#Indiewire

[carnevol]

[jbaileyfansite]

Jonathan Bailey Teases ‘Wicked: For Good’ to IndieWire

“Wicked” is continuing its blockbuster run in theaters and awards season (on Sunday, January 5, it snagged the inaugural Cinematic and Box Office Achievement Award at the Golden Globes), and fans can’t wait for more.

“Wicked Part 2,” now titled “Wicked: For Good,” will hit theaters on November 21, 2025 — and the cast is just as excited as audiences. When IndieWire recently caught up with Jonathan Bailey to discuss his role as the charming Prince Fiyero in the musical adaptation, he teased the changes to come with Part 2.

“I think we understand the world and how it works [now],” he explained. “I’m really excited for the tonal shift. The world gets heavier and more complicated and there’s just that pumping sense of hope and joy and resilience and all the things that we love about Elphaba’s journey that I can’t wait for.”

The ending of Part 1 finds Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) on the run, as she becomes a political enemy of the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), while her newfound friend Glinda (Ariana Grande) is swept up with powerful forces determined to make her a PR mouthpiece throughout Oz.

Fans of the musical know that while Part 2/Act II is darker than Part 1, it also contains a few all-timer musical numbers, including “For Good,” “No Good Deed,” and “As Long As You’re Mine.” When this reporter brought up to Bailey their excitement about seeing how “As Long As You’re Mine” — a sexy, powerful duet between Elphaba and Fiyero — plays onscreen, Bailey agreed it would be worth the wait.

“‘As Long as You’re Mine,’ I was listening to that on [my] bike on the way to meet Jon Chu back, you know, however many years ago, and that’s always been one of my favorite songs,” Bailey said about his apropos music choice for his first chat with the director. “So I’m really excited for that as well. It’s amazing.”

Bailey, an Olivier winner on the London stage, has been a fan of the show since he saw a production of “Wicked” when the stage musical came to London. He’s now enjoying the surreal, very full-circle moment of watching the film version with his family.

“Going to see ‘Wicked’ with friends and family and my Nana the day after it came out here, it’s just really struck me that it is all about local community projects,” he said of his childhood filled with acting and dance classes. “There’s so many moments in your life where you can be inspired by art and passions can be awakened, but the biggest travesty is to allow them to remain dormant when you know they’re there. And so I’m always grateful for Fiyero and ‘Wicked’ because it really has brought my dancing back in [to my life], which is amazing.”

“All I can hope for is to is to continue honing the craft, get back on stage, learn a bit more, make mistakes and then continue,” Bailey said about his post-“Wicked” plans. “And meet lovely people along the way, because I think that’s what it’s all about — hav[ing] a bloody good time.”

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[mrs-stans]

‘A DIFFERENT MAN’ is One of The Favorite 2024 Films of Directors:

Karyn Kusama (‘Destroyer’, ‘Jennifer’s Body’)

Greg Kwedar (‘Sing Sing’): “A Different Man” directed by Aaron Schimberg: This movie works on you in so many ways. Its humor has a terrifying bite in that it holds a mirror to the pernicious ways that comparison is a plague on our self worth. The performances by Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson and Renate Reinsve are stunning. Sebastian Stan and I got to tuck into comfy chairs at the hotel lobby bar, a soulful conversation I’ll never forget.

Lance Oppenheim (‘Ren Faire’)

Gints Zilbalodis (‘Flow’)

[b-skarsgard]

“He’s terrifying, it’s not Bill,” Hoult told IndieWire at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “The Order.” “That’s what’s so worrying about it. He gives a truly transformative performance where there is not anything of Bill left and it’s scary and intimidating. His voice, his physicality, I mean the makeup he has, it’s really a wonderful character and he did beautiful character work with it.”

[choupistickfaitdesbetises]

We remember everything…

Even if it’s heartbreaking… 😭

#indiewire on IG

[randomluck-ofthe-universe]

I can’t wait 😍😍

[boyleblr]

This is... this ugh MY HEART THIS IS SO SWEET (idk if sweet is the right word but it was the best by brain could think of right now)

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[brian-in-finance]

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Remember… there’s a loving relationship with his partner and former trainer Caitlin (Caitríona Balfe, convincing if woefully underserved in a typical “concerned spouse” role), running their own gym where they offer lessons to kids, and having enough local hero clout that there are still younger students begging their moms to snap pictures with him. — IndieWire

[ilovetheideaofu]

Nicholas Hoult teases Bill Skarsgård’s "transformative" role Count Orlok in Robert Eggers' latest film Nosferatu out Christmas 2024.

[🎥: Indie Wire Instagram at TIFF 2024]

[pedropascal24-7]

[carnevol]

Callum Turner | sunshine smile

[jbaileyfansite]

Interview with IndieWire (2024)

Like many a romantic lead before him, when Jonathan Bailey first appears as Prince Fiyero in “Wicked” it’s on a horse, ready to be a savior to some damsel. For story purposes, it’s a good thing that Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) isn’t immediately impressed. But right from his “Hello,” no one would have blamed Elphaba if she ran off with him right then and there.

“[Jonathan’s] the most charming man I’ve ever met,” “Wicked” director Jon M. Chu told IndieWire. “The fact [is] that everybody — we didn’t even intentionally do it — but all the extras, all the background people, all the students were in love with him, and you could see it in their eyes.”

Fans likely aren’t too surprised: The worldwide blockbuster may have introduced Bailey to an even larger audience, but he’s been building a strong relationship with viewers for a while. The Olivier winner has been acting since he was a kid, but it is in recent smash television projects like Netflix’s “Bridgerton” and his Emmy-nominated turn in Showtime’s “Fellow Travelers” in which he’s deployed a singular charm that lets people both connect with and lust after whomever he is playing; the kind of audience bond where viewers miss him when he isn’t onscreen.

He’s got chemistry with everyone, and his playful take on bad boy Fiyero — well, “bad boy” for Oz — makes it a hat trick. We had to know: What’s the secret to portraying onscreen yearning in a way that sizzles?

“It’s one of the pleasures of acting, isn’t it?,” Bailey said of his crackling-energy connection. “I remember when I was on stage, I was doing ‘King John’ for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I was still going to school. It was a life-changing thing to be doing that at that age. But I just remember on stage [realizing], ‘You can use these words, and they have an effect on not just the people [in the scene], but the people in the room.’ And that was the moment I thought, ‘I actually really love this.'”

He continued, “I think ‘Wicked,’ because it’s based on a stage musical, the scenes are very lean. Fiyero doesn’t feature much at all. I’ve always thought this about musicals, but it’s even more evident in the film of ‘Wicked’: the silences in a musical are just as important as the big belts. And I think that is exactly where chemistry lies.”

He may be (duh) charmingly modest — “I do not feel like that in my day-to-day life at all!” — but showcasing that kind of seductive energy is a skill, one he navigates successfully in the film, particularly during his big number, “Dancing Through Life.” In addition to being plot-heavy for the greater arc of the story, the song also calls for him to basically temptthe whole student body via dancing into breaking the rules for a night of clubbing.

“I think musicals and dance numbers, Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, John Travolta, Patrick Swayze, there’s always something crucial going on, and it’s always high stakes,” Bailey said, calling out the dancing in “West Side Story” as a lifelong favorite. “Usually the tradition is that men are using their bodies to try and process things in a way that they haven’t learned or haven’t been equipped to be able to do. And I thought that’s really interesting.”

Joking that he’s now “psychoanalyzing Fiyero,” what appealed about the role was that there is more to him than appears at first blush. “There’s a chaos and a speed to the way that Fiyero thinks that I think gives him access to be able to sort of maneuver instinctively through any sort of pain or any sort of real emotion,” he said. “And I think that’s what dancing through life is. … I think he feels dormant, and I think he sort of instinctively knows that there’s more to life, and that’s why he’s disruptive, and that’s why he creates this chaos that matches his inner world.”

“He brings a depth that is very truthful, but does not weigh it down,” Chu explained about Bailey’s take on the musical’s leading man. “[There’s that] yearning to find something more than the life that he’s living, and I think people can feel that.”

Some of the film’s many highlights soar when the main trio (Erivo, Bailey, and Ariana Grande as Galinda) key into a heightened theatrical energy — think Bailey walking through a wall of students or Grande’s over-the-top reactions to minor slights — which isn’t a surprise, given all three’s respective stage backgrounds.

As we get to talking, Bailey is eager to speak about his theater roots, of which he’ll return to in London in a few months to take on “Richard II.” Viewers may think of Netflix’s regency romance as his breakout, but Bailey puts it at something smaller: getting the stage part of Cassio in “Othello” (directed by Nicholas Hytner, who will also direct “Richard II”) 10 years ago.

“That, to me, is my career break,” he said. “It was that moment because I didn’t go to drama school. … The transition from acting as a child to an adult, everyone says, ‘Oh, it’s impossible. You can’t do that.’ And then people go, ‘Oh, the National Theater, you can really only perform in [that] space if you’ve gone to drama school, and you won’t be able to do Shakespeare.’ And so it’s so funny now that, obviously, there’s groundbreaking experiences of being a gay man and playing multiple parts in these sorts of films. But there’s so many other things that I was up against! So [when I got that part] I just remember being like, ‘Fucking hell, anything’s possible if that’s possible.’ That was huge for me.”

Fiyero has him thinking about his childhood a lot, and it’s with a full-circle appreciation that he now is able to analyze his career thus far.

“I was very lucky,” he said of growing up around the arts. “Going to see ‘Wicked’ with friends and family and my Nana the day after it came out here, it’s just really struck me that it is all about local community projects [and classes]. …There’s so many moments in your life where you can be inspired by art and passions can be awakened, but the biggest travesty is to allow them to remain dormant when you know they’re there. And so I’m always grateful for Fiyero and ‘Wicked’ because it really has brought my dancing back in [to my life], which is amazing.”

It’s a new experience to have a choice of projects, and along with more “Bridgerton” and “Wicked,” Bailey is now taking all kinds of big swings.

“The thing that I think actually is really important is having someone who’s got the singular idea, either a director or auteur who sees something in you that you haven’t yet discovered,” he explained. “I’ve worked 30 years, and the idea that these sorts of opportunities, being at a point now where you can be selective, it’s wild to me, but it’s just so thrilling.”

The coming year will find him tackling both Shakespeare and dinosaurs (he’ll lead “Jurassic World Rebirth” opposite Scarlett Johansson next summer). When asked about other career goals, he noted he’d love to film underwater at some point. It feels inevitable that’ll eventually happen, though one dream may remain unrealized.

Recalling seeing “Wicked” onstage years ago when it came to London, “I remember going, ‘I really want to play the monkey!,” he said. “But that may have just been because I’ve always been called a cheeky monkey.” See? Charming.

Source

[mrs-stans]

Sebastian Stan’s Variety ‘Actors on Actors’ Halted Because No Other Talent Wants to Talk About Trump

No talent that could be paired with him for the video series wants to address Trump or Stan's film "The Apprentice" at all, Stan said. Variety has now confirmed this to IndieWire.

BY CHRISTIAN BLAUVELT

Sebastian Stan said in a post-screening Q&A of his film “The Apprentice” Tuesday night that his participation in Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” video and TV series is halted because no other actor wants to talk about Trump. Stan plays the president-elect in the Ali Abbasi film that covers Trump’s early years and rise to initial prominence as a Manhattan real-estate mogul.

Variety co-editor-in-chief Ramin Setoodeh confirms that this is indeed the case to IndieWire. “What Sebastian said is accurate,” Setoodeh said in a statement. “We invited him to participate in ‘Actors on Actors,’ the biggest franchise of awards season, but other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.”

In his remarks, captured on video and posted on Twitter, Stan said that he thinks this refusal to engage at all with Trump as a subject is unfortunate, and even bad for the country.

“The amount of love that I’ve received from some of the biggest — both of us I think [referring to Abbasi] — in terms of actors, directors, producers, writers who’ve seen the movie and rave about it… But then, for instance, I had an offer to do Variety’s ‘Actor on Actor’ [sic] this Friday, and I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me because they were too afraid to go and talk about this movie, so I couldn’t do it. And it doesn’t matter, that’s OK, that’s not to point a finger at anybody. That’s not pointing at anyone specific, we couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them because they were too afraid to talk about this movie.

“That’s when I think we lose the situation because if it really becomes that fear or discomfort to talk about this then we’re really going to have a problem. There was an op-ed in the New York Times recently that I thought was really interesting, which said that ‘we have to stop pretending that Trump is not one of us.’ And that’s a really difficult thing to deal with at the moment, and I understand the emotions are very high, but I think that’s the only way you’re going to grasp this film. All it’s saying is you cannot keep casting this person aside, especially after they get the popular vote. Should we not give this a closer look and try to understand what it is about this person that’s even driving that. I don’t know if the love is gonna translate into action, but it’s certainly there from what we’re hearing.”

Needless to say, “The Apprentice” does not present a flattering portrayal of Trump. It shows him involved in various grotesque moments — and goes so far as to show him raping his first wife Ivana. Stan has been publicly critical of Trump himself but has stressed the need to engage with why we got here. The refusal to engage with the subject at all since Trump won the presidency aligns with other recent trends, such as the massive ratings collapse that MSNBC has suffered post-election.

[b-skarsgard]

Oscar Isaac may have loved Robert Eggers‘ “Nosferatu,” but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a little jealous over the skills on display in the film. Moderating a Q&A in New York City this past week with cast members Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Skarsgård, Isaac praised the craft of “Nosferatu,” offering particular appreciation for Depp’s incredibly physical performance and the work Skarsgård did to achieve the haunting voice of the undead Lord Orlok.

‼️‼️mild spoilers under the cut‼️‼️

A taping of the whole Q&A is provided at the link

“That pisses me off,” said Isaac, upon finding out that no effects were added to achieve Orlok’s timbre. He continued of Skarsgård’s performance, “I think what really strikes me is when you say you’re ‘an appetite.’ At one point, Willem’s character says that it’s a force greater than evil cause evil, it’s quite binary, right? This is something even beyond that.”

Skarsgård echoed Isaac’s assessment of Orlok, expressing the difficulty of embracing such a figure, especially at the beginning of the process when he was trying to authentically find the character.

“It’s a very abstract role to undertake, cause you’re sitting in your hotel room or living room working on it, looking like yourself and trying to explore the voice and everything and you’re losing your mind,” Skarsgård said. “You have to be crazy to do what we do, I think, but the pieces with the prosthetics and the costume, all of that makes it feel real when you’re performing it.”

In working to capture the evil Orlok exudes, Skarsgård focused his efforts on becoming as inhuman as possible. As Orlok is often featured in the shadows and can only be defined by how he communicates, Skarsgård focused much of his time on creating a voice that felt otherworldly. To achieve that, Skarsgård established a method to put more bass in his voice, while at the same time adding more resonance.

“The voice was something that I knew that he wanted it inhumanly deep, and I don’t think my normal voice is very deep, so it was, ‘OK, how can I access a depth that I didn’t know I had in me?'” Skarsgård said. “That was a wonderful exploration and working with an opera singer trying to lower the voice as deep as possible and trying to be as relaxed as I could and I explored with it and I worked on it so much that I’ve built out this little routine for myself that I knew that, ‘OK, my voice is great when I’m really relaxed.’ So I used this 20-minute routine that I would do to be in the place where the voice was resonating and coming from me as opposed to feeling like I was putting on the voice.”

[sarahshachat]

I haven't done any posting on social media almost all year and so the fact that I went and hunted down my Tumblr login should tell you just how THRILLED and GRATEFUL I was to cover the making of Dimension 20 for work. All it took was explaining to The Bosses™ that Actual Plays are not things where viewers... actually play... that was a new one. 😅

Anyway, please go read about how Rick Perry is a genius and the D20 team collaborate in ways that uplift the art they all make. Aabria Iyengar said so. It must be true.

[czech-hunter-reject]

Winona Ryder is so real for this!! 👏👏👏

She's right, and she should say it