#Indiewire

[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.”

[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.

[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

[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)

source

[brian-in-finance]

•••••

•••••

•••••

•••••

•••••

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]

[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.

[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.”

[czech-hunter-reject]

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

She's right, and she should say it

[jbaileyfansite]

On June 6, the 2024 IndieWire Honors ceremony will celebrate 13 creators and stars responsible for some of the most stellar work of the TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, this event is a new edition of its IndieWire Honors event focused entirely on television. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.

Ahead, “Fellow Travelers” star Jonathan Bailey writes about the many qualities that earmarked the collaboration between our Wavelength Award winners, showrunner Ron Nyswaner and star and executive producer Matt Bomer.

When it comes to celebrating the collaboration of Ron Nyswaner and Matt Bomer, I have to acknowledge how both of them influenced me long before I came onto “Fellow Travelers.” Their work on both sides of the camera has permeated in the same way.

Ron’s writing has always been so significant to me because of his ability to provocatively Trojan-horse brutal truths with tender, human experiences and romances. And this has sculpted my understanding of how to be and how to love. Matt Bomer is someone who visibly made me understand what was possible as I grew up in a world where it seemed that being an out gay actor wasn’t going to be an easy task. There he was — brilliant and visible, a lighthouse.

Now, to see the two of them come together and shine so bright in and around the work of “Fellow Travelers” and to understand the journey it took them both to get to this place, is remarkable. They really are warriors in the same way as Tim and Hawk.

When I first spoke to Ron, he said to me, “This project has been 10 years in the making. It might be my life’s work.” And I replied to him, “Well, whoever you invite to play Tim or any of these characters, it will be their life’s work as well.”

With Matt, we started in Gold Struck Coffee on Cumberland Avenue (the jokes write themselves). The two of us had an hour-long conversation about how we felt, our apprehensions, the opportunity, and the thrill we felt seeing the stories of Tim and Hawk on the page. He led the whole company of actors with such elegant grace and intelligence. He’s a force for good on set and a brilliant friend.

It has been extraordinary to see the work of “Fellow Travelers” celebrated, and that is a reflection of so many people in so many different capacities, but all of whom are being led by these two amazing people, Matt and Ron. And as a society, as a community, and as people who love television, we should always be grateful to them.

Source

[pinktwingirl]

Wait I thought Loki season 2 is getting good reviews everywhere, could you cite some examples?

I really can’t stand what they did with Loki in season 1 and it still feels the same..

Here are a couple of examples that I found. Basically, the general complaints are that the show isn’t focused around Loki, it’s filled with way too much exposition about the multiverse and timelines, and Loki is boring and completely unrecognizable from his previous appearances… which, again… did y’all watch S1??? This isn’t new. Also a decent number of reviewers are clowning on the show for basically becoming a McDonald’s commercial (and rightfully so)

[mrs-stans]

@indiewire: Ali Abbasi speaks about Sebastian Stan having to think about the big undertaking of doing a role like Donald Trump for #TheApprentice.Our full interview: trib.al/qRKpEsl

[jocia92]

The inside story of how an American animation company laid it all on the line to make the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki's "last" film a devastatingly beautiful must-see event.

This article is a really fascinating look into the process of dubbing 'The Boy and the Heron'. I really recommend reading the whole thing.

Dan Stevens mentions:

“Earwig and the Witch” alum Dan Stevens is such a devoted Ghibli fan that he agreed to come back and deliver a few lines as one of the many different henchbirds that do the bidding of Dave Bautista’s Parakeet King (“It’s very cool to get a sneak preview of a new Miyazaki movie,” he told me, “and to be in the mix for what might potentially be the last one is just epic”).

...

Fukuhara didn’t have any frame of reference for what the rest of the dub would sound like when she stepped into the booth (when she and Stevens spoke to IndieWire over Zoom for this article, it was the first time the two of them had ever met)

... there’s a fable-like quality to “The Boy and the Heron” that serves the moral dimension of Miyazaki’s latest and possibly final film. It speaks to the timelessness of a story designed — in the most explicit terms — to outlive its author. A story designed to be transformed by the people who tell it, even though its essence is singular in a way that no one would ever be able to erase altogether. It’s the story at the heart of a movie that will stand as a monumental achievement for as long as we can imagine, even as the world continues to turn its back on beautiful things, and the infrastructure that allows for their creation continues to crumble. “The Boy and the Heron” tells us to build our own tower, and GKIDS, with its bold and deeply personal English dub, has done just that.