This series feels like a more obvious choice for Byrne, given her comedy past; she stars as Sylvia, a lawyer-turned-mom married to Luke MacFarlane, who reconnects with a newly divorced old friend, played by Byrne’s frequent collaborator Seth Rogen. Their relationship stays relatively, well, platonic, but, as happens in half-hour comedies, it ends up complicating the romantic elements in both of their lives.

Platonic was co-created and directed by Nicholas Stoller, who is a particularly important cog in the Rose Byrne metaverse. He directed her and Rogen in both Neighbors films, as well as in 2010’s Get Him to the Greek. Byrne describes the latter movie as “my break in comedy.”

“She’s just so game,” says Stoller of why he’s found Byrne to be something of a comic muse. “She’s probably the most game actor I’ve ever worked with. On Platonic, she’s having a midlife nervous breakdown. In another actor’s hands, it would have felt too heavy or too silly, but she’s somehow able to find the perfect balance and make it completely human.”

Perhaps a reason why Byrne is able to hop from project to project with such seeming ease is because she often collaborates with a team of regulars. “When you’ve worked with people before, you have a nice ability to fall back into rhythm within a few weeks,” says Byrne one afternoon at a café near her Brooklyn home. “You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s right. This is how this ecosystem works together.’”

Collaborating with Stoller and Rogen on this latest series was just “a nice space to be back in again.”

“We’re just happy to make people laugh,” she adds. “There were many days I couldn’t get through the scene [because I was] laughing [so hard].”

Byrne uses the same word to describe Rogen that Stoller used to describe her. “Seth is just always game,” Byrne says. “He’s always got a take on an idea that’s unique, subversive and very interesting. I love that about his work and his comedy. He’s a sweetheart. Just because you’re a funny person doesn’t mean you’re a funny actor, and vice versa.”

Byrne admits that the Neighbors films, in which she and Rogen play a married couple terrorized by their frat boy neighbor, played by Zac Efron, have a “raunchier” tone than Platonic. The new show, she explains, is a slightly more mature and “interesting examination of a male-female friendship. It’s very rare to see that other than in Seinfeld, really.”

She adds that the show “raises important questions about the friendships that existed in a time pre-marriage and career, and whether those friendships can still exist.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Byrne’s role on Physical is, well, a lot more physical. There’s a lot of working out, both on-set and off. “But that’s one of the perks of that job,” she says. “To have this big training three times a week. I see why it’s addictive, but it’s a show about addiction. That kind of exercise is really hard, but it’s the way [I get] into that character.”

“She makes it all seem so easy, but she works so hard,” says Zooey Deschanel, who appears opposite Byrne in the third season of Physical as a TV star who enters her aerobics sphere. “But she’s an absolute joy to work with. She’s extraordinarily easygoing and calm on set.”

Interestingly enough, both Physical and Platonic tackle the subjects of marriage, motherhood and work-life balance. These are the big issues Byrne must clearly grapple with off-screen, too. The 43-year-old actress lives with Cannavale in Brooklyn with their two sons, Rocco, 7, and Rafa, 5.

Clearly one solution for their partnership is working together, as in Medea. This fall, they’ll appear opposite Robert De Niro in Ezra, a drama that casts them as a divorced couple who disagree about how to raise their autistic son.

In a slight departure from her typical family, horror and comedic fare, Inappropriate Behavior is a drama. But Byrne is not intimidated.

As Stoller says, “She can switch between comedy and drama at the drop of a hat. She’s just a comedy and acting machine.”

“Rose has this extraordinary quality of being simultaneously gentle and fierce,” says Inappropriate Behavior director Tony Goldwyn, also an actor. “She always surprises with the subtlety and complexity of her choices.”

As for the complexity of Byrne’s off-screen choices, after spending much of the peak pandemic months in Australia while Cannavale filmed Nine Perfect Strangers, then going to Los Angeles for Physical and Platonic, she is quite happy to take a beat back in New York with her family.

“I really enjoy being back in the city,” she says. “What I love about New York is that you walk around and just run into people all day. That doesn’t really happen in California. We love the city and Bobby loves the city, so we’re not going to go any time soon.”

Being back in New York also means a more regular routine and day-to-day life. “I’m taking a break after having done jobs continuously,” Byrne says. “I’m enjoying the role of being a mom, and I’m looking forward to having a nice summer.”

As for how she handles that hugely important role of mom with two boys under 8, “I need structure,” she says, “otherwise they’ll just go stir crazy in the house. It’s fun to get out, and there’s always lots to do in the city with kids. Or we can just take them to the park.”

At the same time, Byrne is eager for the next thing. Some might even say she was “game” for anything.

Most of all, “I’d love to get back on stage. I would love to revisit that again,” Byrne says. “It’s such a rigorous muscle to work, and it’s also the most extraordinary experience to just exist in that moment. Every performance is different.”

But she’s also happy to continue to grow the Rose Byrne comedic metaverse. Now that she and Rogen have played spouses and best friends, what could be next? The possibilities are endless.

“I have such respect for comedy,” Byrne says, beaming. “I think it’s really hard. I think it’s hard to make it look effortless. I certainly work at it.”

Hair: Harry Josh at Statement Artists
Makeup: Hung Vanngo at The Wall Group
Manicure: Julie Kandalec
Producer: Mariana Suplicy
Styling Assistants: Francesca Lazaro, Kristen Setter, Dawson Hieger (Hair), Jayden Ho Pham (Makeup)
Shot on location at Olympia Dumbo in Brooklyn

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“Venice and the Doges” (Rizzoli)

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Claude Monet “Charing Cross Bridge, The Thames (Charing Cross Bridge, la Tamise)” (1903)

Though they worked more than 50 years apart, impressionist painter Claude Monet and abstract artist Mark Rothko actually have a lot in common. The new book Monet/Rothko (Flammarion) examines these two artists who explored the frontiers of abstraction.

“Monet/Rothko” (Flammarion)

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In the new musical New York, New York, Ryan, who turns 28 just before the Tony Awards in June, stars as Jimmy Doyle, an aspiring musician who falls in love with an aspiring singer named Francine Evans (an equally star-making role for co-star Anna Uzele).

If the title feels familiar, it’s probably because you know the old Kander and Ebb song backward and forward. The little town blues, the vagabond shoes, the city that never sleeps. The show, which also includes other classic Kander and Ebb tunes like “And the World Goes ‘Round,” “Marry Me” and “A Quiet Thing,” is based on the 1977 Martin Scorsese film of the same name. That movie starred a couple of no-names as Jimmy and Francine: Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli. Easy loafers to fill.

But Ryan is up for the challenge. First, there’s the dancing. He tap danced a bit in college, though not enough to score an A, he recalls. When the show’s creative team presented him with the big Act 1 tap number inspired by the iconic photograph “Lunch Upon a Skyscraper,” they told him that as the leading man, he could just step to the side and let the real dancers strut their stuff.

“I started doing the math in my head, and I just thought, ‘I’m on a skyscraper, Where am I going to go?’” Ryan says, laughing. “If I was in the audience, I know how critical I would be if someone was up there faking it.”

“I love an actor who is not scared to take chances, and that’s very much Colton,” says the show’s director, Susan Stroman.

So Ryan spent six months at Broadway Dance Center re-learning to tap. He also worked on the routine for umpteen hours alone with a choreographer. When the rest of the dancers came in to learn the number for the first time, Ryan was humbled yet again. “I had to leave the room. I’m watching these brilliant dancers pick up the choreography in five minutes. They were talking in this other language.”

“It was a real struggle,” Ryan adds, though you wouldn’t know it from his seamless steps onstage.

Then, he needed to learn the instruments. Jimmy is a jazz pianist, “and they wanted it to be so real,” Ryan says. Offstage, he plays the guitar, which was of no help, and he played the tuba in middle school. “[The creative team] thought that was hilarious.” They added in a little tuba action, but Ryan had to relearn how to play that—“It’s not like riding a bicycle,” he says—and spent months learning jazz piano.

“He’s constantly pushing himself to take risks and explore new possibilities,” says Lin-Manuel Miranda, who contributed lyrics to the show. “He leads with a fearlessness in his performance.”

“This whole thing has ended up being a lot of firsts. I’ve never prepped this hard in terms of learning new skills,” says Ryan. “It’s a strange exercise in doing everything I thought was the scariest thing. People ask me, ‘How do you do it?’ and in general, I just don’t know. The minute I start thinking about it, I might lose it all.”

When he was growing up in Kentucky, Ryan’s grandparents exposed him to lots of old movie musicals, West Side Story, Camelot and Li’l Abner among them. In grade school, he landed his first stage role as the Munchkinland coroner in The Wizard of Oz. Quickly, “theater became my everything, really,” he says, culminating in a high school performance in Les Miz.

“That’s the feeling I’m still chasing,” Ryan says of playing Jean Valjean at 17. “I felt something energetic beyond me. I imagine it’s what it’s like for a dancer to jump into the air and do a full tilt, more than 180 degrees. That must feel like the most incredible thing in the world.”

At 21, Ryan had already made it pro in New York as Ben Platt’s understudy in Dear Evan Hansen. He and Platt are still very good friends; Platt happens to be appearing in a revival of the musical Parade this season, just a block away from the St. James. Ryan also appeared on stage in the Bob Dylan musical Girl From the North Country, but after that closed due to COVID-19, “I tiptoed away from things Broadway, even though I missed home a little bit.”

Ryan got called to participate in a workshop of New York, New York while he was filming the Hulu true crime drama The Girl from Plainville in Savannah, Georgia. (He plays Elle Fanning’s boyfriend, who commits suicide. “It was a little heavy,” he says.)

When he read the title sheet on the New York, New York script, he recognized this was “a legends-only lineup” of Kander, Ebb, Miranda and Stroman, a five-time Tony winner.

“It was one thing on paper, but to hear the magnitude of the breadth of [Kander and Ebb’s] work—being inside of it, it lingered like nothing else,” Ryan recalls. The show is a call to arms, he explains, for loving a somewhat broken New York. “And to anyone who saw [the workshop], it was deeply emotional. I just put my hands up hoping we’d do it for real.”

“I knew Colton was right for the role the moment I met him,” recalls Stroman. “He’s got the confidence in his craft and a true passion for music that emanates from every part of his being. Plus, he’s charm personified.”

Miranda adds that Ryan’s voice “is from another era, in the best way. He sounds right at home in 1946.”

Says Uzele, his onstage love interest: “He knows exactly who he is. He doesn’t try to fill anyone’s shoes but his own, and he does it damn well.”

The role of Jimmy Doyle is one Ryan had always dreamed of—a melange, he explains, of “the goof who does a soft shoe like Gene Kelly and the guy who gets to sing the beautiful love ballad to the girl.”

Performing the show nightly, he says, is an “unbridled joy. It gets my blood racing.” It’s also nice to be back in New York with his fiancée, Adrian Grace Bumpas, an actor and producer.

“She is New York City to me. This whole thing is for her,” Ryan says. “We have a lot of dreams together.”

Achieving those dreams, at the moment, involves drinking two gallons of water a day and trying to get a nightly eight or nine hours of sleep before singing and dancing his heart out down in Times Square.

“As much as I’ve been hoping for this moment, I’ve been slowly tiptoeing away from it,” Ryan says. “But I’ve found myself readier than I ever thought. I’m hacking it and I’m hoofing it and I’m really happy where I’ve landed.”

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Hair: Madison Sullivan
Grooming: Sandy Nicha

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The truth is, explains Genao, with this first Broadway leading role, “the vocal stamina of this show is no joke.” It’s certainly more vocal stamina than her job, post-college, working at a private Lebanese bank, here in New York. She left after landing a role in the ensemble of On Your Feet, a Cinderella story of its own.

Bad Cinderella, retooled after a London run, is a campy, over-the-top spin on the classic fairy tale. Everyone is beautiful in the kingdom of Belleville, and Cinderella, here, just finds that completely annoying. She also finds herself in love with a somewhat nerdy Prince Sebastian who equally finds Belleville’s superficiality unsatisfying.

“I love that in our version of this fairytale, Cinderella does what’s best for her,” Genao says. “She doesn’t leave with the prince or need a man to fulfill or support her. She leaves on her own in search of a better life and in search of what makes her happy.”

Genao has gotten into a daily pre-show routine, which includes LED candles, her air purifier, a cup of ginger tea and the occasional episode of Succession in the background. (“It’s my favorite new obsession,” she says.) Oh, and she’s learning to trust herself more, both on and off-stage.

“Andrew has been a dream to work with,” says Geneo of Lloyd Webber. “He’s been so encouraging, consistently vocal with me about what he loves that I do, how proud he is of me, supporting me to sing the song however feels best to me.”

So, she adds, “if Andrew Lloyd Webber believes in me and trusts me, why shouldn’t I trust myself?”

Plus, she doesn’t need a glass slipper or a ball gown for that.

Linedy Genao in “Bad Cinderella”

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His early thirties, however, are returning him to his musical roots. This spring he plays King Arthur in Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Camelot, and next year, he appears in a new live action musical version of Snow White, opposite Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot.

“I was a musicals fan as a kid,” says Burnap. But if you’d told him he’d be experiencing a musical renaissance, he wouldn’t have believed it. “I kind of put that dream on the shelf.”

Despite a few trepidations and some voice coaching, he’s discovered it’s not much different from classic drama. “In Shakespeare, they leap into verse. In musicals, they leap into song. It’s all an articulation of a complex emotion,” says Burnap.

Camelot is a particular pleasure, he adds, because he gets to work opposite actors Philipa Soo (as Guenevere) and Jordan Donica (as Lancelot). “They’re so deeply talented,” he says. And with director Bartlett Sher and writer Aaron Sorkin, who has provided a new book to the show. “I’ve been a fan of Aaron’s since my dad let me watch The West Wing,” Burnap adds.

“It’s a big playground,” Burnap says of rehearsing and performing Camelot at the Vivian Beaumont, “and it’s going to be so much fun.”

Phillipa Soo and Andrew Burnap in “Camelot”

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Barely a decade into his professional acting career, the 28-year-old has already vividly portrayed blues great B.B. King in Baz Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated fantasia Elvis and legendary activist Fred Hampton in Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed The Trial of the Chicago 7, and will soon march across television screens as Martin Luther King Jr. in the forthcoming Disney +/National Geographic anthology series Genius: MLK/X. Next year, he’ll provide the voice for pre-villainous Taka (who later becomes the villain Scar) in Barry Jenkins’ highly anticipated prequel Mufasa: The Lion King. Later this year, he’ll offer his take on the short, tempestuous life of brilliant artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in a new film biopic titled Samo Lives.

“I don’t think about them as icons at all,” he says, seemingly taking these rare multidimensional characters he’s been assigned in his stride. “Because at the end of the day, I still see them eat lunch and pick shit out of their teeth and they just seem like dudes.”

He insists he doesn’t feel the responsibility when portraying real men that he did with some of his earlier fictional roles in films, such as Luce and Waves, which first garnered him attention for his intense screen magnetism and versatility.

“I think the common denominator is the fact that they believed in themselves and they weren’t afraid of opposition,” he offers. “They learned that adversity ultimately makes them stronger and more interesting and, ultimately, the individual always wins over conformity.”

As impressive as his résumé is (his debut was in the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave), consider his newest film, Chevalier (in theaters April 21), in which he plays another real-life trailblazer. It’s a lush, sweeping historical epic in which Harrison delivers a captivating performance as Joseph Bologne, the 18th-century musical prodigy known as Chevalier de Saint-Georges but more commonly referred to as the Black Mozart. The character offers a coveted role that required the actor to not only showcase his prowess with the violin but demonstrate precision fencing skills.

Fortunately for Harrison, he had previous experience with both the art and the sport that allowed him to nail the character. In director Joe Wright’s 2021 adaptation of Cyrano, he learned to wield a sword with expertise, although he shares that his grand fencing scene didn’t make the final cut. The romantic film also showcased his richly expressive singing voice.

“The first instrument I ever played was the violin, and I was pretty good when I was a kid,” Harrison recalls. “When Hurricane Katrina hit, the program that I was a part of was no longer there, so I stopped.”

His relationship with music didn’t end there, however; it’s in his blood, or at least absorbed through the walls of his childhood home. Born and raised in New Orleans, Harrison grew up in a musical household. His father was a popular music teacher who was close pals with Harry Connick Jr. and Wynton Marsalis.

Still, he decided to read everything he could find on Bologne to make his performance as credible as possible. He even showed up on set with binders filled with facts about the musician.

“Those details all matter when you’re trying to justify choices,” he says. “I made these big poster boards in the timeline so I would know what was happening when, but then I had to throw it out the window and just start to create a person, because, ultimately, it is not really active to act history.”

After considering several promising young actors for the film, director Stephen Williams was confident Harrison was the ideal choice.

“Once Kelvin had a sense of how he wanted to tackle the role, he dedicated himself tirelessly to peeling back the layers of the character in a uniquely compelling way,” Williams recalls. “I truly believe that he is the only actor who could have pulled off all that we asked of him for this film.”

It’s as if his previous roles have led to this pivotal film, particularly his brief but dazzling turn as King in Elvis, Luhrmann’s flamboyant take on the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s a film that he was thrilled to be a part of. “Baz is a firecracker,” Harrison shares. “When he speaks, pretty colors come out and you just get moved by anything that’s happening on that set.”

Many actors would be intimidated by playing Martin Luther King Jr., but Harrison says he wasn’t interested in playing the late activist as the iconic figure he’s become. He prefers to convey the man before the heroic character history has made him.

“I can’t play the Time magazine covers or the Nobel Peace Prize,” he says. “All I can do is breathe and go, ‘Well, how do I take care of my kids? How do I make sure my wife feels safe? How do I make sure my people feel seen?’ and make sure they have a sense of somebodiness.”

Still, the gravitas required to play such a mythic man must weigh on an actor.

“The biggest thing that I’ve learned from all of these men is being reminded to never try to fit into a mold, but always do something because it’s coming from the purest place of my heart,” he says. “I’m genuinely interested in sharing that and not trying to preach to the public.”

As for his own private life, it surely can’t be all work and zero play for this busiest of young actors. In 2020, while promoting the guiltiest pleasure on his CV, The High Note, Harrison told an interviewer that he wanted “to explore sexuality and sensuality.” Asked about his current relationship status, he laughs and offers a vague response. “Oh, you’re getting to the juicy stuff,” at which point his publicist asks him to skip this question. The guy is always moving on to the next subject, even in real life.

It’s intriguing to wonder where Harrison will go from here, having already portrayed many of the most dynamic characters any actor could hope for. Harrison longs for a rest.

“I’m well beyond what I could have dreamt of, and so now I’m just trying to work on sleeping more so I can dream more stuff and have something new to bring to the table before I burn out,” he says. “I’m already doing stuff that I just couldn’t believe I’d get the chance to do, and I’m blown away by the experiences. I’m just going to ride that wave.”

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Like as a tiny backup singer and dancer behind Cher in the music video of “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss),” from the soundtrack of her film debut, the 1990 movie Mermaids. Or as disgruntled camper Wednesday Addams torturing camp counselor Christine Baranski in Addams Family Values—camp being the operative word here. As the steadfast lover to Charlize Theron’s serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the 2003 film Monster. As a nymphomaniac chained to a radiator in 2006’s controversial Black Snake Moan. As 19th-century ax murderer Lizzie Borden in The Lizzie Borden Chronicles, which earned her a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination in 2016.

And it just so happens that Ricci is breaking out again, this time in the hit series Yellowjackets, which returns to Showtime this spring. She plays Misty Quigley, a nurse whose behavior tends more sociopathic than empathetic. (She moonlights as an armchair internet sleuth.) Misty becomes caught up in a mystery related to her past, when her high school soccer team was involved in a deadly plane crash.

Critics have gone wild for Ricci’s performance. Just some of the headlines include “Misty Quigley Is Terrifying and Fascinating,” “In Defense of Misty Quigley, Yellowjackets’ Unsung Heroine” and “How Misty Quigley Became Yellowjackets’ Best Character.”

The Yellowjackets producers “came to me with this part,” says Ricci, who didn’t know much about Misty except for a short, poppy scene in the pilot. “But I read it and was super, super excited.”

“We can’t imagine anyone else in this role,” say series creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson. “We always knew that Misty needed to be played by an actress with both amazing comedic timing and incredible depth and humanity. It would have been all too easy for her to become a caricature, as opposed to a flesh-and-blood human for whom we can feel empathy, even as she says and does wild, unthinkable things. Luckily, Christina has an incredible ability to find the truth in even the most heightened circumstances.”

Another actress might be insulted by being recruited to play a psychopath. Not Ricci.

“It’s flattering. I’m very intrigued by people’s behavior who seem to be on the fringe, who don’t react like the norm,” Ricci says. “When someone comes to you and says, ‘This is a really strange character. Nobody seems to get her. Can you use your insight and intelligence to figure her out?’ I think it means I have an understanding of humanity and an observational ability. I’m proud of that. I enjoy playing characters that if you didn’t have a sideways way into it, you wouldn’t be able to do it.”

If you met her in real life, “you’d stay as far away from Misty as possible,” Ricci continues. She believes audiences have responded so positively to the character because “she’s so socially inept, and I think that’s funny to people.” Also, because she’s just a character in a television series, “we don’t really have to deal with her in person.”

Ricci also appears in the Netflix hit Wednesday, a contemporary spin on the character she so memorably played in the early 1990s. Jenna Ortega now plays Wednesday, while Ricci stars as her “normie” teacher, Marilyn Thornhill, who may not be exactly who she claims to be.

Ricci joined the series when there were only four episodes left to shoot. “I wasn’t hesitant at all. It was fun to be a part of the next generation of Wednesday Addams,” she explains. “And I love Tim [Burton] so much.” (Burton is an executive producer on Wednesday and directed four of the episodes. He and Ricci worked together on the 1999 movie Sleepy Hollow.)

Ricci thinks that people respond to her and Ortega’s Wednesday because they both have “so much integrity and are unwilling to bend to societal pressures. That’s really wonderful, especially in a little girl.” Audiences can live vicariously, she says, “and truly be themselves.”

Playing Wednesday Addams in her childhood was particularly important for Ricci, she says. “It made me aware that I could play characters I wouldn’t have to sacrifice myself for. I never liked the typical family fare. I never liked the kid who had to smile constantly and be fake and phony. To know that there was an option for me filled me with hope. I think a lot of people have felt like they were outsiders in different parts of their lives. They’ve felt lonely, like nobody understands them.”

Now 43 and the mom of two kids, Ricci does admit, “I’m not a typical person.”

“I can’t join groups,” she says. “I never agree. I have specific interests and feelings. My take will always be different. I’m very comfortable with it. I don’t need people to agree with me to be friends with them.”

Ricci continues, “I’ll always be the one that doesn’t like the person everyone else likes.” People tend not to ask her feelings about new movies and television shows. “They know I won’t give my opinion, because it’s always the opposite. My tastes differ. Usually it’s me not liking other things that people like.”

It just so happens that Ricci, who has about an hour a day to watch television, is currently enjoying HBO’s The Last of Us, which most people do, generally, seem to like. “OK, sometimes I do love things that everybody else likes,” she says.

As for the group thing, Ricci says she’s more of a “one-on-one friend. Most of my friends don’t know each other.” When I ask if she’s in a book club—Ricci starred as Zelda Fitzgerald in Amazon Prime’s Z: The Beginning of Everything, which she also produced—she responds quickly, “God, no.” (Recent favorite reads, though, include Circe by Madeline Miller and a collection of Shirley Jackson stories.)

That said, Ricci has found great camaraderie in her Yellowjackets cast, which also includes Hollywood lifers Juliette Lewis and Melanie Lynskey.

“This has been a great on-set experience. We all really, really love each other a lot,” Ricci says. “I’ve never been so close with people I’ve worked with. We’ve all been through similar things. We all share stories between set-ups. We bullshit. It’s great.”

Ricci thinks the closeness comes from being older “and not in our confusing, emotion-filled twenties. When you’re older, you settle a bit.”

“We’re all friends working on projects. We all support each other. We really want the best for the show,” she continues. “We’ve all been through similar things. A lot of us have kids.”

The support has been especially important because shooting season two in Vancouver, far from her family in Los Angeles, wasn’t the easiest. Ricci has an 8-year-old son, Freddie, from her first marriage, and a 14-month-old daughter, Cleopatra, from her second, to Los Angeles hairstylist Mark Hampton.

“I’m glad I waited,” says Ricci of choosing to have a second child. “I would feel so much guilt if I wasn’t fully attentive to her. When [Freddie] was younger, I gave him full attention. He got to have that special babyhood and childhood, and now he’s able to help with his sister. There’s not a lot of jealousy. He loves her.”

Freddie is now around the age Ricci was when her star began to rise, and he has a little bit of the acting bug. “Yes, he’s interested in acting, and I’m a believer that if a kid really wants to do it, and they’re being supported instead of being pushed, then they should be able to,” Ricci explains. “I see a lot of how I was in him. I know that he would be totally capable of being a child actor, but I’ve told him that there’s no one to take him. You have to take your child to auditions. You have to take them to set. I can’t do that.”

For now, Freddie has made due with watching his mom’s past performances, including as the original Wednesday and on Wednesday. “He loved it so much,” Ricci says. “He’s really proud of me. He always asks, ‘How did they do this scene?’ and ‘How did they do that sort of thing?’ I think it’s funny.”

The first time Freddie visited her on the Yellowjackets set, he wanted to watch the first season of the show, which has its share of gore and thrills. “I fast-forwarded through all the inappropriate parts,” Ricci laughs. “He has a lot of questions. He always needs me to tell him what happens, and he peppers me with nonstop—what do they call them?—fan theories.”

Most of the questions, of course, Ricci doesn’t know the answers to. “I suggested he go sit down with one of the writers and ask them,” she says.

The truth is, sometimes Ricci only reads the Yellowjackets scenes that involve the present-day characters and skims the rest. She doesn’t get to see a lot of the show being shot, and she likes to watch the episodes and be surprised. “I do enjoy watching it as an audience member. It’s really fun,” Ricci says. “Though my son tells me not to skim.”

Ricci is not surprised that, after more than 30 years, she continues to work steadily in film and television. “There’s always work to be found,” she says. “It’s my job. I’ve always supported myself and my family, and it feels more like my job than ‘I get to do a special project and then go back to my life.’”

That said, the success of Yellowjackets and our cultural obsession with Misty wasn’t something she had in her sightlines.

“I never would have predicted this,” Ricci says. “But I also never try to guess.”

Hair: Anh Co Tran at The Wall Group 
Makeup: Allan Avendano at A-Frame Agency 
Manicure: Zola Ganzorigt at The Wall Group 
Producer: Aiden Tyler Lee 
Styling Assistants: Cherry Wang, Gilbert Villa, Alexis Kossel
Shot on location in Bel Air, Los Angeles, at 1859 Bel Air Road

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“How come you can’t be like the other moms?” Hayek Pinault recalls Valentina asking her at the time. “You’re just not cool and chic.”

Of course, when Salma Hayek Pinault shows up at the Spaniards Inn, a historic pub that appears in works by Bram Stoker and Charles Dickens and is not far from her home in Hampstead Heath, she’s the epitome of cool. Stepping out of a BMW, fashionably late and fierce, she comes in jeans and a Gucci jacket (her husband, Valentina’s father, is Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault), wearing no makeup, with a handsome driver in tow who’d fit in quite nicely with a crowd out of Kingsman.

But raising a teenager? That’s a different story. In that conversation, Hayek Pinault told her daughter that when Valentina was little, their friend and neighbor Charlotte Gainsbourg—whose mother, Jane Birkin, is the namesake of the covetable bag—would often carry and play with her. Isn’t that a lot cooler than knowing what a Birkin is?

Valentina asked her mom why she hadn’t told her earlier. Hayek Pinault felt that knowing about a Birkin at that age wasn’t necessary.

“I said, ‘I would never do that. You’re right, I’m not like other moms and I refuse,’” Hayek Pinault remembers, sipping on a late-afternoon cup of black coffee in a quiet corner of the pub. “We don’t talk a lot about brands at home with the family. It’s more about artistic expression.”

When she and her daughter are in the U.S., “we love going to Target,” Hayek Pinault adds. “It’s funny, because you end up spending a lot more than you thought you would.”

Still, with Kering owning such companies as Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, Hayek Pinault must have a pretty serious wardrobe. She admits she does, and she’s proud to chime in that Valentina “steals from my closet all the time. If she didn’t, I would feel beat down.”

She elaborates. “I want to be angry about not finding a thing or two in there because I know she took it,” Hayek Pinault admits of her daughter’s occasional ransacking. “I want to have that contradiction in my life. It’s a passage of age. It’s a connection. I might not be cool, but at least she must have liked one thing I had in there.”

When Hayek Pinault told her kids (Valentina, her stepdaughter Mathilde, 21, and two stepsons) she’d been cast in the sequel Magic Mike’s Last Dance, which would involve the actress in potentially provocative scenes with a negligibly clothed Channing Tatum, they didn’t blink. A racy still from the film shows the actress with her hand on Tatum’s abs.

“They know Channing. They know [his girlfriend] Zoë Kravitz. They know what Magic Mike is. They knew I was going to make it. They grew up with me doing this job, and their father is so cool about it and understands it so well, so there’s never been an issue,” Hayek Pinault says.

There was just one concern about the movie: “As long as you don’t have to do the cheesy dance,” Valentina said. “As long as you don’t have to do the Pony,” referring to an iconic dance Tatum does to Ginuwine’s song “Pony” in the first Magic Mike. “I said, ‘No, I don’t have to. Don’t worry about it.’ I’d read the script, and I knew I wasn’t doing the Pony.”

Pony or not, says Tatum, “the fact that Salma was interested in our story was a blessing. She’s an icon.”

Tatum might have second thoughts were he to look at the bio on Hayek Pinault’s Instagram account. Valentina, for one, thinks it’s the “cheesiest thing in the world.” Instead of, say, “actress, activist, bombshell, recent Lady Gaga co-star in House of Gucci,” it’s a description of the actress told in a series of nearly 100 emojis. These include a fist bump, a unicorn, a crystal ball, a whale, a bottle of Champagne, two glasses of Champagne, a lipstick, a kiss, a squid…and it goes on. It’s really quite remarkable and sweet and, yes, cheesy.

Hayek Pinault, who has 22 million followers on the platform but says she often forgets to post, laughs when it comes up. “I like a lot of things, and it’s too complicated to think of a way to describe myself in words,” she says. She explains that, as an actress, an artist and a mother, she’s certainly sensitive, “but what saves me a lot is myself and my sense of humor. I don’t want to try to be cool. I want to laugh.”

Friends, in particular appreciate that about her. “I love her open, hearty, unselfconscious laugh, her dancing with freedom and mirth, and her commitment to her growth, creatively and personally,” says her pal Ashley Judd, who met Hayek Pinault in 1995 and played opposite the actress in Frida. “ I love her devotion to female alliances and her connected way of knowing just about everyone, it seems, and how she brings people together.”

Hayek Pinault doesn’t just bring people together; she also does it with animals. As a gift to her husband, she gave him a pet rescue owl and named the bird “Kering.” Wait. Back up. Did he ask for an owl? She shakes her head no.

“But that was my way of having one,” Hayek Pinault says, with a wink. “She loves me.” (She means the owl.)

Having an owl named Kering can’t possibly beat having a husband who runs Kering. But, especially as Gucci has surged in popularity these last few years, there is a downside. People are always asking her for a discount.

“Oh, my God, it’s a problem. It’s crazy,” Hayek Pinault says, while acknowledging that it is not the worst problem to have. “But it happens much more than you would think. I’ve had situations where a doctor I’ve seen for a long time brings it up. I’ve had journalists ask me for it. My daughter gets asked for it at school.”

Hayek Pinault says she understands the urge. “I would want it, too,” she says. But she makes a point to not interfere with her husband’s business. “I wouldn’t do that to him,” she explains. “I don’t want to be in a position of who I give it to and who I don’t. I feel so mortified and uncomfortable, and I don’t want these people to feel like they’re not appreciated. So I stay out of it. I don’t give Gucci discounts.”

The family lives in London because that’s where Valentina goes to school, and Pinault has offices in London and Paris. “I need green. I need nature,” she says. “I love this area. I like the plants. I like the good oxygen. I like to go walk in the park.”

Still, time zone-wise, it’s a full nine hours later than Hollywood, which means she has to do the “double shift.” She has a full day in London, which involves working on her philanthropic causes, among other things, but at 5 p.m. London time, Los Angeles starts to wake up and she shifts focus to her acting and producing projects. There are phone calls until midnight, she says; Hayek Pinault doesn’t use a computer or email (except for her daughter’s school communications).

“I’m either working or tired,” she says. Add in the fact that she enjoys spending time with her husband and family, and “that sometimes makes you very reclusive.”

Living in London also gives her a sense of freedom to do what she wants. “I don’t feel like I have to wear this or be this or do this movie. I don’t need to belong to a box,” she explains. “I like to do whatever I want to do.”

(One thing she does not want to do is theater. “I throw up. I get panic attacks.” She got her start playing Jasmine in a production of the story of Aladdin in Mexico. In rehearsals, everything was great. The first time she had an actual performance, which included being carried out from the wings on a bed, “I saw the audience, I jumped out and I started throwing up.”)

Besides the latest Magic Mike in February, directed by Steven Soderbergh, who also directed the actress in Traffic, she reprises her vocal role as Kitty Softpaws this holiday season opposite her friend Antonio Banderas in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, a decade after the original. Then there’s Without Blood, a drama about a war-torn country based on the 2002 novel by Alessandro Baricco, opposite Mexican actor Demián Bichir. Though the film does not yet have a release date, it’s particularly notable because it was directed by Angelina Jolie, with whom Hayek Pinault became friends while making the Marvel movie The Eternals.

“I’ve never met anyone in my life that was more different than the public image,” Hayek Pinault says of Jolie. “She cares about people. She’s very present. She’s very empathetic. No fakeness. And, oh, God, she could have made this movie with anyone in the world. I didn’t want to play the character; I was really scared of the character. She suffers the entire movie. But I did want her to direct me. So of course I said yes.”

Sure, they share tips on how to be Hollywood moms, but making Without Blood took their relationship to the next level. “We are closer than ever,” Hayek Pinault says. “For both of us it was an amazing, life-changing experience.”

“Really,” Hayek Pinault adds, “It made me fall in love deeper and stronger with being an actress.”

Another experience she had on a film set this year was also particularly empowering. Hayek Pinault won’t name the movie, but when she walked on set, “I started sobbing.” That’s because she looked around and noticed that 80 percent of the people in key positions were women, including the director of photography, the camera operator and the whole sound department.

“I don’t know how long I’ve done this, but it was the first time I’ve seen that in 30 years or more,” she explains. “I waited my entire life for that moment.”

Hayek Pinault has, of course, been on the forefront of advocating for women, and not just in Hollywood. One of the most public situations was a moving and terrifying essay she wrote in 2017 for the New York Times, in which she described the struggles and hurdles of making 2002’s Frida Kahlo biopic Frida under the oppressive and sadistic hand of Harvey Weinstein.

“It took me months and months to write, and I wrote it myself. But I’ve never read it since,” she says. The Times chose the piece to include in its Pulitzer Prize submission packet in 2018. “And we won,” Hayek Pinault says. “That’s really nice for a dyslexic Mexican with questionable English.”

In the article, Hayek Pinault describes how she felt it was her duty to bring Frida Kahlo’s story to the screen. She had to see the project, directed by Julie Taymor, to fruition. “And I was very, very strong in front of [Weinstein]. I stood up. I knew that was the only way,” she recalls. “Harvey was scary, but I think he was also attracted to people not letting him walk over them.”

They had plenty of professional fights, she says, “but I never really got to tell him everything I thought about him—I just kept it all smooth. I never went and said, ‘You know what? You really hurt me.’ You don’t do that to an aggressor because you lose. They see you break and you’re done.”

The thing is, she concedes, “my story is not that special. I put it in the right words, but it happens in every walk of life.”

Frida ended up being nominated for six Oscars, including for Best Actress. It won two (Best Original Score and Best Makeup), though not with any help from Miramax, which was pushing Chicago and Gangs of New York at the time.

When the film was released, Hayek Pinault says, “I didn’t feel supported. I thought, We have so much to offer as women, and why does it have to be so hard?” Two decades later, the industry has made great strides towards representation and inclusivity, but “art needs to be courageous. We need to go to new places.”

Does she feel supported now by her peers? “Yes, now I do. But I’m 56. It took a while.”

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​​“Tom Cruise is one of the reasons I wanted to get into acting,” he says. “So many pilots became pilots because of Top Gun, and so many actors became actors because of Tom Cruise in this film.” So he did what any hungry actor would and chased his dream until it became a reality.

​​In Top Gun: Maverick, out this November, Powell plays Hangman, a character who, he says, is “the best pilot in the Navy” and has as much confidence as Maverick, the role Cruise is revisiting. Extreme training was required, and when Powell arrived on set (the movie was filmed in and around naval bases in Nevada and California), he was already ready to go. “We had to learn how to fly F-18 airplanes,” says Powell. “I was doing so much prep on this film, so when Day 1 came, Hangman was ready to go.” But stepping into such an iconic franchise wasn’t always easy. “I think whenever you’re trying to tread on hallowed ground, you feel like there’s no way to beat it,” Powell says. “But I’ll say this: I think this is the greatest movie ever made: it’s adventure, heart, comedy, it’s just epic. Plus we have 35 years and the benefit of Tom Cruise’s career behind us.”

​​The 32-year-old Powell is as charming and gregarious in person as he is on the screen. He’s shown range in roles such as astronaut John Glenn in Hidden Figures, a preppy frat boy in the horror comedy series Scream Queens and an assistant who sets up his demanding boss in the romantic comedy Set It Up, but now his action star status is cemented.

​​In addition to the impression he’s made on audiences, he’s also charmed his co-stars. “Besides his obvious talent, I loved the fact that he brought his family along with him,” says Octavia Spencer, Powell’s co-star in Hidden Figures. “I’ll never forget when we were working one day, during the cut, he introduced his family. He said, ‘The Powells are a traveling band. They come to all of my sets.’ They all laughed and lit up the room with their signature megawatt smiles.”

“There is a moment when you’re on set standing next to Tom Cruise next to a F-18 jet wearing aviators where you think, ‘this is as good as it gets.’ It was such an out-of-body experience.”

​​Growing up in Austin, Powell’s father regularly took him to the movies, and Powell started acting as a teenager. One of his early roles was in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington. Powell recounts some early encouragement from his director: “Denzel pulled me aside and said, ‘I think you should really give this a shot. I think you got it.’” He took the advice to heart and moved to Hollywood after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin (following in the footsteps of another proud Texan and fellow Longhorn, Matthew McConaughey—a comparison Powell doesn’t mind at all). “Watching Glen curate his resume has been impressive,” says his co-star Jon Hamm. “He’s a hard worker, smart and a super handsome guy with a great head of hair. He’s a classic leading man, but what I’m most impressed by is that he generates his own material. He doesn’t come off as privileged or entitled and he’s willing to put the sweat equity into his projects.”

Outside of acting, Powell is currently developing projects and producing. He’s collaborating with another Texan, director Richard Linklater, on two Texas-based films: the animated Apollo 10 ½ alongside Jack Black and a true-crime drama based on a Texas Monthly article that Powell and Linklater are writing together. “I love putting real figures on the map,” says Powell. “Kevin Costner told me that ‘movies are your epitaph,’ and people will still watch your movies after you’ve passed. I take that responsibility seriously. There’s an aspect of making sure that we’re putting out something in the world, and there’s a lot of power in that storytelling.”

​​The last 18 months have given him a break from movie sets, but he hasn’t been sitting around doing nothing. “I got my pilot’s license right before COVID-19 hit,” he says. “And I was saved by the bell, because I was able to fly all over when other people were stuck at home. Palm Springs, Napa, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe—I thought, ‘Man, this is the life.’ It definitely taught me how to thrill seek and get the most out of every day.” But he hasn’t had to go it alone. Things have gotten serious with his girlfriend, Miami-bred model Gigi Paris, during lockdown—a time when new relationships can go either way. “My little sister, Leslie, was living with me and my girlfriend in Los Angeles when shelter-in-place rules started and we were all quarantined together. Then Leslie moved out, and she’s so fun and hilarious that I was worried that my girlfriend wouldn’t like me anymore without her in the mix. But she did, and I feel I’m the beneficiary of a very positive COVID relationship.” Again, he cites his mentor and Top Gun: Maverick co-star Cruise, with whom he texts regularly, as the inspiration for a career and life well lived. “I love that adventurous spirit and fierce dedication that Tom has. He never wallows and manages to do it all.” And, clearly, so does Powell.

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Dr. Rock Positano

In a new book, Street Smart: The Primer for Success in the New World, brothers John Positano (a successful lawyer) and Dr. Rock Positano (director of the Non-Surgical Foot and Ankle Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City) offer ideas on how to catch these lucky breaks, whether you’re a millennial or a boomer.

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Styled by Sam Ratelle in a Randi Rahm dress and Oscar Heyman jewelry

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That’s mostly because of her spectacularly funny, Emmy-winning performance as the rich, kooky, emotionally unstable Tanya McQuoid in HBO’s The White Lotus. “You’ve reached the core of the onion,” Tanya says throughout the first season, infusing the statement with lopsided humor and pathos at the same time.

At first, Coolidge wasn’t sure she should go to Hawaii to make The White Lotus. “It was the pandemic, and I wasn’t in good shape. I was incredibly insecure during COVID, and I blame a lot of that on not having a big world,” she explains.

When she got the call to play the part, “It was as if you’re mud wrestling and someone says, ‘You know, there’s a church that’s open if you want to get married,’” remembers Coolidge, who regularly uses this kind of non sequitur in conversation. “You’re in so deep. At the time, it didn’t even seem possible to get on a plane.”

But a friend pushed her on it and said, “Jennifer, you can’t pick the timing of something cool that happens to you.” “And I thought, Well, yeah, I can. But she said, ‘You’re out of your mind, you’re out of your gourd.’ And somehow she convinced me I was insane, so I called up Mike and said that I was doing it.”

Mike is Mike White, the creator of The White Lotus and a longtime friend of Coolidge’s, at least since he played her dreadlocked, snake-friendly boyfriend in the 2009 movie Gentlemen Broncos. White has visited her in New Orleans and thrown parties with his fellow Survivor cast members at her house. They’ve even traveled to the Serengeti together on a “mindblowing” trip.

“But it’s not like I asked Mike for a big fat part that would change my life. It was like, ‘I hope you can make it to my Halloween party,’” Coolidge says, referring to an annual party she throws at her “big, scary house” in New Orleans.

The White Lotus was originally meant to be a standalone miniseries, but because it was so successful, White called on Coolidge, 61, to reprise her role in a second season, this time in Italy. The seven-episode season begins in late October on HBO.

“We couldn’t go to Italy without Jennifer. It seemed like bad karma,” White explains, adding that he envisioned Tanya’s arc this season as “kind of like How Stella Got Her Groove Back with some gay guys.”

“Jennifer literally said to me once, ‘I’ve always wanted to be on a Vespa wearing some iconic dress and some guy is trying to light my cigarette,’” White says. “I was just giving her this Italian dream to go on a yacht and stay in nice palazzos and have sex with some hot guy.”

Jon Gries, who plays Coolidge’s love interest in both seasons of The White Lotus, was driving the Vespa. It may not have been exactly what Coolidge expected. “That was a little scary. We were really doing it, and there were no knee pads in case we wiped out,” she says.

Gries describes Coolidge as an “alchemist.” “Working with Jennifer has been a gift—a welcome, fun challenge to play so closely with her. She is a gardener at play, weeding out the so-so and cultivating good invention. She augments as much as she acts,” Gries writes in an email. “We both used to hike to the top of the mountain in Taormina, Sicily, and feed the stray cats hanging around the old church. We talked about so many things, which allowed us to enjoy a deeper bond that seamlessly translated into our on-film relationship.”

For Coolidge, the trip to Italy was “beyond my expectations in every way. It was a real adventure,” she says. “My regret is not knowing Italian, you know, to just be able to say ‘Where am I?’ and get directions.” Coolidge also hints that she had an Italian fling on set, or “something like that”: “It was sort of a fleeting thing, but it gave me an incredibly hopeful feeling for the future.”

It doesn’t hurt that Coolidge also brought home an Emmy this year. Though award prognosticators predicted she would win, “I thought there was no way that was going to happen, even a second before it was announced,” Coolidge insists. (She was up against three of her White Lotus co-stars.)

Didn’t her friends tell her to be prepared? Yes, says Coolidge, “But how can you really believe them? Friends tell you a lot of things. Friends tell you your clothes look good, and you know they don’t. I didn’t expect it at all. Maybe that’s why I got it.”

Ignoring the forecasting meant Coolidge did not prepare an Emmy speech. If she’d believed the hype, “I wouldn’t have made a fool of myself,” Coolidge says. In her speech, she spoke about taking a lavender bath that made her swell up in her dress and said she was having a hard time speaking, before being played off by the band. Audiences at home weren’t clear if she was being real or doing a bit.

But that may be where her genius lies, says White. “It’s always a little bit of a bit, and it’s always a little bit true,” he explains. “She mines her struggle to find comedy.”

Speaking a month or so after the Emmys, Coolidge fears she truly botched her opportunity to thank all the people who have helped her along the way, including the Weitz brothers, who cast her in the American Pie movies, and Christopher Guest, who cast her in four movies, including, most memorably, as a trophy wife in Best in Show.

“Those people kept me alive,” Coolidge says. “I would never have survived without those jobs. Those people deserve huge thank yous.”

But when her category was announced, “I was in a state of shock, I couldn’t remember my own name. I felt like I was having a full-on anxiety attack. It was embarrassing that I didn’t whip out everyone’s name, but I didn’t expect to be up there. I was swelling up inside this dress, and I think I was having an allergic reaction. For all these years of not thinking something like this would ever come, it was all one big inarticulate moment.”

Ultimately, Coolidge is still scratching her head about the overnight success she’s now having, 30 years after moving from Massachusetts to Hollywood. “Jesus, I’ve been around a long time, and I think my odds for this moment were pretty slim,” she says.

After season one of The White Lotus, the calls started coming, including to star in Shotgun Wedding, a new Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy, and alongside Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale in The Watcher, a horror miniseries from Ryan Murphy on Netflix.

“She exceeded my expectations,” says Watts of working with Coolidge. “Every scene, you’re on the edge of your seat waiting for one of her signature golden moments that take you to a place that you never saw on the page. She beams light and empathy, as well as being wonderfully wacky and unique.”

Coolidge says that what she especially appreciates about Murphy and White is that they give their actors a wide berth to improvise way beyond what’s written. “These guys know who they are. They’re not threatened in any way by someone else’s ideas,” Coolidge explains. “They’re very generous. They let you try stuff out.”

It’s a long way from when Coolidge started out in Hollywood. Her first role was as Jodi, the masseuse girlfriend of Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld who won’t give Jerry a massage.

“I had grand thoughts. Massive. I thought I could come from my little town and have a lead in something like Pretty Woman,” says Coolidge. “I remember seeing that movie, thinking, I want that for myself. I truly believe you have to have insane thoughts like that to do well in this business. But I worked with a lot of people and those beliefs got squashed, and I didn’t try for anything bigger.”

Indeed, glancing through Coolidge’s filmography, you find roles with nonsensical names (“Roz Funkeyerdoder,” “Martha Kendoo,” “Principle Lonnatini”) and some with no name at all, like “White Bitch,” “White Faced Woman,” “American Designer,” “Woman at Football Game,” and, perhaps most famously, “Stifler’s Mom.”

“There are a lot of people that can really rain on your parade sometimes, and I haven’t been given a lot of chances,” Coolidge says. “I started to think, I’m really not going to be anything more than the third prostitute that gets turned down by the hideous cowboy at the brothel, which was one of my [early] parts. And I had to buy the airline ticket [to fly to set] in San Francisco myself.”

The whole thing snowballed. “You sort of silently agree to endorse the belief you think other people have about you. I didn’t really think beyond that,” Coolidge says. “Then you have Mike White, who says, ‘I think you can do more than that.’ I’m thrilled that this all makes Mike look like he was right, and people should listen to him.”

Playing Tanya McQuoid, the Emmy, working with Murphy, the fling she doesn’t want to talk about in Italy—it’s all helped Coolidge change her tune.

“I don’t think I’m a good fortune teller or a good judge of what’s going to be the big hit, but I also know you can’t believe their perception of you,” she says. “You have to go with your insane ideas of yourself. I’m going back to that way of thinking. Maybe expectations jinx everything.”

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When Danielle Brooks auditioned for Juilliard at 17, she performed a monologue from August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson. 15 years later, she’ll be playing the role on Broadway. “His work has completely transformed my life,” says Brooks. Working with Jackson as director is “refreshing,” Brooks explains. “She’s a straight shooter, no chaser. She’s going to tell you like it really is. She’s a black woman, born to a black woman, who also came from a black woman. That shared experience leaves room for us to discover so much more about the play.” With Jackson’s help, adds Brooks, “I’m realizing I can be an even stronger actress.”

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Surfer magazine

After six decades in print, Grant Ellis has compiled a colorful anthology of the magazine’s most iconic covers, articles and more. Surfer Magazine: 1960-2020 (Rizzoli) includes a chronological progression of the magazine’s content from world-renowned photographers, writers and graphic designers. Surf stars like Miki Dora, Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton are all highlighted in the new compilation, further cementing Surfer as a leading voice in the water and celebrating the surf subculture.

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